book addiction

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

2012-01-17T22:30:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-10T09:55:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-09T09:02:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-31T20:17:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-22T23:13:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-22T22:23:00.000-08:00

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:

the lack of fixity among characters, the way that they change appearances and somehow also essences while remaining themselves
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
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

2011-12-01T14:25:00.000-08:00

"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

2011-11-28T13:46:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-19T08:54:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-25T23:26:00.001-07:00

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

2011-10-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

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.

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.
"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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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

2011-10-15T23:20:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-11T21:31:00.000-07:00

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.

----------------------------
*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!

Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey

2011-10-03T22:29:00.000-07:00

Don't give up on this book. Please.

You're probably going to want to, especially if you've read some of Jasper Fforde's other novels - The Eyre Affair and The Big Over Easy, for example, start fast and carry you along. If you don't get the references in these BookWorld novels, I'd admit that you're likely to find yourself more or less baffled by most of the goings-on, but that's only because your level of referentiality isn't simpatico with the novel's. (We blame you for this, just so you know.)

In Shades of Grey, the first novel in Fforde's third (!) ongoing series, something else happens. It's still not quite clear to me why it took so long for me to get hooked, or why I came so near to giving up before getting hooked, but it's not just because I was busy and distracted. No, that's just a normal day around Book Addiction HQ. Rather, I suspect it's because this world is so very, very different from our own: Orwellian, in that conveniently imprecise way people avoid adjectivizing the title 1984, but immensely stranger than that, in ways that are basically beyond a casual reader's penetration, and Fforde deliberately sets us up as casual readers.

Briefly: It's Britain in the future, an impossible-to-determine number of years from now. No one can see at night, everyone's terrified of the dark, and a person can see only parts of the visual spectrum. As a result, your last name is a marker of your colour-sightedness (Ochre, deMauve, Cinnabar, and so on), with gradations within each of the primary and complementary colours; your sightedness is determined during the Ishihara test, taken during your 20th year. The lowest class are the Greys, who do almost all the work in this new society, and whose deaths are unremarked by anyone of another colour. American painter and inventor Albert Henry Munsell makes an appearance here, in a role like that of Aldous Huxley's Ford in Brave New World. Compliance with Munsell's Rules is absolute, and money has been largely supplanted by the use of merits and demerits: lose enough points, and you're subject to Reboot.

And just as in every other fictional totalitarian state, something's wrong. Desperately so, but it's so unclear as to be outside the comprehension of the protagonist, one Eddie Russett. Will Eddie learn enough to make some sense of it all before it's too late?

In the acknowledgements section, Fforde remarks that Shades of Grey turned out to be "rather more difficult to get on to paper than [he] had anticipated" (p.435). I'm assuming that this is one reason that it's a hard book to get into, because Eddie's position is so benightedly ignorant - just like the position of (almost) anyone else in his society - that Fforde's not able to straightforwardly give us the tools to assess Eddie's position. Instead, we're kept in the dark the same way Eddie is, to such an extent that it begins to seem obstructively unhelpful, almost like cheating on Fforde's part.

Once you get the necessary information, much of which doesn't start falling into place until you're 300 or so pages into the novel's 430 pages, then the earlier confusion seems reasonable, and you recognize just how much Fforde has had to keep from us in order to let us appreciate Eddie's character and predicament. Once I was okay with Fforde's secrecy, then retrospectively I was greatly impressed by his narrative reserve and his judicious decision to suppress the essential backstory to this culture. It's a startlingly rich and rewarding novel, but you won't believe me until you're a few hundred pages into it.

So in sum, don't give up.

Shades of Grey is NOT an easy novel to get through, by far the most difficult Jasper Fforde I've read so far. But I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be the Fforde novel which stays in the mind longest and most intensely: there's a lot here, and the ending sets up the next volume beautifully. The second in the series, whenever it appears, should have a very different narrative structure that's a whole lot more accessible to anyone who's read this first one - and please, God, don't let Jasper Fforde write Shades of Grey 2 as if its readers haven't read this one! Trust us to follow you around, and we'll follow you wherever you go.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge

2011-09-26T23:24:00.000-07:00

Now, I've talked about Kim Stanley Robinson before on this blog (twice, actually), and I wasn't crazy about what I took to be his normal approach to constructing a novel. After reading Pacific Edge, the third novel in his California trilogy, I'm still not crazy about KSR's approach to narrative structure, but there's more going on in this novel, so I responded more positively to the determinedly unresolved ending.

Plus I'm looking forward with great nerdish excitement to the essay collection he's co-editing with Gerry Canavan, provisionally entitled Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. I'm kicking myself for not getting a proposal in, but what were the odds I'd find time to actually write something? Sigh, and argh, but that's another story.

The year is 2065, and the world's gone post-corporate. There are small companies still, but corporations as such - especially international ones - are illegal, and there are minimum and maximum thresholds for individual earnings. Earn too little, and you get more; earn too much, and you get to choose which public works your dollars will support. Everything, almost, is calculated against questions of ecological sustainability; the dams in Hetch Hetchy are due to come down soon, for example, and in a fit of social justice, the criminally pillaged Owens Valley runs the California water supply.

Basically the novel follows the attempt to build a commercial development where our protagonist, Kevin Claiborne, would hate to see such a development built, but Robinson's genius here is to have a relatively light touch for all the various elements going into it. Municipal politics; the complex intimate relationships of a small town; the altered friend/family dynamics in a post-corporate world; massive technological change, such as the reliance on bicycles and sailing ships for large-scale cargo transport: each of these things gets its time in Pacific Edge, but somehow Robinson manages to prevent them from getting heavy and from going on for too long in sequence.

Really, it's an ideas novel - environmentalism's the new mainstream, anti-corporate struggle (hello, #OccupyWallStreet! though also, holy crap at items #10-15!) is the new normal - but an ideas novel that trusts you to figure out most of the ideas part on your own, and I really liked that part of the reading experience.

Characters live complicated lives in this novel - carpentry labourer plus Unitarian minister, materials scientist plus sculptor - and there's a welcome richness to the lived experience that's portrayed here. Some readers really don't like the novel at all, and that's fine, but mostly it's a question of politics. If you're not on board, then the small things will grate disproportionately, and if you're on board, then you'll give Robinson something of a pass. I gave him enough of a pass that I'm not as critical of Pacific Edge as I should be. And I'm perfectly comfortable with that move.

(For the record, I could totally see myself living in Robinson's 2065. And also, I fell a little bit in love with Ramona myself. These things happen.)

Jim Lynch, Border Songs

2011-09-26T23:04:00.001-07:00

I've been hearing since it came out that Jim Lynch's Border Songs was a special novel, so I moved it up in the queue after grabbing a copy in Tofino last month (salesgirl: "Oh, I'm SO glad someone bought that! It's my favourite novel right now!" Me: "Um... paying by debit, please"). And yep, it's a special novel, special enough that I'm teaching it in January.

Basically, it focuses on a brief period in the life of Branden Vanderkool, a 6'8" young man with assorted intellectual challenges (with only dyslexia being named) who has become a Border Patrol agent for the American government. He's stationed in his hometown, in the semi-rural area just across the border from Abbotsford (or "Greater Vancouver" if that's a distinction you don't care about), dealing with a flood of illegal immigration and pot smuggling. There's a girl, of course, as there always should be, but there are also birds, in ways there almost never are in fiction, and also cows the way James Herriot might know them. (Wonderful moment where a visitor surprises a a farmer, for example, finding him arm-deep in a cow's rectum!)

Did Border Songs remind anyone else of Napoleon Dynamite, I wonder?

Random House calls it a "magnificent novel of birding, smuggling, farming, and extraordinary love," and while that's neither wrong nor entirely misleading, it also leaves out some genuinely fascinating threads. There's the question of mind and intellect, for one thing, which I appreciated but (to be honest) thought could have been handled more sensitively; there's also the question of form, in that Lynch deploys numerous stereotypes as well as draws on a few different literary traditions, notably the picaresque novel and the bildungsroman. It fits neither of these formal models all that well, to be clear, but it's a novel that resonates with other texts and models. Because it's so unusual, to my eyes Border Songs draws some of its strength from its allegiances to the usual, and that's something that strikes me as really valuable here.

And there's art, too, lots of it, even though we have to imagine Brandon's productions. It's another way of seeing, what Brandon represents, and as the reader you get to - have to - choose whether to focus on his intellectual oddities, or on the richness of his life. Very cool novel, seriously, even though this is a shorter review than I might normally do for a novel I liked so very much.

Purchases, Aug-Nov 2011

2011-09-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

OK, OK, I let things side around Book Addiction HQ, and I didn't log some months of purchases. Sue me.

Going forward, though, I'll be combining purchases into monthly reports - they're not great reading on their own, but I do feel a need to keep track somehow. And since it's my blog, and since I've proven myself incapable of note-taking about purchases any other way, I'll post monthly.

August

Renaissance Books - John McPhee, The Control of Nature; McPhee, In Suspect Terrain
Wildside Booksellers (Tofino) - Jim Lynch, Border Songs
Coles (ugh) - Andrew Nikiforuk, Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America's Great Forests

September

Book Marc - Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game; Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?; Kim Stanley Robinson, The Wild Coast; KSR, The Gold Coast; KSR, Pacific Edge
Munro's - AJ Jacobs, My Life as an Experiment: One Man's Humble Quest to Improve Himself; Rowan Jacobsen, The Living Shore: Rediscovering a Lost World
Russell - Octavia Butler, Wild Seed; Jean Hegland, Into the Forest; Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

October

subTEXT - The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon; Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
UVic Bookstore - Rob Budde, Finding Ft. George; Brian Kiteley, Still Life with Insects; Elizabeth Royte, Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It

November

UVic Bookstore - Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination; S.K. Robisch, Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature
Bolen's - Margaret Atwood, Oryx & Crake; Theresa Kishkan, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees
Munro's - Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer
Value Village - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Jean Hegland, Into the Forest

2011-09-21T11:27:00.000-07:00

It's not that I didn't enjoy Jean Hegland's Into the Forest. After all, it's a post-apocalypse novel where the teenage protagonists work hard at learning to live off the land to support themselves, with buckets of ecology lessons and not-entirely-inaccurate information about local First Nations, so what's not to like?

Well, as it happens, not much, I guess, but "like" isn't enough for me as a reader anymore. With my recent reading having been so good (Ozeki and Le Guin), my tolerance has dropped for books that might maybe be good enough.

Plot summary: No absolute explanations are provided, but gradually the power goes out across America (around the world?), pandemics sweep the nation (globe?), and society (or humanity?) collapses. Our story is solely focused on two teenage girls, Eva (18, a ballerina) and Nell (17, an erstwhile Harvard student), who grew up with their parents in northern California, about 30 miles from the nearest town. When the apocalypse comes, their mother has recently died of cancer, and their father doesn't live long once it really gets underway. The book follows their attempts to assume adult roles in the very short amount of time before they'd starve to death as children, emphasizing how they handle their vegetable garden and how they come to understand the bounty available in the forest (food, medicines, and supplies). Assorted crises continue to hit, and the conclusion - while apparently meant to seem comparatively happy - can't help but be unresolved.

(Spoiler alert in the following discussion.)

Setting the plot aside for now, I was fascinated by the slippage between metaphor and represented reality in Into the Forest. For example, the one notorious event in the novel is an incestuous lesbian sex scene between the sisters, some days after the elder one is raped by a passing stranger. Less anxious-making is the fact that later on, the younger sister is able to breastfeed her sister's child, presumably out of sympathy, but it's still a little different. Yikes, right? Except that the whole novel is about the two girls becoming a couple to parallel their parents, taking on adult roles with a division of labour sometimes traditionally gendered, and moving from being children themselves to becoming parents of each other and of the child from Eva's rape. The never-repeated incestuous/lesbian moment stands out from the rest of the novel, so it's problematic for the narrative's represented reality, but it has what might be an essential role in the development of the novel's metaphoric frame.

I had a similar reaction to their book-ending move out of the house and into the stump, too: it was their childhood playhouse, so are they reinhabiting the forest with newly adult sensibilities, or are they reverting to childhood? And did they bring the preserved garden produce with them? (Not clear from the book.) And haven't they rather abruptly turned their backs on a year's worth of learning about how to work in a garden, which is how they learned to sustain themselves?

While reading Hegland's book, I kept thinking of Robert Wiersema's truly excellent novella World More Full of Weeping, which is very different but which also features a child heading into the woods - Wiersema's is a wonderful book, far superior in effect to Into the Forest, even if I've inexplicably failed to comment about it here in spite of having read it fully two years ago now. (I'll be remedying that in the coming days, once I get some actual work out of the way first.)

It sounds really good on the page, this book, but ultimately I was dissatisfied with its outcome and its effects. Worth reading, but basically meh. The label "young adult fiction" shouldn't mark something as incomplete or unhelpfully unresolved, but as Into the Forest shows, sometimes that's what it means, and it's a shame for this book not to deliver on its promise.

Even if so many of its readers appear to adore it regardless.

------------------------
And finally, a pox on Bantam's blurb-writer for this book! What crap: "Once in a generation we open a new book to discover a voice and a vision that have the power to change the way we look at ourselves and the world." Yeah, it's a cool idea for a plot, but is Bantam unaware of the dozens of other post-apocalyptic novels out there? Few of them focus on the perspectives of women, and young women in particular, but that's no excuse for this blurb. And clearly, the book's early reviewers (1998) were way too seduced by millennial thinking to pay close enough attention to the book's construction.

Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

2011-09-20T23:29:00.000-07:00

It's crazy, how many wonderful books there are out there. This post makes 48 books blogged about so far this year for me, though we're not through September yet, and more than two dozen unread volumes loiter in my office that I'm fully expecting to enjoy almost beyond measure. And too, there's a way in which the experience of a book fades once finished, returning at odd moments but still dissipating faster than you thought possible while you were caught up in the reading.

All of which means, among other things, that I should have blogged immediately about Ruth Ozeki's wonderful novel My Year of Meats, without waiting a few days for my thoughts to sort themselves out. I might feel easier if I had even the faintest idea of why it took me so long to get to this book, now 13 years in print, but nothing. No idea, and it was fantastic.

Jane Takagi-Little, a financially struggling documentary filmmaker, finds herself working on the pitch for a new Saturday-morning show for Japanese television, and subsequently working on the production of the show itself. Called My American Wife!, it's a barely veiled advertorial for American meat-packing interests, the Beef Export and Trade Syndicate (or BEEF-EX). Over the course of a year, the program is intended to film an American wife in each of the 50 states, rhapsodizing about meat's place in her family and then cooking something that the watching Japanese wives would then serve to their husbands and families.

As the novel goes on, Jane learns more and more about the meat industry (toxic residue! slaughterhouses! collateral human illness!), and her role in the production - already difficult from her ugly relationship with its sponsor's minder, Joichi "John" Ueno - becomes increasingly untenable.

Paired with Jane's story is that of Ueno's Japanese wife, Akiko, who's suffering intensely through her willing pursuit of what she understands as the ideal wifely ways for a Japanese woman. Her illness and injuries and anxieties are horribly, wonderfully portrayed by Ozeki, so even though we spend less time with Akiko, she comes across nonetheless as a rich, complicated character. I worried about her fate from quite early in my reading, and I was gratified to see that Ozeki makes room for character change, even if that's complicated as well (and I'm not going to tell you what happens there!).

It's a Causes Novel, certainly, even though Ozeki said in my Book Club edition's post-novel interview that she didn't think of it that way until a marketing meeting after it was almost on the market. Gender oppression in Japan (and the US, though differently); unethical food production practices driven by malicious managers and ignorant workers; the disgusting treatment of animals; sexual violence of various kinds (at least three): any summary of the book's content is liable to make it seem preachy or idea-driven, unless you emphasize the characters the way I did above, and yet the causes appear organically in what feels to me like a plot-driven novel that's heavy on characterization.

In a lot of ways, this is maybe what environmentalist literature needs to look like if it's going to generate much of an audience: funny, smart, not overtly educational but full of information. Definitely using this one in my January course on hybridity in environment and literature!

Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

2011-09-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

It's a slim and seemingly light volume, Ursula K. Le Guin's early-70s novel The Word for World Is Forest, but it's shocking how much she's jammed into it. At 180 pages of text, in many ways it's like a haiku, an aphorism, an epigraph: you know what's there without her having to tell you about it.

And it's all good stuff. All of it.

Sure, as other reviewers will tell you, the novel's setup and conceptual framework were deeply mined for Avatar. And sure, it's been respected for long enough that maybe it's time to push back against this novel. I mean, come on - Kubrick accepts anachronism in Full Metal Jacket just so a copy of the novel can be on a bedside table five years before its actual publication date?

But no way am I pushing back. I was grabbed immediately by this novel, firmly, and I finished it the evening of the day I bought it. And for a teacher as hopeless as I am at keeping up with my reading, even when I'm at leisure, the first weeks of September are NOT the time that I tend to read compulsively for fun. For Le Guin and The Word for World Is Forest, though, it seems I've made an exception, and my students are just going to have to be okay with that. (Sorry, gang!)

Basic plot: It's the future, humans are one humanoid race among several, and humans have colonial rights on Athshe, or World 41, which is about 27 years travel from Earth. Technologically advanced humans from Earth have begun enslaving the Athsheans in order to consume and change, entirely, the planet's natural resources. The absolute disrespect shown by humans for Athshe's ecosystems, animals and humanoids leads to warfare, sparked by an individual conflict between a single human and a single Athshean. Previously, the Athsheans had been understood as systemically incapable of violence against another person. Now that they've consciously breached their absolute nonviolence, what then for the Athsheans? And what then for the humans, both those in the novel and those reading it?

If you think of Avatar, then the movie's Colonel Quaritch (played so well by Stephen Lang) isn't a bad fit for the novel's antagonist, Capt. Don Davidson. Both are ruthless in their dealings with the locals and the new world, and both believe that it's suicide not to treat the new world ruthlessly. The difference comes in how Le Guin lets you watch Davidson's disintegration from the inside, from what seems like a stereotypical jarhead into a paranoid psychotic, so that even the hateful (and hateable!) Davidson is fully human after all. No matter how good Lang was as Quaritch, the script meant that the colonel was part of the system, and hence in the movie, the Pandorans had to reject the entire system.

In The Word for World Is Forest, Davidson's pivotal role in shocking the Athshean protagonist Sam/Selver out of his nonviolence makes Davidson a kind of inoculant, or maybe a persistent toxin. It's personal, not just systems-based, and it's far richer as a result. We get to watch two humanoid species at war on the home planet of the lesser species, watch multiple humanoid species try to understand each other, and - most importantly of all - imagine what comes next after this kind of cataclysm, for the winner who cannot but be changed by the experience. And on both sides of the conflict, it's about the individuals, not just the species.

The story parallels the Vietnam war in some ways, but it would have resonated at the time with all sorts of social justice movements. The humans' response to the Athsheans' radical nonviolence, for example, reminded me of the 1965 marches in Selma, Alabama. The dehumanizing language applied to the Athsheans - noted primarily for their long hair - would have made sense to the hippies, even if the Athsheans' hair is usually green and grows all over the body.

So anyway, there's just so very much to say about this fast read of a novel, I enjoyed it enormously, and I'd totally recommend it. But you know what? It's not even the book I enjoyed most this weekend. More about that tomorrow!

David Brin, Sundiver

2011-09-12T21:59:00.000-07:00

David Brin's Sundiver comes squarely from the west coast tradition of ecological science fiction. Its publication in 1980 means that it's missing some of the more egregious sexism that marks such 1970s classics as Ecotopia (1975) or Poul Anderson's Winter of the World (also 1975). On the other hand, it's also missing some of the energy you can find in 1960s and earlier science fiction, when novels seemed to me a little more randomly speculative. (Does it still count as "speculative" when you're just describing the logical outcome of contemporary discoveries?)

But it's an intelligent and thoughtful book, even if the psychologizing is sketchy, the detective-ish procedural a little clunky, and the ending a little ex machina for my tastes. Most important, at heart Sundiver is a fundamentally environmentalist text.

The background's a bit complicated, but basically humans have just been discovered by all the other known oxygen-breathing races across the universe. Every known intelligent species has been "uplifted" by someone else, with the possible exception of the now-vanished "Progenitors" who are believed or assumed to have started the Uplift. All species have honour based on the ancestral line of their patrons, and the line of those they've uplifted themselves. Humans, though, have no patron species, but (though living in ignorance of the otherwise pan-galactic mandate to uplift others) have uplifted two Earth species into fully communicative sentience, namely dolphins and chimps. This puts humans into a thoroughly awkward category for all the other species: cue a wildly complicated sequence of largely invisible but easily imagined scheming to control the implications of human sentience for the pan-galactic project.

The thing is, Earth is living this pretty tenuously. As protagonist Jacob Alvarez Demwa notes, it was fortunate that the first starship bringing extraterrestrials back to Earth was able to alert Earth's leaders to the importance assigned across the entire galaxy to caring for other species, thus allowing humans

... to bury the evidence of some of their crimes! Jacob was one of less than a hundred thousand human beings who knew that there had ever been such a thing as a Manatee, or a giant ground sloth, or an orangutang.
That Man's victims might have someday become thinking species was something that he, more than most most, was in a position to appreciate, and regret. (pp.90-91)

There's even a mention (albeit by the unreliable journalist Pierre/Peter LaRoque) of how important John Muir was to the history of this future Earth (p.249), along with the late 19th-century emergence of environmentalism. A few cataclysmic turns of human society had to happen before the pre-Contact stability occurred which meant the visiting galactics wouldn't condemn humanity for their treatment of other species, but somehow it's Muir who sets the table for what sustainability means for and in this future.

Anyway, I'm not going to get any further into the plot that occurs on top of all this background (basic question: are there any species living inside the Sun itself, and how might we check that out?), but it's a pretty nice example of post-70s West Coast ecological science fiction: recommended, and enjoyed!

