August 2009
15 posts
“A prison becomes a home if you hold the key.”
– Supposedly, this is George Sterling, when asked about the cyanide pill he carried for years before eventually committing suicide with it. I’d love if I could substantiate it somewhere, but I’m having no luck.
Wind from an Enemy Sky
D’Arcy McNickle, 1978 (‘78 is the year after he died; I’m not actually sure when he wrote the book)
It may take me a while to collect my thoughts on Wind From an Enemy Sky. It seems to me to be a more ambitious and complicated, more beautiful and more flawed than The Surrounded. My biggest disappointment is with Adam Pell and his sister Geneva Cooke. When we meet them,...
Story of My Boyhood and Youth
1913, John Muir
We associate John Muir with Yoesmite and the West, but this is the story of his growing up in Wisconsin. (Between Muir, Leopold, and even Little House in the Big Woods, I can’t help but feel like Michigan is getting short-changed while our neighbors to the west are so well-chronicled. I guess I need to spend some more time with Hemingway’s northern Michigan stories. ...
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek...
1974, Annie Dillard
Things that have rattled around in my head for the last few days:
… see passage where Dillard narrates the pleasure of experiencing an unnarrated time in the woods while stalking muskrats. “For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I recieved impressions; I did not print out captions.” (200) (She...
... So, I logged in to Amazon...
and it promptly suggested that I “treat myself” to a Norton Anthology.
I’m struck by how important domestic animals seem, so far, three chapters into John Muir’s History of my Boyhood and Youth.
“This is the roof of the world. An immense, sequestered place, the highest of the...”
– So opens “Ancestral Legacies,” with Shepard’s trademark sucker punches displayed to full effect: an attention-getting opening sentence (nicked from Mingtao Zhang’s “Roof of the World,” and 10 bucks for anybody who knew that already), a sneaky reference (“the Reich”) that slips in a setting and a...
“We are facing a global crisis today, not because of how ecosystems function but...”
– Donald Worster on what the Humanities can do for the environmental crisis, as quoted in the introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader.
I’ve been thinking about this quote for days. On the one hand, I like it. It justifies my existence in the humanities. It gets to the heart of a certain...
Simians, Cyborgs and Women
What on earth sort of use did Morton make of this text? I found it hopelessly tangled and useless.
I could shelve Haraway next to Latour’s We Have never Been Modern as someone interested in making some kind of stand against the tendency to divide the world into nature/culture, animal/human (modernist) binaries. The cyborg as a différance?
Fred Turner offers the garden as another such...
The World Without Us
I want to grab all my New York loving friends and tell them to read the “City Without Us” chapter of The World Without Us. It convinced me that a strong strain in this book - perhaps in any apocalyptic vision - is a love letter to the world under destruction.
More generally, the book made me wonder at its purpose as an object. What is the point of writing of a world without people...
“They called that place Sniel-emen (Mountains of the Surrounded) because there...”
– Epigraph to The Surrounded, which Keith Basso would like a great deal.
The Surrounded
D’Arcy McNickle, 1936
I liked this book a good deal; I’m looking forward to also reading McNickle’s late novel, Wind From an Enemy Sky.
McNickle’s characters are often hard to like at first glance. As the book opens, the main character, Archilde Leon, drifts on home to the reservation in Montana, where his father, Max, a Spanish immigrant, lives alone in the house, having...
The Octopus (Epic of Wheat Trilogy)
Frank Norris, 1901
“It’s naturalism, it’s supposed to suck,” said Chris, trying to comfort me as I slogged through this 700-page behemoth. It was really astonishing what a slow sort of read this could be, even as it intertwined so many (often melodramatic) plot arcs. There is Vanamee, the grief-stricken shepherd whose dear Angele is in the end restored to him from beyond the grave...
