Auður Ava Olafsdottir

A young Icelandic writer stays true to her purpose in a world that wants her to be something else.

There is a lot to like about this novel. I was drawn to its simple storytelling style that accomplishes so much with relatively little. This chapter start, for example:

“Suddenly he’s gone. My sailor.

A tremendous downpour and storm have broken out and there are few customers in the dining room. Then I spot him standing at the door with his duffel bag and I know he’s saying goodbye.”

Another writer might draw this out, but Olafsdottir’s sparing prose delivers the emotional impact without great expansion. The story is told in short chapters that are typically just one scene. There’s little tap-dancing to link the parts together because it isn’t necessary.

And there are wonderful connections among the four principal characters, each facing separate but parallel challenges. Particularly in the similarity of the resolutions. A satisfying, credible conclusion that leaves plenty for the reader to conjure.

I had this on my bookshelf for over a year, saving it for when I got to the Iceland section of the novel I’m working on.  It was useful in helping to recreate the atmosphere in my head: the main character comes from places where my story takes place. It’s from a similar era. But it was also a great read from a voice new to me and a place we don’t often hear from.

Icelandic writers have about as bleak a prospect as anyone. Though appreciation of literature is remarkably strong in their culture, it’s a small country (366,000) with a language that’s not spoken anywhere else.  Nobody makes money writing in Icelandic. Hardly anyone does in English.

The Washington Post recently published an article about Thomas Savage, who wrote the novel that was the basis for the film The Power of the Dog. The book sold fewer than 1,000 copies when it was published, and the rest of his work received little attention: most of the titles are out of print. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a good movie. Bet you $1 it isn’t better than the novel.

Go find Miss Iceland. It’s in English.

Perspective | ‘Power of the Dog’ author Thomas Savage died in obscurity. It’s time to honor his work.

I made two short trips to Newport, RI, for field research. A rainy weekend a couple Januarys ago that was a useful, soggy introduction to the town. I went again last summer better prepared with a list of specific things I wanted to see and do.

The Newport Public Library was on the list. I wanted to read copies of the local newspaper that were published during the timeframe of the novel: summer 2009. Back issues of the Newport Daily News are in the library database, but you can’t access them remotely unless you have a library card and you can’t get a library card unless you live in Newport.

In the library, they set me up with guest credentials that, unfortunately, expired after 60 minutes, so I had to keep going back to the reference desk to get a new secret code. Another bummer was the fact that the section of the library where most of the stacks were was being re-carpeted and was closed to the public. Therefore, no serendipitous discoveries while browsing.

As usual, I found more details about what was going in Newport than I could ever use. There was a film festival, but the famous Jazz/Folk festival hadn’t been held there for a few years. Remnants of indigenous people were considering bidding on real estate the U.S. Navy was giving up. Trinity Church, the landmark Episcopalian church in the historic district, was celebrating the 90^th anniversary of the Seaman’s Church Institute, which it established in 1919. It didn’t seem like anything I could use, but I made a note anyway.

Next day, I’m walking around the Newport waterfront looking for buildings that could be the model for a warehouse that my protagonist owns. I notice signage for Seaman’s Church Institute on the side of a building and there is a café on the ground floor and I drink a lot of coffee. Upstairs, I find the Chapel of the Sea, a small room with a lot of marble and a series of paintings: “a visual homage to Christian saints associated with the sea.” Sat for a while, thinking about Italy.

Still had no idea of how this could be in the novel. Some weeks later in the home office, the manuscript tells me that Marie, one of my characters who was walking along the Newport waterfront, could be enriched by a minor,  accidental religious experience. Voila.

A few petroglyph sites in the Great Basin are easy to find. Nevada has two rest areas along U.S. 50, one with camping, at rock art sites within shouting distance of the road. A paved road plows right through Parowan Gap in southwest Utah, one of the richest sites you could hope for.

Others are far from the beaten path, their exact locations rarely given. Vandalism is a problem. Some sites have White graffiti scribbled on them from the mid-19^th century. If you scroll deep enough, you can sometimes find old websurfer accounts of visiting these places that offer hints. Some of them show up on out-of-print maps and books.

I wanted there to be a site to be in a mountain range roughly in the middle of Nevada. Couldn’t find anything until I stumbled over a vague reference to a hunter-gatherer site somewhere in the national forest that covers most of the range. Searched online maps closely. Quite a few of them and eventually found one outdated map with “INDIAN PETROGLYPHS” hand-lettered near the confluence of two streams flowing from the heart of the range. The site was about seven miles from paved road. Remnants of an early stagecoach line tracked loosely along one of the creeks.

