The Furrows: An Elegy

 

Dear Wayne. You were moving along a groove, the one carved into the world for you. The morning was golden. The roads were as gray and smooth as the skin of sea-born creatures. At the crossroads, you were blindsided. You were as if blind and an immense force came at you from one side. As you stepped forward unaware, it came and knocked you out of your furrow and into another, plowed you up and over, put you in another place, elsewhere, where. I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.

The Furrows: An Elegy has a high literary experimental structure — nothing is straightforward or what it seems — and as such, I don’t relish being the novel’s first reviewer; I don’t know if I totally “got” this. I will say that as an examination of grief and mourning and memory and reality, I was deeply touched by many scenes. And as an exploration of the African American experience — double consciousness (as defined by W.E.B. Dubois), code-switching, class discrimination and incarceration — I am receptive to whatever Zambian-born, Baltimore-raised author (and Harvard professor of English) Namwali Serpell wants to share. Because this narrative is so slippery and surprising, I am loath to reveal too much about it, but I will say that if the first part seems to get a little repetitive, hang tight: part two switches to a different point-of-view, with a different structure and vibe. Serpell tells us several times here, “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt,” and that’s exactly what she has accomplished: The Furrows reveals the lived experience of a person without the actual details of that person’s life being terribly important. Probably genius, and therefore over my head. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

There’s a cinematic sense of anticipation but maybe everyone feels this way nowadays. Life seems both monotonous and constantly interrupted, a punctuated heartmonitor line of events, with maybe some befores and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn’t creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It erupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles. On TV, online, in the prosthetic minds we carry in our hands. It’s as if something immense or catastrophic is always on the cusp of happening. Everything feels asymptotically dramatic, on the verge, as if only a disaster could undo that universal first disaster: being born at all. We are all heroes of cataclysm now.

Since it’s in the publisher’s blurb, I’ll confirm that this starts off as the story of twelve year old Cassandra (Cee or C) and how she lost her seven year old brother, Wayne. And whether he’s dead or simply missing, there was definitely a splummeshing, a ssth-ing, a head rolling around in a strange way, an unreasonable way (but this was allowed: this was our every Sunday; our every weekday; our whole summer). With a white mother and a Black father (and consequently two very different grandmothers) and a middle-class upbringing, Cassandra’s doesn’t seem to be primarily an African American story: but, of course, no matter how she sees herself, society reduces her unique experiences to an African American story. In part two, we meet “Will” — raised in foster care, the fast track to prison was his inescapable fate — and along with the twinning effects of double consciousness and code-switching, Will is tormented by a vengeful doppelgänger. From Will’s POV, the language becomes more “street” and while his is a different type of African American experience from Cassandra’s, the details are unverifiable and don’t, ultimately, matter. I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.

As with her last novel, The Old Drift, I was consistently charmed by Serpell’s turns of phrase:

• My anger always met Reena like water hitting ice: it either rolled off or froze into her own armor.

• As the afternoon passes, time starts to fold under its own weight like honey.

• I’m in your thrall, those tall letters on either side of the word imprisoning me.

But again, as with her last novel, I found The Furrows to be so well-written as to be distracted by its craftedness; I never forgot that I was reading a book. And on the other hand: I never forgot that Serpell had something that she wanted me to learn, and I was here for that.

I don’t matter, you don’t matter, we’re all just matter, codes, scrambles of signs and symbols, the language the world mumbles to itself, or maybe its consciousness, our eyes and ears and mouths sprouting from it like polyps, here to watch and hear and sense it, to record its events and ruptures, its growing and its rotting, its dismal spin.

I can’t wait to read other reviews of The Furrows — I have no doubt that fans of Serpell’s work will not be disappointed with this novel and they will have plenty to say — and even if I’m not sure I totally “got” this, I can’t give it less than four stars.

Just a note to myself: I remember reading something on Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the reviewer was talking about McCarthy's genius word choices, sharing some quote (which I wish I could now find) about the woods looming high as a cathedral (something like that). And then the writer explained that "cathedral" was such a genius choice because the "tall" letters (t, h, d, and l) loomed like trees among the "low" letters, and I remember thinking: Was that actually intentional? Did McCarthy select individual words for his sentences to that degree of hidden meaning? I was doubtful. But then Namwali Serpell comes along with, "I’m in your thrall, those tall letters on either side of the word imprisoning me," and I was absolutely charmed and delighted by that. 

A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions

 

In telling snail stories, this book aims to cultivate an appreciation for these animals and the significance of their loss: to draw us into their remarkable miniature worlds, and then out beyond them into an expansive engagement with the many ways in which snails craft and share these worlds with others. This book is about snails’ modes of perceiving and interpreting the world, from their slime-centered navigation to their social and reproductive proclivities; the immense journeys that brought them across oceans to these islands; the histories and ongoing practices of learning and knowledgemaking about our world that they have been part of; their intimate relationships with Kānaka Maoli as expressed in chants, songs, and stories, but also in ongoing struggles for land and culture. In short, it is a book about the world of possibilities and relationships that lies coiled within each of their tiny shells.

