Smart Energy

Back in 2007, I presented a paper at an academic conference arguing that it should be possible to read clues about previous climate regimes in literary works. My paper was short and only offered a few examples from 18th century English-language novels, but the idea, I think was sound. And thus was climato-criticism born.

So I was especially interested to see that a group of Spanish scholars are mining 8th – 10th century Arabic manuscripts for hints about past climate regimes and events. According to a news release on Eureka Alert, “The sources, from historians and political commentators of the era, focus on the social and religious events of the time, but do refer to abnormal weather events.

” ‘Climate information recovered from these ancient sources mainly refers to extreme events which impacted wider society such as droughts and floods,’ said lead author Dr Fernando Domínguez-Castro. ‘However, they also document conditions which were rarely experienced in ancient Baghdad such as hailstorms, the freezing of rivers or even cases of snow.’ ”

I think that’s a great approach, natch, and it is pretty much the one I took in examining early Gothic novels: the weather (it was the tail end of the Little Ice Age) heavily influenced the tone of these works, and heavy cloud cover, extreme storms, and the like dominate the descriptions of the natural world therein.

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino
3 stars on a scale of 5

review by Brian Charles Clark

When that abusive bastard of a stalking-mooching ex-husband won’t leave you alone, are you justified in murdering him? That’s precisely the question that is never even once raised in this novel by the bestselling Japanese mystery writer Keigo Higashino.

Yasuko Hanaoka divorced the bastard (Togashi) then changed jobs and moved to another apartment in order to shake him off. But he tracks her down anyway and, one night at her apartment, he crosses the line, threatening her and her daughter, Misato. The result? A corpse on the apartment floor.

Yasuko’s next-door neighbor, the high school teacher and mathematician Ishigami, hears the scuffle and steps in to help. He choreographs the perfect crime. Why? Because he’s in love with Yasuko, because he’s “devoted,” as the title suggests.

All this we learn in the first couple of chapters. What ensues is an entertaining and escalating mystery featuring prize-winning Higashino’s recurring character, physicist Dr. Manabu Yukawa, known affectionately as Professor Galileo. Read the rest of this entry »

Spatial relationships communicate information.

I’ve written several genome sequencing stories lately (about apple, peach, and cacao) and have been definitely getting the impression from the science types that there’s lots more to the story than just a genome. A genomic sequence is really just a big pile of information; it takes a ton more work to begin to understand bits of it as useful knowledge.

So this business of spatial relationships among genes adds interest to the gravy and bangs the gong otherwise known as my brain:

If there is one thing that recent advances in genomics have revealed, it is that our genes are interrelated, “chattering” to each other across separate chromosomes and vast stretches of DNA. According to researchers at The Wistar Institute, many of these complex associations may be explained in part by the three-dimensional structure of the entire genome.

And all of that puts me in mind of André Breton’s Communicating Vessels in which, and in a sense, the sensorium of spatial relations is the only channel of information:

a great traveler of untraveling: to experience any place, he simply surrounds himself with its smells or sounds, never leaving the ship it if docks there, or never leaving his armchair. The experience is all the more intense for the imagining, and the contextual props are more elaborate than reality could ever be.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo’s Point Omega is a quiet jewel of a book, a short novel that is really two short stories (the beginning and end of one bookending the second story in the middle) that read like a play. Nothing much happens in Point Omega: the premise of the novel is conversation, our attempts to communicate with the intention of moving another person — the kind of suasion that enrolls a collaborator in an arty film project or another yet disappear into the desert.

As if by touched by fate or brushing up against coincidence, the novel’s bookends (the outer story) communicates only barely with the story in the middle. The inside story is woven by three characters who spend their time talking.

The younger man wants to make a film featuring Richard Elster, the older man, who was an advisor to warmongers. The younger man wants to get him up against a wall and hear what that was like. Ester tells him that they wanted “an individual of his interdisciplinary range, a man of reputation who might freshen the dialogue, broaden the viewpoint.” Someone who could bring new insight to the stumbling war on that adjective, terror, to “the blat and stammer of Iraq.” Someone who could deepen and make rigorous the banality of evil. Read the rest of this entry »

Brian gives "Lipstick Traces" four out of five stars

“The music came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then again a yes:” and then the drums kicked in and “nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false. If nothing is true, everything is possible.” (9)

Welcome to Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus’s collage-o-phonic booklike substance that rings with voices in a thousand registers.

“As I tried to follow this story [the one he perceives running through chapters filled with medieval heretics, Dadaists, Situationists, and the Sex Pistols: “I am an anti-christ,” sang Johnny Rotten]–the characters changing into each other’s clothes until I gave up trying to make them hold still–what appealed to me were its gaps. and those moments when the story that has lost its voice somehow recovers it, and what happens then…. [quoting an ad for Potlatch he found in a “slick-paper, Belgian neo-surrealist review” dated 1954:] ” ‘Everywhere, youth (as it calls itself) discovers a few blunted knives, a few defused bombs, under thirty years of dust and debris; shaking in its shoes, youth hurls them upon the consenting rabble, which salutes it with its oily laugh.’ ” (20)

Situationist gnome, 1963: “The moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” (21) That’s getting personal: I’ve resisted reading this book for twenty years. Now that I have, and since you’ve read this far, I recommend you do, too. So much for the niceties of the book review. What follows is engagement with Lipstick Traces. Read the rest of this entry »

Farber on Film

Manny Farber’s writing sounds like he ran with the Beatniks, smoking, drinking and bopping to jazz rhythms. In Farber on Film, we get the straight, the uncut, the complete writings of Farber on film.

