C.J. Cherryh, Foreigner

I've been cranky lately, and my reviews have been a little harsh as a result: I stand behind them, but I recognize that I've compromised less than I might've done.

C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner, now, I don't need to compromise for. Recent SF reading has gone smoothly, and I've been cranky about realist fiction and about nonfiction (especially scholarly work), so presumably there's something biographical getting in my way. For now, though, there's no point worrying about that.

The gist of the book: future humans travel extremely long distances through space, drawing on the (drug-assisted, tech-modified) talents of pilots whose resulting abilities are near superhuman. The book, though, isn't about that. It's about what happens when something goes wrong, something that never gets explained (at least in this first volume of the series), and a ship winds up at what might approximate entirely the wrong end of the universe. So lost, are they, that they can't figure out a single reference point from the star charts, which isn't at all the same as that time you went out the wrong exit at the mall and had to walk five minutes in the rain.

And so, some generations in, they wind up encountering the humanoids on the planet they're orbiting: first contact is startling and shocking and predictably disturbing. But just like the book's not about getting lost, it's also not about first contact.

Far more intriguingly, it's about prolonged contact with another humanoid species whose instincts and social prescriptions look similar but are so utterly different that there's been no substantial rapprochement whatsoever. (And yes, as a matter of fact I do know "rapprochement" refers to the concept of a return: give me a similar "come together for the first time" term, smart guy, and I'll use that instead.)

Foreigner is the first novel of an in-progress and hence still-growing 14-novel cycle, so there's no news to be found in my thoughts on it. I would say, though, that Cherryh's attention to detail about ecological function and environmental ethics fascinated me, especially because it's so far below the surface most of the time. It's rare to find someone thinking this carefully about such questions, who isn't then foregrounding the questions and answers. (Yep, I'm looking at you, Le Guin, as much as I've enjoyed so far my time spent with your work!)

Plus she's so damned normal, C.J. Cherryh, if her blog is anything to go by. Apparently, it just so happens that even successful SF/fantasy novelists who live with other successful SF/fantasy novelists do small-time renovations with their own hands, renos that do not always go smoothly. Cool to share this kind of detail, even if I won't be visiting the site very often given the amount of reading I've got ahead of me....

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Literary fiction is, mostly, realist fiction, except for the prize-winning literary fiction that's a touch surreal (Rushdie, Garcia Marquez, etc). Julian Barnes' fine novel The Sense of an Ending isn't at all surreal, but it's won prizes, which means what, kids? Especially given that it's as British as the day is long? Realism. Letter-perfect realism. Greatly to be admired, etc, but also ... disappointingly normal.

Our man Tony is getting on now, around 70, and he spends the bulk of this short book reliving angst of one kind or another, mostly different senses of inferiority. He turns out not to have been The Smart One of his school chums, he's never really been successful with women, he's failed to hang onto his friendships: we've read this novel, seen this movie, lived this life, before. Most of his sense of inferiority is justified, but not all of it, and we're meant to identify with him, more or less, so we get to map or extend our own anxieties onto his and hence to suffer with him through the undignified complexities of a man's unravelling life. So far, so ... good, I guess.

I'm a little uncomfortable with my position on this novel, because reviewers have mostly been competing to see whose praise can be most heavily larded with absolutes and cliches ("a highly wrought meditation," said the Guardian; "A slow burn, measured but suspenseful, this compact novel makes every slyly crafted sentence count," said the Independent; "There is a fierce and unforgiving lucidity about The Sense of an Ending, a mature reckoning with ageing that makes its competitors seem petulant and shrill," according to the Australian; "Julian Barnes reveals crystalline truths that have taken a lifetime to harden," said the New York Times. "He has honed their edges, and polished them to a high gleam"). Thank goodness for Michiko Kakutani, even if I'm not usually on her reviewing side.

In my view, Barnes has done a remarkable job in The Sense of an Ending of doing AGAIN what so many British or British-influenced writers -- and actors -- have done over the years, namely to put a human face onto internalized class struggle. Good on him, as far as this goes, but (God forgive me for by blasphemy) I couldn't help seeing in Tony a little bit of Mr. Bean....

Maybe it deserved the Booker this year, I haven't read the other nominated volumes, but it just has to be one of the most predictable winners in a while: not unlike Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan a few years ago, it checks all the boxes for formula elements of a prizewinner, and yet somehow I never got past the conspicuousness of the artistry that itself prevented my investing in reading the novel.

The book club probably liked it, though: I'll find out tomorrow, and then I'll go all Tony and doubt myself, hence proving Barnes a genius beyond compare. Stupid literature and its perceptiveness.

An open letter to Joe Oliver

Dear Joe,

I started 2012 in a cautiously hopeful mood. Off and on, I've been cranky for years about how governments in Canada treat environmental questions, and certainly I've complained crankily about your current Conservative government for just this issue. But 2012, I decided, would be different.

We're citizens of the same country, we're living in the same environment, we're aware of the same questions, and neither of us wants to see the apocalypse come. It's not that I was planning a policy of accommodation, exactly, but I was going to do my best to understand where you're coming from.

And then on January 9, your open letter in the Globe and Mail ensured that I would be unable to hang onto this pledge. And then your utterly absurd interviews on CBC's program "On the Coast" and "As It Happens": ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod.

Nine days into the year, Joe Oliver, you broke me. I survived Stephen Harper's remarks Friday about this sort of thing, but you topped him. Nine days, and you broke me.