When I returned to Nevada in the spring of 2021, I rented a four-wheel SUV. A GPS app allowed me to superimpose my location on a digital version of that old map. I set off one morning to find the lost site.

Got fairly close to the destination when the primitive road got too dicey for a rental. Hiked the last few miles. The higher I went, the more snow. The app said I was darn close as I came to a cliff. At the base of the cliff, a large cave. Scrambled up to the cave and found some signs, in red, as well as black markings. There was no trash, but I knew I wasn’t the first modern person to be there.

If these marks were anything, they were pictographs (paintings), not petroglyphs (rock carvings). It was possible that petroglyphs were elsewhere, perhaps on top of the cliff, but the GPS altitude reading suggested that the cave was the correct elevation. It would be hard work climbing up to the top of the cliff. I am old. I was far from anything.

I took the bird in hand, sat around in the mouth of the cave, listening to the mountains, bathing in sunlight. I was going to try to find a hot spring that afternoon.

From Chapter 19. Claudine vs. the Ants

A few miles later, Hendrik slowed and pulled off the highway onto a dirt track that was blocked by a homespun barb-wire gate. David got out, opened the gate while Hendrik drove through, and closed it behind. There was a muttered acknowledgement when David got back in the car.

The dirt road was mostly smooth and the pace leisurely. A herd of antelope came springing out of the sagebrush, dashed in front of them as they gawked, and bounded away in the desert until the last white rump disappeared. They had arrived so suddenly and disappeared so quickly that the fresh print in memory dried and faded. Hendrik resumed driving.

There were a few more gates to pass through, and the trail was rocky at times. It followed a creek up into the mountains, past a crumbling stone building, an abandoned ranch, through some dodgy puddles, deeper into the range. After a few miles, they came to place where another canyon full of aspen joined from the side. The trail ahead looked too much for the Town & Country. We walk from here, Hendrik announced.

Outside, a thin veil of clouds turned the sky white, suffusing a burning sun beyond. Among the aspens, they found carvings in the white bark: initials, dates and then figures. A rough sketch of a ranch house. Elke asked if Indians had done this.

Basque shepherds, Hendrik answered. In summer, they camped in the mountains with their herds.

Sunlight burst momentarily through the gauze, briefly igniting the white trunks, spring’s emerging aspen leaves. Hendrik found Roslyn alone, admiring a primitive depiction of a woman in high heels and a garter belt, etched by a lonely Basque. Not so easy to carve into an aspen tree, but the intent seemed clear. Probably not the shepherd’s mother. And likely not that long ago, given the lifespan of aspen.

Is she your type? Roslyn asked, teasing.

I might have seen her once in a bathroom stall, Hendrik replied.

It got lonely with just those sheep, she noted, smiling his way. Too obvious, maybe.

Hendrik cleared his throat. Actually, I have … I have a sort of confession to make.

For one beat, he had her attention and was about to plow ahead. But her eyes left him, glancing over his shoulder to something behind him. A different look in her eyes when they came back to him.

I’m not the Mother Superior around here, she said, half-joking.

They weren’t alone anymore. Someone behind him.

What’s he got to confess? Finn intruded.

No. It’s nothing, Hendrik fumbled, abandoning the thing he’d spent much of the day talking himself into. It’s just that shepherds get a bum rap.

Boys will be boys, she said.

And sheep be nervous, Finn added.

At this point, it started to snow. Not seriously, mind you, it was one of those faerie blizzards, filtering down on a wave of colder air, drifting through the aspen grove. Hendrik looked up into it, the sun glimmering through the translucence.

Geez, Roslyn said. This is some desert. Wearing a sweater with no jacket, she shivered.

Hendrik at that point thought he had dodged disaster and hoped like hell that Roslyn would not at some later date ask him what he was about to tell her when Finn walked in on them. He should forget the whole thing, keep his trap shut.

The pilgrims regathered. Given the way the weather was turning, Roslyn wanted to stay in the car. It still didn’t look like a real snowstorm to Hendrik, just a casual flirtation. He said he would keep hiking and would have been happy to go it alone, but David and Elke joined him. Hendrik was relieved that Roslyn was staying at the car, less so that Finn was staying with her.

He led David and Elke deeper into the canyon.

More flurries mixed with sunlight. All the same, it was a good walk in a narrow, eerie wilderness. The higher they climbed, the more snow. At first, banks of it in shadows, then a soggy carpet on the trail itself.

