Oliver Sacks, Island of the Colorblind

I've had Oliver Sacks' The Island of the Colorblind on the shelf for a while, and for most of that time I've meant to get to it. To my eyes, Sacks' books are light reading about complex and important subjects, so they're both appealing and off-putting at the same time. I was reminded during this one of Gabor Mate's habit of inserting himself into his stories about other people (see my cautious review of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts), but Sacks has been writing for far longer and has a far larger audience, so -- Sacks isn't borrowing from Mate, is what I'm saying.

Fascinating stuff in this book, which is really two linked stories. The first one is about Pingelap, an island in Micronesia, and the Pingelapese: a large proportion of them are achromats, with a specific form of colorblindness, and Sacks goes to visit them as well as to encounter the place. Not long afterward, he has a chance to visit Guam to see both cycads (kind of like palms), plus other crazy flora/fauna on Guam and Rota, as well as people with lytico-botig, which is either one or two progressive sclerosis-type illnesses with a completely unknown etiology and mechanism.*

Both places are shockingly beautiful, as I gather tropical places are, though I wouldn't know about that -- sigh -- and the people are warm/deep, in line with the standard expectations for such a place. My favourite part of the book were the detailed footnotes, because clearly Sacks had a different book in mind that his editor and publisher talked him out of. His footnotes show the marks of numerous obsessions, something I'm always happy to see in someone else, and I'm not sure how he was talked out of following them.

Kind of a fun book, though not particularly relevant. Both halves of the volume are about unusual concentrations of rare medical conditions in specific places completely unlike my own, so it's not really my thing, but I had a good time reading it anyway.

* - Since his visit, and after completing the book, Sacks has now argued very convincingly that lytico-bodig was caused by the consumption of now-extinct flying foxes (did I mention crazy fauna?) which would have accumulated in their bodies toxic concentrations of a cycad's amino acid found in high levels ONLY in Guam's endemic cycad species.

Oliver Rackham, Trees & Woodlands in the British Landscape

If this is the first time you've stopped by, yes, I am indeed way nerdy. I wish I was able to call myself a "Riot Nrrd," the sobriquet claimed by some of the characters in Douglas Coupland's fine/fun novel Microserfs, but alas I don't have the commitment for that. (Plus I'm not Conrad Sichler.)

Of course, those who've been here more than once will already figured this out. I try to play things a bit cool, imply that any instances of self-deprecating humour are signs of a well-justified self-confidence, but honestly I just read an unhealthy amount and follow my nerdy interests wherever they take me. This time, they've taken me across the Atlantic, and what fun it's been.

Yesterday saw the completion of Oliver Rackham's surprisingly brief (barely 200 pages) masterwork Trees and Woodlands in the British Landscape: The Complete History of Britains's Trees, Woods and Hedgerows. He's written quite a lot of stuff, Rackham, and I've dabbled in his work before, but this book came along at just the right time. I've been working on some proposals for academic work on 18th-century trees, agriculture, and declarations of "public virtue," and this book clarified some of my thinking really nicely. I've seen it referenced often enough that I've absorbed quite a bit of his principles indirectly, but what a joy it can be to read -- especially belatedly -- an originary source.

Two key points are starkly put quite late in the book: "Tree-planting has come to usurp the place of conservation," and "Tidy-mindedness can perhaps be overcome by education" (p.201). Others have written sensibly and sensitively about ecological restoration, and really that's what Rackham's talking about (rather than conservation as such), but no one has done a better job of cautiously drawing on vast amounts of data on specific places, in the service of generating transportably site-specific principles and practices.

But there are some details I need, too. Far from crediting John Evelyn with increasing interest in forestry, for example, Rackham straightforwardly declares that "much of the misinformation about trees that is still current today can be tracked back to it" (p.92), meaning Evelyn's enormous book Silva, which itself was meant to be a history of and exhortation toward forestry. The nerds among you still reading will know why this is such a relief. I mean, come on: a dilettante in a dozen fields of "study" gets it completely right on one of the popular/esoteric ones that can't be verified by short-term experimentation?

