Category: Writing - Jack Hostrawser's Beginner's Guide To Gibberish

The wide, cold skies of the San Luis Valley

7/20/2019

Ted Conover buys a trailer on some of the cheapest land in America, and sets to getting to know his reclusive new neighbours.

"The amazing thing was that a person, even a person of very limited means, could actually buy a piece of these vast acres of land—some of it farmland with pumped irrigation but most of it just undisturbed, primeval—for not too much money. Not that this would be a smart investment in terms of return: Paul had told me he’d paid about $2,300 for his five acres twenty-five years ago, which was probably close to what it was worth today. “But you know what they say about land,” he said. “They’re not making any more of it!” The lots are now mainly sold online, on the sites that pop up when you search for “cheap land Colorado,” as Matt and many others had done. It is even sold on eBay, where one serial seller maintains that the location of a particular lot doesn’t make much difference: “There are no rare finds here, it is all the same views, sage brush, same rattlesnakes.”

"But to me these lots are not all the same. A few of them had neighbors visible, and you wanted to size up neighbors. A few have been occupied before and have junk left on them. A few of them are situated near enough a cell tower that you’d get more than a single bar of signal. A few are near a road that might see several cars a day (with the associated dust). I thought about these things and about where I might like to buy. I couldn’t entirely explain why: I wasn’t going to move out here, and it wasn’t my wife’s idea of a nice vacation property. And yet, and yet . . ."

A New Yorker Profile of James Mattis

5/30/2017

A quote:

"For Trump, the choice of Mattis seemed more emotional than deliberative. Their initial meeting lasted just forty minutes, and Trump seemed drawn to him less for his world view than for his fearsome reputation. Announcing his nomination for Secretary of Defense, Trump revelled in using the general’s nickname—Mad Dog—and compared him to General George S. Patton, who was famous for his tactical brilliance, his profane language, and his merciless style. Anecdotes about Mattis’s audacity in the field are legion. Early in the Iraq War, he met with local leaders and told them, 'I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I will kill you all.'"

Life After the Gatlinburg Fire of 2016

5/30/2017

Justin Heckert's vivid and powerful article introduces us to the citizens of Gatlinburg who are doing the tremendous work of rebuilding their lives and their community.

John Hersey's "Hiroshima" at 70

8/31/2016

Seventy years ago today, the entire new issue of The New Yorker was, without prior warning, taken up by a single article. Hiroshima was a sensation, with issues selling out almost immediately. Later, it sold over three million copies in book form.

The New Yorker is making this masterpiece of journalism available for free on its website for some amount of time (I don't know how long). If you don't mind reading on a screen, this is perhaps the best piece of nonfiction journalism ever, and is certainly a founding text of the "New Journalism" movement.

Calm, unflinching, and attuned solely to the human experience--not political posturing or retrospective debate--this is a harrowing and immensely moving story that makes us hesitate to consider the million small choices we make each day that, for several "lucky" survivors became the difference between life and death.

Into That Different Country

5/1/2016

"The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer

I bought a book from a secondhand store to pass the time on my flights to and from Japan. It is enormous, nonfiction, and I expected it to be mostly boring but maybe peppered with interesting facts.

I was very wrong. This book is stunning. Its scope is marvelously large, yet it manages to both explain complex scientific language lucidly and humanize the huge cast of characters all navigating very murky ethical waters as best they can. It is lyrical, philosophical, thrilling, meticulously researched and sometimes just plain terrifying. But it rises above morbid curiosity to ask and offer eloquent answers to the new existential questions that face our institutions and our species. I was reminded repeatedly of The Lord Of The Rings, for its scope and detail (and, to be honest, I liked this book better. But that's just me).

It's called The Making Of The Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. It won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the National Book Award. It's one of my favourite books ever and I really, really recommend you read it.

Here is an in-depth review of the book from the New York Times.

Descant LIVES!

5/1/2016

It was a tragic day when the long-running, award-winning, and beloved Toronto lit journal Descant closed it's office door for good. But this is the era of the internet, and great ideas can't stay dead anymore.

So it's a wonderful surprise to browse the pages of this new, growing website that resurrects the spirit of the magazine and promises to feature highlights and excerpts from the library and new blog pieces. No new submissions, please!

Check it out!

Triumph of the English Major

3/8/2015

"So there I was in our C.F.O.’s office with a P. & L. that just eked out a 7 percent return. He looked at that piece of paper dubiously. He looked at me dubiously. I made some weak noises about literary excellence, backlist sales, commitment to authors. He continued to look at me dubiously. Then, with that wry and sad expression with which financial people have regarded liberal arts people since at least the invention of movable type and perhaps even written language, he signed off on my shortfallen P. & L. and said to me, 'You know, we could make more money by just putting this advance into a certificate of deposit.'"

Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography

9/7/2014

I think this is excellent, a break from the rut that autobiography falls into, creatively. If the way we remember someone is a collection of pieces we choose to remember (the parts of his or her life most meaningful to us) then why not give us control over the narrative? I'd love to see some debate about this. Maybe all the infinitely wise people on Reddit will get into a fascinating discussi-- what the hell am I saying? Anyway, here's the link.