{"id":2441521,"date":"2019-03-10T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-10T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=301266"},"modified":"2019-03-11T10:23:47","modified_gmt":"2019-03-11T16:23:47","slug":"half-aspenite-bruce-berger-publishes-new-collection-of-essays-on-the-desert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/half-aspenite-bruce-berger-publishes-new-collection-of-essays-on-the-desert\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Half-Aspenite\u2019 Bruce Berger publishes new collection of essays on the desert"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bruce Berger<\/a> has been a fixture in Aspen for the past half-century, but the mountains are his second love.<\/p>\n

Celebrated locally as the author of \u201cThe Complete Half-Aspenite\u201d and the Aspen Music Festival history \u201cMusic in the Mountains,\u201d and as the host of salon-like dinner parties at his hidden-away cabin off the west side of Main Street overlooking Castle Creek, Berger is best known beyond the roundabout as a bard of the American desert.<\/p>\n

His collections of essays \u201cThe Telling Distance (1990), \u201cThere Was a River (1994), and \u201cAlmost an Island (1998) are on the bookshelves of desert rats around the world, poetically capturing the landscapes, life and lack thereof in the arid stretches of the West. In a major new release from publisher Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, Berger, 80, has collected his favorite works from those earlier books and added new essays.<\/p>\n

Titled \u201cA Desert Harvest,\u201d the book will be published Tuesday. Berger will celebrate the release with a talk and book-signing at Aspen\u2019s Explore Booksellers on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

His earlier desert books were published by small presses and university presses, and inspired a cult following. The new one, from a major New York publisher, brings Berger to a wider national audience aided by a publicity campaign, early review from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews and a seven-stop book tour of the West that launches Tuesday at Tattered Cover in Denver and also includes stops in in Salt Lake City; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Phoenix and Portland, Oregon.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really exciting,\u201d Berger said in a phone interview on his way to the Tucson Festival of Books. \u201cIt\u2019s a sense of finally having arrived.\u201d<\/p>\n

Revisiting his work from decades past, Berger found that \u2014 like the desert itself \u2014 the essays hadn\u2019t changed much with the passage of time and didn\u2019t need to be updated for 2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cI spent a long time getting them just the way I wanted them,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re not so much about what was happening at the moment, so I don\u2019t think they\u2019ve aged in that sense. They say things about the desert that I was thinking then, and I haven\u2019t changed my opinions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book is filled with perceptive takes on the desert and travel, filled with wry humor and telling details. Some of the pieces are as short as a paragraph \u2014 philosophical prose poems like the well-known \u201cHow to Look at a Desert Sunset,\u201d which has been quoted on posters and postcards, and meditations on heat, cacti and the beautiful futility of canyoneering.<\/p>\n

Berger writes slowly, with a thesaurus at his side, meticulously crafting his phrasing and cadence. The result is a contemplative style and lapidary prose to savor.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people write quickly because things flash quickly into their heads and they don\u2019t want to lose anything,\u201d Berger said. \u201cI go bit by bit, forming the sentences the way that I want them. \u2026 It\u2019s a slow process, but it works.\u201d<\/p>\n

The longer pieces include some surprisingly fascinating reportage on the history of canals in Phoenix and a portrait of Berger\u2019s decades-long friendship with an eccentric named Cactus Pete, who had lived in a long-forgotten Arizona town since the 1920s. The new works include several essays on La Paz in Mexico \u2014 where Berger spends most winters \u2014 including the spellbinding \u201cThe Search for Mata Hari,\u201d which tells of Berger\u2019s quest to find for a long lost song by a local composer.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Desert Harvest\u201d closes with a story of traveling to a European physics conference about new theories of time (with Stephen Hawking among Berger\u2019s cohort). That story includes the book\u2019s only Aspen anecdote: about waiting in line at the Aspen Historical Society to have a book signed by one Nobel laureate, poet Joseph Brodskey, accompanied by another Nobel laureate, the physicist Murray Gell-Mann.<\/p>\n

The National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann wrote the introduction to \u201cA Desert Harvest.\u201d McCann, during his time as an Aspen Writers\u2019 Foundation writer-in-residency, began his novel \u201cTransAtlantic\u201d under the spruce trees in Berger\u2019s backyard. Singing Berger\u2019s praises, McCann compares Berger\u2019s masterful tone and style to a prepared piano in the John Cage tradition (Berger, in the interview, noted that he actually held in his hands the odd metal pieces that Cage used to tweak and prepare his piano strings, assisting the pianist William Masselos for a Cage concert at the Aspen Music Festival in the late 1960s.)<\/p>\n

Berger first came to Aspen as a high schooler in 1952, visiting an older sister who had moved here. In 1968, he bought the cabin next to hers. But it was earlier, at age 8, that the desert took hold of him. In \u201cA Desert Harvest,\u201d he writes of traveling from the Chicago suburbs to Phoenix, where his father sought a cure for respiratory problems resulting from asthma and chain-smoking.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all developed now, but it was open desert then,\u201d Berger recalled. \u201cI absolutely fell in love with the desert, the animals, the cactus and the bare geology of it not covered by vegetation. I\u2019ve always loved the mountains, but they\u2019re my second choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

As he puts it in the essay \u201cComfort That Does Not Comprehend\u201d: \u201cIt was as an adult, exiled to the mountains, that I began to dream of the desert.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@asentimes.com<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruce Berger has been a fixture in Aspen for the past half-century, but the mountains are his second love. Celebrated locally as the author of \u201cThe Complete Half-Aspenite\u201d and the Aspen Music Festival history \u201cMusic in the Mountains,\u201d and as the host of salon-like dinner parties at his hidden-away cabin off the west side of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2441521","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-15 03:41:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2441521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2441521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2441521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2441521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}