Snails are said to be “sentinel species” — those sensitive canary-in-a-coal-mine critters that can give warnings about how the earth is changing if we would only pay attention — and despite the fact that snails worldwide are experiencing a mass extinction event, being “non-charismatic” animals makes it hard to get people to care about their fates. As a self-described “field philosopher”, author Thom van Dooren brings us along as he explores the Hawaiian Islands (once home to upwards of 1000 endemic snail species, today only 300 of those species exist, with just 11 listed as “stable”), and as he shares the science, history, and modern day conservation efforts related to Hawaiian snails, van Dooren makes the case for why we should care about their extinction. A World in a Shell ticks a lot of boxes for me — I loved the accessible science and vivid travel writing; the historical perspective; the focus on animals and indigenous peoples — and while I have little to complain about what van Dooren has included here, I do wish there had been more philosophy from this field philosopher: I ended this book with an even greater appreciation for snails and their ways of being but would still be hard-pressed to explain why they have a right to exist beyond acknowledging that every living thing on earth has a right to exist. Still, I enjoyed what is here very much and join the author in his mournful hope for the snails’ future. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The more I explored the history of shell collecting in Hawai‘i, the more difficult it became to separate it from the larger story of European and American presence in these islands, one in which Hawai‘i today remains a nation under US occupation, subject to the accompanying and ongoing social and cultural processes of settler colonialism.

I suppose it’s not surprising that, as with everywhere else they colonised, the Hawaiian Islands were decimated by contact with European (and later, American) settlers: not only was the indigenous Hawaiian population reduced by 90% by 1850 (mostly due to disease), but settlers cleared the land for grazing livestock and sugar/pineapple plantations, putting pressure on the snails’ forest homes from the very beginning. The mid-Nineteenth Century also brought about “conchological fever” which saw folks (primarily Christian Missionary families) engaging in competitive snail shell collecting as a wholesome exercise, with some collectors amassing tens and hundreds of thousands of specimens. Van Dooren also shares that the giant African snail was introduced to Hawai’i in 1936 (wikipedia tells me it was brought to the islands “as a garden ornamental and to be eaten”), but when its escaped population grew out of control and threatened agricultural interests, its natural enemy the predatory rosy wolfsnail was loosed upon the wild — where it proceeded to eliminate the smaller and easier to catch native snail species. Today, several wild snail populations are protected within “exclosures” that are designed to keep out these carnivorous wolfsnails (along with non-native rats and chameleons). Many of the threatened species have small populations kept safe in local laboratories (what van Dooren refers to as “arks”), and interesting moral questions arise about when it’s permissible to take the last of a species out of the wild. Perhaps the most unnatural threat to the snails has been the massive military presence that ramped up on the Hawaiian Islands since WWII.

The sad and entirely illogical result of this situation is that your best chance of survival as an endangered snail in Hawai‘i is to be a member of a species that is being, or has been, routinely blown up by the US military.

Nearly one-third of America’s listed endangered species are found in Hawai’i, but less than 10% of the allocated federal funding goes towards their conservation. And as van Dooren writes, “Parts of these islands are among the most heavily militarized locations on the planet: O‘ahu alone is home to seven major military bases and around 50,000 active-duty personnel.” After decades of live fire and bombing practise, with untold numbers of snail species wiped out with their exploded and burnt out forest homes, pressure from conservationists and indigenous Hawaiians has forced these military bases to not only end the destructive training exercises but to take responsibility for finding and preserving the last remaining wild snail populations on their properties, from their own operating budgets. I found everything about this fascinating.

The following pretty much sums up van Dooren’s philosophy on why snails, and their continuing existence, matter:

In diverse and unequal ways, we are all at stake in extinction. It threatens the ecosystems that sustain us, the cultures and systems of both meaning and mystery that animate our lives, and, in the indifference of so many of our responses to it, extinction also wounds and threatens our humanity. As extinction remakes lives, landscapes, and possibilities, it forces us to ask: Who are we and whom might we become when species disappear?

I became enchanted with gastropods when I read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating — author Elisabeth Tova Bailey was able to make me care about snails in general by introducing me to the quirks of one individual — but although van Dooren scales everything up (at least 450 Hawaiian snails species have gone irretrievably extinct in the past 100 years; the vast majority of invertebrates worldwide have not even been named and disappear without our notice), I found myself not much more devastated by their fate than I was by that of the Devils Hole pupfish as described by Elizabeth Kolbert in Under a White Sky (a species reduced to fifty or so minnow-sized fish living in a cavern in the Nevada desert). And I can acknowledge that my lack of devastation reflects poorly on my own humanity, and I can honestly say that I believe every species does have a right to existence, and where possible, our protection to continue that existence, but I guess it’s the fact that I haven’t been persuaded into devastation that The World in a Shell felt light on philosophy. But again, what is here makes for a very good read.

I remember years ago watching TV with my father and it was something about rare mountaintop frogs that were at the brink of extinction and Dad, not out of character, impatiently turned off the television and snapped, "Why would I give a shit about some frogs? What has that got to do with me?" And I, more out of character for speaking up, suggested, "Everything's connected though, isn't it? That frog might not have anything to do with you, but who knows how its extinction might affect you."

That POV is the very least that humanity demands - to recognise that losing a strand somewhere in the web of life might lead to a collapse that could affect people (hello pollinators! we need you!) - but van Dooren doesn't even make the case for the snails' importance on that basis. Tree snails eat fungus and other microbes off of leaves as they tool around, but where they have gone extinct, the trees still seem to be doing fine. And land snails have always been important decomposers, but earthworms (another introduced invader that has taken over) seem to be doing the job without issue. The only things that eat them are invasive species, so if Hawaiian snails don't have an essential ecological niche, does their extinction matter?

