For Pleasure (summer 2010): This summer's big indulgence (stealing hours from reviewables) is Thomas Pynchon's mammoth Against the Day (Penguin.) I'm at page 415, and so not halfway, but I've gone past the Spock joke, and the time travel-related nod to Jack Finney (I'm speculating.) The Chums of Chance are a marvelous invention, and I'm glad to be back with them after maybe too much of the Wild West. Pynchon is so singular and so fertile that there is nothing I have ever been able to do but read him for pleasure.

Of course there's much more to it, and his choice of era--the 1890s and decades immediately after--are both fascinating (especially in America, where modern cities and technology coexist with the last of the Wild West and original America) and perfect for his themes. I've just read the passages in which refugees from the ominous future when capitalism has finally despoiled and used up too much, raid this past for its innocence...

But the summer's discovery was a shorter and more traditional (but still singular) novel by Alan Sillitoe. He seems to be known primarily in the states as the 1950s author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, not coincidentally both made into fine movies. But judging from Internet info, he's had a longer presence in the UK and is considered a distinguished novelist. On the basis of the 1976 novel I've just read, he should be. (Those are two photos of him above, one from his fame days, the other more recent.)

The novel is The Widower's Son, about the son of a provincial working class army sergeant in World War I, raised to be a soldier, who becomes not only a soldier in World War II but an artillery officer (and hence a gentleman) in the process. The writing is crisp, with what seemed to me to be a few fleeting literary illusions or suggestions (Joyce, Hemingway) but basically an individual style that matches the character of the men he's writing about. The word I kept thinking of was wisdom. There's wisdom in his descriptions, especially of thoughts and character. That he can describe in a few sentences the confusion of an ascendant member of the working class might be expected. But describing so well and so economically the feelings of falling in love? That's a surprise.

He's taken that inner conflict of the "working class hero" beyond the young men he first wrote about into later confusions: "The fact that he had become a colonel had had more effect on him than he wanted to admit. He'd blown gaps into himself with his own guns. While still in the army it was all right. But now with no bounds to hold him, he didn't know where he belonged anymore." But also in writing about war, the military, father and son, youth and age, love and marriage, Sillitoe shows a sure hand, and as a reader I felt confident in him. The end of the marriage has some of the more daring sections--like the tour de force of a couple quarreling by describing military operations--that I wasn't as sure of as I read them, but I will certainly remember them. I was impressed, and I hope to read more of Sillitoe's fiction.

One other note--I forgot a book I finished this spring: Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Its short, thematically related stories were perfect for those last minutes of reading before sleep, and so I savored it over time. And since time is its basic subject, and the stories were dreamlike, that seemed to work out fine.

To Kill A Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
HarperCollins

This is the 50th anniversary year for one of the most beloved and enduring American novels. The success of To Kill A Mockingbird was immediate, winning the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it remains among the top 10 best selling novels of these fifty years. It is also one of the five most assigned novels in American schools, and American librarians voted it the best novel of the twentieth century.

Much of the novel is about the young tomboy Scout (author Harper Lee’s self-portrait) and brother Jem growing up in a small Alabama town in the 1930s. Few writers achieve what she did: portraying childhood events while reflecting the feelings and perceptions gained over time. But the fictionalized memoir becomes a dramatic courtroom drama: Scout’s father Attticus Finch (based on Lee’s father) defends a young black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.

The theme of innocence goes beyond the children to “the mockingbird”—the innocent who only sings and does no one harm—which applies to both the accused Tom Robinson, and to Boo Radley, the neighbor who lives in darkness, the stranger who receives his neighbors’ projections of violence, and is therefore a source of fear.

Another theme, explicitly stated as a lesson to the children, is that of cultivating empathy and understanding by trying to see the world from the other’s perspective, as Scout does finally when she stands on Boo Radley’s porch at the end. To imaginatively live in another’s skin remains a crucial necessity in our public as well as private lives. It’s applicable to many situations but by the early 1960s, it was especially a resonant point of view for whites regarding Civil Rights struggles.

This theme is reinforced in other ways throughout the novel, notably by the story of Mrs. Dubose, an elderly neighbor whose surliness turns out to be the product of physical pain and painkiller addiction. When Jem is punished for vandalizing her garden by being required to read to her every day, it becomes a path for her redemption and peaceful death. It’s another case of assumptions and projections proven wrong, as well as the power of simple acts to do more good than we know.

Harper Lee, now in her 80s and ailing, never published another book. The instant and overwhelming fame she escaped by going back to Alabama may be one reason. But she remained dedicated to the written word. In a 2006 letter to Oprah Winfrey, she wrote: "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.”

A Reader on Reading
by Alberto Manguel
Yale University Press 308 pages

One of the pleasures associated with reading literature is reading about the literature one has read, and even better, about the great literature that one has not yet read and—melancholy fate—probably never will. But in this age when such reading is considered dorky as well as obsolete, a shining rationale is also welcome.

Like Alberto Manguel’s insightful The Library at Night (published by Yale in 2008) this book is a collection of thematically linked pieces: a bit autobiographical, but mostly about specific authors and books (Borges, Conrad, Dante, Pinocchio) as well as cultural and political topics illustrated by authors from the Bible and Homer to Che Guevara.

Another pleasure of this kind of book is the apt quote, as this from Jorge Luis Borges (who Manguel knew in Argentina): “To imagine the plot of a novel is delectable. To actually write it out is an exaggeration.” And this (also Borges): “I’ve always said that the lasting aim of literature is to display our destinies.”

There is variety to choose from, and some chapters are especially tantalizing ( Manguel may have a fascinating book on Cervantes either aborning or aborted.) There is also enough sheer brilliance to make this a book to keep and savor.

Each chapter is headed by a mischievous quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which pay off particularly in a late chapter, “At the Mad Hatter’s Table.” It begins: “As most perceptive readers will agree, the distinctive characteristic of the human world is its insanity.” Though he could not have foreseen it, Manguel’s reading of cultural politics implied in Carroll illuminates the current movement supposedly based on a different Tea Party. But he also notes that writing and reading are activities to lift the spirit, and perhaps the greatest human defense against the apocalyptic times.

