McCloud and McPhee: Closure and creative reading

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud writes a whole chapter (“Blood in the Gutters”) on closure, the mental act of filling in pieces that are missing. In comics, much of what’s missing happens between panels. “Whatever the mysteries within each panel, it’s the power of closure between panels that I find interesting”, writes McCloud. “There’s something strange and wonderful that happens in this blank ribbon of paper” (p 88, Understanding Comics)

Closure captures John McPhee’s advice for writing nonfiction: let the reader do the work. In an interview with the L. A. Review of Books Radio Hour, McPhee said:

Well, if there’s creative writing there is also creative reading… I can mention, as a writer, several things, like cornshocks and pheasants or whatever and that conjures a picture of autumn, in Iowa or something like that. And the reader is doing most of the work. Stay away from the reader. Let her read it. Let him read it.

In Draft No. 4, McPhee explains one instance where he leaves the reader to fill in the picture. At one point in Encounters with the Archdruid, David Brower steps out of a rubber raft, right before the boat enters Upset Rapid. Floyd Dominy, Brower’s archenemy, calls Brower a coward. Brower admits that he’s “chicken.” Then McPhee inserts a multi-line break in the text.

The next paragraph lists mountains in the Sierra Nevada which Brower was the first to ascend. That break speaks. That break is the gutter between the panels. It’s where the magic happens, the magic conjured in the mind of the reader.

July 14, 2022 comics writing closure

The “generous curiosity” of John McPhee

Craig Taylor names the key virtue of John McPhee:

So why is he interested in this telescoping rod? Why the 18-wheeled trucks of the title essay in his earlier book “Uncommon Carriers”? Why did he dedicate so many words to oranges in the brilliantly titled “Oranges”? “Compulsions are easy to come by and hard to explain,” McPhee admits in this new collection. Over the years, with generosity, he’s shared them. “I have never spent time with anyone who was more aware of the natural world.” This is how McPhee described a mineral engineer in one of his finest books, “Encounters With the Archdruid,” adding, “He seemed to find in the land and landscape … an expression of almost everything he had come to believe about that world.” With time, the description now shines back on its author.

“The Patch” is billed as a “covert memoir,” but McPhee has smuggled excerpts from his life into most of his books. “When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author,” he warned students in his recent writing memoir, “Draft No. 4.” “If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost.” Never a known prancer, McPhee has instead drifted gracefully alongside his interviewees, in motion and in communion, in canoes and the cabs of trucks, listening with an almost obsolete respect to both sides of our various divides: to the mineral engineer and the environmentalist. “The Patch” is just another chapter in an ongoing memoir of generous curiosity (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/books/review/patch-john-mcphee.html).

January 1, 2022 John McPhee curiosity

John McPhee on Maine

The sky after dark was a clear as a lens. There was no moon. We stood on the shore, tilted back our heads, looked up past the branches of the jack pines, and watched for shooting stars. One after another they came, at intervals too short to require patience. All the stars in the canopy seemed closer. We were so far out into the clear. There is more to Maine than exists in the imagination. Henri’s house in New Hampshire is a lot closer to New York City than it is to this lakeshore in Maine. Maine is half of New England. It is as large as New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts put together. And most of Maine is in the north woods, reaching embarassingly far into Canada. Our trip would move in a northerly direction, and we had scarcely begun it, yet the lake we were camped by was a good bit north of Montreal. A shooting star burst with almost frightening brightness, illuminating our faces, lighting the sky like a flare. A loon wailed, long and mournfully. We stayed up late–to ten-thirty–too pleased with Maine to go to sleep (pp 28-29, John McPhee, The Survival of the Bark Canoe, Farrar Strauss Giroux: New York, 1975).

January 1, 2022 John McPhee Maine wilderness

Sunset from the office window from a few weeks ago:

January 1, 2022 micro

Curiosity and compulsion

Henry Bryant Bigelow loved boats and fish and saltwater. His upbringing, however, might have suggested fishing as a mere hobby. “In broadest outlines–the prep school background, the Harvard lineage, the European tours, the summer house on the shore–his life seemed that of a slightly decadent Boston dilettante,” writes David Dobbs in his book, The Great Gulf. “His energy and curiosity, though, allowed no decay, and he never cared to dabble. He did” (p 16). Bigelow became an oceanographer.

In the early to mid 20th century, Bigelow lead research voyages to study fisheries in the Gulf of Maine. Dobbs writes:

This was not a man who was going to do his best work indoors. It’s probably impossible to overestimate what Bigelow’s physical restlessness, his compulsion to engage the world with his body as well as his mind, brought to his work–or, for that matter, how lucky he was to find work that let him exercise that compulsion. He loved oceanography’s physical and logistical challenges–the sailing and navigation, the duct-tape engineering, the invention or modification of gear, the weather, the work on deck. These enthusiasms made him a better oceanographer, for they encouraged him to go out repeatedly to collect data. His perpetual engagement in such practical concerns also added rigor to his theoretical side. Like the discipline itself, the fieldwork of oceanography required imposing on the natural world an intellectual rigor that was truly cognizant of the sea’s dynamic nature. A navigational decision that sets you on a certain course, the repair of a piece of dredging equipment that must sink fathoms deep and scoop up sea bottom, the design of a drift bottle that will move easily with the current yet survive all weather and seas–these things were, in essence, theories that would be tested mercilessly. If you send a weak idea in the the sea, it will almost certainly come back mangled. To constantly check one’s ideas against such demands, and to experience the ocean so often and under so many conditions that it provides the texture and patterns of one’s conciousness, can’t help but encourage a reality-based style of theoretical inquiry (p 18).

Bigelow served as the founding director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He died in 1967. His book, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, has undergone three revisions and remains in print.

Sources

David Dobbs, The Great Gulf: Fishermen, Scientists, and the Struggle to Revive the World’s Greatest Fishery Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000)

January 1, 2022 *The Great Gulf* curiosity fieldwork Henry Bryant Bigelow vocation

Walking through the woods near the Androscoggin River, NH

We walk on a mat of shining club moss, a bright green plant that covers the ground like a carpet, padding our footsteps. Tiny rills, small streams, and wide muddy slews cross the terrain at random, emerging from beneath vegetation to trickle or slide along a few yards before disappearing again. In the sandy deltas formed by the streams grow fiddlehead ferns, which are just beginning to unfurl their curled heads; they look like hair green bass clefs. Clusters of false hellebore burst from the putty-colored alluvial flats in fountains of wide, slick green blades. Every stump, every fallen log is covered with mosses, fungi, and lichens. We pass a hip-high stump completely covered, as if spray-painted, with a bright green growth so fine and thin that the comblike contours of the stump and the texture of its bark show through; when one of us breaks off a knob, it comes loose with hardly a sound, revealing soft blond wood. Logs litter the ground, forcing us to step constantly over or upon them. Only about half of these hold us; our feet plunge through the others, pulverizing the rotting wood into mulch. Trees grow atop fallen trees, sending their roots through them to the soil below (p 38, David Dobbs and Richard Ober, The Northern Forest, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 1995).

January 1, 2022 *The Northern Forest* Androscoggin River NH