Let me count the ways:

• If I'm reading you right, you think anyone worried about oil spills wants "to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth." Bullshit.
• I'm concerned that oil spills would themselves cause the loss of jobs in tourism, fisheries, and agriculture. The category "tourism" includes people working in restaurants, hotels, the guiding industry, skiiing, fishing, mountain biking, hiking, and so on. Without the oil spills that will occur, predictably, as a result of this "major project," there would be more jobs in more places.
• The pipeline will HURT economic growth in all those places traversed by the pipeline, except when people get hired -- from outside the local communities, who'll be reduced to providing volunteers for these jobs -- to clean up after the inevitable oil spills.
• The oil industry generates MONEY: it doesn't generate JOBS, in anything like the number of jobs that can be associated with a relatively healthy local environment that's not mopping up after yet another oil spill, happening at predictable intervals.
• Your interview on "On the Coast" opened by saying that environmentalists want a "pristine age" for the environment, from the "dark ages." Again, bullshit. Actually, no, no more pulling punches: fucking bullshit.
• There have been human influences on the environment since there have been humans -- humans are themselves part of "the environment." Yeah, anyone concerned about environmental matters is speaking on behalf of whatever we might imagine as "the non-human environment," but that's simply a balance question. If you'd spent any time reading the thoughtful comments of environmentalists, radical or moderate, you'd know that this "pristine" line is just the most utter bullshit.
• I don't know which member of your communications team fed you that line, but you should maybe question that person's loyalty. When a conservative speaker uses the term "pristine" in referring to the environment, it signals precisely that you don't know the first thing about the discourse you're pretending to critique. Not the first thing.
• Would I have an easier time with your whining about "foreign-funded environmentalists" if the Canadian oil industry was actually Canadian? Probably not. Everyone with power needs to be questioned regularly, including industry. But I can't believe you're unaware that this particular claim has humiliated you and your party on an international stage. You humiliated yourself on "As It Happens" with your comments to Carol Off about this, and about the distinctions between "industry money = good" and "enviro money = bad."
• You think Canadians concerned about oil spills are connected to billionaire socialists?!? First of all, ain't no such thing as a billionaire socialist: if you mean George Soros, you mean a currency-speculating capitalist billionaire with diverse interests in democracy, social justice, and environmental damage. Second, an awful lot of us concerned Canadians aren't members of the groups who've received a modicum of funding from sources outside Canada.

So. You broke me. I've been quiet, not talking publicly about (to choose a couple of recent, fairly egregious examples) Jason Kenney's offensive remarks about the hijab's role in citizenship ceremonies, or about Peter Kent's ignorance about ecological systems, or anything else from the world of politics. Clearly you're not going to let me remain quiet.

You want to stop projects from being opposed by environmental groups, especially by groups receiving funds from American individuals or groups? Fine. Here come the rest of us.

Game on.

You might wish you'd stuck to fighting casually with groups, rather than getting so many voters upset with you.

Best wishes,
Richard

Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

By all accounts a lovely woman, Terry Tempest Williams: I've taught her work before (an essay in the textbook/anthology Writing It Slant), I've been following her on Twitter for some time, and plenty of my eco friends are fans of her work.

So it's uncomfortable that I don't know what the hell to say or think about her recent book Finding Beauty in a Broken World. It hurt to read this book's content, and I can't make sense of its aesthetics. It has its fans and defenders, mind you, some of them people I've come to like and to trust, but I can't call myself one of them.

This Christmas I chose Williams' book for myself, expecting it to partner nicely with Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark (review here). I'd not bothered to learn the first thing about the book, since it was basically an impulse request based on seeing the hardcover on the remainders table at Munro's Books, but I did take the jacket copy seriously. Jacket copy is, of course, reliably misleading (as I've complained before), but sometimes....

Should I have expected to find 'twixt these covers "a luminous chronicle of finding beauty in a broken world," then, or "a narrative of hopeful acts by [Williams'] taking that which is broken and creating something whole"? Well, no. But I did. And this wasn't my experience of it.

We get about 30 pages based in Ravenna, Italy, where Williams learns from a wonderful artist the basics of how to make mosaics: as it turns out, the "mosaic" is the key metaphor for this book. We then get 60 pages of background about the Tempest family (good stuff) and about prairie dogs (good stuff, though more so for eco nerds like me than for yr average reader). So far, it's proving to be an interesting book, with some nice stylistic touches around the use of short paragraphs to mimic in textual form the aesthetics of mosaicists.

Then, things turn awkward: 110 pages almost entirely comprised of shorthand journal notes, from two weeks spent in an observation post watching and trapping prairie dogs as part of an ecological research project in Bryce Canyon, Utah. Fragments, sparks, connections, moments: I get it, life can feel like a mosaic sometimes, but even I had trouble reading each page in this lengthy section. Sure, some lovely moments, but ... someone should maybe have tried harder to talk her out of going exactly this way for the book's middle section. After all, a mosaic works in part through suggestion, by providing lines and flow and colour but NOT being an entirely representative art form: a mosaic flower recalls a flower, but it isn't. This journal section should have recalled a journal, rather than seeming in fact to be one.

And then Williams' brother Steve dies, leading to a 15-page meditation that I found very strong, bringing together the assorted pieces of the book up to that point. Some might say that Steve deserves better than to be compared to prairie dogs, but I disagree: this section worked for me.

The book's last 160 pages, though. Hmm.

