H is for Hawk – Helen Macdonald, 2014

The November book for the Nature and Environment book group, and one I’d been looking forward to since its release because of my T. H. White obsession. I also read The Goshawk at a young age, but it didn’t give me any desire to train hawks myself. One of the main critiques the discussion brought up was how little we ended up understanding the attraction of falconry, to people who clearly love hawks, when it’s also clearly a kind of slavery for the birds.The best explanation for me was “The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.” Macdonald’s vivid description of falling into depression/mental illness after the death of her father was hard to experience, but also helps clarify: “The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge.”

I identified strongly with Macdonald’s early life, especially reading so much from the 19th century:

Being in the company of these authors was like being dropped into an exclusive public school… What I was doing wasn’t just educating myself in the nuts and bolts of hawk-training: I was unconsciously soaking up the assumptions of an imperial elite. I lived in a world where English peregrines always outflew foreign hawks, whose landscapes were grouse moors and manor houses, where women didn’t exist. These men were kindred spirits. I felt I was one of them, one of the elect.

Her initial reaction to The Goshawk is priceless:

I’d reached the bit about the sparrowhawks and I was too upset to read any more. I’d jumped from my bed and gone looking for reassurance.
“Is this the Goshawk book you’ve been telling me about?”
“Yes! He’s got his hawk ready to fly free but then he starts making traps to try and catch some sparrowhawks and goes off and leaves the hawk behind and it’s stupid.”
A long pause.
“Maybe he was tired of his hawk,” [my mother] said, the hand with the cloth in it now pressed to the sink.
This made no sense at all.
“But how could he be tired of a hawk?”

Her material on White seems to come fairly straight from the Sylvia Townsend Warner biography, but with some interesting observations about his context:

… the countryside wasn’t just something that was safe for White to love: it was a love that was safe to write about. It took me a long time to realize how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationship with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.

She mentions Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell (I think I read it a long time ago, but due for a re-read), and a new one to me, A Cuckoo in the House by Maxwell Knight. My Dog Tulip (J. R. Ackerly)  is another that jumps to mind.

I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing—not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to is now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?

November 2017 books read

 

  • H is for Hawk – Helen Macdonald, 2014
  • Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature – Margo DeMello and Susan E. Davis, 2003 (mostly skimmed)
  • Goodnight, Mr. Tom – Michelle Magorian, 1981 – A modern classic children’s book I had never heard of and picked up at a tag sale. Good not great.
  • Dombey and Son – Charles Dickens, 1848 – Since I got my first smartphone, I’ve kept a new-to-Dickens to read  if I don’t have anything else around; it takes me a very long time to get through them. I started this one probably 3? years ago. The death of Paul (Chapter 16, What the Waves were always saying)—wow wow wow, the “golden water” foreshadowing Proust’s “petit pan de mur jaune” (I didn’t realize there was controversy about which part of the Vermeer painting that refers to!) Now up is The Uncommercial Traveller.
  • The Given Day – Denis Lehane, 2008
  • The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot, 1861
  • The Stand – Stephen King, 1978. Yet another re-read (of the original, not the misbegotten rewrite). This time around it was the evolution of Larry Underwood’s character from “you ain’t no nice guy” to a real hero that particularly grabbed me.
  • Howl’s Moving Castle – Diana Wynne-Jones, 1986 – Because I saw the Miyazaki movie again (love it!) and wanted to compare to the source. Good in its own way, but it was interesting to see, for example, that the classic Miyazaki transformation of the Witch of the Waste was entirely his.
  • Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words – Boel Westin, 2014 (mostly skimmed)

The Given Day – Dennis Lehane, 2008

I’d never read any Lehane but had heard good things about him, so I wanted to like this. Maybe the contemporary ones are better—this was a very tin-eared historical novel, set in 1918-1919 with characters who don’t feel of then. A couple of nice images–a dying man “probably slipping across the river right at this moment, climbing the dark shore into another world,” a baby “warm as a kettle wrapped in a towel;” some flashes of humor—“The Bolshies? … I’m not sure they have the capacity to blow up anything outside of their own chests.” “How could you fight righteous rage if the only arms you bore were logic and sanity?” But people shocked at houses that still don’t have indoor plumbing? Getting IVs in a hospital? Citing “a six percent drop in violent crime”? And those are just the irritations I can put my finger on; overall the actions and perspectives of the characters just didn’t convince me. 700 pages too! It’s a Second Monday book group book or I wouldn’t have persevered, and I’m looking forward to hearing other people’s thoughts.