The indigenous Hawaiians (Kānaka Maoli) revere the snails as an integral part of their mythology, saying that when everything is pono ("good or correct"), the snails sing in the trees. (And when white scientists state that it's impossible for snails to sing, the Hawaiians point out that maybe nothing has been pono since the white people came along; no wonder they can't hear them.) I love that tradition, and as much as I am behind indigenous peoples' rights to a healthy ecosystem that reflects and supports their cultural practise, once again, I'm looking to human requirements to justify the snails' existence.

I can certainly recognise the lack of humanity in my Dad's reponse to the mountaintop frogs (which are no doubt all gone by now), and while I can see the poverty of spirit and closed-heartedness (driven by the selfish Me Generation Baby Boomer mentality that made my Dad successful in business), I can't name the fatal flaw in his statement: What does the frog have to do with him? No man is an island? As goes the frog, so goes the food chain? All creatures great and small, the good Lord made them all (and whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to Him)? None of that would reach my father.

This is probably the reason I was looking for the field philosopher's argument in favour of the snails' inalienable rights: to finally win an imaginary debate with my father.

Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance

 

“Liarmouth,” he says with a missing-tooth grin. Liarmouth? That’s even better! Say it again, she begs him inside her head. He does. Only this time he pauses teasingly between syllables. “Liar…mouth,” he whispers, daring her dishonesty to rise up from her throat again. How can one word, even one made up from two separate words put together, melt away her lifetime of carnal caution, she wonders silently.

I was looking for something mindless, hopefully something entertaining, so why not John Waters’ first novel Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance? I knew what I was getting into with Waters — in the early days of VCRs, my friends and I would watch rented tapes of Polyester and the original Hairspray on repeat — but while this was campy with bizarre details, I don’t think it went far enough for my tastes: not truly transgressive or envelope-pushing, it almost felt like the world has moved on and Waters is still telling the same dirty jokes from the 1980s. Not a waste of my time — I did have some laughs and cringes — and fans of Waters’ films will no doubt enjoy the cinematic beats of the storyline even more than I did. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

“We all gotta make a living,” Daryl says with a shrug as he puts the final feather handcuff around Ritchie’s wrist. Christ, he thinks as he looks around at all the creepy framed Tickle Me Elmo portraits hanging on the walls, what a conman has to do to hide out from the police these days.

Sexpot forty-something Marsha Sprinkle is a liar and a hustler — squatting in foreclosed McMansions, fencing items from stolen luggage — and after promising to sleep with her partner in crime, Daryl, if he posed as her chauffeur for a year, the year is up, Daryl is, um, impassioned, and Marsha has no intention of honouring her deal. When they go to the airport to make what Marsha decides will be their final heist as a team, the con goes wrong, the pair run from the police in opposite directions, and the plot becomes a gonzo planes, trains, and automobiles road trip with Marsha trying to get to her ex-husband for overdue revenge and Daryl trying to get to Marsha. Along the way they cross paths with: a tickle fetishist; a hobo kidnapper; outlaw trampoline radicals on the run; an unlicensed pet plastic surgeon; a psychic talking penis; bouncers, flouncers, rimmers, and frotterers. Just about everyone is trying to have alternative sexy time, but when an act occurs, it felt kind of charming:

In. Out. Not like that burger place in L.A., but like a souped-up piston that grinds to perfection. She’s the master. He’s the johnson. And together they redefine human sexual response.

As for my feeling that Waters was stuck in time: He still populates his storytelling with cartoonish drag queens, overweight women, and transvestite sex workers. His cultural references run along the lines of Evel Knieval, Uri Geller, the Amazing Kreskin, and the “diet doctor murderess” Jean Harris; references I get because I was also alive in the 70s. But he also hearkens back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, with one chapter alone using Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Janet Leigh, and Tippi Hedren to make analogies; and, yes, I know who they are but they just don’t feel relevant. He discusses kinks like a naughty schoolboy, without actually showing much, and as the plot eventually takes on some fantastical/magical realism elements (that make for undoubtedly cinematic mental visuals), I didn’t feel a lot of tension in the plot despite this sort of thing:

Marsha Sprinkle may have accidentally outfoxed them once with the tricky little ambulance maneuver but that will be the last time she escapes. The last time she steals. The last time she’ll be a bad parent. The last time she doesn’t respect her own mother. The last time she stiffs a stiffie of his rightful wage. Today will be Marsha Sprinkle’s last day on earth, period.

Like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with poop and penis jokes, this ultimately did fit the bill as mindless and mostly entertaining, but this would probably be of more value to someone who has followed Waters’ career more closely than I have. Good, not great.

Animal Person

 

It is important to establish, before this begins, that I never thought of myself as an animal person. And since I do not come from a pet family, I never thought the family we were raising needed any more life running through it. Especially not a scurrying kind of life, with its claws tap-tap-tapping on the hardwood floors.

There’s a certain reading process that I expect to engage in with my favourite short fiction — my acceptance of the initial set up followed by a swerve that upends my expectations — and Alexander MacLeod writes just these kinds of well-crafted and thoughtful short stories that, rather than feeling like truncated novels, are perfect little pearls of insight that couldn’t be told any other way. The eight stories in Animal Person each center on absolutely believable characters who probe the boundaries between themselves and others — exploring the differences between public and private, between family and outsider, even between animal and person — and as the characters are forced to learn something about themselves, the reader glimpses truths about the world. And they couldn’t have been told any other way. A wonderful collection that perfectly satisfied me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.) The stories:


Lagomorph

I don’t know, but sometimes when he closes in on me like that and I’m gazing down into those circles inside of circles inside of circles, I lose my way, and I feel like I am falling through an alien solar system of lost orbits rotating around a collapsing, burning sun.

