May

Hey friends,

The next book on our list shall be (drum roll please!) Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Sound good? Let me know if you have all read that and I'll pick something different.

Happy reading,
Caitlin

Yiddish Policemen's Union

I'm only halfway done with the book, but I thought I would blog about my thoughts so far to give the site some love and give my friends something to read while they're bored at work.

So at first I really didn't think I was going to like this book. Which is not surprising, because it is true for like 85% of books that I pick up having never read anything by that author before. But I powered through the initial disinterest and now I am totally into it.

Just like with Rabbit, Run, I am finding the supporting cast to be just as, or even more interesting than the protagonist. The down-on-his-luck noir detective is a pretty worn out plot device (see Roger Rabbit, Tracer Bullet, the 1930s) and I thought at first that the character was going to be two-dimensional. Swig from a flask, make a comment about a "dame" or a "broad," run off a string of one-liners, and solve the case. I thought Landsman was going to be simple, basically. But turns out he has a detailed past rife with complications and tragedy, his motivation to keep going is unclear but seems rooted in a general desire to do good work, and he is dirty and gritty without becoming a parody. He's pretty balanced.

Berko the sidekick is pretty awesome too. Pretty much anyone who carries around a giant hammer to scare the shit out of some gangsters with has got my general approval. I think he and Landsman pair very well. Again, at first I thought that as a duo they would be pretty flat, the typical big/little, clean/dirty, Jewish/Alaskan Native dichotomies, but I think they are funny together.

And the idea of a giant Jewish colony in the middle of Alaska is pretty awesome too. Chabon does a really good job of dropping little bits of information about the alternate reality so that you have a little bit of a hint of these past events, but don't get the full story. Like mentioning that the a-bomb fell on Berlin. It gives you a brief, fleeting glimpse. It's like when you're reading Lord of the Rings and Tolkein suddenly drops a reference to Ancalagon the Black, baddest dragon of all time or whatever, but doesn't go on to fully explain it or give the details of events. It's a great author trick that allows them to create this big world but also allows the reader to use some of his or her own ideas to fill it in. Just well done.

The plot, in typical page-turner fashion, is sucking me in. Without giving anything away, I just want to say that I like the twists and turns and the (sometimes excrutiatingly) slow revelations.

So those are my halfway thoughts.

sand county, sad country

the edition of the book that i read was supplemented with photographs by gentlemen who retraced aldo's footsteps and lived on the land where he lived. seeing the landscape as he saw it made it all the more real for me. there were these really haunting images of aldo's grinding stone, laying broken under a tree in different seasons. he died of a heart attack fighting a brush fire on his neighbor's land, did you know that?

living in a city is weird and alien to me. reading this book made me really homesick for a place and time that maybe really only exists in my memory. i grew up on about 50 acres of wooded farmland and feel like i keep moving farther and farther away from that life as i grow older. as i grow older, i romanticize the old farm more and more. i get involved with the local green movements and urban beautification projects, but parts of it seem so masturbatory and filled with this weird sense of self-satisfaction. i feel like some people join these local conservation movements because of the image of it and just spout off this meaningless rhetoric. i appreciate anybody who is involved, but it's a strange, sad simulacrum of the real experience.

being in the country is quiet and leads your mind down quiet roads. i feel like leopold's conservation ethic is borne out of this experience. he focuses on the harmonious co-existence of man and nature, something that a city by its nature defies. i guess the book made me feel dissatisfied with my half-acre plot of city land and small raised vegetable beds. i definitely started feeling like the grass is greener everywhere but here.

Sand County and Leopold's Conservation Ethic

First of all, I am a huge fan of A Sand County Almanac - as a student of ecology, I consider this book to be essential reading for anyone in the biological sciences. More than anything, to me what this series of essays highlights is the power of observation - it is a clear demonstration of the insight that can be gained from simply opening one's eyes and taking in their natural environment. It has recently become a trend in the natural sciences to hire biologists that are question driven; they ask broad ecological or evolutionary questions and then choose a natural system appropriate for answering these questions. Unfortunately, this translates to a dwindling number of true natural historians - experts like Leopold who have vast experience in particular habitats or systems and use observation to motivate their questions. It seems as if the result of this shift is a lot of biological theory manufactured on laptop computers by scientists whose lack of field expertise is as apparent as a shit stain on a pair of fresh underpants. In this vein, I consider Sand County to be a throwback to an older, more organism-based, way of doing science. And I like it.

One of the more interesting themes brought up in this book is Leopold's conservation ethic - as John stated, there are reasons beyond money or public health why we feel the need to restore or preserve our natural environment. It is curious to me where this ethic originates - is it simply because some of us want to do the "right thing" (whatever that is), or is it basally some innate selfish understanding that after a certain point, we will screw up the environment so badly it will cease to support humanity? With the popularity of this new Go Green trend, it seems there has emerged a new, social, motivation for environmentalism that for some has no apparent connection, at least on the surface, to the arguments presented in Sand County.

