autoroute 20; salt fish girl

On my way to my grandmother's funeral last Wednesday, somewhere between Montreal and Rimouski, I waded through Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl. Indeed, reading it reminded me in many ways of the Hass review excerpt in the header of this blog: the waters flowing through the text's (post)apocalypse, coupled with its faintly surreal temporal but recognizable social structures, made the experience of reading it through rather like stepping into a(n) (un)familiar element, teeming with bioengineered life.

In working on a response for a class, though, I found that the element was remarkably difficult to sublimate (or condense), to translate into any sort of consistent coherence. At first, I tried to read it in response to an epigraph pulled from Spider Robinson's Telempath, fixating as many of the book's reviewers have on its characterizations of and reliance on smell. Because the response was for a class framed by Greg Garrard's notion of apocalypse as an environmental trope, I was looking at each author's approach to smell as characteristic of either the comic or the tragic mode that Garrard describes. Robinson's text, for those of you who might be unfamiliar with it, describes a post-apocalyptic world whose crisis is entirely dependent on the human sense of smell:

It was early afternoon, and the same sunshine that was warming the forests and dorms and work-zones of Fresh Start, my home, seemed to chill the air here, accentuating the barren emptiness of the ruined city. Silence and desolation were all around me as I walked, bleached bones and crumbling brick. Carlson had been efficient, all right; nearly as efficient as the atomic bomb folks used to be so scared of once. It seemed as though I were in some immense devil's autoclave, that ignored filth and grime but grimly scrubbed out life of any kind….
Carlson had said one word to me that afternoon, and the word was "Hyperosmia."
Within forty-eight hours every man, woman and child left alive on earth possessed a sense of smell approximately a hundred times more efficient than that of any wolf that ever howled.
During those forty-eight hours, a little less than a fifth of the planet's population perished, by whatever means they could devise, and every city in the world spilled its remaining life into the surrounding countryside. The ancient smell-suppressing system of the human brain collapsed under unbearable demand, overloaded and burned out in an instant.
The great complex behemoth called Modern Civilization ground to a halt in a little less than two days.

Until the very end of the novel, it tends toward a tragic conception of good and evil, and Robinson's protagonist follows a familiar heroic narrative arc. But I was primarily interested in how Lai's text, also fixated on genetically modified human smell—in more than one sense—and with a similar geographic garrison structure (though Robinson's is set against the ruins of NYC and Lai's is primarily the Canadian Pacific Northwest), uses both smell and apocalypse in ways more suited to the comic mode.

Durian is one of the more obvious connections to make to smell, as it in many ways characterizes the novel's future protagonist, Miranda. Its redolence of cat piss and pepper, described as such throughout the novel, clings to this girl from birth, and, in ways that I will leave to Lai to describe, ultimately leads to her initial conception through complicated intersections of culture, gender, interspeciality, and sexuality. But it is her bearing of this symptom that makes Miranda a particularly apt protagonist, as her peculiar relationship with it helps to frame the novel itself as a sort of "dreaming disease," which refers to one of the post-apocalypse effects of genetic modification that insinuate themselves into the lives and landscapes of the human communities, a disease, in many senses, of history and cultural memory that is intimately bound up in the (supposedly contracted) particular scents of those afflicted.

This experience of the novel as dream-disease is heightened by its fluidity (and sometimes alien and seemingly deliberately alienating) in chronology and geography, especially as its protagonists are careful to leave questions throughout, especially as to origins and conclusions, weaving a sort of indeterminate cyclicality whose preoccupation is with fragmentation and rebirth, a rebirth which is itself fractional and dynamic. Its unapologetic celebration of the abject, and perhaps also implied criticism of the adherence to a Romantic individual, allows the novel to complicate readers' sympathy with both characters and corporations, landscapes and waterways, and deliberately shifts the naturalization of beauty and the sublime through subtle critiques of cultural assimilation and heteronormativity.

And now, I think I've chattered long enough, so I'll leave you with a taste of Lai's fluid prose that perhaps makes this novel's juxtaposition with Moreau more apt than anticipated:

The sound of footsteps came from around a bend in the corridor. Ian pulled me into a side hallway. Pressed against the wall, I watched another group of Janitors pass, their tired feet scuffing against the floor. In horror I watched their backs as they moved away from us. There were rectangular holes in their uniforms that ran from the tailbone to the base of the neck. The muscle and skin of their backs had been replaced with some kind of transparent silicone composite so that you could see their spines and behind them, their hearts pounding, their livers and kidneys swimming in oceans of blood and gristle. We had studied anatomy at school. I could see that the organs had been shifted, had been carefully arranged like stones in a formal garden, mimicking the asymmetrical aesthetics of nature, but with human intention. (76-77)

humber river regional hospital, toronto; the island of doctor moreau

So I wasn't being intentionally macabre when choosing reading material for my wait-time in Emergency last week; it just so happens that H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau was the only text I had yet to pick up for my courses, and I anticipated a long wait (16 hours was a bit excessive, but c'est la vie!). This wait was in the week leading up to Hallowe'en, no less, and as I was in the hospital I discovered that my grandmother had just passed away the previous day, so it was a spooky experience all around.

My oversharing, I promise, is going somewhere. It certainly informed my reading of the text, especially as I brooded on the potential reinstatement of Warfarin and its roots—and continued use—as rat poison. I thought about animal testing and the kinds of practice we as a species have engaged in while preparing ourselves to be surgeons of bodies and ecosystems. Given their proximity in the course, it seems only logical that this text would remind me of Neil Evernden's The Natural Alien, and in particular his discussion of vivisection. Indeed, it characterized tendency toward cutting vocal cords while dissecting live creatures, using the characters of Moreau and the protagonist to contrast the two approaches:

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall. (38)

The narrator's honesty about the effects of silence on his willingness to torture resonated uncomfortably with me. My initial disgust at his confession was quickly mediated by my setting; not only was I surrounded by howling, sobbing people and wishing they might be quieter, but was also fetishizing through the means of obtaining that quiet all sorts of non-human animal suffering, as well as human medical environmental injustice. So I found myself continually struggling with the ethics not only of the novel, but of the academic, and of my constructed self as well, and can sympathize from different angles with the existential angst of Prendick's companion: "Are we bubbles blown by a baby?"(106). Though not an especially new reaction, either personally or critically, my profound discomfort was certainly compounded by where I happened to be sitting.

north york, toronto; three day road

Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road bears the potentially dubious distinction of being selected for both Canada Reads! and its local-to-a-faculty offshoot, FES Reads! I jest, mostly, about the dubiousness; the FES offshoot was a stimulating way of incorporating the importance of reading literature into a department that, while remarkably interdisciplinary, is still heavily populated by aspiring planners. Further, the specific texts chosen showed an interesting imagination of "the role that fiction writing can play in advancing our understanding and skills as environmental researchers," as described in the event outline. I'm inspired to read the rest and expand on this imagination in the future, if I can retain a sense of what everyone was saying!