Hendrik was struck how upbeat Elke had become, and supposed she had some kind of crush on David. It was a mystery to him that David – who was a such a hopeless hermit in college, who couldn’t cope with the girls they’d picked up on the aborted spring break – had become a magnet for beautiful women. This further confirmed the one truth Hendrik had discovered while he was still in college: that despite his study of philosophy, he didn’t know shit from a tree. He was going to be a half-assed lawyer, but at least no one would expect him to know anything about life.

They reached the place where a new stream joined from the west, winding deeper in the mountains. According to the gazetteer, the petroglyphs would be up this canyon, not too far away.

The trail clung to a stream. It squeaked underfoot where the snow turned the gravel into something like wet concrete. Spring flowers broke the snow in spots, melting a skirt of mud around them. As they rounded a large rocky prominence, there was a deep, wide cave about thirty yards up the hill.

This is the place, Hendrik announced, and he scrambled up the loose footing at the base of the mountain. There was little to hold onto. When he reached the lip of the cave, its ceiling had been blackened by smoke. Instead of petroglyphs, there were painted designs on the rock, pictographs.

David and Elke reached the cave and began jabbering about the whimsy of the designs, a sign in red that looked like a scarecrow, daubs of red and white. It was not the most spectacular display of rock art they had seen but the two of them were absorbed in it all the same. Hendrik wondered how two people who had only met a few days ago, with little in common, came to have such an understanding of one another. They didn’t try to translate what they found, only respond to it.

And the philosopher-turned-attorney understood that this simple stimulus left centuries ago by an anonymous, unlettered hunter-gatherer, had proved to be more permanent than most other human expression. Even in this remote spot nearly off the edge of the map, people were still reading signs left by someone who probably didn’t waste much energy wondering how big his or her audience would be. Or what people would think of their work.

Hendrik trudged down the gravelly slope to the trail, paused to look back amused by the picture of the cave temporarily inhabited by his college mate and the liberated suburbanite, surrounded by whispering sagebrush. He felt pride in the pilgrimage, even if he was not coming within a light year of understanding anything about rock art. I should study shepherd porn, he thought.

 

Louise Erdrich

 

A ghost leads a modern Native American woman to find herself.

Don’t get too comfortable with this, because it’s going to change. It’s going to start someplace, go where you don’t expect, come back and find another new turn and when you think you’ve got a handle on it, the pandemic arrives. Could it be less twisty, more straightforward? Maybe, but Erdrich’s prose is so entertaining you don’t mind getting led along.

It reads naturally, like this was a year or so in the life of a real person, not a highly scripted novel.

Lots of good bits, amazing bits, really. There’s a very satisfying scene where the protagonist dons blue rubber gloves for some kitchen-sink scrubbing. This arouses her husband. Light comedic banter. A nice turn when they later discuss whether the gloves should come off.

This is a first-person narrative by a modern Minnesota Native American raised under troubling conditions in the city. She is duped into committing a crime that sentences her to a long prison term. It is just the first sentence of significance in the story and gives her enough time to discover reading. Books. Another novel about books. She ends up working in a bookstore. Nearly all the major characters are Native Americans from Minnesota, as is Erdrich. Who also owns a bookstore there.

It’s interesting enough to walk in their shoes, to see modern life – right through voting day 2020 – to get a glimpse of their lives. It is flat-out wonderful to witness, second-hand, the preservation of culture. Among other things, you get to relive the George Floyd experience through the lens of contemporary Native Americans. Which raises issues for the protagonist about her past and her marriage.

A few little things. I sometimes drifted off when the story dove into detailed descriptions of scenes that don’t seem so important. The novel is all first-person narrative until three-quarters of the way through, when she switches briefly to third-person. It didn’t seem necessary to me. Found a typo on page 207. And two instance of the phrase “try and [verb]” instead of “try to [verb].” One of the peeves I nourish.

One of the best books I’ve read in 2022, right up there with The Lincoln Highway, maybe a little more demanding but worth the effort.

 

Exploring Deaf Geographies

Rainy Thursday afternoon in February. Have sold sufficient hours of labor for the week. Set out on foot for “Exploring Deaf Geographies” at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center.

The work of five deaf artists is at hand. Can’t say whether knowing the work was by deaf people shapes my interaction with it, but it probably does. It helps that I am the only one in the exhibit space at the time. There is but little background noise from nearby. I looked at the work on Pyramid’s web site ahead of time. It’s more intimate in person, aware of the quiet, leaning in close.

