(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Wednesday, October 10
Sunrise over Miami, as seen from the fifth floor of the Courtyard Marriott near the airport.
I woke up in the United States this morning for the first time in two months. The trip thus far has been uneventful. I hired a driver, Fernando, who got me safely and quickly from Uvita to San José, where I spent the night in a Marriott Courtyard near the airport. Nice hotel. The flight out was no problem and the only complaint I have on the trip thus far was a long line at passport control coming into Miami, including an asshole French Canadian who decided to just walk past everyone in line until he got to … me. I stepped in front of him and he got a little indignant. But he wasn’t willing to push the issue. He went through after I did.
I’m flying out this morning for Iowa via Chicago. More fun and thrills in airports. This is a lifestyle that I don’t miss in any way, shape or form. I think there was one year when I worked for Scripps that I traveled 40+ weeks. (Some of those trips were one-day jaunts, but still … 40 weeks of airports and hotels and crap food. I’m still not sure how I survived that.) So far, my ankle is holding up really well. It was sore after yesterday’s travel but not abnormally so.
I also started reading The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius. It was written in Latin in the second century A.D. and I did a little research on translations after initially downloading the 1566 translation by William Adlington from Project Gutenberg. I just wasn’t up for wading through archaic English spelling and style while trying to read it, and I also wanted a more contemporary take since the book is pretty bawdy in spots and I didn’t want to read through the gauze of some translator trying mightily not to offend.
Enter Sarah Ruden. Thus far, I’m really impressed with her translation. I have both her version and Adlington’s on my Kindle so I’ve jumped back and forth a bit to see how they compare. Very similar, but her language is much more fun and interesting. I’m glad I opted for it.
This book is the story that inspired Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Instead of a cockroach, the narrator here is turned into a donkey when he messes with witchcraft that he doesn’t fully understand. It’s an early take on the picaresque novel that Don Quixote, Tom Jones and Confederacy of Dunces all took inspiration from. I also am working on a sub-theme in The Book that is inspired by this story. So there’s that.
Onward to Iowa. Hopefully, no one will turn me into an ass. Or a bigger ass, as the case may be …
Banana update. Shot this Monday before leaving for the States.
(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Saturday, October 6
This beauty emerged after the rain finally relented.
After five days of pretty much nonstop rain, the skies cleared last night in a spectacular way. There have only been one or two nights since I arrived here (almost 8 weeks ago now) that we’ve had clear skies in the evening.
As if to make a great situation better, the power went out, creating blackout conditions. I walked out into the parking lot to star gaze. There are few things more humbling that standing beneath the stars in pitch-black conditions. That almost made all the rain we endured worthwhile.
The lucky streak continued this morning with brilliant sunrise filled with bird songs and the distant sound of surf. I was struck with inspiration and awoke at about 4 a.m. and started writing. I do that pretty frequently. The sun rises here every day around 5:30 and I love to sit there and listen to the jungle wake up while the light starts to filter in through the Treehouse. After all that rain, it was wonderful to walk out into a sunny morning after I was done writing. I guess the bad news is the inspiration created more complication in The Book. I was running parallel story lines. Now I have three, including a retelling of the Joe Magarac tall tale. It’s coming together in increasing strange yet interwoven ways.
I read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The River” the other day for the first time in years. What an astounding story driven by her typical themes of the Southern grotesque and redemption. Her ability to craft rich, complex characters is second to none I have an anthology of all her short stories and I almost kept reading, but her work is so dense I decided to move on to something else. So I picked up Conrad’s Lord Jim, which I made a run at once and ran out of steam. I’m faring much better this time but still believe he should have made it a novella, ending with the trial Jim is subjected to. I haven’t finished yet, but the tale of Jim’s years in limbo after the Patna incident feels anticlimactic thus far. I love the way Conrad works the pace of the story, sometimes entering the “ripping yarn” territory and other times slowing down to dive deep into the characters’ inner impressions and motivations. That quality always floored me when reading Heart of Darkness. If you just pull it apart and put it in an outline, it’s an action-packed adventure tale. But he intentionally retards the pace, forcing the reader to turn inward and focus on the motivations and subtexts behind the action more than the action itself.
Gian swung by on Thursday and took me out to a resort south of here where I booked a room for when Lara comes to visit in early November. She’ll be here for about 5 days and then we’ll return to the States together on Nov. 7. Initially, we were going to go the discount route, but it will have been almost three months since we’ve seen each other so I figured, what they hell. Let’s go 4-star. Cristal Ballena definitely is that. It has a wonderful view of the ocean. While I was checking out the room options it was raining, obscuring the ocean in a thick, misty haze that was every bit as stunning as a clear Pacific view. Vultures circled lazily and a pair of macaws squawked there way through the rain toward the ocean, disappearing into the murk.
