I grew up with dozens of images of the gold rush. But they never cohered into any solid idea of what those prospectors were actually doing. Running a sieve through stream water? Dynamiting mountainsides? Hitting the ground with a pickax? So I was happy to learn from Roughing It what sort of process ‘pocket mining’ was.

You take a bucket of dirt from a hillside. Mix it with water in a pan. Slosh it around in a circle. The dirt and lighter rocks fall out; flecks of gold, which is heavy, sit in the center. I knew that.

But here’s what I didn’t know: the pocket miners aren’t after these flecks of gold. Gold is valuable, but amounts that small wouldn’t be worth your time. They’re after the big hunk of gold that those little flecks washed off of.

Western hills erode a lot. When there’s a pocket of gold, it scatters pieces of itself downhill in the shape of a fan. The pocket is the fan’s handle. (The fan image is from Twain.) So the prospector sweeps side to side, and when a bucket of dirt doesn’t yield any gold, he knows he’s off the edge of the fan.

As he finds the edges, he moves uphill, until finally he finds the big pocket, hauls it away and cashes it in.

It struck me that panning for gold is a good metaphor for the creative process. Each draft of a story is another bucketful of dirt. Feedback and time are the water that washes away what’s not gold. Don’t settle for the little bits of gold. They are not part of your finished work. They’re clues to it.

There’s a lot of weird stuff in this book about Chinese people and native Hawaiians. I don’t want to be too hard on him because he seems to be trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. With the Internet, I expect to be able to learn about other cultures in their own voices. From their own authorities. He didn’t have that advantage.

But I do think that Mark Twain’s information was perhaps not entirely accurate. So, sorry Samuel. Parts of your work have not stood the test of time. Also, the contemporary ear does not like the sound of many of the terms he uses. I’m trying to be polite about it.

But the landscape descriptions are compelling. Twain has a beautiful facility with the English language. And the comic moments are genuinely funny.

There’s a wonderful ironic story at the end about a guy who tells huge lies. Twain gets so sick of him that he goes back to San Francisco. But this guy tells exactly the same kind of lies that Twain has been telling the whole book long! The difference is that Twain is self-deprecating, and always gives you a wink at the end of a joke. This guy was trying to trick people, for the sake of his own pride.

This kind of ironic self-commentary is hard to parse. If he’s like the guy, then it’s self-parody and he’s not like the guy. (Who would never make fun of himelf.) If he’s not like the guy, then he’s wildly exaggerating the guy’s foibles, and he’s like the guy. It twists in on itself like a snail shell. Very high-grade irony.

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It is not surprising to me that Dumas behaves the way he does. Valiant yet sensitive, generous and gregarious. In his own mind, at least. He wants to be a Musketeer.

I think he shoots at a bird every blessed day.

It’s also not surprising that he’s treated so well by the locals. He is, after all, touring a conquered territory in one of the warships of the conqueror. There’s some question as to whether it was quite exactly legal for him to do so. And the most tiresome parts of the book are when he feels the need to argue the point. Dude. Your travel book is not the place for fighting with French naval bureaucrats. I’m in it for quaint views of old Algiers, not petty sniping.

That’s a good writing technique lesson, actually. If the subject of your story is your trip to Algiers, only talk about your trip to Algiers. The political fight afterward is a different subject. Save it for the editorial page.

He’s got two friends who are always sketching. They’re in Algeria to get subjects for their art. They go off on their own all the time, just to wander around sketching. I would love to have an edition of this book that includes those sketches. Somebody should be able to put that together. But this abridged Chilton edition seems to be the only English translation available.

The most fun is when he retells jokes he heard from locals. Particularly the anecdotes about the difference between Arab government and French government. The Arabs always come out better in that comparison. Dumas appreciates arbitrary power, I guess. Or has a bee in his bonnet about French bureaucracy; I wonder why?

You can feel his thrill through the page when he meets an Arab who quotes an Arabian proverb to him. It’s almost embarrassing. For sure romanticized out the wazoo. But it’s Alexandre Dumas; you don’t read him for accuracy.

If you want to get a picture of what old Algiers looked like to an adventuring, romantic Frenchman, this is it.

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Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a totally fascinating peek into the old South of the 30s. Half travel memoir and half folklore catalogue, it’s never boring and it really seems to give a sense of what things were like in the places she visited. The first half is Ms. Hurston gathering stories around Florida. It’s full of Brer Dog and the Devil and John and the Lord and Ole Massa, intercut with the day-to-day life of the little towns and logging camps around Polk County. The second half is all about Hoodoo and takes place in New Orleans, and in place of stories she’s recorded all sorts of spells practiced by the conjurers she studied under. It’s hard not to believe in some of the things she says she saw and heard of.

In particular I want to highlight the book’s ending, which is deeply strange and mysterious, and not at all how you expect either a collection of folklore or a travel memoir to end.



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