I see something of myself in “Incidental Exposure” by Laural Hartman. A distracted look, a reverse mohawk hairline. This may be an abstraction sprung from a specific journey in her life, her exhibit notes suggest.

A sense of movement in “Awake” by Youmee Lee. A marshy, aquatic landscape under the moon. Birds in flight. A stream of consciousness trails behind a central figure.

“F Bomb” by Melissa Malzkun seems to exemplify De’VIA, art that comes from the deaf experience and culture. One of a series of prints meant to show “how glorious rich sign language is.” The bomb in question is the raised middle finger, one of the very few signs understood beyond deaf geography.

In his notes, Aaron Swindle doesn’t discuss his artistic process but mentions that he likes jamming on his drum set. Which gives me pause. “Sleepwalking” feels like its title, a fleshy amorphous shape emerging from a darker, more crammed space into a lighter, place of simpler images.

“Virtual Flower from a Hand” by Yiqiao Wang, a precise, skilled papercutting of a red flower growing from a person’s hand. The fingers might have eyes. Brings to mind When the Moon Was Ours (Anna-Marie McLemore), a novel about a woman from whose body flowers grow.

The exhibit notes explain: “Deaf Geographies are at once both physical and abstract spaces, ranging from Deaf community hubs such as Washington, DC, and Rochester, NY, to conversations, impressions, and memories shared by Deaf people expressing their identities.”

Highly regarded colleges for the deaf in each of those cities. The show was curated by Tabitha Jacques, director of the Dyer Arts Center, which is associated with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Looks an interesting place but unfortunately far from dear old Hyattsville.

Just down Route 1 is a brewpub founded by graduates from Gallaudet College. If you go there, it helps if you know ASL. I usually just point to things on the menu and hand over my credit card.

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Links:

Virtual Artist Panel by Zoom on Feb. 23 

Artist Reception on Feb. 25.

De’VIA  Deaf View/Image Art

A unique type of art that focuses on, examines and tells a story Focuses on examines and tells a story that comes from the deaf cultural, cultural, linguistic and intersectional POV and experience, often based on one of three environmental prompts: resistance, affirmation, and/or liberating celebration of the Deaf experience.

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EXT. IN THE SKY OVER GREENLAND – NIGHT

Byron is wedged into an Inuit kayak being blown through a fierce storm. He cannot see what is ahead of him, or what is below, but the air is drenched with the smell of the sea. He has a paddle but can’t navigate with it. The kayak is at the mercy of the storm and the ride becomes wilder, more erratic, sending him sharply higher then crashing down, twisting and jerking from side to side. He drops the paddle, clutches the sides of the small craft.

Suddenly, a cliff emerges from the storm. It is certain the kayak will crash into it. Byron begins to sing.

Byron
When I get to the bottom, I go back to the top of the slide
And I stop, and I turn, and I go for a ride
And I get to the bottom, and I see you again!

At the last moment, the kayak veers away, screaming along parallel to the cliff face. It dips momentarily toward the ocean below then rockets up dangerously close to the shoals.

Byron
Well, do you, don’t you want me to make you?
I’m coming down fast, but don’t let me break you
Tell me, tell me, tell me your answer!

The kayak lands suddenly on a snow-covered landscape beside the Old Church in Upernavik. The church is brightly lit inside, glowing under a cloudless night several degrees above the polar circle. Byron extracts himself from the kayak, approaches a window on the side of the church.

Inside, Buck and Salamina stand before the altar of the church. They are dressed in traditional Greenlandic celebratory attire: he has a white anorak and black dress pants. She wears white sealskin boots that reach over her knees, colorful leggings, a purple blouse and vibrant yoke of beads. They speak to one another, though Byron can’t hear them. He pounds on the window frame to no avail.

Byron goes around to the entrance, opens the door.

INT. OLD CHURCH – NIGHT

Byron enters the church. A large green worm, three feet in diameter, 20-feet long lies on the altar, encircling Buck and Salamina. It is at rest. The couple stop speaking to one another, turn to face Byron, not startled by his appearance.

Byron
What are you doing?

Buck
Just a little ritual, boy.

Salamina (in English)
We love each other.

Byron
You can’t do this. You’re married to my mother.

Buck
She’s not here, son.

Byron
You don’t just leave your family behind.

Buck
No? What are you doing?

Byron
What happens when you go home?

Buck
It’ll sort itself out.