Nerd factor from finding real pleasure in this book: high.
Amount that this troubles me: none whatsoever.

Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

My name is Richard, and I'm an -- no, wait, that's not how to start this. First impressions and all that. Besides, I'm no alcoholic, since I sometimes go for weeks between drinks, rarely get more than a little tipsy, and only read it for the articles.

I spent more than 250 pages being increasingly and searingly annoyed with Gabor Mate, author of this month's book club selection, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. There are at least three books smooshed together in the one volume, and while two of them are fascinating and well done, the third one -- at least through the first 250 or so pages -- drove me beyond batty with its pretentiousness, egotism, and arrogance. I want to hear about how addiction works, emotionally as well as neurologically, both in its development and in its persistence. I need to hear about the lives of addicts in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, which is Canada's most drug-centred neighborhood, poorest neighborhood, most policed neighborhood, and so on; the lives of these people need to be honoured and recognized, rather than rejected. I do NOT want to hear a fairly well-off doctor equate his drive to purchase CD's of classical music with heroin, and his life with the life of a heroin addict suffering from spinal abscesses, multiple infections and HIV, whose children have died of overdoses and whose partner beats her.

If I hadn't finished the book, and I wasn't going to, that's roughly where this review was going to end up. I was appalled, utterly appalled, by Mate's including himself in this book as an addict. Even after finishing the book, I'm left wondering how he'd distinguish between addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, obsessions, habits, and passions, so part of his message didn't get through to this fairly careful reader. There's some incredible material here, and two of the threads are well worth your time, but the other one.... Shameful, is how it seemed to me. Flat out shameful.

And yet. And yet.

There came a point where I started seeing myself in this book, in these behaviours he's describing, even in Gabor Mate himself. I mean, I know that some of my habits aren't the healthiest, and even though I'd like to stop them, sometimes I can't, but addicted? Come on. Save the word for those who need it; let it keep its power. But people who know me well have a sense for how wildly I throw myself into activities. If you read this blog, you may have noticed that the great majority of posts go up when a sensible person has gone to bed. The recent conference, well, let's just say I should have empowered my colleagues to act cooperatively in the planning and execution, but that's not something I'm equipped to do. More personally, well, there've been some habits, some mostly harmless and others much less so.

By the end of the book, I could see why Mate was including himself in this book. His addiction process is the same as that of his patients, and we all need to achieve greater humility in how we face the world, and the people we'd like to think of as lesser individuals. There's room for him in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, and I wouldn't have seen myself there if he hadn't managed to find room. I still think it comes across somewhat amateurishly in the first two-thirds of the book, and I wouldn't blame a single person for quitting the book in protest at his including himself this way, but I'm glad to have finished the book. It's an open question, though, if I'd recommend it to other readers.

My name is Richard, and I'm....

Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

It only makes sense, I suppose, that Jasper Fforde's time-travelling, alternative history novels should be shelved in the science fiction section -- but really, how often do you associate Jane Eyre, Shakespeare, and croquet with sci-fi? These are densely bookish novels, metafictional in a popular though not an entirely scholarly sense, inextricably entangled in a recognizable canon of Classic Literature, so I barely register the presence of the time-travelling ChronoGuard, cloned Napoleons, and so on.

Which is really just a way of suggesting that you dodge furtively into the science fiction section of your favourite bookshop, if you're not already comfortable walking proudly into it. Even if you're the kind of reader who wouldn't ever engage with science fiction, there are some rewards available in these novels, I promise you.

Something Rotten takes its title, of course, from the line in Hamlet about the state of Denmark. There are dozens of books out there with some version of this phrase in the title, Amazon tells me, but not many of them ask whether Nelson's death at Trafalgar was in fact an elaborate suicide plot; discuss the genetics of resequenced Neanderthals (or their contempt for Sapiens social protocols); or explore the byzantine rules of four-ball, ten-player croquet played in an international league, mostly in stadiums seating 30,000 or more people.

