Geoff Schumacher

I am here. I have been here for two days. Here is Ames, Iowa, in a furnished rental condo formerly occupied by the previous publisher of the local newspaper, the Tribune. Starting tomorrow morning, I am the publisher of the local newspaper.

It took three days to get here from Las Vegas. I drove, obviously. A direct flight is all of three hours. I drove because I need my car and my stuff. All told, including a few minor detours, I traveled 1,645 miles. I took the so-called Southern Route, traversing Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. I did this because my wife was concerned that I might get caught in a dangerous snowstorm in Colorado. Definitely possible this time of year. In any case, I didn’t mind taking the Southern Route, because I’d been on the Northern Route twice in the past few years. Wanted to see something different.

The driving was pretty easy. I enjoyed the use of cruise control much of the time. I made it to Albuquerque the first day — 588 miles. On the second day, I decided to cut a hundred miles or so from my trip by leaving Interstate 40 and instead taking U.S. 54 northeast from Tucumcari. It was two lanes instead of four, and therefore slower going. I had to slow down to 45 through the many farm towns. The driving wasn’t bad, but the scenery was not impressive. I expected more charming small towns, along the lines of classic Route 66, but that’s not what U.S. 54 offers. It was amazingly flat and boring terrain through northeastern New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and western Kansas. The towns were ugly, with no evidence of any efforts to make them aesthetically engaging. Texas and Oklahoma, in particular, were forgettable, and western Kansas wasn’t much better. Not an area of the country I would want to live in.

Things got a little more interesting once I reached Pratt, Kansas. Pratt is an attractive town. The natural terrain also became more varied and interesting once I passed Pratt and cruised in to Wichita, where I stayed the second night. From Wichita to Kansas City, you take toll roads — the Kansas Turnpike system. I ended up paying $8.25 for the privilege, but it was great. The highways were in good shape, and they weren’t busy. Every so often, there is a “service area” along the highway, with a convenience store, gas station and fast-food restaurant. It’s only for motorists on the toll road. I got to KC very quickly. Then pressed on to Ames, arriving in the early evening.

I have spent the past two days unpacking my stuff, putting it in place and buying things I need. I’ve been to Target, Walmart, Kmart, the Hy-Vee supermarket and a few other places to get what I need. I’m all set, I think.

I miss my family. This does not surprise me. I have never lived on my own, really, and only a few times have I been apart from my wife and kids for more than a few days. But I know they are coming to visit in a couple of weeks, and I know they will be moving here with me in late July. I gotta believe I will visit them in Las Vegas sometime in May or June. That will be a long stretch by myself if I don’t.

I traveled to Des Moines today. I checked out the big mall on the west side of the city, and visited three different bookstores (two Barnes and Nobles and a big used place, Half Price Books). The mall is very nice. My wife and younger daughter will like it.

I start work tomorrow, and I know this will be an all-encompassing experience, especially for the first few weeks. It’s a big job, encompassing not only the daily newspaper but a dozen other publications (weeklies and shoppers) in the area as well. There are challenges to deal with right away.

I soon will be moving to Ames, Iowa. My company, Stephens Media, has promoted me to publisher of the Ames Tribune and five affiliated weekly newspapers. Check out the story published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal here.

I’m very excited about this opportunity. It’s the logical next step in my journalism career, I think. Moving the family 1,500 miles will not be easy, but it seems that everybody is intent on focusing on the positives and not dwelling on the potential hardships.

Ames is a fine small city. It’s the home of Iowa State University, and it’s about 30 miles north of Des Moines. The Ames Tribune is a good small daily. It won a Pulitzer Prize when it was run by Michael Gartner. I start April 4.

In this age of Facebook, Twitter, websites and mobile apps, there’s still few things better than finding magazines in the mailbox. I get a lot of magazines. This is partly because I am dedicated to subscribing to some of them — New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Atlantic — and partly because my wife does a lot of online surveys and earns points toward magazine subscriptions. She builds points, and we get to subscribe to lots of different magazines. This is how I get New York, Fast Company, Sports Illustrated, ESPN and others. She gets some too that I generally don’t read.

Today the mailbox disgorged a pile of magazines. Four, to be precise: Sports Illustrated, Fast Company, New York and Harper’s. Here’s a rundown on what’s in them and what I think of them.

