And today, standing where the bear stood, I understand with deep clarity — for his questions have become my questions — the final passage of ‘Ktaadn,’ Thoreau’s famous essay: ‘I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become strange to me…. Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?’
This is the Thoreau I admire most of all. Not the hero living by his own means at Walden Pond; not the pithy craftsman of quotable quotes; not the meticulous, miraculous journal keeper whose observations cut to the quick with the precision of a scientific instrument. No, the Thoreau I admire most is the one struck dumb on a mountaintop in Maine. Struck dumb by the smallness of our accumulated knowledge in the face of raw, depthless reality. The desolation of Mount Katahdin turns such formerly simple questions as ‘Who are we, where are we?’ into maddening and unanswerable koans to which the only appropriate response is one’s whole life, one’s being, nothing less. And this is the gift of Thoreau, as I understand it. By virtue of word and deed, this pencil maker’s son uses his pencil to free the rest of us from a worldview prescribed by people and institutions who hold fast to power, prestige, and tradition, and who would claim these stations as evidence of a certain knowledge of the truth. But in the actual world, on the solid earth, what truth is there, and who would be so bold as to name it? Who are we, where are we? To take nothing for granted, not even this — out of deep humility comes the birth of wisdom. The necessity of silence and solitude.
~ Steve Edwards, Breaking Into The Backcountry
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Yet, as with the activity in the supposedly idle brain, and as I have begun to suggest above more generally, all this requires us to complete what is often an incomplete rethinking of stillness and movement together. Erin Manning asks “how can we think a political body that resists the dichotomy between stillness and movement?” (2009)
First, all stillness is movement. As Manning puts it: “Movement never stops. Every movement resonates with its incipient preacceleration and its potential surplus or remainder, active in a contagion of speeds and slownesses” (2009). Apparent or relative immobility masks what in many ways is a different but increased intensity in transactions between mobilities, perhaps an ongoing repotentialising of more obvious mobility, at another level, another place, a transduced energy. We could say that in immobility movement continues otherwise, in space but not quite cardinal space (Massumi 178ff).
Second, all action has something like stillness within it. We don’t need to head to the mysticism of the martial arts to understand this. Consider the simple lever which gives us leverage. A lever also involves a fulcrum, and this is a stillness at the heart of action. This fulcrum, a still point of transformation/transduction of forces, is what allows for more obvious action. So stillness is the complex and ongoing transformation of forces that inhabits the cloth of coherent action. Gertrude Stein points to a kind of natural slowness infusing even nervous action.
~ Andrew Murphie, “Be Still, Be Good, Be Cool: The Ambivalent Powers of Stillness in an Overactive World” @ M/C Journal
If you’ve read 2666, you’ll likely note that Baring-Gould’s descriptions and even tone resonates strongly with “The Part About the Crimes,” a grisly catalog of murder and violence (even Baring-Gould’s chapter title “A Chamber of Horrors” seems to correspond). To be sure, both writers employ a frank, almost reportorial tone that often clashes against lucid nightmare details—there’s a heavy dose of unreality that poses as a kind of cure, almost, to the poisoned reality of mutilated bodies.
Maybe another way of approaching this is to point out how heavily the werewolves of Baring-Gould and Bolaño contrast with the glamorous, sexy werewolves of, say, True Blood or Twilight, werewolves that clearly tap into the mythos and psychology of transformation while at the same time sundering that transformative possibility away from any plain old Joe Schmo’s aptitude for grisly violence.
[…] What I want to suggest is that Bolaño’s werewolves are, in line with Baring-Gould’s, people fated to madness and violence, but also relatively normal people. These werewolves contain within them a dreadful capacity for violence.
@ Biblioklept
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The association of outlaws with werewolves has medieval analogies far outside Normandy. In Anglo-Saxon law the outlaw was identified with the wolf: anyone should kill either. In the thirteenth century, English courts might still pronounce outlawry with the formula caput gerat lupinum.(28) The legal digest Fleta, of the time of Edward I, says that the outlawed man and his female counterpart, the waive, “have wolves’ heads, which anyone may cut off with impunity, since those who will not live according to law deserve to perish without law…”(29)
Mary R. Gerstein finds the like connection between wolves and outlaws made in Germanic and Norse law codes of still earlier dates, for example in the sixth-century Lex Salica. The word warg (or vargr) was also used in several regions in pronouncements of outlawry as a synonym for “outlaw” (Gerstein 1974; Duerr 1985, 61). Du Bois’s reference to the Norman belief that the outlaw, or someone giving him shelter or failing to report him, was thought to become a varou, damned by society and in the afterlife as well, thus has similarities with Gerstein’s contention that the “magico-legal pronouncement” of a werewolf transformed the individual into a thing deserving strangulation (Gerstein 1974, 156).
