Dersu the Trapper

Instead of Huxley, I turned to an old friend, V. K. Arseniev's Dersu the Trapper, and then watched Akira Kurosawa's adaptation Dersu Uzala when I should have been working this afternoon. A nonguilty birthday treat, to be sure, but also one of the best portraits I know of cultures in collision while individuals within those cultures are doing everything they can to shield each other from the shock.

Yuri Rytkheu's A Dream in Polar Fog, to be released on April 15 by Archipelago Books, is a very fine modern rejoinder by an interesting new press. I'm giving it an honored place in my overcrowded shelf of books devoted to polar exploration, inaugurated when my grandfather gave me a copy of Richard Byrd's Alone. (Apparently he'd met the good admiral back in the day.)

I wonder what our contemporaries are reading at the McMurdo Antarctic Research Station? According to the National Science Foundation, "The library in Building 155 contains a collection of polar books, some technical books, and a great number of hard-bound and paper-back books." For no truly good reason, I'd be curious to know just what's in that great number--and whether the station's video collection contains John Carpenter's director's cut of The Thing . . .