A Solstice Observance

Tags

hogfather, mythology, Newgrange, observances, still life, Stonehenge, wheel of the year, winter, winter solstice

Decades ago now, when I’d left behind the monotheism I was (somewhat nominally) raised in, I started a multiyear journey knocking around in various forms of paganism as they occur in the U.S.—New England at first, and then the Pacific Northwest. These were, by and large, either Wicca or Wicca-derived, which is to say that they draw most of their inspiration and practice from European antecedents, whatever appropriations from elsewhere have occurred along the way. Of key importance in all of them were solstices and equinoxes, moments in the relationship between planet and sun in the former’s revolution around the latter that marked points of extremity.

Stonehenge, famously aligned with the solstices. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

My understanding of and association with these things was largely symbolic, but one of the things about living in the Pacific Northwest (as in many of the places where deep myths around these celestial occurrences originate) is that you really can’t help but notice the seasons. Notice them, at least, even if it’s only to observe that it’s rained for seven days straight, or the sun has set and it’s not even 5 pm yet, or it seems like it takes more coffee to get through the day than it did six months ago. Point being, whatever symbolic or spiritual significance is ascribed to them, these are concrete, observable astronomical phenomena. “Axial tilt is the reason for the season,” as the joke goes. It also happens to be literally true.

We frequently talk about aetiological myths in derogatory ways, highlighting the ignorance of the people who came up with them. I’ve always found this a little unfair, not least because in the present days when we presumably know more, you’ll still find people who come up with the most bizarre, irrational explanations for things that seem designed more to fit their own assumptions than any clear-eyed observation. But also, the deeper one delves into myth, the more apparent it is that the assumption that even aetiologies are meant to be taken literally causes us to miss a great deal of their power, and how mythologies function socially, culturally, and psychologically.

Death’s speech in Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather about justice, mercy, and other important concept arising out of human imagination might be relevant here.

Point being, while the Wiccan Wheel of the Year is cobbled together from several disparate sources, in the time and place that I live I’ve come to find it a useful and surprisingly accurate model for marking the seasons. While current convention in America is to consider the winter solstice as the start of winter, the Wiccan convention of the cross-quarter days sets a seasonal transition right around Halloween. That’s always made more sense to me anyway, especially where I live now, and all the stuff about thinning veils and honoring the dead and the dwindling season and the importance of hospitality seems to say: now it’s wintertime. Outdoors reflects this, with the deciduous trees losing their leaves, the temperatures dropping as the hours of daylight lessen, the birds that I see and hear changing as seasonal migrations begin, and squirrels hurrying at frantic pace to stow forage for the winter. Halloween and Yule mark two points of a liminal time when it’s dark and cold, and it takes extra effort to keep the lights on and ourselves and each other nourished. At a solstice ritual I attended this year the gathering was treated to an appearance of the Mari Lwyd, the Welsh Christmas horse. This is no jolly figure, but a reminder of the dangers of privation and the importance of community. Mythical figures map back to real things in the real world—just not always in the way we think.

Chepstow Mari Lwyd, come to drink all of your beer. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This week I started reading Bernd Heinrich’s Winter World as part of my tracking studies. The book’s not just about wildlife activity in winter landscapes, but about what’s going on with them physiologically as the weather gets colder and resources scarcer. Everyone knows that animals hibernate—but what that means is something far more remarkable than, I think, is commonly understood. We can go out into snowy weather and marvel at how the world seems to be sleeping; so much is observable by stepping out the door, or even looking out the window. But there’s a lot more going on in that landscape than meets the eye, from the physics of freezing water to the mechanics of torpor to the effects of changing durations of daylight on circadian clocks. We can’t perceive all of that in an instant, but we can toss up models and stories that feed our intuitive sensations of seasonal change.

Those things affect us, humans, as well, even as I’m sitting in a well-lit dining room typing this on a laptop’s bright screen, while outside the day has one second more of daylight than yesterday. We respond by putting up lights, making giant pots of soup, snuggling under blankets, and doing other things to maintain the bubbles of warmth around ourselves. We, maybe, think about the isolation of previous years, about how our fallow season of rest and ingathering is just when microscopic pathogens that exploit our sociability and need to be with one another tend to thrive. There, again, much is going on that we can’t see, or see only indirectly. Stepping outside at this time of year can be stepping into a silence akin to early in the pandemic, when one day I heard a red-tailed hawk call from further away than I ever had in the city, because the constant traffic on the freeway below my house had been silenced. It feels as though the entire world has gone to sleep.

Winter solstice, Fairbanks, Alaska, 2012. Photo by me.

But it hasn’t. While it’s cold and dark up here, in the Southern Hemisphere it’s the summer solstice; close to the equator, meanwhile, these seasonal extremes are far less pronounced (and those of the Pacific Northwest are mild compared to, say, Alaska, or Finland, or Siberia). These times of rest are local; a time to reconnect with what is near at hand and close to home.

I read something recently, a response to the question of how someone can celebrate the season—or one of the holidays that occur during the season—when there’s so much strife and horror and death in the world. I’d say that that question feels particularly pertinent this year, except that I honestly can’t recall a year that it wasn’t. Anyway, the response said something like this: instead of celebrating, I observe. I like that, not least because all those wintertime legends and stories, however fantastical, were born out of observation.

This morning, I woke up and observed that the daylight had come again.

Sunlight entering the chamber at Newgrange, Ireland, around the winter solstice. Source: IrishCentral.com.

Reading Tobias Buckell’s A Stranger in the Citadel

Tags

A Stranger in the Citadel, book reviews, Fahrenheit 451, librarianship, libraries, Ray Bradbury, Tobias Buckell

Though A Stranger in the Citadel begins on familiar ground, Buckell plants hints early on to indicate that this books-are-illegal, reading-is-punishable-by-death dystopia isn’t going to go the way the reader most likely expects. That’s a good thing; fresh takes on this particular trope are thin on the ground, even as it unfolds (again) in real life.

As a former librarian I felt especially chilled by the tagline on the front cover, a commandment that emerges at key points in the novel’s unfolding crisis: You shall not suffer a librarian to live. That’s particularly unnerving right now, when libraries are once again a culture-war battleground, and librarians are being accused of prurience by the kinds of people who don’t believe in reading the books they object to before objecting to them.