Buck and Salamina turn to face each other again, their four hands joined. They exchange solemn vows in Greenlandic, speaking low and quietly, the way Greenlanders do.

Byron
You can’t do this.

As Byron approaches the couple, Buck faces him, still holding hands with Salamina.

Buck
Are you sure you can do this?

The green worm rolls its head to the side, allowing Byron to step onto the altar. Suddenly, he is alone with Salamina, there is no sign of Buck. She locks arms with him and the worm begins to writhe, its innards grumbling gruesomely.

Salamina
We have to get out of here.

The worm begins to coil closer to them. Salamina hands Byron an Inuit harpoon and hunting knife. He plunges the harpoon into the worm. It reacts violently, shrieking, guts and blood pouring out on the floor, tightening itself around their legs. Byron begins to hack furiously at it with the knife, hot blood spraying in his face. The noise becomes unbearable, drowning out Salamina’s cries, the walls of the church begin to shake from the violence within.

Byron continues slashing at the beast, which offers a final howl and then begins to die. He drops the knife, takes Salamina by the hand, and leads her off the altar and toward the entrance to the church. Windows are blown in by a fierce storm. The door is ripped from its hinges, sucked into the maelstrom outside as the two of them step into oblivion.

INT. ARTIST’S RESIDENCE – MORNING

Salamina and Byron are having breakfast. Through the window, clear skies over frozen Baffin Bay. Salamina sips her coffee thoughtfully, rests it on the table.

Salamina
Tanks you.

Byron
Thank you.

Salamina
Angakok …

Byron interrupts.

Byron
You are angakok, the shaman. Not me.

Salamina shakes her head. She looks away, embarrassed, and gushes forth in Greenlandic, then in Danish, quivering with frustration at not being able to tell him what she wants to say. Byron listens attentively.

Byron
I wish I understood. I wish I could tell you that I saw you and Buck together happy last night,
that I tried to help you. That I woke up this morning suddenly afraid that I could have
killed someone in a blackout rage. I … I wish I could tell you that.

Byron gets an idea, digs into his backpack and retrieves a small notepad and pen. He writes a message to Salamina, tears the page from the notepad and hands it to her.

Byron
Someday, ask someone to translate this to Greenlandic.

Salamina looks at the note, nods her head, and gestures for the pen and pad. She writes for a few minutes, tears the page from the notepad and slides it across the table to Byron.

Salamina
Make English.

Byron looks at the incomprehensible language in a flowing hand.

Byron
I’ll try.

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I met Aron of Kangek several years ago at the art museum in Ilulissat, Greenland. Born in 1822, he was a subsistence hunter off the west coast of Greenland, near Nuuk. In 1858 he was stricken by tuberculosis and could no longer go out in his kayak to hunt. In a cramped, primitive house on the island of Kangek, Aron took up art. Watercolor, woodcuts, drawings. He was aided in his work by Hinrich Rink, the Danish administrator for Greenland.

Aron had no training. In the words of polar explorer Eigil Knuth, he was the first Greenland Inuit to figure out “how to conjure a balanced picture out of a plane surface.” When you’re the first Greenland Inuit to do something, Knuth notes, it’s as good as being the first human to do it.

Tuberculosis killed Aron in 1869. He left behind about 345 known works, including 250 watercolors, many of them depicting scenes from pre-literate Greenland-Inuit legends. The compositions were given to Rink, who was compiling an oral history of the native people in a series of bound books. Rink’s widow gave them to a Danish museum, where they remained for a long time. The Ilulissat exhibition in 2018 was homecoming, their first showing in Greenland.

In the museum, I was drawn to an image of a native hunter in a kayak floating in air near a cliff. [The photo posted here features a reflection from my camera flash and a shadow cast by either my dense head or the camera itself.]

Later, I found myself writing a novella-that-became-a-screenplay that takes place in Ilulissat. The floating-kayaker image seemed to me to fit with an ancient Greenlander tale about an old bachelor who didn’t like singing. I mashed the two together and came up with a dream sequence for my project.

Just recently, I learned that the floating kayaker was an historical figure named Tusilartoq. According to Aron’s story, he was out hunting in his kayak when he was lifted from the sea by two seagulls. The gulls suddenly acquire  white dresses and the wings of angels. Tusilartoq rubs his eyes to make sure he’s seeing what he’s seeing, but there is seal blood on his hands. It ends his vision and he descends to sea.

This has been interpreted as a symbolic representation of the psychological tension in the transition from an indigenous belief system to Christianity, which the Danes exported to Greenland. Church records show Tusilartoq was baptized in 1756, though he might not have actually converted.