The panelists, faculty and a graduate student representative, chose the title Boyden, Anne Michaels's The Winter Vault, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Daniel Suarez's Freedom^(TM), to compete, and the process seemed an exercise in theatrics—as it should be, though the audience could have been a bit more energized in its catcalls. Boyden was defended primarily as full of action, which description all three non-Michaels panelists deliberately contrasted against The Winter Vault. But the tale's treatment of First Nations issues was also foregrounded, and its distinctly Canadian WWI battles, as well as a brisk narrative pace and resonant vocabulary.

I am also in a course taught by the day's conceptualizer and facilitator, Dr. Cate Sandilands, where this text is assigned (and, indeed, we were due to discuss it the following week), so I found it a fascinating debate. I hadn't read through yet, and found when reading the text in the wake of this discussion that I was expecting more from it, at least in the first half. Not that I was disappointed, per se, but as I rather enjoy Michaels, who made it to second place, I was inclined to assimilate the two rather more than I should have—which perhaps demonstrates just how topical the text really is for me.

Once I had drifted away from the impressions I'd received in FES Reads!, I found myself struck by Boyden's repetition of words, particularly the colour red. Indeed, I kept mentally comparing it to my (admittedly rather hazy, as I read it in the first year of my undergrad) recollection of Timothy Findley's The Wars. This comparison was fostered by both texts' complicated relationship with horses, and in what I would argue are similar ways. Findley's descriptions of red are multifoliate, using a wide range of Anglo-specific terms for the different reds of the battlefield. The section on horses, too, is very tightly bound to the subjective experience of the protagonist, whose relationship is, though not Schaeffer-complicated, still quite tangled and extremely personal. Red for Boyden, though, is consistently left in this three-letter word that calls to mind not only poppies and bloodshed, but also the outside racialization of the Cree protagonist. This red is described in myriad ways, but retains its complicated universalization, adding to the alienness of the English language for Xavier and to the enforced familiarity with his displaced landscapes. Horses are an essential part of these landscapes, as he and Elijah wryly observe that they will likely be mistaken by visual association for Plains Cree and expected to ride.

So, in the end I have to agree that this text is a great selection for both Canada and FES, even if it is initially useful in self-confrontation.

toronto, montreal, and rimouski; dress your family in corduroy and denim

Alright, I swear this is the last David Sedaris book I'll review for awhile, especially as I accidentally re-bought Barrel Fever, rather than one I haven't already read/don't already own. It would seem, I'm sure, that Sedaris has been the only author I've been reading since I got here, but bear with me, as I'm hoping to submit a fair few posts today. No promises, though, since they will virtually (hyuk) guarantee non-posting.

I'm hoping that writing these will inspire me to get back to work; it's been a crazy few weeks in that mythical realm, The Real World, that cares nothing for my assignments or Plan of Study, and as a result, I've been finding it difficult to motivate myself back into the world I normally exist in. So I was reading Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim¹ on the way to my grandmother's funeral in an insane 35-hours-in-transit-less-than-20-in-the-city trip, and found it to be a remarkably apt choice. After all, Sedaris does perspective absurdly, and absurdly well, and he turned what might normally be an overwhelmingly depressing and uncomfortable sprint into learning to grieve and engage with the grief of others I haven't seen in at least ten years in my functional second language (despite its initial predominance, it's been years since I was actively fluent) with a wry self-consciousness and a recognition of the potential for transience. So neither of the trips felt too horrifically long, and I emerged on the other side mostly unscathed.

But enough about me. To the text! This collection is much more similar to other books I'd read of Sedaris's than Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, which is certainly not meant as a criticism one way or another. It was particularly appropriate, though, for when I was reading it, because the experience was a much more familiar and comfortingly hilarious one. As Chelsea Cain puts it in the back cover snippet, "It's laugh-out-loud funny, outrageous, and sad, which is just another way of saying it is vintage Sedaris." The darkness, or sadness, is one I have come to recognize, and his autobiographical anecdotes enable the kind of self-consciousness mentioned above, which I needed.

The essay "Repeat After Me," for example, was exceptionally cathartic. His relationship with his sister, Lisa, is framed by her parrot, Henry, whose comic relief allows Sedaris to confront both his own and his family's qualms with his use of their characters and relationships, foibles and fragilities, for the consumption of what has become a fairly international (though not global) audience. Hannah Simpson's acclaim is perhaps almost too appropriate for this collection, and in [articular this essay and the one about his sister Tiffany: "Thank God for the maladjusted lives of Lou and Sharon Sedaris. Their home may have been frenzied and their six children destined for therapy, but they gave us the shrewd and unconventional Davis Sedaris." After Lisa hears of the impending film to be made from her brother's work, she balks, turning to Henry as an initial outlet for her frustration:

"So now we have to be in a movie?" She picked her sneakers off the floor and tossed them into the laundry room. "Well," she said, "I can tell you right now that you are not dragging my bird into this." The movie was to be based on our pre-parrot years, but the moment she put her foot down I started wondering who we might get to play the role of Henry. "I know what you're thinking," she said. "And the answer is no." (148)

From this, Sedaris moves to another parrot-related anecdote, leaving a pause in the family drama for the reader to process Lisa's frustration and setting the scene for further development of one of his two lesser-mentioned sisters (Amy and Gretchen occupy much of Sedaris's attention, while Lisa and especially Tiffany are less frequently engaged, particularly as adults):

Once, at a dinner party, I met a woman whose parrot had learned to imitate the automatic icemaker on her new refrigerator. "That's what happens when they're left alone," she'd said. It was the most depressing bit of information I'd heard in quite a while, and it stuck with me for weeks. Here was this creature, born to mock its jungle neighbors, and it wound up doing impressions of man-made kitchen appliances. (148-49)

Sedaris weaves this story in with the narrative of Henry and his relationship with his family in such a way as to suggest that Sedaris himself might be the parrot, mocking his Lou, Hugh, and Sharon junglemates.