 We’ve been here before, both in fiction and in real life, and it’s not much of a spoiler to observe that the early parts of this story unfold in ways that genre has led us to expect: Lilith, our protagonist, privileged daughter of the ruler of a walled city where literacy is a crime, has first her worldview and then her world shattered by the arrival of a librarian from outside the walls. The librarian, Ishmael, is unsurprised by the unwelcome he receives, but he is one of those for whom his mission matters more than his life. So far, so good, and it’s testimony to Buckell’s skill as a storyteller that this continues to be interesting even if you assume you know where it’s going. There are mysteries: why is literacy not only a mortal sin, but its purveyors automatically condemned to death? Why is this the nature of the bargain by which humanity receives all it needs from the cornucopias that not only feed every city, but provide for every other material need? Why are muskets specifically the weapons the Citadels defenders use, and against what threat? Why, when things fall apart as they inevitably must, does betrayal occur from the quarters that it does?

Much of Lilith’s story lies in answering these questions, though she doesn’t realize it at first. We as readers might sympathize with her desire to restore what she knows to be normal, especially after the last three to four years, but we know before she does that this is a fool’s errand. She’s already been exiled from the Garden, but hasn’t yet found the fruit of knowledge—of good and evil, or of anything else. Indeed, it is her ignorance that leads to her exile, as much as her curiosity, for she has entirely misapprehended the nature of her world and the nature of her own place in it. This is a danger of illiteracy: when you only know one story, to contemplate that others might exist becomes a difficult thought indeed.

A Stranger in the Citadel will remind of Fahrenheit 451, which is deliberate in the sense that the latter was one of Buckell’s inspirations. He works through an element of Fahrenheit 451 that people often miss:  the outlawing of books is not something imposed from above by some authoritarian force, at least not at first, but the result of popular demand. The people of Ninetha and the other cities of A Stranger in the Citadel are at least deriving material benefit from the deal. And they have not sacrificed stories: readers will recognize tales told by Ninetha’s griots that are derived from books that we have read. In fact, this is a world with a robust oral tradition, and it seems at first that Buckell is setting literacy and orality in opposition. What he’s actually doing is a lot more interesting; societies with strong oral traditions can and do maintain impressive integrity of their texts, because remembering these texts is a social act. This ultimately makes Lilith more receptive to books and the idea of using books to preserve knowledge than she might otherwise be.

A Stranger in the Citadel does end rather abruptly; I don’t know whether Buckell intends a sequel. There’s certainly enough left open at the book’s end for one, but it’s also not unsatisfactory for the story to wrap where it does. While he never fully explains how the world which is ultimately revealed came about—that could be something for a sequel, if there ever is one—in our present-day situation it’s all too easy to see how we might get from here to there. On the other hand, the future posited in A Stranger in the Citadel is so remote that it’s hard to read it as any sort of caution, even if the librarians in that future have very similar jobs to today. “Knowledge, and the verification of that knowledge, and the classification of that knowledge,” Ishmael says, and it is gratifying as one who used to make my paycheck doing just that to read those words. In the almost two decades that I did that work, it often felt as though few outside the profession understood what we did or why it mattered. For all the remote strangeness of its setting, A Stranger in the Citadel gets that right.

Reading Tananative Due’s The Reformatory

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book reviews, Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

I’m going to start by confessing that I don’t read horror all that often. No shade on the genre, but I got nightmares complete with sleep paralysis after I read The Shining, and the Alien movies disturbed my dreams for weeks. A story’s got to be really good for me to subject myself to the possibility of these kinds of replays. It says something, therefore, that Tananarive Due’s latest novel came to my attention anyway. I’d been hearing about her for some years (and in fact met her very briefly over twenty years ago, which I would not at all expect her to remember) but I have so many books to read already, am I really going to add another one in a genre that I haven’t even read enough of to know whether I like?

The answer is yes, obviously, or I wouldn’t be writing this. And, I’m glad I did.

A trope that I’ll pretty much always show up for is the restless dead, regardless of genre. If ever a country were haunted, America is: colonization, slavery, and war have seen to that. One could reasonably argue that anywhere humans live is subject to the same, but so much of America’s history of these things is so recent that we’re only a few generations out—and really, not even that—from atrocity. The most affecting stories Due has shared from her book tour are of conversations with people who were sent to the reformatory in which her novel is set—one of them quite recently. To paraphrase William Faulkner, the past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.

I was lucky enough to hear Due interviewed by Nisi Shawl, a Seattle writer whose work I’ve long admired. During the interview, she talked about why she had chosen to write this story as fiction rather than as memoir (though she’s done that, too: the book Freedom in the Family covers her mother’s work as a civil rights activist). There’s a way fiction has of telling the truth, even when it’s not literal. Events at the Gracetown School for Boys might not have unfolded exactly as related in The Reformatory; my own personal jury on ghosts is still decidedly deliberating. But it’s easy to imagine that events like those related in the novel took place, and the framing that Due chooses to tell this story provides the reader a means to grapple with some truly disturbing stuff. (Something else she mentioned in that interview: as bad as what the living humans do to each other in this novel, real history is worse. There are monsters in this story, and most of them aren’t ghosts.)

I’m not a big fan of insisting that everything has to be useful, but one of the benefits of fiction is as a vehicle for grappling with difficult, even terrible things. In America right now there are an awful lot of people who would prefer it if we didn’t grapple with the difficult, terrible parts of our history as a nation. But a country that can’t bear to confront its own history is a country with a fatal weakness in its collective character. If reading actual history is too much, well, maybe a fictional story will provide a more accessible avenue.

That’s not the best reason to read The Reformatory, though. The best reason is that it’s a damn good book. Here’s the premise: in June 1950, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys. This is a six-month sentence for the crime of kicking the son of the wealthiest landowner in the area. The son is white; Robbie is Black. Everything that follows unfolds from these circumstances, which are anything but circumstantial. Due has a deft hand with characterization and setting; her scenes are a master class in conveying tension—not just the dramatic tension of the scene, but the social tensions at play in this setting and among these characters. Here, even the best-meaning people have, or believe they have, limited power to change the circumstances before them that they know are terrible; the agents of a system enact that system in racist ways without ever believing themselves to be racist; such systems twist and victimize everyone involved. The story’s ghosts, when they show up, highlight and accentuate the rules of this story and its world that its author has already established.

Despite all of this, The Reformatory does not read as didactic. It is, in the end, about a family trying to stay together against impossible odds, and the strength of community, and the importance of recognizing evil when we see it. It’s been getting accolades since the day it was published, and deservedly so: this is the work of a master of craft and story, and now I’ve got to go back and read everything else she’s published.

It Matters That It’s not a Baby Peacock

Tags

ai, ruminations, shifting baseline syndrome

There’s this image that keeps going around on social media. If you’re on Facebook you’ve almost certainly seen it: a big-eyed, sad-looking baby bird with bright blue and gold plumage and weird-looking feet. This, per the accompanying text, is a baby peacock:

Uncanny valley, party of one…

Except it’s not. It’s not a baby bird at all.