If my other reviews of Fforde books haven't convinced you to give him a try (here, here, here for the Thursday Next books, and here and here for the Nursery Crimes series), well, I give up. They're great fun. Start with The Eyre Affair, and spend your summer with them.

Patricia Klindienst, The Earth Knows My Name

The title to this book doesn't work for me, not at all, but the subtitle sold me on it in the ASLE publisher's exhibit, from the table run by Beacon Press -- Patricia Klindienst's The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans. The title feels mushy to me, but there's something precise and attractive about the elements of that subtitle.

I bought this book at the same time as I picked up Nancy Gift's A Weed By Any Other Name, also from Beacon, which so far remains on my shelf. I'm guessing Gift's book won't last the summer unread, though, based partly on its subject (embracing clover and the dandelion, rejecting the swathe of grass) and partly on the very high quality of Klindienst's non-academic but seriously reputable book for the same press.

The basic approach here is straightforward. Klindienst gives us eight chapters, each of which deals with one garden or with a few connected gardens, in pursuit of assorted questions around soil health and cultural community. Not all of them work equally well for me, but there are some gems. Individual lines jump out, as with the German man quoted as telling one of our gardeners, "If you cannot see where your food comes from, you are doomed to live in ugliness" (p.84). Individual scenes stand out, as with the tree fruit in the Punjabi garden in Fullerton, California. The details of this book are exceptional, and I would delightedly have read another half-dozen chapters.

The message is a bit foggy, though, as the title made me fear. These people dedicate their lives to the soil, and as a result most of them have intense connections to and within their local communities, so intense that I don't see any way for some of them to have connections to a broader community. Others have very little connection even to their local communities, so while they're showing tremendous allegiance to the earth (the Earth?), their human connections seem more strongly based in nostalgia than in anything else. And what of those of us without the available hours? How do we connect?

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Wild Coast

It turns out that Kim Stanley Robinson has a schtick, an MO, a standard procedure: his novels end at a convenient mid-point, rather than at the end of the action or the thinking. I felt that with Icehenge, and I definitely felt it with The Wild Coast. Whereas the former novel occurs on Mars and Pluto (among other non-Terran sites), this one occurs on Earth, specifically in northern California. Whereas the former deals with the outcome of humanity's mostly successful overcoming of nationalisms, the latter is consumed by their failure.

In other words, lots of differences, but I was still annoyed with where he decided to quit writing. It's an aesthetic decision, certainly, and the implication is of course that we've got work to do before the world becomes A Better Place, but still. Finish the damned story, man.

On the other hand, I really like how he so effectively buries very large issues. In Icehenge, humans live several hundred years now. In The Wild Coast, the US has been bombed almost out of existence. These points matter a great deal, but he doesn't bother explaining either one in much detail. We just have to figure it out, and I can respect that -- it shows some respect for the audience, and for that reason I'm OK with being annoyed at his endings. I won't keep working through the KSR oeuvre, but I'm content with what I've seen of it so far.

Plot summary: we spend our time with members of a small village in California, some sixty-three years after an enormous but mostly unexplained bombing campaign against the US succeeded in nearly obliterating the nation. The UN appears to be allowing nations to patrol the costs, bombing all attempts to recover, but there's no real reason given for this, or indeed much clarity about quite what's going on. The story is that of a young man trying to become an actual man, and what role he may grow into with his community. The novel is interested in the idea of story itself, and how communities exist as the manifestations of their own stories. Plenty of action, with some romance (PG-rated) and violence (ditto), but it felt like a teen novel rather than an adult science fiction work.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

Slumming? Some might say that, sure, but not me: I proudly read Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction classic Icehenge over the last few days. If you want a detailed review, here's a positive and thorough one; I'm just here to say that it was basically fun, but also thought-provoking, and I was disappointed by the ending. It's no space opera, so it's not that I had any firm (or justified!) expectation of closure, but I did want more than this.

This could be a good summer, reading for actual pleasure. What a concept. Admittedly there were several papers at the recent ASLE conference on Robinson and environment, so I stumbled his way on a semi-obligatory, quasi-research excursion, but really it was just a chance to explore a library other than my own for a change. Most refreshing to escape the hothouse.

