andrew mcmurry dept of english, university of waterloo

The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss

A good sequel to Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, which was a solid, if flawed, first novel. Set in a somewhat non-standard fantasy realm (not magic but a pseudo-scientific "sympathy" between objects; not knights and hulking warriors but farmers and musicians are the key figures; not trolls and orcs but thieves and zombies are the main villains; even the "dragon" is more or less an overgrown iguana), that book was the story of one Kvothe, an innkeeper hiding from his past as a famous sorcerer. This second book looks to be not the middle one of a trilogy but of something much longer. The author is growing as a plotter and stylist visibly as the books proceed. 3 radishes.

Paper I gave at recent graduate students' planning conference at UW:
caps-aceau.org/guest-speakersconferencier-invite-2/andrew-mcmurry/

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_snd-american-english.html

 This is a three-way cross of Narnia, Harry Potter, and Bright Lights, Big City. Cannily-done nods and derivations of the concepts and characters from those earlier novels. (I'm reasonably sure some reviewer has noted this earlier.) It's well-done, well-paced, and there's a constant sense of foreboding that all is not as it seems, which replicates the paranoia the protagonist is meant to be feeling. In other words, these magicians are as confused and frightened about the dark as the rest of us. I'm starting a new ranking system: 3.5 radishes (4 are possible).

Second book in the projected trilogy about Marcus Tullius Cicero. Deals with the Cataline crisis up to Cicero's exile. Julius Caesar still prowling. Won't be of great interest to non-fans of Cicero. But since I'm a fan, it's pretty much the best thing about Rome since I, Claudius.

Peter Straub is the poor man's Stephen King who thinks he's Henry James. Or maybe he's the thinking man's Joe R. Lansdale who fashions himself a latter-day Lord Dunsany. I don't know. Anyway, this book reminds me of his earlier Koko, except this time the old friends aren't former Viet Nam vets who experienced some weird stuff in the Shit back in the 60s and are still haunted by it but some former high school chums who experienced a black magic ritual back on campus back in the 60s and are haunted by it. One of them has to figure out what happened, put it all together. Unfortunately, Straub uses a first-person know-it-all writer narrator who doesn't bother to tell the reader whassup most of the time, so instead you're supposed to marvel at Straub's technical virtuosity in pulling all the time-lines and character viewpoints together, Rashomon style, but really you're just annoyed that you can't get your six hours back. Lots of logrolling on the back cover by King, Micahel Chabon, and Dan Chaon. Whenever somebody writes "A devastatingly good novel" you know for an absolute certainty that it is not, and what's more that it's going to be a "look ma, I'm writing!" effort that you should leave on the shelf. Next time I'll know better.

I think I've figured out why Mankell's plots always end desultorily: he's got a fastidiousness that doesn't allow him to violate any of the narrative logic that he patiently builds up combined with a naturalistic approach that says the universe is brutal and uncaring. When deaths come, they come suddenly, but not unexpectedly. In effect, there aren't too many surprises, and the surprises that do come, come out of nowhere, as they do in life. Anyway, this is a nice book with a boring main character and two sub-characters, much more interesting, who represent the ideologocal polarities of contemporary Chinese politics. There's a murder mystery at the heart of the book, and lots of meditation on aging, friendship, and justice.

 

 

Powers

Animal Man: I’m a superhero, ok. There are lots of us. Some with super strength, super smarts,  invulnerability. There are guys who shoot rays, guys who bend time and space, stretchy guys, flying women with lassos and cudgels, guys made of rock. Powers of invisibility, powers of vision, gifted from the gods or from science. You name it.

Emerson: Perhaps the landscape is peopled with a race of daemons who move at a faster rate than men, so fast as just to escape our organ of sight. (Journals v. 14 148)

Animal Man: Sure, we’ve got those: The Flash, Kid Flash, Speedster. Quicksilver. The Whizzer. The list goes on.

Emerson: Do they occupy themselves about matters of general and lasting import, like the Germans or the Hindoos, or upon trifles and a corporeal civilization? (Journals v. 14, 77)

Animal Man: Ahhh, I’d say the former, but it’s complicated. Anyway,  my name’s Buddy Baker. But they call me Animal Man. I entered the DC pantheon in 1965 in a comic book called Strange Adventures; after a few issues, I didn’t really do much until the 80s when I appeared in Action Comics with a group later dubbed the “Forgotten Heroes”: basically a B-list of faded supers. I was a member of Justice League of Europe for a while. But it wasn’t until writer Grant Morrison got ahold of me in the waning days of the Reagan administration that I established some measure of respect. My schtick: the name says it all: I can import and amplify the powers of beasts, kinda pull in their particular capabilities for a short time to do my job, which is the usual costumed crusader stuff: fighting super-criminals, fending off inter-dimensional invasions.

Emerson: You shall not be a man even? (“Divinity School Address,”  79, PE)

Animal Man: All man, just able to summon my inner animal, if you will, or maybe better to say, the outer animal into my inner. You see, I’m tapped in to the universe’s morphogenetic field, which connects all living things. 

Emerson: That Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other?! (“Over-Soul” third para)

Animal Man: I’m not sure Rupert Sheldrake would put it that way but I guess so, more or less. 

Emerson: I ask primary evidence that you are a man! (“Self-reliance”, PW, 143)

Animal Man: Well, look at me; believe your eyes. Sure, I’m a man; I’m just a regular guy who can give himself over, with a certain empathy, to the animals, and I can access the forces within them, to do good. ‘Nuff said.

Emerson: As the traveller who has lost his way throws his reins on his horse's neck and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature; the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. (“The Poet”)

Animal Man: That’s exactly what it’s like. I just open myself to whatever’s around me, the living things around me—worms, birds, fish, ants. I sense their abilities, they just flow into me, I’m transformed, and I can crawl or fly or swim. I can have the strength to lift ten times my own weight, 20 maybe if it’s like a really big ant.

Emerson: It is curious to see how a creature so feeble and vulnerable as a man, who, unarmed, is no match for the wild beasts, tiger, or crocodile, none for the frost, none for the sea, none for a fog, or a damp air, or the feeble fork of a poor worm,—each of a thousand petty accidents puts him to death every day,—is yet able to subdue to his will these terrific forces, and more than these. His whole frame is responsive to the world, part for part, every sense, every pore to a new element, so that he seems to have as many talents as there are qualities in nature. No force but is his force. He does not possess them, he is a pipe through which their currents flow. (“Perpetual Forces”)

Animal Man: And I get such a rush when I’m piping those forces. I know the giddiness of the bird soaring, the bloody-minded passion of the tiger springing. Even a worm has this wonderful slovenly joy when it surges through the dirt. And I feel all that. It’s transcendent.

