What I See — James Hall’s Essays and Florida

Tom Johnson — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 07:05:49 +0000

James Hall's book of essays, "Hot Damn"

On my father’s recent visit from Florida, he brought me a stack of books, one of them James Hall’s collection of essays, Hot Damn!

James Hall is a poet and crime novelist, but he once wrote essays for a newspaper for several years. This book is a collection of those essays.

The topics of Hall’s essays range widely — from adventures in Florida to experiences as a boy in a library, to buying a house, to eating Cheetos while watching sports. But one theme is consistent throughout: the celebration of life. Falling in love with something. Getting excited about an adventure or place that others might simply regard as ordinary.

I believe this attitude is something I’ve largely forgotten. Let me excerpt a few paragraphs that demonstrate his love for life, especially Florida.

In “Home at Last,” Hall explains that he turned down the Air Force Academy to attend Florida Presbyterian College — not for religious reasons, but to escape in to Florida:

I did four glorious years of college in the charming and soporific Satin Petersburg of the sixties. On holidays I explored the west coast, the Keys, camping at starkly primitive Bahia Honda, building bonfires on midnight beaches, discovering out-of-the-way taverns that served cheap pitchers of beer and spectacular cheeseburgers, bays where fish jumped happily into frying pans, the unair-conditioned piano bars in Key West where writers huddled in the corners and talked the secret talk. I had never felt so at home.

In “Florida Trifecta,” spending time near ancient ceremonial grounds, Hall writes,

As my psychic tuning fork hummed, we drank a beer together on a peak overlooking one of the assembly plazas and were quieter than we would have been almost anywhere else on earth. I no longer cared if we went over to Cabbage Key. This was fine. We could stay there all afternoon, standing shoulder to shoulder with the ghosts of our noble forebears who knew and loved this land when its waters were crystalline and dense with fish, its breezes uncontaminated and dense with fish, its breezes uncontaminated by the noise or particulates.

In “The Names of Things,” Hall describes a walk on the seashell-full beaches of Sanibel island:

Lace murex, wentletrap, lightening whelk, junonia. The names are as exotic and various as their shapes. Cones and tulips and angel wings, baby’s ears and worms. Their bright colors litter the beach before me and crunch underfoot. With every step down the sugary sand I cringe with guilt at the possibility that I am destroying hundreds of rare specimens.

In “Winning Me Over,” Hall drives through the Everglades:

It was nearly a quarter of a century ago that I first journeyed west out Tamiami Trail and fell instantly in love with that broad and water expanse of sawgrass and anhingas and alligators. What struck me on that first trip was the way the vast and mesmerizing distances seemed to open up immediately after passing beyond the city limits of Miami. At that time I did not yet know the name of a single bird or bush or tree, and my eyes were not yet attuned to the nuances of that profoundly understated landscape, yet I sense the aching silence, a mysterious, almost sacred hush that seemed to resonate from the immense spread of sky and land.

In almost every essay, Hall’s love of life comes through:

In “Nude Woman in the Grass,” he describes the experience of being gripped by a book for the first time.
In “Dream House,” he narrates a house he fell in love with, purchased, and lived in for eight years.
In “Touchy Feely,” he celebrates the sense of touch in vivid, prolonged ways.
In “Hemingway,” he sees past the flaws that critics point out in Hemingway and values him for his character.

Hall also has a good dose of wit and sarcasm, and the essays are far from any kind of inspirational writing. But in almost every essay, there’s an aesthetic component that uplifts me. The way he sees an experience, or describes a place or person, has an element of rapture with life.

I think remarkable literary writers have this same celebration of life inside them. Think of Walt Whitman, who, in Song of Myself, wrote passages like,

Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what
is that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

Finding this attitude isn’t about looking on the positive side, or avoiding negative gossip or criticism. It’s about looking in to the ordinary and seeing something moving and alive. It’s about learning to marvel at what others regard as plain.

