Pink Fire Pointer July 2013

Torment Forbidden Traverse Trip Report/ w Pictures + My1968 Summit Register Entry

Cascade Climbers had a great trip report
My summit register entry picture from 45 years ago
Seven days in the Pickett Range with Jens Holsten

http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=1109466

 
 
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La Esfinge in Peru (V5.11c) by Vitaliy + Resue on Skyline 7/29/13

Vitaliy is still in Peru with Hamik and having a great climbing vacation
Rescue on the Skyline Trail 7/29 - two and a half miles above Palm Springs

http://vividrea1ity.blogspot.com/2013/07/la-esfinge-original-route-v-511c.html

 
 
http://mtsanjacinto.info/viewtopic.php?t=4260

http://www.mydesert.com/article/20130729/NEWS08/307290027/Hiker-rescued-mountains-above-Palm-Springs?nclick_check=1



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http://philippegatta.fr/blog/trail-tour-du-mont-blanc-tmb/

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Dorothy Johnston's "Eight Pieces on Prostitution"




Dorothy Johnston, an Australian writer who reads my blog and has sometimes commented on it, recently sent me an email about her new collection of short stories entitled Eight Pieces on Prostitution. Dorothy self-published the collection on Smashwords, and it is available for download from Amazon for $9.99. 

On her website, Dorothy says that the stories were written over her writing life, including her first published story, “The Man Who Liked to Come with the News.” She says the subject of prostitution has always interested her, that her first novel Tunnel Vision is set in a massage parlor. Although she does not say why the subject of prostitution has always interested her, she does note that many of her stories are set in Canberra, where she lived for thirty years, and where after the city gained self-government, it pioneered the de-criminalisation of prostitution, which, she says, “remains an interesting prism through which to view our national capital.” - See more at: http://dorothyjohnston.com.au/#sthash.ws55WjN0.dpuf

I like the stories because they are so well-written and because they deal with the difficult to treat subject of sexuality in a delicate and restrained way.  If you are expecting sweaty realism and explicit sexual descriptions, these may not be the stories for you, but if you might be intrigued with the emotional engagement of prostitutes with their profession, evoked in a poetic and somewhat idealized manner, these stories are worth your attention. Dorothy Johnston is not reluctant to use explicit language and graphic description in these stories, but salaciousness is not her goal.

 I prefer the seven short stories to the one short novel, “Where the Ladders Start.”  In this long story about a client who dies during sex, the issue is whether his death by strangulation is an accident brought on by his own sexual desires, or whether he was murdered by the prostitute who served him. Moving of the body by colleagues complicates the criminal aspect of the story, as does blackmail by a neighboring shop owner who says he saw the body being moved. The major interest in the story is plot—i.e. what happened and why, and how it will all end—not what the story means. The short stories, on the other hand, focus on more subtle matters concerning the meaning of the motivation and desires of the women who provide sex for their clients.

Johnston uses various means to distance the narrative from the gritty physical and economical aspects of prostitution.  Professional women are referred to as” colleagues.” Men who visit them are called” clients.”  Their place of business is called a “studio.” The sex act is not usually described.  One prostitute is a university student who studies between clients; one is a mature woman just trying to make a living.

In “The Studio,” the client brings his paintings to show to Eve, the central character. She tells him there is no love in his paintings, that he should paint at least one with love in it. Their sex is described as a meeting of bone and muscle, a “certainty of where she ends and another living being begins.”  When he brings her a painting of herself as Eve in the Garden of Eden, she sees it is her eyes and her naked body, but the painted feelings are those of someone else  When she goes to a gallery exhibition of his paintings and comes up to speak to him, he denies that he knows her. It is as though in the gallery she has momentarily forgotten that she is a prostitute and he is a client. The story ends with an effective ambiguous metaphoric conclusion.

In “The Man Who Liked to Come With the News,” the central character provides services for a man who is referred to only as “the man who liked to come with the news.” This is a very short story that lightly links politics with sex and the normal with a momentary break with the normal.  The story ends emblematically with a radio announcer telling of the collapse of the government and listeners stopping their regular activity momentarily before everything continues again as is “perfectly normal.”

“Mrs. B” opens with a cue reference to a coffee shop/café significantly called the Scheherazade, priming us for storytelling as a thematic activity. She works in a message parlor and refers to sex “decorously as ‘the extra’ or ‘the finish.’” She lays out the prices, the necessity of showering, and the use of condoms to clients as if “a hostess before a dinner party.”