Sedaris is continually disappointed by Henry's mindless repetition, expecting him to respond with opinions to his mutual babbling with Lisa, then transitions to describing a lecture where the author "read stories about [his] family" and "answered questions about them, thinking all the while how odd it was that these strangers seemed to know so much about [his] brothers and sisters" (150). He affirms, "in order to sleep at night, I have to remove myself from the equation....I'm not the conduit, but just a poor typist stuck in the middle." But Lisa's presence in the audience, and her reaction to the idea of a movie, makes this "delusion much harder to maintain." The effect of her presence is compounded by her self-consciousness, faithfully repeated by Sedaris in the next few pages. He also emphasizes Lisa's affinity for animals, her emotional connection with and unwavering trust in them, both coming to a head in a story that he's expressly forbidden to share:

The incident began with a quick trip to the grocery store and ended, unexpectedly, with a wounded animal stuffed into a pillowcase and held to the tailpipe of her car. Like most of my sister's stories, it provoked a startling mental picture, capturing a moment in time when one's actions seem both unimaginably cruel and completely natural. Details were carefully chosen and the pace built gradually, punctuated by a series of well-timed pauses. "And then...And then..." She reached the inevitable conclusion and just as I started to laugh, she put her head against the steering wheel and fell apart. It wasn't the gentle flow of tears you might release when recalling an isolated action or event, but the violent explosion that comes when you realize that all such events are connected, forming an endless chain of guilt and suffering.

I instinctively reached for the notebook I keep in my pocket and she grabbed my hand to stop me. "If you ever," she said, "ever repeat that story, I will never talk to you again." (154-55)

Sedaris, in catching himself trying to convince his sister to change her mind and let him use it, is suddenly horrified by his own persistence. He, too, is haunted by the impending film, not for its potential to extremity in character, but to accuracy. His self-reflection is troubling, and the essay finds Sedaris in the kitchen with Henry, who repeats only Lisa's happiest stories:
From his own mouth, the words are meaningless, and so he pulls up a chair. The clock reads three a.m., then four, then five, as he sits before the brilliant bird, repeating slowly and clearly the words, "Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me." (156)

I'm aware that blockquotes are dominating this "review," and that it's only one of the many riveting stories in this collection. Really, I agree with Chris Lehmann's acclaim: "Do yourself a favour and rush out to read the damn book for yourself." Then, sit down and write a letter to someone you haven't seen in awhile. And another. Maybe a third.

¹Fairly unrelated, but I rather enjoy the quasi-pornographic homogeneity of images that appear on the Google search (where it suggests you try Google Images).

north york, toronto; when you are engulfed in flames

What a great title. I actually picked this book up at Munro's, Victoria's iconic and conveniently tourism-hotbedded (a word? no) bookstore—and, I discover now, "Canada's most magnificent," lucky me—and read about half of it as I was packing up to move and flying across the country. But it was the first book I finished in my new (evidently rather dangerous) neighbourhood, and so the experience shifted to a distinctly Torontonian one.

Indeed, it was the book I was reading my first night, when I discovered much to my chagrin that out there in Ontario, Labour Day and other holidays mean something: that everything is closed. Everything. I spent my first night wrapped in Pashminas, contemplating the cultural assassination this was likely implying. I was reading it when I discovered that the courses in my Environmental Studies program insist that you print hard copies of all of your assignments, despite the fact that three of my four courses have Moodle pages. When I discovered that liquor stores close at nine. That it is a common practice for grocery stores to package their produce in styrofoam. That the city releases warnings against swimming on certain days. That someone in Montreal thought that Calgary was in British Columbia. Smiling at people encourages them to follow you home. Museums tend to be free Wednesday afternoon. Bus fare works only in one direction, and only if you are confident of your travel path. Bus drivers seem to know every single street and business in the city (not true of Victoria, which is much smaller).

Point is, the title made entirely too much sense to me as I mired in picky-detail culture shock. It's not things like population and multiculturality and the 40-minute subway ride that have been throwing me, but the inconsequential details taken for granted. So Sedaris was the perfect companion in my bewildered wanderings through Ontario's quotidian absurdities. He deliberate examines of the nutty little details of life; indeed, he relishes in them:

I've always admired people who can enter a conversation without overtaking it. My friend Evelyn for instance, "Hello, so nice to meet you," and then she just accepts things as they come. If her new acquaintance wants to talk about plants, she might mention a few of her own, never boastfully, but with a pleasant tone of surprise, as if her parlour palm and the other person's had coincidentally attended the same high school. The secret to her social success is that she's genuinely interested—not in all subjects, maybe, but definitely in all people. I like to think that I share this quality, but when it comes to meeting strangers, I tend to get nervous and rely on a stash of pre-prepared stories. Sometimes they're based on observation or hearsay, but just as often they're taken from the newspaper: An article about a depressed Delaware woman who hung herself from a tree on October 29 and was mistaken for a Halloween decoration. The fact that it's illegal to offer a monkey a cigarette in the state of New Jersey. Each is tragic in its own particular way, and leaves the listener with a bold mental picture: Here is a dead woman dangling against a backdrop of scarlet leaves. Here is a zookeeper with an open pack of Marlboros. "Go ahead," he whispers. "Take one."

I'd like to think I'm a blend of the two, but then think back on the conversations I've had here; so many have started with, "Well, when I got here on Labour Day..." and ended somewhere around the fact that you can evidently recycle styrofoam. Usually I'll include what I routinely call "the one fact I knew about Toronto before I got here": it's illegal to drag a dead horse down Yonge Street on a Sunday. The story's changed, slightly; I now know that it's not "Young," for one thing, and it's become much more dramatic with the East/West divide. "Did you know," I'll say, and we have a ready-made conversation.

