History of My Reading: Intro to Berkeley 1969

I was dropped off in Berkeley in late summer 1969 on College Avenue at a house shared by a Knox College grad I will call JB. (Even at this remove, it’s hard to know how people feel about themselves in the 1960s.)  I had friends from Knox in the Bay Area, but JB was more a friend of Joni’s, and she had arranged that we would stay there (or “crash” there as we’d say) upon our arrival.  But it was only me. 

 JB shared the house with a young man, maybe a bit older, who was either a medical student or intern or both, and a very attractive young woman who worked in a Berkeley clothing shop.  I was given a space behind the couch in the living room for my sleeping bag, and a fairly definite limit on my stay.  

 I believe it was on the very day of my arrival that two other former or maybe current Knox students showed up, fraternity brothers perhaps, to take JB on a drive up to Napa wine country.  She couldn’t go but they accepted me, and I found myself in the back seat of an open sports car, cruising up the highway, awash in the California sun.  We stopped at a wine tasting or two, they bought a few bottles and on the way back stopped at a roadside stand for fruit, bread and cheese, making it a kind of Mediterranean adventure.  Within a few hours, I was back in Berkeley. 

 I met up with a few Knox friends in Berkeley, including Mike Hamrin and Mary Jacobson, but had no prospects for another place to stay when my welcome period expired.  I tried a night outside in my sleeping bag, but turned out to be a hopeless hobo, because by morning I had a definite head cold.  I got my spot back behind the couch until I recovered.  It was probably then that I read the first book in Berkeley I remember, which had little to do with Berkeley but more with the happenstance of being on the road, and the guest in someone else’s house.  In fact, I can’t guarantee it happened there, but by process of elimination, it probably did.

 In any case I remember the book very clearly, and the happenstance.  I saw a paperback book in the living room, perhaps on a mantle piece, with an intriguing title and cover.  It was Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester, a science fiction author whose name or work I didn’t know.  What I found was a British edition, complete with the UK price (4/6.) This novel was published later in the US with the title The Stars My Destination. 

 I read it through, intrigued by the science fiction ideas, propelled by the plot.  Apart from some of Kurt Vonnegut, I hadn’t read actual science fiction in a long time.  I didn’t do much more than open even the best-sellers and hippie favorites like Dune and Stranger in A Strange Land.  But this book got me interested again. I was especially taken with the concept of “jaunting,” which was a latent ability to transport oneself by the power of thought that it turned out everybody has.

 Alfred Bester has since become a revered name in sci-fi, especially for this novel and the one that preceded it, The Demolished Man.  He is now considered an inspiration for both the New Wave and cyberpunk science fiction writers. He himself had a love-hate relationship with science fiction, and spent most of his career in other forms.  Bester wrote for comic books, especially Superman (something of a family business as his mother had played Lois Lane on radio), as well as radio, television and magazines, especially the travel magazine Holiday, where he was an editor. I’ve more recently acquired a selection of his sci-fi stories and essays, with a few articles and profiles, notably of authors Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov, titled Redemolished. 

 Re-read today, The Stars My Destination seems a different book.  I was probably impressed by the villain being the autocratic head of a huge corporation, but that’s become more frequent in fiction as in life. Though basically a riff on The Count of Monte Christo, the extreme pulp fiction characters and the throwback attitudes towards both women and men tend to detract, but the forward momentum of the story remains.

 I probably read it through my stuffed head, until one evening the medical student/doctor prescribed a heavy dosage of beer, and took me to a bar.  He was right. I was better the next day.  Meanwhile, Mike Hamrin had moved into a house at Shattuck and Ashby in Berkeley with several others, and invited me to join them. 

The house at 3011 Shattuck as I remember it was a white wood frame building with a back porch entrance at the end of a set of wooden stairs. It was a plainer version of many older houses in the Bay Area, where wood had been plentiful and more practical in terms of earthquakes.  This likely was the second floor (the house there now is a large two level), with the first floor occupied separately, and it may even have been a duplex, but all I recall is the rooms and the people living where I did.

  Inside the back door to the right was the kitchen, and to the left a small living room.  They were separated for most of their lengths by a wall.  Off the kitchen towards the porch was a small unfurnished room, which may have been a pantry or even a servant’s quarters in the house’s heyday.  Past the kitchen was a hallway and several rooms and bathroom.  

 Four people were living there when I arrived.  David and Priscilla were a couple.  Mike had a girlfriend who visited but had her own place.  The fourth was a young man I’ll call Phil because he was from Philadelphia. He may well have been the named tenant.

 It was a varied group.  Phil was Jewish, I had a Catholic background and the others a Protestant, if any.  David was a California Indian.  Today I’d guess Yurok, though his hometown was not that far north, so maybe not.  I don’t recall if Priscilla was from New England, but there was something mythic about her alliance with David.  Despite these differences, which we rarely if ever discussed, we were united by age, general attitude, the times and the place.  And of course we all smoked dope (to varying degrees) and were therefore “heads,” as opposed to “straights,” which in those days referred to anyone who wasn’t a head.

 David has acquired a small yellow school bus, and reconfigured the inside to accommodate gear and the possibility of living in it.  We made a number of road trips in that bus, mostly along the coast.

 On one trip we were pulled over by a Highway Patrol.  We were told it was illegal for the bus to look like a school bus, and we were therefore instructed to paint it.  Which we happily did, in a somewhat haphazard psychedelic style.

We might be accompanied on these trips by others who stayed at the house for awhile.  These might be day trips or longer, when we slept in the bus. On one such trip we wound up late at night at Drake’s Beach in the Point Reyes Seashore in Marin County, and had a ghostly visitor’s center all to ourselves.  It was a kind of chalet, with restrooms and huge vending machines that glowed in the night. 

 These longer outings might include hiking and taking an ocean dip, impressing upon me how frigid the waters are in this part of California even on a warm day.  And as a result of one such adventure, I was surprised and very impressed by another California feature: poison oak.  I’d had poison ivy several times “back East” and had some immunity, but not to the unknown poison oak.  I got a bad case. 

 We consulted a hippie elder who advised rubbing wet baking soda over my entire body.  So I spent several days isolated in that little room off the kitchen, lying on my sleeping bag, naked and covered with clumps of wet and slowly drying baking soda.  (Nudity was fairly common in this house.  Priscilla often stirred the morning oatmeal still naked. Seeing naked bodies doing normal things became ordinary with surprising speed.)