• Sports Illustrated: This magazine is not as vital as it once was. I don’t know if it’s the ubiquitous nature of ESPN television or what, but I don’t find SI to offer a whole lot of must-read material anymore. The Sept. 20 issue has Tom Brady on the cover. I already know the Patriots started the season looking better than many expected. The full-page photos in the front of the magazine are consistently amazing, proving every week that still photography still has value. I don’t generally read the Dan Patrick interviews with big-time sports figures. I like Patrick but don’t much care what these kinds of people think. The writing remains very good. Here’s the lead to S.L. Price’s story on the U.S. Open:

“Talent dazzles. It’s the rare gift, the thing parents pray for, scouts seek and agents sign, but the mean fact about top-level tennis is that every player is fast and hyper-coordinated. Talent comes cheap. Those who know the unique quiet that fills the dying days of a Grand Slam tournament locker room never talk about Rafael Nadal’s speed or strokes, not at first anyway. They talk about his willingness to change, to put in the hours. They always begin with the work.”

And here is Tim Layden’s lead about University of Oregon track and field phenom Andrew Wheating:

“Most gifted young runners are not just participants in their sport; they are fully absorbed in its culture. They begin running early and soon learn the obsessively numerical language of the game — splits, miles per week, national rankings — and they become connected across time zones in an Internet-based community. They are passionate about racing against the clock, but not always about racing against other runners. Then there is Andrew Wheating. He didn’t run a track race until the winter of his senior year at a tiny prep school in New Hampshire 4 1/2 years ago.”

There’s also a piece about car racer Kurt Busch. He’s from Las Vegas, but I’m just not interested in racing.

• New York: This is a good weekly magazine, especially for people who live in New York, which I don’t. The extensive listings don’t mean much to me, and neither do most of the ads. But almost every week, there are two or three great pieces in here. The Sept. 20 issue has Jon Stewart on the cover. I stop first on a one-page article about Vince Neil, the Motley Crue singer. I’m interested because a) Neil now lives in Las Vegas and b) he has a new memoir out that was written with Mike Sager, a prominent magazine writer I was lucky enough to meet and spend a little time with recently. Jessica Pressler’s take on the book: “Tattoos & Tequila the book (there’s an album of the same name) is compelling, not only because it contains many disgustingly fascinating details of how teenage boys behave when they become rock stars, but also because of its subject’s willingness to appear, well, the way he is.” The Jon Stewart piece looks like a must-read, which means I’ll tear it out of the magazine and save it for later. There’s a positive review of Ben Affleck’s new movie, The Town, which I want to see.

• Fast Company: I actually really like this magazine. It’s easily the most liberal business magazine in print. It’s focused mostly on digital media and green business, and it’s very accessible in its coverage of sometimes-complicated business matters. The October issue of a special issue about design. One of the better things in Fast Company is the extensive calendar of events. It consistently covers interesting stuff going on all over the world, and frequently highlights conventions and other events in Las Vegas. It is noted that Tony Hawk’s book, How Did I Get Here?: The Ascent of an Unlikely CEO, comes out Oct. 4. I probably won’t read it, but it’s certainly relevant to avid readers of this magazine. Did you know that Oct. 13 is the 150th anniversary of the first U.S. aerial photo? Neither did I. But here we go: Oct. 14, BlogWorld & New Media Expo, Las Vegas. Might be worth sneaking into. Did you know that Oct. 30 is the 100th anniversary of the cathode-ray tube? Neither did I. Further on, columnist Farhad Manjoo suggests that Netflix and Hulu should merge. Sounds reasonable. The “Masters of Design” package doesn’t do a whole lot for me, except for a piece about McDonald’s design. McDonald’s is not, in fact, the same everywhere you go. Lots of very interesting design variations around the globe. Gonna clip this one, too. But I’m not going to read the article titled, “Can Design Save the World?” No, no it can’t.