Then enters the mouse who makes tactical use of the collection's title, but I'll leave it to the sale rack at Munro's to share that one with you.

massey hall, toronto; squirrel seeks chipmunk

New (school) year's resolution: I'm just going to stop promising sequels.

WARNING: Plot spoilers ensue.

David Sedaris was in Toronto last weekend to read from his latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. I'd like to begin by saying that the reading was just excellent; Sedaris has a quirky sort of stage presence, combined of more or less unequal parts of golden comedic timing, self-effacing asides, and what he claims a listener to have described as a "Muppet" voice. These are all presented with a sort of seriousness, however, belied by the occasional snicker at a particularly absurd turn of phrase.

Needless to say, I was delighted by his reading. I'm always a little nervous before a reading begins; not everyone is instructed in or practices the art of reading aloud, and it can drastically alter the way I receive a story on re-reading post-reading. I leave it to you to untangle that. But Sedaris reads as he writes, and had the humility—arguably unnecessary in what is obviously a tour of promotion—to give some of his reading away. Granted, it was another form of self-promotion, but still; I appreciated his enthusiasm for the other voices on his latest audio book.

But what, you ask, does this have to do with his book?

Well, a fair bit. I purchased the book right before the reading, and hadn't had a chance to glance through it. So I didn't notice at the time that he was leaving pieces out, ending stories early, and that the omissions changed the stories. It was only while waiting in the idolatrous line afterward that I began reading. Actually, the line was so long that I read almost all of the "bestiary" by the time I made it to Sedaris's "friendly friendship," a self-consciously anthropomorphized series of short stories about animals as people. As Sedaris introduced (imagine square brackets, as this is a week-old paraphrase), "I was going to call them fables, except that I think I'm too immoral." So I won't call them fables, either; maybe ineffables.

This collection is distinctly different from any of the others I've read; rather than a series of sidesplitting essays explicitly about the adventures of Sedaris et al, the reader is introduced to the interanimal relations of a wide array of humanimals. "The Squirrel and the Chipmunk," for example, from which the title and fantastic (heh) cover illustration by Ian Falconer is taken, describes an interspecies romance cut short by the prejudices of family...and by jazz:

The chipmunk lay awake that night, imagining the unpleasantness that was bound to take place the following morning. What if jazz was squirrel slang for something terrible, like anal intercourse? "Oh, I like it to," she'd said—and so eagerly! Then again, it could just be mildly terrible, something along the lines of Communism or fortune-telling, subjects that were talked about but hardly ever practiced. Just as she thought she had calmed herself down, a new possibility would enter her mind, each one more horrible than the last. Jazz was the maggot-infected flesh of a dead body, the crust on an infected eye, another word for ritual suicide.* And she had claimed to like it!

The chipmunk is persuaded by the intolerance of her family and her own lack of education about squirrels and their culture to break it off. She eventually marries another chipmunk, has a family, and eventually uncovers the meaning of jazz, first as a genre of music, and then in her own personal revisionist narrative:

When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of "jazz" as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.

The story ends on this note of potential and mourning, and a touch of senility, and is therefore representative of not only the collection as a whole, but also Sedaris's reading. If these stories were sonnets, they would be Elizabethan instead of Petrarchan, with a beautifully macarbre volta in the reader's last breath.

Though remarkably problematic from an ecocritical perspective—something that I hope to pursue in more depth later—this collection forwards brilliantly Sedaris's past thematic criticism of human intolerance. By displacing the stories via species, the bestiary invokes a sort of Jamesonian remove—though not temporal—for the reader, who is encouraged to laugh at his or her own foibles and follies. And, as is usual with Sedaris but particularly sinister in this collection, this laughter is complicated by the illumination of darker underlying normative prejudices and truths, made palatable—and unexpulsable—by its seductive comedy.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, I pronounce thee a success, a tragicomedy for the twenty-first century dissatisfied adult. Read the stories alone, aloud, or alchemically; they're worth the time.

*Here, I would like to just acknowledge the recent public response to the series of suicides prompted by heteronormative intolerance, and to extend my condolences to the families and friend of the youths. Also, I would like to link to some resources that might be of use to anyone struggling with similar issues. There is a community for you.

fernwood, victoria and slocan; the cat who walks through walls

Consistency continues to be damned. (Not really, but for the purposes of this post, we'll pretend sincerity, a phrase I prefer to leave unexamined.) It just so happens that I suddenly stopped reading the aforementioned Glavin and Adams texts—through no fault of their own, of course—in favour of some very well-thumbed Robert A. Heinlein tomes with the shift of the weather. It's finally sunny again here in Victoria, which apparently makes me want to dip into the (un)familiar Tertius, space-time twisters, and sassy female counterparts¹.

Dying isn't difficult. Even a baby kitten can do it. (382)

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was my first encounter with Heinlein's future history, the summer after high school graduation (makes this post somewhat appropriate, as I now re-read—albeit not for the first time—in the summer after undergraduate convocation). My dad, an avid reader, had recommended his work several years earlier, but I chose literature as my site of teenage rebellion and refused to read any of "that science fiction crap." I was a fantasy girl, with a(n un)healthy dose of the classics and children's lit, and would not submit to my father's erratic taste.

In retrospect, this may have been ever so slightly ridiculous. But hey, I wasn't spray-painting old growth forests, burning down public monuments, or some inverted version thereof.

So this, like the Robinson post, will travel—space suit notwithstanding—and like the story itself, will muddle with the concept of time, as my imagination carries rather more immediacy to the hammock in my backyard, long since disintegrated, where I first met Richard Colin Ames Campbell, protagonist and narrator:

It was a gay ending to a happy evening. There was still the matter of the stranger who had had the bad taste to get himself killed at my table. But, since Gwen seemed not to be aware of the unpleasant incident, I had tabled it in my mind, to be dealt with later. To be sure I was ready any moment for that tap on the shoulder...but in the meantime I enjoyed good food, good wine, good company. Life is filled with tragedy; if you let it overwhelm you, you cannot enjoy life's innocent pleasures. (6)

So begins the "rollicking" action described in the New York Times review (excerpted on the back cover); within a few scant pages, Richard and Gwen are engaged, married, and exiled from several planets. Then the story gets interesting.