I’ve decided to name my favorite agouti — he is now Fela Agouti after the late, great African music legend Fela Kuti. He joins Chuckles the Gecko as my constant companions here.
This week, I head back to the states for a business meeting, but I’m not swinging through Ohio. I return here late Friday night, but I have to admit, I’m greatly looking forward to being able to walk into a store and asking for something in English and being understood. I’m just hoping I can navigate the airports without a setback for my ankle, which continues to improve in its glacial way.
(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Thursday, October 4
I wonder where the howlers go after they’ve spent a few days raising hell outside my window. Their calls grow progressively more distant over subsequent days until they disappear into the jungle. Then the cycle repeats.
A new website, How To Be a Monkey, attempts to answer that question. The site offers an inside look at what monkeys in the wild are up to. I’ve poked around in there and love it, even though my limited bandwidth here makes it slow at times. They’re tracking a group of capuchins here in Costa Rica at the Lomas Barbudal Biological Reserve, about 145 miles north of Uvita, near the boarder with Nicaragua. The star is Winslow Homer, a baby monkey that researchers tracked all day on Jan. 24, 2014. They then posted the results in a way that’s both educational and entertaining.
In a story about the project, I was particularly struck by the comments of Susan Perry, an anthropology professor at UCLA, who notes the negative and positive impacts of technology on science education:
This is getting to be true even in Costa Rica, where kids … have some of the most endangered and interesting habitats in the world in their backyard. But they never go in their backyard because they’re looking at the TV or their laptop or their phone … Part of my job as an educator is to try to lure people in to nature. And also get them to understand that even if they don’t want to be bothered to walk outside … that they should at least be able to appreciate what’s out there enough to be the kind of citizen that promotes the conservation of those areas.
I haven’t had access to TV now for two months and I don’t miss it at all. And while I twitch uncontrollably at times because I don’t have the Internet bandwidth I’m accustomed to at home, even that has proven a gift. It’s amazing what you see when you go outside, get quiet and watch.
For the past few days, we’ve had drenching, nightlong rain. No thunder and lightning. Just rain. It abates midmorning before continuing again later in the afternoon, and during that pause, the jungle jumps to life.
A coatimundi. Photo by Clark Anderson, via Wikipedia and creative commons license
The other day I heard an aggressive snorting followed by the squeal of an agouti, who shot past me with his hair standing on end. I jumped up to take a look at what had rattled him and saw a coatimundi — a cousin of the raccoon— stomping around where the rabbit-like agouti normally forages for papaya scraps. Moral of this story: Don’t mess with a coatimundi.
I’ve also been fascinated by the blue flies who harass me as I write. I’ve never seen anything quite like them and haven’t made a specific ID yet, but they’re impossible to kill. They fly up and hover, drone-like, in front of me, but the second I move to swat them they zip off. I’ve yet to hit one despite numerous attempts and strategies. (It’s important to note here that I am not an amateur killer of flies; I’m able to snatch run-of-the-mill U.S. flies with my hand and hurl them to their deaths). It’s almost as if the singularity has occurred, but instead of humans merging with machines, these strange flies have beaten us to it.
I haven’t heard much from the howlers the past few days. I think when it rains like this they pretty much hunker down and ride it out.
Odds and sods
I finished Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Loved it. I’ve finally found one of the Russian masters I can relate to, though I intend to start revisiting the others now.
I read Henry James’ The Aspern Papers, which was mentioned several times in the fiction writing lectures I’m listening to. The way James crafts his characters is amazing, and the use of an unreliable narrator is subtle and very effective. The ending also fits John Gardner’s criteria for Resolution, where no other action can logically take place. One of the most difficult things in fiction, I think, is the ending. I’ve read so many great books that ran out of steam at the end or seemed contrived. Since I don’t know yet how The Book will end, that’s an ongoing concern I have.
Next up, Flannery O’Connor’s short story The River. This is driven because I’ve been listening nonstop to Ray Wylie Hubbard’s 1999 masterpiece Crusades of the Restless Knights. There’s not a bad song on it, and most of them are outstanding. Patty Giffin’s backing vocals are superb, especially on the song “The River Runs Red,” which apparently is based on the O’Connor short story. My obsessions sometimes become microscopic in this way. I just let them run their course. There’s also a wonderful bluegrass waltz on there, “After the Harvest,” that I can’t get out of my head. I think I’m going to quote part of it in The Book. Here are the lyrics (as transcribed by me, so they might be a tad off):
After the Harvest Always before us there have been true believers rising up from the rank and file drunks now for a short time we gather small treasures and after the harvest there’s sweet kingdom come
Once we had wings and could fly over mountains and in the blue yonder we had a home there was a time we could all walk on water if we saw a reflection then we’d sink like a stone
There are these bridges from the past to the present there are these bridges from now until dawn there are these rivers that flow on forever we are like rivers on our way home