 The persistent itching as well as the flaking baking soda made my hours of reading in that room particularly memorable.  I got small bottles of the cheapest California white wine (which was still pretty decent) and whatever comfort junk food the little wine store near us sold.  There were books in the house, only some of which had a known origin.  One was a volume of Hemingway short stories, probably the Scribner collection.  I read it to the end, accompanied by white wine and Oreos.  This is a definite Berkeley memory.  (I finally hobbled off to the Free Clinic and got some topical medicine, and either it worked right away or my affliction had just about run its course, or most likely both.)

 I made some other trips more or less on my own. I went into San Francisco (usually hitch-hiking), including a few times to meet up with Ric Newman from Knox.  The first time, I saw him in the San Francisco production of Hair.  When we met in the lobby afterwards he was enthusiastic about the prospects for What’s Happening, Baby Jesus?, the play I wrote and directed our senior year, in which he played the lead role.  He thought Hair had made it a hot property.  I was unconvinced.

 I’d been in San Francisco just once before this trip, so I saw some of the sights this time, like Fisherman’s Wharf, and made my pilgrimage to North Beach and the City Lights Bookstore, known throughout the world as the center of the beat literature revolution.  I bought a kind of pamphlet book by Alan Watts, just 25 pages, titled Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen.  I was interested in Watts and Zen but since it was published by City Lights Books I mostly bought it as a kind of souvenir.  It was all I could afford.

 One day on the UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza I ran into someone I’d known slightly at Knox.  He was a few classes behind me, and was scouting California campuses, perhaps to transfer or for grad school. Eventually I accompanied him on a hitchhiking tour of  several other coastal colleges, including UC Santa Cruz, and ending up at San Jose State, where we were the overnight guests of English professor Richard Alexander, who’d left Knox to teach there. He fed us the most substantial meal I’d had in awhile.

 But I spent considerable time over the next few months in Berkeley itself, particularly on the UC Berkeley campus and along the now fabled Telegraph Avenue.

  I had arrived in Berkeley in late summer 1969 at an uncharacteristic moment: it was quiet.  Both the university and the city had been in near constant turmoil since even before the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s.  That turmoil had reached a new height just a few months before I got there, with the events that culminated in death and military occupation enforcing a kind of police state. It was the battle of People’s Park.

 The University had acquired through eminent domain a large property near the campus and within the residential and business community near Telegraph Avenue.  In 1967 they bulldozed the buildings on the site but left it empty.  It became an eyesore, a repository for abandoned cars.  Nothing much happened until early April 1969 when a group of local merchants and residents met to figure out what to do about it. Then everything happened, very fast.

 At this meeting, a student activist presented a plan to make the space a public park, and the attendees approved.  An article appeared in the Berkeley Barb, a local/ underground newspaper, and a hundred people, including a landscape architect, showed up to begin building People’s Park.  Eventually a thousand people participated, either working on it or contributing plants and money.

 The university then suddenly announced it had immediate plans for the site: a university sports field.  The chancellor met with park activists, and promised not to do anything to the site without notifying them.  A week later he ceded a quarter of the property to the park builders, and repeated the pledge. A week after that, that pledge was broken.  He announced the beginning of construction.

 

On May 15, Governor Ronald Reagan sent the Highway Patrol and university police to tear out the plantings for the park and erect a fence.  Demonstrations began immediately, spilling from the university’s Sproul Plaza—made famous by the Free Speech Movement—to the adjacent Telegraph Ave.  The crowd of several hundred headed to the site. The police used tear gas and called in reinforcements as the angry demonstrators became a formidable 6,000. 

 Members of some sheriff’s departments carried shotguns, and in pursuing vaguely violent protestors, fired in their direction.  Instead they hit innocent bystanders, killing a man watching from a bookstore roof on Telegraph Ave, and permanently blinding another.  Hundreds of protesters and some law enforcement were injured, some seriously. 

 That night Governor Reagan sent in nearly 3,000 National Guard troops, who acted as an army of occupation for the next two weeks, liberally using tear gas to prevent anyone from planting anything, and breaking up groups of four or more on the streets.

 The turmoil increased, more people became involved, the university partly shut down, and demonstrations continued.  On May 20, National Guard helicopters dispersed tear gas over the Berkeley campus, which spread through the city of Berkeley.  School children miles away were taken to hospitals for treatment. 

After that the unapologetic Reagan government backed off somewhat, withdrawing all but 200 troops, who nevertheless continued to prevent four or more people from talking to each other.  There was a peaceful protest march on May 30. 

 By the time I arrived in August, there was a silent stalemate.  When I first saw the site, I noted that it was one-third dry earth and a few plants, one-third sod being drowned by implacable water sprinklers, and one-third asphalt, where a solitary police sat on a bench guarding it.  Some people drifted through.  A helicopter suddenly flew over, startling me.  But nobody else reacted.

  Meanwhile, there was such internal pressure from Berkeley faculty and a majority of students that the university was at an impasse. Eventually people drifted back to treating it as a park (which is what it is today, with both good and bad effects.)

 But already in August it seemed that Berkeley as a place had moved on. Most students were gone for the summer, and what was left was Berkeley’s ongoing experiment in how a counterculture might function.

 Not that Berkeley gave up politics.  In the few months I was there, I heard activists Bernadette Dohrn, Angela Davis and Tom Hayden each speak on separate occasions and circumstances on the UC Berkeley campus.  

I took notes on Hayden’s talk in a large classroom where he was introduced by sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg, author of a book I’d so admired in high school, The Vanishing Adolescent, and of the more recent Coming of Age in America.  This was just before Hayden went on trial as a member of the Chicago 8, charged by the Nixon Justice Department with inciting violence at the Democratic Convention in 1968. 

 Whatever his positions or his image later, Hayden sounded very militant to me on that day.  He foresaw a long revolution in America of perhaps 20 years, with periods of violence and periods of peace.  When the revolution is successful, the worst counter-revolutionists, such as racists, would be confined in their own ghettos.  “The enemy is not in your head,” I heard him say.  “The enemy exists and must be dealt with.”

 In terms of a broader cultural revolution, though he had no kind words for hippies, he approved the form being developed by people in Berkeley, of “collectives,” small groups of people who live their politics but may specialize in a particular activity, like medicine, to support the community now but also be equipped to take over after the revolution.  “If you have any faith in the future,” you have to plan for after the revolution,” he said. 

One such collective in Berkeley, said someone in the audience, was teaching itself first aid and self- defense, for future confrontations. There had been quite a few antiwar demonstrations down Telegraph Avenue, and a lot of injuries inflicted by police.  But there were other institutions responding to the day-to-day needs of what might loosely be described as the counterculture.  There was the Free Clinic staffed by volunteer doctors, and a similar organization for legal aid.  There were efforts to feed people and distribute free food.