But what I particularly like about this novel (and did on the hammock), is/was/will be not so much the plot, which purposely ignores gaping questions and careens through the laws of probability and believable storylines,² but the characters subjected to it. I remember the intense early summer green of the backyard cherry trees from which I was suspended as I imagined myself into the role of Gwen/Hazel Nowak/Stone/Long/etc. Apart from an intellectual attraction to Ames/Campbell, Gwen/Hazel's role appealed to me at the time as an ideal lady, smart, sexy, savvy, and comfortable in command:

But it was Gwen who brought down the house when Auntie finished her highly-coloured [sic] account. Gwen did it with pictures.

Listen carefully. Gwen had used all her ammo, six rounds, then—neat as always—she had put her Miyako back into her purse. And pulled out her Mini Helvetia, snapped two frames.

She had tilted her camera down a bit, for it showed not only both bandit vehicles but also three casualties on the ground and one bandit up and moving. The second shot showed four on the ground and the superdoughnut turned away.

I can't figure an exact time line on this but there must have been at least four seconds from the time she ran out of ammo to the time the giant wheel turned away. With a fast camera it takes about as long to shoot one frame as it does to fire one shot with a semi-automatic slug gun.

So the question is: What did she do with the other two seconds? Just waste them? (177-78)

Upon revisiting the story, I note to my slight dismay the idealized nature of her character; rather like Lizzy Bennet with Mr. Darcy, I wonder at the creature of Heinlein's vivid imagination and the implications of her impossible polish. But the narrative is playful and self-deprecating, and continually conscious of its profound SFicity. In the end, I appreciate the fact that her pedestal, while not as wobbly as my hammock, includes feist and personality; she's perhaps made even less attainable, but at least thereby functions as a confirmation of genre—and is neither distressed damsel nor femme fatale.

This was the first book I intentionally dogeared, the first I was bold enough to underline (though in pencil; belt and suspenders!), and the first that described cats, to my mind, satisfactorily. Indeed, I will likely use it for an intended future project on the depiction of felis domesticus in literature as an example of the potential for delicate treatment of the cat as individual rather than composite cliche. When I crack its spine, I can smell the sultry, almost stifling aroma of dusty oiled cedar walls marinating in second-floor heat—my childhood bedroom—and taste the sticky sweetness of the tiny backyard cherries (as opposed to the huge, pale Queen Annes wrapped around the front of the house).

At the same time, my current and past selves grapple with atmosphereless Luna and the sybaritic Tertius, communities of the distant imagined future in an almost-parallel universe where lifespans are dictated only by accident and there is space enough, and time. So even as this rereading takes/has taken/will forever be taking place at home in Victoria's Fernwood neighbourhood, in another ficton (which concept will be expanded and featured in my next post, I promise), a young(er) girl who feels impossibly old is discovering adult Heinlein for the first time as she nibbles on baby carrots from the family garden.

¹A note on the latter: Heinlein has been accused of misogyny, which accusation was rebutted by Spider Robinson in favour of "Bob" as a champion for women. I find myself toeing the line between these extremes; Heinlein writes some of the most interesting women I have yet to encounter in any sort of literature, but they tend toward the superhuman, such as in the case of Gwen Nowak. His occasional adherence to prescribed gender roles I find myself forgiving when I remember to look at publication dates (and biographical information, as much as I would hate to admit this most of the time) and consider the leaps in sexual politics and gender relations that he does male—wow, Freudian slip—make.

²"My most outlandish tales are the ones most likely to be true—as that is the literal truth. No storyteller has ever been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad Universe" (Time Enough For Love 31, another Heinlein I'll be chatting up in a few posts).

[intermission]

On extinctions.

yyz, yyc, yyj; melancholy elephants

En route back home from a lightning trip to Toronto, I read bits of several books, but finished first Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants, short (primarily) speculative fiction. I can't promote the title short story enough, but I'm not entirely sure why. There's something about the resolution, perhaps, both of the scene and its players, determination in the face of silent desperation, of probable failure leading to sociocultural death, that appeals to me. It insists earnestly that small victories are essential. That changing huge sweeping behaviours happens not once, but continually, gradually. And that, try as you might (and likely should, since people tend not to learn best second-hand), you can't do much of anything entirely alone. (Here, I would like to offer my condolences to Spider and his family for the passing of his beautiful wife, Jeanne, inspiration for The Stardance Project, and offer this gem rather than my own clumsy, awkward words.)

The second story in the anthology, "Antinomy," claims for its title "the word for the sharpest tragedy a human can feel" (45), aligning urgent contradictions with dramatic suffering and remarking on the strangeness of the word's disuse. It seems, though, to modify the anthology's title, describing the melancholy of the elephants—people of the future, caught by the efficacy of their own record-keeping and resource-devouring in an eminently unsustainable downward spiral of literal and figurative consumption.

"No Renewal," originally published even earlier than the collection's 1984 release (ominous?), is rife with tubercular spasms. I read this one in the Calgary airport, sipping on a gin and tonic as I waited for my transfer, and its fixation on "lasts" was troubling. Conforming to Fredric Jameson's description of the role of SF, the story projects itself into a consequential future where the protagonist owns "for all he knows, the last small farm in Nova Scotia" (126). This farm is conceptually isolated, "bordered on three side by vast mined-out clay pits, gaping concentric cavities whose insides were scraped out and eaten long ago, their husk thrown away to rot." In place of the neighbouring farms of his childhood, Douglas has for neighbours the oddly mixed metaphor of "an apartment hive, packed with antlike swarms of people." The story idolizes rural pastorality, yearning for the "sawmill, rushing streams, hundreds of thousands of trees, and acre after acre of pasture and hay and rich farmland" of yore that perished in the fiction when "the petrochemical industry died of thirst" (126–27). Though Robinson often tackles heavy themes, he rarely leaves the reader in despair, preferring generally to somehow turn his stories hopeful. But the hope in this particular excerpt is a bleak one, and the "birthday present" cantankerous aged Douglas can expect is reminiscent in its blessing of young Smeagol's ill-gotten gift; his expiration date's shadow looms ominously with the end of even artificially subsistence agriculture and, particularly in juxtaposition with the next story, "In The Olden Days," cultural heritages.