The thing about baby birds is that they’re unobtrusive. When much of the rest of Nature is trying to eat you, and you don’t have any means of defending yourself, one way to survive is to just not be noticeable. It’s a strategy common to a lot of baby animals, from birds to deer.

But let’s say you don’t know that. Going by Google search results these days, looking up a baby peacock gets you either the image I posted above, or something that looks like it belongs in a backyard chicken hutch. (The latter is what they really look like, in case you’re wondering.) There’s a lot going on here, from the enshittification of online search to people sharing things with inaccurate labeling or descriptions (something that predates AI, and for that matter the Internet) to the lack of discernment concerning the real and the fake, but what troubles me the most about things like this is the lack of a common frame of reference that includes the world beyond our screens.

Though I’d seen the ostensible baby peacock image before, it happened to resurface in my Facebook feed, side by side with a photo of an actual baby peacock, the day after I’d gone camping in a friend’s patch of forest alongside a river. One of the reasons I like to get up early is that the time around dawn and early morning are prime time for seeing wildlife. There were two families of mergansers hanging out on the river during the time I was there, the babies at different stages of development. One family, the babies were quite small, and watching their mother helping them navigate the boulders and currents was like watching a put-upon kindergarten teacher trying to herd her class. The other, the juveniles were almost as big as their mother, and glided after her in an orderly line as they made their way up and downstream. I’d only ever seen adult mergansers before, so getting to watch two families for a few mornings in a row felt like a treat.

If it sounds like I’m valuing real, if rather unremarkable, birds over an AI-generated piece of digital art, well, yes, I am. If it sounds like part of that value judgment is that the mergansers really exist and the baby peacocks as represented in that digital image do not, well, yes again. But while I have my issues with AI art—most of it’s really bad, and I wonder why the authors of the software are so often trying so hard to get it to make things that can pass for human creations, and I remain unconvinced that it’s art at all—that’s not what troubles me the most here.

It’s that so many of the people who view and reshare the image don’t know that it’s not representing what it claims to; and, when this is pointed out to them, they don’t care. It’s cute, after all, and how often is the average person going to need to know what a baby peacock looks like anyway?

Okay, sure. The chances of most of us meeting a peacock, baby or otherwise, are pretty slim, though feral peafowl are distributed increasingly widely across the United States and in some areas have earned the dreaded moniker of pest. (I have opinions about that designation.) But crows, for example, are common across the globe, despite which a substantial chunk of the Internet believes that baby crows look like this:

Not a baby crow. Google will tell you that it is, though.

It’s not so much that seeing real baby crows is all that simple, especially if you don’t really know anything about them. It’s the taking for granted that an image represents something real because it’s cute, and because we want it to, and because we don’t have the necessary knowledge to recognize that it’s not what it claims to be.

That last part is what troubles me the most. A few years ago I encountered this term: “shifting baseline syndrome.” There are a few different ways to look at this, but one thing it refers to is the human propensity to compare our perception of our current environment to one that was established earlier in our lives, typically in childhood. That established earlier perception is our baseline. But there are two problems: one, childhood memory is pretty hazy for most of us, such that we might not recognize our current environment as impoverished by comparison; and two, that baseline is itself impoverished in comparison to a past from before we existed. The term was first coined to describe generational shift in fisheries, so it’s only appropriate to show an example involving fish:

Comparative images of fish caught in the Florida Keys from 1956 to 1987, showing reduction in size over time. From research by Dr. Loren McClenachan.

This misapprehension of the natural world isn’t new. It’s a well known and much-lamented feature of modern life, and there are entire schools and subcultures out there dedicated to repairing it (I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in one of them). The AI-generated baby peacock is more of a symptom than a cause; we believe in it and share it because we don’t know about baby birds, and into that gap comes something cute and recognizable enough to seem plausible. But I also think that fakes like this can make the problem worse by convincing us that this is what the things they purport to depict are supposed to look like. A lot of nature isn’t particularly cute or charismatic at first glance. It’s still part of the world we live in, a world from which we aren’t really separate and on which we have massive, catastrophic effects, mostly without being conscious of it.

It’s not that I object to fanciful images in and of themselves; much of the art in my house is of imaginary things. But none of that art purports to depict something that you can go out the door and find in the world somewhere. If the baby peacock was being passed around as a baby flumperstinker, I’d still think it was lousy art, I still wouldn’t be a fan of AI art generally.

I just happen to think that knowing how things really are is important, and being able to inform ourselves about things we haven’t directly witnessed is important, and even the most innocuous-appearing image can fool us into not recognizing the real thing when we see it.

And that has dangers far beyond birdwatching.

The Eternal Conflict. See: Conflict, eternal

Tags

book bannings, censorship, libraries, ruminations

Early in the latest round of the library culture wars, there was a reaction I kept seeing from people who were ostensibly on my side of the argument: why are these parents so concerned about what’s in the library when there’s a whole Internet full of undesirable material they can complain about? Running a close second was this one: if there’s a book they won’t let you get from the library, I’ll mail you a copy of your own!

Understand, these are people who are supposedly in favor of libraries and librarians. They have also missed the point.

If you’re of a certain age and grew up in America, you probably remember the movie version of The Music Man: the one with Robert Preston as Harold Hill, and Shirley Jones as Marian. The character of Marian, and especially Jones’s depiction, informed a lot of people’s canonical idea of what a librarian is: stuffy, stuck-up, and a stickler for the rules. This is largely, I think, because Marian initially isn’t swayed by Harold’s charms (and good for her, since Harold is a con artist), but let’s also not forget that several prominent women in the town dislike her for exposing their children to “dirty books” (there’s an extended joke about Balzac that I totally didn’t get as a kid). There’s a larger theme in The Music Man about corruption and influence that the tension between Marian and her neighbors plays into.

I mention this because this is very much a tension that exists in American public libraries generally; the character of Marian wouldn’t work if she was just a piano teacher, or if she worked in a candy shop. (Maybe if it sold dime novels.) But dime novels and candy cost money; the way that you avoid their influence is by not buying them. Libraries, though, are open to all, with a stated mission not to sell a product, but to inform and influence the mind. This is important to understand as not just a nice idea, but a legal and moral principle, underpinned by being funded using public money.