 There was also informal support.  The food co-op—basically a supermarket—did not prevent scavengers from carting away overripe vegetables and fruits that were discarded.  Some restaurants fed people out the back door, and I witnessed individual waitresses placing food left behind where “street people” could reach it. 

 What was the counterculture?  Political opposition was a major catalyst—from opposition to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee at UC Berkeley in the late 50s and early 60s, student issues, to the ongoing and growing opposition to Vietnam and the draft.  In the face of overwhelming disapproval by their elders, this alone created a sense of separation and fostered a subculture within especially the younger generation. 

 It was also a more general rejection or at least questioning of prevailing societal values, expressed at one end by the 1967 film The Graduate (part of which takes place in Berkeley) and at the other by the hippies, the political radicals, and their hybrid, the Yippies.

  But at its heart, the counterculture was about an alternative search for meaning.   Questioning the value system of the dominant consumer society (“Work, Study, Get Ahead, Kill” was an antiwar march chant), questioning the basis for current social mores, for attitudes towards the body and the soul, were catalysts for explorations of self, society and reality itself, by means of experience and imagination that were encouraged and enabled by the “mind-expanding” substances of cannabis and the psychedelics, but by no means limited to them. Music and other people were major psychedelics in the counterculture.  And sometimes, even books.

 Inevitably it led to spiritual quests and, as I saw in Berkeley, more formal forays into psychologies.  That aspect jumped out at me immediately upon my arrival. But more on all that next time, plus the bookstores of Telegraph Ave, the Midnight Movies and the First Annual Holy Man Jam.

History of My Reading: 1969 To Boulder Go (part 2)

 Nineteen Sixty-Nine was a prime year for the counterculture (in fact, it was the year it got its name, when Theodore Roszak’s The Making of The Counter-Culture was published), and Colorado was one of its capitals.  It would be my first prolonged exposure beyond midwestern college campuses.

 As music was the counterculture’s living, pulsing heart, it was also the year of the music festival.  More or less invented on the model of the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas when he organized the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, music festivals of current and cutting edge rock, blues and hybrid forms happened here and there throughout 1969, culminating at Woodstock in August. 

 For three evenings and nights over a weekend in late June, there was one in Colorado: The Denver Pop Festival.   I was participating in the writers conference in Boulder until Friday evening, so on Saturday I took a bus to Denver to hear some music.

 I’m not sure why I decided on Saturday, since the Jimi Hendrix Experience headlined the Sunday lineup. And it turned out to be mildly historic: the last concert the original Experience ever played. (Perhaps I had other plans for Sunday since it was my 23rd birthday.)  But 1969 was a big year for Creedence Clearwater Revival, and they would close the Saturday show. 

 However I did meet a girl on the bus to Denver who claimed to be a cousin of Jimi Hendrix.  She said the last time she’d visited him backstage she’d seen the drug paraphernalia, and showed her concern.  He agreed he needed to slow it down. He was really just a sweet guy, she said.  

 It was a hot day—95 degrees in Denver, and still around 90 when I arrived at Denver’s Mile High Stadium after 5 p.m.  I either bought my ticket or already had it ($6 a night, $15 for three nights) and I was early enough to get a seat in a center section, as people were still arriving. Still, the stage was set up on the field so I was separated from it by a considerable distance.

 I have specific memories of that event, which I am able to corroborate and expand on, thanks to a Masters thesis posted online by Justin Kite of Rutgers University.  He fills in some of the history and the facts of the evening.

 As the time came closer to the scheduled 6:30 start, those in my section of the stands became aware of a crowd growing outside one particular locked gate.  It looked to be wood and wire, and thanks to our position and height, we could see at least part of it. On the inside of the stadium were contingents of uniformed police, most of them opposite the increasingly raucous crowd outside, demanding to be let in, because the music was meant to be free.

 Though I was unaware of it, there was already a history to this festival.  A similar but smaller crowd the night before had tried to force their way in, and they clashed with police, egged on by some of the performers, especially Frank Zappa.  Tonight there were more of them, and they were concentrating on that one gate. 

There was also a longer history involving the Denver police, and their successful efforts to close down the Family Dog, a club in the city that featured rock acts.  And of course, there was the ongoing tension between the straight world and the freaks, the culture and the counterculture, parents and the young. Perhaps we forget how strong the hostility and suspicion could be.

 The confrontation got louder when the first act began, a Chicago band called Aorta.  I could see the gate bulging as bodies raged against it.  Then the next act took the stage: a new Boulder band called Zephyr, which eventually made a couple of albums and is noted as the first band of electric guitar virtuoso Tommy Bolin.  Lead singer Candy Givens was the constant in various versions of the band into the 1980s.

 Zephyr had hardly begun its blues-rock set when the police unleashed their first volley of tear gas canisters at the 500 or so on the other side of the gate.  Some of them lobbed the canisters back. Tear gas came streaming down towards us. 

 The music was halted as the announcer instructed those of us in our section to come down on the field and lie on the ground, face down, until the tear gas cloud passed.  So there I was: reenacting a duck and cover drill with my nose on the grass of Mile High Stadium. In a few minutes we returned to our seats and Zephyr finished their set—but this time the band members were reportedly wearing gas masks. 

Winter at Woodstock

 The next band was Poco, the new country rock band featuring Richie Furay and Jim Messina, two members of the recently disbanded and already legendary Buffalo Springfield.  (Kite’s thesis asserts that the new band of Springfield’s main members, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was originally supposed to play at this festival, but the promoter backed out of the deal when the new lineup failed to get their first album out before the festival.)  Things quieted down enough during their set for me to hear and enjoy it.

But the blazing blues guitarist Johnny Winter got the crowd outside revved up again, and probably the police, too.  They shot off tear gas again, in greater quantity, and this time successfully dispersed the crowd at the gate.  But there was a cost, as during Tim Buckley’s set the wind caught the gas and blew it back into the stadium.  Now people from all over the stadium rushed down to the field to escape the fumes.  In the confusion, the crowd outside attacked the gate again and some got through.  There was a pitched battle between them and the police, until the festival producers opened all the gates to let everybody in.  And suddenly there was nothing to fight about.

 It wasn’t the first time I’d smelled tear gas, and it wouldn’t be the last. As singular as it seems now, it didn’t impress me at the time as all that unusual, that a rock festival would be disrupted in this way.  I was more affected by the distance from the stage.  Without my perceptions artificially enhanced (though there were probably joints making their way across the rows) I felt too detached from the performers.

 By then night had fallen and just as if none of this had happened, Creedence Clearwater Revival played a normal set.  According to Kite, even some of the police stopped to listen.  As Creedence played “Bad Moon Rising,” the full moon rose behind them.  When they noticed this, they played it again.  That’s the story.  I don’t actually remember it.  Kite reports that the young Denver Post reporter called Saturday’s the best music of the festival.