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

Meh.

No, actually it was pretty good, Aravind Adiga's Booker-winning novel The White Tiger. I was gripped, excited, thrilled, etc. Except when I put it down, because I wasn't all that excited to pick it up again. And once I'd finished, I was ready for something else, and it's almost entirely slipped my mind only a few days after having completed it. I don't mind that it won the Booker, because as barely a half-assed reviewer, I haven't read the other nominees, and I'm not sure what else should have been nominated, but I admit that I kept thinking, "Really? This was the best choice?"

Here's the thing. It's closer in feel to Slumdog Millionaire than to anything by Salman Rushdie, and that's what I want to read when I'm thinking about India. I mean, Rohinton Mistry is a hell of a writer, and Adiga's a reasonably good competitor and comparison for Mistry, but neither of them compares to Rushdie. Maybe Adiga will get there, I don't know. This is his first novel, after all, and his "book club edition" interview includes the great good remark that he thinks of most business writing as "bullshit," so he's bright considering that he spent several years as a business writer.

But given enough time to think over past years, I'm confident I could think of at least a dozen non-nominated Booker-eligible novels I prefer to this one. "Score another one for Danny Boyle," I'd say, if it didn't sound so petty/unfair....

Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am

Jacques Derrida has always made my head hurt, as he has the heads of so many others, but to me it's always been a good kind of hurt. (No, John Mellencamp, I don't need to hear from you at this point....) I've been puzzling around the edges of his ideas of animality for a long time, and this summer -- since I've had so much free time, and such an excess of uncommitted intellectual energy -- I decided it was time to read The Animal That Therefore I Am.

Unsurprisingly, it took me forever to read this book, about eight weeks, and as with everything Derrida, my attitude veered between finding it akin to obvious performance art, and finding it wildly ingenious. I've taught his brilliant essay "Before the Law" a number of times, even though I'm convinced I only follow maybe two-thirds of what he's talking about in that piece, and I can see myself trying to use sections of The Animal That Therefore I Am as well, and with the same effect on me.

Among the usual more open-hearted reviews of this book, there are some snide reviews online, and Derrida deserves them. After all, this book begins with his story of being naked in his washroom, feeling self-conscious because his cat is staring at him. Derrida's well aware that we don't (yet?) know what a cat would be thinking in such a situation, so the odd but quotidian domestic tableau leads him to ponder the essences of both animality and humanity, whether there is such a thing as animality-in-general, how we might even provisionally define (self-)consciousness, and dozens of other points. But still, we start with a naked philosopher, and that's trouble!

Among the book's many seductive passages is a lovely little insistence, though expressed in typically thorny prose, about his bodily experience of texts and ideas:

given the infinite complications that I am in the process of recalling, I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation of what I do, think, write, live, but, in fact, of everything, of the whole of history, culture, and so-called human society, at every level, macro- or microscopic. My sole concern is not that of interrupting this animalist 'vision' but of taking care not to sacrifice to it any difference or alterity, the fold of any complication, the opening of any abyss to come. (p.92)

Do I follow all of it? Of course not. But in this book, even in a first reading, I get more of a sense of voice and experience and uniqueness than I've felt in anything else by him that I've read. As usual it's easy to call his prose style as singularly unpleasant, in that you have to read his prose slowly and repeatedly, irregularly but often circling back to the beginning of his accursedly long and parenthetical sentences, but you know what? I kind of fell in love with this book, much to my surprise.

If you want a taste of Derrida's writing about animals, Critical Inquiry posted a snippet online that it published as a short stand-alone piece. Good stuff, though barely enough to give you a sense of what you'd be in for if you tackled the book as a whole.

Leach wins! Leach wins!

Canada's publishing industry features a handful of standout magazines publishing excellent long-form journalism. I'm delighted to see that David Leach -- colleague, friend, and fellow member of the Mook Club -- won the gold medal at this year's National Magazine Awards, in the sports and recreation category, for his piece in Explore entitled "A Deadly Crossing." Well deserved, fella!