Elegiac and philosophical in tone, this (O. Henry Award-winning) story that seems to be about a pet rabbit is, on a deeper level, an exploration of a failed marriage.

The Dead Want

She wouldn’t have felt a thing. They kept coming back to that. Once in every call, someone would say the words and the person on the other end would have to agree. She wouldn’t have felt a thing. She wouldn’t have felt a thing. It was the chorus, the refrain of the first six hours.

When it comes to what we owe our families, sometimes the needs of the dead take precedence over the needs of the living.

What Exactly Do You Think You’re Looking At?

A good bag is a miracle, intimate and distant at the same time; completely mine and completely not mine. When everything is in order, a good bag stolen from the LAX at precisely this time of year shows me a way out, a way through.

How shallow would your life have to be to search for meaning in the contents of stolen luggage? The answer to that question is surprisingly relatable.

Everything Underneath

Me and my sister. My sister and I. My sister and me. It has never been good between us. Never. We are eleven months apart and we have the same parents — the same mom, right there, on a blanket at the beach, reading her book, and the same dad, wherever he is now. But we have always had this gap, too. Eleven months is too close, and at the same time, it is too far away.

Two young girls are snorkelling in the ocean at the end of summer and everything underneath the waves — the swirling grit, the unseen lunar forces — are analogous to what swirls and pushes beneath their relationship.

The Entertainer

He felt sure that even the MC was not impressed. She seemed to be rolling her eyes at the vocalists especially, but he could not disagree. When they sang, the kids closed their eyes and circled their hands in the air, aiming for notes they could not possibly hit. Around him, people visibly winced, and when it was over, they applauded the quiet and not what had come before.

I was sobbing at the end of this: Three characters under pressure make a very powerful human connection through a shared love of music.

The Ninth Concession

I saw a light shining out of the house from the second floor. Allan was there, perfectly framed behind the glass of his bedroom window. He was staring up and over, not down, and his hardened hair was still perfectly parted and everything behind him was illuminated. You know how it is when the light gets like that. Sometimes the person looking out can’t see anything, only the dark, but for the person looking in, every detail is magnified and clear.

A relatable and thoughtful coming-of-age story about class and race and discovering what truly determines a person’s worth.

Once Removed

Amy remembered the closet by the door, and all the hollow shirts and pants stuffed into the Tip Top Tailor bag, a few decades of bad ties. She thought about the afterlife of objects. All the things that were still here and the people who were not.

An interesting examination of what makes a family and the stories we tell about them; what is forgotten over time and what is saved.

The Closing Date

When the news story came out, pictures of the motel were everywhere. Police cars and flashing lights, caution tape and pylons, men in hazmat suits entering and leaving the mobile forensic unit. It was what you’d expect.

In this story of a young family crossing paths with danger, we learn that perhaps the only people less knowable than strangers are ourselves.

Hey, Good Luck Out There

 

I gave her a half hug, we had discussed before how we both didn’t like touching, but I thought she would laugh at me if I tried to shake her hand. She kind of hugged me back, but she was holding on tight to her luggage.

“Hey, good luck out there.”

Divided into two parts — twenty-two-year-old Bobbi’s experience in a residential rehab program and what happens after her release thirty days later — Hey, Good Luck Out There is a decidedly alternative story of addiction and recovery. Perhaps based on debut author Georgia Toews’ own experiences (there are hints of this in the Acknowledgments at the end of the book), Bobbi is a character who goes to rehab after an undramatic intervention by her imperfect family, and although she can recognise that the other women in the facility need to be there, she doesn’t believe that she has personally hit rock bottom, and as a consequence, doesn’t embrace the program or the therapy; solely confronting her demons and her past in the sparkly pink journal her grandmother gave her. There’s discomfort in Bobbi’s halting dialogue and inability to connect with others, some sardonic humour in Bobbi's inner musings, and dramatic irony in the disconnect between how normal Bobbi outwardly insists her life has been and the revealed details of her party days; much of the specifics of the writing are well-crafted and compelling. On the other hand, the overall plot left me a bit cold: Despite some frequently appalling particulars, this didn’t feel “gritty” as the publisher’s blurb states — likely because these are the hinted at experiences of third parties and fuzzy memories that Bobbi brushes off; not much gritty happens in the present moment — and if this is meant to be a critique of residential rehab and twelve step programs, Toews doesn’t really dig into that either. Bobbi is simply a broken human drifting through life — accepting abuse or aid as it comes — and this driftiness gave me little to grab on to. I would give three and a half stars and am rounding up for the sentence-level writing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I had only been in rehab for four full days and already I was beginning to forget which woman had suffered what, which woman was attacked when, who ran from the cops or whose boyfriend found her seizing in the doorway. That must be the point. Inundate you with horror stories and trauma until you realize how serious your addiction is and finally give in to the program, your only saving grace. But at this point, I didn’t feel shockable. I just felt that all that bullshit was a given.

A hardcore alcoholic, and occasional party drug user, Bobbi was talked into rehab by well-meaning (hard-drinking, mentally unstable) parents who didn’t know how else to help her. But because she’s doing the rehab more for the parents who paid out of pocket for the program than for herself, Bobbi doesn’t really do the work; just counting off sober days until her release while frequently bursting into uncontrollable tears and only confiding past trauma to her journal. Most of the first half of the book is about Bobbi’s efforts to fit in with the other women at the facility, but poor conversation skills and an unwillingness to be vulnerable leads to her being accepted, but not really embraced. I have no idea how realistic her cold turkey experience is (she can’t drink so she won’t drink, without physical or psychological effects), and when she is eventually released, it’s a stubbornness of mind and a wish to not disappoint her parents that Bobbi will rely on to keep herself sober.