October 2017 books read

  • Drinking: A Love Story – Caroline Knapp, 1996
  • Encounters with the Archdruid – John McPhee, 1971
  • Doorways in the Sand – Roger Zelasny, 1976. I read the first section in Analog, the June 1975 issue,  which was I think the first SF magazine I ever bought. The idea of being a perpetual student like the protagonist grabbed me then—and I’m living it now!
  • It’s Not About the Tights: An Owner’s Manual for Bravery – Chris Brogan, 2015. Great title, disappointing book.
  • Demian – Herman Hesse, 1919

Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth – Herman Hesse, 1919

The October book for Great Books group – I’m behind as usual. If I didn’t flag passages, I’d be more inclined to just let it go.

As a teenager, I knew Hesse for Siddartha, Magister Ludi, and Steppenwolf (all in my parents’ collection; I think I started Siddartha but never got very far), but I had never heard of Demian. Everyone at book group who was at least a few years older (I’m almost 53) had first read it in their teens, so it’s interesting that it fell out of the zeitgeist that quickly. I and at least one other person found it a little creepy historically, despite its appeal. Hesse was notably anti-war, and yet there are weird echoes to me of what would become Nazism. Like this passage spoken by Demian:

What will come is beyond imagining. The soul of Europe is a beast that has lain fettered for an infinitely long time. And when it’s free, its first movements won’t be the gentlest. But the means are unimportant if only the real needs of the soul—which has for so long been repeatedly stunted and anesthetized—come to light. Then our day will come, then we will be needed. Not as leaders and lawgivers—we won’t be there to see the new laws—but rather as those who are willing, as men who are ready to go forth and stand prepared wherever fate may lead them. Look, all men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened. But no one is ready when a new ideal, a new and perhaps dangerous and ominous impulse, makes itself felt. The few of us who will be ready at that time and who will go forth—will be us. That is why we are marked—as Cain was—to arouse fear and hatred and drive men out of a confining idyl and into more dangerous reaches. All men who have had an effect on the course of human history, all of them without exception, were capable and effective only because they were ready to accept the inevitable. It is true of Moses and Buddha, of Napoleon and Bismarck.

It’s a strange book tonally. The first chapter, the narrator Sinclair’s torment at school, is very realistic and vividly agonizing—I was dreading reading on—but then it turns almost supernatural and much more detached. The story of Cain and Abel, with Cain as the hero, threads through the book. Demian says that Cain was visibly special in some way, better than the rest, and that’s why they feared and slandered him. Yet he also says about Sinclair’s enemy, Kromer: “We’ll find a way, even though killing him would be the simplest. In cases like this, the simplest course is always the best.” And later in the book: “You wouldn’t consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright and carry their young in their bellies nine months!”

The ambiguity of Demian’s appeal is set from the start:

I saw Demian’s face and I not only noticed that it was not a boy’s face but a man’s; I also felt or saw that it was not entirely the face of a man either, but had something feminine about it, too. Yet the face struck me at that moment as neither masculine nor childlike, neither old nor young, but somehow a thousand years old, somehow timeless, bearing the scars of an entirely different history than we knew; animals could look like that, or trees, or planets… he was like an animal or like a spirit or like a picture, he was different, unimaginably different from the rest of us.

Demian can concentrate his will to make things happen. Nietzsche-like. Demian’s Eve-like mother, (even named Eva) also advocates will-to-power, saying to Sinclair: “Your fate loves you. One day it will be entirely yours—just as you dream it—if you remain constant to it.” Later she tells the story of a youth who fell in love with a planet and finally jumps off a cliff: “At the height of his longing he leaped into the emptiness toward the planet, but at the instant of leaping ‘it’s impossible’ flashed once more through his mind. There he lay on the shore, shattered. He had not understood how to love. If at the instant of leaping he had had the strength of faith in the fulfillment of his love he would have soared into the heights and been united with the star.”

I wonder whether this book is one of the first appearances of what’s now the old saw: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”

While the Demian passages I’ve quoted are puzzling and intriguing, there are many Sinclair passages I loved:

For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread, of some terrible renewal.

