Flight

Here's the book I just finished, Sherman Alexie's Flight, given to me by the writer, ornithologist, photographer and digital archivist Michael J Bennett during my stay in the US.

In fact, it was Mike who first introduced me to good old Sherm ages ago with The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a collection of interweaving stories about the hard life on the reservation. Alexie's writing is a bracing antidote to most fiction about American Indians, which seem to be either hippy dippy stories about vision quests or isn't the white man a bastard, Dances with Wolves-esque type stuff. Alexie doesn't turn away from hard life of the modern day Indian, or the horrific past, but he does it with dark humour and without self-pity, making it miles better than the sanctimonious claptrap about the Indian experience that white writers seem to churn out.

Flight is narrated by teenager Zits (he has a lot of them), a half white, half Indian orphan who is continually in trouble with the law. He is befriended by an anarchist named Justice, who convinces Zits to go into a bank and shoot the place up. As he is standing there weighing whether or not to open fire, Zits time travels through American history - jumping in and out of the bodies (a la Quantum Leap) of various people: a white FBI agent involved in murdering Indian activists in the 1970s; an Indian child who witnesses the battle of Little Big Horn; his own alcoholic father, long since dead; an elderly Indian tracker named Gus in the 1870s. The plot is a bit thin, but the novel is carried by Zits' bitterly funny voice and Alexie's ability to be breezy yet poignant and provocative.

By the way, here's Alexie on the always excellent Colbert report promoting his newest, a YA novel.

Random pics

A few shots from the US. My friend, the writer, ornithologist, photographer and digital archivist Michael J Bennett with Tundra (Mike is the one with the cap) in the wilds of Petersham, MA; pumpkins for sale in New Braintree; what my skilled hands did with one of those pumpkins; the Granary Burying Ground in Boston; and, this is not actually the US, but a clear shot of Greenland from 37,000 feet in the air on the way back.

You can go home again

Keen Expat File observers will note a lapse of 15 days from the last missive. Not, because, a la my last post that I have blog fatigue, but that I went back home, in the welcoming bosom of family, and off grid. I had to work for the first few days I was there - slavishly so, I might add, for a publisher did pay my flights over to Boston. All right, slavishly might be the tiniest bit of exaggeration. But the time went too quickly and I didn't get to see as many people as I thought I would.

As always with return trips to the States there are mixed feelings. There are so many people I miss, of course. And so many little things: the home fries at the Boulevard diner; Fenway; Sam Adams on tap; the view from the top of Mount Monadnock, Jeopardy! with Alex Trebek; the love notes etched into the window pane in the Old Manse in Concord MA by Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne; that people in shops apparently really, truly want me to have a nice day...

But I left for a reason, I guess (I mean apart from the murder charge). And some of those things kind of make me break out in a cold sweat during most trips back: the shrill, strident tone of the news reporting; crawling, sprawling suburbanisation; the blinkered unthinking patriotism of most of the country; Simon Cowell...

Those things I object to in America exist in the UK, in one form or another. But the beauty of being an ex-pat is that you can tune them out to some extent. If you don't really belong somewhere, you don't ever have to care as much. But then, do you ever feel at home?

Blog fatigue

I read somewhere that people start up blogs, are all gung ho, but then in a few months just lose their mojo. So a look at my postings - a paltry six in September, this is the first in October - seems I've hit the wall. True, I have been busy, but it doesn't take much to dash off a few lines, now does it? And it's not like I am doing this for the amusement of anyone but myself.

But then again, I am doing it for other people - in that this is a public facing diary if I can't just write whatever stuff that comes to my head like I do in my regular diary. Or, ahem (voice deepening) my journal - the old fashioned one kept with pen and ink and a Moleskine notebook (I do have a bit of a Moleskine fetish it has to be said. Have you seen the new Volant range? And the soft cover notebooks - oh yeah, baby, 'get in touch with your softer side') Sorry, drifted off there. Anyway, I made the mistake of re-reading an older diary, and the overwrought stuff within brought a flush of embarrassment to my face. And that was stuff I wrote just a year ago. Hate to look at my teenage diaries.

Anyway, let's get back to the blog; my life filtered, cleaned up and suitable for blog-cast.

I have mentioned before that I live next door to a mental hospital and have on occasion come across some of its patients. Tonight, there was a big black fellow outside the hospital, clinging to a lamppost as if a lover, yelling in a West African accent: 'I didn't kill any individuals' over and over again. And as I came closer swivelling his eyes on me, trying to make me understand that he didn't kill any individuals.

Now, that gives one pause. The Bedlamites I come across are usually rather benign, bumbling around in just their dressing gowns - confused more than anything else. I found myself nodding to this man, though he seemed like he might have killed individuals and maybe even entire villages of people in some child soldiering past in Sierra Leone.