A.J. Jacobs, The Guinea Pig Diaries

2011-09-08T22:36:00.000-07:00

When the book club read A.J. Jacobs last summer, I was in a busy patch, and I didn't get around to The Year of Living Biblically. I figured it'd be a lot of fun, but even though I wasn't teaching at the time, somehow I still failed to make any time for it. I've always regretted that missed book more than the others (though I regret there've been any missed books at all).

So anyway, when I was at Munro's recently and saw on their sale table Jacobs' more recent The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment, well, it was an easy choice to pick it up. And that's in spite of the ways I'm trying to change my life after having read Ellen Ruppel Shell's wise and chiding Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, which by the way I encourage you to read and think about carefully.

The Guinea Pig Diaries was just as much fun as I'd hoped it would be. I laughed several times while reading this book, loudly enough and often enough that my daughter looked up from her infinitely prolonged self-enacted Playmobil stories to glare meaningfully at me, and that's not something that happens much around here. Jacobs has figured out how to tell a story effectively while doing little more than telling us one MORE time that he's got some personality quirks and that his wife is a saint who's nevertheless awfully good at pushing buttons (his and others'), and it's a very pleasant book as a result.

Anyone who watches the usually funny but too often cringeworthy How I Met Your Mother will be familiar with the regular line "Challenge accepted! I, Barney Stinson, will [insert task here]": Neil Patrick Harris' character keeps interpreting comments like "that'll never work" as challenges, with predictably humiliating and/or dazzling effect. Well, Jacobs does the same thing, usually for a month at a time.

He outsources as much of his daily life as he can to a company in India: the weekly sweaty-eared call to his parents, passive-aggressive apologies to his wife, pushing deadlines with his editor, and so on. He does exactly what his wife tells him to do, for a whole month. He tries to be as rational as possible, catching his brain taking shortcuts whenever possible. (His description of the hell of 80 minutes spent taste-testing 40 kinds of toothpaste, for example, made me laugh for what seems now like inexplicable reasons, but laugh I did: "I never realized how much I hate mint. What a tongue-stinging, foul taste. It brings back memories of the green goo that goes with lamb chops. What kind of stranglehold to mint growers have on toothpaste makers? Bite me, mint lobby" [p.88]).

But that's it, mostly.

Sure, he contextualizes it all in a frame narrative of "what have I learned over the years?" and "has my life really changed as a result of the experiments?", but mostly it's a series of cute stories about a guy clever enough to realize that his wife is a gem, that he's a schmuck, and that the world's a really cool playground, even for adults. Words to live by for most of us, I guess, but it's a pleasant rather than a meaningful book.

Which is okay, I sometimes try to tell myself....

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

2011-09-04T22:54:00.000-07:00

Is this old-school fiction, or is it obsolete? Is it wilfully over the top, or is it genuinely thrilling for its readers? I'm not sure what you'll think of it, but this is a longish review. If the length troubles you, good luck finishing this monster of a book.

Plenty of love has been lavished on this book since its initial publication, enough that the softcover edition comes complete with four pages of quoted praise (and five back-cover blurbs as well). Particularly egregious among them is the LA Times, whose reviewer absurdly compares Verghese's unending 650-page beast to something Cormac McCarthy might write. (And suggests that somehow, the book's so good you might read all 650 pages in a single sitting. With a catheter, one assumes, and a team of support staff.)

The clear winner of the bad review, though, is Richard Eyre in the Sunday Telegraph, who compares Verghese favourably not just to Chekhov but to Shakespeare: it's too much to hope for, I think, that he means Pavel Chekhov and Nicholas Shakespeare, but honestly, and I hate to belabour the length issue, but how can you possibly say that a novel this size compares to the tautness of a five-act, three-hour play? Or its writer to a playwright capable of writing so many tightly packed masterpieces of comedy as well as tragedy?

Mind you, I've been unable to track down Eyre's actual review, so maybe it's a one-liner or a "buy this book to give away at Christmas" remark, so who knows.

And reviewers without the stamp of professionalism have loved them some Verghese as well, to the point that I had trouble finding objections to it online. Erica Wagner in the Times, bless her, called for an actual editor to work with Verghese on his next novel, and Aida Edemariam wrote in the Guardian in partial opposition to Eyre's laudatory review, but Verghese's got some disciples out there otherwise.

It took me only a few pages before I got cranky with the prose style, with the descriptions, with what felt to me like predictable trappings of fiction about postcolonial countries (especially ones where colonialism remains part of the picture). I was annoyed by the wildly erratic personifications of technology (the autoclave, for example), the catalogues of trust-me-i-know-this-place details (plants, for example, or surgical tools). I was irritated by the first-person narrator aiming so utterly, so consumingly, at self-knowledge and self-exposure, clearly delighting so much in the prose through which he was building his first-person world and yet allegedly unaware of himself as Artist.

And it's a small point, but battered and small old buildings, no matter their construction material, do not look like they appeared as a function of the same geologic change that created the imposing range of mountains behind them. Judge me harshly, if you loved this image on the very first page.

I kept reading, though, and it's a moving novel, no doubt about it. I wept not, neither did I laugh, but I could imagine other readers weeping at it. It's old-school fiction, and there's something admirable about that. There's nothing new about it in formal terms, nothing whatsoever, and I kept imagining echoes of Salman Rushdie's dizzyingly inventive Midnight's Children, beside which Cutting for Stone is a formulaic, predictable slog.

This novel is a great example of popular historical fiction, but it's also just a wordy and over-long sequence of "and then after that, I..." passages. Enough people like that sort of thing that it's done really well in terms of its sales, and too few reviewers have the time, energy, and expertise to parse through the great from the apparently great.

Cutting for Stone looks not un-great. But lord, it's not great.

Andrew Nikiforuk, Empire of the Beetle

2011-09-04T21:20:00.000-07:00

Now, you have to remember (or should know, if you don’t yet) that I’m a third-generation BC forestry nerd, a tree-hugging commie, and a pinko environmentalist, so maybe I’m a little biased. But even if I wasn’t as rabid as I am about BC environmental history and environmental politics, I’m confident that after having read Andrew Nikiforuk’s newest book, I’d still stand by the following claim:

Andrew Nikiforuk’s Empire of the Beetle is the most important book to have been published in BC so far this century.

That’s not to say it’s the best book, because that’s a very different question. Nikiforuk’s not aiming at literary excellence, though at his best he’s a rival for John Vaillant in the way he brings together disparate and complicated facts in the service of an energetic narrative. He’s also not giving us bullet-proof academic work, though I was sometimes reminded here of the brilliant Julie Cruikshank’s ability to nestle such careful research into the texture of wide-ranging, apparently effortless stories.

But nobody but Nikiforuk has put in this much time into understanding the question of beetles in the forests of this area (by which I mean not just BC but the whole Pacific Northwest), and I don't know who could communicate that complex understanding so smoothly. He contextualizes the contemporary beetle crisis against similar crises elsewhere at different times, and he links the BC mountain pine beetle crisis to crises among different tree species (here and elsewhere) caused by different species of beetles. Most amazingly to me, he’s even able to dwell lyrically and powerfully enough on beetle biology itself, especially beetles’ speciation and evolutionary history, that I came away feeling like I’m working in the wrong academic discipline.

Like beetles are where the cool kids are at. Or to put it less flippantly, where the only really important work is being done.

Nikiforuk brings together the history of forestry as a science; the vagaries of public policy related to forests and forestry; and the miraculous lives of beetles. At bottom, he moves toward the argument that humans are coming to the end of their run, and that beetles are taking the world back from us: “mammals[, not just humans but mammals altogether,] look like a quaint evolutionary experiment with limited prospects” (p.164). Beetles, he explains, can be understood to farm entire forests. We’re okay with the idea that an ant colony works together to build its complex structure and (for example) maintain small farms of fungus, but we can’t fathom that beetles kind of do that with entire forests, on an almost unimaginable landscape-wide scale. Maybe it’s a metaphor, “farming,” but maybe not: it’s the closest we’ve come so far to describing the world-changing collective practices of a million members of the same species.

So let me say it again. Empire of the Beetle is the most important book published in BC this century, not because it’s subject is so important to BC, but because its message about beetles’ past and future influence on human history is so troubling, so detailed, and so richly imagined. You need a copy of this book for yourself, and you need to buy it for anyone you know who won't get around to buying it for themselves.

Oh, and the book's really well written, too. I kind of hate this Nikiforuk guy. I wonder if I can convince him to attend our book club meeting in November when we talk about the book....

(Don’t trust my praise of Empire of the Beetle? Trust the Winnipeg Free Press: they get it.)

Ellen Ruppel Shell, Cheap

2011-08-30T23:22:00.000-07:00

It's a valuable book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. Ellen Ruppel Shell is a science journalist by training and inclination, so this book illustrates her background effectively. She includes numerous interviews with professors of one kind or another, for example, and the book is stuffed full of useful and interesting background information. I will say, though, that some of the book's value has to be found in spite of Shell's accomplishments here, because she falls short of living up to the quality of the material she brings together.

For one thing, Cheap opens and closes with Shell's comments that she'll always be a bargain shopper. At book's opening, it makes sense that Shell would want to ingratiate herself with her audience, which she can safely assume would be at least a little resistant to the idea of deliberately spending more for everything while buying much less in total. At book's end, the motivation behind this remark is less clear, unless Shell more clearly understands than I do the depth to which a uniquely American devotion to low prices runs in the collective, national unconscious. (Just to be clear: of course she understands it more clearly. I just don't know if that's enough of a reason, because it isn't to my eyes.)

For another, I can't fathom how she can bring together all this data and history, and all these ideas, and not find herself calling specifically for revolution, with targeted actions and with high-profile villains richly deserving comeuppance. (Wal-Mart, I'm looking at you, and especially at former CEO Lee Scott.) Sure, she concludes Cheap by describing the "bloodless" consumer revolution to come (p.231), but a revolution without bullets or bullhorns? It'd be an oddly Canadian revolution, taking advantage of the nuclear option otherwise known as the cold shoulder, or possibly the disapproving sniff, and I don't see how her data leads her to think that the inescapably mild behaviour of the goodhearted consumer has a chance against media and retail behemoths.

Hey Americans: individual responsibility gets trumped by determined collective coercion, about every time. Discount culture will not be overthrown by my buying clothes only at recycle stores or at bespoke tailors.

But like I said, it's an enormously valuable book, and I'd strongly encourage everyone to read it so you understand what you're up against every time you suggest maybe it'd be nice if we respected each other a little more. Ellen Ruppel Shell has done a wonderful job of bringing together the tools you'll need to defend this mild position -- and its much more radical consequences.

Daniel Defoe, Roxana

2011-08-30T23:03:00.000-07:00

Well, we'll see how this works out. I chose Daniel Defoe's Roxana as the earliest of three novels in this fall's 1660-1900 survey course in British literature that I'm teaching, not having actually read the novel in ... let's just call it "several years" and be done with it.

And of course on reading it, I remembered all those things that annoyed me when I was reading it the last few times, rather than the things I enjoyed so much that have always stayed relatively fresh in my mind.

In brief, Roxana is a first-person narration about the life of a woman pushed early into trading sexual favours for money: she becomes her landlord's mistress to avoid eviction, nearly two years after her foolish husband has disappeared. Over the next few decades, Roxana sees an awful lot of the flesh of some very powerful men, becomes seriously wealthy, and explores a few different positions in European class structure. It's a fascinating case study in psychological development, under the influence of Christian morality, poverty, and the silence of God. Defoe's personal interest in debt and mercantilism makes it also a detailed account of eighteenth-century economics, and the role of Roxana's servant Amy is fascinating in terms both of narrative/psychological structure and of servant-master relations in the period.

All of this is to the good.

It's written as a single chapter, though. And eighteenth-century publishing practices being what they are, the book's been heavily leavened with capital letters, italics, very long paragraphs. Too, there are next to no quotation marks, and several sequential speeches by different characters may appear in a single paragraph, unflagged except with "she said" and the like. Defoe's obsession with finances means there are several points where you're left trying to figure out the conversion rates between currency from several European countries, as well as the process for transferring funds between countries when there where no rapid communication methods or overly stable currencies.

Can I get the students to appreciate this novel? I hope so, and I've already posted some reading tips even though the term's a week away from beginning. But it'll be a challenge, I think, so I hope it doesn't push people away from the course. There were a lot of great novels written in the eighteenth century, and I've accidentally chosen one of the less accessible ones. Ah well. Though also, yikes. It's a great book to look back on, but it can be unpleasant to read at the time.

Kristeva Dowling, Chicken Poop for the Soul

2011-08-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

I wish Kristeva Dowling luck with the inevitable lawsuit, if it wasn't already resolved before the publication of her new book Chicken Poop for the Soul: In Search of Food Sovereignty. Or maybe the good folks at Chicken Soup have a sense of humour about this sort of thing. In any event, Dowling's book is good-hearted enough that it's certainly not a drag on the brand (with which, I hasten to say, her book is completely NOT affiliated). If you're a locavore or wannabe, or if you've wondered about moving to somewhere wild, and you want to spend some time with someone witty and open and usefully provocative, this just might be the book for you.

Dowling writes openly and directly here about her social and philosophic concerns, her material planning, and her many disagreements with the regulatory bodies governing small farms in British Columbia. Rare for a book with a food-driven audience, Chicken Poop raises all sorts of issues that might seem a long way from growing your own veg. Marketing boards, abattoir regulations, eating wild animals, killing wild predators: the great advantage of this book, to me, has to be the breadth of Dowling's careful thinking about her multifaceted subject. I'm not sure I'd've sampled everything she did at the local Rod and Gun Club potluck dinner (cougar? beaver? really?), but I'm genuinely impressed by the effort she's gone to in this attempt to think through the implications of cold-weather and wet-climate food sovereignty.

She does a great job, in particular, of unpacking the assorted challenges posed by BC's legislative and administrative restrictions on local food production. I'm busily trying to figure out some ways around them now, just because someone should, even though I've got some family connections that mean I'm automatically in a circumvention loop; I've always known enough about the restrictions to be annoyed by them, but Dowling's cranked the mechanism a little tighter by providing both information and commentary.

Plus the recipes look excellent, I laughed several times about one story or another, and some of the events approach the moving. Some of her neighbours are real characters, and I felt for her struggles: you laugh with her, and you worry with her.

On the downside, Chicken Poop feels something like an older self-published volume: glossy paper, longer than it might need to be, each chapter more scattered than you'd think an editor would support. She doesn't have the prose of Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, or Wendell Berry, but who does? Really, I kind of liked what felt like a DIY aesthetic, even in the unlikely event that the generally wonderful Caitlin Press was behind some sort of cunningly faux-DIY packaging.

Don't let appearances put you off, if you happen to see Chicken Poop in a bookstore and waffle about buying it: give it a try, because there's a lot more to this book than there is in your typical volume of "I am (new) gardener, hear me roar!" Maybe some of the DIY comes from its origins on her blog, which by the way is worth a read in its own right - though you should consider kicking some money Dowling's way anyway....

Sherryl Vint, Animal Alterity

2011-08-14T23:28:00.000-07:00

Nothing detailed here, because a longer review will be turning up in The Goose in the fall, but I just finished Sherryl Vint's Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal, and I really enjoyed it.

In brief, I'm still unclear on why she chose to talk about the books and stories she did, and as a result I'm not convinced she's not something of an advanced dabbler in science fiction. (But then I'm even more of a dabbler than she is, so maybe it's just that I'm ignorant enough that the pattern's invisible to me!) Still, her comments are clear and focused, especially on the early days of Amazing Stories, and she does a great job of demonstrating how human-animal studies can be used to shed light on literature and culture: and vice versa. Thoughtful, prickly, and careful, Animal Alterity generated a lengthy reading list for me, damn Sherryl Vint anyway. This book is a really good read for academics with an interest in the literature/environment intersection, important for those interested in literature's handling of animals, and I suspect it'd be a good read even for a lot of sf readers without much interest in literary theory.

Maybe it's not worth the $109.50 CDN that Amazon's charging for it, but then what is? Obviously Robert Wiersema's latest would be, Walk Like A Man, but I haven't laid hands on that one yet, and it's priced much more competitively anyway.

Check out the current issue of The Goose, though: lots of commentary on writing from and/or about Canada, with a tight focus on connections between culture and environment, including more than twenty book reviews!

Don Gutteridge, Turncoat

2011-08-14T22:38:00.000-07:00

Well, that was unexpected. I didn't think I'd find the book club's next Random House book to be the next dud, but there you go.

And if I was to be polite, I probably shouldn't call Don Gutteridge's Turncoat a dud. It's a heart-in-the-right-place detective novel with a reasonable toehold on Canadian history, and that's not a bad thing in itself. Maybe it'll Get The Kids Reading, and it'd be nice if people learned a little more about WIlliam Lyon Mackenzie (rather than just WLM King), and it's nice to get some perspective on life in 1830s Canada. Other than the griping of those meanies Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, of course.

Gutteridge seems genuinely like a good guy. But most of the women are sexualized caricatures, the prose is pedestrian, the violence cartoonish, the hero's exposition of his solving the mystery painfully long (and inexplicably NOT met with violence from the unbelievably patiently listening villain). Honestly, I'm not recommending Turncoat to anyone.

Apparently Gutteridge has written a dozen of these Marc Edwards novels now, though I can only find about four of them online, so maybe the other eight remain in the pipeline. Maybe mystery readers like this sort of thing; I'm definitely not a mystery reader, so I'm no judge, but mystery readers, I'm not going to love you if you tell me how impressed you were by this one.

(Oddly, one of the blurbers blogged about how pleased he was that his comment made it onto the book's cover. Maybe I'm the only one who finds it odd. Odd, if that's true.)

Eden Robinson, Traplines

2011-08-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

One of my fave lines from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is from former president and perpetual man-about-galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox, on his own stylishness: "I'm so hip I have trouble seeing over my pelvis." Me, on the other hand, I'm a long way from hip. Always have been, always will be. I eat beets happily, enjoy bluegrass as well as jazz, delight in books about things that my blog stats tell me no one else on the planet appears to be interested in.

I've gone back to Eden Robinson's short story collection Traplines in advance of a grad student's defense in two weeks (great paper, well done, etc), reading the whole collection again rather than just the stories she's thinking about in relation to Robinson's novel Monkey Beach. Students love Robinson, with three grad students in my department defending Robinson projects this month, and no question she's an accomplished and polished writer.

But wow, I'm a long way from hip, and the positive critical attention to Traplines, and students' appreciation for it, really clarified that for me this weekend during my re-reading. Or maybe it's okay that it was a New York Times Book Review notable book. The NYT may not be as hip as I fear....

Anyway, I recognize that violence and drug use and abuse are markers of, and metaphors for, lives lived without white privilege, and I recognize that I've lived a life of white privilege. (Not that I've been wildly privileged as whites go, but social privileges accrue to the white. I'm not getting into it here, so don't tempt me to go on.) The thing is, I have a visceral dislike of stories emphasizing said violence, drug use, and abuse. I'm assuming that this is part of my blah response to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, too, but I'm not digging up that one again just to figure it out.

And these stories have a seriously impressive level of violence; abuse in some cases approaches total domination; and drugs are normal, if also made to seem at times horrifying. Robinson's characters aren't all First Nations (though many of them are or appear to be Haisla), but their lives are the products of the social conditions in which they find themselves, and there's a lot of darkness with precious little light in any of them. The violence, in other words, is justifiable both on narrative grounds and on social-commentary grounds. I just don't like it.

And yeah, maybe it's because I don't want to look at the ugly parts of my society. But I'd rather think it's because I don't want my society to have ugly parts. Not that I know how to do that, and not that I'm the least bit active (outside my classroom) in doing much about it, but I'm getting closer to taking steps. I want to live in a better society than I do. Robinson's harrowing, violating, remarkable portrait of a society that I don't want to have to recognize as my own is (a) an aesthetic achievement and (b) an unnecessarily precise image of the effects of that version of our society I'd like to see overthrown.

Up to you to decide whether this counts as a recommendation of Traplines!

Wayson Choy, All That Matters

2011-08-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

Good heavens, what a book: I'd been expecting to admire and enjoy All That Matters, Wayson Choy's 2004 followup to his smash 1995 novel The Jade Peony, but I really fell for it. I've always had a habit of being persuaded by whatever I've been reading most recently (best novel ever! smartest theoretician ever! sexiest issue of People ever!), so in some ways I should recognize that response behind some of my appreciation for Choy's novel - but it's also just that good.

The novel follows the classic coming-of-age plot, with a young boy (Kiam-Kim) arriving in a new home (Canada, from China) with assorted family challenges; the historic period covered is 1926-1947, with some details about the '29 economic crisis as well as post-WW2 social reconstruction. The Chen family is a complicated one, genetically as well as emotionally, and Choy does a wonderful job of illuminating the many ways in which these complications feed into each other: silence and volubility, adherence to tradition, yearning for the new, siblings whose parentages are variously step-, and so on.

Set in Vancouver's Chinatown, mostly in the 1930s, All That Matters emphasizes racial segregation and mingling, both formally sanctioned and personally pursued. Chinese kids playing with Irish kids; Italian teenagers fighting with Chinese teenagers; Chinese women working in "white" offices or warehouses; Chinese and Japanese people impossible for "white" Canadians to distinguish from each other: Choy makes these things real, if a little bit cartoonish at times, but even then the cartoonishness is itself true to a situation where you don't know the first thing about people not like you.

