Jim Crace's Harvest is a tight novel revolving around the enclosure of common lands in pre-Industrial Britain and the societal upheaval that follows.
Now nothing gets me more excited than a yarn about ye olde historic tymes, especially British ones, but I have to say that Harvest did a great job of not seeming like a historical novel, with ripped bodices and luscious locks and, I don't know, jousting sticks or whatever. And it wasn't boring. And? What? Why can't I be honest? That's just what I feel.
And it's true, even though the setting seems esoteric — or at least it was to me; perhaps I was just zoning out during some British history class I never took — it's not overly historical, at least any more than Absalom, Absalom! or Beloved or some such.
Part of what really pulls you in is the simple formula — take conflict (societal upheaval), add personal conflict (everything that happens in the book) and round out with yet more conflict (an all-out final conflagration). And the poor subsistence farmers don't have any bodices to speak of, but they do "spend" and "disburse" themselves in an with one another: "Lying on her back with me on top, her creamy stomach sways and frowns like a shaken posset."
The final parts of Harvest are as great as they come. [Insert spoiler alert here.] As society as the characters know it is crumbling and falling away, the villagers scattered to some other village, or perhaps a city, the main character is left behind to tend to the burning remnants of the manor. He's taken a hallucinogenic mushroom and believes the arsonists have made breakfast and packed his bags for him — it's a wonderful image: decent society as one big drug trip; look at this chaos and try to believe that everyone isn't just one step away from burning the whole place down. It reminds me of something my Anthropology 101 professor said about culture being a "scam." I only half understood what he meant by this. He also taught the same class at the community college for a fraction of the tuition. (In retrospect, it's possible he was cribbing from Terence McKenna. I only now learned who Terence McKenna was.)
[Now I will proceed to make a straw man out of someone or something.]
The other thing I took away from Harvest is that it was refreshing to read a real goddamn story for a change. The more time you spend with normal goddamn stories, the more cheesed off you get with this glut of infantilized authors writing infantilized books about infantilizing subjects. Is it a US versus UK thing? Is it the fault of the Safran-Anderson Industrial Complex? (By the way, what did Steely Dan think of Moonrise Kingdom? I actually never saw it.)
Nothing against 25-year-olds, but would a 25-year-old do more than five and dime the beginning and end of the manuscript like Harvest? Or is it too, I don't know, middle-aged? What's the enclosure act about anyway? The size of stamps or something? And what's a letter anyway?
[Now I will backtrack slightly from the preceding.]
Look, clearly, not everything is ___________'s fault. I don't mean to complain. I'm very pleased and inspired by vintage A-line dresses and ukeleles. But sometimes it seems like we lost our way. We used to make shit in this country, write shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket and grimace knowingly when we remove our hand and find that in it is a copy of Miranda July's latest book, It Chooses You.
Posted: January 15th, 2014 | Author: Scott | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: Book Club, I Think I Actually Used The Word "Conflagration" Correctly!, The Joy Of Posset, Unmitigated Sniping
I'm pretty sure John McPhee can make any topic interesting.
Which is to say, you might balk at reading a 150-page profile of two tennis players interspersed with a recap of what seems like virtually every point of their four-set match — unless John McPhee wrote it, in which case you will be completely engrossed in it.
It helps that one of the players profiled is Arthur Ashe, who you know has to have an interesting story. And it also helps that it covers an interesting point in competitive tennis history when amateurs and professionals played together in "open" tournaments (i.e., the "US Open"). And it helps that it takes place during an interesting time in U.S. history — 1968, when . . . aw, hell, you know.
All that said, you probably still wouldn't want to read Levels of the Game. And that'd be a mistake and which is why book club is a good idea when it gets you to read stuff you wouldn't normally read.
I will say that I assumed it'd probably be good but that's only because we'd read The Pine Barrens, which was another book about a topic — the "backwater" part of Southern New Jersey where squat pine trees grow — that you thought you'd never be interested in but which actually was interesting.
So while Levels is about tennis, it's not so much that it's about "more" than tennis — too many documentaries and nonfiction pieces seem to use "it's more than" as a cheap ploy to pull you in: Angle bracket literature (">"). Rather it — like all good nonfiction, I suppose — helps you appreciate the game that much more — on a, er, different level, I suppose.
There is something special about the dramatic irony of the arc of Ashe's life, but the pieces that Levels compiles were written contemporaneously, while Ashe was still a young amateur player, and obviously long before his AIDS diagnosis. But that just gives the book some historical significance; it's still interesting in an of itself.
It's interesting to read how Ashe and Clark Graebner, Ashe's opponent profiled in Levels, lived so modestly as amateur players. Both had other jobs, for one. Also interesting was how much Ashe read — you just don't see tennis stars today as that well read or intellectual — most athletes in general come off like savants or machines who work on their game to the exclusion of anything else in the world. McPhee makes a comment along the lines of that although Ashe reads a lot he's not intellectual; today, anyone who reads anything at all is probably "intellectual"; it's crazy to think that there was a time in the U.S. when people actually read.