Perhaps Hall’s essays resonated so strongly with me because of my time in Florida. Hall moved from Kentucky to Florida, and then spent the next thirty years of his life there. I must admit that I never viewed Florida as a literary paradise. It’s hot, muggy, and subject to urban sprawl like any other place. But that’s not what Hall sees. Whether he’s picking up sun-bleached shells on a beach, or staring out into the ocean for several days straight, or going into an old diner where they plaster the walls with dollar bills, he’s jazzed about the experience. He celebrates the life that happens all around him.

As I think back on my four years in Florida, it was a literary goldmine. All too frequently I dismissed my surroundings as mundane, as unworthwhile. And yet, it seems no matter where I live, the landscape is just as ordinary as it always is. Hall taught me to stop looking other places and instead look right where I am. To look into the ordinary and see something more. And with that something more, embrace it.

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Writers See Stories Where Others Don’t

Tom Johnson — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 19:33:37 +0000

Last week I had the opportunity to listen to Chad Hymas, an inspirational speaker (not the Chris Farley type), who related several powerful stories that changed him. A quadriplegic after a tractor-hay bale incident, Hymas shared how one can live a happier, more fulfilled, more productive life even without the use of one’s limbs.

We all sat mesmerized while Hymas related story after story. His speech wasn’t polished or his diction articulate, but his life-altering stories held me at full attention. As I walked back to my department, I wondered how he had become a motivational speaker. Was it the handful of life-altering stories, which he could deliver in sincere, moving ways, that made him inspirational? I thought, perhaps if I had a handful of life-altering stories …

But later I realized Hymas probably didn’t have more stories than anyone else. There are hundreds of other quadriplegics, others who have broken their necks, who are no doubt dull, unmotivating, and ordinary.

What separates extraordinary presenters and writers from others? I believe it’s the ability to see stories where others miss them. The ability to create stories where others look at the obvious and see nothing.

Writers see stories where others see nothing

This week I’ve been reading a book of essays by James Hall, a contemporary Florida novelist. In one of his essays, Hall explains how that his love for reading stemmed from a murder mystery called Nude Woman in the Grass, a book he randomly found in the library and started reading when he was ten. The smutty-sounding title (which turned out to be very PG) grabbed his attention, but he found the mystery gripped him, and led him to see the appeal of reading. He writes,

“So this was why people read! Books were about adult things. Strong emotions, extreme behaviors, the inside stuff of a world I had never imagined existed. In this my first recreational book I suddenly realized that novels could fill one with heart pounding fear as well as lip-smacking lust. That they could, in fact, suddenly expand the boundaries of the tiny hillbilly town where I had always lived and where I imagined I would always stay.”

Hall’s experience was quiet, subtle, and mostly stationary — he was merely reading a book in a library. But within this one moment, he sees a larger, more meaningful narrative.

The writer’s ability to see story where others pass it by is similar to the photographer’s eye. When I take photos, I merely point and click, and don’t think much about what I’m doing. But real photographers, I’ve been told, look for the single moment that tells a story — the one split second where someone’s countenance tells the story of the whole. Novices don’t see this. The captured moment is something you must learn to see. The photographer sees the invisible story and captures it.

Yesterday Jane and I rode our bikes through some winding roads in Eagle Mountain, passing by rustic 9,000-square-foot ranch homes, many with horses in the sides of their yards and four car garages. The sun was setting over the mountain hills. I was pulling all three kids in a bike carrier behind me.

Nothing happened on the ride, but I felt, in a few distinct moments, that we had found a place we could call home. After years of living all over the world, and months of searching for the right place, we found the right place.

I started to see how I might create a story out of an experience that didn’t seem to include a story. We were, after all, just riding our bikes. No one was injured. No one broke world records. No one even talked much. But I caught a glimpse of the narrative that was going on, almost invisibly before us.

——–

photo from SAAO

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What I See — James Hall’s Essays and Florida

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Writers See Stories Where Others Don’t

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