 Much of the Jimi Hendrix Experience set on Sunday night is preserved on YouTube.  Besides being the last Experience show, its other claim to fame is the pre-Woodstock debut of Hendrix’s version of the Star Spangled Banner, which flowed into “Purple Haze.”  But apparently the prior hours were dominated by noisy and constant warfare between police and gatecrashers.  Kite reports that the now iconic singer Joe Cocker, on his first U.S. tour, was found hiding in his dressing room.  “So this is America?” he asked.

 For me, there was one further outcome to the Boulder writers conference. After the open reading at the end of it, a tall man with dark curly hair sought me out to compliment my poems.  Not the Litany so much as the sound poem.  He was Arnold Weinstein from Yale, and he was accompanied by four or five acting students from the Yale Drama School. 

A few days later I ran into him again.  I was having eggs and toast at the Charcoal Chef, one of those chain restaurants that serves breakfast all day, near where I was staying in Boulder.  I was at the counter when he came in for coffee.  The jars of jelly for toast in restaurants had recently been replaced with little plastic tubs which were then, as they are even more so now, nearly impossible to open. So I simply stabbed at mine with a fork, which for some reason he really liked.

 It might have been after the reading or there at the counter, but at some point he invited me to hang out with his group, which was sticking around for awhile to work on improvisations.  Actually it was never clear to me what they were doing, or what he did, but in fact Weinstein taught playwriting at Yale, was a poet and playwright, and at that point in a long and successful theatrical as well as academic career, he had been working with Paul Sills’ Story Theater.  

 It also was never clear to me what he expected me to do. At first he asked me to fool around on piano, and then on guitar, as his students did whatever they were doing onstage.  This resulted in only one moment I remember.  I heard someone on stage say “hello” and I began riffing on it on guitar.  The actors picked it up and built it until the cast was clustered at center stage shouting a rhythmic and frantic “hello” to the (non-existent) audience. 

 It was an interesting, confusing and somewhat uncomfortable few days.  It’s too bad I wasn’t up to it, because Weinstein did several theatrical pieces that integrated music, and took them to Broadway.  I’ve also wondered who those Yale students—and one in particular--turned out to be. 

My immersion in the counterculture began in Fort Collins, where (thanks to Joni's cousin Mary) I had my palm read and my astrology chart done by stoned hippies around a fire. And there was a lot of talk, from the cosmic to the very personal. People just trying to figure things out.  Especially themselves.

  It continued in Boulder.  I hung out quite a bit at a bookstore called brillig (“Twas brillig and the slivy toves”—Jaberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, in which brillig means four in the afternoon, which is probably when I usually showed up at the bookstore) with their books on astrology (Dane Rudhyar), numerology, natural health remedies, cosmic philosophies, as well as books on underground filmmakers, artists, writers.  Scorned or overlooked past writers were being rediscovered, too—including Lewis Carroll. Brillig was also a great place to overhear conversations or engage in them.  (Somewhere I have a note about befriending a clerk there, who admitted she was afraid of the customers.) 

There were books reflecting the evolving sexual revolution and the boundaries of censorship: everything from Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask to newly available novels by Henry Miller and the illustrated book version of the scandalous stage pastiche Oh! Calcutta! 

 There was R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy Verbatim.  George Leonard’s Education and Ecstasy, Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching As A Subversive Activity.  Zen Flesh, Zen Bones; The Book of the Hopi. All breaking accustomed boundaries around mind and body, searching for new answers and new questions.  Mind-expanding chemicals suggested untapped powers of mind, human potentials censored by a narrow, rigid society.  Cosmic feelings and new intimacies required a stubborn and sometimes misguided search for conscious and nurturing communities that honored individual freedom while withdrawing from a culture of self-righteous conflict that unfeelingly trashed the planet and mechanized non-human life. 

 The apocalyptic tenor of the 1960s had deepened towards decade’ end.  The unrelenting Vietnam war, the oceans dying, DDT and other chemicals poisoning food and the environment, were all in the summer’s news.  So there was interest in arcane takes on the patterns, on the future. Edgar Cayce’s books and prophesies, and similar approaches were part of the mood. 

I browsed the bookstore but unfortunately the only book I can remember reading specifically in Boulder—and I didn’t read all of that—was Bill Stage’s paperback copy of The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda.  I didn’t think much of it.  It wasn’t until his later book, Tales of Power, that I got deeply into his work, and went back to read what I’d missed.

 Besides the bookstore, I often gravitated to the campus.  I recall attending a public lecture by Nobel Prize winning physiologist George Wald, who’d begun speaking out against the warfare state.  He concluded his talk, accompanied by slides, by referring to the ultimate biological cause of the Vietnam War.  It wasn’t clear to me what he meant, so I stayed afterwards and asked him.  “You’re young now,” he said smiling, almost teasing.  “But soon you’ll have to make a living and then you’ll understand—Protein!” Very apropos as it turned out, though just what the direct relevance to Vietnam could be, however, still eludes me.

 A somewhat cryptic surviving note tells me that it was in Boulder that I saw the 1968 film version of Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, with David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave—the couple that had debuted together and had such a strong effect on me in Morgan! a couple of years earlier.  (I’ve now seen at least four versions of The Seagull, none I can think of on a live stage.)

 All of my experiences that summer adhere to the music that was playing in the background.  Everywhere, from Galesburg to Boulder, if a stereo was blasting, it was the Crosby, Stills and Nash debut album.  Or it was Tommy, the Who’s double album.  Or if not those, then Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

 It was one of the ironies of Boulder that it was legally dry—nothing alcoholic but 3.2 beer could be served.  (Despite my attempts at a bar called The Sink, I never quite got the taste for it.)  On the other hand, pot and psychedelics were everywhere.

 My surviving notes record that on July 30—the day I heard President Nixon on the radio declaring that Vietnam was “America’s finest hour,” I dropped mescaline for the first (and so far only) time.  Or what we were told was mescaline.  Unless you know the chemist, you could never be sure.  (I seriously doubt that I ever ingested a full strength pure psychedelic. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure some of the marijuana had an extra ingredient.)

 This event was at a cabin in the mountains about 20 miles outside Boulder.  The cabin was rented for the summer by John, a friend of Bill Stage’s who had shared the living room shag rug with me when he first got to town.  Since then he’d bought a truck and a couple of dogs—both blond Samoan huskies, more or less puppies.  One he named Kachina.  And he’d rented this cabin. 

