PowellsBooks.Blog

So this is it. The end of a day of sitting on this bench next to Lake Geneva, thinking about stuff and remembering. And just now, I was thinking about sleep. I don't know about you, but this is how I go to sleep... I lay there, imagining places I've been in my life. If I'm lucky, my dreams pick up and I'm carried back in time.

I forgot to say this at the beginning of these blogs.

Which is strange, as it's the entire point.

I think we're capable of time travel, and I think we do it all the time. Not in the manner of the WAYBAC machine from Rocky and Bullwinkle, or Doctor Who's TARDIS. Memory is the vehicle of travel into the past.

I know, it sounds nuts.

This book has been in my mind ever since I started taking photographs in the '70s. It seemed to be the perfect visual exercise — seeing the everyday environment in a whole new, albeit detailed, way. Though it took me a while to finally approach this particular project, the experience has been tremendously gratifying, but even more importantly, a whimsical new adventure. The potential was there; it was just a matter of opening up to the discovery.

As a professional architectural photographer in New York since the publication of my book American Diner in 1980, I have trained my eye to be acutely aware how the built environment affects our daily lives. I have photographed everything from tall skyscrapers to small houses, each having a very different story to tell. It is with this kind of documentary attitude that I approached Alphabet Everywhere. Here, though, the twist was that I was looking for these elements that were not so obvious, so I could, in my own way, bring them to the foreground of people's awareness. So, instead of telling it like ...

There are a lot of memories seeping up through the hidden folds of my neocortex (the most highly evolved part of the human brain where consciousness dwells) and going, "Boo!" or "Howdy!"

I'm obsessed with memories.

Not mine, so much.

It's the concept of memories.

What the hell are they?

We may contemplate memories and analyze them in the neocortex and come up with swell ideas like Cartesian Skepticism or Cheeseburgers, but memories themselves are stored in the limbic system, in the hippocampus region to be precise. They call the limbic system "old mammalian brain." Meaning, it's what humans had for brains 100 million years ago, before evolution kicked in big time. They also called it "emotional brain," because it's where emotions are generated, in the amygdala region. There's other bits in the limbic system, bits that tell your body all's well; but contemplating (up here in the neocortex) that things like spontaneity and creativity dwell side by side with emotions and memories (down there in the limbic system), well... it doth make old mammalians of us all.

But I can't ...

For the first couple of years that I was learning to hunt, I was reluctant to talk about it. There was no simple way to explain why I — a lifelong animal lover and city slicker — had decided to confront my fear of guns and learn to stalk and kill wildlife for meat.

I'd recently moved from New York City to Bend, Oregon, to cover a rural area for the local newspaper, and I wanted to identify with the rural culture that surrounded me. Though I had long considered myself an environmentalist, the hunters I met here seemed to understand and appreciate the ecosystem better than I did. I'd come to view wild game as one of the most ethical meat sources available. Whenever I tried to put these reasons into words, they came out sounding overly complicated and poorly thought-out.

More than anything, I avoided the topic because most folks in fast-growing Bend had moved here, like I had, from larger cities. I assumed most of them disapproved of hunting, just as I had until recently. Hunting is a divisive topic, and I wasn't comfortable defending my ...

More thoughts from the bench...

Sometimes, this one flashes through my eyes so clearly I think I'm there again. It's the first memory I have of my life. Looking back, I'm pretty sure I was three years old. It's funny. Like setting the WAYBAC Machine (from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show) to 1953, the furthest point in time my imagination can travel.

I'm standing at the screen door of our house in Spokane, Washington, and I'm watching my older brother playing with his friends in the front yard. My older brother's name was Robert Dallas Price (it still is).

I should explain a couple things...

Sometimes you can sit next to the lake and see the strangest things. Actually, it's what you can't see. Sometimes fog swallows the entire lake and the mountains on the far shore and all the sky. There's nothing beyond the shore but a swirling mass of etheral looking stuff where the world used to be. You can still hear the water lapping against the stone jetty. You can still hear the ducks swimming about, quacking as they bump into each other. The world's out there, you just can't see it.

I remember, once, I watched the fog from dawn till late afternoon. This was a couple years after I'd quit TV news and was suffering from PTSD in a bad way. Fog watching was all the excitement I could handle. Even so, I had to take a lunch break. I walked to the centre of Cully, where two doors from l'Auberge de Rasin there's a place called Café de la Poste.

There's a bench in Cully, Switzerland. It's in a little park tucked up against the shore of Lake Geneva. I go there a lot to just sit and think, or not think. I've been doing it for 13 years. I'm sitting on that bench now, writing these words.

First time I came here... Christ, it was a long time ago... spring 2001. I was still a news cameraman for ITN (the Brit independent TV network) and had been working the Intifada for eight months straight. I'd already seen hundreds of people shot dead or blown apart.

I'd already been hit once and nearly killed twice. I'd been targeted by both Israeli and Palestinian snipers. One shot nearly tore off my leg; another shot almost took off my head. A centimeter either way, I'd be dead.

Then there was the night I was having dinner in Jerusalem and the street blew up (Palestinian suicide bomber). Then there was the night in Bethlehem when another street blew up (Israeli missile strike).

Then there was the night a suicide bomber walked into a bar. He had a bomb ...

Have you ever met a barista with a college degree? What about one with a master's degree? Spend time in Portland, or likely any other major city in North America, and this experience is not uncommon. Between those who are completely unemployed, those who are underemployed, and those who have just gone off the grid, there's no shortage of people who aren't working at the jobs for which they trained.

Last year in Portland, an opening for a receptionist position that paid $14 an hour with no benefits attracted more than 300 people who showed up for interviews, many of them college graduates. As you'd expect, the vast majority of these applicants were qualified or overqualified, but at the end of the process, only one could win the "prize" of moving off the unemployment lists to a menial job.

What's the real problem here?

It used to be that when we met someone with advanced education who wasn't working in their chosen field, we would think they ...

Whatever one thinks of Twitter, the Friday Reads hashtag is kind of a cool tradition. Take some of your favorite books by people you know, hashtag #fridayreads, and link directly to the book at your favorite local independent bookstore.

It looks something like this:

#fridayreads Loving #AVeryMinorProphet by @jamesbfrost. Tall bikes, zines, hipster love! Get it at @powells: http://bit.ly/JNfz8L

In honor of that tradition, here’s a list of some of my friends and their books. It's hard to write a book, so love and respect to all you.

(Oh and though he's not a personal friend, go to Powell's tonight and see Matt Love present his new book Sometimes a Great Movie: Paul Newman, Ken Kesey and the Filming of the Great Oregon Novel. Love a guy dedicated to preserving Oregon's history.

In no particular order:

• Greg Robillard — Captain Freedom
• Laurel Hermanson — Soft Landing
• Kerry Cohen — Seeing Ezra
• Gigi Rosenberg —

When you are a young writer, or an unproven writer, you receive a great deal of well-meaning advice from people who don't write and can't understand why you persist at it. Some of the advice is helpful — most of it, probably, is helpful: keep at it; don't give up, being the most common and broadly supportive. It costs the person nursing the sobbing, recently rejected writer very little in the way of insight or effort to urge them to "keep at it," and the effect is disproportionately useful.

If truth be told, when it comes to the crunch, a writer keeps at it and a non-writer gives up. There's not as much moral courage as we would like to think about the tenacity and immortal optimism of writers, just the compulsion to do it that, following a disappointment and after a period of mourning lasting anything from hours to years, will come to the fore. The writer will keep writing, and simply "keeping at it" will almost certainly improve both their work and their odds of success.

Before my first book, The Outcast, was ...