... 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 high plateaus, many times the size of the Reich. I’m still sick. The porters still gesticulate and exchange private jokes when they assume my attention is elsewhere. Beger’s bad ankle is still swollen. Somewhere I’ve misplaced my certainty. ”
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 point of view while ostensibly describing the scenery, the establishment of internal and external conflict in a few short phrases — we’ve met several other characters and learned that the narrator is both watchful and ill — and a paragraph closer that works in a lovely turn of phrase while establishing our hero’s state of mind, then and now. All this in the tale of two Nazi scientists trekking through Tibet on a search for the yeti as a way of proving racial theories beloved by Himmler. I can think of six writers offhand, myself included, who might drag that idea through a 400-page first draft tentatively titled “Misplaced Certainty.” Shepard gets the job done in 15 pages, tipping his hat to H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James and still coming out ahead.
The above is from Daniel Handler (yes, Lemony Snicket)’s New York Times review of Like You’d Understand, Anyway.
Hat tip to friend Ben for tipping me off to this review last year. (This is one of the reviews I’ll use to show my students what a good review can do.) In Ben’s case, he attests that it “forever changed the way [he thinks] about first lines.” That’s a pretty badass thing for a book review to do. I’m in the market for another great (film or book) review or two. Particularly something that uses a mediocre product as a great jumping-in point.
My uncreative first response to the much-acclaimed Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. That and… I really adored Sylvie.
“ We are facing a global crisis today, not because of how ecosystems function but rather because of how our ethical systems function. ”
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 blockage I’ve been noticing in political discourse — a tendency to interpret statements of fact, about the finitude of resources, perhaps, as political statements. Of course, they are political statements - you wouldn’t ask a question like, ‘what would happen if everyone on the globe lived like an American?’ if you didn’t have a political agenda. But the desire to dismiss such empirical facts as Scary Socialist Sayings is a blockage in our debates and suggests that there’s an ethical system in play that makes the appraisal of the ecological system taboo.
Of course, I guess I’m also edging up on what I don’t like about the above quote — the bifurcation of ecology from ethics that it goes ahead and reifies even as it tries to make a bid of the relevance of humanities / ethics to ecology. It buys into the idea that ethical systems (culture) are apart from ecosystems (nature) and not something that stems from and is part of ecosystems. Isn’t it our ecosystems that made us competitive, self-interested bastards?
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 hybrid form in “Cultivating the American Garden” in the Ecocriticism Reader. Turner, very humanist, takes that to mean that we shoud take responsibility for nature! Dominate it, but do a good job of it. (It’s very O Pioneers!).
Not that I think Haraway and Fred Turner would get along. Not that I could locate any so easy a target in Haraway - it didn’t seem cogent enough to have a sort of ecopolitical / policy agenda.
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 (Weisman later reveals himself as having a fair bit of sympathy with the Voluntary Human Extinction crowd of the [off the] Deep [end] Ecology movement.
I mean, you’d have to be an environmentalist to ask a question like, “how long will it take for all of the plastic wastes reaking havoc in the ocean foodchain to break down?” But if the answer is, 100,000 years, maybe longer… what was the point of asking the question, and printing its answer in your book? Weisman seems to proceed from the idea that there’s something improving about being exposed to the vision of a world without us, some capacity for this kind of dream-vision, with its beauties and sadnesses and horrors, to reset man’s idea of his own place in the world? An apocalyptic sublime that makes environmentalists?
“ They called that place Sniel-emen (Mountains of the Surrounded) because there they had been set upon and destroyed. ”
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 kicked his wife out twenty years before. Living in a cabin on the grounds, Faithful Catharine, first of the Salish to be baptized by the Catholic missionaries, cannot seem to trust her son or reach out to understand the modern city he’s been living in, away in Portland. But you come to care about both of Archilde’s parents in the end, and much of the rest of the community, in a way that makes the story grow and gather richness to itself as it proceeds through reconciliation, misadventure and murder…
Other characters:
- Father Grepilloux
- Modeste, Archilde’s uncle
- Elsie La Rose, Archilde’s granddaughter
- Mike & Narcisse, Archilde’s nefews
- Sheriff Quigley
Frank Norris hates monopolies and you should too.