The book ends with eloquent meditations on the meaning of reading itself. After confessing “As a child, I made no clear distinction between my own identity and that which books created for me,” he summarizes: “It may be that, of all the instruments we have invented to help us along the path of self-discovery, books are the most useful, the most practical, the most concrete. By lending words to our bewildering experience, books become compasses that emobdy the four cardinal points:mobility and stability, self-reflection and the gift of looking outward.”

Manguel then states something else that he’s so far implied: that reading can be a political act. It is not only pertinent as lived in time (he notes that he was reading of Don Quixote’s idealism during the political tumult of 1968), but as a perennial place to stand: “Reading at its best may lead to reflection and questioning, and reflection and questioning may lead to objection and change. That, in any society, is a dangerous enterprise.”

Reading provides us the power "to see with the eyes of others and speak with the tongues of the dead." "Reading is the ability to enter a text and explore it to one's fullest individual capabilities, repossessing it in the act of reinvention." Or as Emerson put it, when you are reading, "you are the book's book."

There is a chapter on wordplay, and the book's title is itself a pun. A Reader on Reading is autobiographical, with Manguel as the reader. But it is also a book of readings, often called a Reader. Manguel offers a chapter of adages on the ideal reader, such as "The Ideal Reader wishes to get to the end of the book and to know that the book will never end." "Reading a book from centuries ago, the ideal reader feels immortal." "The ideal reader is a novel's main character."

Bottom of the Ninth
by Michael Shapiro
Times Books

Major League baseball was the most popular national sport for a long time. A lot of factors went into changing that status, but Michael Shapiro makes a particular case for what happened in this “inside baseball” book.

According to Shapiro, 1960 was the year that baseball blew its opportunity to remain America’s dominant sport by subverting the ongoing attempt to create a third major league (the Continental League), where equally matched teams would compete with each other and share financial resources. Instead the National and American Leagues decided to add new teams (consisting of major league castoffs and minor leaguers that guaranteed losing seasons) while retaining the selfish every-team-for-itself finances that favored the rich teams in major markets.

At the same time, a new pro football league arose (the American Football League), founded on the Continental League model. It became a big success, and when merged into the National Football League, began football’s dominance.

I admit I started reading this book because the blurbs suggested that the Pittsburgh Pirates victory over the Yankees in the 1960 World Series was the start of baseball’s decline. But that series was not only incredibly thrilling for young western Pennsylvania baseball fans like me, it was historically exciting: Bill Mazeroski’s homer remains the only home run to decide a World Series in the bottom of the ninth of the seventh game.

It turns out that Shapiro meant only that this series was so exciting that it should have cemented baseball’s dominance for future generations. But it didn’t, and although Shapiro’s overall thesis seems leaky, he’s right about the plight of small market teams. The Pirates were reigning World Champions again in 1980 when the team’s General Manager described to me in an interview how the inability to compete financially made its decline all but inevitable. In fact they had one more excellent team in the early 90s (Barry Bonds’ last years in Pittsburgh) before beginning a record-setting string of consecutive losing seasons that’s still ongoing.

I really enjoyed the game-by-game description of the 1960 World Series, especially that remarkable seventh game. But the book is at least as much about the corporate insiders running the major leagues as about the players running the bases. So even though it covers an era I enthusiastically followed (enough to note that catcher Del Crandall’s name is repeatedly misspelled), it’s maybe a little too inside the baseball business for me. This book can still bring back memories of the days when every American kid’s summer sport was baseball--and when "inside baseball" was really about baseball.
[continued after photos]

The photo on the book's cover (also the top of these two, although a slightly different--maybe earlier shot) captures the Moment--Bill Mazeroski's homer in the bottom of the 9th--at Forbes Field in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh. The photo was taken from high atop the Cathedral of Learning, the University of Pittsburgh, which was across Forbes Avenue from the ball park. Forbes Field was torn down, and the Pirates went with the Steelers to the North Side, to Three Rivers Stadium. Though that stadium is also gone now, the new football stadium and the new baseball park--one of the most beautiful in the country, meant to suggest the feeling of Forbes Field--are near where it once stood, on the North Side, just across the Allegheny River from downtown.

Where Forbes Field used to be, there is now a parking lot and a little park, and the Pitt Library. Home plate is still there, with a memorial to Maz, and part of the left field wall is also preserved, where Maz's homer went. There are some who say that leaving Oakland contributed to the falling Pirates fortunes. They were first and foremost an Oakland institution. But that's another factor in the decline of baseball: teams left their city neighborhoods as people moved to the suburbs, and baseball became a bigger business--with much bigger payrolls--even as it slipped down from the #1 sport, to #2 and now #3 in places that have an NBA basketball team or NHL hockey club.

About that 1960 Series: Shapiro tells it mostly from the Yankees point of view, focusing on Casey Stengel. So that added new stuff to what I knew. And I really valued the description of the seventh game. When the Pirates won the National League pennant in 1960, so many western Pennsylvania fans wanted to see the Series that the team held a kind of lottery for most of the tickets. Like everyone else, I sent in the money for two tickets. The Pirates randomly selected from those envelopes, and you either got two tickets to a game of their choice, or you got your money back. I was lucky, sort of. I got tickets, but to the sixth game.

For awhile it looked like there might not be a sixth game, but then the Pirates were actually ahead 3 games to 2 when they returned to Pittsburgh. For the first five games, the Pirates won low-scoring games by a run or two. The Yankees won high scoring games in which they scored a lot of runs. Unfortunately for me, the sixth game fell into the Yankee victory pattern. It was a miserable 10-0. I did get to see all those amazing players, though, from out in the left field bleachers: Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Roger Maris and the other fabled Yankees as well as the Pirates I'd of course seen before.