I found the characters difficult to see through at times, especially the quieter female characters, but I'm assuming that's part of Choy's aesthetic. This was especially the case for the three young women linked around Kiam-Kim (Jenny Chung, Meiyung Lim, and Stepmother); maybe Choy's emphasizing the wilful inscrutability of these characters as their strengths and/or weaknesses, maybe I'm not attuned enough to his writing, maybe he's not as good with female characters as with male. Hard to say, and I'll leave the speculation to others. I recognize that some reviewers felt let down by Choy's prose and his linear narrative (unlike that of The Jade Peony), but honestly, the aesthetic worked really well for me.

So in sum, I was utterly absorbed by All That Matters. It was a mandatory read so I could support a student project, but I quickly found myself choosing to bury myself in this novel. Great stuff, even if I'm coming to it fashionably late, seven years after its initial publication....

Anny Scoones, Home and Away

2011-08-01T23:22:00.001-07:00

It's pretty much adorable, Anny Scoones' second book about her life on a small farm on southern Vancouver Island, and I'm guessing that Home and Away: More Tales of a Heritage Farm has been given to a lot of people on a lot of different occasions since it first appeared five years ago. I'm late to the party, apologizing mildly once again to TouchWood Editions for ever doubting them, but these things happen.

And just in time, too, because it appears that Scoones has recently sold Glamorgan Farm! Scoones seems lovely, too, so she deserves the break, and I'm kind of excited by what Sue Wilson has planned for the place.

To the book, though, because it's all about the book around here: adorable. Her occasional drunkenness is always funny, with a ring of truth; her variously aged rescue dogs are alternately heartbreaking and inspiring; and her farming experience is appealing enough to almost make you consider taking it up.

Home and Away is best taken in small doses, mind, because it'll come across disjointed otherwise (since it's a true sampler of stories from across Scoones' entire life), and because it can get cuter than anyone could possibly need. You need some breaks, but if you take them, you just might really enjoy this book. Lots of small stories about the intersections between small-town farming, Canadian literati (mostly Lorna Crozier, to be honest), and politicking.

It's not for everyone, and it's for NO one in my book club, but if you like this book a little, you'll probably like it a whole lot.

bell hooks, Belonging

2011-08-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

The first time I read bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place, I decided not to review it here. hooks is a well-known and well-respected writer, so it’s not like she needs (or would particularly benefit from) my approval.

That’s not something that’s stopped me before, though. Besides, she’s dealing with enormously important issues and questions that no one else on the planet thinks about in the same way, and more people really should get the benefit of her thinking. These ideas are collected together nowhere else, so the question is how well Belonging represents the best of hooks’ ideas.

Mostly, I just wasn’t sure how to characterize the book’s atrocious level of finishing: and it really is atrocious. Routledge should be ashamed of letting this book depart its offices looking like this, and that’s why I couldn’t bear to review it last time. Details on that at the end of the post, though, because we’ve got some great stuff to talk about first.

It’s an eddying, circular book, this one, and hooks goes over the same ground numerous times in Belonging. The same touchstone writers and volumes are cited more than once (Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Carol Lee Flinders, M. Scott Peck, Wendell Berry, and others), and sometimes the same quotations are offered in more than one chapter. The same insights, too, come up again and again, and the same crucial moments from her childhood are re-recounted.

But I’m more than okay with that, because bell hooks is dramatizing here the cumulative process of discovery and self-discovery, illustrating how hard it is to hang onto what we’ve learned. When you leave the country young for the city, as she did, and when it takes years for you to figure out how to remain country the way you need to, while making the most anyone can possibly can from what the city has to offer, and when you manage somehow to return nonetheless to the country, well, lessons sometimes have to be learned more than once, and they get learned each time in a slightly different context. Sometimes it’s a grandfather’s habits with a plough that prompt her; sometimes it’s a postmodern cultural critic. It’s a treat to watch her keep approaching the same lessons these different ways.

Among the key lessons are these: black American culture was still 90% agrarian less than a century ago, and the overwhelming emphasis on black urban experience now is itself a highly successful product of white supremacist oppression. Black Americans have been led (and in some ways forced) to forfeit and to deny their historically very intimate links to nature, so they’ve had to fake their way into developing a wholly urban culture without any tradition or history of urban existence. An awareness of black American culture’s historic roots in nature must be developed before that culture can become fully mature and hence overcome (while retaining, as it must in order to remain mature) the scars of slavery, segregation, and racisms both official and unofficial. Without some sense of and for nature, black American culture can never really generate a sense of permanence, of place, of belonging.

These, as I say, are among the many lessons of this book. hooks’ comments on porches and quiltmaking are inspired, and some of her pieces on family are impressively moving. Mind you, I wish she spent more time commenting on, rather than praising, the texts and writers she cites, and I rather selfishly wish she’d offered some more overt clues for how to apply her book to places other than Kentucky (rural British Columbia, for example...), but there’s a lot here to grab onto. The book deserves readers, lots of them.

Routledge, though, has badly screwed up the chances of that. If I was bell hooks, I’d sue them.

By my casual, though slightly obsessive, count, more than 150 errors survived the editing process: extra letters (the name “Chollly”), transposed letters (like “form” rather than “from,” more than once), missing quotation marks and apostrophes (even spots where a single word had a double quotation mark at the beginning, a single at the end), spellcheck errors (Gerard "Manly" Hopkins, not "Manley"), you name it. Some sentences don't end with a period; some end with two; some have a period in the middle somewhere.

hooks uses several quotations twice in this book, and not a single one of them - NOT A SINGLE ONE - is quoted the same way twice. How do you misquote Psalm 121, for example, especially when you get it right the other time the line appears?!? “I will lift up mine eyes UNTIL the hills, from whence cometh my help” - I mean, honestly. How is it possible that not a single repeated quotation appears the same way twice?

But MOST egregiously, there’s more than one case where there’s a missing “not,” so hooks appears to be saying precisely the opposite of what she’s been arguing all along. Appalling. If I wasn't worried I'd come off sounding like Gordon Ramsay, I'd have more to say than that.

Routledge, you should be ashamed. I’m tempted to write and demand that you send my entire purchase price directly to bell hooks, because you’ve done her ZERO favours with this volume! I've complained mildly in the past about small-time presses not helping their authors, and I stand by that, but this butchery is thorough enough that it looks like sabotage.

Michael Lewis, The Big Short

2011-07-28T10:06:00.000-07:00

Let me be clear. I've always thought of investment planners as hacks, capitalism as a shell game, economists as an embarrassment to real scientists, and financial markets as inherently fraudulent. Business schools have some excellent people in them, as students and as faculty, but I have to force myself to think of them as similar to (um sorry, colleagues!) real graduate programs.

In other words, Michael Lewis' The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is hardly the kind of book I'd seek out for myself, although I should say that his articles on the 2007-09 financial collapse were very helpful in letting me get enough of a handle on everything that I didn't feel left out. Economics is something that at heart offends me so much that I can barely stand knowing enough to avoid total ignorance, but that's one of the things book clubs are good for: learning things you'd otherwise ignore, deliberately or accidentally.

So I was really surprised, last night, that I found myself unable to stop reading The Big Short, cramming its 270 pages into a five-hour blitz. I was absolutely, utterly riveted, and this morning I think that everyone capable of understanding the text owes it to the future of human civilization to read it carefully.

Mind you, I'm not sure yet what role Lewis himself played or plays in my sudden obsession. As he says in the afterword, people have been treating him as an expert, but he's really just a reporter. A reporter who understands the story, which is exceptional when you're talking about something as complex as collateralized debt obligations, or pay option negatively-amortizing adjustable-rate mortgages, but a reporter nonetheless.

The gist is that the biggest American financial institutions, over the first decade of the 21st century, fucked themselves in search of profits and through their own stupidity (of individuals and of the institutions), by deriving especially fraudulent investment schemes out of the spectacularly corrupt ways in which a number of smaller, opportunistic American financial institutions had already been fucking the American public. A select few people figured out the extent to which the larger institutions were ignorant of the ways in which they themselves were fucked (rather than wildly profitable, as they understood themselves to be), and bet against the institutions.

The machinations of these select few people prolonged and intensified the pre-collapse behaviours of the large firms, and as a result the few made obscene profits, and the institutions almost without exception faced the possibility of bankruptcy. The American government rode in to save most of them by handing over vast sums of taxpayers' money, and as a result most of the financial institutions remained solvent, their employees made bonuses, and their executives made absurd amounts of money after their ignorance had nearly caused the collapse of the American financial system.

If you've seen anything else I've reviewed lately on this blog (like this, this, or this), you'll know that I'm basically green. Non-human nature good; people of suspect value. My own life has too much brown in it, far too much brown in it, but green is where my allegiance lies.

As far as society goes, I've really been in a state of mourning for years, sometimes passionately and sometimes quietly, that environmental change and climate change are combining to mean that the forms of human society I love can no longer function. I've used a lot of breath and ink supporting farmers' markets, community justice initiatives, pollution remediation efforts, and the rest of it.

But after reading Michael Lewis' The Big Short, I'm no longer mourning. I'm perilously close to being on board with Derrick Jensen, who has for years kept saying that the only way to save human society is to bring down the current version of it. No one in Lewis' book deserves to avoid the apocalypse. No one. And if I get nuked with them, well, today I'm not sure I'd mind that.

Angry doesn't begin to describe how I'm feeling, with this extra bit of insight into the unavoidably corrupt, demonstrably fraudulent, criminally parasitical financial services industry. As an academic, honestly, my response is hardly likely to be anything other than text-based and wannabe, but mother of god, there's a gigantic reckoning out there that's richly, richly deserved. Time to raise the black flag, as they say.

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

2011-07-24T08:06:00.000-07:00

I first read Thomas Hardy's 1878 novel The Return of the Native twenty years ago in an upper-level undergraduate course taught by the erratic but personable Reg Terry, from whom I'd earlier taken a second-year survey course (Medieval to Victorian; motto: "We read it all, thinly!") that I'd enjoyed enormously. The Victorian novel course was a bit of a slog, to be honest, with nine novels in thirteen weeks. Sir Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian, for example, takes up precious little of my memory banks, though I suspect there was quite a bit of Action and Drama in it, and I'm still unsure whether I've actually read Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, though I did own a copy for many years that I'd bought for the course.

But Hardy's Return of the Native was, as the cliche has it, a revelation. I'm teaching the novel this fall at my university, so I've just finished reading it again, and my goodness.

The book's representation of a socially claustrophobic small community hit me very hard on first reading, and it hit just as hard again. There are so few people in the novel, but they deliberately enforce - and sometimes against themselves - what they believe to be the standards of the much larger society. Utopic fiction often starts from a small community that's somehow able to evolve standards that suit themselves, that allow an escape from an oppressive larger social structure in order to move forward into a (relatively) stable private reality: that's not at all what happens in The Return of the Native, where the private reality remains inexorably linked to the larger world even though the larger world remains invisible and seems to most characters scarcely imaginable.

And the representation of place itself as an agent of change; metaphors (and actualities) of vision and blindness; character self-awareness and self-ignorance; accidents of circumstance: I really do find this novel astonishingly satisfying, even with (because of?) all the tragedies large and small that develop through its pages.

That's not to say that I don't have concerns about teaching the class. For example, I'm a little anxious about how the pacing will line up with student interests more broadly, since the long-ago undergrad experience of someone who becomes a literature prof isn't a reliable indicator for a book's popularity now. Perhaps more specifically, I'm also anxious whether the book's narrow social milieu (only a few dozen people living across a fairly large desolate area) will resonate with those accustomed to social media's hypothetically infinite community. With luck, and the support of some engaged students, it just might work - and it'll be the last book we read, so by then maybe I'll know how to sell it!

Poul Anderson, The Winter of the World

2011-07-17T22:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry to repeat a trope and a theme, but oh, 1970s science fiction: at what point did you figure out a way to at least fake an understanding of women's lives and values? Poul Anderson's The Winter of the World is interesting for a lot of reasons, though maddening or off-putting for others, but its gender politics are pretty dodgy. Check the cover image, for example, which has little to do with the plot: note the woman in bare feet on what may be ice, the handsome specimens behind her, and the increasingly erect phallic weapons the men are holding (read left to right, from downward ax to erect spear).

As with Callenbach's Ecotopia, and I'm guessing most of a generation's worth of science fiction, reading The Winter of the World is partly an exercise in mental gymnastics, in that you have to figure out what can be abstracted that's not irretrievably connected to the gender ridiculousness. But the setup means you persist, even though it takes 60% or more of the book before you start getting much payoff:

"First came the ice--and a magnificent civilization collapsed beneath the glaciers. Then all men became barbarians living in a time of chaos. But out of confusion came new and perhaps stronger cultures...." (back-cover blurb)

Not exactly global warming, but really, we should be talking about climate change anyway, or about increased climate instability, or something. Warming is the short-term effect, but the longer term is harder to imagine what with all the cascading effects, hypercorrections, inversions, and whatnot that might come down the pike at us. So yeah, this novel just might have something to offer.

Much of The Winter of the World has to do with what appears to be a far-future New Orleans, several thousand years in the future, after a lengthy Ice Age has scoured much of the planet. Three (or possibly four) of the world's powers are in conflict in the general area, including the Northlanders, who are the most unusual of the groups in terms of their political structure, gender relations, and ecological role. It takes the novel a long time to get to what the blurb promises, and there's a fair bit of action along the way there (swashbuckling! promiscuity! learning new languages!) that'd suit most science fiction of this period. Eventually, though, we end up somewhere kind of unique: an ancient city that was saved from the glaciers, possibly Chicago, whose towers remain standing but are being gradually quarried for their metal.

Upon first seeing this huge, abandoned city, a minor character remarks, "I never really appreciated till now ... what a lot the ancestors grabbed. They left us mighty lean mines and oil wells, didn't they?... As is, nobody will make anything like this city again" (p.151). One of the main characters thinks to himself, in reply, that this theory would explain why the world's most productive mines were along coastlines, which would have been underwater before the ice came and hence not available for exploitation. More than that, though:

"Was that why the ancients died? Had they spent so much of the earth that, when the Ice overcrawled a great part of it, not enough of remained for them to live the only way they knew how?" (p.150)

Presumably, yeah: much like in The Road, not enough survives the catastrophe for civilization to rebuild itself the way it was, and in The Winter of the World, it takes thousands of years for much of anything to happen, in terms of what we might call civilization.

From the abandoned city of Roong, the novel moves on to some seriously interesting speculations on human evolution going forward, with natural selection favouring those who'd rather live in small groups without rulers, rather than in large groups under someone's direction, and favouring those who'd rather spend a lot of time in nature, being natural. It turns out in the end that the novel's oddly 70s gender politics (women able to think themselves into non-fertile states! shared sexual partners! open marriages!) might be part of the way forward, once civilization collapses. This doesn't make it more likely you won't roll your eyes at much of it, mind you, but at least there's a reason for it.

Fascinating stuff. Not the best writing, or the least predictable, or even the sexiest, speaking of that, with oddly little eroticism for a novel so keenly interested in sex sex sex, but fascinating in times of climate change.

David Gessner, My Green Manifesto

2011-07-16T22:05:00.000-07:00

I first came across David Gessner's work when I was trying to put together something of a shit-disturbing panel for ASLE '09 in Victoria: his book Sick of Nature suggested he'd be a good match with Terry Glavin and Brian Fawcett, since all three of them push environmentalists to do more and better work than they've done so far. Neither Fawcett nor Gessner attended, in the end, though I gather that Glavin enjoyed winding some people up.

Gessner's new book pushes some of the same buttons that he was after with Sick of Nature, but for quite a different effect, and not just because it's a focused book rather than a collection. Instead of working as a sniper this go-round, he's on a good old-timey sort of mission in My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism. He wants to change the culture - actually two cultures, both the consumerist and the environmentalist - so this book really is a manifesto. A funny, satiric, personable manifesto, if that's imaginable.

The world needs saving, as we greenies all know, and we're all wondering how to get it done. Well, Gessner has some firm ideas about that:

"You may find yourself wishing that, even if the doomsday predictions are entirely accurate (down to the last minute and extinction), even if our fate is sealed (or, almost sealed as they always like to say, giving us a last second chance at reform), even if it is all true (and I, for one, will admit it is true, more or less), even if this is all the case could we just SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT FOR A MINUTE?... I don't want to bury my head; I just want a short fucking break to remember that there are good parts to being alive." (p.29)

Climate change is underway and worsening. Extinctions are legion, inexorable, and permanent. Oil supplies are disappearing before we figure out how to replace them. But you know, the world is a pretty great place to spend a few years, and some parts of the world really deserve some celebration: let's do that, in amongst the small task of turning around human civilization from the momentum generated by the whole force of almost all of human history.

Remember the small stuff, one might say. Learn something specific, pick a fight about it, and stay in the fight (expanding its terms or changing its ground as needed) until you've won.

Don't think about climate change. Think about the creek that your street's gutter drains into, or the hummingbirds you see for a month or two every summer, or the Vancouver ground-cone that you might sometimes see in late June or early July under salal bushes by the bus stop. Figure out how to make things better for whatever it is you're thinking of, and don't stop fighting for it.

But also, and this is key, you need to drink beer outdoors, maybe something stronger on occasion. You need to get your hands and feet muddy, your muscles the good kind of sore, and your skin burned. You need to be gobsmacked by the weirdness of insects, or the miracle of bird flight, or the size of either a tree or a bit of moss. You need to be okay with not knowing stuff. Above all, you need to be capable of taking a slackjawed pleasure in the world, because if you can't do that, then you're living in your head first, and that's where we worry. Love something, and fight for your love. It's that easy, and that hard.

Mind you, I'm not entirely on Gessner's wavelength. At a few different spots, he says that the book is what he'd wished his 16-year-old self might've read, and hence something that might work for 16-year-olds now. I don't see it that way, since I'm only a decade younger than he is and yet it feels almost immeasurably closer to the annoying 1960s than I'm comfortable with - but then again, I regularly forget how important the spirit of the 60s still is for those tending toward environmentalism. You can keep your Che t-shirts and unkempt John Lennon haircuts to yourselves, and I'm happier with recent riverboat-gambler Dylan than with acoustic Dylan: but we do all march together, and I have to keep reminding myself of that.

In sum, this is an important little book, and also one that's fun and biting and pleasing. We do have to shut the fuck up about the bad stuff sometimes, even while we work to overcome or reverse it: there's something good to save, not just something bad from which to save the good stuff.

Don't want to read it? Want more than the book has to offer? Try listening to him, or maybe even watch the handsome bugger.

WP Kinsella, If Wishes Were Horses

2011-07-15T23:33:00.000-07:00

How could If Wishes Were Horses miss? W.P. Kinsella's collected works include both clunkers and hits, but the two novels for which some of his readers actually venerate him (rather than simply appreciate him) are The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, featuring Gideon Clarke, and Shoeless Joe, featuring Ray Kinsella, which you may - and should - also know as Field of Dreams, starring the then-ascendant Kevin Costner, who may never have been better.

Because If Wishes Were Horses brings together Ray Kinsella and Gideon Clarke in the same volume, and lets them both talk at length, without interruption, with each chapter entirely narrated by only one character. If the first two novels were as character-driven as most of us thought they were, then this novel would be wonderful.

Basically, Ray and Gideon come together to ponder and help solve the unlikely, improbable, and impossible events occurring in the life (or possibly lives) of Iowa-born Joe McCoy, a retired pro baseball player on the run after apparently kidnapping a child and committing numerous other crimes - except that it didn't quite happen that way, and for some reason nobody wants to actually arrest the guy. McCoy means well, always, and he lives a small life with at best small victories, so we're meant to see in him our own weaknesses (and our own strengths in Kinsella and Clarke, vindicated in the earlier novels).

It's a brilliant idea, and the set-up is terrific. I bought into the characters (OK, the male characters - the female ones, Kinsella has always kind of struggled with), and I appreciated how he handled questions of setting.

But I'm glad I read enough to be glad of partial successes. I couldn't stay excited about this book, and the big plot twist explaining McCoy's increasingly improbable existence ... well, let's just say that the original version of The Abyss came to mind for me. I mean, honestly. Dude. It's a novel: there's no reason not to give us the director's-cut DVD up front, with all the good stuff left in.

Lots of sweetness in this novel, but for me, not enough of anything else.

Cannings x 3, The World of Fresh Water

2011-07-12T22:49:00.000-07:00

A little over a decade ago, two of the Cannings boys (Sydney and Richard/Dick) wrote and published the enormously valuable British Columbia: A Natural History. Inspired by the large number of stories and concepts that had to be left out of even that large and rich book, Dick and Syd joined up with brother Robert to start writing self-contained books based on individual sections of the bigger one. The World of Fresh Water was the first of those succeeding books, uninspired in its title if I may say so, but an absolute joy to wander through.

It's not a writerly book, but its writing is very good indeed: evocative, descriptive, zippy. These are scientists, and I think I felt a distinct note of apology in what was meant to be a simple remark that "the physical and chemical characteristics of fresh water are largely ignored" (p.ix). But they're scientists who are in it to communicate, to share what they've learned in order to make sure we understand what a remarkable place British Columbia is.

This is an engaging, big-hearted book about fish, beetles, moss, saline lakes, and honestly a thousand more topics in a little over 100 pages. I found the brief sections on beetles to be irrationally fascinating (new favourite word: plastron), but there wasn't a chapter I didn't linger over. Admittedly most people who know me wouldn't be surprised to find me marvelling at such details as the relative mineral concentrations of lakes whose inflow streams pass quickly over steep rock, and those whose inflow comes slowly across alluvial soil, but the Cannings boys make this sort of stuff sing, they really do.

Man, what I wouldn't give to have the naturalist nerd chops to hang out at Cannings family dinners, and it's not just these brothers. I'm a hack and a dilettante, even if I'm usually okay with that, and even if I'm sometimes more knowledgeable than other people. (Cue Douglas Adams' paranoid android, Marvin: "That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.") I'm excited to dig into the rest of this series.