~ Darryl Ogier, “Night Revels and Werewolfery in Calvinist Guernsey,” Folklore
But aren’t hundreds and thousands of novels published in huge editions and widely read in Communist Russia? Certainly; but these novels add nothing to the conquest of being. They discover no new segment of existence; they only confirm what has already been said; furthermore: in confirming what everyone says (what everyone must say), they fulfill their purpose, their glory, their usefulness to that society. By discovering nothing, they fail to participate in the sequence of discoveries that for me constitutes the history of the novel; they place themselves outside that history, or, if you like: they are novels that come after the history of the novel.
~ Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (via literalab)
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If you’ve been watching any media whatsoever, you’ve probably heard about the phenomenon that is Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James. Millions of readers have discovered these sexually-charged novels, and many women point to the series as having sparked their love of reading. Meanwhile, some have criticized the novels or even had them pulled from library shelves. I was honored to stand next to EL James at her Connecticut event, and I witnessed for myself the hundreds of women who said that they hadn’t read a book in many years prior to Fifty Shades of Grey. This led Michael and me to ponder “book snobbery,” and to make a new vow: don’t judge a book until you’ve read it, and don’t judge a person for what they read. Care to join us in our vow?
@ Books on the Nightstand
Rebecca Solnit: Maps, like photographs, show specifics that dismantle clichés. They make generalities — “There were 99 murders in San Francisco in 2008” — precise and poignant when you show the exact location of each death. You look at that map — one of the ones in Infinite City — and suddenly you see how that number 99 breaks down into 99 tragedies, into specific locations where you might go yourself. Maps invite us to locate ourselves in relation to whatever they show, to enter the labyrinth that is each map and to find our way out by grasping what is mapped. They are always invitations to enter, to arrive, to understand, in a way that is different than the invitations of visual and written art.
@ Terrain.org
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Jeff VanderMeer: The novel isn’t set in Finland but seems to reflect Finnish themes, in that the wilderness and rural areas are important elements of some Finnish fiction. What is your personal relationship to the wilderness and environment?
Johanna Sinisalo: My personal relationship to the wilderness is a very close one. I have spent all my childhood living in the middle of woods, the forest starting from almost from the doorstep. Many Finns say that they love nature and it’s very important to them, but they still do not fully respect it. They love to go to the woods to pick wild berries and mushrooms, but when they encounter a poisonous snake or a bear, they feel threatened, like they had gone to an amusement park and then there are suddenly dangerous murderers lurking behind the merry-go-round. In my opinion, the wild nature is something we should respect as it is, and we should remember we are a part of the ecosystem, not some kind of separate entity outside and above it. Birdbrain is a book dealing with power structures, from the simplest one between two persons, to the biggest of them all, namely between nature and culture.
@ SF Signal
‘Take if off, someone! Quickly!’ Sasha screamed, both hands over her ears.
‘Who did that?’ Violet demanded. Garry lifted a long locust from Sasha’s shoulder and stamped on it. The old women of the village were all laughing: toothless, with jewellery jingling. Their dogs began barking and ran around in circles. It seemed to the group they were liked, or had been accepted, and at such short notice.
The Cathcarts came back to the bus, satisfied. Doug beamed a bit to show their approval. These people were all right. Some of the women stood up, breasts swinging, and children crowded around the metal door, staring. The driver started the engine.
Mrs Cathcart bent down before getting in.
‘And what’s this little tacker’s name?’
‘The boy pointed to himself:
‘Oxford University Press.’
‘She means your name,’ Doug put in, encouraging.
The boy nodded.
‘Oxford University Press.’
That’s nice. Doug, give him a coin. What would you like to be, dear, when you grow up?’
The boy looked at Mrs Cathcart. The driver began revving the four-cylinder engine.
‘A tourist.’
~ Murray Bail, Homesickness
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Anyone who lives in a major tourist destination like New York and San Francisco knows that tourists mainly confine themselves to a few well-trodden streets, usually the same ones that locals avoid like the plague.
Eric Fischer, a computer programmer from Oakland, California made some incredible data visualizations that prove it. He took geo-tagged photos from Flickr and found an interesting way of sorting out the locals from the out-of-towners.
Fischer reasoned that Flickrers that only post photos from one place for less than one month are probably tourists, and the ones that post most of their content from one metropolitan area for more than one month are locals.
The spots with tourist photos are colored red, and the places where the locals are taking photos are colored blue. When it is unclear whether the photographer is a local (if they sporadically upload to Flickr, for instance) their photos are marked with yellow.
@ Business Insider
Ewer (1968,p. 154) has characterized threat as follows:
‘A threat may be defined a s a signal denoting that, contingent upon some act or failure to act on the part of the recipient of the signal, hostile action will be taken. One may distinguish an offensive from a defensive threat: the former carries a message whose equivalent is “If you do not retreat, I will attack you”; the latter means “I am not about to launch an attack, but if you take the offensive, I will retaliate.” The function of the threat is to deter the opponent; to drive him away in the first case, to prevent him from making an attack in the second.
