Reading

Ah, finally a Saturday between all semesters.  I started reading for fun on Thursday, and on Friday I picked up two book packages and ordered a new round.  So, let me just survey through the books that are likely to pop up as I ramble along in the next few weeks--until the dreaded fall semesters begin on their various dates, and I may not get to write at all...
   

So, books that arrived--The Bedford Reader, a composition anthology for a class a didn't design.  Um, haven't opened that.  But also arrived, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan.  (This is a book that Haraway talked about in several places in When Species Meet, so I'm following up a thread from that reading.)  I've read through the first chapter just now, with first coffee here at Lakota.  The authors seem to be offering a critique of the "modern synthesis" in evolutionary biology, which they claim overstates the importance of random mutation in evolutionary change.  Instead, they stress, "the important transmitted variation that leads to evolutionary novelty comes from the acquisition of genomes" (12), a process they call "symbiogenesis":

As members of two species respond over time to each other's presence, exploitative relationships may eventually become convivial to the point where neither organism exists without the other.  Long-term stable symbiosis that leads to evolutionary change is called "symbiogenesis."  These mergers, long-term biological fusions beginning as symbiosis, are the engine of species evolution. (12)

They apply this (still in Chapter 1!) to not only lichens and green slugs, but humans:  "we people are really walking assemblages, beings who have integrated various other kinds of organisms....The completely self-contained 'individual' is a myth that needs to be replaced..." (19).  Well, this book will be a good stimulus, one which already links to my interests in the shifting boundaries of our reality (ok, I'm going toward plural ontologies).  Reminds me of the provoking novel, Darwin's Radio.

Other books.  I'm looking for a non-fiction book for a new last-minute writing class.  I want to encourage a collective learning process with a book that will offer an overall theme for the course, a theme that will challenge students with new ideas, that will insist we see each other as intellectually serious, but not be arcane or removed from their lives and futures. Such a book also needs to offer a common starting point, but allow for each student to branch off into his/her own research explorations.  Ok.  That's possible. I've used two books like this in other classes, and they work--Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben, and later Hot: Living through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard.  I browsed around and ordered several books from Amazon, keying on the slightly different organizer, the Anthropocene. 

  http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/images/anthropocene_cartoon.jpg 

 

[And I realize how much I depend on the layers of information in Amazon to pick books...there's hitting the right key words to start with, looking at price and number of pages and publication date, using the descriptive blurb at the top, the professional review excerpts, then the anybody-reviews, keying in on repeated criticisms, topics that interest me, discounting students who just say it's "boring," but yes, reviews that say jargon-heavy or badly written matter, comparing 5 star and 2 star reviews, and coasting on to "Customers who bought this item also bought..."]

So, I found Adventures in the Anthropocene:  A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince.  The blurb says,

We all know our planet is in crisis, and that it is largely our fault. But all too often the full picture of change is obstructed by dense data sets and particular catastrophes. Struggling with this obscurity in her role as an editor at Nature, Gaia Vince decided to travel the world and see for herself what life is really like for people on the frontline of this new reality.

Editor of Nature, big plus. First name Gaia, really?  Eh...I'm moving away.  "Persuasive, illuminating — and strangely hopeful"--so, is this a whitewashed, feel good, eat-more-tofu-and-build-condos-out-of-old-2-liter-bottles piece of propaganda?  That won't be accurate criticism of Vince's book, of course, but will this book be direct and serious enough for a class?  I ordered it, but it's not my first choice.

And also, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman:  

With her distinctive gift for making scientific discovery intelligible to the layperson, Ackerman takes us on an exhilarating journey through our new reality, introducing us to many of the people and ideas now creating—perhaps saving—our future and that of our fellow creatures. A beguiling, optimistic engagement with the changes affecting every part of our lives, The Human Age is a wise and beautiful book that will astound, delight, and inform intelligent life for a long time to come.