The second half of the book sees Bobbi on the outside — with shockingly little support from parents who assume she will be able to find herself a job and an affordable apartment in downtown Toronto on her own — and again, I have no idea how realistic it is to portray someone with addiction issues and unresolved trauma (and no support system other than her former party friends and recent rehab roommates) who can take stressful situations as they come and just not drink because she promised her mom and dad that she wouldn’t. Once again, this part seems to be about Bobbi’s efforts to make connections with new people despite her lack of sober communication skills, and some people help her, some take advantage of her — some do both — and the tension in the plot comes from wondering if the shaky sobriety will stick.

I walked past the hostel and back, trying to make up my mind, I wanted a part of me back, the brave part. No, I wanted the child back, the one who had friends, who had a safe house and a family that didn’t hold their breath around me. I kept going through the scenarios: living, dying, drinking on this beautiful summer evening.

Of course I was rooting for Bobbi — she really is a damaged character who deserves stability and hope for the future — but it felt like, ultimately, the events of the plot (the good things that landed in Bobbi’s lap, the things that were taken away) were more random than literary (like there wasn’t a point to the up and down struggles beyond, “It could happen this way”) and that was a bit frustrating for me, a bit wispy. Still, overall, a very good read.

Fred: An Unbecoming Woman

 

I noticed that the tailors were referring to me using they/them pronouns. I hadn’t asked them to do so, but there was also no information about my gender on any of my forms. At the time, I believed this was a silent revolution for my non-binary friends, and a demonstration of the uncoupling of gender and appearance. But I didn’t realize that maybe it was a liberation for me as well; I didn’t have to be a “she.”

I’m starting with the above quote because it is the only discussion of pronouns in Fred: An Unbecoming Woman, and as the publisher’s blurb uses both “they/them” and “she/her” to refer to author Annie Krabbenschmidt, I want to note that I have done my best to proceed respectfully and have decided to use “she/her” because that seems to be the pronouns with which Krabbenschmidt refers to herself on her website, Annsplain. And so to the review:

The truth was that since I took off to New York — to live alone, to be singular — I’ve been un-becoming a woman. I’ve been looking more and more like Fred. Who is Fred?! The people are clamoring for an explanation.

In what is essentially a collection of introspective essays, Fred is Annie Krabbenschmidt’s coming-out/coming-of-age story, and it is filled with humour, heartbreak, candour, and thoughtfulness. I always say that I read (fiction and non-) to learn about the world and how others navigate it, and Krabbenschmidt’s story — overcoming an affluent and loving childhood that, perversely, traumatised and oppressed Krabbenschmidt with its strict gender expectations — represents the perfect union of a person with something to say and the writing skills to say it; I learned plenty. I appreciate what Krabbenschmidt shares about her life, appreciate what she has to say about society at large, and although her struggles were not my struggles, there’s something relatable and universal about this story of striving to make the painful transition to adulthood with authenticity and self-love. I’m glad I read this and wish the author much happiness and success. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It would be ignorant to assume that every person can come out to family and friends at this moment. Not everyone has the privilege of a safe space and close confidants. But for those of us that do, our visibility matters. Visibility ensures that for every tokenized, boxed in, stereotypical representation we see of ourselves in the media, we also see someone who is a real, nuanced, and complicated human being, who also happens to be gay.

Coming from a “Marin County, nuclear-American-family, Lululemon-wearing, Duke University world”, Krabbenschmidt acknowledges that hers was an uncommonly privileged upbringing. But even so, country club societies (and social climber parents who want to fit in there) have very strict rules about behaviour and appearance that can stifle and oppress a young child who knows early that she doesn’t fit into the standard mould; sometimes the only recourse is to hide one’s true self, even from oneself. The titular “Fred” is a persona that Krabbenschmidt would inhabit at sleepaway camp — loud and dirty, definitely unladylike — and as freeing as these sporadic experiences were for young Annie, it took until she went away to college before she realised (or at least admitted to herself) that she was gay and didn’t want to conform to gender norms any more. In Fred, Krabbenschmidt reveals how painful it was for her to come out to her family and friends, how difficult to find romantic love, and how there was still much work to do to find herself even once she was out and “free”. As the essays travel back and forth through Krabbenschmidt’s history, reframing time periods through slightly different angles, it is evident how carefully she has thought about her life; how carefully she has worked on presenting it to an audience.

I’ve been perfectly honest with you, but being vulnerable with everyone isn’t necessarily the same thing as being vulnerable with someone. I’ve written you this book so that I could tell you everything I needed you to know without having to sit across from you, where I would have hoped so desperately for you to hold my hand and feared so greatly that you wouldn’t that I would have kept them clenched on my lap.

Fred is well-written, responds to my curiosity about how others navigate their way in the world, and Krabbenschmidt touched me with both her humour and her candour; I can’t ask for more.

If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

 

For narwhals to suffer a Nietzsche-like psychotic break, they would need to have a sophisticated level of awareness of their own existence. They’d need to know that they were mortal — destined to die one day in the not-so-distant future. But the evidence that narwhals or any animals other than humans have the intellectual muscle to conceptualize their own mortality is, as we’ll see in this book, thin on the ground. And that, it turns out, is a good thing.