And in unrelated news, I see that it's now possible to have computer-generated nonsense accepted for publication in academic journals. Oh, to be creative.... I mean, how exactly is an academic supposed to compete with ACTUAL technobabble?

ASLE bloggers, so far

A few blogs out there about ASLE in Victoria -- happy browsing!

• Simmons Buntin, the indefatigable editor for/of online magazine Terrain.org, blogged daily about his experiences (some excellent reading, I must say), and posted a wonderful photo gallery as well
  
• Adrian Ivakhiv on rabbits, cougars, and the future of ecocriticism, as well as on ecocriticism and the future of reading
  
• Rhona McAdam made a few remarks while/about attending the conference
  
• Ruth Ozeki, on her own banquet lecture
  
• Andy Revkin, one of our plenary speakers, blogged and offered up some video about UVic's rabbit problem
  

Update
Here are a few more, the first three sent out by Adrian Ivakhiv to the ASLE listserv, and the last by jo(e) of Writing as Joe who has also been posting:

• Randy Lee Cutler from ECIAD
  
• Keri Cronin at Diary of a Dandelion Diva
  
• Bev at Excelsior (several posts, bless her), and
  
• Julie Meloni at Academic Sandbox.
  

Additional update: Rhona McAdam has a wonderfully useful post up that lists all the texts she heard mentioned in various panels, with hyperlinks to as many of the online versions as she can find. Now THIS is obsessiveness I can get on board with!

ASLE books

World enough and time, world enough and time -- last week what felt like the entire world came to the University of Victoria (hi, world!) to attend the ASLE conference. I only managed a quick browse of the publishers' exhibit, and had no free time for the authors' reception, but I did pick up two very cool books that together encapsulate things I'll likely spend the rest of the summer doing and thinking about:

• Nancy Gift, A Weed By Any Other Name: The Virtues of a Messy Lawn, or, Learning to Love the Plants We Don't Plant ($26)
  
• Patricia Klindienst, The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans ($19)
  

Not a lot of folks out there blogging the conference yet, but I'll see if I can't aggregate a few of them here later on. Once I get up from my nap, that is.

Sid Marty, Black Grizzly etc

A short note, for a few reasons. First, I'm badly sleep-deprived due to conference organization duties, and second, I don't have the nice things that I would to say about Sid Marty's Governor-General's Award-nominated Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek.

Terry Glavin's a favourite writer of mine, and he loved this book (on his blog, in Canadian Geographic, and as a GG judge this year). I tend to think of GG-nominated books as worthy, even when I don't find their subject congenial, but this one ... the subject is distinctly congenial, but I just didn't enjoy the writing here at all.

To me it veers between imaginative creative nonfiction, with reasonable justification for imagining the thought processes of a couple of bears, and fairly clumsy (and overly long-form) journalism. I mean, the cumbersome references to interview dates got old quickly, and the shifts between perspectives and modes were never smooth. Great subject, and I know Marty spent a lot of time on this book, but I don't see much sign of artistry as such. His earlier book Leaning on the Wind remains close to my heart, though, so maybe part of my reaction comes from being just a little resentful that he didn't give me what he did there.

But I don't think that's the whole story. For whatever reason, Marty kept three stories distinct (the attacks, his reaction to them, and his subsequent research 20 years later), and there's no obvious signal for what that reason might be.

Harold Rhenisch, Winging Home

I really like Harold Rhenisch's writing, I do - but after Tom Thomson's Shack, Winging Home is the second of his books from which I've come away seriously baffled.

The project is a wonderful one. He sets about to pay careful attention to how his vision has to shift from how it developed during his upbringing and adult life in the southern Okanagan (Keremeos, Cawston, etc.), if he's ever going to learn how to make sense of his new surroundings in the Cariboo (108 Mile Ranch, 150 Mile House, etc.). Colours don't make sense to him anymore, with the different qualities of light and snow and humidity and so on. In his careful attention to how colours shift in the world he's looking at, he finds himself spending a huge amount of time watching birds, and so the book really is A Palette of Birds, as the subtitle has it, because it's through birds both that he comes to understand his vision of the world, and that you're meant to understand both this new vision.