For this very reason, public libraries are unlikely things. I’ve come across the observation more than once recently that if public libraries didn’t already exist in America, they wouldn’t be allowed to. I think this is actually true. A space open to everyone and supported entirely through taxes? With selling things and making money occurring absolutely nowhere in its mission? (Money from fines and book sales typically goes back into the budget, and more and more libraries have disposed of fines altogether.) With contents curated according to published standards, by people professionally trained in their curation? (Imagine if the Internet were held to that standard.) Can you imagine any municipality, no matter how progressive or idealistic, in this country trying that today? This is worth reflecting on because public libraries are public spaces. This makes what happens in them important.

It’s also the source of tension in the current culture wars around libraries—which, by the way, isn’t new. I’m old enough to remember the previous rounds with this playbook going back to the 1980s. The books being objected to were different—most of them are still on the American Library Association’s most banned books list—but the objections to them were exactly the same. Mention sex in a book a ten year old might read, and next thing you know, they’ll be having it, or so the thinking goes. (I can personally attest that this is nonsense. What I did get when I was ten was a lot of information that helped me make healthy choices later. The time to learn this stuff is before you need it.)

Just as before, the real stakes are whose voices and what information we validate by allowing it to exist in a public space accessible to everyone, whether they avail themselves of it or not. As the people challenging these books themselves often point out, the books and the information in them don’t cease to exist just because the library doesn’t have them—and it is true that the alternative means of accessing them are more accessible than they were in the 1980s. But the presence or absence of something in a library is a statement of validation, and the conversation around what should be present or absent is increasingly adversarial.

Unless you work in libraries you probably don’t know this: the usual way that a book or anything else gets added to a library collection is by a librarian choosing it according to specific selection criteria. Those criteria can encompass the expressed desires of the community in which the library is situated, the collection development policy of the library, reviews in publications like Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, and the librarian’s professional knowledge and subject matter expertise. (In the library where I worked for 18 years, I selected all of our science and nursing materials for most of that time. I’m neither a scientist nor a nurse, but I worked with plenty of both, solicited their opinions and feedback, and read a great deal of their professional and research literature—as well as the curricula of their academic programs. All of these were factors in my decisions.) There’s a great deal of literature on the subject of collection development itself. Most of it’s pretty dry and not very interesting unless you’re a librarian (and even then some of it’s a cure for insomnia) but all of it wrestles with the question of what a library should have, since it cannot have everything.

But note the first item on my list of criteria: the expressed desires of the community. This could most simply be interpreted as: the library should have what most of the community wants, and exclude what most of the community does not want. After all, no library can contain everything, for reasons of both space and budget (and if you want to argue that searching for information on the Internet is free, I invite you to take a real hard look at how well Internet search works these days).

This, however, is a misapprehension of both the purpose of public space and the purpose of libraries. Community desires cannot be the sole determinant of what a library contains. That would render a library’s purpose to be merely to confirm what the people who might enter into it already know (or think they already know), which is anathema to discovery. There are people who believe this, to the point of fetishization; you can tell because they completely lose their minds when libraries get rid of obsolete materials to make way for new.

But part of the point of a library is to be larger than the conventional wisdom of the community it serves. This principle necessarily informs the selection process of what goes into a library’s collection. It’s also, though not always, where challenges to what’s in that collection come from. Most libraries have a challenge process that attempts to find the line between someone having an objection to this or that material, someone else wanting or needing to have access to that same material, and the larger context of the library itself and who it serves. This nebulous ground becomes the site of battles over questions like whether LGTBQ characters should be acknowledged to exist through the presence of books about them in the collection—and this is why the Internet, bookstores, or offers to mail books to individuals, admirable as all those things are, are not solutions. It’s always been possible, if not always easy, to get hold of materials that one’s neighbor might object to, or that go against nebulously stated community standards. In question here is whether materials that some people find objectionable or obscene nonetheless belong in a designated public space. (We had a chance for the Internet to be designated public space, but that ship appears to have sailed.)

This conversation has always been relevant to libraries, and is pretty much always going on, but right now the discourse is at a fever pitch—and largely defined by people on one side of the argument. Often they haven’t read the books they’re objecting to, which makes their habit of citing sentences or scene fragments out of context more than a little suspect. Or, one aspect of the book that makes them uncomfortable is taken as being the book’s entire subject. People objecting to library materials containing LGTBQ representation often argue that they aren’t claiming that these materials are obscene, exactly, they just don’t agree with “normalizing homosexuality” (scare quotes because that was the exact phrase used!) by having And Tango Makes Three in the children’s books collection.

This is why buying copies of banned material or giving them to people deprived of them by their removal from the public library, as helpful as these actions can be, are not solutions. The defining characteristic of public libraries is that access is determined not by personal preference, nor by ability to pay, but by collective definition of what belongs in the public sphere. This is not solely, as librarian Mary Jo Godwin famously wrote, that a truly great library has something in it to offend everyone. That’s actually rather incidental to the larger principle at work; namely, that if we are going to believe in the value of civic institutions at all (an unpopular idea at present no matter what your political alignment) then we have to believe in the role of libraries in enabling discovery, expanding knowledge, and facilitating the broadening of perspective beyond one’s own beliefs and observations, and act accordingly.

This does not mean that nothing in the library can ever be subject to question or even challenge. If the library is a public square, then the public has a role and voice within it. However, it also means that those who wish to ensure that public space stays open to discourses that others might find uncomfortable need to do more than provide alternative means of accessing stories that have been excluded. The tactics of those who wish to exclude are quite overt, but they also show the grounds where objections to those tactics can be raised.

It also means acknowledging that libraries are a space where these questions are never settled, as much as parties on any or all sides of any particular question might like them to be. The battles being fought now over library collections, as I mentioned up above, have been fought before. Only the particulars change, and they don’t even change that much. Just because the battle is ongoing, though, doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting. It might be hard to conceive of a fight over a particular book as a fight over people’s right to exist…but it’s worth remembering where those fights can lead.

Reading Stephen Markley’s The Deluge

Tags

book reviews, Stephen Markley, The Deluge

Every time I picked up this book to read another (lengthy) chapter, my mind tacked “Après moi…” to the title’s beginning. I don’t know if Stephen Markley had that saying in mind when writing the book, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The phrase, attributed to King Louis XV, presages disaster, but with a kind of resignation: we saw the cliff ahead, and accelerated.

The deluge being referenced in the title of Markley’s doorstop of a novel is more literal than that, though. This isn’t much of a spoiler: very early on, oceanographer Tony Pietrus has modeled a warming trend that presages climate catastrophe, including a sea-level rise that will drown the American Atlantic seaboard, most of the country of Bangladesh, and a great number of the world’s islands, among other geographies. And while the novel’s cast of thousands interact in various ways with this emergent catastrophe, the overall trajectory—and theme—remains both clear and inevitable.