The tone of the story elevates Mrs. B above the physicality of what she does in sentences like this:
“And strange it was, but men who came to the shabby house in Acland Street warmed toward Mrs. B.  In spite of, or perhaps because she’d found a way to sing, her body never lost its ambiguous receptiveness.”
The story ends in an ironic poetic image after Mrs. B. and her colleague Denise serve fifteen clients between them without a break. The exhausted Mrs. B. has a vision of herself serving tea with jam: 


She felt her smile slide along the surface of an internal river that was flowing so fast now there was no hope of stopping it…she stood up and danced out of the kitchen, singing loudly and taking charge at last, negotiating the corridors in a series of intricate and dainty steps, out into the traffic at the wrong end of Acland Street.


“The Cod-piece and the Diary Entry” introduces Harry who visits the message parlor/brothel dressed in sixteenth garb, complete with an “authentic Shakespearean cod-piece, preserved for centuries in a mixture of camphor and methylated spirits.” He has sex with Maria, “whose daily experience was that of being inhabited by the body of another.”  After sex with Henry, she thinks of the principle of disorder in the universe, feeling that “someone, somewhere out there, was preparing for them—for herself and Harry, a disjointed, disorderly end.”

The story is built on the extended metaphor of the sexual encounter as a play. When her landlord raises the rent and forces her to move to another place, she misses Harry and his costumes. “Looking back, she could not shake the feeling that she’d been on the point of understanding something important while in Harry’s company that understanding had been no more than a breath away.”

And what she seems on the verge of understanding she writes in the story’s last sentence in a child’s school exercise book she uses as a diary: “That we must continually take off our costumes and replace them means no more to us than it did to Harry. It means no more than an acknowledgement of love.” 

Although Dorothy Johnston is perhaps best known as a writer of mystery novels, these stories, with the exception of the short novel Where the Ladders Start, which seems primarily a character –based, plot-dependent, genre mystery fiction, are literary stories that depend on short story techniques of lyrical language, metaphoric resolutions, and universal thematic significance. I recommend them to my readers, for the pleasure of their prose and the complexity of their meaning.

The Spectacular Dolomites Skyrace of 2013 Video

The scenery is truly spectacular in this video
Team Glitterbomb in Greenland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpryz4t9Fq8&feature=player_embedded#at=192

http://www.explorersweb.com/offsite/?source=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.montagna.tv%2Fcms%2F%3Fp%3D49770&lang=it



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Team Glitterbomb in Greenland
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Chacraraju East in the Cordillera Blanca (Andes) + Prussik Pk

Hamik and Vitaliy M are having a great adventure in the Andes
Prusik Peak East Face in the Cascades
Whitney Portal Store Message Board
k2 news
Ranboze on Thunder and Lightening Cloud  (below)

http://www.supertopo.com/tr/Chacraraju-Este-ED1/t12058n.html

http://vividrea1ity.blogspot.com/2013/07/chacraraju-este-jaeger-route-ed1.html



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http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=1109178

Prusik Peak East Face

Whitney Portal Store message board
http://www.whitneyportalstore.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=1&page=1

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http://altitudepakistan.blogspot.com/2013/07/summer-2013-teams-abandon-k2-climbs.html

http://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2013/07/21/climbing-news-karakorum-success-and-tragedy-denali-records/


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Tim Horvath's "Understories"



A few months ago, Tim Horvarth, who teaches creative writing at Chester College of New England, was kind enough to send me a copy of his first collection of short stories entitled Understories(Bellevue Literary Press, 2012).  I read the stories and enjoyed them, but got caught up in another project I am working on that I have not had the opportunity to share my thoughts about the stories with my readers.  I apologize to Tim for this neglect of his very thoughtful and beautifully written collection. I have gone back and reread several of the stories; I recommend the book to my readers.

What fascinates me about Tim’s stories is how they focus more on ideas than on the everyday life of characters in the real world.  The stories alternate between what-if concept stories, fantasy pieces, parables, and seemingly realistic narratives.  However, even the realistic stories are less centered on the everyday life of folks than they are on the essence of human experience.

My three favorite stories in the collection are: “The Understory,” “Circulation,” and “The Discipline of Shadows.” 