Farber wrote scores of film reviews for The Nation, Time, The New Republic and other publications. But his reviews rarely fit into the “first this, then that, and I liked it because” box that most reviewers cram themselves into. Farber mused on the beauty of images, confronted actors’ choices, challenged directors, and digressed down rarely trod paths in order to introduce pertinent impertinences and relevant social revelations.

Farber was a self-described champion of “termite art”: he loved eccentric virtuosity rather than “white elephants,” conformist monstrosities that “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.” Termite art, in contrast, is “ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” White elephant art was seamless mass in “pursuit of… continuity” and “harmony,” while termite art participated in the world: it is “an act of observing and being in the world” and

goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, like as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. Read the rest of this entry »

Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz

Set in war-torn, German-occupied Poland during World War II, Pornografia is a key text of late modernism — and this is the first edition that is a translation into English from Gombrowicz’s Polish. (The previous edition came into English from a French translation.)

Witold Gombrowicz is a novelist of psychological entanglements, and Pornografia is a novel of erotic entanglement. It is often cruel and sometimes cruelly funny. It is a novel by a man certain that language in some profound way determines ontology, that what we hear and say sculpts the way we are.

Set in a country idyll with the war roaring dully in the background, two refugee intellectuals conspire to contrive a liaison between a pair of kids who have grown up together there in the Polish countryside. Pornografia is an unholy little novel, chillingly dark, at times dripping with cynicism, but at its best beset by bracing, high-brow hilarity and jaded, deeply sublimated hysteria. First published in 1966, it’s only recently that readers have begun to talk about Gombrowicz as a Latin American writer rather than a Polish one. The question of influence is good, if ultimately divisive. Division is precisely Gombrowicz’s strength; you imagine he not only enjoys taking the frog apart with a tiny knife, he begins to split the world apart as if it were empirically just an intimately interbleeding network of heartbeats. Read the rest of this entry »

Gain by Richard Powers

Gain, Richard Power’s amazing sixth novel (originally published in 1998), takes one of the most difficult issues of our time and humanizes it. The issue is corporate culpability. We all know that “better living through chemistry” has its price and its consequences, but who is to pay?

Not Clare, the transnational corporation whose history is charted across three generations in this saga of a novel. The company makes soap — a cleaning product that offers the homemaker so much to gain. And the company, of course, has gained, prodigiously, over the years: it has profited immensely.

Clare manufacturers its products in Lacewood, Illinois, where Laura Bodey is an estate agent. Laura has ovarian cancer. Her story – of her illness and how, as she disintegrates, her family reunites around her – is intertwined with the story of Clare International.

Long before the novel makes the facts plain, we’ve already drawn connections: our chemistry is killing us. The brilliant Powers draws parallels and cycles in abundance but, to his credit, he never once hits over the head with any moralizing message.

Perennial plants flower and die, and so do people and industries, he implies. It’s the way of the world. We can change things, perhaps and, after reading Gain, we may well join one crusade or another, seeking justice for victims of industries focused on nothing but gain or, contrarily, seeking to eliminate the tort system that is, at this point, the victim’s only source of recompense and punishment for the polluters who make us sick. Either way, or no way, that’ll be what you got out of the novel, not what’s there. Read the rest of this entry »

Generosity by Richard Powers

Richard Powers is a master of sleight-of-hand. He writes novels full of science but escapes being called a science fiction writer. In Generosity: An Enhancement, the latest novel by the MacArthur “genius” grant and National Book Award winner (for The Echo Maker), Powers feints and flourishes in order to — presto-magico — pull together two seemingly unrelated themes: genetic engineering and creative nonfiction.

In Powers’ hands, the relation between the two themes is laid bare: they both are concerned with the nature, manipulation, and enhancement of reality. In recent years, we’ve seen the formerly innocuous genre of memoir mutate into the high-stakes blockbuster industry of creative nonfiction. And woe unto he who fudges the truth in his memoir, who tells a lie, however small. What used to be par for the course in memoir is now a cardinal sin: remember James Frey and A Million Little Pieces? Read the rest of this entry »

I just found a couple more reviews of On Joanna Russ, to which I contributed an essay. This review is by Paul Kincaid, and was featured on The SF Site; snip:

Anyone who came into science fiction during the late 60s and 70s would have been aware of Joanna Russ. Even if you never read any of her relatively few novels or stories, you couldn’t avoid the name. Of the three great women writers who did so much to transform science fiction at this time, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Russ, Russ was far and away the most controversial. So much so that it was known for her name to be greeted with boos at an sf convention, and believe me even in the conservative world of fandom that was unusual.

Joanna Russ is an incredibly important figure in the history of science fiction and the author of a couple of novels and several short stories that deserve to endure. This beautifully produced collection of essays is a fitting tribute to her, and even those who know Russ’s work well will learn from many of these essays. Even so, this is still only telling part of the story about an elusive and complex writer. We’d be better off if all her work were back in print, but until that happens this is a superb reminder of what a valuable and important writer she is.

The other review is by Cheryl Morgan who makes a point about book reviewing that is near and dear to my heart; snip:

it occurs to me that those people who complain that book reviews should always be neutral and objective, and not bring in the reviewers personal viewpoint in any way, are very like those people who claim that books that have no obvious character ethnicity (and are therefore default white) are good because they are “colorblind”. If you get criticized for standing out from the cultural norm it is probably because you have said something interesting and subversive.