This is pretty grim stuff to begin with, but by situating the novel in what is very clearly our own contemporary present and near future on the one hand—there are references to presidencies up through the early Biden administration, to COVID-19 and January 6^th, and to well-established and increasingly obvious meteorological, climatological, and ecological trends—and by unfolding a plot that consists largely of everything that’s happened recently only worse, the overwhelming mood for all of The Deluge’s 900+ pages is one of doom. It’s like that joke about the Tarot deck that consists entirely of 72 Tower cards, unfolding with the inevitability of a train derailment even as (some of) the passengers try to apply the brakes.

Climate change, ecological disaster, and what we do—or don’t do—about them have long been the province of science fiction. Indeed I was often reminded of other novels, especially Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which has undergone something of a rediscovery of late due in part to its prescience. Yet The Deluge doesn’t really read like science fiction, at least not initially. Though the opening chapter features Pietrus’s discovery, it’s veiled by his receipt of a threatening note in the mail, complete with mysterious white powder. That’s not a future projection, it’s contemporary, from the faux-anthrax scares of 2001 up to as recently as this year. Science fiction can have a contemporary setting, but part of Markley’s point is that what’s happening in The Deluge isn’t speculative, except perhaps arguably at the very end. This sets the book apart not only from Parable, but other novels exploring similar terrain such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.

In some ways The Deluge is more of a techno-thriller, except that it’s made clear from the outset that the principal problem that needs to be solved here isn’t technological. The fix, instead, requires something far more challenging: getting a sufficient mass of people convinced as to the nature of the problem, what needs to be done to solve it, in a position to actually take meaningful action. That close to 900 pages elapse with a number of major characters killed off in horrible ways before something like consensus even begins to emerge gives you an idea of how difficult a problem that is, even in fiction. It also sets The Deluge apart from the Michael Crichton style of contemporary techno-thriller, for all that the initial setup is reminiscent of the genre Crichton helped establish. Markley has larger ambitions in mind.

Despite the grimness and complexity of its content, much of The Deluge goes by faster than you’d expect. There are parts that don’t: the parts where it feels like Markley sets aside the story and its characters to earnestly inform the reader of a great deal of necessary technical detail, political and historical context, or the statistical scope of the latest disaster. These infodumps tend to occur at moments of accelerating catastrophe; the effect at times is to throw a roadblock in the path of the narrative. It feels somewhat churlish to complain about this: the world is ending and I’m demanding to be entertained. But some of these passages are real slogs, such that one wishes Markley had brought the vividly detailed efficiency he deploys elsewhere to bear.

On the other hand, one can only endure so much vivid detail. It’s all here: not just ecological catastrophe, in the form of hurricanes, heat waves, floods, wildfires, and even earthquakes, but human catastrophe as well, from suicide to murder to terrorism to assassination. This is probably realistic; for one thing, in the scenario Markley posits things are going to get a whole lot worse for most people before they get better, and for another desperation has a tendency to breed violence. At least some of Markley’s characters—all vividly drawn and to some degree sympathetic—are in a position to influence events, a few of them dramatically. Others are just trying to avoid being swept away. The results are often explosive.

A stylistic choice that seems as though it shouldn’t work, but does, is Markley’s adoption of a different narrative mode for each of his major characters. Tony Pietrus, the oceanographer we meet at the novel’s opening, has a fairly standard close third point of view. But we only get to know Kate Morris, the impassioned activist whose vision and verve drive a great deal of the action, through the eyes of others—mainly her lover Matt, though her life winds through those of several of the other characters by the novel’s end. The brilliant analyst Ashir al-Hasan communicates mostly in white papers, albeit with a bent for personal narrative. Direct-action activist turned ecoterrorist Shane’s chapters are told with inset snippets from the points of view of other characters in the scene, and hard-luck case Keeper’s chapters are told in second person. Plus there’s collages of news headlines and the occasional Vanity Fair or Atlantic article—they read like they’re from those publications, too, Markley’s remarkable skill as a stylistic chameleon extending even that far.

It works. It works surprisingly well, and the effect is to broaden the scope of the story still further, to accentuate the impression that these are narratives arising from disparate sources rather than from the mind of a single author, as though all of this were being assembled after the fact by some archivist or historian. Not that Markley goes for the device of making all of his narrative seem like documentation. That doesn’t work as well as it used to for one thing, in this age of ephemeral social media; for another it’s kind of tired and runs the risk of robbing the narrative of its immediacy. Thus while The Deluge does include newspaper and magazine articles as well as the occasional page of collaged headlines, most of its story is told in relatively straightforward fictional narrative. All of his characters are interesting. A few of them are even good people. And what ultimately makes reading The Deluge worthwhile are its small moments, the tiny actions of individual characters adding up, the realization—possibly too late—that there is no choice left but to do something, anything.

As I write this, a tropical storm has just hit southern California for the first time in over 80 years, while a boiled-brass sun sets over Seattle through a high haze of wildfire smoke. Smoke has become an annual visitor to western Washington just since I moved here in the late 90s, but this year the eastern U.S. got their own taste of it. It’s been so hot across so much of the country that I’ve felt grateful that Seattle’s summer heat waves haven’t hit triple digits this year—but I remember the heat dome of 2021 and how local temperatures skyrocketed to 107 degrees F, unprecedented for this region.

And yet life goes on. That’s the other thread running through The Deluge—how life continues, how business as usual attempts to continue. Until it literally can’t. For all of the novel’s narrative tricks, for its occasionally relentless lugubriousness of theme, for all that near the end it does take on a science fictional cast as technology (partially) saves the day, for all that the intersections of some of the characters’ lives come to seem contrived to the point of improbability, in this sense above all The Deluge is both hopefully and depressingly realistic. It’s fitting, then, that it ends with a question mark; albeit, I think, an optimistic one. But it’s optimism at a knife’s edge, and the question is whether we’ll find our way before all of us go over.

It Came from the To-Read Pile: Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s Urban Bestiary

Tags

book reviews, other authors

It’s a little astounding to me that I haven’t read Urban Bestiary (published in 2013) before. Author Lyanda Lynn Haupt, it transpires, is practically a neighbor; we both live in West Seattle, and when she describes certain encounters and experiences in this book I can imagine with a fair amount of specificity where they might have occurred. I recall the series of incidents involving nesting owls that she relates in her chapter on predatory birds. And, it so happens, I’ve studied with several of the people she mentions or cites: David Moskowitz, Jon Young, and others affiliated with the Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, where I’ve taken just about every class they offer for adults.