• Harper’s: This magazine is not like the others. This is a serious magazine for serious readers, my friend. I like it, but sometimes, you know, it can be a bit much. However, the Harper’s Index never disappoints. To wit: “Total number of pages in the financial reform bill enacted by Congress in July: 848. Number of pages in the bills that created Social Security and the Federal Trade Commission, respectively: 29, 8.” Also in the October issue, there’s a “Letter from Cuba” that looks interesting but long. There’s also a piece on “the decline of NASCAR” that appeals to my dislike for racing. There’s a short story by T.C. Boyle. I like short stories, but I never seem to read them in magazines. Don’t really know why. I often clip them out and save them, planning to read them at some point, but then I don’t do it. This one is kinda long for Boyle. Benjamin Moser’s book reviews don’t interest me at all this month. I will, however, read Terry Eagleton’s review essay about Tony Judt. Judt, a great public intellectual, died recently.

• New York Times, July 29, 2010: Amazon is introducing a new version of its Kindle e-reader that will sell for $139. This low-end version will be a wireless-only unit, so you’ll need to have access to a wi-fi system to download books and so forth. But wi-fi is pretty easy to come by these days, so plenty of people will be attracted to this version, which is lighter than earlier versions and has greater book storage capacity. Apple has sold millions of iPads but you gotta believe its price ($499) is beyond the reach of a large segment of the population. Not so with this new Kindle, which will be out just in time for the holiday season.

• New York Times, July 29, 2010: The new e-books coming out have a lot more to offer than a digital replication of a printed book. “The new multimedia books use video that is integrated with text, and they are best read — and watched — on an iPad, the tablet device that has created vast possibilities for book publishers,” the Times reports. The new e-book version of Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein, includes 27 videos scattered throughout the book. “Most are news clips from events described in the book, including the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960,” according to the Times. The possibilities are, indeed, vast, and this is where the iPad has a distinct advantage over the Kindle.

• Orange County Register, republished in the Las Vegas Sun, July 27, 2010: The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif., recently took possession of a cache of multimedia material from the Nixon presidential years: “300,000 photographs, 2 million feet of film, 4,000 videos, 30,000 gifts, 4,500 audio recordings and 46 million pages of documents.” This is stuff Nixon wanted destroyed, but Congress intervened to protect it. Litigation ensued. “Finally, in 2004, a deal was reached that allowed the collection to leave the Washington area,” the Register reports. And a few months ago, “21 trucks loaded with documents left College Park, Md., and pulled up at the library in Yorba Linda.” Since then, researchers of all kinds have been poring over the materials, most of which have not yet been properly indexed. Rest assured, interesting revelations will come, eventually, from this trove, including, perhaps some new information about Howard Hughes, one of my pet interests.

• New York Times, July 26, 2010: Wealthy and upper-middle-class people in Indonesia tend to speak English more than the national language. They also send their children to private schools where they can learn almost exclusively in English. This has created cultural and political problems in Indonesia, where some fear the demise of their national language. Also, if kids raised on English have trouble speaking Indonesian, it could create conflicts and difficulties for them.

• New York Times, July 26, 2010: The National Journal, described as “a sleepy weekly magazine for lobbyists and lawmakers,” is aiming to increase its profile and its vitality. It has hired Ron Fournier, former Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, as its editor in chief. Also, Ronald Brownstein, a former Los Angeles Times political columnist, will work alongside Fournier to increase the magazine’s profile. More hires are expected soon from the cream of the nation’s political reporting crop.

• New York Times Book Review, July 15, 2010: Elizabeth Gilbert’s best seller, Eat Pray Love, now a movie starring Julia Roberts, is not the first book “to mass-market the ashram experience.” An essay by David Shaftel reminds that in 1944, Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge sold more than 3 million copies. Pico Iyer has called it the prototypical hippie novel. Shaftel traveled to the ashram where Maugham visited in the late 1930s and found “no landmark to commemorate his visit nor is The Razor’s Edge sold in the well-stocked bookstore.”

From Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. Here, in a piece published in 1959, Capote writes about when he was a young boy and encountered Louis Armstrong. Just an amazing scrap of writing:

“Surely the Satch has forgotten, still, he was one of this writer’s first friends, I met him when I was four, that would be around 1928, and he, a hard-plump and belligerently happy brown Buddha, was playing aboard a pleasure steamer that paddled between New Orleans and St. Louis. Never mind why, but I had occasion to take the trip very often, and for me the sweet anger of Armstrong’s trumpet, the foggy exuberance of his come-to-me-baby mouthings, are a piece of Proust’s madeleine cake; they make Mississippi moons rise again, summon the muddy lights of river towns, the sound, like an alligator’s yawn, of river horns — I hear the rush of the mulatto river pushing by, hear, always, stomp! stomp! the beat of the grinning Buddha’s foot as he shouts his way into ‘Sunny Side of the Street’ and the honeymooning dancers, dazed with bootleg brew and swearing through their talcum, bunny-hug around the ship’s saloony ballroom.”