John was the host for this event, and there were five others besides me.  I’d met four of them, including (let’s call them) Don and Susan, a couple.  We dropped in a meadow about noon, and everyone immediately left—singly and in pairs.  I eventually walked around, came upon one of the group—the only unattached woman—but she had such an evident force field around her that my smile faded and I got as far away as possible.

 So I walked, sprawled in another meadow in the sun, and heard voices of some of the others but I couldn’t see them. Then when it started raining lightly but threatening a storm, I returned to the original meadow and gathered up everybody’s gear—radio, cameras, etc. that they’d left—and took them into the cabin.

 I remember the sense of distance and perhaps alienation from the others.  I recorded a certain self-consciousness that rippled through my experiences, as if I was watching a film or a series of films, but I was also the lead actor.  My perceptions and emotional reactions were heightened, so when I saw Don and Susan in an intense couples thing, I felt both sides of that.  I had a lot of thoughts, about past and present and ongoing relationships, among other subjects. 

And eventually, through the six hours or so, I had one lasting observation.  I had enough visual hallucination to see the whirls and striations in rocks or the rings in wood as if they were in motion.  I saw them as process: for example, the rocks forming from volcanic flow.  Everything seemed to be half growing and half decaying, simultaneously on the way to life and death.

 I was also sick much of the time.  I had the sick stomach associated with mescaline but not intense enough to throw up.  Instead I had it longer.  But I wouldn’t call it a full-blown psychedelic experience.  Afterwards, John felt there had been some speed in it.

 Feeling sick wasn’t an entirely new experience in Colorado.  The altitude and the dry air played havoc with my sinuses, and often I felt lightheaded or suddenly fatigued.  Eventually I heard fluid sloshing around in my good ear, which was alarming enough that I saw a doctor.  He was a young ear specialist, and said it was the altitude.  He asked about my hearing, and I told him of my deafness in one ear.  He tested it, and thought the problem was in the middle ear.  He got very excited, because, though there was nothing that could be done for it when I first was diagnosed as a child, there was treatment now.  He was so happy that I might get my hearing back.  But he did another test and his face fell.  No, it was the inner ear after all, and still permanent hearing loss.  I had been on this roller coaster before so I wasn’t much fazed, but he took it hard.

 Throughout all this I kept writing.  Either falling asleep or just waking up on that shaggy floor in Boulder one day, I had the germ of an idea that would obsess me for decades, and lead to a novel and a screenplay in several versions. It was a good story and pieces of it have appeared in other people’s movies and in digital life since then.  But what I wrote then was a story about something happening in Colorado that summer.

 Somehow I missed the controversy that summer over a scheduled atomic bomb explosion in Colorado, the incredible purpose of which was to test the feasibility of extracting natural gas by exploding 100 to 200 underground nuclear bombs across the gas field.  There were protests organized by activists from Boulder and Denver, but apparently there weren’t very many of them.  And in early September, the bomb was actually exploded underground, with demonstrators bouncing in the air above it.  (I was gone by then.)  But eventually voters got it banned, and the idea failed anyway—too much radiation in the gas, duh.

 However, there was another controversy that did get my attention. Just about a month before I got there, a fire at the huge Rocky Flats plant that manufactured plutonium components, and was highly radioactive, got people wondering what other hazards were around them.  While I was in Boulder it was revealed that at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal there was some 21,000 clusters of nerve gas in explosive bombs—enough to kill two trillion people, if there were that many.  They’d been manufacturing it there for years.  The canisters were basically stored out in the open and decaying.  A stray bullet or a lightning strike that set off a chain reaction, a scientist said, could wipe out a lot of Colorado in a matter of minutes.

 It was insanity on such a huge scale that it called for a kind of Doctor Strangelove approach in the less that successful short story I wrote towards the end of my stay in Colorado.  Bill Stage read it and liked it, and showed it to a friend he especially respected when he stopped by.  He read quickly through it and made a face, directing his dour judgment to Stage, although I was in the room.

 I was crushed enough to remember this.  It wasn’t just that it was hard to be objective about new work, especially at a time of fluid standards, but that so much depended on the last thing I wrote.  It could be the key to my future, which would go a long way to directing my present.

 That said, reading it now, the guy wasn’t wrong.The main plot was funny, though perhaps not as ironic as I meant it, and I can see what I was trying to do with the subplot in contrast, but it was especially awful.  It was at best a shaky first draft.

 Besides which, the reality was more absurd than my story, and became even stranger.  Nerve gas production stopped in 1969, and Rocky Mountain Arsenal eventually became, first, a Superfund cleanup site, and now, a National Wildlife Refuge.

 All through my Colorado stay, I saw Joni whenever we could manage it. She visited me in Boulder at least once, when Stage was away for a few days.  She also invited me down to Denver to meet her sister and her sister’s husband when he came to town.  He was a law student at Yale.

 What she didn’t say was that her mother would also be there, for our first encounter ever. We met at some kind of public swimming pool, so I was basically on nearly naked view for judgment by the family.  Everybody got along fine, it seemed.  The only memorable moment was at poolside when I turned around to look down at the level below.  It was lined with people in lounge chairs sunbathing.  One was a teenage girl in her skimpy swimsuit who looked up at me and extravagantly licked her lips.  I turned away so she wouldn’t see me laughing.  I was living the theatre of the absurd.

 Another time I remember specifically we were together was on July 24, the day the Apollo 11 astronauts were scheduled to land on the moon.  Joni arrived with her friend Kathy, for a drive along mountain roads.  My  Boulder days were marked by the huge flat rock faces visible from Cascade Avenue and the university campus.  Now we were twisting through what were literally rocky mountains, with little vegetation.  Maybe it was my mood as much as the scenery, but sitting in the back seat while Kathy and Joni chatted in the front, I felt like I was getting a preview of the moon. 

 Kathy drove us to her house, and we watched the moon landing, and saw Neil Armstrong become the first human to touch another world, in the basement rec room.

 When we had sold and given away the elements of our Galesburg household and headed west, the ultimate goal was California.  This was a pause on our way to the Bay Area, specifically Berkeley, where we both had friends.  The last patch of the Colorado interlude was waiting for a “driveaway:” some unknown car a stranger paid an agency to arrange to be driven to California.  High and dry Colorado was not wearing well with me.  I yearned for an ocean.

 

At last we scored a car, and we prepared to leave.  I took the bus down to Denver to pick it up.  Joni met me there.  We were going to leave the next day.  She packed an elaborate picnic lunch, complete with a bottle of wine.  We went to Washington Park in Denver, near the sculpture of Eugene Fields’ most famous characters: Wynken, Blynken and Nod.  In my perennially ongoing college novel, three of my main characters being swept along by the tides of the times were Lincoln, Blakely and Nod.  Eugene Fields also figured in the mythology of the Illinois college I’d invented, since he’d been a Knox student for a year and later  a columnist in Chicago. But as it happened, he’d previously worked on a newspaper in Denver.  Of course, Joni knew all of this. The sculpture was her surprise.