Of all the essays in this book, I find the bit Axe in Hand to be perhaps the most meaningful piece , as far as a commentary on the practicalities of conservation/restoration ecology. Particularly, Leopold mentions his "own axe-in-hand decisions", or a-priori biases that influence his specific land-use choices. Its funny to me that Leopold recognized in the 1930's what goes virtually unstated in conservation biology today - that the strategic goals of restoration are absolutely based on human "axe-in-hand" priorities that may often have no relevance to natural ecosystem dynamics

The goals of any conservation strategy include often dogmatic ideals that are considered generally "good", or worth conserving: diversity, native species, or species that provide "ecosystem services". Really, this is a list of things that humans like in a habitat - lots of diverse, interesting species that make ecosystems productive, not a list of community attributes that promote stability. In reality, many communities are not like this - some are simply unproductive, highly disturbed, or dominated by a single keystone species (and probably should be maintained like this). In this way, Leopold's discussion of axe-in-hand decisions to me really say something about conservation biology in the present.

READING, FOR A LADY OR A MAN

Attention literati:

It has come to my attention that it is time for me to suggest a book. I thought about suggesting a totally bitchin' comic book or making everyone read this, but instead I am going to make April's book The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by awesome dude Michael Chabon.

If you don't read this book you are not a man (even the ladies).

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

So...Rabbit, Run

Just finished it moments ago, and have taken in a few thoughts from everybody. So I'll start like this:

I find myself splitting the difference between John and Kyle in regards to identifying with Rabbit. Obviously there's a part of me that disregards the things I might find myself reacting to or identifying with initially, just because he's such a bastard. Objectively though, it's hard not to see in myself that impatience and lack of direction and making a choice because of what I feel opposed to what I think or know. But I don't think it's Rabbit's impulses that make him a bad guy. I think it's that he constantly allows himself to act on those impulses. Or maybe not even allows himself to act on them, but that he can't help but act on them. Maturity or adulthood seems very much determined by a person's ability to do what they said they would, or what they know they should do. I agree with Kyle in that there are decisions we make because others have already made those decisions for us, and we never questioned them, but second-guessing scholasticism as a sophomore in college is very different then second-guessing fatherhood with a wife, a two-year-old and another child on the way. Maybe it's even as simple as the equation changing once you become responsible to somebody else. For my part, you just can't run out on your kids. If a relationship doesn't work, fundamentally has problems, you reconsider, but you do it in the interest of your children.

Another aspect that I kept coming back to is the fact that this was written in a different time. I think that superficially the male and female relationships aren't that different, or at least aren't that startling. I think Rabbit slapping Mrs. Eccles on the ass is an interesting moment, in the same way it's interesting to watch an episode of Mad Men, but it doesn't shock me because it's the way I understand the male/female dynamic of this other era to be. However, it is very hard to empathize with the way sex is handled. I think Kyle's right in the way that it's a power thing, but I don't think it's the women who hold that power. It seems that here, men hold this power, and in Rabbit's case, what he has isn't enough. Again, the bj scene is a good example, as is the scene with Rabbit and Janice in bed after the birth. For Rabbit to approach these moments as though he's owed something just speaks to the larger sense of entitlement that he's pretty consistently walking around with. He can wrap it up in whatever kind of insecurity or neediness he wants to, but ultimately he's just an overgrown kid who wants what he wants.

The more I think about it, the more psychotic Rabbit seems to me. He's so sensitive to everything and there's something in every moment that could potentially invert his feelings about a person or place. The way that he can love a woman (Janice or Ruth) one moment and the next be repulsed by her facial expression to the point that he questions his entire opinion of her. He lives so much in each moment I suppose, that he can't help but act as erratically as he does, but it's still so off-putting. You can't really trust him from one moment to the next. Then again, I suppose that's the jumping off point of this entire story, so I shouldn't complain too much.

In the end I really did enjoy it. All the things that bothered me about the character motivated a really interested story. I will even admit that I enjoyed the run-on sentences for the most part. I think that type of writing is as close as I'll ever get to actually appreciating poetry. Also, I recently read American Pastoral by Philip Roth, and that dude's sentences go on for fucking ever. It was much more tedious in that case than here. Admittedly though, I don't really know what to make of the end. I guess he's running again?

Sand County

So obviously A Sand County Almanac isn't a complex work of fiction like Rabbit, Run, and there's not as much to parse. But I think what's most interesting about reading this book is the way it shows how conservationism has changed over the years.

I think Leopold is right even still when he says that very few people are interested in conservation for conservation's sake. You have to attach a price tag on it somehow. In Leopold's day they did that by mostly saying that fucked up land was land that couldn't be used to make any money. Today we do that by saying the world's going to be all fucked up for the kids when they get older, global warming is going to launch tsunamis at us, etc, etc. It's hard to argue that you shouldn't clear cut forests because that's just a total dick move.

I also think it's interesting how interwoven hunting is with Leopold's environmentalism. That also just seems completely alien today. When he first started talking about shooting ducks I was kind of shocked, because now we think of environmentalists more or less as hippies who want to preserve every last living thing. But, as he points out, hunting can serve a genuinely good ecological purpose if, say, the wolves in your neighborhood aren't doing a very good job of making sure the deer don't eat all the young trees.

Anyway I picked this book before I had read any of it, and I'm glad I did. It's a pretty good book that I'd never heard of before, and is evidently some kind of landmark in nature writing. It's pretty crazy that this book was published in the late 40s, when most of America just wanted to take the axe to nature in the name of chrome-plated Shining Progress.