Tusilartoq had issues. He brutally maimed his wife in a gruesome manner because she couldn’t make their infant son stop crying. This led her to suicide, which led to a blood feud and a killing spree by Tusilartoq. Not exactly the likable chap in the story of The Old Bachelor.

Odd coincidence: Tusilartoq means deaf person in Greenlandic.

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Amor Towles

Four young men face numerous setbacks and detours on a cross-country road trip.

This is a lively, well-crafted tale that keeps the reader engaged with a twisty, fast-moving story line. The four principal characters, all young white men in the early 1950s, are clearly drawn and illuminated. Relevant backstory is provided as the narrative unfolds. It feels epic (576 pages), rambunctious, adventurous, sometimes poignant.

It is currently ranked #1 on my list of novels read in 2022.

The Lincoln Highway is a smooth ride. The four principal characters are rarely all together in the same scene. The gears shift often – but fluidly. That’s a tribute to the strong characterization: you figure out who these people are early on and recognize them quickly despite getting bounced along.

The story parts are well-fitted, with enough unexpected twists to keep you on your toes. Two of the protagonists in particular are complex characters who wrestle with good and less-good instincts. The other two are naïve and charming in their own ways.

It’s hard to say their personalities evolve or are changed by the story, although their situations are significantly different at the end of the story. The various endings are sometimes unexpected but they fit with the groundwork laid by the author.

The prose is sophisticated, amusing, earnest and insightful. I enjoyed it. But it sounds more like an erudite, mature novelist than any of the young men driving the story, one of whom is about 10.

The novel is realistic. As with most novels, coincidence happens. But it’s credible coincidence. One road bump for me was a 1,300-mile journey by a single motorist in about 18 hours. In an old pickup truck in 1954, when the Interstate system was a twinkle in Eisenhower’s eye and the eponymous Lincoln Highway was a collection of routes that ran through towns and cities, rather than steering around them.

Truth be told, I put this on my reading list because it was a best seller about a road trip on the Lincoln Highway. My as-yet-unsold road trip story, Claudine vs. the Ants, is centered on the stretch of U.S. 50 that runs across the Great Basin from Lake Tahoe to the Nevada-Utah border. It’s called the Loneliest Road in America because of the dearth of traffic, but it’s also considered part of the Lincoln Highway as that’s currently defined. At least by some.

The Lincoln Highway is strongly recommended, especially for the reader leans nostalgic for the 1950s and young guys finding themselves on the road.

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SPACE OUT AT GEORGE JETSON LIBRARY 

Once upon a time, Prince George established a public library on the road to Adelphi. As it was 1964, the prince considered naming it for John F. Kennedy. Instead, it was called the Hyattsville Branch of the Prince

George’s Memorial Library and become famous for its flying-saucer canopy at the main entrance.

According to the Maryland Historical Trust, the saucer was meant the draw the attention of the passing motorist and was not intended to be “programmatic.” Examples of programmatic flourishes on commercial buildings include large buckets of chicken, doughnuts, cowboys and so forth. The observer can intuit from those signs that chicken, doughnuts and western boots are available in those establishments.

The library did not offer artifacts from interstellar travel. However, experts characterize the saucer is “a graceful and satisfying element” that echoes an important architectural motif of the early 1960s, as seen in the works of Eero Saarinen, a famous architect who had nothing to do with the library.

However, our saucer landed at a time when people were driving around in some space-age cars.

In recent years, Prince George has undertaken a massive rebuild of the library that is nearing completion. The flying saucer was not abandoned, but it had to be moved. It didn’t fit with the chic look of the rebuild.

Our monument to the space age is now located at the back of the library, along Toledo Ave, next to a garage entrance that has no recognizable motif. While no longer in the spotlight, the saucer now commands attention a the center of a ring of 11 objects meant to signify planets in varying patterns and colors. There is also a cosmic swirl of color on the ground beneath the dome.

In addition to being jazzed up, it is no longer squeezed into the juncture of two parts of the building.

Imagine yourself in a Rodin-like pose upon the red planet. You muse that our flying saucer may be literal, the sign of a vehicle of knowledge. Passing motorists may see it as a form of broader transport than their primitive automobile. The future beckons through the saucer’s dome as we wander among the stacks.

“We set sail on this new sea because there is knowledge to be gained,” President Kennedy said, thinking of the moon.

The first public libraries in the county of Prince George were bookmobiles.

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