It would seem that author Justin Gregg chose the narwhal more or less randomly for the fetching cover art and title of If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal (as an Adjunct Professor at St. Francis Xavier University and a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project, I accept that narwhals are simply one of Gregg’s “favorite marine mammals”, even if I was slightly disappointed not to actually read about the enchanting sea unicorns in the book itself), but counterpointing narwhals with Nietzsche does make for an intriguing title and serves to underline the fact that this book is equal parts biology and philosophy. By exploring the latest research into animal intelligence, and comparing the results to what we know about the human experience, it’s hard not to share Gregg’s conclusion that human intelligence — and the undeniable harm we cause to each other and the planet through its unique powers — can be more curse than gift. If only, as Nietzche lamented, we were all as stupid as cattle — living in the moment, neither melancholy nor bored — we would have no existential angst. More cynically, as Gregg writes, “Narwhals do not build gas chambers.” This is a fascinating work of comparative biology that eventually pulls itself out of the misanthropic muck (human intelligence is capable of some good if we choose to use it that way), but when Gregg repeats a few times that there’s a 9.5% chance that humanity will be responsible for our own extinction by the end of this century, it’s hard not to default to Nietzchean nihilism. Interesting and thought-provoking (if a little bleak), rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Like most human cognitive achievements, language is a double-edged sword responsible for as much misery as pleasure. Would we, as a species, be happier without it? Quite possibly. Would the world have experienced as much death and misery had humans remained a nonlinguistic ape? Probably not. Language might generate more misery than pleasure for the animal kingdom as a whole. Language falls victim to the Exceptionalism Paradox: It is the ultimate symbol of the uniqueness of the human mind, and yet despite its wondrousness, it has helped generate more misery for the creatures on this planet (including ourselves) than pleasure.

Over the course of seven chapters that explore phenomena that we think of as uniquely human traits (not just deception but “bullshitting”, the awareness of our own eventual deaths, morality, etc.), Gregg demonstrates the limits of these traits in non-human animals, and then goes on to explain why the dumb beasts of the field and air are better off without them. In evolutionary terms, Gregg argues against humanity thinking of ourselves as the peak of creation: not only does our unique intelligence cause existential angst and genocide and climate-changing catastrophe, but we’ve been here as a species on Earth for the blink of an eye and will likely wink ourselves out — while bugs and bacteria and crocodilia continue on with their millions of years of existence unaffected by our incidental flashing in the pan. (And as our sun will eventually die anyway, none of us — collectively or individually — will matter in the unimaginably long history of the universe. Cheers.) The science writing is often humorous and always accessible — featuring quotes by Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell and Greta Thunberg — and as an animal-loving scientist who rescues slugs from his driveway before taking his daughter to school every morning, Gregg mostly laments the ecological damage our intelligence has effected:

Our hankering for a snack in the twenty-first century is identical to what it was ten thousand years ago, but our complex cognition allows us to engage in activities (e.g., oil and gas extraction, mechanized farming, soil depletion) on a massive scale, which is transforming this planet into an uninhabitable shithole. Our kitchens are full of foods that come from a global agricultural-industrial complex that is fundamentally problematic to the survival of the human species.

But again, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal isn’t all doom and gloom. By the end, Gregg concedes that human intelligence has the capability to produce great works of lasting beauty. And if we can eventually get together and decide to save ourselves, we’re capable of that beautiful act, too. The tie-ins with Nietzsche makes this different from other books I’ve read on animal intelligence (Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, Aesop’s Animals, The Soul of an Octopus, etc.), and it adds a valuable contribution to the fascinating conversation about our place in the universe.

Compass

 

The qamutik, my compass, would be my sundial. I rigged a slot into the center of the sled and planted the harpoon. Its shadow crossed the deck on the starboard side of stern. It flickered as a low cloud slid by, then set. The mark stayed true. I had harnessed the sun.

Compass combines a lot of my favourite themes — Far North nature writing, Indigenous mythology, a person being pushed to the limits of survival and sanity — and as a medical doctor who has served as a fly-in physician for a traditional Inuit community on the Arctic Circle for the past fifteen years, author Murray Lee is well-placed to tell this outsider tale of an arrogant adventurer who mistakenly believes that the North has been tamed since the dangerous heydays of polar exploration. From early on we know that some tragedy will befall this character (dubbed “Guy” by his Inuit hosts and otherwise unnamed) — so, while a thriller, the plot is less about what ultimately happens than what leads up to it — and by making Guy essentially unlikeable and unself-aware, Lee sets up a situation that gives the reader a delicious feeling of schadenfreude. I liked everything about this — Compass certainly doesn’t feel like a debut novel — and I hope that for a small release it gets a big reception. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Nowadays, with modern navigation systems and conveniently thin ice, cruise ships like mine glide through the waters on little more than a collective whim and the pensions of upper-middle-class urban professionals. Every fog-shrouded little beach they pass is the deserted stage of historic tragedy. My job on these trips was to tell those stories of shipwrecks and starvation — ghost stories, I suppose — as satellites guided our ship safely through a sea of despair. We were walking, as it were, on a path made of bones.

A former academic who became famous writing pop history books, Guy has been travelling the world on the lecture circuit, rehashing the tales of European exploration with a specialty in the Far North. Notwithstanding his Gore-Tex parka and carefully curated adventurer’s beard, Guy was outed as a poser by a colleague who had actually been to “The Edge” (the place where the northern lands, or at least the solid ice, meets the open sea), and when he has a break in his touring schedule, Guy determines to make a trek to The Edge to see it in person. Despite the local Inuit contending that June is the wrong time of year to make such a trip, Guy insists on bending reality to his own convenience and off he heads into the midnight sun with little more than his reluctant guide and a flask of celebratory Scotch. What could go wrong?