Don Gayton, Kokanee

2011-07-12T22:14:00.000-07:00

I've now finally read Don Gayton's Kokanee: The Redfish and the Kootenay Bioregion, after giving an autographed copy to my father and somehow picking up an autographed copy for someone named Pam, after having Don speak to one of my classes when he was the Haig-Brown Writer in Residence at my university, and after I'd managed to put it onto the book club's fall rotation for November. Well past time to get on it, in other words, and I'm glad to have spent time with it while camping for the first week of July.

Now, as another volume in the excellent Transmontanus series edited by Terry Glavin, Kokanee is short, non-technical, and genre-bending, but still rigorous and careful in its detail. If you're the kind of person who thinks this means it's likely to fall between stools, well, I can't help you with that, but that's never been my experience with Transmontanus. These books are about wonderfully diverse topics (ancient clam fisheries, historic and idiosyncratic uses of explosives, the Vancouver histories of punk and beach nakedness, basking sharks, etc); they're written from a position of relative expertise, mostly by talented writers; and they're edited and designed beautifully. I continue to ponder ways to organize courses around them, to be honest.

Gayton's books isn't my favourite in the series (Theresa Kishkan's Red Laredo Boots is still that, so far), and this isn't Gayton's best work (Landscapes of the Interior holds that distinction, at least until I reread The Wheatgrass Mechanism one of these days to see if I get it now). Still, I appreciated the light touch of including his father's end-of-life story, even if I wanted more of that thread than you end up getting, and Gayton's always really good at flicking effectively between subjects without leaving you feeling dislocated. The beginnings and endings of his chapters (titled sections?) are often wonderful, too, but I'm not going to spoil those for you.

On the informational side, I came away knowing a lot more than I'd known previously about the non-oceangoing kokanee salmon. In my teens I fished for them regularly in the Deadman Valley between Cache Creek and Savona, a terrific little part of the province of BC, but that's about the extent of my intimacy with them. Just textbook stuff, otherwise, so I'm grateful to Don for sharing some knowledge with me.

And I learned more about Kootenay landforms, too. It's a part of the province I barely know at all, so it's fun just to bring it into my thinking for a change. It feels kind of like home (like both the Shuswap, or at least the wetter North Shuswap, and like northern Vancouver Island), but the topography's still somehow mostly wrong for my sense of space. Very odd feeling to be there, though it's aesthetically beautiful and ecologically interesting.

If you want to live in BC, and feel like you know the place, this is the kind of book you need to spend some time with. You don't need to study it, or tattoo its lessons on your wrists for easy reference, but it'll save you SO much time as you try to figure out how the Kootenays are different from the rest of the province; how the assorted fish species fit together; what the deal is with provincial, federal, and volunteer fisheries workers; why hydroelectric dams are more like the devil than you might thnk; and so on. Plus it's really good writing (sometimes scientific, sometimes memoir-ish, sometimes travel), in a lovely little package suitable for framing. Buy three today.

John Vaillant, The Tiger

2011-06-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

I've read John Vaillant before, and I really enjoyed his first book The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed. Mind you, I was unpleasantly surprised while teaching the book to my fourth-year class in literature and environment to discover, mid-lecture, that the chapter sequence is quite different between the hardcover and softcover first editions! I haven't seen an explanation for the difference, but maybe I should just ask him....

Anyway, his second book came out last year, again to considerable acclaim, and perversely I've deferred reading it for months after being loaned a copy. Now that I've sat down to read it, I can tell you that I had a really tough time interrupting myself while reading The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. (Maybe his third book will be subtitled A True Story of [only one noun], and his fourth simply A True Story [full stop]. Publishers. Who knows.)

It's not unputdownable, this book, but Vaillant has again done a great job of wrapping a complex array of thorough background elements around a gripping but ultimately brief story. Anyone thinking of writing a book-length piece of nonfiction journalism needs to see how Vaillant does it, because he's much more successful than many other writers (I'm looking at you, Marty), even though his method is ultimately predictable.

The hook is simple: huge man-eating tiger! multiple victims! animals who think! And the story itself delivers on the promise, with suspense and excitement and moments of genuine drama, but that's the easy part. What sets this book apart is Vaillant's ability to keep us reading through all the background so that the hook becomes more or less irrelevant to what we take away from The Tiger, no matter how deeply the hook might be set in our readerly jaws.

Now, I'm nerdy about this sort of thing like you've never seen, so it's predictable that I'd enjoy it, but I'm not the only one: here, or here, or here for reviews by readers less likely to be automatic fans.

Tiger evolution; the timetable of ancestral human dispersal from Africa; two-plus centuries of Sino-Russian politics; Jakob von Uexkull's concepts of "Umwelt" and "Umgebung" ("In addition to being delightful words to say, umwelt and umgebung offer a framework for exploring and describing the experience of other creatures" [p.162]); post-perestroika cultural collapse, aka katastroika; tiger consciousness: this book offers all kinds of angles, just like The Golden Spruce did, and to similarly impressive effect. Vaillant brushes up against here at least a dozen themes from the recent ASLE conference I attended, and I can't recommend the book highly enough - even though it's possible that you may not like the book as much as I did.

You'd be wrong, but it's possible!

(Don't believe me? Try the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Independent. The Independent has what looks to be the most positive review I've seen: "Whatever its signal virtues as eco-fable and chase narrative, The Tiger also counts as a supreme example of true-crime writing driven by wide-angle empathy and compassion. Some readers may choose to shelve it, not among cosy wildlife yarns, but with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.")

Keri Cronin, Manufacturing National Park Nature

2011-06-28T23:11:00.000-07:00

I'm always pleased when I see the academic books that have grown out of essays I've appreciated, and the sensation is sweeter when the author's a friend. I don't know Keri Cronin all that well, personally, but as another executive member of ALECC, as well as a fellow attendee at several events over the years, she's someone I've come to trust and to like. Her essay in Mosaic from 2006 is one I've assigned more than once to my classes, and it's made such great sense to them (as well as making my teaching easier as a result).

All of which means I've been looking forward for some time to the publication of her 2011 volume from UBC Press entitled Manufacturing National Park Nature: Photography, Ecology, and the Wilderness Industry of Jasper. In sum, it's just as good as I'd hoped, and I'm now dreaming up courses where I can assign it to students!

Basically, Cronin's arguing that the evolving technology of the photograph, and the framing conventions associated with it, have defined our relations with animality and landscape in conventionally understood wilderness settings such as the northern Rocky Mountains. By looking at postcards (including hand-written notes on the back), souvenir photos, related ephemera, and more self-consciously artistic images, Cronin asserts that the tradition embodied in their visual rhetoric (a) governs our relations with places and animals and (b) hides the ways in which these relations are in fact unbalanced power relations. In doing so, she also shows a wonderfully light hand with why we like the pictures we do, and why we're not bad people for having the preferences we do: there's an openness and a humanity to this book, which could so easily have been not much more than hectoring.

It's not perfect, of course, and I for one would have appreciated a tighter connection between the chapters to justify the final one on the "fake nature" of museums and dioramas, but it's a much better read than your typical academic book. I don't know that I'll be giving Manufacturing National Park Nature away for Christmas, but it should be essential reading for anyone with a deep interest in the ecology of photographed places, especially parks.

For ecocritics working on representations of nature either visual or textual, this may prove invaluable: request it for Christmas, I beg of you!

Douglas Coupland, Player One

2011-06-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, it was maybe a poor choice for my trip across the continent last week, passing through four airports each way, to take with me Douglas Coupland's novel Player One: What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours (from the CBC's Massey Lectures, the first novel in its 50-year history). Fortunately, no security personnel asked about it or recognized that much of my 26 hours of travel time would be spent in the company of five people trapped in an airport hotel's martini lounge during a global crisis, possibly even the apocalypse.

"Why no, officer: I didn't know that's what it was about. A conference about literature and environmentalism? Yes, I was just at one of those. Plenty of talk there about apocalypse and fear, yes, right you are. Why do you ask? I should go in which room, then?"

I've reviewed Coupland before on this blog, of course: Generation A, Girlfriend in a Coma, The Gum Thief, and JPod. Something of a fan am I, in other words, but this is a different sort of text. It's a novel, sure, but it was written for delivery from a podium to live audience (though edited afterwards); it was written for a specific audience (CBC listeners); and it was written for a particular prompt, rather than simply out of "inspiration" (and I don't use scare quotes very often). What would come of the usual Couplandia whatnot, with these factors in play?

If you've ever seen Coupland in an interview (and you should, especially a strange one), you won't be surprised to hear me opine that there may be nothing that'd ever prevent Doug from achieving Couplandia. If you've enjoyed anything Coupland's ever done, including his wonderful book Terry (about Terry Fox, about whom you should know if you don't know him already), then you'll enjoy this one. If you've never read Coupland, or never enjoyed him, I think there's something here for you as well, more than there often is with this idiosyncratic and ubiquitous artist.

The characters are recognizable in type from Coupland's other novels, especially in their only partly self-aware internal monologues that I find so valuable in his works, and also from my circle of broad acquaintance. I'm troubled somewhat, mind you, by the representation of Rachel, whose assorted complex conditions had me thinking constantly of the vulnerabilities discussed in Jean Vanier's Becoming Human. I know too many people with them, including too many young children, for me to overlook the use of disabilities simply in order to forward a plot; this is the narrative element that I'm the least sure about, because otherwise I think the characterization is both successful and functionally useful. All of them are damaged, in different ways, mostly as results of distinctly contemporary (postmodern?) issues or conditions. Addiction, loss of faith, the loneliness of crowds: people suffer every day, and Coupland has a real talent for showing us what middle-class suffering looks like.

But in an ASLE context, which was the conference that took me across the continent, ashamedly burning oil the whole way, it's important to note that the apocalypse that traps our characters together in an airport hotel's martini lounge is a specifically environmental one, an apocalypse we are likely to suffer through ourselves sooner than we would like.

You can find detailed reviews and commentaries in assorted places online, so I'm not going to say more about the plot, but Coupland hitches a ride on my hobby horse with this one: community is our only chance. Not a happy novel, but apocalypse turns out to be survivable, mostly, at least for the short term, and for now, we've got to keep telling stories about it so we can have a narrative to follow once it arrives in our lives. I'm not prepared to let Cormac McCarthy's The Road be the narrative I'm looking forward to.

Jean Vanier, Becoming Human

2011-06-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

What was I thinking, reading a book on the plane to ASLE and then not commenting on it before filing my head with three days of earnest conversation, interesting presentations (mostly), and assorted goings-on most pleasant? Ah well.

Jean Vanier's 1998 Becoming Human is another of the Massey Lectures collections. (I've already commented here on both Thomas King's and Ronald Wright's, and I read Douglas Coupland's on the flight home from ASLE - more on that soon.) Unlike some of the other collections, it ended up with a special note on the front cover: "The #1 National Bestseller." What was it about this book that touched the reading public in such numbers, and does it still stand up in 2011?

Vanier founded L'Arche, an organization committed to providing intimate, small-scale housing for those with intellectual disabilities. From a modest beginning in 1964, a year after Vanier had been introduced by Father Thomas Philippe to several men with such disabilities, L'Arche now has multi-residence communities in 34 counties on six continents, including more than 200 homes, workshops, or day programs in Canada. Basically, the program does all it can to provide support and encouragement to these very vulnerable people, so that they can find peace and comfort in their lives: so many people with intellectual disabilities live in poverty and suffering, are unable to help themselves, and have for many reasons not found support from their own families or in their communities. It's not all that easy to find critiques of this faith-based organization, and Vanier is regularly described as a possible saint. I wouldn't go that far, even if I had any faith of my own, but my experiences of individuals with such disabilities suggests that the L'Arche model just might be incredibly valuable.

Becoming Human, though, isn't really about L'Arche, but about compassion, forgiveness, and community. In brief, Vanier believes that if we don't open our hearts and minds to those who differ from us, especially those we would much rather continue to see as different, we cannot be fully human. The connection to L'Arche comes in his searching analysis of why it can be so very difficult to spend time with an adult with an intellectual disability: since we prize reason and shared values, we're confounded utterly by another adult seemingly without reason and seemingly incapable of understanding or sharing our values. We fear them, we fear being or becoming them, we turn away from them: we fail to live out our common humanity. The same situation applies in facing someone of a different faith, a different politics, a different social class, but the question of intellect haunts the book's most evocative, affecting passages.

There's more to it than that, but at heart, Vanier's arguing that we can only be ourselves if we know those least like ourselves. I found myself wondering how one might go about expanding his circle of community, such as to the nonhuman world, but Vanier doesn't offer any help with that.

Even though Vanier tries to reduce the presence of faith-based discussion in the book, there's plenty of it for those who like that sort of thing (or like to resist it). Faith isn't the only part of his argument, and you should be able to get there from a rigorous ethics, but still: it's hard to separate it out, or to read around it. Still, this atheist found himself close to tears a few times, flying across the continent to spend four days with several hundred people very like him talking mostly about the nonhuman from which we separate ourselves at our cost. There is another world of humans, too, that we mostly ignore - and they both need and deserve our attention and our caring.

ASLE 2011 - Day One

2011-06-22T20:47:00.000-07:00

In this report:

Thank the host!
Attend outside your area!
Doubt the theory!

And maybe use fewer exclamation marks, but that's up to you.

First off, you need to understand just how difficult it is to host a conference this size: eight hundred people for five days, with up to twenty-one sessions happening at the same time? Madness. ASLE has always worked with a local host, rather than a local committee, and we all decided after the 2009 event that it was time to put a stop to this terribly unsustainable practice. It worked out at Victoria, and there were local individuals who were prepared to help more than they did (and helped in every way I asked them to), but in some ways I'm still recovering. It took months before I could bear to look at the accounts (sorry again, Amy), and I've continued to be affected by the experience. I took everyone's thanks genuinely, so no one could have done more to make me feel better afterward -- hosting ASLE is just that deeply affecting an experience.

Christophe Irmscher has done the vast majority of the local work for this conference himself. To the degree that this conference is a success (and it IS a success! People are very happy here), it's a credit to him that comes with a personal cost that I hope fades quickly. When you next see Chris, thank him earnestly: maybe even give him a hug, if you're comfortable with that, but don't tell him the suggestion came from me. (And 2013 host, whoever you are, you absolutely must must must have a strong committee supporting you! No more bits and pieces of help from whoever might want to help out where they might happen to be needed. Email me, call me, write me a letter, but I'd like to talk.)

And you should thank Ursula, too, because Chris' job has been to do all he can to make her vision come to life. It's Ursula's program and Ursula's conference, in collaboration with Chris. They're greatly to be commended, congratulated, and appreciated!

Second, I always encourage people to surprise themselves a bit at ASLE. I get along well with my department colleagues at home, but there's not much overlap between our research in different literary periods, national literatures, genres, and so on. Here, I have a lot in common with the environmental medievalists, the ecological performance artists, the eco-Victorianists, really everyone, and it's such a treat to realize materially our common pursuits, just by taking the time to listen to some of them go on at some length about their areas of research.

I mean it: at ASLE or affiliate conferences, like ALECC's, you should make a point of attending one panel that has absolutely no connection to your own research apart from the "eco" bit. What a treat to recognize that we're part of a unique discipline after all, not just part of the real discipline of literary studies.

Third: the dicey bit. I mentioned on Twitter today that I'd heard Timothy Morton mentioned several times in different sessions, not discussed but mentioned, and the mentions have been nagging at me.

Here's the thing.

Two years ago, I took the long view that if someone was using theory to read environmentally, or to read environmental texts, or to read the environment itself, or whatever, then I'd support that person's efforts. Maybe I didn't appreciate what that person was doing, but that's okay. The discipline needed theory, needed theorization, and I was glad that Morton was doing that.

Six months ago, I expressed some misgivings about Morton's work in a tepid but informal review of his Ecology Without Nature. In the end, I said that I was "underwhelmed by the outcome of Morton's considerable expenditure of effort in pursuit of a new theoretical model," and that the book "feels kind of obvious, where it doesn't feel unhelpfully fuzzy." Ecology Without Nature was, in short, a call for people to do what Morton seems not to know that people are already doing.

If I was going to defend and/or support Morton's future work, I needed it to be clearer as well as more cognizant of others' contributions to the field.

And I haven't seen that. His work hasn't been clearer, and it hasn't taken adequate notice of others' work in the field. At bottom, I'm not convinced that his research has been careful enough, and I know that this is a terrible thing to say about a fellow academic. However, his piece in PMLA on queer ecology was name-checked today by Una Chaudhuri in an otherwise excellent plenary session, and Morton's PMLA piece just doesn't deserve that kind of attention. There are a half-dozen or more people at this conference who've spent much more time on queer ecology, doing much more thorough work on the subject, and I'm not happy that it's Morton's comparatively unresearched article that gets selected to represent some version of where the field's going.

I love and admire Morton's energy. I follow his Twitter feed, I read (many of) his blog posts, I watch (some of) his filmed lectures that he posts on his blog. I'm delighted that there's someone with as much intellectual curiosity working in the same field I am.

But he's doing his thinking in public, and he's not being treated that way. I'm all for experimentation, for trying on hats and what have you, but his readers need to understand that that's what he's doing. If the mentions of him at this conference are any indication, his writing isn't being treated as provisional, and that's how I'm finding myself forced to take it now. For example, the queer ecology piece seems to be already in his rear-view mirror, traded in for hyper-objects: good on him for being open to changing his mind, but again, his readers need to understand that his writing is provisional and provocative, not resolved or thorough. He has had what I think is a disproportionate presence at this conference, for someone who isn't here, and I'm surprised to find how vehemently I feel that his presence here isn't fully deserved.

Hit me in the comments, y'all, especially about the Morton references that have been bugging me (and that maybe you've been loving!).

Tomorrow morning I'll post a separate note about all the fun I'm having, which includes the very first fireflies I've seen in my sheltered Pacific Northwest existence; a skunk outside the residence (bunnies? here's what I think of your stinkin' bunnies); and sundry pleasantnesses. For now, though, it's belatedly time for bed.

Jacques Cousteau, The Silent World

2011-06-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

I'm a sucker for older paperbacks anyway, and I'm always looking for nature writing, so when I saw a 1966 edition of The Silent World at the Times-Colonist book sale this year, by Capt. J.Y. Cousteau with Frederic Dumas, well, I just had to grab it. Not that I was going to read it any time soon, necessarily, especially with all the things I have to do these days, but then Richard Ellis talked about in Tuna: Love, Death, and Mercury, and the cover reminded me of Arthur C. Clarke's The Deep Range, so onto the reading list it went.

And I'm really pleased to have made its acquaintance, though I will say that, wow, the world was SUCH a different place a half-century ago!

This was Cousteau's first book, so he spends quite a bit of time on the background to his current work underwater (as of 1953). We learn, for example, that they had to invent almost every tool they used, and that as a result they could be subject to all sorts of risks: carbon monoxide poisoning from the generator that powered the pump filling their air tanks, for example. More than that, they tried all sorts of experiments just to see what would happen: moving progressively closer to underwater explosions of one-pound TNT bombs, for example ("When a burst caused too much discomfort, we stopped" [p.41]), and other explosives as well.

Their relations with the life aquatic, too, was fascinating. Cousteau described how whole species fish in different areas, which at first were curious if not friendly, learned rapidly that humans were dangerous as a category and hence began to avoid them. He suggests that they seemed able to recognize the limits of human powers, so staying just outside the different ranges of harpoon, spear, and so on, as if they recognized the different weapons separately. He recounts the story of what dragnet fishing looks like on the sea-bottom, appalled by its indiscriminate effect; he describes numerous heroic (!) battles underwater with large fish that have been harpooned by hand.

Cousteau offers up gory details, too, about what can go wrong on a dive. When a helmet diver's air supply fails at great depth, and if the nonreturn valve doesn't hold, very bad things happen: "By the suction of the air pipe, his flesh is stripped away in rags which stream up the pipe, leaving a skeleton in a rubber shroud to be raised to the tender" (p.133). I like the double meaning of that word "tender," too.

It's instructive, too, to recognize just how gradually his vaunted environmentalism grew in him. In the years before this book, Cousteau and his crew would harpoon dolphins and let them swim for hours, doomed, so that sharks would approach the boat. Similarly, they occasionally used grenades or explosives to kill enough fish to attract sharks, and on occasion just to obtain an accurate census of fish in a particular area. Frederic Dumas, who regularly coerced octopi into "dancing" with him, by exhausting them so much that they weren't capable of resisting him, delighted in spearing large fish. Environmentalism flashes into and out of sight constantly throughout The Silent World, and I really appreciated catching it on the wing like that, so to speak.

Great book, well worth a couple of afternoons of your time!

Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood

2011-06-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

Well, darn it. Now I'm going to have to read Oryx & Crake: not that I didn't want to, but Margaret Atwood's been an unwitting victim of my West Coast anti-Ontario prejudice, even though I regularly recommend that people read Wilderness Tips, and even though I've enjoyed everything by her that I've ever read. I'm busy. I'm not going to read stuff unless I've got time and energy for it, unless the book club makes me do it, and The Year of the Flood was impressive enough that I've got to find the energy for Oryx & Crake as well.

Since others raised the question when the novel first came out that Atwood was writing these two novels, I had to do the customary mulling over of whether it's still science fiction when a "literary author" writes it, or if it remains "literature." (And I don't use scare quotes often, so take them seriously!)

It's set in the future, with technologies that we're developing now but that aren't here yet, and it's got plenty of the traditional hallmarks associated with dystopian sci-fi: huge corporations, the faceless and anonymous powerful, ethical blind spots, intense personal conflict between characters representing competing worldviews, and so on. Environmentalism has been part of the science fiction universe since before there was environmentalism, too, so even there Atwood's representation of pre- and post-apocalyptic environmentalism shouldn't be seen as new. So it's sci-fi, and we should move on to talk about the book.