In fact, it was a talk I gave on wildlife tracking at PLU, where I worked for 18 years and from which I retired last month, that led me to this book: one that had lurked on the shelves of the library where I served as (among other things) science librarian without my knowing it. A colleague who attended the talk mentioned the book to me; I checked it out, read it, and was astounded that I hadn’t come across it before. So it sometimes goes, in tracking: earlier this week I walked past a nearly denuded seal skeleton several times on a Washington coastal beach before I noticed it was there. (In my defense, someone, probably a park ranger, had mostly buried it in beach detritus, and it didn’t smell much.) Sometimes you don’t notice things until you notice them.

As it happens, I came to Haupt’s book at the perfect time for it to inform some of my own thinking around wildlife tracking and observation. When we get into tracking, it’s often with the hope of seeing something really cool, outside of our everyday—and I have to admit, my first-ever viewing of wolf tracks was just such an experience, deep in a remote mountain area several hours’ drive from Seattle. Tracking has taken me to locales I might never have explored otherwise, and taught me a lot about places I’ve visited even when tracking itself wasn’t the intention. It’s taught me to pay attention to my surroundings in a way both conscious and intuitive; I learn a lot about who’s been around recently while hiking or even walking around my neighborhood, even when their presence isn’t obvious.

That last is increasingly what tracking has been about for me, and it’s the focus of Urban Bestiary as well. Most of us live in cities; even those of us who spend a lot of time hiking and backpacking are actually pretty unlikely to lay eyes on a mountain lion or bear (I saw my first of the latter on a backpacking trip just this month; I’m 49 years old and have been hiking for most of my life) but there’s a good chance we’ve seen and even interacted with squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and maybe even coyotes or foxes. Not to mention birds; Haupt, whose previous work includes the book Crow Planet, is at her most observant and lyrical in her chapters on birds, encouraging reconsideration of pigeons, crows, and even house sparrows and starlings.

Indeed, a reader might be moved to recall urban wildlife encounters they’ve had; to realize that there is, as Haupt puts it, “wilderness in our midst,” that we are not in fact separated from nature at all. Perhaps this book has moved people to experience what she terms the “slender mental shift” that engages the tracker mindset; while there’s a fair amount of skill and learning involved in doing tracking well, the mindset shift is foundational and requires nothing more than an opening of perspective. I was reminded of my own early experiences that led me to tracking: the coyote who dashed across the major arterial near my house very early one morning; the eagle soaring above a nearby urban forest, majestically ignoring the harassment of half a dozen crows (I’ve since followed crow ruckus to observe all kinds of things); the straight line of compressed vegetation in my backyard that served as a highway for all sorts of small beings; the orb weavers that spin their webs around my porch light every fall. (I do wish Haupt had chosen to include insects and other arthropods in her bestiary; perhaps she thought this would be too much for readers still coming to terms with the genius of rats to accept, especially given how many of them live in our houses.)

What makes a book like The Urban Bestiary so valuable is that not only does it facilitate understanding of species more of us are likely to observe, interact with, and learn about, but it also makes this kind of observation and understanding accessible. Wolf tracking, for example, requires going to remote locations that can be difficult to reach even if you lack disabilities that make backcountry travel challenging or impossible. Far more people can investigate a backyard, a park, or even a planting strip on a city street. Doing this can reopen our perceptions to just how remarkable species that we regard as familiar, even pestilential, really are, and thereby start to question the idea that rarity is what makes a wildlife encounter special.

More than that, however, I’ve observed for many years now that when it comes to urban wildlife encounters, a lot of people tend to lead with fear. A coyote sighting means pets and children are in danger (despite neither being part of a coyote’s preferred diet); molehills in the yard are unsightly nuisances (despite the benefits moles offer of free soil aeration and nutrient mixing, not to mention pest control); a raccoon out in the daytime means it has rabies (untrue, though it may well have babies it’s trying to feed); starlings and house sparrows crowd out other, native bird species (probably also untrue, so far as research has been able to determine). Leading with curiosity instead, as Haupt advocates, opens up whole new worlds that exist intermixed with our own; these species are common in urban environments because we humans have created the conditions for them to thrive. Recognizing our own responsibility for this through curiosity and observation leads not only to greater care for the places we live and the lives of other beings within them, but greater care for our world in general. And that can only be a good thing.

Come on Barbie, Let’s Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds

Tags

Barbenheimer, Barbie, movies, Oppenheimer

Though I haven’t seen either one yet, one of the truly delightful developments of the summer of 2023 movie season is the apparently spontaneous mashup of two major releases: Oppenheimer and Barbie. It began almost as soon as the marketing campaigns for the respective films kicked into high gear, quickly blossoming into a plethora of memes, fan trailers, and hot takes that rapidly overtook other memetic mashups (I’m still fond of the early Mad Max/Barbie memes I saw, personally).

“Witness me!”

Most of the commentary I’ve seen so far on this phenomenon points to the near-simultaneous release of the movies in question, but as a child of the Cold War who grew up with Barbie dolls (most of them hand me downs from an older friend), I think there’s something else going on here. Put it this way: if the launch of Zuckerberg’s Twitter clone made you think of an intensely disturbing BBC production from the early 1980s, you’re probably feeling these memes in a way that’s tough to articulate.

Not that the Barbie movie is being presented purely as a nostalgia item, though there’s definitely some of that at work; it’s being marketed partly as that, partly as a critique (that one trailer insisting that this movie’s for you whether you love Barbie or hate her), and partly as a fun summer romp. Pulling all three of those off will be an impressive achievement, but the first two wouldn’t even be possible if Barbie didn’t cast such a long shadow to begin with (the first trailer, with its 2001 callback with a giant Barbie in place of the monolith, demonstrates how aware the movie itself is of this point).

Also sprach Barbie

Plenty of people with more qualifications and knowledge of the subject than me have written about Barbie’s massive influence and enduring popularity, but I’ll just mention that while Ruth Handler’s discovery of the German Bild Lilli doll that inspired Barbie was a happy accident, that Barbie took off among American girls in the late 1950s and early 1960s was not. A whole lot of social and cultural phenomena facilitated Barbie’s early and enduring popularity, beyond the novelty of an adult-appearing doll that could be played with by children: the rise of consumer culture and, along with it, the distinction of children and teens as marketing segments with their own mass-produced products and mass media; the rise of feminism, which has influenced Barbie’s ongoing evolution and reflection of American culture; and mass media itself, without which the cachet of particular consumer products would not be possible. In the midst of all of this, Barbie offered girls an opportunity for imaginative play beyond that suggested by dolls that looked like babies. (One bit of commentary I’ve seen this week observed that one thing Barbie has never been is a mother, though her pal Midge was—one of the more disturbing 1980s products I’ve ever seen. Not because Midge was a mom, but because the doll’s representation was as anatomically uncanny-valley as everything else about Barbie.)