The Series was played during the day then, and so for the seventh game I was back in school. It was a torturous afternoon, because some of our teachers (all nuns) allowed us to listen to the game on radio, but most did not. I vividly recall getting highlights whispered to me, courtesy of students sitting next to the open windows, listening to Bob Prince and Jim Woods doing play by play on KDKA radio, drifting down from a classroom above. It was an incredibly dramatic back and forth game, that I never saw.

The school day ended with the score tied after eight innings. Most of the other students got on buses to go home. I lived close enough to walk, but instead I hurried up to the big classroom on the third floor, where I heard the football team was watching the game on television. I'd barely got into a seat when Mazeroski hit his home run. The room erupted. I heard later about the pandemonium on the buses as the play-by-play came over transistor radios. And Pittsburgh went nuts. In my first conversation with playwright August Wilson, he told me what it was like in the Hill District and in Oakland. Shapiro's account doesn't come close to capturing the joy as well as the frenzy. I also remember stories about commuters driving home, listening on the radio. There are a few long tunnels on the parkway, but once you drove in, radio reception was blocked. Afraid to risk it, cars pulled off to the side when the ninth inning started. They were rewarded. Horns resounding in the Squirrel Hill tunnel. It makes me smile just imagining it. How sweet it is! We had 'em all the way!

For Pleasure (winter/spring 2010): Hadn't realized that since last spring I've failed to note books I've read for pleasure, so I'm now not going to remember them all. The best I can do is a recent sampling, from winter and spring, starting with the most recent: Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright. Yes, I've read this entire 1018 page novel, published posthumously in 1942. An essay on utopian fictions by Ursula LeGuin put me on to it, but it is more than the standard tour of an imagined better place--it's a richly imagined novel--a thoroughly imagined place, but also a thoroughly imagined story and main character, who is the narrator. It is set in very early 20th century, in an imaginary society that seems to be geographically around New Zealand? In any case, it is in many ways ahead of its time, in others time-bound, but in essence, timeless. The many descriptions of the physical world, particularly on voyages--climbs, rides, etc. in a society without machines--remind me not a little of Kim Stanley Robinson.

I read Islandia in a 1958 hardback edition from the local university library. Finding traces of earlier readers--their notes and bookmarks, even their food stains--adds to that reading experience. I also read a book discarded by that library, which I picked up at a library sale: Master Minds: Portraits of Contemporary American Artists and Intellectuals by Richard Kostelanetz, and by "contemporary" he means from the 1960s, when this book was published. The portraits, ranging from the still-well-known (Marshall McLuhan, Allen Ginsberg) to the little remembered (historian Richard Hofstadter, pioneer consultant Bernard Muller-Thym), and including unusually thorough portraits of figures known today mostly as names attached to a few ideas, like Reinhold Niebuhr and John Cage. I especially enjoyed his perspective on Glenn Gould and Ralph Ellison, but really, all the portraits were fascinating, both in themselves and as a snapshot of an important time that especially grips me.

A chance find at a bookstore sidewalk sale got me The Zoo Where You're Fed to God, a novel by Michael Ventura. I knew Ventura from his book with James Hillman and two volumes of his newspaper columns and essays, and I even exchanged emails with him a few years ago. I'm not sure when I acquired this book, but I finally read it this spring, and was dazzled. Some of the dialogue is a little mannered but it works as a narrative as well as offering insights beyond what you're likely to find in most literary novels.

Just in time for Jim Harrison's latest collection of novellas, I read his last one: The Summer He Didn't Die. A Brown Dog story (I'm sure all of these will appear in one volume someday), female POVs in "Republican Wives" (which in an odd sad way reminded me of Salinger's "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut"), and an autobiographical piece. Harrison sets a high standard, and this didn't disappoint. Part of the fun of this one was the actual book's origin: it is a hardback I bought off the Internet, and came to me via "U.S. Army Libraries Korea."

Another novel off the pile of "meant tos" was Author, Author by David Lodge, a novel about Henry James. Surprisingly absorbing (I'm not that into James), with the additional interest of a different sort of way to do a historical novel. Interesting also in light of current theories/gossip about James. Lodge makes a good case for James' failure to marry as a conscious choice, to keep him free to write. There is no suggestion of the fashionable assumption of his homosexuality--even a scene in which he is repulsed by the opportunity. There are other equally absorbing characters in the book, such as his friend George Du Maurier. It's much a book about the vagaries and ironies of literary success and/or failure.

In the areas where science, mind and larger contexts may or may not meet, I read Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time (actually contemporary this time--published in 2007.) I was attracted to it because Lynn Margulis was a co-editor, but it seems she wasn't all that involved in conducting the interviews. I found it more uneven and diffuse than I'd hoped.

I'd started to read a new book from Yale, Paradoxical Life by Andreas Wagner, and found another book that seems to complement it: Emergence by Steven Johnson.

I dipped into some classics, read some plays and theatre criticism but that was at least tangentially work-related. A guilty pleasure was the first half of The Thurber Carnival, and the second half is likely to be a guilty pleasure of the summer. It's a paperback I've had since high school, so this is definitely a re-read, but it's been a long time. I'm currently reading another library discard, an autobiography by television news pioneer David Brinkley (titled simply David Brinkley.) It's delightful, but I guess you have to know who Estes Kefauver is to appreciate the revelation of the way he picked up girls while campaigning for vice-president. But Brinkley was close to major events and people of the 50s and 60s etc., so there's insight and informed recollection told with the clarity and wit that first made Brinkley famous.

Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World
by Claire Harman
Holt 277 pages

Viewers of PBS may be forgiven if from time to time they conclude that they’ve stumbled on the Jane Austen Channel. In recent years PBS/BBC have filmed five of her novels and a new biography, following the international success of the Pride and Prejudice miniseries of 1995, which author Claire Harman credits as the beginning of the current wave of “Austenolatry,” or Jane-mania.

New movies and books are just the start: there are Austen festivals, web sites, board games, fashions and yes, Darcy and Elizabeth action figures. A virtual industry in the UK, Austen is an international icon. She has the fame of the single name: absent Tarzan, she is our only Jane.