 We spread the picnic out under a tree near the sculpture.  After I’d had a glass or two, Joni told me that she had decided not to go with me to California.  She was instead going to Connecticut, where her sister had secured a teaching job for her.  However, she though it was important for me to go on to California myself. She did not use the phrase “to sow your wild oats” but I thought that was the basic idea.  I could rejoin her later in Connecticut. 

 Who could blame her?  California wasn’t a plan.  It’s hard to say what it was. I won't go into the various ways I was a jerk.  Still, I drove the car to Boulder in shock.  The next day I felt worse—lightheaded, queasy, weak.  This didn't seem to be the way to start a solo drive for a thousand miles across challenging country I'd never seen.  Instead I drove the car back to the driveaway agency in Denver.  Eventually, Joni’s cousin Mary and her boyfriend decided to take his vacation in California, and they kindly ferried me along with them. Their camper wasn’t exactly a wooden shoe, but I had definitely sailed off.  They dropped me in Berkeley. 

R.I.P. 2022

 

I first knew of Barbara Ehrenreich from a mutual acquaintance as another freelance writer struggling to get published and especially to get paid.  This puts additional light on her most cited work, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in which she documented her own experiences working at minimum wage jobs. 

 But she was also well-educated and well-connected, and was published in the best newspapers and periodicals.  Besides her single subject books, like the aforementioned 2001 volume, her periodical pieces were collected. For instance a volume covering the 1980s, which was for her (and many others) a grim and disenchanting decade, as reflected in her title: The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed.  Her 1995 collection is titled The Snarling Citizen. All of these essays exhibit her wit as well as insight. She spotted important destructive trends which unfortunately still pertain. Throughout the decades, she wrote with great acuity about the conditions and injustices women face (and she faced some painful ones herself), and for that and her lively if uncomfortable reporting on both gender and class, she deserves to be read and remembered, learned from and imitated. 

 Greg Bear was a productive and insightful science fiction writer who I met at a Star Trek convention in Seattle, where he was based.  I especially admire his visionary novel Darwin’s Radio. 

Hazel Henderson

I once saw Hazel Henderson essentially take over a World Future Society convention.  As a futurist, environmental activist and economist, she was most dynamic in person, but she reached wider audiences with her books, including Creating Alternative Futures and Building a Win-Win World.

 Suzi Gablik was an artist who wrote about art.  In 1970 she published the first in- depth book on Rene Magritte (and helped make him the highly visible artist he is today), after living with the artist and his wife. In the 1990s she broadened her conception of art to include Indigenous and other worldviews, publishing The Reenchanment of Art. As she became more concerned about self-destructive civilization, she published Conversations before the end of time, a collection of amazing interviews. Both I consider to be landmark books.

 Ted Mooney’s day job was editing Art in America (so he may have edited Suzi Gablik.)  But his contribution to literature is his individual vision in four novels, the first being the best known: Easy Travel To Other Planets in 1981, which an American literary critic placed on his list of the best 100 novels of the twentieth century. 

Roger Angell was best known for his writing on baseball in the quintessential New Yorker style, but he also wrote fiction and other non-fiction (plus the witty annual New Yorker Christmas rhymes), as well as serving as the New Yorker’s fiction editor for many years.  In that capacity he wrote me the most flattering and most heart-breaking (literary) rejection letter of my life, in which he said the New Yorker “could hardly bear not to publish” my story.  History shows they all managed pretty well. Angell was 101.

  Doris Grumbach wrote novels and was known for literary criticism in the New Republic and other periodicals.  Among those she reviewed (approvingly) was novelist Maureen Howard, a writer I also enjoyed.

I admired Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. Hilary Mantel wrote various kinds of novels and stories but is most famous for her historical fiction. Nicholas Evans was a British broadcaster and writer whose best-known book is The Horse Whisperer.

 Larry Woiwode published much-praised fiction, essays, biography and poetry from 1969 to 2022. Besides writing some 18 books, he taught writing and ran university writing programs, so his students got the benefit of somebody who walked the walk.  

Before he was a familiar narrator for historical and nature documentaries, David McCullough was a prize-winning author on mostly historical subjects.  Educated at Yale and a model of aristocratic culture, he was born and raised in Pittsburgh, which may have given him particular perspective on the subject of his first book, the Johnstown Flood.

Mike Davis wrote penetrating books about cities and their future, especially Los Angeles. From 1971 to 2012, Todd Gitlin wrote about mass media and politics. Peace activist Staunton Lynd wrote and edited books on political action and nonviolence. William Rivers Pitt is best known for his reporting and political analysis of the American war in Iraq.  P.J. O’Rourke wrote from the other end of the political spectrum, though he started out as just a funny guy. 

Then there are those who are prominent for reasons other than writing, but also published useful books. The latest name added to this year’s rolls is Barbara Walters, whose death was announced on December 30.  She was 93.  She was a television news pioneer and an expert interviewer, and she was famous.  Though I never met her, I once interviewed her on the phone for a piece on Hugh Downs.  Because of her schedule she had to call me, and I didn’t know when she would.  When she called—evidently in the makeup chair for some television appearance—I was in the shower.  So I in fact interviewed Barbara Walters while naked.

 Others who authored books in addition to their day jobs were former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (whose penultimate book was titled Fascism: A Warning), Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader of the Soviet Union; and for all I know, Pope Benedict and Queen Elizabeth. 

Scientist James Lovelock saw Earth as a living system, developing (with others) the Gaia Theory, and warned of the dire consequences to the planet of the climate crisis in a series of popular books.  He had 102 years of a remarkable life. Environmentalist and writer David Foreman founded Earth First!

 Revered Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh reached millions with his lectures, audio meditations and his many books. Stage director Peter Brook wrote several important books about theatre.  Before he made films, Jean-Luc Godard wrote about them, and continued to talk about filmmaking at book length.

 Print and television journalists who published books (and some who didn’t) but passed in 2022 include: film critic Sheila Benson, Mark Shields, Bernard Shaw, Bill Plante, Jim Angle, Michael Gerson, John DiStasio, Francis X. Clines, John Hughes, Ann Garrels, Richard Lopez, Shelby Scott (who I remember from WBZ in Boston), and Robert Herman.

 

Chronicled in books and other media, the legendary work of World War II and fashion photography Tony Vaccaro, and of the photos of Tim Page in Vietnam and afterwards.