Obviously — at least I think it's supposed to be obvious — the race part is an important part of the book. Ashe's biography is important in that respect, and McPhee certainly addresses it, first subtly and then more directly toward the end of the book. So it's also interesting how close the two competitors are if not in cultural background then at least in competitive background, and how for each of the personalities the game seems to take over. Hard to express, but in the side-by-side biographical sketch of the two players there's something less "other" seeming about the two men when they're sketched out side by side. It's an interesting take, and given what was happening across the country in 1968, it could be seen as a little provocative: The through line for both players is an intense work ethic, and although McPhee shows differences, ultimately there seems less different about the two men.
Even if you don't see it that way — and to be fair, the entire book has example after example of the two players' divergent styles and backgrounds — you can't help but read Levels and feel like the U.S. is somehow less cohesive than in the 1960s, which is both fascinating and kind of frightening.
Posted: January 14th, 2014 | Author: Scott | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: Book Club, Tennis
I think everyone has at least two minutes at a cocktail party. Which is to say, there's a brief grace period when someone asks "And what do you do?" and you go on explaining how you oversee document maintenance for a department in the [insert city here] office of a multi-national firm, and then that person nods and asks some pertinent followup question, which you answer thoughtfully yet vaguely. This repeats until the other party runs out of questions, but I think everyone on the planet gets about two minutes at least. It doesn't have to be a full-on cocktail party, either. It could be a kegger. Or even some sort of opening event with free cheese and white-or-red wine.
Those of us fortunate enough to have a really interesting resume or life experience can hold court much longer than two minutes: Maybe seven, eight, even 14 minutes, until a drink is empty and one's palm has long since cut waterlogged napkins into pulpy cookies, or given up entirely and bunched them up between the ring and pinky finger. Pulpy masses of napkin sticking to palms is a terrible image. Suffice it to say, which is to say, no one stands around forever just soaking up war stories, anecdotes or off-the-record tales.
Which is also to say, there's a genre of book where academics make a case for how whatever it is he or she studies applies in ways large and small to most of our lives — hopefully large, but even small will do. It's not Team of Rivals or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, because that comes much, much later. It's more like a paperback supervised parole in, or back in, the real world.
Not that that's a bad thing — people in academia and those in the outside world should know what each other does for a living. It can't ever hurt to be better able to explain a theoretical concept, even if it gives you a headache. Your poor mother deserves to know what your weird postdoctoral advisor has you cooped up for all winter break. I think all academics should be required to write one piece of popular history, or a Nova special, or blow up balloons or make bubbles at a children's birthday party. Society would be the richer for it.
Hal Herzog's Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals is like blowing bubbles a children's birthday party. Large, luxurious, freeflowing, earnest bubbles made from a wand unlike any you've seen. Which is to say, Herzog is really trying to captivate you with anthrozoological issues. "Anthrozoology," simply put, is the study of how animals and humans interact.
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat has a higher bar to overcome in part because no one has really heard of anthrozoology. There are no real departments of anthrozoology; an anthrozoologist seems sort of like a cross between a psychologist and an anthropologist, though Herzog notes that some veterinarians, historians and sociologists count themselves as anthrozoologists.
Some was one of our book club choices because the person who suggested it noted, in part, how children seem hardwired to love animals. That's part of Some, for sure, but only a tiny part (maybe because no one can really explain it?). The book brings up lots of issues in anthrozoology, and is a great primer for the field itself, but in the end it seems that so many of the issues that are brought up are simply noted, and then you move on to another one. Yes, there's something really interesting about a mouse research lab with a rodent problem, and it does seem to be a perfect symbol of humanity's schizophrenic relationship with other species, but I'm not sure where it goes from there. I'm thinking about the next drink I want to get, but I haven't walked away just yet. And that part of the book does get into the issues of using mice in research, and there are some good things to know — a lab mouse is not considered an animal for the purposes of the federal Animal Welfare Act; the research animals rights activists use to show that animals feel pain was performed in experiments where animals felt pain; weird! But this, and a lot of the book are just issues and topics brought up. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it does make it difficult to remember a lot of the anecdotes and topics.
Something I did remember was the part about vegetarians who own cats: If you oppose killing animals for moral reasons (i.e., you're not a Bill Clinton vegan) then you shouldn't own a cat on the grounds that cat food is all animal based — not to mention that the quality of animal in pet food is probably some of the worst industrially farmed shit around. I never put that together. (PETA argues you can have a vegan pet; it seems better not to have one at all, or maybe a manatee or elephant instead.)
All told, Some We Eat is a good book. That said, when unraveling the conundrum of why we love some, hate some and eat some the conclusion seems a little wanting: "What the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with the animals in our lives — the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat — are, likewise, more complicated than we thought."
Complicated? That's it? What is this, Avril Lavigne? I need closure! Simple answers! Grand unifying theories! HuffPo pieces! Cable news stories! Instant Indices! Or at least another scotch and soda — can I get you something at the bar?
Posted: January 14th, 2014 | Author: Scott | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: Anthrozoology, Blowing Bubbles, Book Club, The Philosophy Of Avril Lavigne, The Problem With Cats