Not bad for a writer with (it’s said) a single plot: Boy Meets Girl, Girl Gets Boy. But as Harman chronicles it, Jane wasn’t always famous. For years after her obscure life and quiet death in 1817 she was virtually unknown, except by other novelists plundering her plots and stealing her characters. Even her centennial was modestly marked, in contrast to the popular acclaim accorded to the more florid novels of the Bronte sisters (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre.)

But eventually the ironic yet romantic grace of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, etc. became more powerful, first with the English elite and then more broadly. In World War I “Austen was prime among the texts that went to war, and the trenches were full of Janeites.” By World War II, the inspiration and comfort of the English identity she expressed was more consciously employed when Pride and Prejudice first reached the screen in 1940, starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson.

Interest in Austen herself fueled Jane-mania, and Harman describes the many attempts to deal with—and to pointedly embroider--her sparse biography. It’s worth noting that, at least until feminist critiques and gender-based marketing, Austen’s wonderful sentences were as openly admired by men as by women.

Harman’s book is accessible but scholarly. She starts with the strong momentum of Austen’s life and Jane’s satirical bent, but that ends abruptly with her death after 60 pages. The subsequent literary history and Harman's pointed observations can be interesting, but I admit I was waiting for more than she offered about the films. So let me suggest that the best brief film about Austen and her work is on the DVD of The Jane Austen Book Club, which is itself the most subtle and satisfying of the recent Austen-based movies.

As for the screen versions of Austen's novels, they continue to be points of entry to the books for many people. They were for this literature major: it was seeing that 1940 Pride & Prejudice on TV that started me reading all of Austen in quick succession. But I also admire the Keira Knightley feature as well as the PBS miniseries. In fact, I find that most of the screen versions I've seen have their own particular virtues, but in the end their best elements are Austen’s sentences, even as occasional dialogue. Austen’s stories are clearly mythic for our time, but those sentences are why she truly is Divine Jane.

Eaarth Day Books

Besides the deafening silence today versus the two million shouting voices forty years ago, this Earth Day has some significant differences from the first. For example, there is 40% less sea ice in the world, and much of what remains is melting. There are 8.5 million square miles more that must deal with a tropical climate; half of Australia and much of the American Southwest are in permanent drought. River water has shrunk by a volume equivalent to the Mississippi. Glaciers worldwide are shrinking, and some are virtually gone.

There are tens of thousands--probably hundreds of thousands--fewer species of life. There are fewer edible fish in the sea, and life there is dying out fast. There is less water in many places on land, and partly as a consequence the world produces 40 million fewer tons of wheat, corn and barley per year. There are more storms, more heat waves, more diseases in more lifeforms, more forest fires and other destruction, not only in the U.S. but in the Amazon. "We're seeing the end of some forests as we know them," says a U.S. forester.

At the foot of a melting glacier in northern Tibet, a young man from a small village there was asked to explain the reason for the change. His answer was neither ethereal or complicated. "Global warming," he said. "Too many factories." A simple and much more than an inconvenient truth. The Climate Crisis is not some vision of the future--it's been with us these forty years, it's gotten worse, and now it's having effects that only the self-blinded and deluded can deny. But still...we can stop it, right? We may be able to prevent the very worst--runaway climate change in the far future, although what governments around the world are so far willing to do won't be enough. In any case, for the foreseeable future, it's only going to get worse. And then at the very least it is going to stay that way, for thousands of years.

That was the message of David Orr's book, Down to the Wire, last year. This year it is no longer a new message-- not among climate scientists and those who follow their work. It is the starting point for Bill McKibben's new book. We no longer live on the same planet as existed on the first Earth Day. He gives the planet we will be living on from now on a new name: Eaarth. So in a sense, this is the first Eaarth Day.

McKibben's book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books) uses only about a quarter of its pages to describe the current situation and trend lines, and another quarter to explain the inadequacy of the proposed responses to the Climate Crisis, and the extreme unlikelihood that large-scale changes in policy, energy generation etc. can be made in time to head off very major changes in how human life on this planet is to be lived. "And if our societies start to tank, we'll be in worse shape than those who came before. For one thing, our crisis is global, so there's no place to flee. For another, most of us don't know how to do very much--in your standard collapse scenario, it's nice to know how to grow wheat."

McKibben comes right up against the logical conclusions, the doomsday scenarios of nuclear wars over oil and water, mass migrations, a dieback of half or 3/4 or more of humanity, leading to the day-to-day life for the survivors imagined for us in a host of grim movies, from Mad Max to The Road. Instead he backs off, partly because (I imagine) it's as David Orr wrote--if this is indeed the future, there's not much point in writing a book about it. Instead, he writes: "The rest of this book will be devoted to another possibility--that we might choose instead to try to manage our descent. That we might aim for a relatively graceful decline." [Emphasis is his.]

So the second half of the book is about how to do that. It emphasizes local and small-scale solutions--living "lightly, carefully, gracefully." Locally generated clean power, focus on maintenance instead of growth, no more consumer culture or the world it represents. Except for the Internet. Because local utopias are likely to get stifling without contact. "Which is why, if I had my finger on the switch, I'd keep the juice flowing to the Internet even if I had to turn off everything else."

McKibben makes his case for all this being well within the possible, sometimes persuasively ( although I'm dubious about the Internet surviving.) He notes that part of the problem is that "We lack the vocabulary and the metaphors we need for life on a different scale." He offers his "candidates for words that may help us think usefully about the future." They are: durable, sturdy, stable, hardy, robust.

Good words, and useful for the kind of society he foresees. McKibben made a choice in both the language and content of this book: not much philosophy or generalizing, a lot of practical specifics and common sense. But I doubt that this vocabulary is going to be enough. For one thing, there are some slightly higher-order words that will be very important, like courage, compassion, attention, dedication, fairness. But even beyond that, people need a larger vision, to guide and inspire them. And if it's going to really work, it has to be the right vision.

