If ever there was a book that deserved having the term "novel" applied to it, "Old Buildings In North Texas" is it. I've never read anything quite like it.

 

I was hooked from the start. How could I not be with an opening like this:

"The situation: before they'd let me out of rehab, someone had to agree to act as my legal custodian. There it is, the snappy truth about why, at the age of thirty-two, I live with my mother. She now has control over every aspect of my life from my finances to my laundry. One little cocaine-induced heart attack and it's back to my childhood to start over."

This is not a Hallmark, "the Twelve Steps saved my life - praise the Lord" view of overcoming addiction. This is not a teaching aid with clear moral messages. It's the story of a woman in love with cocaine but having to deny her lover if she wants to have a life.

 

This is a story of recovery, rather than redemption. As our heroine (no pun intended) puts it: "I'm working to get better not to be better". Of course, she isn't always working very hard. She disdains her court-mandated therapist, is irritated by her parole officer and infuriated to be back under her (perfectly reasonable and deeply supportive) mother's supervision.  So she finds a way to freedom, a personal path to her new life. Does it matter if it's built on lies and deception, trespass and theft and placing her heavily pregnant baby sister at risk? Actually, no, it does not. Suck it up.

 

Our heroine takes up "urban exploration" as a hobby. This initially involves finding a way into and exploring old abandoned buildings in North Texas but leads on to systematic, profitable looting.

 

I liked the voice of the main character, especially as performed by Sally Vahle in the audiobook version. She wasn't always nice but she was always authentic. Her mixture of anger, denial, simple curiosity, complicated obsessions and determination to escape is beautifully described. She presents her worldview with humour and enthusiasm without allowing herself to sugar-coat the issues - well not much anyway.

 

Old abandoned buildings in Texas are almost characters in their own right in this book. Jen Waldo made them seem so real to me that I had to check whether the type of building she talks about actually exist. They do. You can go here to take a look at some. I've put my favourite pictures,  ones that remind me of places visited in the book, below:

Jen Waldo has a unique voice, I'll be reading more of her work to find out what else she has to say.

 

 

If the rest of this book lives up to its opening sentences, I'm going to be a very happy reader. It starts with:

 

"The situation: before they'd let me out of rehab, someone had to agree to act as my legal custodian. There it is, the snappy truth about why, at the age of thirty-two, I live with my mother. She now has control over every aspect of my life from my finances to my laundry. One little cocaine-induced heart attack and it's back to my childhood to start over."

Am 31. August 1846 fuhr ich mit Eisenbahn und Dampfboot von Concord, Massachusetts, nach Bangor und ins Hinterland von Maine, um einen im Holzhandel tätigen Verwandten bis zum Damm am westlichen Nebenfluss des Penobscot zu begleiten, wo er Land kaufen wollte.

The Poet - Ralph Waldo Emerson What this essay says, in case you don't feel like reading it:

1. Good poetry is pretty. Great poetry feels inevitable.

2. Good poetry can tell the story of an age; great poetry is for the ages, and lives on long after the poet and his culture have rotted away.

3. Great poetry makes us feel as if we've learned something new and, at the same time, as if we knew it all along.

4. Great poetry makes us feel as if we were just let out of prison.

5. Poetry is awesome, and it's for everybody. The idea that poetry can only be enjoyed by high-minded preshus snowflake-types is a load of hooey.

6. The idea that poets should be total drunkards and druggies? Also a load of hooey.

7. Poets shouldn't booze it up, but they should make their readers feel as if they just had a beer or three.

8. You can lead an exciting life or you can write great poetry, but you can't do both. At least not at the same time.

9. Great poetry is its own reward, for both the reader and the writer.

American philosopher and Harvard professor Stanley Cavell claims "Emerson and Thoreau... are the founding philosophers of America" and comparable to Plato. Before reading this I tackled Thoreau. Emerson was his mentor, and they were both considered part of the Transcendental circle in mid-Century America. I found Emerson less irritating than Thoreau, but less readable and challenging. By challenging I don't mean less difficult, but less thought-provoking. I think Emerson is harder to parse, to "get." From what I've read elsewhere even many of his contemporaries found Emerson impenetrable and at times even incoherent. Thoreau on the other hand is easily understandable--and often provocative. So even while I hated what Thoreau had to say in "Living Without Principle" or "A Plea for Captain John Brown" I was engaged and I could see how his thinking tied in with various schools of thought and movements and the history of the era. I seldom felt that way about Emerson. And most of the essays were originally lectures and it shows. I often felt "talked at" from a height in a way I didn't feel with Thoreau. I got a sense of just how far apart we are in his essay "Transcendentalism" where he divides people into "Idealists" and "Materialists." He's definitely the first, and I'm definitely the second. I value being grounded in the senses and reason and science--I'm a fan of reality. I find nature more harsh and cruel than beautiful and pure. I'm not much interested in doctrinal issues in Christianity such as examined in "An Address to Harvard Divinity School" and "The Lord's Supper" or such spiritual essays as "The Over-Soul," which I found about as relevant to reality as a horoscope. And for a quintessential American philosopher (not that Thoreau was much better in this) I couldn't help but note that Emerson pretty much ignores any American intellectuals such as Franklin, Paine, Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson et al to pretty much load up instead on classical allusions. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. called Emerson's address "The American Scholar" America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence," but I couldn't see it in that essay. European thinkers alluded to in the article? Plato, Cicero, Chaucer, Bacon, Shakespeare, Marvell, Dryden, Locke, Pope, Swedenborg, Linnaeus, Johnson, Goldsmith, Cowper, Gibbon, Goethe, Burns, Cuvier, Wordsworth, Davy, and Carlyle. Americans? None. Admittedly in 1837 writers such as Poe, Longfellow, Melville and Hawthorne had yet to make their mark, but I can't for the life of me see anything in the address that has American roots and his philosophy in general obviously owes huge debts to Plato, Descartes and Kant. The density of classical and topical allusion made much of what he wrote about in these works obscure to me. I also think there are some thinkers where you're just fine on your own--that they can be sophisticated yet accessible. Plato for one. Even Thoreau. With Emerson I did miss not reading this book as part of a college class or well-educated reading group. I suspect with Emerson that there was a lot that may have passed over my head. He's long-winded, rambling, pedantic and very abstract. That said, there was hardly one essay in the book where I didn't find insightful and striking passages in the essays. I suspect that one thing that made Emerson so difficult is so much insight and wisdom is so densely packed in that you hardly have time to take in one idea before another hits you. He was hard to absorb and I admit some essays I just skimmed over, but even the earlier ones that I determinedly tackled word for word I wouldn't say I understood completely. If I had to pick a favorite essay, it would be "Self-Reliance" with that famous passage about consistency being "the hobgoblin of little minds" and "Friendship" with just so many passages that stuck out to me ("A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud." "Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.") I didn't care much for English Traits, his reflections on England after visiting there. There was a lot of talk of Englishmen as a race here--common to the time but still disconcerting, and a lot of unsourced data and abstract speculation, where I would have found more specifics of what in his visit led to his conclusions more valuable. As for the poetry included, I was underwhelmed, perhaps because I recently read poetry by John Donne, William Blake and John Keats and in comparison I found Emerson mediocre. So, bottom line, I think this collection is worth at least browsing through. I'm not likely to revisit any but a very few of the essays however.