Except that really, The Year of the Flood is a sci-fi novel that didn't get received that way when it appeared, and a novel that's not received as sci-fi isn't genuinely sci-fi. If you talk about Fight Club, you're really not in Fight Club; if you're not treated like a genre-fiction pariah by literary reviewers, you're not a sci-fi novelist. You could write a novel about robots failing in their attempt to regrow humans, now extinct, from the DNA of Leonard Nimoy and Jeri Ryan, on a satellite right where the Earth had been until its destruction by the Vogons, but if newspaper book reviewers want to talk about it, it's not sci-fi. That's especially true if said reviewers think of the novel as anything other than sci-fi, and The Year of the Flood got too much attention.

Yes, yes, I realize that the purchasing and borrowing audience for science fiction is huge, and that in most countries, more people read science fiction than mainstream literary fiction. Not the point. Science fiction is outsider literature: financially successful publishers, employed and remunerated authors, glossy covers and decent copywriting, but there's no place for it at the mainstream table.

But is this really an issue?

Atwood's novel offers a rich, complicated look at apocalypse--before, during and after--in a society that looks not unlike where ours might be in a few decades. Some things should be understood metaphorically rather than actually (transgenic sheep bred for organ transplants, rather than bred for hair transplants), but otherwise this imagined alternative future kind of fits. The blend of religion and science among God's Gardeners is brilliant, really, and her hymns are shockingly believable (and good, too). Some characters are a little cartoony, but society has done that to them. As I watched the uncivil unrest occur in Vancouver last night--which I refuse to call a "hockey riot"--some scenes from this book came to mind, particularly of Toby looking out from her refuge and wondering what kind of world she was going to be left with. In other words, it's the kind of book where the futurist dystopia leaves you differently equipped to face the world you're already facing, and that's a very good sign.

It's a powerful book, The Year of the Flood, well worth reading slowly and carefully, or racing through a couple of times if that's your preference. Whether you're a sci-fi reader, or a reader of Real Fiction, there's something here for you, and either way, you should read some books more often read by the opposing side. When the apocalypse comes, we'll want a common language by which to know each other.

Richard Ellis, Tuna: Love, Death, and Mercury

2011-06-08T23:20:00.001-07:00

I need to talk about Richard Ellis' 2008 book Tuna: Love, Death, and Mercury (originally published as Tuna: A Love Story) in two quite separate ways, because it's both fascinating and maddening.

The content of Ellis' book is worth a considerable chunk of your time, even if Taras Grescoe's slightly more recent Bottomfeeder (reviewed here) gives you a perspective on more than just the assorted species of tuna. But the writing, or possibly the editing, drove me batty enough that I'm tempted to suggest reassigning the main editor to other duties, and keeping the author under a very firm hand indeed in any future work.

In brief, the book's a paean to the assorted species of tuna, who collectively and individually represent all sorts of marvels technological and evolutionary. They're warm-blooded fish, unbelievably, with built-in flow-reversing heat exchangers keeping their body temperatures constant at about 27 degrees Celsius in water ranging from 3 to 30 degrees. They can swim at up to 55 miles per hour, grow to over 1500 pounds, cross the Atlantic once or more per year, dive to more than 1500 feet of depth.

And in 2001, a 440-pound bluefin sold at auction for the equivalent of roughly $173,000. Single large bluefins, the most prized for the Japanese sashimi market, each sell for thousands of dollars, though a great many factors weigh into the price: fattiness, texture, market economics, scarcity versus glut, and so on. As a result, bluefin tuna has been fished so intensively that extinction is on the horizon. The other species aren't suffering as badly, at least not yet, but the book's theme is basically that tuna has been overfished since they were first taken seriously just over a century ago (with bluefin not being particularly important to Japanese cuisine until the 1960s, much to my surprise), and unless we stop wanting to eat so damned many of them, there won't be any left. (Hello, Atlantic cod fishery. How are things?)

The more carefully I read the book, though, the crankier I got at the repetitions, the lack of cross-references, the incomplete (shoddy?) index. And I'm not talking about people recurring unnecessarily at different points, though they do, or at revisiting the same ideas: I'm talking about whole sentences appearing more than once in the book, separated by a hundred or more pages. For example, a seven-sentence passage on farming bluefins appears verbatim on pages 16 and 268, including a multi-sentence quotation, and pages 20 and 167 feature identical brief discussions of how great white sharks can sometimes enter tuna nets. The index is fairly lengthy, but it doesn't include all mentions of its terms: when I went looking for mentions of Andrew Revkin, to confirm whether the same quotation was used more than once, I found that the index only included some of the occurrences.

Plus the titular reference to mercury had me expecting it to be a major thread, and it's not. It doesn't show up until 75% of the way through the book, and it only takes up a few pages out of roughly a 20-page section. The postscript for this edition (by Vintage) addresses mercury specifically, but that's hardly adequate to justify the title. Felt to me kind of like a marketing scam.

Ellis complains at one point, in a footnote, about Farley Mowat's failure to provide a full scholarly apparatus in his books, particularly Sea of Slaughter. Admittedly it seems that Mowat may have made some things up, in order to generate a more effective narrative or to support more broadly a hypothesis or belief, and so Mowat should be chastised for this sort of thing. But in a book that's lacking structural consistency? Glass house and stones, let he without the first sin, etc.

Great details, interesting characters, almost an inside story: Richard Ellis' Tuna has almost everything going for it, except an editor up to the task of directing and controlling Ellis' copious energies. Read it and learn, certainly, but it's not as well crafted as Taras Grescoe's Bottomfeeder, or Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, or Alisa Smith and JB MacKinnon's 100-Mile Diet.

If you're interested in the book anyway, don't feel badly about reading a chapter or two instead of the whole thing - especially if you stop eating tuna indiscriminately. Learn where it's from, how it's caught, and whether it's sustainable: eat knowledgeably, and everything wins.

CS Richardson, The End of the Alphabet

2011-06-03T22:59:00.000-07:00

CS Richardson, like Chip Kidd, but also completely unlike Chip Kidd, is a book designer who's moved into writing novels. Richardson's acclaimed 2007 novel The End of the Alphabet is this month's book club selection, which explains my otherwise inexplicable escape from recent trawling through retro science fiction and logging novels.

Now, I was underwhelmed by Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys, to put it mildly, and in retrospect the warning signs were there in Kidd's reviews. Conceptually interesting, but unnecessary, is how I thought of it. Nick Bantock's books are more interesting than that, though maybe I just think that because they're warmer of heart than Kidd's intellectual (?) exercise, but I was a little anxious about The End of the Alphabet.

Now, bear in mind that this novel's an international bestseller, puffed in the blurbs section by USA Today, the Globe & Mail, and People magazine. Bear in mind, also, that it won the 2008 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Novel (Canada and the Caribbean region). People have said publicly, in other words, that This Is Good Stuff.

To my eyes there are two ways to read this novel, and I think I'm unable, perhaps congenitally, to avoid reading it both ways at once.

It's a delicate, restrained portrait of a suddenly dying man and his lovely wife, who understands what he needs but is mostly destroyed by losing her husband. As People puts it, "a compelling look at an enviable marriage--one that just happens to be coming to an end." He gets a 30-day life expectancy, and wants to visit a different place for each letter in the alphabet. She wants to be home, to feel at home, to hold tight to him at home, and the novel depicts their struggles to get what they want and yet to let the other's desire be met as well. Full of compromise and quiet drama, melancholy and courage, the financially secure upper-middle-class Brit hasn't been rendered so lovely in print since ... wait, have they ever been lovingly rendered in print before? (Kidding. I assume that they have, even if I don't read that sort of thing very much.)

It's also boring and twee and self-indulgent, a coded lament for the tattered ruins of collective capitalist egotism that shouldn't be stomached. Ambrose Zephyr travels obsessively following his diagnosis, abandons his family and friends, and burns up his wife's energies to live out the life's goal of his juvenilia, to visit places from A to Z, for no other purpose than simply to do it. Of course USA Today and People loved the book: those particular journalistic lights spend much of their energy bemoaning the decay of Right Values while also celebrating the borrowing of bijoux from Harry Winston and the best $500 shoe for this season. There's a deadline for our lives, and for our society: doing the same thing we've always done, more intensely, is no way to effect change.

It's both these things and neither of them. It's good enough, I guess, and I'm glad for Richardson both that he has found a readership and that readers have found something to keep them rewardingly teary-eyed. But I don't get it. I really don't.

Gene Stratton-Porter, Freckles

2011-06-03T12:48:00.000-07:00

No, wait, wait, don't go! I know that with a title like Freckles, by Gene Stratton-Porter, it's going to sound like some sort of teen novel, probably featuring someone plucky, and with some kind of romance plot, and I don't....

Actually, yeah. Published in 1904, Freckles IS a teen novel featuring a plucky young man of ignoble birth who falls in love with an even pluckier younger woman of high birth. But - and this is key, so pay attention - there's a twist. Instead of vampires, there are loggers: the hero guards the Limberlost Swamp against timber thieves so the trees can be cut down by the man who holds the actual timber lease, but falls madly in love with the flowers and birds and whatnot. The girl visits the swamp just to spend time with its extravagant flora and fauna, along with a slightly older woman who's an accomplished nature photographer, so there's romantic tension along with conservationist tension.

And also: gunplay! orphans! love! accidents, some comical and some nearly fatal! paternity revealed! male homosocial bonding, with hugging and declarations of love between employer and employee! Scots dialect! vultures, both human and avian!

Gene Stratton-Porter was a wildly popular Indiana novelist writing at the very beginning of the 20th century, with many of her novels being set in and around the Limberlost Swamp (notably A Girl of the Limberlost); she also wrote a number of nature books, formed a movie company, and financially supported wetlands conservation with the income from her assorted endeavours. Freckles was apparently made into a movie in both 1935 and 1960, so I'll have to see if I can find one or the other of those, but I was really intrigued by the way that her characters are represented as loving the "unspoiled" nature but also respecting the timber industry, to such an extent that the nature-lovers are excited by the prospect of having furniture veneered by bird's-eye maple taken from the Limberlost.

It's a long way from the union-loving complexity of Roderick Haig-Brown's Timber, even though there's a romance plot in that novel as well, and a long way from the cursing and homocentricity of the nearly contemporaneous Woodsmen of the West, by M. Allerdale Grainger, but I'm grateful to Nancy Holmes for pointing me toward it. I've been thinking about those other two novels in terms of their potential utility for thinking about the collaborative activity needed to respond to climate change's local impacts on forests both large and small in British Columbia, and Freckles offers something quite different. I don't know what to do with it, but there's something to be done: maybe somebody can suggest some ideas....

Revisiting Gabor Maté

2011-06-03T07:43:00.001-07:00

It's odd to me, but the stats are undeniable. Week after week, day after day, the search engine results keep telling me that people arrive at this blog in pursuit of assorted terms connected with Gabor Maté's book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Some weeks it's as high as 80% of the search engine stats, with three or four of the top ten queries (though there's always something entertaining to break up the monopoly).

As I said in my initial post, which is STILL receiving comments and significant traffic nearly two YEARS after it went up, I'm not crazy about the book. I came around to what Maté was trying to achieve, and I'm appreciative and deeply respectful of his commitment to the cause of drug addiction, especially in Vancouver's suffering neighborhood Downtown East Side, but as a book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by turns annoyed and interested me - plus it's not as polished a piece of writing as I'm used to, but then I've been trained into snobbery no matter how much I resist it.

Some commenters to the post tell me that they're professionally angered or offended by Maté's approach, others that they find him to be the only person who's ever understood them. I don't have any perspective from which to judge these opinions - I'm a reader, nothing more. This counts for something, but only something, and I'm very much aware of that. Still, it's fascinating to me that so many readers of this blog are here for something about which I know so little, and about which I once simply mumbled some partly formed thoughts. I was talking mostly about literary form, not addiction, but Google maybe doesn't sort out details like that.

If you're here to read about addiction, and if the title of this entire blog is part of the reason you're here (Book Addiction), well, sorry if you feel misled. But feel free to stick around: you might like some of the other books I've been reading, too. Maybe try a "best of the year" post on for size, or an "everything I read this year" post, but thanks for stopping by even if it doesn't work out.

Arthur C. Clarke, The Deep Range

2011-05-31T21:59:00.000-07:00

I'm going to have to get off the retro science fiction eventually, but it's just so cool! So earnest about environmental crisis, and such manly men (if often embarrassingly girlishly women to match), and such a blend of hope and anxiety.

Arthur C. Clarke's 1957 The Deep Range, for example, is about a man who'd been a wildly successful space engineer until a serious accident left him with astrophobia so intense that he's not able to return to his wife and sons on Mars, let alone to keep working. His wife and sons had been born on Mars, too, so Earth's gravity would crush them, so he divorces his wife and can't see his sons. The time lag on the visiphones, too, means that there's no way to see or talk to them, so they're reduced to writing letters.

But Walt Franklin's engineering talents mean that after some intense psychotherapy, he's able to start a second career with the Bureau of Whales, one of the two major units in the Marine Division. In this version of the late 21st century, humans have figured out how to farm the seas to an almost unimaginable extent, with sonic fences allowing for the segregation of whales from their predators (mostly sharks) in order for the human race to get much of its protein intake from whale meat. It's incredibly humane, and the wardens have a deep respect and even love for their whale charges, but still: it takes a lot of dead whales to generate more than 20% of the protein needed to feed 5 billion people.

Buddhism is the only viable religion left, since the others all foundered in one way or another on the rocks of science, which is a problem. Its insistence on causing only the smallest amount of pain and the fewest possible deaths means a collision looms between Buddhist ethics and technologically advanced industrial whaling. Plus there might be sea serpents (no spoilers here, though!), and links between futuristic whaling and historic practices of ranchers and farmers (with plankton farming as a parallel to wheat farming). And explorations of suicidal ideation, electronic direct-democracy initiatives, media obsessiveness, uncapped undersea oil wells, and several other topics.

And in only 175 pages, amazingly!

Possibly the most interesting character, though her role isn't central, is Indra Langenburg, who we first meet as a 20-year-old graduate student "busily hacking away at the entrails of a ten-foot tiger shark she had just disembowelled" (p.26) as part of her research project on the vitamin content of shark liver. When we get into her thoughts later, it turns out that she's always expected to marry, but she's never wanted to give up her career. She does marry, and she does give up her career, but she remains current with the research anyway, and among other things, she publishes a piece on the evolution of the goblin shark that leads to her being "involved in an enjoyable controversy with all five of the scientists qualified to discuss the subject" (p.101). An awfully long way from postmodern feminist politics, certainly, but I liked that even in this brief book, Clarke made the effort to imagine the additional complexities of a woman's life - even if it's almost painfully studded with 1950s assumptions about family structure and femininity.

The world would be a better place if we all just read more pulp fiction. I heartily recommend judging books by their covers, I really do!

Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

2011-05-29T22:23:00.000-07:00

I think I'm done with reading the Dune series, with this third one: since 3500 years elapse between the conclusion of Children of Dune and the opening of God Emperor of Dune, it's a natural break, and I found myself increasingly uninterested in the complicated (and mystical) politics of this novel. I'm going to insist that I'm reading it as a full trilogy, even though there are three more novels (plus notes for a seventh, which was in the end written by Herbert's son).

Not that I'm not interested in the implications of the politics, but I prefer my scifi to be either more purely speculative (like thought experiments), or closer to Earth. The multivolume interplanetary epics without much link to Earth do rather less for me than I'd like. I appreciated the Fedaykin death commandos' key principle that "humans can endure only in a fraternity of social justice" (p.324), for example, and Farad'n's insightful remark that "the influence of a planet upon the mass unconscious of its inhabitants has never been fully appreciated" (p.194), but I would rather have seen Herbert work with them in a less purely hypothetical context. I'm not sure whether I'm resisting the sense that I need to read these novels as allegory, or resisting the idea that I need instead to treat my own life as allegory, but resist I do.

But the further it got from the preoccupations of my own planet, and my own planet's assorted ecological crises, the more unnecessary it felt for me to spend the time on it. I've got more immediate concerns both philosophic and ecological than these, unless a Dune-ite wants to explain otherwise in the comments below....

Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert

2011-05-27T11:02:00.000-07:00

Now this is what I call nature writing!

I'd only read single essays by Joseph Wood Krutch before happening upon his 1954 The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Interpretation at the recent TC book sale. Already, I'm in the process of adding every single Krutch book to my unofficial wishlist that family members draw on at birthdays and Christmas, because it's just wonderful, wonderful stuff.

It's the kind of book that you just want to wave at people and make them read, rather than offering up selections, but this might be a kind of motto: "It is not ignorance but knowledge that is the mother of wonder" (p.149). Krutch is defending the theory of evolution against its opponents at this point, but it applies to so many of his discussions, whether it's the mysteries of lichen, the speed of a roadrunner, or the slow growth of saguaro.

To some extent, much of the information in the book is common knowledge now, but 1954 was a different epoch, scientifically speaking. For example, we now know that lichen (one of Krutch's many minor passions) is a synthesis of fungus and algae: this wasn't experimentally proven until 1939, though it had been theorized in the middle of the 19th century. For another example, his discussion of dispersed plant and animal populations keeps foundering on inexplicable gaps between locations, such as Africa and North America, but again, he's writing in 1954: the theory of plate tectonics was barely a glimmer until the key research was performed and published between 1957 and 1967. Krutch is writing conversationally and accessibly about contemporary, cutting-edge research, and he's even doing some of it in his desert home. Self-deprecatingly, he describes his own research as if it's merely the pottering about of some random retired gentleman.

And really great prose style, too. There's something so appealing about nature writing of that era, even where the science has been superseded, and even where the sociopolitics are dated. Krutch's politics seem okay to me, at least in The Voice of the Desert, and his science is up to date for 1954, so it all comes together beautifully.

One regular point of interest for Krutch is how to distinguish between the human and the non-human. He has no patience for exceptionalism that places humans at the pinnacle of anything: intelligence is a muddy thing to locate or define, given the complexity with which insects live their independent lives; heroism has no logical connection with intentional action, so he sees as especially heroic the first beings that/who crawled or jumped from the water to see if maybe they could survive on land (rather like soldiers drafted into service whose instincts drive them to actions subsequently labelled "heroic"); and human courting, or "love," is less complex and more utilitarian than the courting behaviour of many other species.

For Krutch, the land comes first. Everything that lives in, on, under, above, or through the land has a fundamental equality, and he's no shy about objecting to exploitation, to anthropocentrism's consequences, and to changing the desert into something more useful (by which he means fertile for crops useful to humans). He's writing a long time before the first Earth Day, but he's engaging with and extending the insights of Aldo Leopold, who has had so much more press than Krutch has ever had.

Okay, I'm just going to interrupt myself at this random place in the discussion. My point, quite simply, is that everyone should read some Juseph Wood Krutch. My first book-length encounter was with this Voice of the Desert, but maybe there are better options. Any suggestions?

Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain

2011-05-24T22:30:00.000-07:00

I don't remember when I first heard of Gary Paul Nabhan: possibly something Keith Basso said or wrote, possibly in one of Michael Pollan's books, I don't know anymore. His most recent books have focused mostly (though not entirely) on food in the modern world, so I'm really pleased that I started instead with The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country. Reviews like this one, of his Coming Home to Eat, come across as awfully naive when Nabhan's comments are read in relation to their original context, so I'm pleased to have accidentally started at the beginning.

This short book, only an overture and ten brief chapters, manages in spite of its brevity to comprise a few different books. Nabhan's a very perceptive naturalist, so in the discussion of oases, for example, we get enough detail about bird counts (both species and individuals) to understand his point about the relationships between birds and humans: there are more birds where there's some human use of the land, because humans generate additional diversity both in landforms and in vegetation. But he's also a talented ethnographer, so he offers up some nuanced comments from children, from elders, from outsiders, and from insiders. But then again, he's outside his home space, so he's got to take us travelling with him, getting the thorns into our own sleeves, so to speak.

Dating from 1982, The Desert Smells Like Rain feels a little bit dated now, but it's a gem of a book. Nabhan's description of the ceremonial drinking and vomiting of saguaro wine carries particular weight, encapsulating and complicating as it does so many stereotypes of First Nations peoples, but I was also really impressed by his description of how the traditional Papago diet may connect with Papago genetics to predispose these people toward diabetes.

Through it all, though, I felt like I was kind of there. Nabhan's experiences there remain inaccessible to me, and I can't imagine I'll ever be fortunate enough to have enough time on my hands to do what he did, but Papago country - materially, psychically - is within my imagination now, and that's the mark of a really good nature writer.

Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

2011-05-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

I've been reading me some Frank Herbert lately (see here and here for others), in preparation for a student whose project on Dune I'll be supervising between September and April. Pretty fun stuff, and it's been interesting to read the Dune novels that made his reputation in relation with more speculative, one-off pieces.

In part it's fun because the prose of the Dune novels is stodgy, classical, heavy: since The Green Brain uses a much more conversational, contemporary prose style, it's obvious that it's not just Herbert's writing style that's at issue. This is important because I heard from more than one person who said that Herbert's books were slow to read, not engaging, distant, which are just the sorts of things that prevent a person from even trying out a new author.

So anyway, it's clear that in the Dune series, Herbert purposefully aimed at a prose style that defamiliarized the reader somewhat. I feel some stylistic connections with different sacred texts, which makes sense given the novels' representation of an overlapping religion and government across many years. It's not a Genesis story, by any means, or Revelation either, more like one of the middle Gospels where things bog down a bit in the minutiae. It's vital to the story arc of Herbert's represented world, much like Philemon or 1 Timothy are vital to Christian Bible, but when was the last time you heard a less from First Timothy discussed at a funeral or non-core church event? When was the last time you heard Philemon discussed at church, period?