Emerson: This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal -wood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication,--which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact. (“The Poet”)

Animal Man: Well, I... uhh... live pretty clean...I don’t drink, smoke, do drugs. I’m a vegan. But I don’t really follow the…ummm... arts. I do like to traveling. And war, jeez. I guess I wouldn’t be in this racket if there wasn’t some appeal.... I once had an epic battle with B’Wana Beast at a zoo. In case you don’t know—and I’m thinking you don’t—he was also known as the White God of Kilimanjaro...had a secret base up there. He was primal, almost an ape himself. Ability to fuse two different animals together, make whaddaya call ‘em? Chimeras. Very strange power. Anyway, I kicked his....Well, I won the battle, put it that way. He made a big impression on me, though. Why, you ask? He was the only human being whose powers I could absorb.

Emerson: Man is a stream whose source is hidden? (“Over-soul” 210)

Animal Man: Exactly. Humans, at least as far as their powers go, don’t exist to me. It’s as if they’re shielded from the morphogenetic field. It’s actually always puzzled me, the way they’re excluded from the web of life. They stand apart or above, they aren’t grounded. It seems like they’re not really hooked in with nature any more.

Emerson: Is there less oxygen in the atmosphere? What has checked in this age the animal spirits which gave to our forefathers their bounding pulse? (“Introductory Lecture on the Times”)

Animal Man: I don’t know. All I can say is that I can’t find much animal in people these days. I think we may have lost something--or, more accurately, we’ve repressed it. If people don’t feel connected to the network of life, how can I possibly reach them? The circuit is broken; we’re over-civilized, weighted down with gizmos, artificial limbs and senses, electronic minds...

Emerson:We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there amid essences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh mountain-chains, and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear too much of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of natural objects, makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp out and eat roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks, and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk. (“Nature”)

Animal Man: But I think all that sitting on chairs of ivory and carpets of silk has indeed amounted to a deviation. Worse: a redirection. We live outside of nature altogether.

Emerson: Nature is so pervaded with human life that there is something of humanity in all and in every particular (PE 42)

Animal Man: So you’re saying that there is a--

Emerson:--wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small things, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color. (PE 45).

Animal Man: We’re going to have to come back to this “lord” business eventually, but for now if I’m following you correctly, you’re suggesting that there’s a sort of mirroring of humanity by nature?

Emerson: If you take man, he has breathing, sight, organs for taking food, for digesting, expelling, locomotion, reproduction, and if you take a muskrat, you find their equivalents: breathing, locomotion, eating , expelling, protection from cold, house building, reproduction, and care of the young. In short, ‘tis only a man modified to live in a mud-hole... (Journals v. 14 237)

Animal Man: Wow, that is one crazy image!

Emerson: A fish in like manner is man furnished to live in the sea; a thrush, to fly in the air; and a mollusk is a cheap edition with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oysterbank or among the sea-weed. (“Natural History of the Intellect”)

Animal Man: You don’t mean any of this literally, do you?

Emerson: If we go through the British Museum or the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, or any cabinet where is some representation of all the kingdoms of nature, we are surprised with occult sympathies; we feel as if looking at our own bone and flesh through coloring and distorting glasses. Is it not a little startling to see with what genius some people take to hunting, with what genius some people fish,—what knowledge they still have of the creature they hunt? The robber, as the police reports say, must have been intimately acquainted with the premises. How lately the hunter was the poor creature's organic enemy; a presumption inflamed, as the lawyers say, by observing how many faces in the street still remind us of visages in the forest,—the escape from the quadruped type not yet perfectly accomplished.

From whatever side we look at Nature we seem to be exploring the figure of a disguised man. (“Natural History of the Intellect”)

Animal Man: Your confidence in man’s centrality to the scheme of things is something I don’t share. Considering you must have read Darwin, I’m a bit surprised your views on this matter seem so settled.

Emerson: The doubt recurs whether Man is the cause or the effect, Are beasts and plants degradations or are these the prophecies and preparations of nature practising for her masterpiece in man? Culminate we do not: but that point of imperfection which we occupy is it on the way up or down? (Journals v.10 383)

Animal Man: How about neither? Or sideways? How about we say animals followed their own evolutionary pathway, which had no bearing on man’s?

Emerson: A fish is left to be a fish, and an opossum an opossum with all their elements and belongings, and not masqueraded into manikins, as the circus riders do with dogs and horses and apes? (Journals v. 10, 12)

Animal Man: Right, just let them be, forget about making them imperfect people for a minute. Let’s stick with nature’s constant relevance us, which is a more intriguing idea from my perspective….So from the mental to the physical, the ideal to the material, you see nature as always having some kind of claim on us? 

Emerson: The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural. (“The Transcendentalist”)

Animal Man: But I can no more tap the powers of a plumber than a poet. Neither are accessible; neither reveal the natural, animalian core you’re talking about.

Emerson: The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. (Idealism)

Animal Man: Ok, so you think we’ve got a sort of full-spectrum rapport with nature. I like that. But I still can’t help but wonder if somehow humans have actually transcended their brute nature altogether, left behind the animal part of the themselves, and that’s why I can’t tap into their powers?

Emerson: Strong race or strong individual rests at last on natural forces, which are best in the savage, who, like the beasts around him, is still in reception of the milk from the teats of Nature. Cut off the connection--

Animal Man:--cut off the connection? 

Emerson:---cut off the connection between any of our works, and this aboriginal source, and the work is shallow….In history, the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty:--and you have Pericles and Phidias,--not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity. (Power)

Animal Man: Well, you may have something there. And who knows? Maybe my inability to tap the powers of the animal in man isn’t the fault of man, but my own. Maybe the flaw, the glitch--it’s in me.

Emerson: There is an American disease, a paralysis of the active faculties, which falls on young men in this country, as soon as they have finished their college education, which strips them of all manly aims and bereaves them of animal spirits, so that the noblest youths are in a few years converted into pale Caryatides to uphold the temple of conventions. (“A Letter” -The Dial- Uncollected Prose)

Animal Man: Well, I didn’t go to college. And I’m over 30.

Emerson: After thirty a man wakes up sad every morning. (Journals v. 7, p. 135)

Animal Man: Got that right.

 

Temperaments

Animal Man: There was a lot of concern, in your time, on the status of African-Americans--guess you would have called them Negroes--and of woman, too. I know that you yourself wrote against slavery, and for the rights of women, and that in general you were trying to figure out a way to extend moral obligations to cover the weak and the marginalized. There was a lot going on--utopian communities, underground railways, suffragism...

Emerson: Others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming; and the tyranny of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. (“New England Reformers”)

Animal Man: But that view of nature was entirely pragmatic. You people never gave a thought to the animal world, did you, for its own sake?

Emerson:  The ox must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him.  Even the insect world was to be defended, — that had been too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitos was to be incorporated without delay. (“New England Reformers”)

Animal Man: Now you’re just mocking me. But do me a favour? Don’t let your moral imagination close itself off to the rest of the life-world for maybe 50 seconds. Wrap your mind around the notion that the world is composed of non-human entities with their own interests, their own form of engagement with the world that has nothing to do with the priorities of man. I know from your writings that you were trying to put yourself in the place of the Negro or the Irishman. In my time, there is a good deal of concern for animals. Something that might seem unbelievable to you is that there is a world-wide ban on whaling, not perfect mind you but `... 

