Carolyn's Tumblings

"Intrinsic Value: Will the defenders of nature please rise?"

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:29:18 -0500

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

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:59:28 -0500

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

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:37:00 -0400

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

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:13:36 -0400

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...

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:03:46 -0400

Every once in a while, I make a new one of these to terrify myself with.

"Alexander Wilson was even capable of activism on behalf of birds. When in 1807 good sense would not..."

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:54:39 -0400

“Alexander Wilson was even capable of activism on behalf of birds. When in 1807 good sense would not prevail with merchants who were killing thousands of robins to satisfy the genteel palates of Philadelphia, he wrote an anonymous article to city newspapers explaining that robin flesh was unhealthy because of the birds’ heavy diet of pokeberries; though Wilson knew the claim to be entirely false, it effectively curtailed the slaughter of robins for the Philadelphia market.”

- Robins: almost another passenger pigeon? This is Michael Branch in the article, “Indexing American Possibilities”

"Nature is the only gardener able to do work so fine"

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:20:00 -0400

“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...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:19:13 -0400

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 museum wall. (It’s very much a response to the Yellowstone fires of 1988)

She concludes with a call to appreciate parks and wilderness as something other than art - something that remakes itself. Then, I think, she goes off the rails a bit, in calling parks “nature’s laboratory.” Why is it better to say “nature is a scientist like us” than to say “nature is an artist like us”? Both are human-centric, and both are elite - she frets that “aestheticization of landscape” is a luxury for leisure classes; nature-as-scientist seems to me a luxury for educated ones.

My First Summer in the Sierra

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:17:08 -0400

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 does Muir, the budding environmentalist? He’s not quite a shepherd and not quite a tourist.

The sheep as commodity interested me. (I must read the Quest of the Silver Fleece - the DuBois book, which, I am told, is all about cotton as commodity.) Muir often, wryly it seems, or as part of a slang I do not understand, refers to the sheep as “the wool,” as in, “The wool is dry and calm.”

Muir’s description of how the landscape comes to be (he was actually ahead of his time at understanding the action of glaciers, for instance) uses phrases like “meadows planted with _____” or says that bears “turn and till the soil.” Here, I think, he bounces interestingly off of William Howarth’s “Some principles of ecocriticism.” He points out that the very language for geography and geology often comes from human bodies, buildings, tools, etc. Is it really a humanistic tendency, though? To me, it seems that Muir’s insistence upon a land planted by birds or tilled by bears is one that insists on an animal-centrism, on animals as actors. The question, I suppose, is, Can such content and intent allow you escape from etymology?

I have not been so bad...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:54:39 -0400

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.

The first prose draft of “The Fascination of What’s...

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:11:26 -0400

The first prose draft of “The Fascination of What’s Difficult.” JWF mentioned this today, drawing attention to the heart-breakingly adorable misspelling of “colt,” and saying that some have suggested that Yeats was a dyslexic. This piques my dyslexic pride radar, for obvious familial reasons. The final, in case you need your memory jogged:

The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

I think I die of love for Yeats whenever I read this poem. (Prose draft swiped from Jeffares on Yeats, of course.)

"A prison becomes a home if you hold the key."

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:05:31 -0400

“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

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:44:00 -0400

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, Cooke’s son has just been murdered, and these two characters simply don’t act like a bereaved family – any plot device might have gotten them in the room to talk about their holdover squabbles from childhood, etc (151).

McNickle’s own biography (what I know of it) plays interestingly into the places and events portrayed here. He is critical of the conversion of the reservations from commonly-held lands to parceled allotments, and the subsequent sale of many ‘spare’ allotments to white settlers. He himself sold his reservation allotment to finance an Oxford education. He is also offering a nuanced critique of the Indian bureau (which succeeds in distinguishing the institution from the people working for it, as represented by Rafferty, the agent, and The Boy, the tribal policeman), one that comes from experience – he worked for the bureau under John Collier, whose papers I combed through looking for the famous circulars prohibiting traditional dance, about which my dear M. Austin had so much to say. The dance controversy reared its head in The Surrounded, and again here (4).