Terry Tempest Williams went to Rwanda in 2005 as part of an artists' project to bring some healing and some sustainable development to a post-genocide country. It is impossible, perhaps, for a country to move beyond its genocide, but better words are hard to find. In brief, Williams goes there to work with a group called "Barefoot Artists" on a memorial project that's intended to bring positive change to a single local community. As their time in Rwanda goes on, though, the project's effects expand outside the local community, the local people immerse the artists ever more deeply in their lives, and the genocide becomes ever more real to Williams and the other artists.

Which leads this book from mosaic-making in Italy, to ecological research on prairie dogs, to explicit descriptions of moments from throughout the genocide. The details of the different ways that skulls can be fractured. Of how people survived by hiding under the rotting bodies of family members. Of child rape. Of a river so full of corpses that the bodies formed a dam, flooding a village's houses partly with the blood of its former occupants.

I read every page of this book. It ends with a small positive movement, though a tentative one, and it's no counterweight to the horrors that preceded it.

Terry Tempest Williams had three books she could have written here. She jammed them all together, using the metaphor of the mosaic, and setting mosaic-style short paragraphs beside each other so that the book's style matched the organizing metaphor.

I wish she had written the three books instead. They would have been remarkable, I bet. This one ... for me, it's a mess.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope In The Dark

New Year's Eve, as 2011 turns into 2012, and also blog post number 500: a big day for odometers, metaphorically speaking, and also an excellent occasion to talk about Rebecca Solnit's 2005 book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

Yeah, we're most of us feeling pretty apocalyptic these days, like the end of the world is nigh, or at least near-nigh, and we're not wrong to feel that way. Beetle hordes changing whole ecologies; Republican nutbarswith a shot at the 2012 presidency; goddamn Peter Kent and stupid Jason Kenney; climate change and Arctic methane: as was so wisely sung so many years ago by Merle Haggard, "Think I'll just stay here and drink."

As Rebecca Solnit reminds us in Hope in the Dark, this isn't the first time that we've feared the future. The 20th century's two world wars, for example, were pretty dark periods, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation was not the happiest thing one could have looked forward to in one's childhood (though I'm pleased regardless by the fiction that this nuclear fear pushed Douglas Coupland to write). From the 1960s to 2005, though, the world got so much better, in so many ways, in so many places, for so many people. Gay rights; the civil rights movement; feminism's successes; and the mobilization of the masses for environmental causes all signify sea changes in Western culture. (Admittedly she's talking about the US only, but I'm comfortable generalizing, at least partway.)

Sure, most of these successes were and are partial, or the drink-inducing catalogue above wouldn't mean anything, but Solnit's key point is that they were nonetheless successes. Perfection is the enemy of done, I regularly remind my students, and the maxim applies even more consequentially for social justice movements. We need to appreciate every improvement, given the weight of PR, government shilling, and corporate lobbying arrayed against us, even though work remains to be done. And then -- which is the really important thing -- we have to get back to work.

Fun fact: "Viagra is good for endangered species" (p.77). No, not because they mate more consistently (but maybe there's a research project there?), but because it has demonstrably reduced the demand for all those bizarre animal-based aphrodisiacs and treatments for impotence. I'll keep asserting that Viagra's, um, rise is a legitimate sign of the apocalypse, because of the money involved and the chemicals and the carbon burden of the packaging and transportation, but I'll always be grateful for the reduced hunting pressure (mostly illegitimate) on Siberian tigers, for example.

So anyway, in honour of post number 500, and of our entry into 2012, I'm trying to change. I'll still be predictably cranky, I'm sure, but it'll be leavened by a little bit of how Rebecca Solnit felt six years ago. Nobody tell me how she feels now, okay?

(Oh, and the methane thing? Still complicated. Go about your day, but do try to walk rather than drive, please.)

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Now, I know that I just finished saying that we need to read the classics - but might Margaret Atwood count as a classic writer, and her recent science fiction novels as themselves classics, already?

I loved The Year of the Flood, and I've seen and heard some wise people talk about that novel as well as Oryx and Crake. Possibly the worst academic conference paper I've ever seen was largely about these novels, too, so you don't get smarter just from dealing them, but that's true for Shakespeare and Aristotle, too, so I'm hardly worried about that.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I preferred Year of the Flood, which came out second but functions in part as a prequel to Oryx and Crake. The earlier novel takes place in the minds of people less damaged by the apocalypse that's occurred around them than Snowman/Jimmy, the protagonist for Oryx and Crake, so I'm probably responding positively to the more conventional narrative posture, but that's fine by me.

Multi-species animal splices, corrupt biotech corporations, class warfare organized around intraurban boundaries, truly posthuman human bodies: it's a wonderfully imaginative world that Atwood's giving us in the MaddAddam trilogy, disturbingly real in amongst all the fantastic elements.

So very excited for the third book, am I!

Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

I've been dabbling in science fiction for a while now, dipping into space opera and campy stuff, spending time with some classics, just generally appreciating it. Hard to explain quite why, except to guess that in response to contemporary crises of ecology and finances and political structures, I'm looking for the kind of thing that it turns out Ursula Le Guin referred to as "thought experiments." Realist fiction gives me a good look at the crisis; poetry, well, it's poetry, so even at its most potent and insightful and trenchant, I'm still always distracted by questions of form; nonfiction makes me either sad or angry, rather than helping me think.

So, science fiction.

Robert A. Heinlein is obviously a classic, a giant in the field. I'm not sure how much of his stuff I've actually read over the years, but certainly a few novels and a bunch of short stories, but he's been off my reading list for more than a decade. Coming back to him through The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress might not be the best option, but whoa, I'm not sure what else I'd want to read, because this book was terrific. (If you're looking to me for advice about Heinlein, you're probably in the wrong place, but welcome anyway!)