Emerson: Capt Brooks told me that the last whale he killed was 72 feet long, 52 feet in girth and he got 200 bbls of oil from him. (Journals v. 10, 64)

Animal Man: Needless to say, whale oil ain’t a boom market anymore. But there are still limited food hunts, often under the guise of cultural events. I once went to the Faeroes and tangled with some local whalers. They drove the animals onto shore, then the whole town ran out with gaffs and clubs and beat hell out of them. Kids, too, getting trained up as butchers.  The sea was red with dolphin blood, orgy of killing. One of the sickest things I ever saw.

Emerson: The people being wolfish, will in one way or other have blood.  (Top Notes. V 1 239

Animal Man: That’s pretty cynical, in my view.

Emerson: We cannot eat the granite nor drink hydrogen. (Schr 10.275 26)

Animal Man: Ha ha. But it’s the killing of intelligent animals--whales, primates, mammals in general--for fun and protein that disturbs me to my core.

Emerson: Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. (Nature)

Animal Man: Matter of opinion.

Emerson: Ah if a lobster could taste himself or a terrapin or an oyster! (Journals v. 10, 89)

Animal Man: I think taste is almost completely unnatural, to be honest, meaning a lot of the things we eat have very little to do with genuine taste and much to do with the cultural conditioning of our palates. In fact, I should tell you that in my time, many North Americans had stopped eating meat altogether.

Emerson: We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living by it. (“Gifts”)

Animal Man: I don’t think that’s the point for most people. It’s simply because they thought eating animals was no longer acceptable for a host of reasons: moral, ecological, healthful, even….ah….aesthetic.

Emerson: [Milton] tells us...that he who would write an epic to the nations must eat beans and drink water. (Milt1 12.263 11)

Animal Man: There you go. Even before your time, people who thought about this issue intuited something profoundly wrong about the meat culture. In my time, it was becoming one of the great causes of the day. Social movements, organizations, were devoted to, well, shaming the rest of us into turning away from meat.

Emerson: I hate goodies. I hate goodness that preaches...Goodies make us very bad. (Journals v.7. 31)

Animal Man: Yeah, I know what you mean. In my own career, I was constantly getting called on by animal rights groups, defenders of wildlife, and so on, to use my powers for the cause. I was ok doing the action hero stuff, but when they tried to make me a spokesman…just couldn’t bring myself to do the propaganda, even if I believed most of it.

Emerson: I suppose no man can violate his nature. (“Self-Reliance”)

Animal Man: And I’d seen enough kinds of hurting to know how deep violence runs. I mean, realistically, how could we quit killing animals before we’d learned how to quit killing each other? Hard to talk about this stuff with any authority, so many ways to look like a nut.

Emerson: Eat or be eaten...It is an emblem of nature whose problem seems to have been to see how she could crowd in the most life into the world and for every class of eaters which she inserted, she adds another class of eaters to prey on them, and tucked in musquitoes among the last. (Journals v. 8 432)

Animal Man: Something to that. But what I meant was that the decision to not eat meat was finally personal. It couldn’t be compelled from without; it was hard to articulate, harder to persuade. I couldn’t even persuade my own son, Cliff. He was always off sneaking a hamburger. You could only provide the education, the example, the personal account. I hate that kind of wishy-washing approach for so much else--seems like the whole point of political philosophy is to come up with arguments, reasons, and sort of force the issue by making a structure that keeps people on track...but this, eating, so basic...well, to try to make people want to turn away from meat is like saying, you must see this painting as beautiful or you must love this person. And I think there’s also some negative emotion involved, too. You talked a lot about morality in your work: isn’t there a component to morality that has to do with embarrassment, sort of a recognition that you need to cover up your sinfulness? Well, it’s hard to shame people these days. I can make you feel pain by punching you in the nose. Shame isn’t like that. Shame’s something that you either feel or you don’t.

Emerson: Why is our diet and table not agreeable to the imagination, whilst all other creatures eat without shame? We paint the bird pecking at the fruit, the browsing ox, the lion leaping on his prey, but no painter ever ventured to draw a man eating. (Journals v. 5 345)

Animal Man: I never noticed that before, but you’re absolutely right! Both ends of the feeding process are better off unrepresented. I think that could mean something...

Emerson: (pause) I begin to dislike animal food. I had whimsies yesterday after dinner which disgusted me somewhat. The man will not be much better than the beast he eats. (Journals v.5 392)

Animal Man: Well, I think that’s great, but you’re getting off track. You’re again suggesting that the big drawback of meat is that we become more animal by ingesting it, and that’s a bad thing. I’m saying that we are animals already. Didn’t Darwin make this clear? Before him, didn’t Malthus--

Emerson: Malthus revolts us by treating man as an animal. (Journals v. 12, 60)

Animal Man:--exactly my point! We are animals, right down to the fact that we use up resources according to the same formula you apply to animal species whose populations aren’t checked. Carrying capacity--

Emerson: The Unbelief of the age is attested by the loud condemnation of trifles. (Journals v.7 21)

Animal Man: But it isn’t a trifle. We’ve maxed out the planet. Yet if we simply stopped relying on animal protein, we might be able to do something about a host of other environmental problems: deforestation, crash of fish stocks, reliance on oil, soil loss. Meat is a luxury product that makes no sense in a depletionist age.

Emerson: The agriculturist Bakewell created sheep and cows and horses to order, and breeds in which every thing was omitted but what is economical. The cow is sacrificed to her bag, the ox to his sirloin. (ET5 5.95 6)

Animal Man: Look, you keep going back to the pragmatic argument, what’s known as the techno-fix. I’m saying it isn’t pragmatic, or at least it can’t start there. You’ve got to begin with the will, the temperament, the desire to change the way we operate in this world. Sure, I know folks raise steers--or oxen, as you call them--to maximize their edibility. But let me try a different tack: a fellow named Nagel asked a very simple question: what is it like to be a bat? Have you ever tried to put yourself in the mind of a bat? An ox?

Emerson: 'T is of no importance what bats and oxen think. (MoS 4.173 26)

Animal Man: Nagel thought it was. The upshot is that we can’t know what it’s like to be a bat without being a bat, just as you can’t know what’s it like to be me without being me. We can’t reduce the experience of being a conscious entity to a physical description of what goes on in that consciousness. I take from his work that our ignorance of the conscious world of animal others is a big part of what limits our capacity for empathy. We reduce them to automatons, little machines. But, you see, I happen to know firsthand that this reduction isn’t just false: it’s just an alibi for the ongoing animal holocaust.

Emerson: If a great man among small objects turns his attention to inferior natures he will show the divine in them; and this is the way in which the cicada, the raven, the spider, and ant, the dog and the bull have had their natures made classic and deep. (Journals v. 7 208)

Animal Man: No, no, no. They’re not small objects, but I’m not saying there’s anything divine there. I won’t go there; that’s your bailiwick. I’m just saying that I know, when I channel the powers of these animals, that their world is important to them. They care about it--and their own living presence within it--just as we care about ours. They understand it differently than we do, but they nevertheless don’t wish to be denied that presence. If they could talk, they would say so.