The Chicago writer Richard Stern has a new collection of nonfiction pieces out called “Still on Call.” This excerpt deals with the fundamental difference between fictional characters and real people:

“A fictional existence needs but a tiny proportion of what constitutes real life. . . . [Fictional characters] offer clarity seldom experienced in the murk and complexity of real life. . . . Fictional people have been honed and sharpened, rehoned and resharpened into a kind of perfection which not even the greatest saints, sages and heroes of real life touch. There is no revision in real life. Even if one makes up for what one has badly done, the make-up action exists alongside the “original.” And even in the best of real life action, there is so much accompanying complexity, both ex- and interior, so much that reveals next to nothing, that it never approaches the comparative purity of fictional action where every thought, dream, opinion, exchange and interaction matters. The individuality of a living being may resemble that of an author’s creation, but the creation is purer, clearer, as reflections in water, free of the bedazzlement and impurities of the atmosphere, are clearer and usually more beautiful than what they reflect.”

I have a lot of books in my house. They are shelved in every room. There also are books shelved and in boxes in the garage. But the subset of books on my desk strikes me as moderately interesting. Here’s a look:

BOOKS I AM READING:

- Reno’s Big Gamble: Image and Reputation in the Biggest Little City by Alicia Barber. I’m about halfway through this book. I’m taking notes along the way, because I owe the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly a review.

- Reporting at Wit’s End: Tales from the New Yorker by St. Clair McKelway. This is a collection of articles by the late New Yorker writer. I’m about a third of the way through this book, and I’m enjoying it immensely. McKelway is the forgotten man of the New Yorker, but his work is every bit as interesting to read today as that of more famous contemporaries Joseph Mitchell or A.J. Liebling.

- Portraits and Observations: The Essays of  Truman Capote. I’m about a quarter of the way into this book, and it’s fantastic. The essays are included chronologically, so I’m still reading Capote’s earliest nonfiction, the highlight, so far, being the 1955 nonfiction novella “The Muses Are Heard.” Capote is an amazing prose stylist.

- About the Author: Inside the Creative Process by Nicholas Basbanes. This is a new collection of Basbanes’ interviews and profiles of modern writers. Most of these were newspaper articles. Basbanes is a fine chronicler of the history of the book and book collecting but he’s also very good on writers and writing.

BOOKS I HAVE READ:

- Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields. This intriguing and maddening book will be the subject of a dialogue between Scott Dickensheets and me soon on the Las Vegas Review of Books website.

- Corn Flakes with John Lennon: And Other Tales from a Rock ’n’ Roll Life by Robert Hilburn. This is a fine memoir of Hilburn’s tenure as chief music writer for the Los Angeles Times. Lots of great stuff in here about Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley, U2, Nirvana and others. I intend to write a review of this book for the Las Vegas Review-Journal‘s Book Nook blog.

- Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt. Thought-provoking political essay by one of the most respected public intellectuals in the world. I have started writing a review of this book for the Las Vegas Review of Books website.

BOOKS I PLAN TO READ SOON:

- What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey. Hard to find but highly praised meditation by a British critic on the issue succinctly described in the title.

- Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim. This essayist from the 1960s and ’70s is highly touted.

- The End of Major Combat Operations by Nick McDonell. A McSweeney’s book by a young writer who was embedded in Iraq.

- About Writing: Essays, Letters & Interviews by Samuel R. Delaney. This book by an eccentric science-fiction writer is said to be more interesting than most such how-to books. Eager to find out.

- The Walk by William deBuys. The writer is a professor of documentary studies at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico, and the book is described as a “mix of memoir, landscape and social history” in a specific area of New Mexico. Found the book in a Southern California independent bookstore and for some reason it drew my interest. I think deBuys’ is regarded as something of a modern-day Thoreau. Eager to find out but this one will have to wait a bit.