The interplay of antinomy and the "Melancholy Elephants" fixation on infinity is the key to uniting the stories, I think: "I think it comes down to a kind of innate failure of mathematical intuition, common to most humans. We tend to confuse any sufficiently high number with infinity" (12), and act accordingly:

Well, it takes a lot less than [ten to the eighty-fifth, "the current best-guess for the number of atoms in the universe"] to equal "infinity" in most minds. For millions of years we looked at the ocean and said, "That is infinite. It will accept our garbage and waste forever." We looked at the sky and said, "That is infinite: it will hold an infinite amount of smoke." We like the idea of infinity. A problem with infinity in it is easily solved. How long can you pollute a planet infinitely large? Easy: forever. Stop thinking. (12)

So now what? 25 years later, we're still fixated on the infinite, even though we're running out of all sorts of things, including the hydrogen mined for the kids' balloons at Victoria's World Partnership Walk (and, according to one earnest ten-year-old, the turtles who will eat said balloons if released by his younger brother). While some of the individual stories in this collection refute Robinson's tendency toward hope, the tales fit, one way or another, into an arching narrative of extinctions, of creativity, of ways and forms of life, and to the hopefulness of enlightened sharing. His characters mature through the textual bildungsroman to marital, sexual maturity. By honing and focusing his earlier characters, many of whom have to forced from their self-absorption by the epiphanies in their mini-narratives, to the eminently adult "High Infidelity" and finally the phoenix of "Rubber Soul" as a cultural maturing and rebirth. It is important to the growth of the elephants that they strive for dynamism; even the progressive tendency of the bildungsroman is challenged by the non-sequiturs, stories like "The Chronic Offender" that resist a simplicity of development and the framing narratives of "Melancholy Elephants" and "Antinomy" with their profound anxieties. Extinctions, the stories earnestly confide, are complicated—and unbelievably important.

Today's focus on extinctions inadvertently but quite conveniently segues with the topics of my next posts, Terry Glavin's Waiting for the Macaws and other stories from the age of extinctions and Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Reading these three texts concurrently, especially coming out of Don Gayton, certainly informed my reception of each. Now, how to reconcile these looming extinctions with drinking imported gin suspended in an airport, waiting for my next flight?

Stay tuned.

interlude continued

A quick word on the absentia: I have been houseguest-sitting for the past few days and have not had a chance to do any reading at all. I did, however, cruise the used bookstores of Victoria and the Times Colonist book sale and found a whole bunch of gems. Pocketbook considerably lighter, I am now the proud owner of the following titles, which will hopefully make their way onto this blog in the near future:

From Munro's,
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (w/aigu over the second "u"—and the only "new" book in the bunch)

From Russell Books,
Andrew Dobson, The Green Reader
Terry Glavin, Waiting for the Macaws and Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions (this should be the next post, as I was reading it with Gayton—a stark contrast and fascinating juxtaposition)
Robert Gottlieb, Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change
Stephanie Kaza, Mindfully Green: A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking
Pojar and Mackinnon, Plants of Coastal British Columbia, including Washington, Oregon, and Alaska
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-eye View of the World
Spider Robinson, Melancholy Elephants (which is my favourite of his short stories, so I hope the anthology is as good)

From Snowden's,
C. Miller, Some Parasites of British Sheep, with Some Suggestions for Their Eradication and Control (complete with advertisements for a tantalizing variety of "sheep dips")

From TCBS,
Henry Beard, Zen for Cats
Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods
Deborah Coates, Cat Haiku: The Ancient Art of Japanese Poetry—Cat-Style [sic]
Theresa Corrigan and Stephanie Hoppe, With a Fly's Eye, Whale's Wit, and Woman's Heart: Animals and Women
Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: A Mystical Excursion into the Natural World
Paula Gunn Allen, Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women
Ted Harrison, Children of the Yukon
Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki
Monte Hummel, Endangered Spaces: The Future for Canada's Wilderness
Ken Kiernan, This...is British Columbia (whose second installment I recently found at Fireside Video, which has a fascinating array of gardening texts and romance novels)
Nancy Larrick, Room for Me and a Mountain Lion: Poetry of Open Space
Bruce Mitchell, The Love of Big Cats
Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf
Ian Niall, The New Poacher's Handbook (not sure if this is serious or not...will report back)
Bhikku Nyanasobhano, Landscapes of Wonder: Discovering Buddhist Dhamma in the World Around Us
Reader's Digest, The Bedside Book of Nature
Sierra Club, Ecotactics: The Sierra Club Handbook for Environment Activists
Mrs. Herbert Strang, The Great Book of School Stories for Girls: Play Up!
Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods (nope, didn't already have it...)
Bill Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
- - - ., Weirdos from Another Planet!

Some common themes making their way throughout, certainly. It will be interesting to see where the attention wanders over the course of reading.

In the meantime, let me direct your attention Glavin-wards with this brief, but compelling, excerpt:

The simple premise of this book is that all these extinctions are related. The intent of this book is to explore the relationships among and between all of these extinctions, and one cannot even begin to do that by relying on the prism of environmentalism. As a separate category of thought, environmentalism is of little use in comprehending the scale of extinctions the world is suffering. Extinction is the fate befalling the things Hosea described—the wild and the tamed, the land and everyone that dwelt therein, and the beasts of the field as well as the fowls of heaven. All these extinctions are part of the same phenomenon and properly part of the same conversation. The forces at work in the world are "not well understood," to borrow the vernacular of scientific journals. But they are cultural forces. (Waiting for the Macaws 5)

Thank goodness (which stubbornly tried to typo as "goofness" three times; perhaps a sign, but I feebly resist).

interlude

Not strictly to form (then again, I've always favoured the functional), but there is a new Robert Hass book, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems. His work, including the title poem, has received mixed reviews, but the poetry of Robert Hass will always be among my favourite.

Hass himself is delightfully helpful; while working on Ecodemia, I stumbled across his team-taught course in poetry and the environment, and emailed him to ask for the syllabus and permission to use it on my site. He not only obligingly complied, but encouraged my fledgling idea by suggesting sites like River of Words as good fits for the site I had in mind.