Emerson: In ignorant ages it was common to vaunt the human superiority by underrating the instinct of other animals; but a better discernment finds that the difference is only of less and more. Experiment shows that the bird and the dog reason as the hunter does, that all the animals show the same good sense in their humble walk that the man who is their enemy or friend does; and, if it be in smaller measure, yet it is not diminished, as his often is, by freak and folly. St. Pierre says of the animals that a moral sentiment seems to have determined their physical organization. (The Sovereignty of Ethics)

Animal Man: What’s the take-away here?

Emerson: I see the unity of thought and of morals running through all animated Nature; there is no difference of quality, but only of more and less. (“The Sovereignty of Ethics”)

Animal Man: Well, that’s a start, but, boy, this is just really hard for you. Look, I don’t want to talk in those terms; I don’t want to use words like “diminished” or the scale of “less and more.” Now, I’m no expert on morals. I’m just saying that our species has to acknowledge that animals aren’t so different from us as we assume. Like to assume. Benefit from assuming. Yes, they are still different; but difference isn’t about diminishment. Difference is a word we can use without implying an evaluation and hierarchy.

Emerson: I talk with very accomplished persons who betray instantly that they are strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the sod, the cat, are not theirs, have nothing of them. They are visitors in the world and all the proceedings and events are alien, immeasurable, and across a great gulf. (Journals v.7 181)

Animal Man: Well, I want that gulf to be bridged. Let’s put it in terms of estrangement, then, about radically different consciousnesses encountering one another. What would you do if you met a stranger from China--or even an alien from Mars? Would you automatically want to kill him? I don’t think so. You would attempt communication. And if that proved difficult, you could probably content yourself with respectful silence. That’s what I’m asking for here: respect the silence of nature; don’t let the fact it can’t speak up for itself be your excuse to destroy it. Could we, could you, show compassion for something that won’t talk back?

Emerson: We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken….Let us be silent,--so we may hear the whisper of the gods. (“Friendship” 2.211 25)

 

Fates

Animal Man: Your age thought that everything important was inside us already, predefined. When you talked about nature, that's what you meant. One’s nature was a given; it was destiny, fate. But we don't think that way anymore. Beyond a few basic bodily facts, most of what makes a person comes from how he's brought up, the culture that surrounds him. Any yet I think your age’s approach hasn’t been set aside, and my age is just an extension of yours, a culmination of what you began. I read something recently by a French philosopher--

Emerson: Metaphysics owes little to the French mind (Journals v. 14 214

Animal Man: Well, anyway, this French...ummm…thinker-- 

Emerson: Descartes? (“Swedenborg”)

Animal Man: No, Derrida. He thought that about 200 years ago--during your era really--our relationship with animals began to change. We started to develop, of course, the techniques, the knowledge, the organizational prowess to grow, manipulate, butcher, process animals on a scale unprecedented in history. But we also began to develop, as a kind of immune response to this ongoing yet hidden horror, a different form of relating to animals that probed deeper into our natural compassion and sympathy and fellow-feeling than the logic-driven mentality of previous generations was prepared to go. In short, your age saw in the best and worst of humans‘ relationship to animals--to their own animality. Ever since, there has been this voice--on the margins always, but constantly pressing in on the centre--to find a language, a way of communicating this pathos to the rest of us.

Emerson: The Greeks called it Psyche, a manifest emblem of the soul. The man down in Nature occupies himself in guarding, in feeding, in warming and multiplying his body, and, as long as he knows no more, we justify him; but presently a mystic change is wrought, a new perception opens, and he is made a citizen of the world of souls: he feels what is called duty; he is aware that he owes a higher allegiance to do and live as a good member of this universe. In the measure in which he has this sense he is a man, rises to the universal life. The high intellect is absolutely at one with moral nature. (“The Sovereignty of Ethics”)

Animal Man: OK, but part of what I need you to see--what I want my own age to see, too--is that it’s this commitment to a soul, to some sort of built-in nature, that has to go. I guess you could say that your belief in your own self-reliant, eternal soul is what’s interfering with your capacity to open yourself to the pathos of others. You’re afraid to let the Other in because you think you’ve got something to protect.

I want to tell you a story. But you need some context first. I was always what you might call a lower tier hero. The top dogs in the Justice League--Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter--they never knew how to use me. I think because they were like gods, maybe were gods, somebody like me fell off their radar. I mean, I wasn’t even on par with Batman--and he was just a plain human with money and a good backstory. No, somehow because my powers reached down past man right into the animal world, well, it was like I was tainted. The fact that I could regrow a lost limb by grabbing the regenerative power of a worm, or that I could survive extraordinary punishment with a cockroach’s durability, or that I could fire off a sonic pulse like a pistol shrimp, I don’t know, it was as if I were less than human myself, not more than human. The better I was at a channelling zoë, the more the Übermenschen thought I was beneath them. It was as if my extraordinary ability--to extract and intensify these powers--was forgotten, and all that they perceived was that I stank like a skunk or barked like a dog. I became the dog and the skunk, maybe less than them because I was a step removed. Does that make sense?

Emerson: Admirable mimics have nothing of their own. In every kind of parasite, when Nature has finished an aphis, a teredo--

Animal Man:--sorry, I should know this: what’s a teredo?

Emerson: ...a mollusk (“Natural History of Intellect” 12.22 8)

Animal Man: Thanks.

Emerson: When Nature has finished an aphis, a taredo, or a vampire bat, --an excellent sucking-pipe to tap another animal, or a mistletoe or dodder among plants, --the self-supplying organs wither and dwindle, as being superfluous. In common prudence there is an early limit to this leaning on an original. (“Quotation and Originality”)

Animal Man: Uh-huh. I sort of get what you’re saying. Well, maybe not. But here’s the story: once when I was tracking this weird metamorph, who turned out to be from another level of the implicate order (long story there!), Superman visited me. He’d been on his way to Adelaide or Perth to pull an ocean liner out of whirlpool or something of that sort. So. basically, he just dropped in to say whassup on the way to a disaster. Amazing, huh? (I’ve often wondered what his day-planner would look like: “Apprehend Luthor. Smash asteroid. Pick up dry cleaning.” Anyway, he knew how to time manage. Well, he said he’d “heard” me on his flight--I mean, he heard me while he was cruising at 60000 feet, I suppose--and just wanted to fly down and introduce himself in between heroics. Can you imagine? And I was pretty grateful, and proud he deigned to stop. But I got to thinking about it later: here was this demigod from another planet, with these built-in powers, these essential powers, the standard sky-god package: effective immortality, good looks, altruism, super strength. And here I was, a guy who grabbed the hearing of a bat for maybe 30 minutes so I could fight in the dark. Whatever. I think in his lofty way, Superman felt obligated to acknowledge my existence. But it was like a man patting a dog on the head. And what was sad was that I had responded like a dog: I wagged my tail, licked his hand, so to speak. Yet here mine were the...uh....grass-roots powers, they came from the earth, they were of this earth, not from Krypton, not from some extraterrestrial sorcery. They were American powers, for chrissakes! But nevertheless they were inferior to his, illegitimate, contaminated by that very association with our own ball of mud. Bush league powers, hick powers, compared to his. So, sure, I was jealous and toadying at the same time.