What does all that have to do with Oppenheimer? Lynda Carter—herself associated with an icon with an influence similar in scope to Barbie’s—put it best:

She’s just a Barbie girl, in an atomic world…

Plenty of people with more qualifications and knowledge of the subject than me (again) have drawn the line from the Manhattan Project to the American use of nuclear weapons in World War II to the Truman Doctrine to the Cold War, and if you’re about my age (late 40s) and had an American high school education the above formed a significant part of your history class curriculum around 10^th or 11^th grade, probably. As I was writing this I saw a comment to the effect that Oppenheimer is an opportunity to remind people of the social, economic, political, and cultural aftereffects of the Manhattan Project—to say nothing of the physical—but in a very real way, we’ve all been living with those things ever since. Existential angst: it’s not just for French philosophers anymore! And how better to distract ourselves from it than via the dreams and fantasies facilitated by mass-produced material culture—a culture that the same industrial-strength research that led to the atomic bomb made possible?

For those of us of a certain age, both the Bomb and Barbie were just part of our growing-up environment. The 1980s is taking its turn in the nostalgia barrel right now, but I invite anyone who was around back then (and if you weren’t, one of the mixed blessings of our age is that the mass culture of the era is still accessible to you at a level that it wasn’t for any previous generation) to recall some of the music and movies of the time. Prince’s “1999” sounds so cheerful on first listen that it’s not until you pay attention to the lyrics that you recognize the shadow of nuclear annihilation looming over it. I still recall my own hollow laughter the first time I watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day when John Conner inquires of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, “Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?” (That line aged well.)

“Two thousand zero zero party over oops outta time”

But the threat of nuclear catastrophe, the materialism of consumer culture, and other hallmarks of the 20^th century didn’t begin in the 1980s; along with rapid advances in science and industry, space exploration, the concept of teenagers as a market segment, the concept of market segments—none of them would have manifested as they did without the Second World War. Is it a stretch to say that Barbie wouldn’t exist without Oppenheimer? Not as much of one as you might think.

The atomic age: you’re soaking in it.

Admittedly, to say that all of the above is on the minds of everyone determined to make a double feature of Oppenheimer and Barbie would be a stretch. The simultaneous release dates and wildly different tonalities of the marketing make them an ironic pairing to be sure (something else Gen X excels in), but in looking back on post-WWII America, you’d be hard pressed to find two more iconic images than the Trinity test mushroom cloud and Barbie. The linkages between them are somewhat indirect, but present all the same: interdependent facets of the American Dream, expressions of a hacking of the material at the atomic level to realize a promise of imperial power and wealth.

As the 20^th century recedes further into the past, that promise seems to be increasingly called into question, morphing the preceding century’s existential angst into something of a national identity crisis. Oppenheimer and Barbie, at least judging by the marketing so far, don’t seem to be standing as arguments against this; rather, perhaps we’re finally achieving enough distance, with enough elapsed history, to really look at who we are and what we’ve wrought. Though Oppenheimer famously recognized immediately what the Manhattan Project had unleashed, I think it’s impossible to live that close to annihilation daily and see it clearly: it’s too big to be seen up close. As a child I had the luxury of faith in adults, who surely knew what they were doing: no one would actually use a weapon like that, would they? (Except, they already had, and I was born in the country that had done it.)

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.

And Barbie, well, the whole point of Barbie—the reason that, speaking as a former child who played with Barbies constantly, she has remained so enduringly popular—was to model and pretend adulthood from the relative safety of childhood. My mother worried that Barbie would give me an unrealistic idea of what women could be. She was kind of right, actually, but not in the way that she thought. I knew real women didn’t look like Barbie. What I didn’t know was how much being a woman would limit my choices in the real world. Barbie, with her perpetual smile, her total agency and her literal Dream life, represented the eternal possibility that I imagined adulthood held. Barbie was born in a time of technological potential that seemed limitless, for good or ill: we could wipe ourselves out as a species or shoot for the moon. Or both.

It’s tempting to see “Barbenheimer” through a nostalgic lens, but as I said up top, I think that’s at best only part of what’s going on here, and not a particularly large part. Most of the people likely to go to a movie theater today weren’t alive during the time that we’d be being nostalgic for. Instead, perhaps paradoxically, I think the massive conjoined buzz around these two movies springs from a desire for something new: not only something new in movies, which have been dominated by superhero franchises for the last however many years, but something new in our understanding of ourselves. We’ve had ample opportunity in recent years to observe how this country collectively handles a real crisis. Not all that well, it turns out.

Emergency resuscitation of a COVID-19 patient at an ER in New York. Source: Time magazine.

Unlike superheroes, Oppenheimer was a real person who really existed, and who was instrumental in releasing a power into the world beyond the scope of just about any fictional superhero other than, well, Doctor Manhattan. And Barbie? She’s not a real person, but she is a real icon, whose slender plastic shoulders have borne the weight of dreams of generations—not to mention the weight of rejections of those dreams and what they represent. Both of them are mythic: not mythic as it’s come to mean, a story that is untrue, but mythic in an older, more powerful sense: these stories aren’t literally true and aren’t meant to be interpreted as such, but they ring through us in ways that reveal true things about ourselves.

Most of us won’t be responsible for nearly so much, thank god. But we’re all functioning within interlocking systems of power and influence too large and complicated for us to even account for all the consequences and ramifications of our own actions, never mind those systems as a whole. If stories and myths still serve a purpose, it’s to help us navigate realities too complex to perceive, and open our perspectives onto a wider world.

Learning how to be bad at things

Tags

Ira Glass, ruminations, still life

Tell me if you can relate to this:

When you were a kid, you were Smart. You grasped concepts, skills, and ideas right away, and were frequently praised for it. You did well in school and being Smart became part of your identity, to the point that when you weren’t immediately good at something, you tended to avoid it or give up on it. After awhile you stopped risking having the wrong answer to a question, or trying something that you might not do well at—if you’d ever been willing to take that risk in the first place. You may or may not have been successful in life by whatever standards we socially measure that, but the choices you made to reach that success were safe ones that didn’t challenge you much personally or intellectually.

This probably sounds a bit like The Drama of the Gifted Child, if you’ve read that book. I’m not sure if that’s what happened with me or not (though the word “gifted” was definitely applied to me up until about seventh grade or so, when I came very close to failing algebra after having been Good at Math up until then). What I do know is that up until about five years ago, I was really averse to trying something I wasn’t sure I’d be any good at, and very likely to give up on the things that I did try if I wasn’t good at them right away.

