The Book's Called The Rope Eater,
And I'm Probably Remiss For Not Reading It Yet

Like Mark says, I'd plug Robert Birnbaum's interview with Ben Jones even if he hadn't said nice things about my blog.

It's interesting for me because I haven’t traveled to the Arctic. To me the Arctic was always the most interesting as a landscape for the imagination. The ice is the ice, and there isn’t land, and it’s not rooted in the land, and the transformation that it goes through makes it sort of timeless and incredibly transitory. For me, when I talk to people who have traveled a lot in the Arctic, they say, "Oh, you really described this well." I think that’s great. [laughs] Lucky me.