Emerson: Insist on yourself; never imitate...the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. (“Self-Reliance 160”)

Animal Man: Yeah, well that, and also the fact that I got these powers only after being in the vicinity of an exploding alien ship--which kinda undermines my nativist argument a little, I know. Still, I’m hoping you’re getting the bigger picture here. For a long time I resented the patronizing gaze of the demigods. I took it personally. It was about me, Buddy Baker, not getting my due respect. But when I finally puzzled out what was behind their condescension, I realized what really should have been bugging me: you see, the true scandal was not their bias against Animal Man but against animals, and the accompanying bias against animality in general. And what was even scarier, Superman was no better or worse than any human: it wasn’t that he held his bias more strongly than humans: it was that his bias was exactly the same as in humans.

So here’s the upshot of this story: With the same easy arrogance of Superman looking down on me, humans look down on animals, and the animal within us. Do you get it now? In the end, we’re all animals to one another. We’re all of us engaged in denying to Others the same self-possession we accord ourselves. Our whole culture, this death-culture, rests on a concept of self that gives its possessor life by a... umm...defining it against the Other’s weaker claim on life. To put it in your language, it’s like we’re huge transparent eyeballs bloated by the living juices we siphon from others. Or in Nagel’s terms, your own consciousness never knows what it’s like to be another’s--and it doesn’t want to know! You understand? We need each other to be less than human, i.e., animals, so that we in turn can be more than human. And I’m the metaphor of this process. Me, Animal Man. What does the Sage of Concord have to say about that?

Emerson: In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. (“Friendship”)

Animal Man: Well, that’s the exception that proves the rule. My experience is that we were better off in the trees. At least there our meanness was pure; now it’s disguised as civility.

Emerson:The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear.

Animal Man: Come again? His rear?

Emerson: His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when prospectively beheld from the distant brain of ox, crocodile and fish. (“Plato”)

Animal Man: Do you really think we can observe with our reptilian hindbrain? That we can summon the animal within and reflect on our present with our primitive past? What if the inner animal didn’t like what he saw?

Emerson: I went to the menagerie Tuesday and saw 14 pelicans, a sacred ibis, a gazelle, zebras, a capibara, ichneumon, hyena, etc. It seems to me like “visiting the spirits in prison”… What a humble calamity would be to them one moment's endowment of reason! Yet sometimes the negro excites the same feeling, and sometimes the sharp-witted prosperous white man. You think, if he could overlook his own condition, he could not be kept from suicide. (Journals v. 3, p. 307)

Animal Man: Yeah, your works are full of animals, all right, a veritable bestiary.  Just like all the other philosophers. You needed them, couldn’t make any sense of man without the animal. In fact, you even thought that words emerged somehow emerged directly from nature, didn’t you?

Emerson: Every word is a metaphor borrowed from some natural or mechanical, agricultural or nautical process. The poorest speaker is like the Indian dressed in a robe furnished by a hundred half a dozen animals (Journals v. 7 207)

Animal Man: huh?

Emerson:  raven ravenous

owl howl

snake sneak

worm worm out

ram ram-rod

dog dog

ape ape

cow cowed

badger badger (Journals v.8 238)

 

Animal Man: You believed natural facts revealed moral laws, right? You believed the ox’s posture taught us a lesson in humbleness, or some damn thing.

Emerson: Write a sermon upon animals. They are to man in life what fables about them are in ethics. Draw the moral then of the bee, ant, fox, hedgehog, ermine, swine, roe, woodpecker, pigeon, worm, moth, mite, a frozen snake. (Journals v.2, p. 471)

Animal Man: A “frozen snake?” Well, what if all the animals in the world were frozen? What if they all just disappeared? How could the lessons that were revealed to you in your time be available to any of us in such a world? What moral lessons could you determine from a natural world impoverished by the actions of its so-called masters? What moral lesson do you draw from the extinction of an animal species? Does the animal teach morals in its own vanishing? 

EmersonL Every animal in our system of creatures leans upward on man, and man leans downward on it. Lynx, dog, tapir, lion lizard, camel crocodile--all find their perfection in him. He is the grand lynx, the grand lion. the grand worm, the fish of fishes, and the bird of birds. (Top. Notes. 75)

Animal Man:….and so?

Emerson: So that, if one of these tribes were struck out of being, he would lose some one property of his nature. (Top. Notes. 76)

Animal Man: There you go. In other words, a critical loss for man, but not any kind of loss for the animal itself. In the end, all of nature is for us and our moral, intellectual, and practical improvement. It’s a balance sheet with no balance, just profit. Not much different from thinking like a fur-trader or a logger, is it? Wipe out the beaver or the bison, destroy the forest, then move the killing floor to the next valley… have I got it?

Emerson: The history of man is a series of conspiracies to win from Nature some advantage without paying for it. (“Demonology”)

Animal Man: It’s as if we’ve thought the earth was sort of an infinite checking account.

Emerson: “Wood is the excrescence of the earth,” said Lord Caernarvon, “designed by Providence for the payment for debts.” (Top. Notes. v.1 38)

Animal Man: And to what does that kind of thinking lead?

Emerson: The kingdom of man over nature. (PE Nature 50)

Animal Man: Phah. That’s exactly why the world so messed up. The arrogance. Who says we have any right to lord it over the earth? Who says we belong here at all? Maybe we’re a mistake, an evolutionary dead end.

Emerson: That we are here, is proof we ought to be here. We have as good right, and the same sort of right to be here, as Cape Cod or Sandy Hook have to be there. (“Considerations by the Way”)

Animal Man: That’s tautological. It’s no answer at all. Let’s try something else. You believe in justice, don’t you, compensation? Where’s the justice in man extinguishing whole species, whole ecosystems? Where’s the justice in denuding the earth, turning the oceans into cesspools, filling the air with poison? Where’s the justice for the earth?

Emerson:We confine our justice to man alone; according to Porphyry's remark (Journals v.7, p 433)

Animal Man: Porphyry? And what else did he say? What did he say about obligations to animals?

Emerson: In Porphyry on Abstinence from Animal Food?

Animal Man: Yes. You know full-well he argued for our moral duties toward animals. 

Emerson: Morals implies freedom and will. The will constitutes the man. He has his life in Nature, like a beast: but choice is born in him; here is he that chooses; here is the Declaration of Independence, the July Fourth of zoölogy and astronomy. He chooses,—as the rest of the creation does not. (“Character”)

Animal Man: You act like choice is the signature of the divine. Who says so? Doesn’t your own Scripture say that choice led to the Fall? And who was left in Eden, still choiceless, after that Fall, by the way? Perhaps the divine always resided not in man but in the creatures? Maybe Eden was for animals.