So, thanks again, Dr. Hass. I will be picking up the book this afternoon, and reading it in the woods somewhere so I can come back and write it up. This is going to be fun.

marifield drive, victoria: interwoven wild

We’re digging in the clay, MF chopping away with his shovel and me plunging viciously with my pitchfork, and an enormous, vital nightcrawler springs from the tortured earth. It’s a strange feeling, massacring thousands of shining white bulbs in order to prepare ground for planting—counterintuitive on this first day to the point of visceral shock. When the bulbs pulse and move, scattering in panic at our brutal penetration, I struggle to justify our well-meaning annihilation.

I become rapidly less and less helpful, opting instead to sit crosslegged and pull the stems and roots one by one, rationalizing to my partner and myself that this is more thorough, will prevent the reappearance of these all-too-willing “pests” and their subsequent second holocaust inflicted by our tools. It’s not that slow, methodical murder is exactly better, rather that it feels less wanton, more conscious somehow and connected.

Reading Don Gayton’s Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden on my bus ride after gardening seems to make sense of some of my moral confusion. For a more careful, less eminently subjective, review, stroll on over to Book Addiction. For me, Gayton's methodical simplicity of approach, detail-oriented and focused on the experience of gardening, jives with my slow, mucky preference. He makes me yearn to compost, as an activity rather than an ideology, and wonder again aloud with MF at the regenerative power of severed worms, who, apparently, eat microbes rather than leaves.

I keep wrestling with my conscience as I tear down ivy and ferociously unearth clusters of nondescript bulbs. My continual fall back to the nondescript is encouraging me to pick up a plant identification guide, to engage in "the slow process of recognizing and committing plants to memory" (64); I feel like this indiscriminate late-stage microcosm of a plant- and insect-based holocaust would be alleviated if I took the time to get to know these plants, first. Perhaps herein lies my tendency to revert to meticulous, patient slowness as I pull each "weed" and all of its roots, then replace as much of the soil as I can. MF's approach is much faster—in the amount of time it takes me to clear two metres, he can normally manage five. Gayton, also reverting to language of warfare and conquest, addresses this tendency to guilt thus:

My arsenal for the weed war is pretty basic. I have my hands, the dandelion fork, a scythe and a dutch hoe. Henry David Thoreau mused about this implement while in his garden, wondering what gave him the right to "make invidious distinctions with his hoe," choosing which plants should live, and which should die. I have none of Mr. Thoreau's qualms. (56)

I, on the other hand, certainly do. If not just for the sake of the discriminate displacement of these plants as groups or individuals, then I am certainly concerned for their dependents—the post-World War civilians teeming with life and left with barren, stripped soil to bake in the May sunshine and eventually starve. And yet, this moral dilemma, this continual confrontation with the very real and immediate impact of human aesthetic intervention, is perhaps the most present I have been in [the pithy, short] ages [of the seemingly interminably young].

Speaking of presence, I intend to ask the Victoria Zen Centre's Abbot, Venerable Eshu Martin, about the morality of gardening according to the Rinzai Zen tradition tonight at the weekly Tuesday sit in the University of Victoria's Interfaith Chapel. Perhaps musing silently on the breath and its destructive, essential tendencies will simplify my guilty gardening. More on this later this evening, I suppose—this book and its setting will have to exist twice, I think.

In the meantime, I shall continue to approach this garden with the overwhelming astral application of significance, hyperbolically (and perhaps accurately) posed by Gayton: "one could even imagine a system of astrology based on trees" (78), an arbourology that distills and elevates. Though certainly a problematically anthropocentric approach to the immediacy of non-human nature, perhaps this quasi-neopagan imposition would indeed provide another kind of lens, one intensely focused on the role of immediacy in a grander sense of the moment.

shepherd books, meeting interwoven wild

Purchasing Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden was, well, kind of wild, in an appropriated French saying sort of way.

I wandered into Shepherd Books for what I thought was the first time, and gave it the new-old-bookstore-once-over, careful to reign in my interest in the hopes of avoiding the over-zealous sales pitch—actually, this pitch applies to all manner of sales establishments; I just have more self-control in others—while paradoxically scrutinizing the shelves for the placement, division, and density of the environmental literature and science fiction, and was pleased to discover that though the SF wasn't immediately visible, the nature and travel writing was. Indeed, they took up the middle display, shiny utopian scenes of waterfalls and foreign countries juxtaposed against the post-1984 Carsonian pronouncements. I browsed idly through some of the authors and titles, just to get a sense of who was waiting patiently there and how the screening process at this particular location played out. I was late for a picnic at Beacon Hill Park, whose website is ironically utilitarian and decidedly unattractive (and who is pictured in the margin photos of this blog, actually), and had just stopped in to make good my longtime resolution to take a peek inside.

To my further delight, as I approached the shelved environmental creative nonfiction, I noticed that not only did the section on environmental literature spread out to the surrounding walls, but that books lay three deep in some places. One place in particular, for no immediately apparent reason, caught my eye. Compelled, I shifted through the two books ahead of it to pull out the aforementioned loose ecologist's gardening text.

I was already somewhat familiar with Don Gayton, and this text in particular, as he had come to English 478: A History of Nature Writing (syllabus hosted on Ecodemia) to chat about his latest work and its role among authors such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Luther Standing Bear, and John Vaillant. His presentation was quite engaging, perhaps especially to those in the class from the sciences, perhaps to those from the arts, for both as examples of the extensions of their roles.

What was particularly strange about finding his book, though, was that I knew it was going to be there. Not in the store, not in the section—remember, I had never been there—but in that particular location, behind the two nameless books in front, on the middling shelf against the wall. I had already bought this book from this place with the intention of reading it, and I couldn't refuse.

It was pondering this already-seen on my way to the park, the precision of location, the clarity of detail, that inspired the project as it stands now.

Thanks, subconscious.

lifelabs, 1641 hillside avenue: going away to think

I'm going to start in an unlikely wood—and not the hundred-acre variety, either—LifeLabs in the Lansdowne Professional Centre. Here, I was waiting for some lab results to be processed and reading Scott Slovic's Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. It was a strange day, one in which absolutely every single out-of-house interaction went awkwardly awry.