~ @ Third International Conference on Bears
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Havoc reigned in Scranton tonight when WNEP-TV’s 11 p.m. newscast was interrupted by bears. Black bears, specifically, at least four of which decided to invade the outdoor set from which meteorologist Kurt Aaron was preparing to deliver his weather report. Aaron was, understandably, concerned for his safety and sought shelter somewhere indoors. The bears were still wandering around the backyard of Scranton-Wilkes-Barre’s ABC affiliate as the broadcast ended at 11:35.
@ Deadspin (via Matthew Dicks)
This coming Saturday afternoon, 4/28, I will be participating in Small Press Saturday at the wonderful Newtonville Books. I look forward to representing Atticus Books alongside folks from Concord Free Press, Madras Press (whose Sumanth Prabhaker will host the event), Nouvella Press, Muumuu Press, Agni, The Common, The Normal School, Post Road, Redivider, Salamander, and Tuesday.
I hope you’ll come out and join us, if you’re in the area — especially if you haven’t yet seen the store’s new location.
It was a cloudless day in early summer and the fierce morning sun reached even into the cavernous verandah of the hotel.
Sometimes I tilted my face slightly to catch the draught of cooler air from a fan overhead and watched the dew forming on my glass and thought with approval of the extremes of weather that afflicted the plains. Unchecked by hills or mountains, the sunlight in summer occupied the whole extent of the land from dawn till sunset. And in winter the winds and showers sweeping across the great open spaces barely faltered at the few stands of timber meant as shelter for men or animals. I knew there were great plains of the world that lay for months under snow, but I was pleased that my own district was not one of them. I much preferred to see all year the true configuration of the earth itself and not the false hillocks and hollows of some other element. In any case, I thought of snow (which I had never seen) as too much a part of European and American culture to be appropriate to my own region.
~ Gerald Murnane, The Plains
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~ Mikola Gnisyuk, People in Trees (The Rooks Have Arrived), 1964 (via wood s lot)
Often, my students kind of groan when I say, “Let’s talk about research.” They say, “We got into creative writing so we can make shit up!” But yes, for me, it really is an excuse to learn more about the world, to find some subject, whether it’s poisonous snails or sturgeon or the early construction of radios. In “The Hunter’s Wife,” I just got interested in hibernation, how animals’ heart rate slows way down. Do you call that dreaming? Do you even call that life? There’s this huge gray area between life and death. So often, I start by reading a lot about a subject with no real idea of how to build narrative up out of it except that I’m very interested in it. I think that’s the key for young writers — of whatever age, but young in their career — is to find those things that you’re vitally interested in, even if you don’t want to, or are unable to articulate why you’re interested in those things. Whether it’s violin-making or horse racing, or how dry cleaners work — the more you learn about it the more you realize, first, how ignorant you are and second, how interesting it is. Like that incinerator you showed me yesterday; I’ve never even really thought about an incinerator, what a job in an incinerator would be like. And how maybe in there, there’s some engineer who is probably really passionate about making garbage burning more efficient. And maybe there isn’t necessarily a story in that and you’ve spent a day learning about something you won’t be able to build characters out of.
~ Anthony Doerr @ flyway
What we’re going to see more and more of is the pseudo-contemporary novel — in which characters are, for some reason, cut off from one another, technologically cut off. Already, many contemporary novels avoid the truly contemporary (which is hyperconnectivity).
The basic plots of Western Literature depend on separation by distance — Odysseus separated from Penelope; the Odyssey doesn’t exist if Odysseus can catch an easyJet flight home, or text Penelope’s Blackberry. Joyce’s Ulysses doesn’t exist if Bloom can do his day’s business from a laptop in a Temple Bar coffeeshop.
~ Toby Litt @ Granta
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(via Infocult)
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Eyes closed and standing still, I was listening to Marie’s voice coming from thousands of kilometers away, her voice which I could hear despite the countless lands that separated us, despite the steppes and immeasurable other plains, despite the expanse of the night and its gradation of colors spread across the surface of the earth, despite the mauve light of a Siberian dusk and the first orange streaks left by a sun setting on the cities of Eastern Europe, I was listening to Marie speaking faintly in the early evening sunlight of Paris, her frail voice reaching me, sounding more or less the same as ever, in the late night of train, literally transporting me, as thoughts, dreams, and books can do, when, releasing the mind from the body, the body remains still and the mind travels, swelling and expanding, while gradually, behind our closed eyes, images are born, and other memories, feelings, and states of being surge into view, pains and buried emotions are reawakened, as well as fears and joys and a multitude of sensations — of coldness, of heat, of being loved, of confusion — while blood pounds in our temples, our heartbeats accelerate, and we feel ourselves shaken, as if a fissure had cracked the sea of tears frozen in each of us.
~ Jean Philippe-Toussaint, Running Away