There were good words and visions at the first Earth Day, that helped inspire the effort leading to most of the environmental progress that was institutionalized in the first decade of the environmental movement, and has continued on that momentum. But mostly, environmentalists have been terrible at vision, and especially at "good words." With the switch from the soft-sounding and not even accurate "greenhouse effect" to the vaguely pleasant sounding "global warming" and "climate change," the response to global heating has especially suffered. As for the titanic struggle ahead between those who want to use resources to stop the cause of global heating to those who insist we can only afford to fix the effects, what environmentalists offer us is the mind-numbing choice of mitigation versus adaptation. Which more or less guarantees that a sensible discussion of these issues won't occur in enough time to have clear policies before the panic and politics combine to drive the situation out of control.

But in the past thirty years there is one word, one concept and one vision that has the proven power to move human souls: Gaia. The sense of our planet as a living organism, prefigured in myth and science, proposed as a hypothesis by James Lovelock and refined by him and others into a real scientific theory, it has also proven to be an inspiration and a possible focus.

The breadth and depth of what Gaia can mean for the future is brilliantly suggested in the new compendium of essays, Gaia in Turmoil ( the MIT Press), edited by Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinkler (with an introduction, by the way, by Bill McKibben.) This volume includes various views of the science(including its relationship to systems theory and cybernetics),the historical resonance of the ideas, the applications to policy and how people relate to their planet in their moment-to-moment lives. There are trenchant essays on Gaia and evolution, forest systems, water, biodiversity, and on its relationship to ethics, education and governance. Particularly striking are the essays by Martin Ogle on Gaia as model and metaphor, and David Abram on Gaia and the transformation of personal experience of the everyday world. I don't think I am exaggerating when I suggest that an entire curriculum could be built around this book, producing a very valuable education for the future. Together with McKibben and Orr--and one other book , A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)--I place this at the top of my indispensable Eaarth Day books.

Solnit's book explores responses to recent disasters to pose the key questions "Who are you? Who are we? In times of crisis, these are life-and-death questions." This is another component of how we realistically face this tougher future. Another useful anthology, with an emphasis on social questions regarding future environment, is Human Footprints on the Global Environment: Threats to Sustainability (MIT), edited by E. Rosa, A. Diekmann, T. Dietz and C.C. Jaeger. This volume may be of interest primarily to scholars, professionals and policymakers, but it does indicate the seriousness and sophistication of a growing multi-disciplinary approach to larger scale issues of the onrushing future.

A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature by James William Gibson (Holt), on the other hand, is a marvelous synthesis for the general reader as well as specialists looking for a broader and deeper view. Not as squishy as the title might indicate, it narrates pertinent history and it's a good introduction to classic authors and important if more obscure books that combine the practical with the necessary spiritual dimensions of approaching our relationship to the natural world. Though these relationships faded in our current built environment, a hotter climate and all that it brings will force humanity to once again confront the power of nature. When humans were closer to nature by necessity--when humanity developed by means of its relationship with the rest of nature--the spiritual dimension was very important. It likely will be again.

Other useful approaches can be found in Living Through the End of Nature by Paul Wapner (MIT) and Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order by Thomas Princen (MIT.) Wapner looks at the attempts to master nature through the history of civilization, and proposes practical ways to redress some sort of necessary balance. Princen grapples with the persistent basic issues of economy and ecology, at best using direct language to untangle them. Though that effort isn't always successful, there's enough merit to add it to the Eaarth Day reading list.

Earth Day #40: Classics

Stewart Udall, Secretary of Interior in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died last month. A pioneer in environmentalism before and after the first Earth Day (and a major voice in the excellent PBS American Experience docu, Earth Days), he was the author of a mostly forgotten but very important book, The Quiet Crisis (1963). Following only a year after Rachel Carson's expose of chemical pollution, Silent Spring, Udall's book took a more historical view--chronicling American conservation efforts--and a wider view of the present: "In a great surge toward 'progress,' our congestion increasingly has befouled water and air and growth has created new problems on every hand. Schools, housing, and roads are inadequate and ill-planned; noise and confusion have mounted with the rising tempo of technology; and as our cities have sprawled outward, new forms of abundance and new forms of blight have oftentimes marched hand in hand."

Some books of bygone decades describe problems which the subsequent environmental movement addressed in America, while others--like Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb--dealt in terms now obsolete with problems that are still with us, and have even grown worse. But there are other books, like Udall's, that are of more than historical interest: they are classics both in the sense of being among the first to break new ground, and of enduring value to us now, including as reading experiences. They are classics, not only or not specifically of "environmentalism," but of all that pertains crucially to Earth, and Earth Day.

Udall's book was one of the first public policy books to recognize the importance of Aldo Leopold and his essay on "the land ethic," in the now classic book, A Sand County Almanac. Another writer of that era was Loren Eiseley, and to pick out probably his best known title--The Immense Journey--is to give only one example of his enduring writing, in a number of books.

The next generation of indispensible writers begins with Gary Snyder, in his poems but also in his prose statements, especially the landmark The Practice of the Wild (1990) but also The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work (1980) and A Place in Space (1995.)  These helped to inspire the bioregionalism and rehabitation movements that were and are especially influential in the western U.S.
One of the most important figures in establishing the breadth and depth of the ecology movement--and one of the most forgotten, was Paul Shepard. His essay, "Ecology and Man, A Viewpoint" was a foundation document. Many of the ideas now entering the mainstream through newer authors were even more fully and gracefully articulated in his books, considered radical in their time, particularly the crucial importance of nature to childhood and human development (Nature and Madness) and the idea that "animals made us human" (even the phrase is originally his) in Thinking Animals, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, The Others and other books.

Today we pursue a deeper understanding of the Earth through the ideas that coalesce around the powerful image of Gaia. Various elements of that understanding come out of books that are still classics, such as the best-selling essays of Lewis Thomas in Lives of A Cell, and Gregory Bateson's Steps Towards An Ecology of Mind. Learning more about the ways in which our human ancestors related to the natural world (another major subject for Paul Shepard), is informed by a deeper understanding of surviving Indigenous peoples. A classic in this regard is Make Prayers to the Raven by Richard Nelson, who used this experience with the Koyukon elders to inform his own intense experiences in The Island Within.