I enjoyed the nature writing, the historic storytelling, the Inuit mythology, and maybe especially, the reality of Canada’s nebulous claim to the North:

Every Nunavut town I’ve ever been in has had a small patrol and Sim was exactly the type of guy who was in each of them. A volunteer militia in matching red sweatshirts tobogganing around the Arctic as Russian and American nuclear submarines slip silently underneath them. It is such a Canadian approach to national defense — understated, admirable, and quite possibly completely ineffective.

And:

The fact that Canada has kept itself together is a sign of either the kindness of its neighbors or a worldwide lack of interest in what that place has to offer. Certainly, they don’t put up much of a defense. The world’s longest coastline and, as far as I can tell, the country seems to rely on the honor system.

Parenthetically: I once met an American — an educated, well-travelled professional from Chicago — who laughed when I suggested that Santa Claus is a Canadian. He laughed but then said, “Wait. Do you actually believe the North Pole is in Canada?” I replied yes; if you look at a map, Canada goes all the way up to the top. And he said, “Now that’s funny.” Well, where do people think Canada stops? I appreciate that Lee points out our precarious claim (or at least our inability to defend it). And I want to make mention of some intriguing quirks of Lee’s vocabulary that point to his medical background. Twice he refers to “omentum” (once as a "choice" bit of meat that was offered to Guy [which he eventually spat into a stream], and once as Guy held some after gutting an animal), and he uses more evocatively bowellish terms to describe the polar ice: Guy notes that the ice rumbled with “borborygmic bass-beats that I could feel beneath my feet,” and he grew to fear “the deep, wet respirations of an edematous death. It was the end of my ice.” I had to look those words up, and I appreciate their imaginative use.

The ice was etched like elephant skin. Pools had formed at a few fissures’ forks, bleeding into each other through a latticework of shallow channels. I knew the floe was thick from looking down the breathing hole, but it was clearly rotting. And beyond the ice, along the shore on its every side, little waves were eating at the edge, as industrious as ants. My world was a clock, counting down.

What most worked for me in Compass was the slow revelation of Guy’s character: as a first-person narrative, it isn’t obvious from the beginning how generally unliked and undeserving of his acclaim Guy really is, but it eventually becomes clear that his hubris will demand a response from the gods; even if they aren’t his gods. A fast and engaging read, this really worked for me.

Butts: A Backstory

 

Butts, silly as they may often seem, are tremendously complex symbols, fraught with significance and nuance, laden with humor and sex, shame and history. Women’s butts have been used as a means to create and reinforce racial hierarchies, as a barometer for the virtues of hard work, and as a measure of sexual desire and availability. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that there is little a person can do to dramatically change the way their butt looks without surgical intervention, the shape and size of a woman’s butt has long been a perceived indicator of her very nature — her morality, her femininity, and even her humanity.

Early in Butts: A Backstory, author Heather Radke dismantles the “adaptationism” theories of evolutionary psychology — the notion that perceived sexual markers, like a peacock’s tail or a woman’s rear end, signal reproductive health to prospective mates (which is what I know I had been taught) instead of being merely physical artefacts of some minor modification that happened along the way — and offers instead the idea that, when it comes to women’s butts, the attractiveness and meaning of these incidental mounds of muscle and fat is entirely culturally imposed. In the West, the idea of what attractive backsides look like has varied greatly over the years — from extravagant Victorian bustles to narrow-hipped flappers; from hardened Buns of Steel to bulbous Kardashian belfies — and while these standards have generally been determined by straight, white men, women from all walks of life have endured the incessant evaluation of a body part they can’t even properly see. More social commentary than straight-up science, Radke looks at the cultural meaning of the female butt from many fascinating angles, and with writing that is equal parts informal and journalistic, she presents an eye-opening overview of something I had never given much thought to at all. Engaging and provoking, I’m rounding up to five stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Because of the power long held in science, politics, media, and the realms of culture and politics, white people, men, and straight people have always maintained an inordinate amount of influence and control over what meanings are applied to bodies. They have invented and enforced ideas of what is normal and what is deviant, what is “mainstream” and what is marginal. By looking closely at how people in power have constructed those meanings, my hope is that I will make visible something that often feels invisible: the deep historical roots of why women seem to have so many — and so many contradictory — feelings about their butts. I wanted to understand why butts have come to mean so much, when they could very well mean nothing at all.

Throughout, Radke makes the case that there is a pernicious racial dimension to the evaluation of the female butt (and particularly with the belief that Black women have the largest butts — which white men take as an invitation to sexual advances and which white women envy and feel threatened by.) She tells the story of Sarah Baartman — the so-called “Hottentot Venus”, an enslaved South African of the Khoe tribe — whose butt was so tremendous that she was brought to England in 1810, where she was put on display in a nude body stocking for Brits to pinch and poke with their umbrellas. (More egregiously, Baartman’s various body parts were put on permanent display in Paris’ National Museum of Natural History after her death.) Radke draws a line between this “scientific” fascination with large behinds and the eventual fashion for bustles (with the added bonus for white women that they could present this alluring racialised silhouette in public and remove it in private.) This chimes with one of the last stories in the book: After Miley Cyrus infamously “twerked” onstage at the MTV VMAs (a dance, appropriated from the Black community, that goes back to New Orleans’ antebellum Congo Square) Cyrus apparently made twerking a part of her concert tour, strapping on a huge padded butt for her performances (a racialised act, which could then be undone in private.)