 Some subjects of journalistic and other writing that should be mentioned but haven’t fit into previous categories include General Charles McGee, last of the Tuskegee airmen of World War II, and Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg; American Indian activist Clyde Bellecourt, artists Claus Oldenberg and Margaret Keane (those big-eyed figures popular in the 60s); sportscaster Vin Scully, men’s basketball great Bill Russell and women’s basketball great Lusia Harris; legal scholar Lani Guinier, co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund Art Cooley.

 In general, writers don’t get a lot of respect in America, though they may be celebrated locally or within a profession.  So whatever degree of success or failure, fame or obscurity these following writers had in their lifetimes, as long as they have a book or a periodical piece in a library somewhere, or something buried in the depths of cyberspace, there’s a chance some stranger may read it, and their words will live again.

 Also passing away in 2022 were: Andre Leon Talley, Anne Harris, Barbara Love, Geoffrey Asche, Terry Garrity (The Sensuous Woman), Carleton Carpenter, Bruce Duffy, Valerie Boyd, Leonard Kessler, Paul Cantor, Shirley Hughes, Sally Watson, Bethany Campbell, Thomas F. Staley, Sydney Shoemaker, Francois Bott, Tom Maddox, Julia Powell, Sharon Presley, JFK conspiracy theorist David Lifton, Stuart Woods, Joanna Clark, Raymond Briggs, Andrew Hubner, Helen Potrebenko, Terrance Green, Mark Girouard, Michael Malone, Antonin Bajaja, Sue Hardesty, Luis Agular, Jean Franco.

 Poets Gerald Stern, Peter Landborn Wilson, Simon Perchik, Dennis Wilson, Noah Eli Gordon. Editor and publisher Jason Epstein, and literary agent Sterling Lord (I was once represented by his esteemed agency.) Let this list also honor the writers whose deaths were unnoticed.  May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on.

Books That Matter 2022

 Lots of books are published each year, and many of them contribute in some way: they inform, remember, correct the record, advance a new idea, edify, inspire and/or entertain.  But there are a smaller number of books that matter.

Though what matters can mean different things.  Some books matter because of their consequences over time.  Novels (like plays, movies and songs) can become beloved, or in the overused term, "iconic" or even "classic." Typically they speak to different people in different ways, saying different things to each.  Yet they remain memorable for many, and eventually become cultural touchstones that nearly everyone knows at least a little.  

However, identifying such books is best accomplished years afterwards.  Less time needs to pass perhaps to see a novel's influence in the world.  For example, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future, published almost two years ago,  has clearly become a book that matters.  Not only is it the author's best-selling novel but it has entered into, and in some ways focused, discussions on how to address the climate crisis future, not only in the U.S. but perhaps even more strongly in Europe and internationally.  Richard Powers' two most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment, have also exerted strong responses and focused emotions, inquiry and discussion on a range of related topics: not just forest issues, but questions of what constitutes life and intelligence, and the relationships of humans to the rest of life--what is increasingly called the "more than human world."   

Nonfiction books can perhaps be more easily identified more quickly as books that matter.  Published nearly a decade ago now, Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is clearly a book that matters.  Applying contemporary economic and historical analysis to very basic questions, Picketty both inspired and coalesced important thinking about basic changes in economic structures needed to make a stable and better future.  Its analysis of the failures of today's economic order and prevailing conservative philosophy, particularly showing the dangers of the huge gaps between the few at the top and everyone else, has become influential even to approaches less radical than Picketty might favor, such as a simple return to the Keynesian economics that prevailed in the U.S. from FDR until Reagan.  That analysis which shows that prosperity is attained by supporting the middle class and public sector investment is becoming U.S. policy again under the Biden administration, in what journalist Michael Tomasky is calling Middle-Out Economics, the title of his new book: perhaps a candidate for a book that matters. (In the meantime, this Politico piece and interview is a good summary.)

But books can matter before their influence is measured simply by being crucial contributions on crucial topics. They are groundbreaking in important ways, though not necessarily unique.  Their importance depends as well on how riveting they are to read.  I have several candidates for books that matter on this basis, published in the past year or so.  It's not an exhaustive list; perhaps the minimum.  The order in which I present them does not imply rank.  What links them is that they present in a generous if not full way a dramatically new synthesis that tells us something startling about our world that upends conventional wisdom and offers a new framework for perceiving and acting in the world.  In that sense, they bring the news.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Published towards the end of last year, this book is already influencing newer work.  Its scope is enormous: nothing less than the human story.  The linear story of development (or evolution of society) is a comfortable one for many reasons.  It simplifies textbook categories, and it leads logically and inevitably to contemporary "advanced" societies, the apex of it all: from caveman to capitalism.  Who loves this story?  The same type folks who extracted "Social Darwinism" from the complexities of Darwinian evolution.  Robber barons like John D. Rockerfeller and Andrew Carnegie saw that it was good, and gave it their monied blessings.

According to the two Davids, both archaeologists, the story is wrong, right from the beginning. Modern humans weren't the sole apex of evolution--other humanoids had real societies, too, with all the elements of intelligence and expression.  We carry some of their genes. 

Society did not develop or even change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to urban.  All these forms coexisted and intermingled, and there were many hybrids.  There were urban societies without kings or rulers, and tyrannical hunter-gatherers.  The Davids may be a little judgey in their descriptions of the varieties of Native (North and South) American societies, but they make their point--they were not simple or primitive or identical; they were often sophisticated, complex, various and sometimes large.  

This book emphasized an historical point that has since been taken up by others: that the form of democracy that governed the Six Nations Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee) that lasted longer than our democracy has so far, was patiently explained to Benjamin Franklin and others by some of its leaders, and informed the formation of the non-Native American democracy.  Too bad it didn't also adopt the Prime Directive of the  Haudenosaunee: in all decisions take into account the seventh generation to come.

This book of 692 pages is replete with examples, written with verve and wit, so it can read like a wonder book.  We don't really need Marvel or the other purveyors of outsized fantasies:  it's there in the histories that have either only recently discovered or studied, or conveniently ignored because they complicate or contradict the main story--the one that has gone a long way towards the fix we're in, on the brink of destroying it all.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong 

In Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, the character that most readers noted and remembered is a woman scientist who discovers that trees in a forest communicate with each other, and help each other chemically to ward off disease.  She is ridiculed by scandalized scientists and forced out of academia until her research is vindicated, and she becomes a kind of folk hero.

 This character is based on a real life researcher, Suzanne Simard, whose book Finding the Mother Tree subsequently became popular.  But even more popular was a book on the same theme published a few years earlier by forester Peter Wohlleben, with the more arresting title The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate.