Emerson: “Swans, horses, dogs and dragons,” says Plutarch, “we distinguish as sacred, and vehicles of the divine foresight, and yet we cannot believe that men are sacred and favorites of Heaven.” (“Demonology”)

Animal Man: Don’t twist Plutarch. I’ve read him chapter and verse. You know Plutarch was an ardent defender of animals. What did he say? “Our conduct in slaying animals and then preparing them for food is wholly against nature.” (Of Eating of Flesh)

Emerson: The reason of Plutarch's vast popularity is his humanity….His humanity stooped affectionately to trace the virtues which he loved in the animals also. “Knowing and not knowing is the affirmative or negative of the dog; knowing you is to be your friend; not knowing you, your enemy.” (“Plutarch”)

Animal Man: Well, he got that from Plato: all that business in The Republic about dogs combining faithfulness to friends and fierceness to foes. And Plato probably got that from Homer: poor Argos, whose only point in the Odyssey is to wag his tail for Odysseus after the 20 years’ absence, then drop dead. All it means is that even in our earliest story-telling and philosophizing there was plenty of affection for fellow creatures--combined with the usual suppression of that affection’s significance. 

Emerson: It was a beautiful fable of the Greeks. (Top. Notes. v. 1, 143)

Animal Man: You know, your thinking is entirely anthropocentric; animals are never for themselves: everything comes back to the human.

Emerson: Persons alone interest us. (Journals v.8, 13)

Animal Man: Can’t you see that that exclusive interest is, in philosophic dress, merely the cover story for all human thinking. It’s what you might call the tragedy of the common mind? Everybody thinking selfishly; everybody a tool for someone else’s end.

Emerson: Motley assemblage on the planet; no conspiring as in an anthill. Every one his own huckster to the ruin of the rest for aught he cares. (Journals v. 8, 24)

Animal Man: Well, if you can see that, why do you keep trumpeting the lordly potential of we hucksters?

Emerson: A soon as a man gets his suction hose down into the great deep he belongs to no age but is Eternal Man. (Journals v. 8 24)

Animal Man: Man, man, man. “They’re digging a grave for the world and there’s no one to stop them.” (Animal Man n. 4, 15)

Emerson: Up again, old heart! (“Experience” CW 492)

Animal Man: The optimist.

Emerson: There is always the rumour that the race of man is dwindling (Journals v. 12 534)

Animal Man: Maybe the rumour is true.

Emerson: Lovers of men safe as the sun (Journals v. 12, 536)

Animal Man: But we’re not lovers, we’re killers.

Emerson: Every being weaponed (Journals v. 12, 53)

Animal Man: “We have to be stopped. Mankind has to be stopped--” (n. 4, 17)

Emerson: Life a long protean March. (Journals v. 12, 546)

Animal Man “--has to be stopped before there’s nothing left. We think we own the world--” (m. 4, 17)

Emerson: The rich take up more world into life (Journals v. 12, 546)

Animal Man: “--but, oh god, we’ve fallen so far and--”

Emerson: I would not be happy or good with clowns (Journals v. 12, 476)

 Animal Man: “--and there’s still no bottom.”

Emerson: Our life, an ass with hay. (Journals v. 12, 534)

Animal Man: Enough. Your superpower is the aphorism, I guess. But, ultimately, you abhor nature, raw, wild nature, don’t you? You talk it up, talk a good line, but in the end, you don’t much like the animal spirits you give lip service to?

Emerson: ...the sordors and filths of nature... (PW 50)

Animal Man: You bad-mouthed the beasts...

Emerson: … disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests…(PW 50) 

Animal Man: … you loathed the derangement...

Emerson: Problem of poet to unite wild freedom with hard sculpture (top notes v3, 205).

Animal Man: … the wildness, the chaos, the forces uncontrolled, unknowable... 

Emerson: Animal magnetism peeps...Keep away from keyholes. Do not write secrets on the walls of necessaries.

The ox lay down and died in the furrow. (Journals v. 7 28)

Animal Man: … death, the mystery...

Emerson: I ventured to look in the coffin. (Journals v. 14, 154)

Animal Man: You despise me, what I manifest? 

Emerson: I hate your personalities. (Journals v. 12, 463)

Animal Man: And you despise me because you fear me, don’t you? What is it that you fear, anyway?

Emerson: The terrible aristocracy that is in nature. Real people dwelling with the real, face to face undaunted: then, far down, people of taste, people dwelling in a relation, or rumor, or influence of good and fair, entertained by it, superficially touched, yet charmed by these shadows:—and, far below these, gross and thoughtless, the animal man, billows of chaos… (“Aristocracy”)

Animal Man: Then you fear yourself. Your true self.

Emerson: Sir have you wondered…? (Journals v. 12, 459)

Animal Man: What?

Emerson: We fear for the not natural. (Journals v.12 462)

Animal Man: I fear only that it can’t be stopped.

Emerson: A cheerful face is culture. (Journals v. 12 462)

Animal Man: It’s a mask covering horrors.

Emerson: The Man is all. The world can be reeled off any stick indifferently. (Journals v. 10, 53)

Animal Man: The Man is part. The world is all. 

 

Tough book about broken down people in a broken down Pennsylvania steeltown. Two young men trying to get out, but they get pulled back in. Some bit of hope in the end. I had to skip the last 50 pages because I just wanted the pain to end.

1069 pages of the usual. I started to think about the stamina this guy has had, for so many years and across so many novels. I don't mean the actual work, the tens of thousands of pages, the millions of words. No, I just mean the stamina to stay engaged with these character types and plots, day after day, when they are all just shadows of the same ur-type and ur-story in King's mind, the story about the monster under his bed that's really under his bed. I don't know how he stays the course. I think he might do it by just writing, just keeping the fingers playing over the keyboard, from one scene to the next, like a bricklayer piling up brick after brick on wall after wall. Lunch-bucket writing, you could say. I can imagine him thinking, "ok, 600 more words then do the crossword" or "I'll kill this guy off then go for a walk." It's fun to track some of the the little grooves that worm across that mind. For instance, in this book he must have used the same phrase ("above my pay grade") at least ten times. He had this military character, who begat four other military characters, and military types these days, apparently, like to say, by way of offloading responsibility for something, that "that's above my pay grade"...well, anyway, this character, Dale Barbara, really didn't do much but toy with the heroic centre of the novel and then get tossed in the clink for, oh, 500 pages. I guess being a real hero was above his pay grade.  He made room for new heroic types by allowing himself to go into said clink, but these other types also had things happening that were above their pay grades. The whole novel, in effect, was above any single person's pay grade, I suppose, except for the best thing in the book, the crazy mayor who formed the evil centre of it all and who thought nothing above his pay grade. I think Under the Dome might have been below my own pay grade, but I read it anyway.

Great cranky jeremiad against the Roman...er American imperium. Hedges expects the collapse to come pretty soon thanks to the looting of the treasury by the oligarchs on Wall Street and the overextension by the military-industrial complex. Reality shows, wrestling, porn, fake politics, and the lousy higher education system are symptoms and causes.

In this book Erlendur looks at some old missing persons cases plus a recent suicide that doesn't feel right to him. I don't know what's up, but Arnaldur has really softened Erlendur in this one. He's like Joe Sensitive, running around doing the bidding of his daughter and even trying to be civil with his ex-wife. I'm starting to realize that the big story arc in this series is the warming up of the main character. He's now at about room temperature.