The realization that my problem was one that concerned all men, a problem of living and thinking, suddenly swept over me and I was overwhelmed by fear and respect as I suddenly saw and felt how deeply my own personal life and opinions were immersed in the eternal stream of great idea. Though it offered some confirmation and gratification, the realization was not really a joyful one. It was hard and had a harsh taste because it implied responsibility and no longer being allowed to be a child; it meant standing on one’s own feet.

My childhood world was breaking apart around me. … A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year’s secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.

In the dying embers, red and gold threads ran together into nets, letters of the alphabet appeared, memories of faces, animals, plants, worms, and snakes. … Even as a young boy I had been in the habit of gazing at bizarre natural phenomena, not so much observing them as surrendering to their magic, their confused, deep language. Long gnarled tree roots, colored veins in rocks, patches of oil floating on water, light-refracting flaws in glass—all these things had held great magic for me at one time: water and fire particularly, smoke, clouds, and dust, but most of all the swirling specks of color that swam before my eyes the minute I closed them.

My typical approach is to read the book first, and then start background research if I have time. One of the first things I stumbled upon was the K-pop group BTS, whose album WINGS was inspired by Demian. The music video for “Blood Sweat & Tears” explicitly references it. Apparently the book is very well-known in South Korea. I’m grateful to my boss, Maria, who recommended it!

Encounters with the Archdruid – John McPhee, 1971

We  had a great discussion about this in the Nature and Environment book group. I particularly enjoyed the arguments about McPhee’s artifice—“he’s pulling the wool over our eyes,” said one person. The New York Times Magazine article had just come out, and it brought up the structure glyph in the chapter headings—the three triangles on the line balanced on a single triangle–which most of us would not have recognized otherwise. Encounters suffers in comparison to Desert Solitaire, which is so much more vivid, but it’s interesting and very timely. One of our members had known David Brower personally and gave us more insight into what he was like as a person, not the figurehead/symbol he is in McPhee’s book. The three archvillains—Charles Park, Charles Fraser, Floyd Dominy—feel more fleshed out. They get in some zingers, like Park talking about the number of children Brower has (“Population is pollution spelled inside out”), and cataloguing the minerals Brower’s house contains and where they came from. McPhee says about Brower:

When he is in the Yosemite, he seems to be packed in nostalgia, and he appears to be unaffected by the valley’s peeled-log Levittowns, its tent cities, its bumper-to-bumper traffic, and its newsstands—all results of what has been described as the fatal beauty of Yosemite. In all likelihood, he accepts Yosemite whole because the valley was already urbanized when he was young.

But Brower points out: “Wilderness was originally a nice place to go, but that is not what wilderness is for. Wilderness is the bank for the genetic variability of the earth.”

Some funny passages:

The trees were dead because the dunes were marching. Slowly, these enormous hills, shaped and reshaped by the wind, were moving south. They had already filled up half of Fraser’s lake, and, left alone, they would eventually fill it all. Five buzzards stood at the edge of the water. Fraser stood there, too, with the unconcealed look on his face of a man watching a major asset disappear. “We’ve got to stabilize these dunes,” he said.

Cans of beer are known as sandwiches in this red, dry, wilderness world. No one questions this, or asks the reason. They just call out “Sandwich, please!” and a can of Coors comes flying through the air. They catch the beer and drink it, and they put the aluminum tongues inside the cans. I threw a tongue in the river and was booed by everyone.

That story is part of what makes it feel like McPhee is creating a narrative performance rather than sharing his subjects’ feelings on these topics. But his observations are great:

Although there was no way for an automobile to get to Holden except by barge up Lake Chelan and then on a dirt road to the village, we saw there a high pile of gutted and rusted automobiles, which themselves had originally been rock in the earth and, in the end, in Holden, were crumbling slowly back into the ground.

September 2017 books read

Gilgamesh: A New English Version – Stephen Mitchell, 2004

Another wonderful title we read in Great Books that I’ve procrastinated about writing up and it’s now overdue at the library. I set my timer for 15 minutes. GO! — That was October and now it’s Jan 1 2018… and I’m tackling old draft posts. Note that I am now publishing the post the month I read the book, not when I actually wrote it, for my own purposes when I go back and see what I wrote when, which will make this at least 3 months off even if I finish now!