After (questionably) helping a friend to move his couch into my Fernwood basement suite for active summer storage by opening the door just quickly enough to permit standing in the way, I was offered a ride down to the lab. Protesting politely against infringing on the driver—friend of my friend and still practically a stranger—was to no avail whatsoever. Instead, I managed to hopelessly confuse the poor girl and render myself entirely inarticulate, mumbling incoherent syllables of uncommunicable self-recrimination. Her look of mute concern at my tongue-twisted flailing served only to finally silence me as, practically fuscia, I climbed into the backseat and buckled my belt. So far, I was off to a good start.

After arriving at the lab, I was quickly prepared for my test and then sent to sit in the waiting room for half an hour. Having been warned about the wait the first two times I attempted to take this test, I brought Slovic with me to delve into his notions of bioregionalism, smugly imagining my composed inner monologue as evidence of staying home to think.

Slovic addresses bioregionalism, discussing the apparently inherent contradiction of ecocritics preaching ecological sustainability and the importance of the local by travelling all around the continent to present on these issues. He describes the ecocritical scholar's relationship to literary and inspirational "home" in response to Wendell Berry's admonition to stay there, claiming physical regionalism as "the quandary, the anxiety, of the place-conscious scholar. Should we wish to sustain our species on this planet, we must learn to live more lightly—to use fewer resources and trample less aggressively on this surprisingly delicate globe" (15). Slovic claims that "Berry pricks my conscience and leads me to consider the virtues of my travelling life and the possible virtues of a more sedentary, home-rooted life." But what is more interesting to me is how Slovic chooses to deal with this ethical confrontation, deciding

to take the poem as a prompt and point of departure for such meditations, not as an absolute statement of prohibition....The point is not to push everyone into a sudden immobility, but to nudge those of us who travel frequently to do so more mindfully, with more awareness of the costs of such a life to ourselves and to the planet.

This observation of the importance of mindfulness, too, strikes a chord with my own interpretation of the role of ecocriticism more broadly. In a world necessarily concerned with and impacted by the concrete, physical realities of uneven population and resource distribution; air, water, land, sound, and aesthetic pollution; and in- and out-fighting between those working to suggest alternative actions and modes of consumption, it seems essential that we take the time to sit and think, think about what imaginings and their side effects brought us to where we are and are continuing to propel us where we seem to be going, think about how some of these imaginings might be ir- and reconciliable, and to think about how they might together reimagine sustainability that works and lasts, is dynamic and fluidly evolves to transcend confrontation in favour of interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate every aspect of our societal imagination.

Whew. An eyeful, certainly. This hopelessly overwhelming series of phrases and clauses is of course a selectively reduced and incomplete assessment—it only just barely begins to olfactorially graze the edge of a single lupine on an immense mountainside shrouded in the potential of its nigh-spherical resting place—but we've got to start somewhere. Why not here, reading Slovic in the LifeLabs waiting room?

My technician, who was moving to Nanaimo and whom I had seen weekly in the fall for INR tests, directed me to room three.

"I've never been in this room before!" I said brightly, hoping to mitigate some of the unhappy patients she had received before me.

"Oh, my, I'm going to miss you, too!" she rejoined, much to my confusion. Baffled, I struggled to sort out how her answer applied. "But maybe you'll come and see me in Nanaimo, someday," she consoled me, and I gave up trying to think of a reconciling or self-explanatory response and smiled.

Well, one missed connection at a time, I suppose. Craigslist has it figured out; we need to start facilitating conversations, any way we can. And any time I start to feel like home has become too predictable, it kindly offers non-sequiturs to remind me that communication gets scrambled as soon as I step outside my door. Plus, I went all the way from the familiar waiting room to room three, unfamiliar in its own right, and then to an unintentionally alienated Nanaimo. There's plenty of work to do, literary studies, in reading, writing, re-reading, and re-writing our societies, one neighbourhood at a time.

the project

Though "a very good place to start," I find the very beginning is often redefined by its conclusion, so this post will likely grow and change as much as the rest of the blog itself. For now, introductions: I'm a brand new University of Victoria "alumnus," prepared with my shining, as-yet nonexistent English B.A., and it's summer. In the past, I've had classes to keep me reading and focused through the summers, and preparation for the following semester was enforcedly harried and short.

This, year, though, I'm moving to Calgary to start my M.A. in English, and I've got a lot to read before I get there. Further, I've been in Victoria for four years and seen not much more of Vancouver Island than the Victoria Zen Centre's Zendo in Sooke, B.C. and the overwhelming array of fabulous used book stores in Sidney, B.C. But there's a lot more of the island to explore—indeed, even in Victoria there are places like my front yard which, until the last week or so, I had spent no time in.

Now, I propose rectifying this situation (which is quite at odds with someone whose claimed academic interest in ecocriticism and regional studies implies a larger interest in the environments of regions physically and as written) by using sustainable transportation methods to get to local places I have and haven't been and read environmental literature and nonfiction there. Rather than reviews, I will post reflections, inspired by as-yet unsolidified aspects of these experiences. Whether I'm writing about the literature, the spaces, the literature in these spaces, or the trips to and from, I'll at least be confronting ecocriticism's role in the environment.

Fellow students and non-academics alike are always a bit stymied by the concept of ecocriticism when I mention it in passing. One memorable response stumped me (pun not originally intended): "What, do you just hate trees or something? Point out all their flaws?" It stumped me because, contrary to my initial reaction, I realized that this assumption wasn't entirely wrong—I spend a fair amount of my time criticizing the way trees are represented, and flowers, oceans and rivers, non-human and human animals. I do point out their flaws, insofar as I try to identify the potentially environmentally hazardous assumptions contained in their descriptions. I read to find how these assumptions are produced and reproduced in the hopes of eventually identifying ways in which they can be changed so that sustainability becomes, problematic punned cliche aside, second nature. Scott Slovic characterizes the role of ecocriticism as "contextualization and synthesis" (Going Away to Think 34). He writes of his experience hiking and writing with nature writer Rick Bass that he "stood back and watched Rick watch the world." I like this characterization. For this project, I'll watch Scott watch Rick watch the world, and try to watch Naomi watching Scott watching Rick watch the world around my home.

Instead of going away to think, I'll stick around here and read.