And both of these. Set in Iceland, natch.

And too many of these.

I've read too many of these.

There were six Leaphorn/Chee novels at the cottage, so I read them: Blessing Way, Talking God, Sacred Clowns, The First Eagle, Sinister Pig, Wailing Wind. I liked those, so I bought two more: Coyote Waits and Skinwalker. Also listened to The Ghostway on tape.  A bit light on characters--Leaphorn and Chee aren't a whole lot different. At this point I really don't remember much about the indivudal plots: most involved the find of a body out in the desert, the tracking of culprit to some other place in the desert. But great atmospherics. I'd like to learn more about the Navajo Rez.

The first time I saw this movie was in 1982 at a drive-in in Cheboygan, Michigan with my brother Charlie in his old Plymouth Duster. It was a cold, clear August night, as I recall. The movie didn't run for more than a week in Cheboygan--or anywhere else. That surprised us, since it was the most terrifying, visually disturbing, relentlessly horrifying flicks we'd ever since, and this during an era when special effects (i.e., special make-up and costume effects, usually involving glistening hunks of rubber and goo) were in an arms race of out-grossing: Dan O'Bannon's work in Alien (which I recall him saying would send movie-goers screaming out of the theater), Rob Bottin's work here and in The Howling, to name a few examples. Anyway, I had read the John W. Campbell story, "Who Goes There?" on which this movie was based (much more truly based, in fact, then the Howard Hawks '50s version with James Arness as a giant, unstoppable plant-based alien) and knew the premiss, but Carpenter outdid Campbell in terms of fright factor by about 100 times. Does the movie hold up, 27 years later? It does. Uncompromising work even from a director who maybe didn't compromise all that often, and then only in the best tradition of schlocksploitation. A great cast of character actors (Wilford Brimley, Richard Dysart, Richard Mazur, Keith David) headed by the always serviceably nihilistic Kurt Russell. No character development because there's no chance to develop them: everything happens so fast it's just a study in (justifiable) paranoia and animal fear. The main reaction shot shows disgust and revulsion; if you want an emotional centre, it's the human instinct to recoil from The Other. The cinematography is great: cold, dark, windy (ok, so it's the Antarctic in winter and most of the guys run around without toques or snow pants, I guess that's kinda a continuity problem). Stewart, BC was where it was shot, probably on top of a glacier. Anyway, the point here was that the movie tanked at the box office, and I guess the reason wasn't that the plot had holes, the characters were flat, and the dialogue was laced with "motherfuckers." Critics for the most part said it was repulsive and devoid of an human decency. Maybe that's true. But you have to love a movie where the only two survivors sit around in the burning ruins of the ice station, knowing that as the flames die they'll begin freezing to death, pass a bottle of whiskey, and speculate if or when the other one will suddenly transform into a pile of steaming gibbets with waving tentacles and pustular malformed heads. When asked by Keith David what'll they do now, since shortly it'll be 100 below zero, Russell says, "Why don't we wait here for a while--see what happens?" Screen goes dark, terrifically eerie Enio Mariconi score comes back in, credits roll. What more do you want? A rescue helicopter? A final shot of an alien-possessed guy being thawed out and brought back to civilization, just to point toward the sequel? Fuggitaboutit! That's kid stuff. Carpenter did the right thing by bringing down the curtain.

What's left to say about this crucial book? In 1980, Catton fully explained the central issue of our time--of all time--and that is very simply the finitude of the planet and the outsized appetite of humankind. There's only one outcome: crash. The only question remaining is: how hard will we hit?

 A combination of Frederick Brown's "Arena," Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Survivor (as in "next time--on Survivor!"), Death Race 2000, and, most interestingly, Fahrenheit 451, this "young adult" novel made for an intensely pleasurable four-hour read on a cool summer cottage evening. Lots of many-layered characters, driving plot, and some unfinished business in this dystopian future leaves me wanting to read the sequel--recently released--before I forget what is going on, which usually happens to me these days. (Case in point: George R.R. Martin's so-slowly unfolding Game of Thrones tri-quadro-quinto-whatever...logy, the plotline and cast of which lie mistily in the mystic cords of memory and so renders serial reading impossible. One must take up again the whole yarn, right from the beginning, each time a new volume is published--which is apparently once every three or four years. Will Martin last long enough to finish writing it, and will I last long enough to read it if he does?)

This tough-guy book concerns one Jack Reacher, former Army cop and current off-the-grid-troubleshooting-Travis McGee-lone wolf-sometime-investigator and star of several previous actioners. Wounded, y'know, and cynical, in that post-Viet Nam way, but in this case, a post-Operation Desert Storm kinda way. He seems to show up like a brutal avenging angel when needed by former contacts or current law enforcement schlubs. After 911--just like the rest of us--he enjoys the distraction of terrorists. Foreign and domestic, I would imagine. Lots of scalps. Set in some fictitious Indiana town south of Bloomington. Looks a bit like Bloomington. Maybe Bedford. Lots of limestone. Some ex-checkos are running the crushed gravel concession and have to off a bunch of people to keep the money flowing. Ex-gulag survivors, they know no limits. Those mobster Russians: the stoic villians of so many post-Cold War potboilers. Anyway, Jack Reacher has to kill them all, avoid the police, solve the crime, sleep with a couple of the all-beautiful cast of supporting heroines, show off his prowess at shooting, fighting, f*****g, crime scene investigation, and smart-aleck dialogue. This might have made a good Rowdy Roddy Piper vehicle back in the day. Or maybe Bo Svenson. Lee Child writes as if he has an IV drip of pure testosterone for the month and a half it must take to write books of this ilk. But I'm sure he's as gentle as a throw pillow, because none of it convinces: everything Reacher does and says comes straight out of the Hollywood scriptological echo chamber. Fella has absorbed a lot of dap dialogue, bro, thas fo shuh! Pretty good ear for a Brit. It's the kind of book that has italicized sentences like, Rule number 10: don't mess with Jack Reacher! and evocative description like, "He stood six feet five inches and weighed in at 250." Four hours I can never get back.

It's hard to heap too much praise on this gutsy, unflinching book. Jensen writes about himself in a way that's never self-serving, always aimed at the bigger problems of our way of being, the problem of civilization. He says a lot of things I wish I'd said, but he's always working around to action, how to take culture down and save what's left of the wild. He multiplies the example of human arrogance and selfishness to the point where it's impossible to argue that humans are worth a pitcher of warm spit. It's us against them, he seems to say, but there really is no us, and I suppose that's where I differ with him: we can't get around to the end of us in order to outflank us, Nathan Bedford Forrest-style (Jensen is a Civil War buff). Doesn't seem we can, anyway. He believes we can; I don't. That puts me in the second category of negativists, which he describes in volume 2: the defeatists and arm-chair nihilists, common among academics, who know the score but don't think there's anything to be done: pass the remote control and wait for the end. Maybe he's right. But I like to think of it as nihilism perfected, purified, of all pretense at recovery: we own up to our unvarnished selves, the horror of us, and start fresh, with no entailments, sloughing off the tens of hundreds of years of civilized self-absorption, and with it, the arrogance. This is another form of clarion call, one that says we must face full-on the absolute reprehensibility of humanity and the social system's inability to accommodate positive change. Unlike Jensen, I don't have the answer. I don't know that taking down civilization and putting us back into hunter-gather mode is a true solution. That's a make-believe solution as much as the techno-fix. Yes, the fourth world war will be fought with stones and sticks, but it seems more likely a huge die-off will produce a smart, sustaianale world made by the survivors as much as a catastrophic bonfire of civilization will produce a stable world.

