July 2011
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Summer Bison Behavior
… is a lot more active than winter bison behavior.
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Home from Yellowstone...
Fantastic four days in the park. Didn’t get mauled by any grizzly bears, though we were on that trail the day before it happened. Photos forthcoming.
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June 2011
2 posts
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“12. Don’t swerve the van to avoid hitting small animals; the risk of...”
– Our driving directions from Camp Davis. I couldn’t help but be reminded of this anecdote from Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain:
When I got out of the army I went up to Amarillo with Gene Edmonds for the rodeo and stock show. He’d fixed us up with dates and all. We was supposed...
December 2010
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August 2010
2 posts
September 29, 1952, Life →
Life magazine publishes America’s first uncensored images of the atom bomb’s aftermath in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“You show up to the party with the Times or Playboy on your arm and people...”
– Finding this piece on freelance journalism resonant to my current project of shopping a novel and/or short fiction.
July 2010
2 posts
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May 2010
1 post
“For the half-life of radioactive material often far exceeds the parameters of...”
– Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium, 214.
April 2010
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“When sentiment gets overripe, it becomes sentimentalism. The sentiment for...”
– Ways of Nature, by John Burroughs. He says sentimentalism like it’s a bad thing.
March 2010
7 posts
“a. Ascription of a human form and attributes to the Deity.”
– * 1753 Chambers Cycl. Supp., Anthropomorphism, among divines, the error of those who ascribe a human figure to the deity.
Oldest OED definition & use of anthropomorphism. And here I thought it and personification were mere synonyms. Anthropomorphism’s first use in English is as a...
“I always wanted to live in Vermont, and because I always get my own way, this is...”
– Tasha Tudor in The Private World of Tasha Tudor. She’s so fascinating. She identifies herself as a hedonist… whose idea of pleasure is to raise goats, heat with wood, and make her own clothing from flax, and generally run a 500-acre farm by herself with 1830-level technology. She is,...
February 2010
1 post
Finished Tree of Smoke
I much enjoyed it. (This is not about to be the most intellectual of posts on a long novel.) It’s so different, consuming 720 pages of Denis Johnson instead of his short, sizzling fictions of Jesus’ Son. It’s not.. um.. shapely, which is my criticism of a lot of these big extravigant novels (They can’t all be The Sot-Weed Factor, alas!) but it had several characters who,...
January 2010
2 posts
Some rubrics for the day, good folks...
My chair asked for rubrics for my lists, in preparation for my exam next week. It was astonishingly hard, but I think useful, to try to make out of the rich and nebulous swirl of thoughts a coherent list of categories, even overlapping and partial ones.
Americans Abroad
Apocalypse
The Child in the Wilds
Connections to the wild through the Half-Domestic
Coyotes and Wolves
Ethnography +...
December 2009
2 posts
Taking a break from my irregularly-scheduled...
November 2009
5 posts
“East and to the south there was water on the flats and two sandhill cranes stood...”
– Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing, p.171.
I’ve just finished The Crossing, the second book in McCarthy’s border trilogy, and I am hard pressed to think of a time when I was more ravenously eager to finish a book, or to read its next of kin. (I even heard a rumor that the characters of the...
Dear Dana Phillips, I am the Lorax...
… and I speak for the trees. They are, however, not mimetic trees. They are, in fact, day-glow colored Truffula Trees.
I suppose that I am saying that, in the first chapter of The Truth of Ecology, Dana Phillips claims that ecocritics are interested in texts & the natural world because of mimesis (or by the method of trying to revive mimesis as a critical concept). We don’t...
"Intrinsic Value: Will the defenders of nature...
So, I’ve finally read my first Arne Naess. Having been previously exposed both to some dubious claims that grow out of Deep Ecology (ie: Oates in Myth and Reality in the Rainforest: ‘the great thing about dictators is that they can really get conservation done.’) and some of the important challenges to it (Nations: “Deep Ecology Meets the Developing World.” ‘try to tell...
Legacy of Conquest
Patty Limerick, 1987
There’s obviously a good deal of information and conceptual work in this book – it’s after all, a whole history of the whole West, and Limerick positions herself as trying to move the entire field beyond 1890 and the Frontier Thesis. Of the many points of interest in the book… Limerick finds pioneers of the religous-missionary type to be fairly logical...
October 2009
4 posts
Zeitoun
Dave Eggers (2009)
I read Zeitoun cover-to-cover last night.
It was obviously enjoyable, particularly strong and suspenseful leading up to Katrina. I think it would be interesting to teach next semester. If I think about the theme that’s emerged from what I’d taught so far, it’s that texts that look like they’re about “nature” are often about other things...
All the Pretty Horses
1992, Cormac McCarthy
What a gorgeous, dark, violent, beautiful book. My favorite thing I’ve read in a while. I described his first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965) as the way Faulkner would have written if Faulkner was a disciple of Hemingway. Well, Hemingway is very much in ascendence here, which isn’t telling you anything you don’t already know about McCarthy. It’s...
“Alexander Wilson was even capable of activism on behalf of birds. When in 1807...”
– Robins: almost another passenger pigeon? This is Michael Branch in the article, “Indexing American Possibilities”
September 2009
5 posts
“Nature is the only gardener able to do work so fine”
– John Muir (with his humanism showing?) in My First Summer in the Sierra
More on seeing nature as a man-like actor...
Alison Byerly’s 1996 article, “The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and The National Park System,” describes the human-centric tendency to describe natural wonders as art, (perhaps God’s art, though I don’t think she says this.). We therefore expect that we can stretch a velvet rope and that the natural forms will remain unchanging as a painting on a...
My First Summer in the Sierra
John Muir, covering the summer of 1869, published in 1911
(How close to the original diary was it?)
I’ve had these notes sitting on my desk on a scrap of peper for several weeks.
Muir calls the real shepherd, a naysayer to the beauty of the land, “poor in spirit.” Here, then, is the opposition of the worker and the tourists down below who come to see the valley. But where...
I have not been so bad...
I read Huck Finn. I have been plugging through the Ecocriticism Reader. I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer - another first encounter with a writer who has me really impressed. I’d like to get to her nonfiction, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle soon.
Oh, yes, and I’ve been obsessing over teaching. That’s where the rest of the time goes.