- Bad Nature, Or with Elvis in Mexico by Javier Marias. Marias is a Spanish writer of great acclaim. This book is 57 pages long in a small format. It’s really a long short story. But it’s about Elvis, which is the focus of my next book, so I had to have it.

- The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I’ve been looking forward to this one coming out in trade paperback, which is did last week. I thoroughly enjoyed Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, and I hear this one is even better.

BOOKS I AM READING ON MY KINDLE:

- Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture by David Hajdu. Great writer. Currently reading a piece on Sammy Davis Jr.

- Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock & Roll by Mikal Gilmore. Very good music journalism.

Go here to read my Las Vegas Review-Journal blog post on the death of rock vocalist Ronnie James Dio.

So, I was reading this little Dell paperback I picked up recently at a used bookstore. It’s called “Edge of Awareness: 25 Contemporary Essays,” edited by Ned E. Hoopes and Richard Peck. First published in 1966. Some good stuff in it, including essays by Jack Kerouac, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Arthur C. Clarke. A nice piece on the craft of writing by Paul Engle. Some thoughtful pieces on a range of subjects pertinent to the human experience.

Late in the book, in a section dedicated to science, I came to an essay by James Dugan tited “Portrait of Homo Aquaticus.” Dugan was a friend of Jacques Cousteau, the famed French sea explorer. The piece is about Cousteau’s vision of a future in which men live underwater. Now, Cousteau wasn’t thinking about men living within machines providing oxygen to breathe and so forth. No, Cousteau’s vision was that a surgical procedure will be devised so that men will have gills like fish and be able to survive under water for long periods.

Cousteau, of course, was involved in the invention of the Aqua-Lung, which allowed men to breathe underwater without having to be tied to an air tube reaching the surface. Neat thing. But this futuristic vision of the man-fish was something else entirely. Cousteau believed this “underwater species will come in about fifty years.”

“He should be able to swim to a depth of about a mile, instead of the mere fifty fathoms [300 feet] of present-day free diving,” Cousteau said. “Home aquaticus won’t be able to go beyond a mile because, when we reach that stratum, the external pressure will be about 170 atmospheres. At that point tissue would begin to compress and the body would be literally wrecked.”

The great adventurer didn’t just envision a few brave, surgically enhanced men experimenting with underwater living. No, he saw entire “colonies of underwater workers” engaged in various forms of exploration of the uncharted depths.

What fascinated me about this article was how soberly this science-fiction notion was presented, not only by the author, who obviously had a bias toward Cousteau, but by the editors of the collection. By all rights, Dugan’s essay did not belong in this book that included some big-name writers as well as some serious-minded thinkers.

And yet, I was intrigued by the subject. After all, as the article points out, humans come to life immersed in liquid in the womb. It’s where we start, so it’s natural to think we might want to figure out a way to get back to an environment like that. Cousteau’s idea also caught the public imagination during the ’60s. The excitement included an exhibit at the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York depicting what living underwater might look like.

Well, it’s been almost 50 years since Cousteau’s prediction and nobody’s breathing through gills underwater just yet. No real-life Creatures from the Black Lagoon. But I decided to look around the Internet a bit and see if people are still talking about this idea. Not surprisingly, they are.

Conspiracy theorists offer revelations of secret Navy experiments with artificial gills that of course have been covered up. But all in all, the dream of Homo aquaticus seems to have lost its momentum. Most people seem content to go scuba diving on tropical vacations. However, there does appear to be a nascent movement to create hotels under the sea. I can imagine a fair number of people wanting to spend some quality time underwater without needing artificial gills implanted in their bodies.

Scott Dickensheets and I have started a new side project called the Las Vegas Review of Books. It’s a website dedicated to long-form writing about books. No, not necessarily books about Las Vegas. Any and all books that we think might be interesting to write about.

The first post is up. It’s a “back and forth” essay in which Scott and I discuss the merits and demerits of John D’Agata’s new book, About a Mountain. I think we delve into some fairly interesting territory, such as whether nonfiction needs to stick absolutely to the facts or whether some literary license should be allowed.

Check out the site here, or it’ll always be listed in the blogroll on the right side of this page.