Who’s Your Favorite American?
Nessmuk is my all-time favorite American, at least for the moment. You can learn more about him at the Adirondack Experience, a museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. Like Twain or Le Carré, Nessmuk was a pen name. His other one was George Washington Sears. He was from south-central Massachusetts, and he had a canoe that weighed ten and a half pounds. At nine feet, it was half the length of most canoes. In homage to a character in Dickens’s “Martin Chuzzlewit,” Nessmuk named it Sairy Gamp. In 1883, he paddled the Sairy Gamp from Old Forge to Paul Smith’s and back, two hundred and sixty-six miles on Adirondack lakes, ponds, and rivers, rolling out his duffel wherever darkness overtook him. The St. Regis lakes. Upper Saranac Lake. The Raquette River. Raquette Lake. The eight lakes of the Fulton Chain. He recounted these travels in the magazine Forest and Stream, and, in 1884, published “Woodcraft,” a foundational text of American forest camping. Nearly a century later, I could not help referring to “Woodcraft” in these pages in a four-part piece on Alaska, one of which was included in the issue of July 4, 1977. In the second of those installments, I said that Nessmuk’s journalism contained “so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French.” Nearly a century before the modern environmental movement, Nessmuk was fairly shouting contempt for a society full of “petty, narrow greed.”
MADONNA
Selected by Carl Phillips
Source photograph by Paul Natkin / Getty
I was teaching at a small boarding school in 1984 when Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” appeared. A mania quickly took hold of the students, partly reflected in how they tried to adapt the school uniform to include such Madonna trademarks as fingerless gloves, large hair bows, bustiers as outerwear, and tulle skirts. As faculty, I was to report any infractions of a dress code that, honestly, I found ridiculous. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t, I explained to the headmaster. My time was short there.
From the start, Madonna advocated for freedom of expression, especially queer and sexual expression, at a time when media was silent on these topics. She spoke fearlessly about AIDS and, just as important, about queer joy and freedom, for which many people considered AIDS a form of punishment. Married to my best friend from college—a woman—I had no clear idea of my own queerness. Madonna’s music and her public example were irresistible, made me start questioning everything; I began writing the poems that would eventually out me when I didn’t seem able to come out myself.
Just as important to me has been Madonna’s indifference to societal expectations around art-making and what’s appropriate. Like any artist, she has ambition, but the largest part of that still seems an ambition to make the art she must make, for herself. Her work redefined American life at the time; maybe more accurately, it awakened a country that had all but fallen asleep, embodying a freedom the nation had forgotten was its founding purpose. My first book and Madonna’s “Erotica” came out within a week of each other, in 1992. I hope we’ll keep travelling together a good while longer.