You may be wondering what all this has to do with Dune Messiah, the second novel in Herbert's trilogy, and the alleged subject of this review. Not much, but really I don't have much to say about this one. I know I should be more interested in the shape-shifting and genetics and disguises and so on, especially since I'll be teaching ENGL 478 in January 2012 on roughly this subject (special topic: "Splicing Genes, Splicing Genres"), but the ghola, dwarf, and Tleilaxu/Face Dancers left me a little cold.

The eponymous first novel of the Dune series saw Paul Atreides rise to power, drawing on his genetic heritage, his Arrakeen environment, and his mother's Bene Gesserit psy training. This second novel sees Paul Atreides, now generally known as the religious icon Muad'dib, unhappily administering a vast Jihad occurring in his name but against his will, as well as a vast bureaucracy. Intrigues occur, favourites come into disrepute, visions of the future collide: space opera, without the singing. Meh.

Frank Herbert, The Green Brain

2011-05-18T14:03:00.000-07:00

OK, you science fiction lovers, you know as well as I do that an overwhelming number of sci-fi books, even classics and experimental triumphs, contain clangers of one kind or another. Retrograde politics, howlingly irredeemable gender relations, racism cloaked as alien/human conflict, characters not complex enough for Harlequin, a plot interrupted right at the point where the author would have to do the first interestingly complicated thing with the implications of whatever innovation or twist has been driving the novel: you name it, and we'll be able to find dozens of examples.

So yeah, Frank Herbert's 1966 The Green Brain, his first novel after Dune, has some of that stuff. I'll generally defend science fiction as real fiction, whatever that term might mean, but you've got to admit that even the good examples aren't always good examples, if you see what I mean.

The gist of The Green Brain is that roughly a hundred years from now, and following China's example, South America is attempting to eradicate all insect life except for genetically mutated bees that'll continue to perform whatever tasks might be deemed necessary for continued human existence. The goal is to eradicate disease altogether, and to remove insect as a competitor with humans for food. Since the Chinese have maintained the specifics as a state secret, no one knows all the details, but things haven't gone nearly as well in China as has been advertised. And in South America, somehow, the insects have figured out what the humans are doing, what the consequences for the planet might be, and how to respond, including how to fight back.

The collective response of the insects is really the story of the novel, and it's an audaciously speculative concept. There are some human characters, three of them in particular, just the right number for a movie IMHO, and their nationalities are interestingly and usefully varied, but they're representative figures. (I'm fine with that, incidentally. How much more sensitive introspection do we need, honestly? Give me something to think about, rather than someone else's thinking or - shudder - feeling.) This novel is about the big question of how far humans should intervene with the non-human, or how much effect humans should have on the non-human.

It's a bit muddled, though, by the sense that the over-reaching seems to be the exclusive province of socialist governments rather than capitalist ones (or corporations, such as Monsanto, the "evil corporation in your refrigerator," as some would have it). Given everything we know about capitalism's role in food speculation now, there's no justification anymore for unilaterally demonizing both the Green Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Sure, demonize both movements if you like, but you can't let capitalism off the hook when it's similarly demonic.

Anyway, I always get tangled up with the terminology. Natural, cultural, human: use what works for you. Herbert's proposing a richly non-binaristic view of nature and humanity, anchored in the minutiae of ecology (to which he refers only sparingly in the novel, mind you), to imagine some valuably self-imposed limits to human actions or achievements. It's a little weird, though, how he sets this philosophic problem beside a spectacularly complicated biological problem that he chooses not to explain (the mechanics of the collective insect response), so in my reading I find at best an uneasy fit between the engine driving the drama and the engine driving the ideas.

And gender relations are just plain odd, too, notably everything to do with entomologist and noted Irish beauty Dr. Rhin Kelly, about whom I'll say only that it's convenient when a spy's habitual sexual drives are so powerful that they can't help but make her effective. (Oy.) If you read the novel, please do watch out for repetitive strain injuries from your regular eye-rolling.

But after all this carping, I have to end by saying that I rilly rilly enjoyed The Green Brain! Fascinating ideas, even if the plot and characters and structure might have been different: valuable and worthwhile speculative fiction, though not for everyone.

Mark Kingwell, Catch & Release

2011-05-17T23:16:00.000-07:00

I'm glad for several reasons that I've now read Mark Kingwell's Catch & Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life, one of which is simply (and selfishly) that I'll now find it much easier to remember that he and Malcolm Gladwell are in fact two separate people. (There was a time that I had the same trouble with Elton John and Billy Joel, for some reason, but I'm older now.) It's kind of an odd book, and I'm not convinced that he and Penguin, his publisher, ever really got a handle on who their target market was and what consistent approach might best be taken, but I greatly enjoyed pieces of it even if I found it strangely variable in its approach and subject(s).

I'm guessing that this book has found its way into the Christmas stockings and under the Christmas trees of many a fisherman over the last few years, and that many a fisherman has given up reading it fairly early, if they weren't deterred altogether by the back cover, on which Kingwell complains to his family members dragging him along on a fishing weekend, "I will sit in the back of the boat reading The Critique of Pure Reason, but I will not fish." When Kingwell uses the phrase "the meaning of life" in his title, we are not talking here about the philosophizing practiced and promoted by David James Duncan and lesser writers (Richard Bach, Robert Pirsig, and their ilk). We're talking about Kant and Hegel and the rest of them, the luminaries whom even most intellectuals try to learn about rather than to read directly. Sure, there's plenty of talk about catching small rainbows by dry fly or wet fly, stories about Royal Coachmen and green nymphs and whatnot, but there's also Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein.

You'd be right, I think, if you imagined I was roughly the target market for this sort of thing. But even I wondered where Kingwell was off to, more than once, with his digressions and perambulations.

There were some great lines, though: the time spent at night clubs the evening before the fishing begins, for example, had me laughing out loud at a couple of points. Kingwell's regular insults against his brothers, who don't get to respond in print, were often very funny indeed, partly because of the extra joke that he gets to write about it and they don't. Possibly worth the price of admission all on its own, even though the section might have been dropped randomly into this book from some entirely separate project, is his reasoned discrimination between the painfully closely related categories of boredom, procrastination, and despair (up to the point of mental paralysis), because it's exceptionally thoughtful and well-written, and because it speaks to so much of my life as a university instructor.

Of course, if you've read as far as this into this commentary, you're probably thinking that this is a pretty scattered sort of review. And you'd be right. It's a scattered sort of book, and it turns out I'm unable to respond otherwise to it.

This book purports to be about The Weekend, an annual event at which the Kingwell boys and their father (and also Fred) get together and fish. It really is about that, but it's also about the consolations of philosophy, the urban/rural divide, the awfulness of baseball caps and risotto (separately), New York versus the rest of the world, and the value of male friendship among men whose acquaintances are mostly female. Excellent ingredients, but an odd cocktail: maybe you'll love it, though. Who am I to say?

John McPhee, Basin and Range

2011-05-16T21:43:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year I remarked briefly on my surprise that I hadn't commented on John McPhee's wonderful book The Pine Barrens, even though I'd enjoyed it immensely. It's kind of a combination between environmental history, near-home anthropology, and memorial to an almost Cracker way of life in a forested region of New Jersey. It's well worth your time, for McPhee's engaging prose style (and personal style, for that matter), and it prompted me to read more of his catalogue.

Up next was Basin and Range, since I thought that at one-third the length, it'd be an easier read than his 700-page Annals of the Former World, even though I knew both of them were about geology, loosely organized around US highway I-80. Turns out that it's actually the first third of the longer book: complete in itself, but part of a larger whole. Obsessive as I am, I'll have to wade through the remaining 500 pages this summer, but I'm okay with that. It's a terrific read, almost enough to make me think I should have considered geology more seriously as a career!

And as it happens, that's part of McPhee's mission in the book. Well, no, actually it's the classroom mission of Kenneth Deffeyes, at that time a geology prof at Princeton, and now one of the leading prognosticators of the "peak oil" theory (to which I subscribe, so those aren't scare quotes, just regular quotation marks giving a phrase a hug). Much of the book recounts McPhee's journeys with Deffeyes, sometimes in search of silver, sometimes merely observing roadcuts and other access points to geology in the western US, basically from Great Salt Lake west. The book's goal is to give its readers an overview of geological theory, including a sense for how the theory developed over time, along with some place-specific descriptions of specific geological features to help make sense of it all.

The writing isn't for everyone, I should say. The paragraphs get long, as the book rolls on, sometimes lasting for two full pages. There are lengthy lists of specialized terminology that it'd be madness to pay close attention to. McPhee's persistent recursion to the marvellous concept of geological time is off-putting, if you think you're okay with the concept.

But it's written this way because McPhee wants to remind us just how new some of geology's thinking was in 1981, when Basin and Range came out. It was less than 200 years since serious people thought the planet was less than 6000 years old, for example; people born in the 1970s and after don't realize, either, that the whole theory of plate tectonics developed during the ten years between 1957 and 1967. The newness of plate tectonics as a theory is what I found shocking, not the sense of geological time, but I suppose that in 1981, a lot more of his readers would still have been far newer to plate tectonics and its associated effects than someone my age or younger.

(I wonder what McPhee would do if he wrote about evolution and/or intelligent design, speaking of theories about which people can go mad.)

For much of the book, McPhee explains how different locations earned their shape today as a result of successive, cataclysmic change. Tectonic plates crash into each other, blocks of the earth's crust turn slowly on end or upside down, seismic faults open up in the earth as visible cracks, the floor of the ocean is swept clean, and so on. New crust grows at the edges of plates that are crashing into their neighbours, on the opposite side from where they're being stretched thin. Low ground is raised up, and high ground is brought low. Everything changes, absolutely everything. A metaphor for geological time: look at the palm of your hand, from wrist to fingertips. Use a nail file briefly on the end of your longest finger. Well, you've just deleted the portion of the hand corresponding to the duration of human history.

It's a brilliant work of natural history, not unchallenging but remarkably clear and personable nonetheless. There's a sense throughout Basin and Range of John McPhee as just some guy trying to put words to ideas that he adores for their remarkable fitness to the material, non-imagined world, and he can turn a sentence beautifully. Read the book, if you have any interest at all in the remarkable western US landscape, or in geology more generally, or if you'd like to see how natural history is done by someone prepared also to write about the writing of natural history:

"If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone." (p.183)

May 15, Times-Colonist book sale

2011-05-15T23:07:00.001-07:00

Always a most pleasant time, attending the Times-Colonist book sale. I've learned now to take a pocketful of cash rather than rely on credit or debit, but it's been a few years since I've been tempted to spend all of it, in part because I now attend early on the second day. No first-day crush, but also no post-breakfast or post-church johnny-come-latelys, so it's pretty calm for the first 90 minutes or so.

So with the occasional hint from one blurb or another, and excluding books for my daughter, here's the day's haul:

Poul Anderson, Twilight World ("The time is shortly after the Great Nuclear Spasm")
Poul Anderson, The Winter of the World ("First came the ice, and a magnificent civilization collapsed beneath the glaciers")
BC Motorist (14 issues between 1963 and 1970, the magazine of the BC Automobile Association)
British Columbia Digest, a 1965 issue (now BC Outdoors)
Arthur C. Clarke, The Deep Range ("...a future when submarine patrols harvest the water's wealth to feed the world")
Capt. J.Y. Cousteau with Frederic Dumas, The Silent World (Cousteau's first book)
Garth Coward, Tree Book: Learning to Recognize Trees of British Columbia (great little pocket guide that I'm hoping will let me practice enough to distinguish between the assorted firs and spruces that continue to plague my best environmentalist intentions)
Richard Ellis, Tuna: Love, Death, and Mercury ("at once an astounding ode to one of nature's greatest marvels and a serious examination of a creature and world at risk")
Finnish Forest and Park Service, Forestry Environment Guide ("This booklet has been printed on the high-quality Finnish paper necessary to do full justice to the fine paintings and photographs used to illustrate it")
Erna Gunther, Northwest Coast Indian Art (awesomely, the catalogue for the Fine Arts Pavilion at the Seattle Word's Fair of 1962)
Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
Frank Herbert, The Green Brain ("His masterpiece of ecological horror!")
Robert Hunter & Rex Weyler, To Save a Whale: The Voyages of Greenpeace (tales and photos from leaders of the mid-70s anti-whaling adventures)
Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Interpretation
Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold, ed. Luna Leopold
Lisa McGonigle, Snowdrift (documenting a few years spent snowboarding etc in the Kootenays, after this young Irishwoman "abandoned her scholarship at Oxford")
T.C. McLuhan, The Way of the Earth: Encounters with Nature in Ancient and Contemporary Thought
Jonathan Raban, Old Glory (boating solo down the Mississippi, in a 16-foot skiff)
David V. Reddick, Ma-Kee: The Life and Death of a Muskellunge (um, yeah, actually an imagined biography of an individual fish, which might be the clincher in assessing whether my nerdishness is in fact redeemable: it's not unlike Fred Bodsworth's wonderful Last of the Curlews, if that helps)
Andy Russell, Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer: Memoirs of a Modern Frontiersman
Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher, Driftwood Valley: The Northern Frontier ("Together, a trapper and a naturalist set out for the wilderness to the North"-published in 1946)
Gene Stratton-Porter, Freckles (one of the Limberlost novels, but about a logging company: thanks to Nancy Holmes for telling me about it!)
John & Mildred Teal, Life and Death of the Salt Marsh
Susan Vreeland, The Forest Lover ("A lavish historical novel about a pioneering woman artist and the untamed country she loved"-meaning Emily Carr)
Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (a recent recollection of Nelson in 1951, organized around the city's newest Chinese cafe, owned by Wah's father)
Sheila Watson, Deep Hollow Creek (the Cariboo of the 1930s, written at that time)
Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals

Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia

2011-05-11T23:02:00.000-07:00

Oh 1970s, how on earth did you manage such naivety - and in so many areas - in the midst of such political complexity, scientific advances, and artistic experimentation?

I've meant for years to read Ernest Callenbach's epochal novel Ecotopia, and I've finally made the time for it. The back cover blurb's emphasis on the narrator's "relationship with a sexually forthright Ecotopian woman" wasn't a good sign, especially with the blurb's closing words of "startling climax" punning openly about the sex and the narrative structure, and definitely its politics are dated. Gender essentialism has come back into a certain fashion, though in a limited way and presumably among limited demographics, but it's rarely defended openly, and racial essentialism feels now like something your least predictable great-uncle might espouse while half-cut, and for no good reason, at a wedding reception.

Race isn't particularly important to the book, so maybe one could simply overlook it, but gender is crucial. I'll have to think harder about how Callenbach uses sex and sexuality in the novel, before I could say something particularly cogent about it, but I will simply note here that Ecotopia seems to enable, if not to be based on, some of the standard gender essentialist elements to environmentalism, the ones that mean ecofeminism needs to counterbalance mainstream environmentalism just as thoroughly as it does consumer society. Chicks aren't just there for the dudes, in environmentalism or anywhere else. It's not good enough to specify that women in Ecotopia (the fictional place) have much more power of sexual choice than they do in the real world (or the fictionalized America), or even that they've got more political power than men do. I'm not sure what WOULD be good enough, mind you, but this isn't it.

I was trying to make excuses for it all, or at least to stick my fingers in my ears long enough to make it through the novel, but I gave up when it turned out that the nurses often have sex with patients for therapeutic reasons. Oy.

Basic plot: during the early 70s oil crisis, a secessionist movement managed to carve out a new country consisting of Washington, Oregon, and northern California, and over the last few decades they've developed a steady-state economy without any diplomatic relations with the rest of America. A reporter for the New York Times-Post named William Weston gets an unofficial mission from the US President to explore relations with the new nation of Ecotopia, under the guise of a series of newspaper columns, and he becomes the first American to enter Ecotopia openly since secession. The book's written in alternating form across about a six-week period, with a newspaper story followed immediately by diary entries about the same experiences.

I'm giving nothing away if I mention there's plenty of sex (though not explicit), regular references to marijuana consumption, and lengthy disquisitions on the dubiousness of Ecotopia's steady-state economy and community-driven social structure (all of which we're meant to see through). The Ecotopian experiment could only have happened on the United States' west coast in the 1970s, because of its climate and terrain, and because of the oil crisis, and frankly I'm convinced that only at that time and in that place could the book possibly have been written this way.

It's a fascinating thought experiment, to imagine a nation with such different principles but the same basic roots, and I'm always ready to give time to someone imagining a better way for us to live sustainably and ethically. Ecotopia should keep being read, and widely. It's a cool book, with lots of valuable ideas, but wow, does it ever need updating. Wow.

Up, Cascadia! Arise! Or, I don't know, something actually stirring.

Charlie Connelly, Attention All Shipping

2011-05-11T22:33:00.000-07:00

Four times daily, BBC radio broadcasts the shipping forecast, naming thirty-one separate regions in about three minutes and providing both current and projected conditions of sea and wind for each one. The forecast has been running (with different frequencies and regions and so on) since 1924, so I imagine it to be rather like a place-based version of the CBC's 10 a.m. Pacific use of the National Research Council time signal (Wikipedia: "Canada's longest running but shortest radio programme"). The names and the rhythm and the music snuggle down deeply into British psyches, at least among households that have the radio on much, or the ones that used to etc - insert lament here about pace of modern life.

Three and a half years ago, I picked up a copy of Charlie Connelly's Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why I kept not reading the thing. That's not because I'd heard such good things about it: I bought it on a whim and had never heard of it before. And then when I loaned to a 70-ish Englishwoman who I thought might appreciate something about this BBC institution, she wasn't the least bit excited about it afterward. "Hmm," I thought, "must not be as good as I hoped." As it happens, it isn't as good as I'd hoped, at least not all the way through, but even if it was excellent, she wouldn't have liked it anyway. Too much time spent in pubs for her, and too much late-30s angst from our humble narrator: never should have loaned it to her.

Anyway, there are good things about this book, and I enjoyed it, but I'll open with the bad news and get it out of the way: Charlie Connelly here comes across as something of a cut-rate Bill Bryson, and the book's achievement is distinctly inconsistent. I love a little good self-deprecating humour, for example, or "self-depreciating" as more than one student inexplicably wrote this year in essays for me, and Connelly can play that note well at times, but the book could stand to have a few other notes to it. Some of the chapters had precious little hold on me, too, without enough intimacy with the places and people he encounters, and yet also without the interestingly complicated history-telling that makes some chapters so very pleasant.

At his best, Connelly shows a genuine passion for the places and people, made more compelling because it seems so unlooked for. He goes at the project of touring all thirty-one regions within a calendar year in a quite cavalier manner, not unlike that of Tony Hawks's surprisingly enjoyable Round Ireland with a Fridge (apparently a most UNenjoyable film, though I haven't seen it and hence shouldn't say anything about it). Connelly's self-castigating rant on the Isle of Man about his unprepared bicycle tour of the island's often-fatal motorcycle racing loop applies equally well to the book as a whole. He didn't take the project seriously to begin with, and this comes back to bite him with depressing frequency, but this means you believe him when he gets impassioned about something, and he often does get passionate, geekily so. I really liked that contrast, even if I wanted to punch him occasionally for making yet another predictably, damnably stupid travel decision.

From Attention All Shipping I've learned a startling amount of stuff about remote, nearly uninhabited chunks of rock around the fringes of Great Britain, and I've got even more respect than I did previously for lighthouse keepers, marine rescue personnel, and small-town folk generally. It's a fun book if you've got any interest in any of those things, or if you like your travel-writing to feature as many pubs as possible. Not what a 70-ish respectable Englishwoman might want to spend time with, but how many people reading this blog are likely to fit that description, anyway?

Dave Eggers, Zeitoun

2011-05-03T12:21:00.001-07:00

Honestly, I didn't expect this from Dave Eggers, though I should have. I've read several issues of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and I'm a regular visitor to McSweeney's Internet Tendency, so I'm familiar with the jocularity, bathos, and mock-heroic diction of same. Plus just this spring I taught Eggers' first book, the stirringly titled Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (which I seem NOT to have commented upon here in March, what with all the marking), so put those together, and they're collectively the source of whatever expectations I came in with.

But what I should have remembered, instead, were the fairly humble, heartfelt, and reasonable yet passionate videos I've recently seen of him discussing his volunteer work, such as at the 2008 TED Talks, where he received a significant grant to make the world a better place. That's what seems genuinely to drive him, this desire to make the world a better place, and it's this which should have tipped me to expect the form in which Zeitoun appeared.

The book's earnest; it's straightforward; it skews toward reportage. There's anger, sure, and this is after all a portrait of a family and a couple and two people who go through something very painful, but Eggers does a really great job of staying out of his own way. Overall, it's a very successful portrait of a family that should by all rights be ordinary, but is treated as extraordinary - and turns out to deserve to be treated that way, though not quite in the way that it happens.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun (pronounced "Zaytoon," Eggers helpfully explains early on) is a Syrian immigrant in New Orleans running a very successful house-painting business, when the city's brushed gently by a little rain-shower called Katrina. Zeitoun's wife Kathy (an American convert to Islam) leaves the city with their girls, and Zeitoun stays to look after the jobsites and assorted properties, several of which they own. One thing leads to another, and Zeitoun experiences the best and the worst of what happened in New Orleans while it was underwater. The family, afterward, both recovers - somewhat - and suffers.

I'm not giving away any of the plot details here, but this book's both uplifting and heartbreaking, maddening and encouraging. Give it to people who might be interested in how people respond to externally imposed crises, either natural disasters or family trauma. Give it to people whose character means they need a personal view of someone unlike them, either brown of skin or religiously other. Give it to people comfortable with America's fraught political and racial landscape.

And give it to anyone who might have voted for Stephen Harper, because Zeitoun illuminates fully half a dozen planks in the execrable Conservative platform, and this is absolutely NOT the kind of country I want to live in. (Yes, I am cranky about yesterday's election. No, my mood isn't going to be improving any time soon.)