Things I liked especially:

1. the lack of fixity among characters, the way that they change appearances and somehow also essences while remaining themselves
2. the way that Manny, the main character, so often has no real idea what's going on around him, even though people look to him for direction, and
3. Heinlein's emphasis on what the lunar environment would mean for people living there.

There's more to it, and more reasons to appreciate this novel, but those are enough for me. I really liked that people didn't expect to remain the same, and that others didn't expect them to stay the same, and yet somehow they remained the same through all their changes (in body, in family allegiance, in politics, and so on). I kept laughing about how often Manny - the narrator and putative protagonist - was kept in the dark by other characters, and about his comfort with being manipulated for positive ends by his friends. (Help yourselves, folks. I won't mind.)

And I was fascinated, above all, by Heinlein's attention to the influence of place and environment on the political and bodily realities of his characters. Air isn't free, if you have to manufacture it; that's obvious, but Heinlein does a great job of demonstrating the impact that this change would have on your relationship with your environment. Bodies work differently at different gravities, too, and they suffer through a raft of complex changes when gravity is either stronger or lighter than a body expects it to be, and again, Heinlein explores all kinds of ways that gravitational pressures make bodies function differently: the even sexier walk that a woman can manage with reduced gravity, differential abilities at hand-to-hand combat, and so on. It's brilliant, it is, and that's even before you get into the political complexity of an off-world non-planetary nation, or the cybernetic philosophizing made manifest in the character (?) of Mike, the super-computer that basically runs Luna.

New books are worth reading, and authors writing now both deserve and need our support.

But the classics ... are classic. We need to read them, because we are poorer intellectually if we fail to do so.

UVic United Way book sale - Dec 1/11

"Stupid book sales," he wrote half-heartedly.

Even though the address for this blog opens with "boughtbooks," I've stopped noting my purchases here, though I've been keeping track and might post monthly updates about those: no one ever comments on those posts anyway (I know, Theresa, except for you!), so they're starting to feel like interruptions between the reviews, without salience for readers. This particular book sale, though, is always full of good stuff, and anyone reading many of the reviews here would be interested themselves in a number of these books.

But they're mine. You can't have them, unless you ask nicely, in which case I'll mail almost any one of them to you. For two bucks each to the United Way, I picked up all of these:

• William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscape of New England (SUCH an important book; SO surprising to find it on Day 3 of the sale!)
• Pierre Dansereau, Inscape and Landscape: The Human Perception of Environment (based on his 1972 Massey lectures for the CBC)
• ed. Donawerth & Kolmerten, Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference (an essay collection, not a literary anthology)
• Alan R. Drengson, Beyond Environmental Crisis: From Technocrat to Planetary Person (a philosopher from/at UVic)
• ed. Greg Gatenby, Whale Sound: An Anthology of Poems about Whales and Dolphins (including so many Canadian writers who were important, rising, or fading in 1977, when it seemed reasonable to publish a book of poems about marine ecology and whale survival)
• ed. Gary Geddes, Skookum Wawa: Writings of the Canadian Northwest (my third copy: gradually collecting copies, not sure why...)
• John Frederic Gibson, A Small and Charming World
• Charles Lillard, Voice, My Shaman
• Northwest Environment Watch, Cascadia Scorecard: Seven Key Trends Shaping the Northwest (or "Pacific southwest," for us smug Canadians)
• Maryka Omatsu, Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese Canadian Experience
• Anne Pearson, Sea-Lake: Recollections and History of Cordova Bay and Elk Lake (some very local history)
• POLIS Project, Highlights of the BC Community Forestry Forum: Exploring Policy and Practice (a CD from the March 2002 session)
• Frank Rasky, The Taming of the Canadian West (coffee-table special, with lots of art but fairly heavy on text: impressively dated in outlook, I suspect)
• ed. Safranyik & Wilson, The Mountain Pine Beetle: A Synthesis of Biology, Management, and Impacts on Lodgepole Pine (published by Natural Resources Canada: and the clearest, most recently added marker of my nerdish obsession with BC landscapes)
• Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild: Essays

So, is anybody jealous of me for finding even one of these? Or is my office just becoming a graveyard for these kinds of books? Every so often I can't help thinking - it's weird to be an academic. All I do is read, but it's rare to find people interested in reading the same things I am, and yet somehow the isolation just doesn't matter....

Theresa Kishkan, Mnemonic

It's been a long time, too long really, since I've had the chance to review a new book by Theresa Kishkan. One of the first writers who talked to me in blog comments, she's a wickedly accomplished writer of environmentally inflected memoir, and her books Red Laredo Boots and Phantom Limb are among my very favourite books of and from British Columbia. It was therefore with delight that, out of my packed end of term schedule, I carved out enough time to work gradually through the essays in Mnemonic: A Book of Trees.

I've remarked before in other reviews that a really great book makes me slow down, makes me keep closing the covers so I don't have to finish it as quickly as I might, and Mnemonic I dragged out for more than a week. I hesitate to give you samples, because I want you to go and read it yourself, I'm that excited by this book, but here's a passage anyway that encapsulates some of the book's hold over me but doesn't actually give anything away:

And yet. And yet. I never expected to feel such physical loss as when I stand in the centre of my own still world and remember the past, which is almost always a landscape. Which is almost always what happened in a landscape. (p. 214)

"There never was an is without a where," as Lawrence Buell memorably put it in his book Writing for an Endangered World, and Kishkan puts is'es and where's aplenty into these pages, from all over the world, emphasizing moments of BC and her BC sensibility.

