Chamonix with kids

I answered some question for Brave Ski Mom's blog about skiing with children at Chamonix. Here's a sample.

Q: Are there any “secrets” are you willing to share about Chamonix?
A: More than four hundred English-speaking families live in Argentiere, the village at the base of Grand Montet. Cheap Argentiere apartments can be had in the Grand Roc buildings and the walk to the ski slope is about two hundred yards or less. The other hot tip is to stay on or near the pedestrian district in Chamonix, where there are plenty of restaurants friendly to kids and everything is handy.

Full post may be found here.

Jung and Novels: Pilgrim

Pilgrim is a man who cannot die. He hangs himself and a few hours later his heart begins to beat. He comes back to life.

He is a preposterous character in a literary work.

And yet he is a complicated and believable character in Timothy Findley's novel, Pilgrim. The curse is a brilliant foil for our modern obsession with everlasting youth. Here is a man who has lived for centuries and all he wants to do is die.

Pilgrim is one of three great novels that uses either C. G. Jung as a character or Jung's method (i.e. analytical psychology) as a narrative device. (The other two I'll post about later). I do not include the legions of writers and works influenced by Jung, writers like Herman Hesse and Frank Herbert.

While I was writing Powder Dreams, I began to see the difficulties of using analytical psychology in a narrative. It is easy for a writer to frame therapy as two people, an analyst and analysand (or doctor and patient), sitting across from each other and talking. I've not seen this approach done well, not even on television.

There are many moments in an analysis when the talk begins to collide with life all around and the two begin to interplay in a way that brings a kind of euphoric dream state. This is the trick. How do you portray the analysis in such a way that life is not only embraced and lived but in such a way that therapy is a sort of turbo charger or booster rocket?

In the case of Pilgrim, Timothy Findley pulls this off not once, but at least twice, because Pilgrim's analyst is C. G. Jung.

Now it takes some literary cojones to actually use Jung as a character in your novel and Findley does not flinch at the challenge. But he uses Jung not so much as a narrative device, but as a character with the full stature of Pilgrim. Their sessions are two heavy weights going at each other and a significant part of the story is what is happening to Jung during this period in his life. It is after his split with Freud, when Jung finally dropped through the floor and entered a place not many people go, a place not many people want to go.

And Pilgrim himself is formidable, knowing some of history's great secrets as a man who has lived for centuries would. Secrets like what the Mona Lisa smile is and a thoroughly disturbing view of the Bonfire of the Vanities, not the Tom Wolfe novel, but the ritual. Findley uses a very large canvas and goes deep into detail.

Guest Dream'n

"There is a giant grizzly bear on his hind legs looking into the house." A dream of mine and two interpretations on The Daily Dreamer.

On Publicity

I wrote a guest post, entitled Brad Pitt at the Grocery Store, for Man of la Book with some of my thoughts on publicity. It can be found here.

About.com's Mike Doyle on Powder Dreams

"You're going to be sucked into a no kidding, no bull, running description of a typical ski bum existence so quick you won't want to put the story down."

Full review can be found here.

Cary Grant dropped acid. More than 60 times.

In his autobiographical essay Archie Leach, Cary Grant - The Man From Dream City - describes coming face-to-face with buried secrets:

"The shock of each revelation brings with it an anguish of sadness for what was not known before in the wasted years of ignorance and, at the same time, an ecstasy of joy at being freed from the shackles of such ignorance."

Grant beautifully describes, for paragraph after paragraph, his descent into the subconscious. His vehicle was LSD. He made the trip more than sixty times, each with a psychiatrist as a guide. Here's his description of the mechanics of the process.

"There is a lessening of conscious control, similar to the mental process which takes place when we dream. For example, when you’re asleep and your mind is no longer concerned with matters and activities of the day, your subconscious often brings itself to your attention by dreaming. With conscious controls relaxed, those thoughts buried deep inside begin to come to the surface in the form of dreams. These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies and, if you will accept the reasoning, could be classified as hallucinations. Such fantasies, or hallucinations, are inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood. Dreams are really the emotions that we find ourselves reluctant to examine, think about, or meditate upon, while conscious."

It is a tidy way to sum up what goes on in dream analysis, which is part of the narrative structure of my novel, Powder Dreams.

Steve Jobs went through something similar. Here is an excerpt from his obituary in the New York Times:

"He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand."

Greg Stump, Skiing and Powder Dreams

Any novel that includes skiing in the 1980s or 1990s must include Greg Stump. Here's an excerpt from Powder Dreams:

"Greg Stump and his cadre of ski stars had by now carved an indelible place in the ski season... With The Blizzard of Aahhh’s skiing had changed. Stump’s films went from the well worn images of people skiing bumps or big powder to lunatics jumping off cliffs... Nearly everyone I knew watched his movies and found in them something distilled and crystallized, some statement about why they loved the mountains and skiing and why they loved, especially, the people. Stump was foremost a story teller and the very essence of a good story is the people."

Stump is the inspiraton for generations of ski filmmakers. If you'd like to see some of his movies - perfect slices of ski history - follow this link. In January (2012) he will be releasing Legend of Aahhh's, which he describes in an ESPN interview:

"The real storyline of the movie is, it's the history of ski films. From the 1930s in Nazi Germany through what the kids are doing today, and pretty much everything in between. And the way that those films helped perpetuate and promote big-mountain skiing, and really this whole extreme-sports movement."

Can't wait to see it.