Six degrees of separation, FROM Ghost cities TO …

/ Whispering Gums

Last #SixDegrees I was driving to the Wurundjeri Wandoon people of the Greater Kulin Nation, that is in my part of Melbourne, but this month, I’m somewhere exotic – Japan. When this post is published, I expect to be on a train between Tokushima, in northern Shikoku, to Hikone, near Lake Biwa in Honshu. I may not manage to respond quickly to all your posts but will do my best. Meanwhile, the meme. If you don’t know how the #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. And this month it is another I haven’t read, but should, given it recently won this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award in Australia, Siang Lu’s Ghost cities.

With Australia’s National Poetry Month (see my Monday Musings) having just ended, it seemed right to try another #SixDegrees title-poem for my this month’s chain. I had fun with it too:

Ghost cities, where
A superior spectre, 
Seeking The great unknown, 
Floats down Ghost River
to A place near Eden
Called Cloud Cuckoo Land –
And joins The infinities.

Angela Meyer, A superior spectre
Angela Meyer, The great unknown
Tony Birch, Ghost river

With thanks to Siang Lu, Angela Meyer (first as author then as editor), Tony Birch, Nell Pierce, Anthony Doerr, and John Banville for helping me produce a chain of books whose titles – even if their content doesn’t always – invoke other worlds and other worldliness!

I am proud of myself for using very few filling words in this “poem”.

We’ve travelled in and out of the real world this month, with Australian writers of diverse backgrounds, and an American and an Irish writer – and I’m 50:50 on author gender. How good is that?

Now, the usual: Have you read Ghost cities? And, regardless, what would you link to?

18 thoughts on “Six degrees of separation, FROM Ghost cities TO …”

  9. It is tempting to follow the ghost cities theme, but the only book I can think of about ghost towns is Stampede to Timberline, a book with histories and drawings of old mining towns in the Colorado mountains. That leads nowhere in particular. So, with a purely verbal linking

    Degree one will be Cities of the Plain, the third volume in (the English translation of) Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

    Degree two is Great Plains by Ian Frasier, a book of travel on the American Great Plains, with history mixed in.

    Degree three is Montcalm and Wolfe, a volume of Francis Parkman’s history of France in the New World. I include this because the decisive battle occurs on the Plains of Abraham, outside the wall of Quebec.

    Degree four, skipping the verbal tie, is The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, set in an earlier campaign of that war. (Let me add that the Mohicans are not extinct: as far as I know, you can gamble at a casino they own in New England, and they own a presumably profitable WNBA franchise.)

    Degree five is The Last Gentleman, by Walker Percy. Percy wrote one excellent novel, The Moviegoer, but was increasingly burdened after that by a failure to notice how he himself sounded.

    Degree six will be A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. This one I have not read. My wife disliked it.

    Reply

    • Fascinating George. Particularly Degree 3. Good one.

      Thanks for the info about the Mohicans. Good on you for clarifying the misleading title! And I’m interested in A gentleman in Moscow. I did enjoy it but I know some who didn’t.

      Interestingly not many chains I’ve seen did go the ghostly route!

      Reply

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