McNickle is also (like Zora Neale Hurston) an anthropologist. The book portrays Adam Pell, capitalist who collects and keeps a museum on the side (I’m reminded of the millionaire collector who showed up and made an ass of himself at Junior’s grandmother’s funeral in Absolutely True Diary)… he loves to say how much he respects the Native Americans, (as he imagines should be evident from how much he likes buying their art and artifacts and digging up their ancestors’ bones (149-50). Pell alternates between total ass and somewhat-anthropologically self-aware. He describes an Incan artifact as “ripped from its cultural context” but is dumb enough to think that the Indians of the (fictional) Northwestern tribe (“The Little Elk People”) might accept it in place of their destroyed medicine bundle.

We get various ways to understand that sacred object – as a physical thing (210), through its origin-story, never to be told to a white man but printed here nonetheless (207-8) and through the political and land-history of the region, which Pell thinks, rightly or wrongly, allows him to understand the sacred object (209). See also his collection of the pre-columbian cartwheel (142)! And the suggestion that ‘cultural respect’ can be just another system of control! (38)

McNickle has a reputation as one of the first ‘pan-indianists,’ but he’s clearly no fan of Pell’s practice of lumping South American civilizations with the Little Elk People. Pell’s attempt to substitute one sacred object for another turns out disastrously… but the day before that all occurs, Pell takes a drive around the reservation and sees the sub-divided lands, encroached on by outsiders… and with Pell’s enormous wealth, though McNickle never comes out and says it, he might have bought out those small landholders. This was the injustice begging to be righted, whereas the cultural disinheritance was a fate that never could be righted. Yet he never says it, just leaves that landscape-vision there, a way to derail the tragic train of events, trembling on the edge of obviousness.

Astonishingly, I’ve gotten this far without naming some of the complex and (in contrast to Pell), convincingly drawn characters, Bull, the aging chief, Two Sleeps, the outsider and seer (given McNickle’s obvious consciousness about cultural mixing, I found moments when Two Sleeps or Pell might have fit Christian martyr archetypes to be quite interesting, as well as moments of biblical language, ‘a cleft of the rock’ on p.1, etc.), Bull’s more assimilated brother Henry Jim, bitter Louis… and Bull’s grandson Antoine, who’s been (kidnapped) away at school.

Names are important throughout, often marking someone’s degree of assimilation, but there’s a meditation on the translation of them on 26.

“foolish Indian anger” - internalized stereotype? Borne up by the book? (24)

Great meditation on grid survey as a Great Plains necessity stupidly imposed on the northwestern terrain (191-2)

picture of paternalism (93)

A few scatters of gorgeous phrases:

wind from an enemy sky (197)

“the wind is pulling at my shadow” (19).

the ‘bleached bones’ of the ‘killed water’ (2-3)

Finally, both here and in The Surrounded, I appreciate how McNickle individuates horses. They’re more than just hooved set-pieces to him, whether it’s Henry Jim’s big bay, or Antoine’s little buckskin…

Story of My Boyhood and Youth

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:15:59 -0400

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. But really, what’s good early Michigan literature?)

Anyway, on to content. Parts of this story make you wonder to what extent Muir is mythologizing himself, and/or if some people just live bigger than the rest of us. Muir’s waking at 1:00 each morning (I’m reminded of recent research on short sleepers) to tinker with inventions and efforts at stealing time from farmwork to read borrowed books read like something very like an Abe Lincoln biography. I keep feeling like there are also resonances with Wordsworth’s Prelude, but I’ve not managed to make that idea textually specific.

Add to my earlier observation on domestic animals: birds. As wild as the country Muir’s family settled was, 100 miles from a rail line, crossed by Indians (whose loss of land Muir seems to sympathize with) and marked by Indian mounds… he spends a good deal of time being interested in birds. How striking to find John Muir to be someone who loves nature because he had a pony and a good dog and loved to watch birds…

Recent woodcut illustration of a young John Muir by Michael McCurdy for Story of My Boyhood and Youth.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek...

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:05:39 -0400

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 attributes a charming ingenuity to photography (though they tell me I should not longer use that word to mean ‘ingenuousness’))

Also interested in her use of the microscope as a pleasure instrument rather than as science (or science for pleasure).

Giant water-strider section (early) and meditation on the motives of creation.

Dillard’s afterward on wanting to publish as A. Dillard or as a male pseudonym because “a great number of otherwise admirable men do not read books that American women write.”

Also, Dillard’s appetite for trivia reminds me of Rebecca :-)

... So, I logged in to Amazon...

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:33:05 -0400

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...

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:13:05 -0400

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..."

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:09:00 -0400

““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...

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:43:05 -0400

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..."

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:28:00 -0400

“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?