We all have our favorite authors and their books describing their experiences in the natural world, but among the essential authors who combines description of experiences with a greater context, Gary Snyder is one of my favorites, and I revere especially his book, The Practice of the Wild.

Another book that was particularly important to me but which I feel is a classic that fills in an important conceptual area is the relatively unknown Ceremonial Time by John Hanson Mitchell. It is the history of a single square mile of New England, over 15 thousand years. It gives the dimension of time to place, and vice versa.

Finally, there are much more recent books on the most important topics concerning the Earth and its future, particularly in two areas. First is biodiversity and our understanding of both the deep interrelationship of life and the understanding of other species, particularly as we overcome the bias of the mechanistic interpretation of Darwinian evolution. I don't know if there are any classics in these areas yet, though landmark books would likely include Acquiring Genomes by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, and Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb. Books like Beast and Man by philosopher Mary Midgely and books by Elaine Morgan like The Acquatic Ape and The Descent of Woman are exciting to read and shake things up.

The other topic is the climate crisis, and in this area I have more definite choices: An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore remains the classic survey of the subject, Forecast by Stephan Faris is the best account of the present consequences, while Down to the Wire by David Orr is the best book so far on the climate crisis future.

And now that I've been so definite, I have to take it back--these are my choices, books I would recommend as classics, but I haven't read everything so I'm sure I'm missing plenty.

A quarter century experiment in artistic and educational achievement by at-risk youth and their remarkable teacher, presented in this eye-popping volume, reviewed in the post below.

Tim Rollins and the K.O.S.: A History
Edited by Ian Berry
MIT Press 272 Pages

In 1981 a young artist and teacher named Tim Rollins ventured into the rotting rubble of the South Bronx, and began his first art class for at-risk middle school students with these words: “Today we are going to make art, and we are also going to make history.” Through thick (lionized by the New York art world) and thin (a student murdered, Rollins broke and virtually homeless) they did both. That first class led to an independent and self-renewing group that more than 25 years later still exists: the Kids of Survival, or K.O.S. The artwork they produced is bought and shown in major museums and galleries around the world.

Rollins channeled and challenged the energies of those first students, refusing to accept that a kid who could play a video game for eight hours straight was condemned to A.D.D., or a kid who could reproduce perfectly a long rap off a record was disabled by a learning disorder. Influenced by the theories of educators John Dewey, Jane Addams, Ivan Illich, Robert Coles and Paulo Freire, Rollins was also inspired by the actual writings of Martin Luther King as well as Emerson and Thoreau. “I have always thought that art, at its best, was a form of civil disobedience,” he said. “We are not going to take it the way it was given to us. We have the audacity to have a vision of something new.” [review continues after illustration.]

One of the "golden trumpets" works responding to Kafka's Amerika, in which a utopian theatre group welcomes new members with a chorus played on golden trumpets. Painting directly onto book pages began early in K.O.S. history, and remains a trademark.

Organizing at-risk kids to make art wasn’t entirely new then and it isn’t now, but Rollins’ approach is still notable. He paid attention to product as well as process, discarding either the expected representation of social conditions (“abject art”) or empty affirmations of the “we can make a difference” variety. And he used the art-making process to increase knowledge, as the group researched and explored their projects through classic literature (at first by Rollins reading it aloud.)

The result is a variety of striking art, handsomely reproduced in this large-format volume: from the early cartoon-influenced paintings responding to Frankenstein and Dracula and the Orwell-inspired portraits of political figures as Animal Farm figures, through the surreal golden trumpets inspired by Kafka (their first big art world success), and various projects including conceptual and installation art connected to the words of Flaubert, Aristophanes, Ralph Ellison, Mark Twain, Harriet Jacobs and H.G. Wells, as well as the music of Haydn, Schubert and Strauss. Rollins believed his students needed these alternatives to the otherwise inescapable contexts of their lives, and felt an ethical responsibility to involve knowledge, rather than simply teach art to students “who couldn’t spell ‘artist.’”

This excellent volume doubles as a catalog for a traveling exhibit that is now at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, until May 31.

David W. Orr's noble attempt to confront the realities of an age of severe climate consequences is reviewed below.

Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse
By David W. Orr
Oxford University Press. 261 pages.

Because environmental studies professor David Orr’s book is gracefully written, with a lucid and comprehensive vision, it is easy to read. But because of its subject and its messages, it is very difficult to read. For all of those reasons, it is important that everyone reads it, because it is about your future, which is likely to be very different from the present.

Orr begins with a view of the future that close observers of climate change are increasingly coming to, and it’s a real difference from just a few years ago. Despite current denialist noise and other snowjobs, it’s not a question of “if” anymore. It’s how fast, how bad and how long.

For those playing catch-up: Even Al Gore’s expositions of the massive evidence, for example, were accompanied by suggestions on how to “solve” the Climate Crisis. For awhile there was a popular impression that changing light bulbs would do it. Though it’s true that a shocking amount of of carbon could be kept out of the atmosphere with some simple efficiencies, that wasn’t going to change what had already been set in motion. Some experts (like Mark Hertsgaard) cautioned that because of a 30 year or so time lag from cause (greenhouse gas pollution) to effects, the crisis was already underway, and we need to prepare for some consequences.

After more climate data was collected and evaluated, books by respected figures like Martin Rees and James Lovelock in the UK that foresaw more cataclysmic consequences were taken seriously but still seemed extreme. Then came observations of Arctic sea melts in 2007 that were far sooner and far more advanced than climate scientists had predicted. “Instead of the long, slow problem many had imagined climate change to be, we seemed to be staring at a dynamic system bent on flipping into some new state,” writes Bill McKibben. More urgent warnings followed, by the chief U.S. climate scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, among others.

