August 14: Pay Out the Line, My Book Bag, "Preparing the Ghost"

"Now for the R!  Up we go!  Attach!  Descend!  Pay out the line!  Whoa!  Attach!  Good!  Up you go!  Repeat!  Attach!  Descend!  Pay out line.  Whoa, girl!  Steady now!  Attach!  Climb!  Attach!  Over to the right!  Pay out line!  Attach!  Now right and down and swing that loop and around and around!  Now in to the left!  Attach!  Climb!  Repeat!  O.K.!  Easy, keep those lines together!  Now, then, out and down for the leg of the R!  Pay out line!  Whoa!  Attach!  Ascend!  Repeat!  Good girl!"

That's Charlotte in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web narrating her acrobatic writing process.  You can almost see the little gray spider leaping, twirling, jumping.  Creating a miracle of language.  Something that's intricate and fragile at once.  A thing puzzling and wondrous.


I've been carrying a book around in my book bag that is just as strange and beautiful as a dewy spiderweb.  Matthew Gavin Frank's Preparing the Ghost, a 282-page meditation on the giant squid, Moses Harvey (the first man to photograph it), monomaniacal obsession (think Captain Ahab chasing a Moby-Dick with tentacles), death by chocolate ice cream, a fatal Chicago heat wave, a grandfather's saxophone legacy, and an Insectarium.  Listed like this, these topics seem like dots of paint on a pointilist canvas.  But, stepping back, and back, and back, the book becomes an impressionist landscape of our deepest passions.

Frank does not lay out his story easily.  Like Charlotte the spider, he plays out his lines slowly, weaving his threads together.  The reader gets passages of prose poetry mixed with lists of arcane fact.  The result is a blend of reality and myth that questions the very fabric of narrative:

Myth as quite possible.
Myth as commodity, as bought and sold, as served 
     with a side of potato salad.
Myth, in Portugal, encourages the mosquito to eat 
     leather and turn into a flesh-eating cow.
Myth, in India, inspires the tribe to receive all nec-
     essary sustenance, from the smells of food, partic-
     ularly the apple, and, when traveling, to carry the
     apple with them, as they will perish in the absence
     of its smell.
Myth as On Special!, as Ladies Night Discount!
Myth as embedded in our mouths.

Frank's Ahab quest in the book seems simple:  to find out the details of Moses Harvey's discovery and photographing of a specimen of the giant squid in Newfoundland in 1874.  His prize, however, remains elusive.  Hiding behind locked doors.  Trapped in essays written by Moses Harvey himself, where Harvey fashions his own myths of discovery.  Ultimately, Frank's subject is even more difficult to capture than the giant squid itself:

And we're always preparing the next ghost, still in its larval state.  This time, let's give it a tailored sheet, a wedding dress, a bow tie, a nice clean shave . . . We're preparing the next ghost, as we do with any myth, to best scare us, and define our fear.  So far, BOO! is the best we've come up with.

Frank's book is larva and moth, myth and fact.  In his explorations, he discovers truths about himself and his family.  Poppa Dave, a whale of a man who, eventually, succumbs to his own tentacular mantra:  "There's always room for ice cream."   The compulsion to eat, even when sated.  The need to pursue impossible pursuits that slip away like the giant squid in an ocean of black ink.

Take some time in these last dog days of summer.  Pick up Preparing the Ghost, and get trapped in Matthew Gavin Frank's narrative web.  It's obsessively fragile and miraculously intricate.

Saint Marty gives it four out of four tentacles.

Death by chocolate and squid!