I’d heard of Gilgamesh but never read it and didn’t know much about it. I had no idea how recently it was re-discovered and translated (19th century), despite how old it is (almost 4000 years). All of us were blown away by how fresh and novel it feels—and Mitchell quotes enough of the literal translation in his notes so you know it’s not him adding that, although his adaptation makes it much easier to read by smoothing out the missing parts. What’s really remarkable to me is the voice of the 1200 BCE poet Sîn-lēqi-unninni, who wrote the prologue that describes Uruk and tells the reader:

Find the cornerstone and under it the copper box
that is marked with his name. Unlock it. Open the lid.
Take out the table of lapis lazuli. Read
how Gilgamesh suffered all and accomplished all.

It’s full of surprises, from the contemporary echoes in Gilgamesh’s desire to kill Humbaba and “drive out evil from the world,” to the low comedy of losing Utnapishtim’s immortality-giving plant by putting it down, to vivid and weird images like the frightened Enkidu: “his face turned pale like a severed head.” “For six days and seven nights I mourned him, until a maggot fell out of his nose.” The dead “squat in the darkness/dirt is their food, their drink is clay, they are dressed in feathered garments like birds,/they never see light, and on door and bolt the dust lies thick.”

Also striking, as well as over-the-top funny, are bravura strings of curses and insults reeled out by Gilgamesh—to Shamhat:

may wild dogs camp in your bedroom, may owls
nest in your attic, may drunkards vomit
all over you…

and to Ishtar:

Why would I want to be the lover
of a broken oven that fails in the cold,
a flimsy door that the wind blows through,
a palace that falls on its staunchest defenders,
a mouse that gnaws through its thin reed shelter,
tar that blackens the workman’s hands,
a waterskin that is full of holes
and leaks all over its bearer, a piece
of limestone that crumbles and undermines
a solid stone wall, a battering ram
that knocks down the rampart of an allied city,
a shoe that mangles its owner’s foot?

Profound too, like this description of how sex with Shamhat lured Enkidu from the animal world into the human:

He knew that his mind had somehow grown larger,
he knew things now that an animal can’t know.

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness – Edward Abbey, 1968

Like Walden gone right. I loved it, but I’m going to have to re-read it later to grab all the quotes I want… how do I manage to read without post-its at hand (sorry, sticky notes!) when I know I’ll never remember what I want to? Too quick to read, too slow to think and write, as usual. But I very much look forward to re-reading and re-savoring this, especially because I wasn’t able to attend the Nature and Environment book group discussion. But then I might just end up quoting big chunks, like this:

[In Delicate Arch] you may see a symbol, a sign, a fact, a thing without meaning or a meaning which includes all things.
Much the same could be said of the tamarisk down in the canyon, of the blue-black raven croaking on the cliff, of your own body. The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (There is no beauty in nature, said Baudelaire. A place to throw empty beer cans on Sunday, said Menken.) If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful—that which is full of wonder.
A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us—like rock and sunlight and wind and wildflowers—that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous, then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on Earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.

The one of the many, many quotes I would have marked, had I had the sticky notes, that stuck its sticky self in my brain so I had to go back and find it: “the delicious magical green of a young cottonwood with its ten thousand exquisite leaves vibrating like spangles in the vivid air.” The older I get, the more I love trees. Thank you, Edward Abbey.

Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult – Bruce Handy, 2017

I love books-about-books, and this one is about my favorite genre, so I would have enjoyed it anyway. But it’s also extremely funny, brilliantly-written, and has one of the coolest designs I’ve ever seen—credited to Thomas Colligan. The jacket, front endsheet, and back endsheet are each the most stylized possible element of a famous picture book (Where the Wild Things Are, The Cat in the Hat, and Goodnight Moon) rendered as “flat” paper, with an iconic partial element visible under a lifted corner: Max’s yellow crown with his clawed costume hand and foot, the Cat in the Hat stripes with the fish tail emerging from its bowl, rabbit ears against the green wall under the corner of an expanse of evening sky blue. I couldn’t put the book down and totally agree with Gretchen Rubin‘s jacket blurb: “I only wish the book were ten times longer.” I have a fantasy of writing essays like this about some of my personal favorites that he doesn’t cover, like The Mouse and His Child (he does mention Frances, at least) and Mistress Masham’s Repose. Inspiring.