As editor, satirist, and all-around man-about-town H.L. Mencken memorably put it in 1919, in relation to poetry, of all things, "Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." Zeitoun's not about that. But the sentiment's in the air, throughout the book and throughout its readership, and across Canada after yesterday's Conservative election victory and across the United States after the death of Osama bin Laden, and it all makes me more than a little anxious.

One wonders what the world's coming to: or one would simply wonder, if one wasn't feeling rather more committed today to not just waiting to see what the world comes to.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

2011-05-02T11:11:00.001-07:00

I'm fortunate enough to be teaching ENGL 200B in September, and one of our texts will be Jane Austen's semi-satiric faux-Gothic novel Northanger Abbey. (The BBC version is okay, but its additional plot twists and timeline manipulation are unnecessary and unhelpful, even if the changes relieve the filmed version from having to account for all the novel's metafictional commentary on novels and readership.) I've always liked this novel, this being approximately my fifth reading of it over the last two decades (call me Grandpa!), and unsurprisingly I continue to like it.

Not a lot of point to throwing additional e-ink at Northanger Abbey, really, given the vast amounts of material out there on it, and given the scary persistence of Jane-ites the world over, but a few things come to mind.

First, I'm going to be interested to see how the novel's bookish in-jokes come across. Much of Northanger Abbey's humour has to do with books that the main characters, especially Catherine Morland, have read, and that the novel's initial readers would be expected to have read as well. The conventions of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction aren't as current for young readers as they were in Austen's time, and while the novel version of Twilight touches on many of those conventions, the movie strips away some of the useful ones (replacing Edward's mildly creepy old house, for example, with an airy modern glass confection). Maybe the Goose Bumps series will help, I don't know yet.

Second, it's going to be interesting to see how ready students are to separate social commentary from personal qualities, representative characters from complex characters from actual people. Catherine Morland is basically a decent young woman who nonetheless goes off the rails in some ways and is corrected for it; Henry Tilney appears a bit flighty in some ways but turns out to be more serious than that; General Tilney, well, what's up with that? It's not a novel about the silliness of girls, though several of them in the novel are silly. It's not a novel proposing a naturally sober seriousness among men, though the good men in the novel are mostly that way. Determining the precise target of humour isn't always easy for newer readers, and it's harder when satire's involved.

And third, Austen is so superb at drawing the rotten little characters that they can be unpleasant to spend much time with. For my money the most horrifying character in Austen is, from the BBC Pride and Prejudice, the version of Mr. Collins played by David Bambers. Here, the Thorpe siblings give Bambers' Collins some competition, and I look forward to seeing how students respond to them.

Great book, but you've probably heard that already. The plotting's a bit peculiar, and the moral of the story inconsistent, since Austen can be assumed never to have quite finished it up the way she might have wanted to, but really a fun little book.

Jack McDevitt, Time Travelers Never Die

2011-05-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

I don't read a ton of science fiction*, but I tend to enjoy it when I do. It's more often a smaller pleasure for me than I find in most other genres, or other modes of fiction, but it's good stuff. Engaging, appealing, that sort of thing, but not often more than that.

And that's how I felt about the current book club selection, Jack McDevitt's Time Travelers Never Die. I appreciated the main characters, Shel and Dave, one of whom's fairly geeky and the other of whom's an overworked university instructor - ways of being which felt unaccountably familiar, not that I identify in any way with either one - and their mostly healthy relationships with women (especially Helen Suchenko) were refreshing. But, well, it didn't make much of an impression on me, and I don't see how it's going to make much of an impression on casual readers, on McDevitt's fans, or on science fiction more generally.

Of course, it doesn't need to make such an impression. Mild pleasure is a good thing, and the reading experience doesn't always have to be "shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet," in Douglas Coupland's memorable phrase for how intensely we remember events from our childhood and teens (Life After God, p.48, if you need to track it down).

I will say, though, that I liked that the main characters don't understand the technology that permits their travels through time, that they decide to trust people they meet in the past with their limited conceptual understanding, and that these trusted past people don't seem to do anything that mucks up the timeline. It's nice to find someone else who thinks that we can indeed get a long way forward just by mucking along with good intentions.

Summary: best as light reading for the already confirmed McDevitt fan, or for those who prefer their sci-fi without much sci- (or indeed without either politics or philosophy).

------------------
*While I don't read a ton of science fiction, sometimes it slips in anyway: Ursula Le Guin, Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson (twice!), and Frank Herbert.

May 1 - Value Village

2011-05-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

A quick jaunt for a used lightweight jacket, leading inevitably to a few books at $3.99 each:

Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (essays about her adopted home of Wyoming)
Mark Kingwell, Catch & Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life (the one-weekend conversion of a philosopher who starts a fishing trip by saying, "I will sit in the back of the boat reading The Critique of Pure Reason, but I will not fish"), and
Anny Scoones, Home and Away: More Tales of a Heritage Farm (great little book about the author's very small farm on southern Vancouver Island).

Frank Herbert, Dune

2011-04-08T11:46:00.001-07:00

I know, I know, I should have read Frank Herbert's epic and epoch-making novel Dune years ago, but I was born in a barn. What do you want from me?

Thing is, I was the wrong age to be allowed to see the David Lynch movie when it came out, and as a result I only saw and heard the things that'd make sense for someone who'd seen the movie and read the book. I mean, come on, those outfits practically wrote their own jokes.

But Dune is a seriously impressive piece of work, and a serious work of the imagination. It's rare, I think, for someone to imagine as densely as this a civilization's dramatic changes without somehow falling into the assorted traps of dys- and utopianism, but that's what Herbert does.

The Fremen are a civilization living out the implications of humanoid eugenics through interplanetary environmental manipulation, but so are the Sardaukar and everyone else, and the vast but secret humanoid breeding program of the Bene Gesserit operates around and through all of it. And then there's the problem of being able to see numerous possible futures simultaneously, an effect of the spice harvested on Arrakis, most of which show Paul, the main character, innumerable versions of an interminable and bloody jihad in his own name that he wants (mostly) to resist.

While reading, I kept finding myself thinking about Earth's desert peoples, especially in the American Southwest, which I know only through anthropological and ethnographic work by writers like Keith Basso (Wisdom Sits in Places, about the Navajo), Gary Paul Nabhan (The Desert Smells Like Rain, about the Papago), and John McPhee (Basin and Range, about geology and its effects on both perception and imagination, among other things, because honestly McPhee's a genius). It's not just that people have to act differently in order to survive on Herbert's imagined planet of Arrakis; it's that they have to think differently, imagine differently, even dream differently. Bioregionalism does take the imagination seriously, but I'm not sure that it's really caught up to the implications of Arrakis.

I haven't done any research yet into responses to Dune, but I'll have to dig into the critical material for the 2011/12 directed reading I'll be supervising. For now, I'll say simply that I've long thought of science fiction as particularly fertile ground for the analytical lenses of ecocriticism, environmental ethics, and posthumanism. Even so, it seems to me that Dune may well represent one of the most intriguing science fiction texts, and not just because of its popularity, for the citizens of a planet undergoing global warming as a result of anthropogenic climate change. Work to do, work to do.

Enjoy the trailer to Lynch's movie version!

March 27 - Untitled Bookstore

2011-04-01T10:34:00.000-07:00

Yep, it was actually called the Untitled Bookstore, and it was small but terrific! Along White Avenue in Edmonton, I went downstairs into this little place. Too bad my luggage was so full that I couldn't add the things I wanted to, except for:

Frank Herbert, Dune ($5.75: a student's thinking of doing an ecocritical reading of it for a directed study, so I need to test-drive it before deciding whether to agree), and
Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey in the the Landscape Wars of the American West ($13: brilliant).

February 24 - Russell Books

2011-02-24T19:13:00.001-08:00

Now, it looks like I spent some cash today at Russell Books, but in fact it's a swap, because really I just used up the remainder of my outstanding credit when I handed over some books that I wasn't going to miss having around. (This raises, obviously, some questions about whether I'd genuinely miss any of the thousands that, or possibly who, survived the recent purge, but it's best if I just don't think about that. New to the menagerie, then:

Chris Bruce et al., Myth of the West ($12.99, a dandy book of essays and images from a major 1990 show by the U of Washington's Henry Art Gallery)
Harold Coward, ed., Traditional and Modern Approaches to the Environment on the Pacific Rim: Tensions and Values ($5.99 for frankly a terrific volume of essays, by writers like Stephen Owen, Rosemary Radford Reuther, and Nancy Turner)
Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl ($9.99 for what I hear's a brilliant pre-modern AND post-apocalyptic novel, blending two different time periods: "a remarkable novel about gender, love, honour, intrigue, and fighting against the dark forces of biotechnology," says the blurb)
John McPhee, Basin and Range ($7.99: apparently I'm gradually collecting McPhee books, and I sure did enjoy his The Pine Barrens, even though I seem unaccountably NOT to have posted any notes on it)
Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country ($4.99, I have to say for no clear reason, given the utterly fascinating subject and approach, though admittedly I'm a giant nerd for this sort of thing), and
Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage ($9.99 for the book, not the movie, and I'm already having trouble not reading it rather than marking papers the way I should).

February 13 - Value Village

2011-02-17T11:42:00.000-08:00

Looking for jeans at the Village, since I do my best to buy new as few articles of clothing as possible, I unaccountably found myself in the books section. Whoops:

Edith Fowke, Folklore of Canada ($3.99: "fairy-tales, legends, jokes, myths, tall tales, riddles, sea songs, and every other type of unwritten lore in Canada is represented in this first anthologized cross-section of the nation's diverse folk traditions" -- it's a book every Canadian should have, honestly)
Granta 89, on "The Factory," including a sensitive Joe Sacco comic about Chechen refugees living in a cowshed ($3.99)
Robert Kroetsch, Alberta ($3.99: "Kroetsch's wonderful storytelling and travel writing classic captures a luminous land in its golden era")
ed. John A. Murray, Out Among the Wolves: Contemporary Writings on the Wolf ($3.99)
ed. K.W.G. Valentine et al., The Soil Landscapes of British Columbia (5th book free! And I'm, um, a giant nerd)

Karsten Heuer, Being Caribou

2011-02-14T21:11:00.000-08:00

A colleague of mine today, when she saw me heading for class with a pile of books related to animality, with Karsten Heuer's Being Caribou perched on top, exclaimed, "Being Caribou? Oh! I really didn't like that book. Ugh." I may be slightly misrepresenting the disapproving grunt with which she wrapped up her thumbnail review, but disapproving she most certainly was.

This made my opening remarks not five minutes later a little anxious, but the good reasons for someone teaching Canadian literature to find Heuer's book outside their ken aren't especially relevant to what I want my students to get from the book. The blend of phenomenology and spirituality, the faith in the real, the narrative linearity: these aren't what gets you a room in the CanLit hotel, so to speak, but they're crucial to any understanding of environmentally inflected literature. I resist spirituality as well, and I'm suspicious of anyone claiming too much (or too loudly) to have faith in the real, but anyone who knows me well will see in me, I think, a desire for ecological connection with place.

CanLit be damned, because this book's been written to express a thorough desire for connection. As one of my students said today, it's a book that can make you jealous -- she meant of the expedition, but I'm jealous of how close to success Heuer came in his attempt at transparent writing.

(And I've talked about the book before, so this doesn't count as a new read!)

February 4- Russell Books

2011-02-04T14:10:00.001-08:00

You win some, you lose some. A few boxes of books have been languishing in the garage for the last three years or so, and this week I went through them. Some went to the office; some came out of storage; some stayed in storage; and others made the ultimate sacrifice.

Yep, I turned them into store credit at Russell Books, an exchange that so far has netted me:

Keith Basso, Portraits of the "The Whiteman": Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols among the Western Apache ($8: a brilliant study of one thread of Apache humour, the mocking of white folks through mimicry)
Michael Frome, Chronicling the West: Thirty Years of Environmental Writing ($7: occasional articles from numerous sources, many of them hard now to locate)
Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century ($8: popular environmentalism, practical knowledge, scientific conservationism - great stuff, in an enormously valuable book of which Tina Loo ought to be very proud).

And with the amount of credit left over, some other day will bring other half-dozen or so books. Just what my newly alphabetized but still groaning office bookshelves were looking for.

2010 reads

2011-01-18T23:03:00.000-08:00

In speaking with a colleague this week, who was complaining about the impressive amount of reading that one of our job candidates had made it through in 2010, I realized that I hadn't figured out my past year's reading yet. The last few years I've made it through about 50 volumes annually, and I figured I'd managed about half that this year. Some distractions, anxieties, and weaknesses, though nothing out of the predictable range of such things: save your pity for the genuinely deserving.

Without further ado, in 2010 I read the following books, in the following order:

Derrick Jensen & Stephanie McMillan, As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial
David Gessner, Sick of Nature
Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural HIstory of Zero
David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Michael Chabon, Summerland
Lilli Carré, Tales of Woodsman Pete
rob mclennan, red earth
Stanley Evans, Seaweed on the Street
Martin Amis, The Information
Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism
J. Douglas Porteous, Environmental Aesthetics
Melody Hessing, Up Chute Creek: An Okanagan Idyll
Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island
Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns
David Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect
Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future
Brian Brett, Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life
Eugene Meese, A Magpie's Smile
David Leach, Fatal Tide: When the Race of a Lifetime Goes Wrong
Stephanie Meyer, Twilight
Alexandra Morton & Billy Proctor, Heart of the Raincoast: A Life Story
Thomas Wharton, Icefields
Barbara Hurd, Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark
Betty Lowman Carey, Bijaboji: North to Alaska by Oar
Jeffrey E. Foss, Beyond Environmentalism: A Philosophy of Nature
Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes
Rick Bass, The Book of Yaak
Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Karsten Heuer, Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd
Mark Leiren-Young, The Green Chain
David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp
Bill Gaston, Mount Appetite
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma
Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River
Roderick Haig-Brown, Timber
Stephen King, Under the Dome
Ken Belford, Decompositions

Some of them I'd read before, but not many, and I hadn't reviewed any of them before. It was, though, a good reading year, and a more productive one than I thought it had been. Here's hoping that 2011 works out even better, for you as well as for me!

Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams

2011-01-11T22:33:00.000-08:00

I think often of Pierre Bayard, author of the celebrated/infamous How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. To quote one of his comments that appeared in the Guardian's review of his book (which I haven't in fact read in full), "'Because I teach literature at university level,' he says, regretfully, 'there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that most of the time I haven't even opened.'"

The past five years, for me, have been spent gradually getting to some of the books that I've most been wishing I'd opened, so that I can stop relying on the tricks I've half-heard from those who might have read more of Bayard's book than I have, in order to use these valuable but unread books in my intellectual practice.

(Don't try this in your classes, kids!)

Key in this list of thus-far-unread books has been Hugh Brody's Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier -- but no longer. A work of immersive social science, not uninfluenced by Clifford Geertz' approach to ethnography but with a sharper political purpose, Brody's work proceeds through chapters in alternating discursive modes: one a narrative of some time spent with the people of a particular Reserve (cloaked with some fictitious detail), one a discussion of economic, political, or historical influences or impacts. Brody spends most of a year participating in the annual round of activities, in pursuit of enough trust from the people of the region's reserves that he can generate maps of their historical and contemporary land-use, in order to challenge the planning processes for oil and gas development, including the by now long-completed Alaska Pipeline.

The most potent sentiment for me as I read this book was simply, what changes have there been to the circa-1978 First Nations way of life Brody portrays? How could I know what changes there've been in BC's northeast? And on what basis might I be able to judge such change?

At times, I feel quite keenly the worry that I tried fumblingly to articulate after my PhD defense to the members of my examining committee: as a literary studies academic, I live mostly inside my head, but the good bits of the world are almost exclusively outside my head. It's not good enough for me simply to think differently than I once did -- but the roads to other effects on the world are difficult for the benightedly academic fully to recognize, let alone to inhabit. I understand how one might use Maps and Dreams in a literature and environment classroom, for example, but my role there generates a different influence than did Hugh Brody's year with the Dunne-za (formerly known as the Beaver Indians).

Let me end, simply, by offering some of Brody's words that ring truer now than they ever did, with the enormous scope of the oil sands project in northern Alberta:

"Resources left in the ground are saved, not lost. The rapacious frontier in northeast British Columbia is not in anyone's long-term interests. A questionable economic urgency is being allowed to overwhelm the needs of the Indians for whom the northeast corner of the province is both a home and an economic base that has lasted more centuries than the energy frontier might last years." (p.281)

To be clear: The Dunne-za have lived in northeast BC for more than a hundred times longer than the expected productive tenure of the oil and gas companies in the same region. And when the companies are ready to leave, the land will be filthy, the game trails and hunting trails will be disrupted, and the vegetation patterns will be unreadable to anyone familiar with it today.

The lessons that Pierre Bayard shared with the world in his little book have, though I haven't read it, allowed me to touch on Maps and Dreams in the past. I'm glad to have finally done my small bit by actually reading it: the very least, I think, that a would-be-responsible academic can do.

Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

2011-01-07T21:54:00.000-08:00

"Culture springs from the actions of people in a landscape."--Janisse Ray

I've spent the last few evenings reading Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, doing so tonight in the intimate company of a dying cat. Her kidneys are basically gone, she stopped eating some days ago, and this afternoon her legs quit. If she shows some pain, then we'll head for the animal hospital, but so far she's resting comfortably beside me on the floor, and I'd rather she be at home for the end. Which likely won't be long.

And my father's been seriously ill, and his father passed away just before Christmas, so I'm maybe in a susceptible frame of mind.

Janisse Ray, though: I've been staggered by the beauty and the artistry of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Just staggered by it. I've spent such a long time digging into the regional culture surrounding my own home that I've deliberately, if sometimes reluctantly, avoided writers whose places are far enough from my own to make the connections seem mostly ideological rather than material, or even genuinely cultural. Nature writing's increasing sophistication, however, has meant I've been getting more and more anxious to get into the last 15 years of it, and Ray's memoir is pushing me even harder toward catching up than did Rick Bass's excellent Book of Yaak. I've felt more impressed by this book than I can recall being in a very long time.

It's not just Chloe's inevitable fate, tonight, that has me so moved by Janisse Ray, just as it wasn't only my grandmother's slow death that had me so affected by Theresa Kishkan's Phantom Limb and Red Laredo Boots. Few things tempt me toward dropping my stern atheism long enough to use words like "fate," but sometimes we're lucky to find books at the right time. And Theresa Kishkan and Janisse Ray have fallen into my lap at the right times.

What's it about, you ask? Well, this book's written in alternating chapters, one about the ecology of the longleaf pine forests (of which only about 1% remains in older growth form), and then one about her upbringing in a junkyard (yes, an actual junkyard). It's a complicated family, with mental illness and potent religiosity and poverty, and Ray only came to an ecological perspective later on in her life, so we get to see competing Edens, so to speak, and to watch her wonder whether these Edens, if that's what they are, are mutually exclusive. Not really much to summarize, perhaps, but Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is stuffed with beauty, so very much beauty, if you're able to look with her through her multiple perspectives on it all.

And if you're as lucky as I've felt this evening, helping my cat through her dwindling, you'll find yourself seeing with something a little bit like Janisse Ray's eyes once you put the book down.

Ken Belford, Decompositions

2010-12-31T20:27:00.000-08:00

I've read some other Ken Belford books in the last few years (Pathways into the Mountains, ecologue, and lan(d)guage), so I was very pleased to hear earlier in 2010 that his newest volume, Decompositions, was coming out shortly from the wonderful publisher Talonbooks. I enjoyed Maureen Scott Harris's review in the December 2010 issue of The Goose (ALECC's regular journal/newsletter), helpfully reprinted with credit on the Talonbooks site, and I'm not sure I've got much to add.

Still, I retain my slight anxiety about these pieces, and the whole landpo mode that Belford is working. At a 2009 Open Word presentation in Victoria, Belford suggested that lyric poetry is basically corrupt, as a way of connecting with or expressing ideas of the land in British Columbia. (Lorna Crozier, who identified herself during the Q&A as a "lyric poet," didn't take this especially well.) I'm fine with this assertion, and with the occasional related remarks here (nature poetry as "death with / a pretty picture," on p.45), but I'm still a little puzzled by what I take to be a prickly wavering between openness and insider language: between colloquial rhythms and words on the one hand, and specialized vocabulary from indeterminate specializations on the other.

Maureen Scott Harris sees these specializations as those of vascular plant biology and geology, to give two examples, but he also connects with computer virology and coding, with the physiology of disease, and with other fields of study. Is he saying that I need to understand these fields to make sense of the poetry? Is the jargon a collective red herring, reminding me of the assorted additional pulls on my attention and time? Is he using the language not for precise meaning, but to underscore the connections that should be made and recognized between a poem and a larger world? Am I supposed to get by with a limited understanding of these words, because I (we?) tend to muddle through the world learning only enough to get by?

Landscape is an idyllic place
in the imagination, a claim of meaning
farmed by old fogeys. I'm looking, not
for a theory that allows for duplication,
but for a consonance that's better. (p.46)

Decompositions is a terrific book that repays your attention, definitely, and I encourage you to take a run at it, but maybe you can drop me a note to suggest what I should think of it....

Stephen King, Under the Dome

2010-12-31T15:38:00.000-08:00

Life, I think, is too short for me to bother again with Stephen King unless I'm getting a ridiculously positive suggestion from someone I trust. At nearly 900 pages in the UK hardcover I found at Value Village, his Under the Dome is our January book club selection for Da Mook Club. I'm finished it, so it's review time here at Book Addiction. I'm not spilling any plot points because some of the guys are still reading (or are yet to start, in some cases!), as is my usual practice with these, but jeez, what the hell else is there to talk about?