“The Understory” is a fiction based on at least one historical person, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. The central character, Schoner, a Jewish professor of Botanical Science at the university in Freiburg, is, I assume, a fictional figure.  The time of the primary action is in the early 1930s, although this is a flashback from the 1970s in America, after Schoner fled the Nazi persecution. 

Schoner teaches his students out in the forest more than in the classroom.  When he meets his colleague, Professor Heidegger, they go for walks in the woods, and while Schoner talks of cycles of growth, decay and regeneration, Heidegger talks about poetry, art and music.  It is this dichotomy—between what Heidegger calls the essence of science and what Schoner reveres as the living world—that creates the narrative energy of the story.

When Heidegger is appointed rector of Freiburg University, Schoner is confident that he will speak out against Hitler’s rise to power. But he is disappointed to hear him talk of German destiny, historical mission, and the will of the people.

When Schoner flees to New England, he marries, has a child, and learns to love the woods of New Hampshire.  He writes to Heidegger, who has since become disillusioned with the Nazi promise and resigned as rector of Freiburg, and tells him: “Trees have always defined the forest for me.  I climbed the canopy, because I thought that’s where the best, truest view was.  But in the wake of the Storm of 1938, I find that the little plants of the understory have become very dear to me, dearer than I could have ever imagined.”
It’s a relatively simple narrative line told in carefully wrought prose, but it has complex implications about the dichotomy between ideology and actuality.

“Circulation” is told in first person by a man who has grown up with his father’s obsession to assemble a book called The Atlas of the Voyages of Things.—a book that attempts to document the complex chain of events by which things come to be what they are and where they are. After his father is hospitalized, the narrator is charged with cleaning out his apartment and finds only bits and pieces—nothing that “even approximated a coherent text.”

The father has previously written one book, a thin self-published volume entitled Spelos: An Ode to Caves,which recounts his passion for going into caves. Most of “Circulation” recounts the circulation of a single copy of the book from the library for which the narrator is the Director of Circulation.  However, the stories about the book’s circulation that the narrator tells to his hospitalized father are all invented.

One obvious inspiration for the story is perhaps the most famous story about libraries, Borges’ “Library of Babel,” for the narrator sometimes imagines himself the proprietor of Borges library—a library that “essentially comprises the whole of the universe—the universe as library.”

Another inspiration is The Arabian Nights, for in Scheherazade fashion, the son tells his father story after story of his one book’s circulation, which sustains the dying man. But if telling stories evokes literature’s most famous storyteller whose very life depends on her storytelling skill, a book about caves inevitably also evokes that most famous cave of all—Plato’s metaphoric cave in which perceived reality consists of shadows cast on the cave wall. The story ends after the father’s death and the son immortalizes his book in a realm somewhere in between actuality and fictionality—a realm in which what is is that which is invented.

“The Discipline of Shadows” is told from the first person pov of a philosophy professor who chairs a department of umbrology devoted to the study of shadows. His epiphany occurs when he realizes that printed words were the shadows of referents, and thus that all fields of study were umbrology--that all academics spend their lives studying shadows. Once again, it is inevitable that the study of shadows would find its source in Book Seven of Plato’s Republic, which recounts the Myth of the Cave.

If you come to fiction to experience the gritty feel of physical reality, then you may not find these stories engaging.  But if you think about, why on earth would you want to come to fiction, especially short stories, to experience the gritty feel of reality?

The short story has always had an ambiguous relationship to what pragmatists like to call “reality.” Poe was criticized frequently for the lack of humanity in his stories—that is, until Borges redefined what constituted humanity in short fiction. From its origins in myths, folktales, fables, and parables, the short story has always been more interested in what the mind makes than what simply exists in the physical world.  The short story has always been more focused on human desires, wishes, fears, hopes, obsessions, anxieties, and dreams than on human actions in real time. As a result, short fiction is more oriented toward “meaning," more directed toward a significant conclusion, than merely in recounting one thing after another.

I like Tim Horvath’s stories and agree with other readers of his work that he belongs in a tradition that follows the short fiction of  Borges and is continued in the fiction of Barth, Barthelme, Gass, Millhauser, and Saunders. I like the clarity and complexity of his prose, and I like his frequent focus on the relationship between fictionality and actuality, which has been one of the most important themes of short fiction since Poe.