 That book’s success, expanding on revelations about the complex life of the forest, led to a series of similar books by Wohlleben and many others, with titles often beginning with “The Hidden Life of” or “The Secret Life of” various animals, plants and other natural phenomena, including ice.  These books reflected new research but also observations that had gone unnoticed or derided because they contradicted established views on the natural world as comprised of simple if sometimes mysterious living objects, of interest mostly as exploitable for human ends.

 All of this helped prepare readers for the June 2022 publication of An Immense World by the much praised science journalist Ed Yong. It turns out that everything has a life hidden to humans, partly because our current preconceptions block awareness, but also because other lifeforms experience the world in vastly different ways.

 The key concept here is umwelt, named by early 20^th century zoologist Jakob von Uexkull.  It refers to the sensory world of animals, determined by what senses they have and what they can do.  As Yong demonstrates through scientists he visits, these vary considerably.  Some creatures taste with their feet, others hear ultrasound or see into the ultraviolet. They may sense electromagnetic waves.

   Senses that we share with other animals are used in different ways, and the balance among them can be radically different.  Dogs smell and hear better than they see—so their world is one of aroma trails.  Even their color vision is different, and one of the more startling illustrations in this book compares the colors in a typical room that we see, and how dogs see them.

Though sometimes based on dismissed and forgotten insights, most of the research is new, as scientists use new technologies to dispel old assumptions.  That birds can’t smell is one of them, but there are many more.  Some of these discoveries are astonishing:  for instance, the vocalizations and communication that goes on out of human hearing range.  We can detect only a fraction of whales’ songs, and it turns out that mice sing to each other.  At some points this book starts to sound like Douglas Adams’ humorous takes in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (that mice actually run experiments on humans, that dolphins can escape human catastrophe) may have more substance than expected.

 Apart from the wondrous details, there are larger points here.  Humans assumed a lot about other life based on their own sensorium, but we’ve missed quite a lot.  “Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way.  To us, it feels all-encompassing.  It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know.  This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”

 But science and other forms of observation at the service of human imagination can help us see not only some of the ways other lifeforms live and communicate, but how our own activities disrupt their lives.  Light pollution wreaks havoc on various birds and other animals; noise pollution in the oceans endangers whales and other sea creatures.  

Despite the book's length, Yong's precise but informal voice and his flourishes of wit make it eminently readable, yet the science reporting itself is admirable. Even the footnotes are interesting reading. It helps that what the science is reporting remains continuously fascinating. 

 This research has greatly complicated human conceptions of what other lifeforms are, and expands the notions, extent and range of sentience and intelligence. It is this theme that James Bridle takes up in his book.

 Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence

By James Bridle 

Bridle writes and thinks chiefly about technologies, and his disquiet about the direction and limitations of artificial intelligence sent him to explore other kinds of intelligences in the natural world.

 Again, the concept of Umwelt is evoked. Bridle also refers to both Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as starting points for his own explorations.  He ranges far and wide, from our humanoid ancestors to the intelligence of slime mold, and applies his observations to the new machines.  “The idea of forming new relationships with non-human intelligence is the central theme of this book,” he writes.  “It emanates from a wider and deeper dawning: the increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more-than-human world.”

 Bridle’s cogent and provocative musings apply not only to the possible futures of machine intelligence but, as Yong’s book does, to the endangered life of this planet and the necessity to actively preserve it.  As we discover and admit the extent of intelligent life and its beautiful complexity, we are close to destroying it.

 The singular and expressive organization of information and the inspired insights more than compensate for some slackness and an editorial lapse or two. Bridle's ideas and their expression in this book merit serious attention.

This recent run of books on non-human life, culminating so far in Yong and Bridle, should end any credibility given to the traditional notion of animals as natural automatons, important only as they are useful to humans, with no feelings to consider or intelligence to respect and learn from.  Gaia expanded the definition of life, and now we grapple with kinds of intelligence not only in familiar animals but plants, microbes and other life. We'd better start learning.

 One of the ideas that Bridle interrogates is the notion promoted by digital industries and other enthusiasts that intelligence is primarily based on calculation.  That is a theme in the latest novel by Dave Eggers.

 The Every: Or At Last A Sense of Order, Or The Final Days of Free Will, or Limitless Choice is Killing The World

A novel by Dave Eggers 

The Hollywood pitch for this novel might be Alice in Wonderland meets Nineteen Eighty-Four, or perhaps Brave New World would be a closer match to its onrushing dystopia.

 In this stand-alone sequel to Eggers’ The Circle, the Facebook-like corporation has merged with Amazon (referred to here as the Jungle) to form a monopolistic continuum, not only of business, not only of culture, but of shared reality.  Welcome to The Every.

 Delaney is a young woman intent on destroying The Every from the inside.  She is intelligent, intuitive, creative and acutely observant, but the plot hinges on her also being repeatedly naïve about the outcome of her efforts, as she proposes a series of outrageous changes that turn out to be big hits with The Every users, which seems to include Everyone.

 Eggers is not shy about stating his theme early in the novel: “the war on subjectivity.”  Everything is objectified to decision by calculation. (This includes the maximum number of allowable pages in a readable novel, which is 577—as it happens, the exact length of this book.) Ironically this also results in the disappearance of actual objects and authentic life, in favor of digital imagery and ideological judgments.  The result is a society caught in self-referential stasis, that punishes difference. 

 The novel does not fall easily into political categories. It exposes corporate conformism, but also its effect of cancel culture. The reasons (or excuses) given for much of the social pressure to conform are to save the environment and promote social justice.

 Delaney is a former forest ranger, so it may have seemed natural to her to organize an outing of The Every employees to visit Pacific Coast seals, but it was a disaster from start to finish, especially when they were confronted with the realities of these animals and their lives.  This incident is outrageously exaggerated and yet totally believable, and ultimately dystopic, especially given what these previous books tell us.

 It’s also funny, as is the novel generally, in a Dr. Strangelove sort of way. It has some characteristics of a satire of a monomanical corporate culture becoming a monoculture at large. Delaney’s best friend and fellow skeptic is the first to succumb to The Every’s embrace, supplying a horror movie vibe (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)  Delaney’s own fate involves a confrontation with the head of The Every, who was the naïve young woman protagonist of The Circle.

 There are many other related issues raised in the novel, in an entertaining narrative context that feels real right now.  The story is in development for a TV series, but right now this is a book that matters.

These four books matter because they give us crucial new information that creates a new context of how we see the world, our society and ourselves.  Right now there is no more important context that the relationship of humanity to the rest of life, and secondarily to the digital life humans are creating (for if we don't solve the survival problems associated with the first, the second won't much matter.)  They are robust enough to generate further discussion, and they cry out for action.