I’m not sure when exactly the switch flipped, or why. Maybe because I’m middle-aged now I just don’t give as much of a shit anymore. Maybe I’ve realized that nobody’s keeping score, or at least no one whose opinion I care about. I do recall one of my tracking instructors pointing out that needing to be right about identifying a particular track or sign can actually interfere with seeing what’s there, because there’s a lot of ambiguity in tracking. Being willing to be wrong, conversely, can put you on track (heh) to the right answer, because it forces you to advance a hypothesis and then test whether your observation fits that hypothesis. Very scientific, and much more fun without the arbitrary high stakes of a grade attached to it.

I enjoy tracking, a great deal, and have done Actual Science with it. But the most fun thing about it is exploring a track or sign as a group, throwing out observations and ideas about what we’re seeing. We want to get the right answer, but (unless it’s for science, and even then someone else will be checking our conclusions) there’s no moral weight attached to it. It’s been a great environment for letting go of being Right as an aspect of my identity.

About five years ago I started playing Hardanger fiddle, or hardingfele. I’m not especially good at it; my experience with bowed instruments in general is strictly amateur, and my teacher (who is also a classically trained violinist who plays with professional orchestras) has observed that the Hardanger fiddle is more challenging than most. This week she talked me into joining her in playing on the street at Seattle’s Syttende Mai festival; while I could have played better, what I mostly took away from the experience was a list of improvements I look forward to practicing, and a satisfaction at having done it at all. When I was younger, all I’d have remembered were the mistakes, and probably given up the instrument when I didn’t turn out to be brilliant at it.

But the thing is, most of us aren’t brilliant at most things. Not ever, and certainly not at first. Even the outrageously talented among us reach the stratosphere through incredibly hard work. (Prince is one of my favorite examples of this. He had a musical talent that was beyond enviable—and was notoriously obsessive about his work. Both of these things show in the results he got.) Being identified as Smart short-circuits the necessary work to not only develop your talent, but your ability to get an idea from inspiration to reality. There’s a well-known quote from Ira Glass on this subject, of which this passage is key: “And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.”

Glass is talking about getting good here, but I think just as important is the recognition that wherever you’re at right now might not be very good, and that’s okay. Not because you shouldn’t be trying to improve—though that’s up to each of us, for each of the things we try and do—but because the pressure to Get it Right immediately can actually hamper that improvement, and it certainly isn’t any fun.

It can also, as it did for me, dissuade you from trying things in the first place. Things that, with practice, you actually might be good at after all.

And if you’re not, that’s okay too.

Reading Esther Woolfson’s Between Light and Storm

Tags

Between Light and Storm, book reviews, Esther Woolfson

Before one begins reading Esther Woolfson’s Between Light and Storm: How We Live with Other Species, there are two ways to interpret the subtitle: as prescription or as description. It’s the latter that Woolfson intends, her elegant narrative sweeping through human relationships with non-human species as they have occurred for thousands of years. That those relationships, as she details to a degree for which “painstaking” is an understatement, have been mostly exploitative is probably not news to the readers most likely to pick up this book. Then again, as I’ve frequently reminded myself during my career as a librarian, everything is always new to somebody.

More to the point, the overarching theme of Between Light and Storm is one of separation. The two first chapters, titled “Sharing a Planet” and “A Thing Apart,” are a beginning as the book means to go on, from “a world where animals were supreme and the vastly more numerous ‘keepers of the world’” (p. 40) to one where humans are so predominant that many of us go through our days at best dimly aware that creatures beyond our pets and the occasional bird, squirrel, or house spider exist. Birds in particular are stars of Woolfson’s writing; reading her meditations on the ways of doves and magpies, I’m troubled by the latest AI bird rendering making the rounds on social media, which anyone who knows anything about birds would recognize at once as not real. (And by “know anything” I don’t mean that one needs to be an expert—just have spent some time looking at birds, or even pictures of birds.)

Birds figure largely as metaphor, too, particularly in the chapter on souls and the historical debate as to whether animals have them. Birds have an association with the soul or with spirits in many cultures, perhaps due to their capacity for flight and thus to cross distances so vast that they might well include the gulf between this world and others. Then again, the notion of the soul as something distinct from the body is by no means a universal belief, even in the cultures Woolfson mostly profiles. Her emphasis here is more on how this idea has been used to justify the use of animals for whatever purpose we might devise—even purposes that are exploitative or abusive. The subsequent chapters largely continue on this theme, their titles giving some idea of what’s in store: “Blood,” “The Hunt,” “The Coat,” and so on. Even chapters with titles seemingly innocuous, or at least less grim, continue the theme: “Rights” and “Tradition” are mostly about denial in the first case, and justification in the latter. “The Museum” reminded me that in the last several years I’ve become less interested in zoos and their emphasis on (to that particular locale) the exotic, and more intrigued by the beings who live in my neighborhood and in the less-impacted places near where I live. Rats, pigeons, and raccoons are often considered pests, but I’ve come to greatly admire them. After all, they’re not only surviving humanity, but thriving all around us.

The final chapter, “What is Love?” appears at first to posit an answer to the theme of separation that dominates the book—but it also calls into question our practice of keeping pets, now a full-blown industry that blows my mind every time I go to the pet food store. Our two cats were both street rescues, one of them requiring treatment for a mysterious bacterial affliction not long after we got him that, had we not adopted him, likely would have killed him. And yet thousands if not millions of domestic animals commonly kept as pets are killed every year, through abandonment, abuse, euthanasia, or other means. This isn’t exactly news; a more nuanced approach might look at how some species, domestic and non, have thrived at least in terms of overall numbers due to human impact (consider crows, coyotes, and the aforementioned pigeons, raccoons, and especially rats, the latter of whom are both kept as pets and thrive in the basements, attics, walls, yards, and other interstitial locales of human habitations). Woolfson does touch on this a bit, when she meditates on the birds who have lived with her over the years, not always, exactly, as pets.

One is left, as one often is with books in this genre, with a sense of sickness and grief at human brutality, and of urgency to take action about it. Certainly I found myself contemplating my own deliberate journey of the last several years to deliberately tend and cultivate my integration with the natural world, but it also left me with a desire to have seen Woolfson touch on this aspect of her theme more explicitly: we are not, after all, separate from the rest of life on Earth, no matter how much we might try to be. In a sense, the history of humanity has been the history of a series of choices we’ve made, individually, culturally, and globally, about how we live in the world. It would have been nice—if perhaps unrealistic from Woolfson’s perspective—to have read her thoughts on how to do that.