I somehow managed to buy this book, a vanity press edition from something called "mars media publishing" in Lexington, from Amazon. Shows the dangers of the "Those who bought this book also bought feature" on that worthy website. It's about a group of bigfoot hunters who talk like like what you imagine bigfoots might, and they possess all the emotional richness of same. One thing I can say for this author/publisher is that I found no copyediting errors, which shows the care that went into preparing this text for publication. On the other hand, the written quality and plotting of the work gives new meaning to the word "amateurish." It's difficult to convey just how ineptly this graduate of English progams in Kentucky and Brandeis Law School writes. Let's read one of his evocative descriptions:

After tossing in some pine cones and dried needles, the fire quickly blazed into a steady, soaring flame. Jesse piled on a couple of thick logs to increase the burn time of the fire. On top of this, Brad tossed an armful of more pine needles and small twigs. The fire smoldered and choked under the new fuel, then burst into a tall, bright, roaring pillar of fire. It even illuminated the surrounding trees during the quick-lived flame-up. After the pine cones and needles burned off and the flame returned to a normal size, Jess was convinced that the fire was steady and solid enough to last for a few more hours. As he turned to head to his tent, a loud noise halted him in mid-step.

We are there! We can see the dextrous fire throwing fuel on itself; we feel the comforting weight of that "Armful of more pine needles"; we hear the soaring and roaring flame as it morphs into fire, solid, smoldering, choking and steadying as it may be, ultimately convincing in its solidity. But what about dialogue? how's this:

"I guess I've been sidetracked for a while," he answered in reposnse to a question from Laura about his history.
"Are you on the right track now?"
Jesse pursed his lips and furrowed his brow as if in deep thought. "You know, I just might be."
"On this trip with your buddies?" Laura continued.
"No, I think I can see now that this trip may be part of my sidetrack. I can't get off that path right now, though. It's something I've got to do. But I think if I do it, I just may be able to step off that track and get back on the right one--one I haven't been on in a long, long time."
Laura looked confused.

Yes, all those tracks are confusing, Laura, but so deeply compelling, much like Frost's diverging roads. This is deep, heady stuff, that Jess is dealing with, poor chap. Thankfully, Jess and Laura get on the right track by the end, though not before three other folks on the wrong track get offed by some nasty bigfoots in the woods of Kentucky. Turns out sasquatches are not shy and retiring gentlemen of the forest but bloody-minded, limb-ripping primates. Kinda like man.

A novel set in northern Sweden, near the Arctic Circle, close to Finland, so out of the known section of Europe that it seems like Ultima Thule to the North American reader? A cast-out, scarred, female tax lawyer from Stockholm, returning home to this forsaken place to help clear up a murder? A crazy collection of churchies at the root of it all? Sounds like an interesting read, good enough to win a Swedish first mystery novel award? It did. But the book is comepletely unatmospheric; we may as well be in Timmins or Lansing. The author can't describe a landscape, building, or a weather system if her life depends on it; she only identifies snow, drizzle, and blowing snow. As for the Church which figures so prominently: it's just a bunch of words nipped from the bible; these folk don't believe in a thing, and neither do we. I suppose she has some capacity at characterization, though the protagonist's back story is muddled. Maybe in the next book you'll read more; I won't be bothering.

Michael Jackson died yesterday. As Jane Wyman (also dead) once said to Lorenzo Lamas (still alive) on Falcon Crest, "you'll be missed at the family gatherings." A Jackson Five reunion would be without its fifth wheel. In the summer of 1977, my brother Cameron burst into the family cottage with this statement: "Well, the King is dead." Elvis's kingdom was the female heart and the male ego-fantasy; Jackson, some of that same territory, but also somewhere else, largely unnameable. Michael Jackson produced three offspring that are known, two of whom bear the name "Prince Michael Jackson." Some people think of Michael Jackson as a kind of long-lived Mozart. Once, Michael Jackson held his infant out over a balcony to adoring crowds below. He divorced King Elvis's daughter after a brief marriage, reputedly because they had conflicting  views on child-rearing. During my college years no one admitted to enjoying Michael Jackson's music but everybody in the bars would stop talking when Thriller came on the projection screen. Michael Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana, which is an authentic American sacrifice zone. He wound up in Santa Barbara, which is a replica of the Palatine Hill, circa 50 BC.

Erlendur and company try to figure out why a 30 year old skeleton at the bottom of Lake Kleifarvatn has a hole in its skull and is tied to a Soviet-era transmitting device. Turns out it has something to do with young socialist Icelanders studying in Leipzeig back in the '50s. As usual, Erlendur is the most persistant, cantankerous, truth-seeking sonofabitch in Reykjavik. Tangentially, I happened to find a copy of Jar City, the movie. It was great! One of the most memorable sequences was Erlendur picking up some baked sheep's head at a drive thru, then using his pocket knife to dig out the eyeball and gobble it. Burger King should try offering these items to North Americans. Iceland: I really want to get there before I die and drive around the island on highway 1, the ring road. It's only a little over 800 miles long, thorugh some of the most starkly beautiful landscapes on earth. It's still hard for me to believe there's an entire country, with a big city and lots of little towns, lying up on the Arctic Circle, about the latitude of Baffin Island. Heck, it's farther north than southern Greenland, which isn't even green, whereas Iceland is. The winters in Ottawa are colder than in Reykjavik, plus Ottawa has no hotsprings. Anyway, now I need to read some of the novels by Halldor Laxness, the Icelander who won the Nobel Prize in 1955.

"Futile Culture" visual essay

I'm still waiting to find out what Iceland is really like, whether it's as starkly beautiful as I think it is, but Erlendur is still inveistigating murders by heading inside, this time in a hotel. In fact, he's so comfortable indoors that he decides to check into the hotel while he's there handling the case. His daughter, the drug addict, drops in, and he meets an intriguing medical technician he takes to dinner, and his colleagues do all the legwork down in Harfyfjordfyord or someplace to gather the key info about the deceased, a down and out boy soprano turned doorman. I guess the weirdest thing is that it's obvious he's gay, and being gay is crucial to unravelling the murder, but Erlendur figures out this proclivity only about seven tenths through the novel. I suppose the author didn't realize he was yelling the truth so loudly. I notice that in these novels minor characters are rarely given names, so we've got "the manager" and "the check" and "the receptionist." I'm afraid that if you're not given a name, even if you play a large role, it's because you're not going to be the killer.