"Exhilarating," "astound, delight"--sounds pretty much like teaching kids the 3-Rs and making them cry about polar bears without ever connecting any dots, explaining anything about material flow or keystone species or... (this is the standard, counterproductive approach I've found over and over in the background of most of my college freshmen...ecology at the level of a Coke ad).  Lots of the reviews say "unfocused."  Warning sign. I ordered it, too, as a book I need to know about.  But--not likely a text I'll use.
  

http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/lt/lt_cache/thumbnail/960/img/photos/2012/08/10/b3/a0/28biz_POLAR_46990_1269270a.jpg 

And The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet by Christian Schwagerl:

Drawing on his own experiences and research as a journalist with rigorous scientific training, Schwägerl offers readers the means to envision and create realistic solutions to our current ecological crises. He shares a planetary vision of an attainable world that balances ecological sustainability, economic prosperity, political justice and cultural vibrancy.

A review offers that  

Because it does go beyond describing the forces at work, "The Anthropocene" becomes the best book written on the subject to date by presenting a new rubric for our relationship with nature where we are neither in it or outside of it.... He gives us a glimpse of our potential role as gardeners, caretakers, designers, inventors and creators. He goes beyond both the vision of apocalypse and the tensions between exploitation and preservation.

This one is my best hope for a text so far.  A concern, that it's translated from German.  Will it be readable, or that dull, plodding, I-want-to-stop-and-play-Free-Cell-after-every-paragraph?  


Not for classes, but in the exhilaration of the idea of being able to read, I also ordered The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert--not the older book by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, also The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind, which is really a grim forerunner of our current focus on the Anthropocene.  And This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein.  She's a writer who comes up often, was on the Board of McKibben's 350.org, and this book was specifically invoked at an AAG session this spring.  It's probably very solid, but would be too political for a class.  And finally, Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing by Sidney Dobrin, editor. Yes, this is a topic I'm much interested in, but it will open yet another path that will lead me away from sitting right here and writing that section of my Geography thesis about the need for an altered way of communicating.  Sometimes, I'd rather be uninformed for just a little longer...

Well, these are all supposed to show up Tuesday, and I can begin sorting through and making decisions.

Meanwhile, I have books here to keep on with.  I just read another essay in Carl Wolfe's Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, and someplace, I still have Graham Harman's Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy--something I need to read in an open time like this, since it won't be "light," but, well, it's too much for my first two days on sleeping in.  

  

There's Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, the third volume in his Mars trilogy.  I used the first book, Red Mars, a couple summers ago in a class I made up call "Imagining Mars," when in one of those serendipitous bumps, I found a text with exactly that title. I should sometime talk about why science fiction matters, as a way to explore and experiment with futures, but here, I'll just say how well Robinson prepares us to think about the demands, losses, and human narrowness involved in geoengineering, something we here on earth will have to consider in the next two decades, and either rally around or fight against.
 

  http://blogs-images.forbes.com/markhughes/files/2014/06/Snowpiercer-2.jpg

And in some box or pile of papers, I still have Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood to read.  It's the third in her trilogy.  I've used Oryx and Crake in a number of freshman classes, and went ahead with the second, The Year of the Flood, in a recent contemporary novels course.  Both are great explorations of impending crisis and very different responses--from an urbanized back-to-nature, to extreme bioengineering, along with a sort of Twelve Monkeys "fix."

And what I actually did, the first day post-grading, was to begin reading Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, Shaman.
    

A blue moon...

Reading academic books, like most of those I browsed through above, I wind up with questions of language, effectiveness, whether the academic process in itself too much abstracts, generalizes, and thereby falsifies the real complexities of the world.  But such books are not avoidable; there's where much of our knowledge is held (held captive?) and developed.  And I wind up "unfolding" their logics into other books I know, movies, poems, personal experience, harvesting phrases and words for titles (like 'contact zone' from Haraway and that biologist's spin on 'diagnosis' from Margulis and Sagan).

But more immediately, I picked up Shaman, returning to the act of reading from a physical book, feeling several layers of screen-stress drop away, joining the boy Loon on his "wander," that initiation sometime in a post-Ice Age where humans still cross paths with Neanderthals and shamans pass along traditions of hunger and spirit worlds.  I read one good chunk of the book outside, there in the morning after most of the mosquitoes go to their vampiric rest, but before the 90+ degree swelter began.  The dogs took turns expecting my free hand to rub their head or belly, while a cat, fairly wild, climbed up on the table to drink rain water from a cooler I'd left out.  She stares at me, assesses the threat level, then drinks as if I'm not there, her tongue barely rippling the surface of the morning.
  

later, bob