So the dire situation that Orr outlines is becoming more generally accepted: Continued greenhouse gas pollution will result in an unrecognizably hot planet for hundreds of thousands of years, shorn of the life we know. “But a sober reading of the science of climate change indicates something else: we have already set in motion forces and trends that threaten the stability of the biosphere in a few decades and that will persist far longer.”

This is the growing consensus: severe and long-lasting effects are already in the cards. They may well be so overwhelming and persistent that they will absorb most of our attention and resources. Orr discusses some of the variables, and I’ve seen recent comments by climate scientists suggesting a time frame of from ten to thirty years before the cascade of multiple and interacting crises become painfully apparent. Orr writes: “Climate change, like the threat of nuclear annihilation, puts all that humanity has struggled to achieve—our cultures, art, music, literatures, cities, institutions, customs, religions, and history, as well as our posterity—at risk.”

“Climate change, in other words, is not so much a problem to be fixed but rather a steadily worsening condition with which we must contend for a long time.”

Orr looks at issues of governance and attitude as well as more specific ideas for getting through the coming climate collapse, and what elements of human civilization and human beings will help that process, while suggesting that the survival of these qualities—from inventiveness to compassion and community--are reasons for the human adventure to continue. For instance, we will need to understand and put into practice the home truth that the global economy is a subset of the biosphere. In this period of fear, anger and stress, personally and nationally, we will need to learn and employ the skills of peace, or we will lose what chance we have to survive.

“The long emergency ahead will be the ultimate challenge to our political creativity, acumen, skill, wisdom and foresight,” Orr writes. Though he doesn’t dwell on the worst implications—like deaths in the millions or worse—he realizes that such crises in the past led to war, tyrannous gangs, barbarism and the haunting ignorance that characterizes a Dark Age. In a coda, he even suggests the added difficulty of keeping a cool head in a hot world, when the heat itself is bending and breaking the world we assume and depend on.

He titles one late chapter "Hope at the End of Our Tether," which is a pretty direct reference to H.G. Well's last book, Mind At the End of Its Tether, in which he found humanity fated to fail because it was too late to save itself. (The expression, by the way, means to have exhausted one's options, like an animal tethered, unable to go farther than the rope will allow. It goes back to the 16th century, but became an expression with this meaning early in the 19th. Like a lot of cultural metaphors from agriculture, it's pretty much lost its referent, except of course for dog-walkers.) He ends this chapter with this paragraph:

"At the end of our tether we must imagine the unimaginable: a world rid of nuclear weapons and a world powered by sunlight, safe from the possibility of catastrophic climate change. Utopia? Hardly. But those are the only realistic options we have."

That's a powerful, present-tense restatement of how far we've stretched our possibilities. In 1960 and especially in his 1961 Inaugural, President Kennedy noted that humanity now had the power to abolish poverty, and also to abolish human life. Humanity could choose utopia, or it could choose oblivion. But as Buckminster Fuller and others soon suggested, the power of nuclear weapons etc. really meant that either we choose Utopia or we get Oblivion. It's an either/or. Orr stretches the tether even tighter, by noting that resource problems and catastrophes from the Climate Crisis make nuclear war more likely and therefore more dangerous. So we don't have much of a choice--though as Orr notes, even if we save ourselves from our two principal scourges, without losing civilization in the process, we still won't wind up with Utopia, the perfect society. That at least forestalls the objection that he's asking for perfection, which is by definition impossible. He's just saying the just about impossible is just about essential.


“There is no historical precedent, however, for what we must do if we are to endure,” he warns. And though he admits “I know of no purely rational reason for anyone to be optimistic about the human future,” he opts for hope—but of a particular kind: “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Hopeful people are actively engaged in defying the odds or changing the odds.” He quotes Vaclav Havel’s definition of hope as “an orientation of the heart” and “ability to work for something because it is good.” Orr believes the only thing that will save us is “people behaving heroically.”

Orr begins his book by noting that UK scientist Martin Ree’s 2003 book (Our Final Hour) which suggests that humankind has about a 1 in 2 chance of surviving the 21st century, was almost entirely ignored. Orr’s book has been out since last spring, I believe, and has also been pretty much ignored. In one sense it’s not surprising: even if the science is admitted, the message is so apocalyptic that it cries out for a grief response, starting with denial and anger, and maybe moving up to bargaining (i.e. technological fixes that few believe will change the immediate future, even if they work.) I had a tough time with this book myself, and only copious amounts of high-quality chocolate and some sleepless nights got me as far as this review.

But while this is one of the first books about how to contend with the coming “long emergency,” (and this phrase devised by Jim Kunstler looks like it will stick) it won’t be the last. For instance, Bill McKibben’s new book to be published in April, bears the subtitle: “Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.” Maybe it's groupthink, but I don't think so: these sentiments are becoming pretty common among those closely observing climate and climate science.

If we keep hearing this, and evidence piles up (and we have the wit to understand it--for instance, that the northeastern snows this month support global heating theories, they don't contradict them), sooner or later we’ll move through depression to acceptance, and then maybe we’ll get to work salvaging a civilization. Meanwhile, we ought to be grateful for writers like Orr who are preparing us for this future, as well as the scientists and scholars who are bringing their skills to bear on these topics, regardless of the terrified barbarians at the gates.

And this future doesn’t include continuing global failure to cut greenhouse gases, which makes the farther future even bleaker. “I also write with the assumption that we will succeed in reducing atmospheric CO2 below the level that would cause runaway climate change,” Orr adds, “otherwise, there is no point in writing anything other than an elegy or funeral dirge.”

How hard it is to read and then write these words, because it’s real now: very probably, the world we’ve known is ending, and humanity faces its greatest challenge, including the dual tasks of living in this harsher world while still doing what is necessary not to make things worse. Ending greenhouse gas pollution is still necessary, but it alone is no longer enough. We enter the age of consequences.