In between, Radke covers ‘20s flappers and the eugenicists of the 1940s (who were trying to determine what a “normal” [read: “white”] shape looked like); fashion, “ready to wear” clothing, and drag queens; exercise trends, surgical fixes, and the music industry. As for the last: I was intrigued to learn that Sir Mix-a-Lot didn’t think of “Baby Got Back” as a novelty song; it was meant as a political statement, a push back against the time’s media preference for skinny white women. And while that song and its video might serve more to objectify than extol Black women and their butts (they are presented by and for the male gaze), Nicki Minaj takes ownership of her own body and its meaning by sampling “Baby Got Back” in “Anaconda” (and I would have never considered the cultural importance of either song without this book, and I now feel like I should have been paying attention.)

In so many ways, butts ask us to turn away, to giggle with hot-faced shame and roll our eyes. When I started writing this book, I wondered what would happen if I instead turned my full attention toward the butt, if I investigated its history and asked butt experts and enthusiasts of all stripes — scientists, drag queens, dance instructors, historians, and archivists — serious questions about what butts are and what butts mean. In doing so, I found stories of tragedy, anger, oppression, lust, and joy. And I found that in our bodies, we carry histories.

I don’t know if I was entirely convinced that attraction to the female butt is primarily generated by popular culture (evolutionary psychology is a hard theory for me to shake off based on a couple of quotes), but as an examination of how cultural trends pressure women to conform to shifting, impossible beauty ideals (even the eugenicists couldn’t find a woman to represent the “norm”), and how those pressures are felt differently to women of different (primarily different racial) groups over time, this work is scholarly, wide-ranging, and surprising; exactly the kind of thing I like.

ETA on April 20: Lizzo hosted SNL last weekend and she mentioned her TED Talk on twerking and what she has to say (about the cultural roots of twerking and the appropriation of Black culture and Black women's bodies) dovetails perfectly with this material.

Mercury Pictures Presents

 

“Here, I have an idea.” In the lower right corner, under the Produced By credit, Artie crossed out the John in John Doe and wrote Jane. “Jane Doe. No one, and I mean no one, will have any doubt who Jane Doe really is. Satisfied?” Maria might have been had she not noticed the one non-anonymized name on the poster. It appeared right above the title, in small but legible cursive: Art Feldman and Mercury Pictures Presents …

I’m going to go with: It’s not the book, it’s me. Mercury Pictures Presents has plenty of five star reviews, and I have raved about author Anthony Marra’s work before, but this time? I was kind of bored; unmoved by the writing and unsurprised by the plot and its details. I have zero interest in stories about Hollywood and moviemaking, and I feel like everything important that can be said about WWII in fiction was written by the people who lived through it, and although there was the potential for something interesting about Hollywood propaganda drumming up fascistic control over those “resident aliens” who had fled rising fascism in their birth countries, it didn’t much pay off for me. Marra draws some fine characters, gives them some snappy lines, puts them in singular circumstances, and none of it really touched me. I acknowledge this failure to connect is on me; another reader’s experience may be totally different. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

“People like you and me, Art? The sons of furriers and cobblers and glovers who’ve been in the business since the battles with the Edison Trust? We came out here to build ourselves a broken kingdom where only the broken prosper, and then, our children, they hold it against us when we make them whole.”

Mercury Pictures is a small-time movie studio — owned and run by twin Jewish brothers who emigrated from Poland long before Hitler was a threat — and as America enters WWII, they hit it big with military training films and jingoistic agitprop created through their hastily assembled Propaganda Unit. The storyline of Mercury Pictures Presents follows the fortunes of this studio and the (mostly) immigrant artists who staff it. We see the fate of Italian antifascists who were sent into internal exile (confino) by Mussilini, unable to leave a certain radius within San Lorenzo. We then witness the fate of those antifascists who fled Italy or Germany ahead of WWII — forced to register as resident aliens when the US declared war on Europe, unable to travel beyond a two mile radius of their homes, subject to curfews and the confiscation of goods. We see expat German architects engaged to recreate Berlin in the Utah desert for the USAF to test incendiary bombs for use against the actual city (and this part may have been shocking if I hadn’t read about it recently in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia). We see a Chinese-American actor reduced to playing a caricature of a bellicose Japanese bogeyman (and the racism that he provokes in the role is so successful that he finds himself in danger on the streets of L.A.) There’s a goldmine of irony in the idea of Hollywood (and its German- and Italian-born immigrant artists) manufacturing the face of an enemy for the country to set its sights on — even more irony in the eventual McCarthy Hearings trying to root out those Hollywood Communists who had been antifascists “too early” — but while the elements of something interesting were here, I simply didn’t find it terribly engaging. A taste of the snappy writing:

• For years, Maria had devised strategies for smuggling the profane beneath the most sensitive censorial snouts. At her best, she passed more colorful bullshit than Babe the Blue Ox.

• Annunziata knew the bribes were wasted, but when you’re desperate, every open pocket is a wishing well.

• She was Rubenesque, and, like both painter and deli sandwich, irrefutable proof of Creation’s genius.

And there were many grasps at meaning-making:

A dark inkling deepens to certainty. This parched patch of Utah is indeed the farthest outpost of the Third Reich, alike in the immodesty of its vision and narrowness of its humanity.

But I think that, overall, this experience just confirms my disinterest in WWII novels. This was a fresh angle (I didn’t know about the confino before), and Marra has a large and colourful cast of characters intersect in complex ways, but the story didn’t surprise or move me. And I so don’t care about Hollywood that the setting neither charmed or intrigued me. And as mine seems to be a minority opinion, no one should take my word on this one.