Some tips:

• For those who don't read environmental or environmentalist writing, that's not what this is. It's a memoir, with trees of different species as signposts and emblems and evocations.
• For those who don't read thoughtful memoirish essays, that's not what these are, either. It's a collection of environmental writing, cataloguing the ways that we relate to the world in which our lives occur and with which our lives intersect.
• For those who.... Never mind. It's environmental writing. It's also memoir. And damn it, you should drop your pretensions and read Mnemonic. You'll love it, I swear, or if you don't, you know someone who will love it, and you can pass it along at the next gift-giving opportunity!

Not that aren't detractors: Brian Fawcett's a very good writer as well, but he does draw on his Curmudegeonly Critic routine in commenting on her book. In his review, if that's the right word for his article, he opens with the line, "Theresa Kishkan is the sort of human being I’ve spent my life avoiding," remarking in the second paragraph on her husband, poet John Pass, "I’ve long found his admittedly-skilled work incomprehensible –no, wait, the right word is inconsequential...." These are review-ready remarks how, exactly?

But Fawcett comes around, more or less, though retaining his traditional posture. While he remains prickly about what he sees as the book's faults (most of which are that Kishkan's not herself Brian Fawcett), he gives what counts for almost extravagant praise: "her sensory array is both complicated and profoundly educated, and if you can get over the rhetorical pomp and the sometimes insight-arresting sensitivity, there is an expressive richness to this book that’s quite a lot more than simply charming." Back-handed, sure, but sometimes that's the best you can hope for.

Her recent novel, Age of Water Lilies, I wasn't as happy with as I wished I had been. (In unrelated news: that was two years ago? Good God, but I'm old.) It was well written, and the characters were interesting, but I never really got hooked. This new one, though, Mnemonic, is good enough that I'm buying copies and giving them away - honestly, I sent my first one out the end of last week, and I've got a few other people in mind for presentation copies! With Christmas around the corner, you could do no better than to read an essay or two, compare your impressions against your buying obligations, and distribute it widely.

For all his codgerly grumpiness, Brian Fawcett sums up, far better than this fan has been able to, what's so appealing about this book: "a rare glimpse into a complicated and intelligent woman’s mind travelling at very high velocities, and in pursuit of startling verities." Wonderful, wonderful stuff - congratulations, Theresa!

Absences

You ask why I don't write.
But what is there to say?

It's always a challenge for university instructors, staying afloat from late October to late November. The assignments keep coming in, there's the labour of reviving your old understanding of your material while also continuing to make sure your old understanding remains somehow relevant, the annual cycle of administration has gotten seriously underway.

And then something like Occupy Wall Street happens: there's something every year, always something, though OWS kept me more excited and intellectually busier outside my usual working area than most past ... distractions? Can I call them that? I blogged a little about Occupy, and I read a lot, and I tweeted back and forth quite a bit. It's taken up a surprisingly large portion of my thoughts over the last month, though I'm not sure what it's going to mean to me as time goes on, and the camps come down.

And my Twitter account got hacked, and I got into a TwitterSpat with someone claiming to be a grad student at the London School of Economics. His point (and I use that term loosely) was that cuckoldry is the male equivalent of being raped (actually saying it more than once), which ordinarily I would simply have mocked as inane, and ignored as trolling, except that he was claiming the support of evolutionary psychology, so game on, "nature" boy.

And I reread books for current courses and for student supervision, and I sampled books for future coursework.

And I finished an article arguing that the BC forest industry is quiet about climate change for underlying ideological reasons connected to a frontier-ish ethic unique to the Pacific Northwest that's most easily explored in BC novels about logging: a startling number of moving parts in this project, so while the article's done, I'm painfully aware that I have to keep going with it if I'm going to make sense of it all.

And probably most important of all was this little project, in which I spent a whole lot of time and energy critiquing, commenting upon, and suggesting changes to my employer's Strategic Plan (what the brilliant Joe Bennett long ago taught me to think of as a "planny sort of plan"). Now that the comment submissions deadline has passed, I'm probably going to let that project relax a bit. Maybe I'll go back to the existing plan, see how the promises lined up with what was delivered, but we'll see how time works out.

And also, you know, life and stuff. I'm gradually coming back to this blog.

These nail-parings
bore you? They explain my silence.
I wish there were as simple
an explanation for the silence of God.

(This post is book-ended by the opening and closing lines of RS Thomas' poem "Correspondence." It's wonderful, and it's posted here by a fellow Thomas fan.)

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Gold Coast

I write this review of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast, the second volume in his so-called Three Californias series, with the knowledge that in Oakland tonight, an estimated 500 police officers moved with tear gas, batons, and flash grenades against a group of peaceful - and of course predictably annoying, unsettling - Occupy protesters. They're doing the work they're assigned to do, in the way they're trained and encouraged to do it. These things happen. I'm appalled by these actions, offended by the naked signals of power the officers are being manipulated to express through their bodies, but I understand the officers' actions.

As Robinson recognized in the late 80s, though, while writing this most immediately activist of his California trilogy if not before that, resistance of some kind is essential unless the current path is to be followed to its painfully logical resolution. In The Gold Coast, Robinson's several characters all embody and enact different kinds of resistance to the system that's nonetheless consuming them. The city has become two stories tall, with a layer of megafreeways on pylons above residential neighborhoods; Orange County's last standing orange trees are in the cemetery, some of them being felled every year to allow for more burials; there's nothing but concrete and fast food and oppression and McJobs.