The thing is, he relies enormously in this book on metaphor -- and to me, some of them overwhelm what he's trying to achieve. It's an audacious project, in the best sense of the word, but I don't know that his audacity pays off.

In one paragraph, for example, describing some crows waiting for leftovers after some eagles finish with the carcass of a winter-killed muskrat, he compares the crows to "the subalterns always milling around in the background of German military photographs from the Second World War--tall, thin, relaxed, chatting, maps in hand, their uniforms buttoned up tightly around their necks"; as well as to "waiters and Maitre d' circling a table at a five-star restaurant"; and also to "the Nez Perce with their Appaloosa ponies and their war paint coming down out of Union Gap after John Wayne" (p.89).

In another, he reports that the snow "looked like a lacy pattern of icing sugar on a chocolate torte in a fancy bakery shaded by plane trees in Baden Baden" (p.74).

I take the point, I think, which I believe is that our ways of seeing the world are inexorably bound by culture, but -- and certainly part of this is my fatigue presently -- I'm not sure whether it's a lesson I needed to be sustained across this many pages. I loved parts of this book, such as the intimacy of his closing address to his wife, and I smiled regularity at the, yes, audacity of it all, and there was never a time when I remotely considered NOT finishing the book, but on the whole, I dunno. Maybe with some more pondering I'll get a better sense of what I actually thought of it!

Des Kennedy, An Ecology of Enchantment

Just the ticket, is what this book was for me a couple of weeks ago, when I needed some calming.

Des Kennedy is an author I've had a hard time getting into. His west coast novel, The Garden Club and the Kumquat Campaign, is about subjects that really should make it my cup of tea, but the title (along with the cover summary) put me off badly. The half-rhyme jokey reference to Clayoquot Sound had an unreasonably large effect on me, augmented by the advertised eccentricity of the book's Gulf Islands characters, and with more books in the world than time in my life, it never made it to my reading list (thought it has been sitting quietly on my shelves). To my ears, it sounded like the sort of thing likely to be thought funny by a boomer who's been on the Gulf Islands too long and is basically writing to/for his friends, one of whom happens to have an influence with a publishing house.

I enjoyed flipping through his gardening book Living Things We Love to Hate, though, so I became a little more kindly disposed toward Kennedy. When I saw the title of his newest book, though, I knew I had to give Kennedy a try. Now that I've read An Ecology of Enchantment: A Year in a Country Garden, I'm moving The Kumquat Campaign onto my reading list for summer.

In An Ecology of Enchantment, Kennedy manages to write from a position of knowledge without shutting out those of us without nearly so much knowledge. It's broken into 52 sections, one for each week of the gardening year, and the great majority of them are pensive and descriptive and genuinely evocative. There's a really nice attention to sensory detail - perhaps to sensuous detail, maybe even sensual - that's set off nicely by the regular hints at domestic discord between gardeners, or bits of self-deprecating humour at the state of a shed or the loss of a glove. Great sense of balance, though I would happily have read only the descriptive stuff.

It strikes me that there may have been an excellent editor at HarperCollins helping with this book: not that Des Kennedy's not capable of writing well, because clearly he is, but the writing has a very assured quality somehow, and the book is so much stronger than Living Things We Love to Hate (albeit for a different audience and a different purpose) that it feels to me that he worked with someone capable of drawing the very best out of him.

And if Kennedy can write better than this, well, I got me another writer for the personal pantheon.

The title, by the way, turns out not to be all that helpful. An Ecology of Enchantment sounds terrific, and I do see some possible connections to David Abram's similarly alliterative The Spell of the Sensuous, but it's a gardening book. For a book about ecology and enchantment, you'll have to go somewhere else, maybe to Matthew Dickerson (whose book Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of CS Lewis I'm reading now, and whose book on Tolkien I've loaned to a student).