The Canadian paperback version, which I noticed at Bolen Books just yesterday, includes a frontcover blurb by Lee Child claiming it to be "The best yet, by the best ever." There's plenty of overheated commentary online about Under the Dome, with plenty O folks agreeing with Child, but love a duck, I don't know why.

The bare outline: a mysterious dome comes down over the small New England town of Chester's Mill. A small amount of air and water can get through, but nothing else, and the dome (The Dome!) appears impervious to initial testing. Bad men are in positions of power. Good people are powerless. Things get worse before they get better -- but do they get better, really?

Lots of interesting details, but in 900 pages, you'd expect there to be SOME details that worked out. The plot turns over pretty rapidly, and the prose style stays out of the way, but there's so, so, so very little of what I go to fiction for. Creative writing instructors often talk about using the whole toolbox, in a longer work: if Under the Dome is the best yet by the best ever, then I guess that King's the master of using a hammer, and only a hammer. Maybe he gets things out of his hammer that no one else can -- but dude, it's still a hammer. Try a fretsaw next time.

Roderick Haig-Brown, Timber

2010-12-30T20:38:00.000-08:00

Now this, THIS, is a book to marvel at: Roderick Haig-Brown's 1942 romance novel Timber. Sure, it was rereleased in 1993 by Oregon State UP's Northwest Reprints Series, with an introduction by Glen Love and a manly cover photo of loggers, but you don't get the full effect if you don't read the Collins White Circle Edition, with full-on pulp-fiction cover art and blurby goodness!

It's the story of young Johnny Holt and his best friend Slim Crawford, plus Slim's cousin Julie, a good girl who kind of wishes she was bad, and their evolving fates inside the British Columbia forest industry through the 1930s: blacklists, union drives, coroners' inquests, and technical lingo like no other romance novel you'll ever read. The whole first chapter is taken up with testimony at a coroner's inquest after a man was killed by a log during the loading process on the camp train, including a juror who doesn't understand the terminology and has to keep asking for clarification. Make it through that, and it's pretty clear sailing.

Unless, that is, you're surprised by what I assume is unconscious homoeroticism like this passage, in which Johnny reflects on his pal Slim:

Last night and this morning he had been kidding all the time, his red mouth twisted with that smile and his blue eyes looking at you from his smooth, evenly brown face. Slim was like a swell-looking woman sometimes; brown curly hair, always lighter in summertime just above his forehead, where he pushed his hat back; long, round chin, full lips and straight nose. It was good to look at him. But he wasn't like any woman you could ever come near, or any soft woman. Just his face was like the faces on woman statues sometimes are. His hands were big, long-fingered and wide, and there were long hard muscles in his forearms and shoulders, across his back and on his flat belly. It wasn't right to think Slim was like a woman, except for his face sometimes and when he talked sometimes. (p.35)

And a few pages later there's a shower scene, just after a fistfight, in which a character ponders the differences between men's bodies. I found it a bit distracting, because it's not clear to me what's gained by this particular form of self-awareness in the characters, seeming almost to gender attention even to one's own body, but fascinating nonetheless.

Richard White, The Organic Machine

2010-12-30T20:14:00.001-08:00

It's been on my shelf for a while, and I've dipped happily into it more often than I thought possible with such a small volume, but Richard White's environmental history gem The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River had gone unread in toto until this hols. I'll be teaching it this semester, so it's long past time for me to have read it with the requisite care and attention, but my previous dipping had made me comfortable with that extent of knowledge.

And I remain so. White's book was mentioned in some essay or other in JA Wainwright's collection Every Grain of Sand: Canadian Perspectives on Ecology and Environment (another book I'm teaching this term) as a remarkable work, startlingly rich given its brevity, and indeed it is. His key insight is simply that the Columbia River has been the site of human effort since there were humans in the Pacific Northwest: local First Nations named every rock and fishing spot, and worked to improve and adapt the best fishing spots over time, and Europeans tried to get what they could from it (salmon, irrigation, hydroelectric power, etc) as soon as they arrived. It's been a form of technology for a long time, as long as you don't worry too much about the concept that technology is unnatural.

If you're still worried about a nature/culture divide, or still seeing one, you're not paying attention, is roughly White's point. Nature exists, obviously, but it's not entirely separate from human culture. And that's okay, honest. It doesn't mean nature doesn't have its own power or place in the world or however else you want to express it, just that humans are part of the same world as rivers and whatnot. I'd like to add "obviously," but a whole lot of ecocritical rhetoric tells me there's nothing obvious about this perspective....

Christmas 2010

2010-12-27T20:13:00.000-08:00

An impressive haul, this Christmas, enough that people were looking around grumbling that next year books might have to be off the wishlist:

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier (a classic, a gem, a treat)
Robert Budd (who I gather may generally be known as "Lucky"), Voices of British Columbia: Stories from Our Frontier (transcribed interviews from people living in BC in the early 20th century, including 3 audio CDs)
Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us (the 2010 Massey Lectures)
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (an upcoming Mook Club selection)
David Pitt-Brooke, Chasing Clayoquot: A Wilderness Almanac
Tara Saracuse, Island Kids (former student!)
Vikram Vij & Meeru Dhalawala, Vij's: Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine (best. food. ever.)
Robert J. Wiersema, Bedtime Story (an uncorrected proof, though I did ask for an autographed copy from Bolen's!)

Skewed toward Douglas & McIntyre, as it happens (Brody, Budd, Pitt-Brooke, Vij), but I'm okay with that!

December 5, Value Village

2010-12-05T23:34:00.000-08:00

Three books today, all of which fit my new intention of buying used books only when (a) it's out of print, (b) I've already bought a new copy of it once before, or (c) its author has no need for my pittance (in that order):

Margaret B. Blackman, During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, A Haida Woman ($2.99)
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ($3.99; for the West Coast lit grad class I'm team-teaching)
Stephen King, Under the Dome ($3.99 for 900 pages of British hardcover edition; our January book club selection).

Update: Bugger. Blackman's book isn't out of print after all. Am I going to have to get a smartphone of some kind just so I can stay virtuous?!?

Update #2: Actually, the one that's in print is the revised and enlarged edition from 1992. I bought the unimproved and still-shrunken 1982 edition. Curses, but does that mean I'm still partly virtuous?

Update #3: No way can I keep to the oath implied above. But that's not news to anyone who's been to this blog before.

Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma

2010-12-05T23:19:00.000-08:00

Dear Doug,

I've just had three whole evenings free, with nothing in hand to mark, and tonight I'll receive ninety first-year composition papers: around 110K words, so they'll take over my dreams once I get rolling on them.

But in the interim, though, I picked up once again Girlfriend in a Coma, your novel I'm teaching in January for a grad course on West Coast literature, to see how much I could get through before I had to suit up for all those essays. For years, whenever your name came up in conversation, I'd say that you're one of my favourite writers and that I'll always read everything you write, and I'd say that Girlfriend in a Coma is the clearest example of your inability to finish a novel properly. But what the hell, I thought, I'll assign the thing. A reader can't understand the contemporary West Coast without spending some time in your version of it, even if it gets ridiculous at the end.

How did this happen, though?

The novel doesn't get ridiculous. I remain an atheist, so the details of the plot's climactic machinations remain a problem, but Doug, honestly, how did I not end up on my knees ten years ago with Linus and Wendy and Megan and the rest?

Admittedly, I got verklempt to the point of near-weepiness while watching Elf this afternoon with my eight-year-old daughter, so I'm pretty heavily battered by fatigue and assorted middle-aged strains, but gosh. Time to build a world.

Regards,
Richard

Bill Gaston, Mount Appetite

2010-12-01T12:41:00.000-08:00

This will be a very short note, because it's been two weeks since I finished reading Bill Gaston's Mount Appetite, and there've been a lot of student words under the grading bridge since then.

And that's kind of a shame, because I really liked this collection of short stories. HIs narrators and characters were personable but unpredictable, and Gaston shows a keen eye for moments of personal crisis. Some of these are large, some small, but you know how it is -- a decision eventually has to be made, even if it's to do nothing, and sometimes you can't help betraying principles (yours or someone else's) or even other people. The title story is pretty remarkable, involving a parent's attempt to retain custody of a child with special needs when the government wants to take over, but there are some real gems here.

I read him as a BC writer, as a coastal writer, and he's got value if that's your focus, but more than that, he's just a great voice to spend time with. I gather that some female readers would like to see something different for and from his female characters, so you might feel that as well, but we're all critics, no? Read it. Great stuff.

November - UVic Bookstore

2010-11-30T14:42:00.001-08:00

And also, with times being what they are (frantic), I'd neglected to mention that I picked up books by two of my brilliant colleagues:

Nick Bradley, ed., Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (a Malcolm Lowry collection), and
Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (theory, animality, ethics and more)

Two excellent books, these ones.

Nov 30- United Way book sale

2010-11-30T12:53:00.001-08:00

It's nothing close to the scale of the epic event that's the Times-Colonist book sale, which after all is basically a bookland version of a monster truck rally, but I always appreciate the annual book sale put on at the University of Victoria. Sure, I always buy things I don't need, but I always do that everywhere anyway, and at least these ones are for charity. (You like that rationalization? Yeah, not even I buy that one.)

Anyhoo, at $2 each:

Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (how can I not already have this?)
Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (no, this is not a reply to the blog F.U., Penguin - motto: "where I tell cute animals what's what")
Justine Brown, All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia (another Transmontanus selection: #5 in the series)
Anthony Carter, Somewhere Between (a slim coffee-table book from 1967, mixing photos of First Nations peoples and practices, with photos of natural scenery [occasionally with urban details], and with stories, captions, and explanations -- very 1967)
Eric Collier, Three Against the Wilderness
Alan Drengson, The Practice of Technology: Exploring Technology, Ecophilosophy, and Spiritual Disciplines for Vital Links (that last phrase feels like it's from a different book, imho)
ed.-in-chief W.G. Hardy, The Alberta Golden Jubilee Anthology, 1905-1955 (right at the beginning of oil, including Eleanor Shearer's piece "The Siren Sands," which begins thus: "The Athabasca oil sands ... are the wonder sands of the world. They were there when the first Indian paddler came down the Athabasca--great glinting cliffs, whose asphalt odour was strong on the summer air" [p.325]")
ed. Doreen Jensen and Cheryl Brooks, In Celebration of Our Survival: The First Nations of British Columbia (a collection of pieces by assorted First Nations individuals from BC, answering the call to say what's important about their separate and linked peoples)
E. Pauline Johnson, Flint and Feather
R.G. Large, The Skeena: River of Destiny (complete with gift dedication to someone about to visit the Skeena: "You will also meet the Author, who is a little more believable than most up there" -- sorry, what?)
Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams
Mourning Dove, Cogewea: The Half-Breed
Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (they knew their way around a ringing title in 1959, didn't they?)
Catherine Owen, The Wrecks of Eden ("A superbly clear-eyed poet, an anti-Romantic Audubon, her precise elegies enter the heart like scalpels"-George Elliot Clarke)
ed. Leroy S. Rouner, On Nature [volume 6, Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion]
Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics

Oct 9 - Value Village

2010-10-09T22:32:00.000-07:00

I figured that if I'm teaching Twilight next term, I'd better pick up the second and third volumes. Good news was that Value Village, predictably, had both New Moon and Eclipse ($3.99 each). More interestingly, it also had Arthur Kruckeberg's excellent Natural History of Puget Sound Country ($7.99, from the notorious - in some very small circles, admittedly - Weyerhauser Environmental Books series for the University of Washington Press), as well as John McPhee's celebrated The Pine Barrens ($3.99).

From 1967, The Pine Barrens is about a thousand-square-mile region in New Jersey that at the time was almost uninhabited, in the most densely populated American state. In 1988 the area became a UN Biosphere Reserve, too, so it's not like McPhee was talking out of turn about this place. My interest, really, is in the idea that the idea of wilderness (and a largish actual "wilderness," with all the definitional problems of the term) can survive in such an industrial, urban state. I'm looking forward to reading it, and more so because I find the usual voice of 60s nature writing so comfortable!

David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp

2010-10-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

Well, that was interesting. Fellow book club member David Leach loaned me his copy of David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, thus causing my spellchecker to break down and weep the very first time I typed out all four names in sequence.

As graphic novels go, it's no comic book. I mean, it's about a 50-ish "paper architect" (who teaches but has never had anything built) who loved, married and was divorced by a lovely young woman, an artist, and who subsequently loses it and dumps his entire urban, urbane existence for a hand-to-mouth small-town shambles of a life. Things never stay static for our man Asterios, mind you, and I'm not going to tell you anything about the plot beyond that starting point, but I will say that it ain't predictable.

Your kids will so not dig this book, but I liked it a whole bunch. I mean, I'm getting old as well, and who doesn't have complications in their past, but it wasn't just a matter of partial identification. Mazzucchelli does a great job of exploiting the art form, making his characters alternate between two-dimensional figures (so to speak) and self-aware individuals. The characters wise-crack, and not every joke is comprehended by everyone there to hear it, so there's a complex register of irony at play -- in the service of a story about how reflex ironizing left this guy unable to have anything like the life he's almost able to throw off his irony and ask for. (That's a clear sentence, right? No? Crap.) Not everyone likes it, clearly, and it's true that there's a lot of familiarity to elements of the story, but I'm okay with that. Hell, I'm old enough not to need new stories anyway. I'm already forgetting the old ones. Tell me the story beautifully, and I won't mind if I've heard it before.

Plus Scott McCloud's going to have to update his brilliant Understanding Comics to accommodate some of the shifts in perspective here, too. (Good man, McCloud -- he's already been thinking about this, I now see!) I loved the shift out of the pop-art two-D stuff into contrasting styles for Asterios and Hana/Daisy, where he's a geometric assemblage (form without content) and she's over-heavily shaded without lines (content without form).

A graphic novel that your kids will ignore, but that you might really, really appreciate.

Oct 8 - subTEXT

2010-10-08T13:58:00.000-07:00

Three pickups before lunch:
Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City ($4)
Vision, Space, Desire: Global Perspectives and Cultural Hybridity ($19 - NMAI Editions, from the National Museum of the American Indian, based at the Smithsonian - a collection of essays about Native art and artists early in the 21st century)
Dale Zieroth, Clearing: Poems from a Journey ($5)

Oct 2 - GVPL

2010-10-04T09:03:00.000-07:00

Most branches of the Greater Victoria Public Library leave little carts near the lineups for patrons checking out books. There's rarely much of interest to me there, but once in a while... well, honestly, how can I be expected to leave behind Jon Tuska's seminal 600-page tome The Filming of the West: The Definitive Behind-the-Scenes History of the Great Western Movies -- Illustrated?

Even with the over-amped title, and with the super-fan's devotion rather than the analyst's perspective (as reviewer John Cawelti put it), this is a great chunk of useful background to add to the shelves. (Worth to me rather more than the $2.50 I paid, and AbeBooks agrees with me.)

Mark Leiren-Young, The Green Chain

2010-09-26T21:31:00.000-07:00

I've had to put up my feet a bit this weekend, so it's been pleasantly productive amid the inconvenience. One person on whose work I've only now been able to lavish some belated attention is Mark Leiren-Young, a BC writer working on environmental subjects in assorted media (journalism, humorous nonfiction, podcasting, theatre, movies, and probably something else I'm missing). This weekend, I've managed to watch his movie The Green Chain as well as to read his interview collection of the same name drawn from his Tyee podcasting series.

But it feels funny to offer a review, in the traditional sense. The book is close to a transcription of the Tyee podcasts, so I get a little stuck in the new media vs. old media conversation when I think about that, and (a) the movie is unconventional in form (seven lengthy monologues, in sequence, by somewhat interlocking characters), plus (b) I'm no movie critic.

So let me just say this. If you have even the slightest need for some perspective on the role trees and forestry play in BC, Canada, or North America, then you need to pick up this collection of interviews. OK, fine, if you listen to podcasts on your iPhone or MP3 player or whatever, fine, download those from The Tyee, but the book gives it some heft, some texture. And because many of the questions are similar, it's a treat to be able to flip back and forth to check the assorted responses to questions about how the BC forestry system should be reimagined. (Hint: "appurtenancy" comes up more than once, and it's a word that every BCer needs to understand.)

As for the movie, well, hmm. I liked it a lot, but I had a hard time thinking of who else in my assorted circles might like it. Leiren-Young has seven characters offer lengthy monologues about trees and forests and forestry, each of them a character type but all of them overlapping in one way or another (teasers are available on YouTube). For me the Firefighter and the Waitress were the most impressive, almost mesmerizing, but there wasn't a weak link in the batch. But you know, I couldn't figure out why there wasn't the Reporter as an eighth speaker. The book's interviews occasionally talk about the need to connect with media, and more than one of the film's speakers brushed up against that topic as well (especially the Star, played by Tricia Helfer of the new Battlestar Galactica), so it would have been fascinating to see the nuances to that particular character.

In sum: buy the book and share it; watch the movie's trailers and take a chance on it!

Karsten Heuer, Being Caribou

2010-09-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

Decision made: Karsten Heuer's Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd is one of the texts I'll be using in January 2011 for my literature/environment class. We'll be focusing on what can be termed the "environmental gaze," pondering the assorted ways humans have developed of looking at the world, so Heuer's multiple perspectives here of the Arctic, the Porcupine caribou herd, and individual caribou will give us lots to think about.

More than that, though, Being Caribou is a beautiful book. As other readers have noted, there's plenty of logistical detail, sure, and plenty of facts to learn from it, but it takes a rare book to live up to its chapter epigraphs from Rilke:

There's a lightness in things. Only we people move forever burdened,
pressing ourselves onto everything, obsessed by weight.
How strange and devouring our ways must seem
to those for whom life is enough. (p.103)

While there are numerous ways to characterize the book, the most frequent is to emphasize the logistics and intent of the mission undertaken by Heuer and Leanne Allison: fifteen-hundred kilometres on foot in five months, supported by fully a dozen food drops by airplane, in pursuit of migrating caribou, in an attempt to understand and communicate the ecological significance of the threatened lands of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in order to prevent oil and gas development there. Activism and natural history both float my boat, so I'd encourage anyone with those interests to read this book.

More interesting to others will be Heuer's charting of his own move from relying on his scientific background, toward something more akin to spirituality. Being Caribou ends up a long way from new-age mysticism, don't worry about that, but his perceptions of Being shift significantly through this experience of fatigue, repetitive movement, persistent quiet, isolation, and intimate companionship with Leanne, with the place, and with the animals.

And possibly most interesting to me, at least this time through the book, is the shift from inarticulacy to a voice, with the accompanying anxiety about whether the developing voice will find ears to hear it. At book's opening, Heuer gives up trying to explain what he's seeing as thousands of caribou surge past his Yukon cabin, holding up a cell phone up to the passing herd whose enveloping presence fails as disembodied sound. By book's end, Heuer's finding the different voices he needs to speak with the Gwich'in, with politicians in Washington DC, and inside his own head -- none of them easily found, none of them unconscious, but all of them valuable.

If this interests you in any way, you might want to watch the movie on the project's official website (courtesy of the National Film Board). It's a different experience, and actually Leanne Allison's movie tells something of a different story, but well worth your time.

And if you're REALLY interested, you should definitely watch him discuss the book and movie (and some other projects, too) in his appearance at ASLE 2009 at the University of Victoria. (Click the "Karsten Heuer" link.) More than one person told me that it was a real highlight for them, a number of them American visitors who had never heard of him or the project before arriving.

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

2010-09-23T09:24:00.000-07:00

Recent reads notwithstanding, I don't think of myself as someone who reads murder mysteries or alternate histories. (Plus I can't help thinking of alternate history as a sci-fi mode, even though it manifestly isn't.) I enjoy them when I read them, always have, but you know how it is -- too many books etc. And with my long position as an underdog reader ("Toronto authors don't need my support!"), plus my recently confessed resistance to reading American (which connects to the underdog bit), it wasn't all that likely that I'd be picking up a Michael Chabon novel, especially since I was under the mistaken impression that he was a New York writer (cf Jonathan Franzen, Augusten Burroughs, Dave Eggers, and so on*).

But once I read and delighted in Summerland, it was clear that I'd be reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

The setup can be explained quickly: in 1940, the US acts on Harold Ickes' proposal that Jewish settlement be approved for Sitka, Alaska, and when Israel collapses in 1948, Jewish immigration to the US explodes and concentrates there. Decades later, with the sixty-year lease about to expire, there are more than three million Jews living in Sitka. The book opens with a murder, and with the introduction of a badly rumpled detective, which connects in the end to the fate of the region -- and maybe the world.

It was such fun to read this version of the west coast, thinking all along about the versions of the coast we're discussing in our grad course on the subject. But you know, one of the strongest impacts is that I keep finding myself using the turns of phrases that the novel's characters do! I'm hardly the first person to have this problem with a book in which you immerse yourself, coming out of it showing evidence of having been there, but it feels more odd to me when the evidence is coded in terms of a cultural identity that I don't share. (Confusing for me? Oy, you don't even know from confusing.) The characters sound like the Jewish characters in every movie or TV show you've seen about, so I feel suspiciously like I'm making fun somehow, in ways that just aren't right, but there's nothing bad about. It's just that Chabon has warped the linguistic centre of my brain, for at least the next little while.

Wait, did I just say it's not bad for someone to warp the linguistic centre of my brain? How deep is my commitment to reading, anyway?

* - Yes, I know that these aren't all New York novelists. Part of my ongoing self-evisceration so common to academics.

Werner Herzog knows chickens

2010-09-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

Now, I don't know quite where this video is from, so I can't tell whether it's meant seriously -- but Werner Herzog appears to know a thing or two about chickens. And also about interior decorating: I'm loving the lion under glass beside his chair!

Werner Herzog on Chickens from Tom Streithorst on Vimeo.