So the characters try to resist, in different ways and with differing degrees of self-awareness. Through extreme use of designer drugs, or the design and marketing of such drugs (California Mello, or Buzz, or Pattern Perception, and so on); through sex, usually in temporary "alliances" (since marriage appears to be dead) and usually videotaped and simultaneously projected on multiple screens around the bedroom; through art, either poetry or painting; through stepping outside the economy through tenting instead of renting; through missile attacks on military defence contractors: they try to resist. Orange County represents the pinnacle and nadir of 2027 America, and everyone who lives there is overwhelmed by it. This place cannot be celebrated, though the characters do take a nihilistically gleeful run at it anyway, at least until the wheels start to seriously come off.

It's a more powerful novel, for me, than either of the other two volumes in the series. Vol. 1, The Wild Coast, was a relatively standard, uneasily semi-utopic, post-apocalyptic narrative, and my review here was very brief because it just didn't rock me (and because I read it at a ridiculously busy time in my life). Vol. 3, Pacific Edge, which I read quite recently, I found much more enjoyable: I was somewhat annoyed by the narrative structure and by the focus that I wished was directed at slightly different targets, but my sympathy with its politics meant I couldn't get too excited about any complaints I could come up with.

The Gold Coast, on QUITE the other hand, is a richly realized, complexly organized, intricately layered novel and representation of a city. Obviously I'm going to find myself drawn to a main character like Jim McPherson (composition teacher and self-loathingly failed writer, the most socially awkward person in any group, place geek extraordinaire), so I don't have a hope of reading the novel critically unless I work assiduously at it, but still: it's a place-anchored novel exploring modes of resistance to the death of place, with wacky but believable characters, snappy dialogue, and trenchant politics. It's not all about Jim, even though we spend much of the novel watching and participating vicariously in his path toward what looks like it might turn out to be a shaky enlightenment.

So much that's interesting about this novel - the excavation of Orange County's forgotten history (which appears in a strong of separate chapters, presumably written by Jim); the tour of Great Sites Outside America culminating in an epiphany at an abandoned, isolated ruin in Crete; an escape into the Sierras; a person's self-construction after breakdown - that I'm reluctant to privilege any of it through detailed discussion.

I will say, though, that Occupy Oakland, and Occupy San Francisco, and Occupy LA are exactly the kinds of things needed to forestall the culture that develops by 2027 in Robinson's version of Orange County in The Gold Coast. Resistance, friends: resistance! We don't know how to get from here to the world we want, but we sure as hell know some versions of what we'll do anything to prevent the world from becoming. The Gold Coast shows us one of those worlds, more clearly than should be comfortable.

Occupy This Blog

Predictably, I've been of many different minds about aspects of the Occupy movement. I attended my local movement on October 15th, and I've wandered by twice since, but I'm not planning on camping out. Obligations, you know, too many of them about which I feel too strongly to set them aside for this.

But I've also gotten cranky about some of the comments I've been seeing online, particularly by people whose opinions I thought I knew enough about to predict their politics. Some of this, I should say, comes from an exchange with local reporter and man-about-journalism Murray Langdon, opening with his tweet the other day of "If #ows wants to target overpaid individuals, occupy #NBA arenas and #NFL stadia. Forget town squares." He's a good guy, Murray, and I understand his frustration with the movement (both his personal frustration and what I take to be his frustration as a journalist), but I found myself ... provoked.

So for good or ill, I've found myself unable to avoid attempting something of a manifesto-style response: feel free to determine the appropriate hand signals with which to respond at each point.

1. The protesters are not themselves the entire 99%. This should be obvious to everyone, not needing to be said, but apparently it's not. The people able to sleep at the protest site will sleep there, but that's not to say they're a demographic mirror of the protest's supporters. They represent me anyway, even if they don't look like me.
2. "Where have these people been the last 15 years?" One of the comments that makes me the angriest has to do with what's said to be the sudden awakening of this protest, after years of apparent silence about these issues. First, do you really think that a protester is more likely to be correct as a result of spending more time on the barricades over the years? And second, have you not noticed that for decades, there have been smaller or larger protests every few weeks in every major North American city? We've been protesting: you haven't been taking us seriously.
3. The "professional protester" issue. You've seen the comments, about these protesters being the usual suspects, and it looks at first like a tough point to refute. Yeah, many of us have been at protests in the past, and some of the occupiers have organized their lives around the ability to take action. But you can't object on the grounds BOTH that we've been silent for too long (point 3 above) AND that we've been protesting too often for too long. And "professional" protesters? Um, an unwaged volunteer gig doesn't count as a profession. Call them "committed" or "dedicated," or maybe "multi-issue": some of them are among the most knowledgeable people you'll ever talk to, if you make the time.
4. The nutbar factor. Now, don't get mad at me here, because I'm a friend to the broad-based nature of the occupations. If you've got a beef with the system, take it public, and come on down. But me? I've got no time for the rare but persistent 9/11 truthers; for the persistent opponents of smart meters for power (a BC issue, mostly: read the comments for a deeper view of the discussion); and for all those other ideas that I have a hard time recognizing as anything but conspiracy theories. The Occupy protests are an umbrella, but you know what? Some people deserve to get wet, and not just the 1%.
5. Where are the specific demands? Um, you may have noticed this already, but it's a protest, not a legislation-drafting session. We're identifying what's wrong. Hundreds of people, like little old me, are raising our voices in writing to identify what we think needs to be changed, and sometimes how we think they should be changed. If we had control of the levers of power, we wouldn't need a protest.
   Spend some time reading all of our assorted comments (and note that each word there is linked to a different nearly random site, with whose content I may or may not be in agreement). Do that, and you'll see that there are all sorts of ideas out there for you to choose from. Support what you want. You need to get engaged in this process as well, rather than waiting to be told what to do.
6. Why not do something constructive? I've heard people complaining, for example, that the Occupy protesters should have done something like donate a can of food each to the local food bank, rather than hang out making noise in the town square. My answer is, who do you think already makes donations to local programs? I haven't seen stats on this, and I suspect they'd be excruciatingly difficult to generate, but my suspicion is that many of the Occupy protesters have been donating and contributing to such programs for years, and working for some of them as well. (See the "professional protesters" note above, #4.) And a protest, by the way, IS constructive, at least potentially. Plus at least some of the Occupy protests ARE soliciting for the local food banks.
7. "These [grubby/hairy/oddly dressed/rude/etc] people are not me." Of course they're not. They've got time in their lives to do this sort of thing. The only question for you is whether you support at least some aspect of their message. If you do, then to just that extent, they're working on your behalf. If you disagree with them entirely, then fine. They're not really the 99%, after all, no matter how convenient a slogan that might be. You want them to protest something different? Then do what you can to influence them, or someone else. Just participate.
8. What are the key issues, really? Pay attention to this now: there are no key separate issues, and all separate issues are key. Plenty of things could stand to be changed, if we're going to live in a world of broader social equity than exists now.
9. OK, then what are your key issues? My big three issues are:

• the semi-criminality of financing and investing, which includes the banks and stock markets but (gulp) probably mutual funds and similar vehicles;
• the unethical and unsustainable madness that is the food industry; and
• the reluctance to take genuine action against anthropogenic climate change.

These are huge issues, and effective responses to them would require significant changes by (or at least on behalf of) millions upon millions of people. I don't expect that camping for a few weeks will make much happen, but the Occupy protests are a signal, a call, a loud and sustained principled objection. I'm ecstatic that people are objecting, and that the system appears to be listening. I'll not improve my mood, at bottom, until the system appears to start taking the objections seriously - instead of simply responding to the inconvenience itself of having people in the town square - but it's a start.

I am the 99%. So are you. You have different ideas than I do? Great. Bring it on; I get excited at the prospect of changing my mind to something better!

Steven Price, Into That Darkness

Aptly titled, this novel: Into That Darkness is precisely where Steven Price takes us with his debut novel, about a devastating earthquake that hits the Pacific Northwest. The novel is set entirely in Victoria, though there are vague and conflicting media references about what's happened in Vancouver and Seattle after the quake (which is claimed at different points to range between 8.1 and 9.0, and lord help us if it's accurate about what an 8.1 will do to us), so in some ways it's nice just to be nominated, as it were, but this really is literary disaster porn.

Finely described injuries, the recreation of horrible smells, humans gone feral: this novel has it all, in the relatively small space of under 300 pages. I'm okay with a little disaster porn, I should say, viz. my comments on Cormac McCarthy's excruciating The Road, but Price's is a painful novel. I didn't dream well while reading it, and he's to be commended for bringing that home into my head. I may punch him in consequence, I hope playfully, if he ends up attending our upcoming book club meeting, but it's a good sign that he's done so.

Mind you, the disaster isn't the only reminder of The Road here, and I'm a little unsure how I feel about that. Most obvious at the level of page layout is simply that Price, like McCarthy, decided to eschew the lowly quotation mark, so dialogue blends into exposition and the rest of the prose. (Oddly, the blog stats claim that my long-ago post on McCarthy is one of Google's favourite places to send people interested in McCarthy's punctuation, but I'm certainly no expert.) Price, I assume like McCarthy, gets rid of punctuation marks out of sympathy for how stripped-down society becomes after a disaster. I guess it's appropriate, but I'm not sure where the boundaries are between homage and imitation.

And the young boy / parent dyad is common to McCarthy, too, though I like Price's move - perhaps a tad too CanCon multiculti - to have a nonwhite boy walking with an unrelated elderly white man. It raises some additional questions and resonances of race and age, generation and community, that McCarthy's novel ignores, again to Price's credit.

There are some great lines in the book, thoughtful and concise, such as Arthur Lear's quietly passed-over epiphany soon after the quake has hit: "He understood that very little of what he had outlived mattered" (p.35). Price's form is intriguing, too, in that the third-person narrative that mostly follows Lear (and occasionally gets inside his head) is regularly interrupted by italicized passages of interior monologue by the main wandering characters; these energize the deliberately spare main narrative by enlivening these laconic, stunned characters apparently suffering from shock.

I've only finished Into That Darkness just tonight, so I need to think a little more about it, but right now I'm surprised I didn't like the novel more. I appreciate the artistry, and the evocation of catastrophe in the place where I live, but I was never swept up in it the way I expected to be, given the kinds of positive thoughts I was having as I was going through it.

Given this book club's feelings about Clara Callan, it's perhaps unwise to bring it up as a comparison piece. And given the wild success of Price's spouse, novelist Esi Edugyan, to whom Into This Darkness is dedicated, what I said four years ago about Richard Wright's award-winner might seem unnecessarily biting against Price. I don't mean it that way, because I enjoyed this novel far, far more than I did Clara Callan, and some major literary prizes are won by terrific novels. But I did feel like Into That Darkness is such a readerly novel, showing so many of the traditional cues for High-Quality Literary Canadian Fiction, especially by a poet, that I found myself getting what I expected from it. That shouldn't sound like a complaint, should it? It does, I know it does, but I'm not entirely sure why it should. Hrrm.

