Discoveries

Battle Rock: The Struggle Over a One-Room School in America’s Vanishing West, William Celis, Public Affairs: 221 pp., $25

This story about a one-room schoolhouse in a Colorado canyon began as an article in the New York Times. The Battle Rock School was founded in 1915 and for almost 80 years most of the students were cousins, brothers and sisters. In the 1990s, this changed dramatically (according to Celis, 5.2 million Americans in urban areas moved to the country). There was also an increase in the number of one-room schoolhouses, but the mix of relatively wealthy urban kids and locals proved toxic, at least in McElmo Canyon at Battle Rock School.

Parents fought over everything from indoor (modernized) toilets versus outhouses (the way it had always been) to a picture in a reference book of Botticelli’s Venus, which caused many of the locals to take their kids out of the school. Celis spent a school year living in nearby Cortez and attending the school, where the students, grades one through six, were taught by 40-year-old Stephen Hanson. In the end, a reader sees the arguments over education in the 20-student school from both sides, but, ultimately, his sympathies lie with the locals.

Zipping My Fly: Moments in the Life, of an American Sportsman, Rick Tosches, Perigree/Penguin: 245 pp., $19.95

A $6,875 trip to New Zealand to write a 10,500-word article on fly-fishing, Rick Tosches explains, had “a lot to do with why I don’t work for the Los Angeles Times anymore.” Tosches is a weeper; his humor is an explosive mix of Dave Sedaris and Dave Barry, as he tries, in several essays, to do justice to the absurdity of fly-fishing, (the sport, Tosches reminds us, that is often referred to as “a jerk on one end of a line waiting for a jerk on the other), from Alaska to New Zealand to the World Fly-Fishing Championship in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Turns out he wasn’t too upset about leaving L.A. for Colorado. Not enough water in a city where everything is paved, with the exception of “the ocean, which the City of Los Angeles could not pave because, as I understand it, Johnny Carson owns it.” And so it goes. Even the chapter titles poke fun at the sanctimonious eggheads of this world: “The Drivel Runs Through It,” “Dances With Morons.” There’s a fair share of little boy humor as well, on the favored subjects of nose-blowing, farting and drinking, but even these can get you going. Fishing with a hangover, Tosches’ friend keeps shouting at the flies, “Jesus Christ, do they have to beat their wings on the water like that?”

Letters on Cezanne: Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated from the German by Joel Agee, Edited by Clara Rilke, North Point Press: 84 pp., $13

Joel Agee, translator of this volume of little-known essays on the many ways that Cezanne’s paintings inspired the poet, admits in his foreword that there are places in these essays where Rainer Maria Rilke’s “love of precision seems to have abandoned him.” There are places in “Letters on Cezanne” where Rilke struggles to absorb “that balance between the reality of nature and the reality of the image which was Cezanne’s entire striving.”

In the fall of 1907, a year after the painter died, Rilke went every day to the Salon d’Automne to sit in a room filled with Cezannes. “You can feel,” he wrote, “what a light green carriage can be on the Pont-Neuf or some red that can’t contain itself, or simply a poster on the fire wall of a pearl-grey group of houses.” He admires Cezanne’s “plainspoken truth,” his deference to the power of color. Cezanne could make “saints” out of an apple or a bottle of wine “and forces-forces them to be beautiful.”

The writing is clearly inspired, almost breathless: “Avenues,” he wrote stepping out into the streets of Paris, “flowing toward you in a scarcely perceptible downward slope, fast and rich and like a river.... And all of this lies out there with the generosity of a born landscape, and casts forth space.”