Long is the history of the romanticized solitary retreat into the cabin. Thoreau, of course, had his Walden. To the woods he went! Where life is more pure! The woods, unfinked in the ways he felt civilization finks on life. Simplicity! Not so simple. As in any act of meditation, it seems as though the very act of tuning out the buzz of human voices only serves to amplify one’s own. As the famous origin story of 4’33” goes, John Cage sat in a room with no echo, as silent as we can contrive, and was assaulted by the sounds of his own nervous system. And then there was Justin Vernon, of Bon Iver renown, who, following a series of illnesses and lamenting the mediocre state of his life, isolated himself in his father’s hunting cabin and recorded his ode to peace-of-mind, For Emma, Forever Ago. Vernon would go on to critique the romanticization of the hunting cabin in the folklore of the late-naughties, saying, “It’s sort of odd to look back and see it as magical, because it felt like a lonely few months at the cabin, where I plugged in the laptop and fucked around.” The archetypal cabin, it seems, is doomed to Thomas Kinkade galleries.
When Pablo Picasso was 19, his best friend killed himself. The struggling artist soon began wandering from the Montmartre apartment where he was crashing in 1901 to the Saint-Lazare women’s prison and sanitorium. The bleak facility’s inmates often had been arrested for solicitation or petty crime, then detained because they carried syphilis, which back then was an incurable disease that might lead to blindness, disfigurement, madness or death. Tumbling into a cavernous depression, Picasso decided to paint the people he found confined here, many of them mothers locked away alongside their children.
While writing The Blue Period, a novel exploring the years during Picasso’s youth when he depicted the downtrodden in nocturnal shades, I drenched myself in these haunting Saint-Lazare portraits—Femme aux Bras Croises, Femme Assisse au Fichu, Materniteé—and reflected on the means by which the canvasses so concisely express the troubles of our existence.
How might writers, I began to ask, bring such poignancy and pathos to the page?
When I Google the term “salmon burger” now I’m presented with recipes that insist that following the steps outlined will produce an actually good salmon burger, like it’s some sort of mythical white... er... salmon. When I search specifically for restaurant salmon burgers, there are few results, and even fewer are restaurants I’ve ever heard of. But salmon burgers were once good, or at least perfectly fine and much better than many other sandwiches that persist on basic restaurant menus (grilled chicken comes to mind). Crab cakes — a not entirely dissimilar seafood patty — have secured a permanent and beloved place in the American diet. So why not salmon burgers?
Writing about fairies against a backdrop of rising rationalism is one thing, but what really complicates the picture is the fact that Kirk was an Episcopalian minister, having succeeded his father at Aberfoyle in 1685, and having served a neighboring district for two decades before that. And yet, Kirk did not appear to see anything contradictory about his position. He seemed more or less at ease with a nexus of religion, rationalism, and the supernatural, even if he felt some need to justify his project in both Christian and Enlightenment terms. An open-minded, non-judgmental chronicler, Kirk treats the fairy stories of his parishioners, which form the bulk of his inquiry, with face-value seriousness, deploying ample quotation of biblical verses, as well as his own solid reasoning, to prove that there is no inconsistency in believing in both the Kingdom of God and the realm of faery. The result is a book that is at once a wonder-filled compendium of supernatural delights and a neatly structured argument.