J.D. Salinger, whose death was announced Thursday, is remembered in the post below, along with historian Howard Zinn, who also died this week. This top cover of The Catcher in the Rye is the famous blank one Salinger insisted on, and of the edition I first read. Salinger didn't want an illustration to interfere with how the reader imagined Holden Caulfied, and he was right. When I first saw the cover on an earlier edition (bottom photo) that my friend Mike brought on a high school debate trip, I was shocked. That wasn't my Holden. Now I have paperbacks with both of these covers. Salon has a slide show of its many other covers--though I haven't been able to get it to work myself, here's the link.

J.D. Salinger, Howard Zinn

Update: Here's a really neat little story about Salinger's life in Cornish, New Hampshire.

J.D. Salinger is dead at the age of 91. I discovered Salinger at the same time of life as most, although when I did--in the early 1960s--it was more subversive (especially for a Catholic school boy) and yet more of the times, since Salinger was still publishing then. He was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1961. I was blown away by The Catcher in the Rye, and Salinger's voice (like Vonnegut's would later) took over any writing I tried. It was just something I had to work through and assimilate. But Salinger changed more than my writing--he changed how his own generation wrote (John Updike, Philip Roth included) and following generations as well.

For me his Nine Stories and his two Glass family books were in their own way even more mind-blowing. I can vividly remember finishing "Teddy" as I was walking fast up Hamilton Avenue in my hometown, too excited to sit or even stand still. This story and some of his other stories were my first introduction to Zen and other non-standard philosophies. I remember in high school getting a book of the Stoic Epictetus out of a college library, through the sister of a friend, because of Salinger.

And in high school and my first years of college I would check every issue of the New Yorker, hoping for a new story by John Updike (a reasonable hope) or--wonder of wonders--J.D. Salinger. And one night in 1965, wonder of wonders, there was one: the final Glass story and the final story of any kind Salinger published in his lifetime. I was in a bus station--I don't remember why--but I do remember reading it while sitting in the waiting room very consciously of there being an attractive young woman (older than me, however) on each side. But even that couldn't keep me from being absorbed in the story. The short stories, Franny and Zooey, were reading revelations.

For years afterwards I would wonder what Salinger was writing, and when we would see it, the literary equivalent of the Fatima letter good Catholics waited for the Pope to read. Salinger was not just a recluse but fierce in defending his silence and any use of his work. Now, depending on what his heirs and literary executors do (and they're already active, having made the announcement of his death), we may be in for a flood. No one knows how many new novels and stories there are, or what they might be like, or if there are none intact. It's hard to believe, after all these years, that they could be as revelatory. But Salinger may surprise us again.

There's also the distinct possibility of new collections of previously uncollected published work, and the less attractive possibility of movies and TV shows based on his work (there must be producers tonight already rabid for the rights to "Catcher") and various versions of Salinger's life. (The basic accuracy of a book about him by one of his children was challenged by his other child.)

The day before Salinger's death was announced, we learned of the death of Howard Zinn, whose A People's History of the United States not only made him a campus hero, it changed how the history of this country is written. I heard Zinn speak twice--the first time in the 60s, to a small group of beleagued draft-age students about the Vietnam War, the second time in the decade past, to a gymnasium filled with students--the largest crowd I've ever seen on the Humboldt State campus. I have a favorite Zinn passage--an eloquent and profound one-- by which I will always remember him. I posted it on another blog here. May these flawed men whose work changed our lives now rest in peace.

These provocative essays by Paul Chaat Smith on American Indians in contemporary culture, reviewed below.

Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong
Paul Chaat Smith
University of Minnesota Press 189 pages

Paul Chaat Smith is an enrolled Comanche, veteran of the American Indian Movement in the 60s and 70s, and now an associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. His main interest is contemporary artists, and many of the essays in this volume were originally linked to particular exhibitions—though the subjects range well beyond art. As for what the title means, “it’s a book title, folks, not to be taken literally,” he writes. “Of course I don’t mean everything. Just Most Things. And the You really means We, as in all of Us.” So this book should be of interest to Native readers as well as non-Natives.

Smith has a fluid style, contemporary and anecdotal as well as incisive, so these pieces are easy to read. He’s big on irony (“Alas, it’s practically the only thing I know”) so there’s edgy humor. This is a collection, so his opinions, observations and bits of autobiography are repeated, though in different ways. That works pretty well: you won’t forget what he really thinks about Dances With Wolves or his AIM experiences. Among the fascinating topics he takes on several times is the late 19th and early 20th century transition, when American Natives lost the last of their land, with some joining the Wild West show and all becoming defined by the movies, including a very early epic about the massacre at Wounded Knee, starring actual participants on both sides. (The soldiers were a little worried that the Indians were going to show up for the battle scene with loaded rifles.)

He can be provocative: “Generally speaking, white people who are interested in Indians are not very bright.” He worries that Indians have bought into a limiting self-image. He’s more interested in conceptual art and the installation art of James Luna, for example, who plays with traditional forms and the contemporary world, to interrogate common images and self-images of Indians today. Although Smith writes with intimate honesty about the National Museum of the American Indian, he wonders when contemporary Indian artists will see their work exhibited alongside other contemporary art.

He’s not advocating assimilation either. He argues that Indian peoples have always absorbed change into their cultures. His basic message for all might be this: “Good intentions aren’t enough; our circumstances require more critical thinking and less passion, guilt and victimization.”

Even with my limited experience, I am still often surprised at the simplistic views many otherwise intelligent non-Natives have of Native peoples. Non-Native readers who've had some authentic acquaintance with Native neighbors are more likely to appreciate this sophisticated treatment. Probably Native readers will find it intriguing. Not everyone is going to agree with Smith’s views, but they should start some interesting arguments.

Not Forgot: Remembrances of writers who died in the past decade by other writers here in the Guardian. Authors we lost in 2009 include (pictured): J.G. Ballard, John Updike, influential anthropologist Edward T. Hall, poet and memorist Jim Carroll, science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer, novelist Frank McCourt and Arne Naess, co-author of the paradigm-shifting Deep Ecology.