Really a good novel, this, so maybe I've just read too much (what?!? Blasphemy!) to really find the pleasure in it that others seem to. I'm not the only one with misgivings of one kind or another, but professional reviewers out there are close to unanimous that it's a very special novel, and I'm completely confident that they read even more than I do. (And by the way, Thomas Allen, keep your links alive! Most of the newspaper reviews on your Into That Darkness pages are dead....)

And for the record, one R.J. Wiersema found the novel worth rhapsodizing about in the National Post, so what the hell do I know:

"Into That Darkness is many things: a novel of survival, a collection of post-apocalyptic quests, an account of loss in its myriad forms, and of hope at its most vital and true. It’s a fundamentally human work that draws deep into the soul and the spirit. It is also that rarest of books, a literary novel with the narrative momentum of genre or commercial writing. It is, above all, compelling and real, a novel that will satisfy at every level."

Octavia Butler, Wild Seed

Wow. Octavia Butler was not on my radar before this summer's ASLE conference, but when she kept getting name-checked, and when people I trusted there kept telling me how important she was, and a cool read as well, then I had to try out Wild Seed. It's a good fit after Ursula Le Guin's ambisexual world of Left Hand of Darkness, though stranger because it's speculative fiction set in Earth's relatively recent past (1690-1840). And I don't know what to make of Wild Seed, though I'll have to collect a few of my thoughts before tomorrow morning's meeting with my Honours student to discuss it....

Start with the obvious stuff. The two main characters are Doro, who's basically a 3700-year-old spirit who moves between the bodies of people "he" kills and then occupies, and Anyanwu, a 300-year-old woman who's able to heal herself and others through intensely visualized knowledge of the body's internal workings. Doro can take on male or female bodies; Anyanwu can become a body in any form she likes, of either human gender or of any animal or bird of which she has a physical understanding (ideally, through eating at least a mouthful of it). Doro has been pursuing a centuries-long breeding program to build humans with inhuman powers of assorted kinds (telekinesis, telepathy, etc), making use of the slave trade to build experimental communities in North America; Anyanwu has been living in her own African village for her whole life, healing the sick and protecting her children and their descendants. Doro finds Anywanwu in the book's first chapter, and tries to insert her into the breeding program. Hijinks ensue.

No, not at all: hijinks most emphatically do not ensue. This is a dark and troubled book, imagining the human race to be potentially under threat from someone who looks like one of its own, who cannot be killed and yet cannot be reached and changed either. Butler places into conversation the discourses of stasis and progress, talent and worth, place and movement, independence and obedience, all sorts of terrifically powerful dyads. As an ideas novel, it's pretty impressive, even if it's much less satisfying as a novel of character or action.

For me, it wasn't a wildly readable book, so I'm hoping to enjoy Parable of the Sower a little more (advice, anyone?), but it's thoughtful and thought-provoking. Probably worth your time, but it depends what else you're reading....

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

I first read The Left Hand of Darkness about four years ago, and I came away from the experience so very impressed. Since then I've listened to a handful of academic talks about one Le Guin novel or another, read a couple of student papers about her, and waded through a handful of scholarly articles. Conclusion? She's smarter than anyone who ever gets around to talking about her, with the possible exception of the redoubtable Fredric Jameson*, though rather more than the similarly redoubtable Harold Bloom.

Do I have more to say about LHD this time? Well, yeah, I guess so, but it's like what Johnson said of Gray, in a way: had she written always thus, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise [her]. Le Guin does a wonderful job of portraying the two quite different competing cultures on the planet Gethen (known as "Winter" to the representatives of the Ekumen, the coordinating body not unlike Star Trek's Federation), and the nuances of their different social spheres. As she remarks in her brilliant introduction to the novel, to her a work of science fiction is a thought-experiment that comments on the present. One of the nations is bureaucratic, petty, and randomly vindictive; the other is monarchic, chaotic, and enduringly vindictive. There's some clear social commentary on contemporary American politics and culture from the time (1969), especially on the intertwined questions of gender and sexuality.

Because you see, people on Gethen are neither male nor female. They are potentially both, and usually neither, except for a few days each month (a period known as "kemmer") when a person becomes either male or female. The same person can father children with another Gethenian, as well as become pregnant and carry children to term. They're humans, more or less, as the Ekumen believe that the previous Hainish civilization engineered the Gethenians and left them on Gethen to evolve in isolation, but their differing sexuality means that they've evolved different social structures, taboos, and intergroup practices. Le Guin's thought-experiment finds that without stable gender, for example, all-out war hasn't appeared, and marriage in the traditional sense hasn't evolved either, but the human incest taboo takes a surprising turn.

Environmentally, Gethen is at the border of human survivability, in its average temperature and climatic conditions. There are surprisingly few species of animals, too, since the Gethenians haven't evolved from the planet's original species, so there are some really fascinating passages (to my eyes, at least) about the outsider's absolute dependence on the insider's inherited knowledge. It's just such a unique, provocative book, that it pays back any time you want to spend on it.

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*The Jameson link is to the original 1975 version of his article "World Reduction in Le Guin," which appears in expanded/clarified form in his 2005 essay collection Archaeologies of the Future, a book you should all read, except for Fraser, who would hate it. The full text of the 1975 special Le Guin issue of Science Fiction Studies appears to be online, too, so happy browsing there!