Continuing to cut continues to provide illusions of progress. True fact: the only thing I read this Christmas was two dozen undergraduate papers and a Roomba owner’s manual.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Taking a break from my irregularly-scheduled prelims updates: this is Tom Russell’s song, “Angel of Lyon.” I listened to it again last night while preparing a congratulations-on-passing-your-prelims mixtape for Rebecca, and noticed Tom call his character a “saint of rag and bone” in one of the later verses (after the guitar solo). A passing reference to “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” by W.B. Yeats? With Tom, you never know…
…
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
I’ve been organizing and trimming the list (as well as chipping away at it by *ghasp* reading.) It’s sort of starting to look doable, right? In 2 months.
“ East and to the south there was water on the flats and two sandhill cranes stood tethered to their reflections out there in the last of the day’s light like statues of such birds in some waste of a garden where calamity had swept all else away. ”
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 first two, discrete casts, intertwine in the third.) I’m adoring McCarthy - this one is, I think, my favorite yet, adoring him for his violence and his beauty and his holding out of the possibility that it doesn’t all end badly, and his horses that matter and his human characters who are so inscrutable to themselves that destiny seems to hangs over them like something in Faulkner or The Violent Bear It Away.
And then there’s the above. A landscape; “sandhill cranes stood tethered to their own reflections” - a beautiful vision, a metaphor already. He adds, “in the last of the day’s light.” Okay, if you must. And then, here comes the McCarthy signature, an overdone simile hanging off the back of the sentence. (This tendency flowers even more fully in The Road.) Birds like statues of birds? You did already say that they stood. Birds “like statues of such birds in a Waste of a Garden [of Eden?].” And it’s not over yet. He adds in a calamity, no, excuse me, that’s no-article Calamity, which has swept all else away. Cormac, I love you, but please lay off the foreshadowing stick and the deeper-meaning siren.
Those similes. And a pair of odd stylistic moments at the height of tension, when some important character is in jeopardy, and McCarthy tells you that Billy “was afraid then that _________ would happen,” or “thought that _______ ,” and thus you learn prematurely that it doesn’t. If I was line editing for him I’d have cut both of those moments, or at least the first one. With two I suppose you might see a pattern and begin to wonder why it’s there. A little glimmer of insistence on retrospect; an unwillingness to be entirely a thriller, although the reader’s pulse is already racing and the worst is already happening, or what you thought was the worst, until McCarthy proceeded to bring you along to the next disaster.
You jar me, Cormac McCarthy, and not just when someone gets his eyes kissed out of his head so that they dangle by the optical nerves providing views of boots in the street while I’m trying to ride the bus and look like a normal person.
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 practice on nature-writing exclusively, however. Or even entirely on descriptive, realist texts. And, as I think the example of The Lorax says quite clearly, we are interested in non-mimetic texts (and mimetic ones) not because we expect to find the natural world or the trees somehow “in” them, but because we find these texts in the world, striving to inspire action in it. That is the connection, and it flows through a changed reader.
"Intrinsic Value: Will the defenders of nature please rise?"
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 someone whose kids are starving not to shoot that wildlife because it has intrinsic value’)… I suppose I was expecting something more out there. Granted, there are some problematic ideas here. Like positing identification with all life forms (and concomitant desire to protect them) with “full human maturity.” (He does admit that social realities sometimes make the protective step impossible.) BUT. There is something terribly wrong with creating a spectrum from ‘not fully mature’ human beings and societies to ‘mature human beings and societies,’ and placing yourself smack on the mature end.
Otherwise (and that’s a big otherwise), Naess is rather more measured and more deeply interesting than I was expecting. His concern that scientists answer the questions at hand (compare Evil Dam Project A to Evil Dam Project B) and do not publicly advocate their personal convictions… this slips interestingly into the discussion which is very much ongoing (See Lackey’s 2007 “Science, Scientists, and Policy Advocacy,” who suggests that scientists must never advocate, or the public will lose respect for the impartiality of science. An unsurprising position for a scientist in the Bush EPA, in fact.) (And I would tend to agree with Naess.) I was also intrigued by his depiction of the microscope as an instument of pleasure – a motif, if you will, that’s intrigued me in both Dillard and D.H. Lawrence.
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 and explicable individuals: extraordinary faith inspires extraordinary action. It’s the gold-rushers, land-claimers, uranium-hunters (like the pair Abbey describes having a shootout in Desert Solitaire, btw) who should strike us as downright odd. She uses a variety of extraordinary examples to make them strange, and concludes:
“Neither the Western past nor the Westen present will make sense until attachment to property and attraction to profit find their proper category as a variety of strong emotion” (76)
… I’ve been mulling this over, trying to decide what we get by reclassifying this commercial activity, placing it within the scope of natural human emotion. Compare to other ways of shelving it – as the bedrock of a socio-capitalist-Darwinism; in a moral plane as greed or lust for profit; in a pathological framework as a madness for money. So. Emotion instead.
Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is running through my head, too, in relationship to this idea, as I think about the treatment of Jimmy Blevins’ need to get his horse – and then his saddle and gun – back from the town, followed by the more admirable/reasonable John Grady’s need to do the same.
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 - race, religion, politics… (Think of Thoreau’s “Wild Apples”) Well, this looks like a book about a natural disaster (especially if you don’t read the reviews before reading it)… and turns out to be also very much about who gets to be American. The early parts of the book are what I might most enjoy teaching, where Eggers makes a number of fairly obvious moves to connect the Zeitoun family to ‘traditional American values.’ The combination of salience and skill strikes me as a nice one for a freshman comp class, where students are sometimes still half-skeptical that subtexts and connotative meaning exist in literary texts.
I’m also aware (and would bring to the classroom) the issue of such a text about personal and national tragedy being ‘pleasurable.’ I’d probably spend a day with images of Detroit and the issue of ‘ruin porn’ before teaching Zeitoun, just to help make the reading experience that much more self-conscious.
I’m a little fretful of course book costs, but I have a few more days to mull it over before I have to tell the bookstores in town what I’m using. $17 for Zeitoun, $10 for Ceremony, $15 for They Say/I Say (our writing text)… plus a huge markup if bought on campus, plus I’m contemplating a coursepak, which involves purchasing readings upfront instead of hiding the costs at the end of the semester when students often run out of their printing alotment and wind up paying painfully for every page. (I really wish that the students were charged per page instead of per side. They could all use the duplex printers and be okay!)
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 not even the writing style, specifically, that has me thinking Hemingway. Rather it’s the eating and drinking in little cafes and stores and around campfires and in hotels, the occasional peaceful natural interlude, the gratitude for the goodness of strangers and proprietors, that takes me to Burguete and Pamplona - to The Sun Also Rises. Except, here in All the Pretty Horses, there’s a bloody possibility lurking behind any doorway, over any horizon. Instead of in Hemingway, matters of life and death seem to intrude upon the fiesta, whereas, on McCarthy’s Mexican holiday, they seem to have been there all along.
Every once in a while, I make a new one of these to terrify myself with.
