Strange Children

"Strange Children," an essay I wrote, was recently published in Dark Mountain 5. It began as an attempt to understand a bizarre episode in the Mahabharata, where a young man dresses up as a woman and pretends to be pregnant, and then gives birth to an iron ball.

Eventually, this story, which always confused and captivated me as a child, started to connect with other stories of childbirth from the epic, and I wrote out the pattern that seemed to draw them together. I retold the stories as well, since they are much larger than any interpretation I can make of them.

If you can track down the anthology, I hope you enjoy the essay. My contribution aside, I think the issues are getting better and better, as is the Dark Mountain blog. (I enjoyed this essay in particular.) The Mahabharata essay was draining and I have been fallow for a while, but hopefully I will feel the touch of something soon.

Solnit, Abbey, Day: Three American Anarchists

My latest essay for Dark Mountain has just been posted. It covers a good Rebecca Solnit book about the communities that form after natural disasters, an Edward Abbey novel about a post-apocalyptic America, and Dorothy Day's memoir The Long Loneliness (her picture is below). I tried to use the three books to get at what bothers me about certain American writers and their glorification of self-sufficiency, an ideal (or rather, a way of naming an ideal) that has always struck me as ludicrous, since from birth to death we are never anything but dependent, both on other people and the natural world. All we can aim for is closer relationships, rather than distant and impenetrable ones, with a world on which we are always and entirely dependent; this is all "self-sufficiency" can really mean. Maybe a new term is in order?

Also, readers of this blog may remember that I am a fan of the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia. I reviewed another novel of his called Equal Danger for my Lost Classics series on the Ploughshares blog. (A previous entry dealt with an excellent novel by Selma Lagerlof.) Please feel free to suggest other books that might be good to review. I was planning to write about David Jones's long WWI poem In Parenthesis but ended up getting rather confused about what was going on and finally put it aside, to be taken up (maybe) on another day.

Somehow I seem to have stumbled into my own genre: long, essay-like reviews that compare disparate books of ecological and literary interest as an attempt to get at general truths! Alas, this is a genre for which, as far as I can tell, no market currently exists. I remain hopeful, though, that if I keep on dropping these bizarre fruits on the forest floor, some undernourished creature will eventually come along to see if they can be used for food. Thanks as always for giving them a try,

Akshay

Dark Mountain 3: An Interview with Dmitry Orlov

For the past few weeks, I have been reading through the third Dark Mountain anthology. It is a lovely book, and has a maroon color and tough hardcover binding that makes it look a little like my old high school English anthology ("Voyage to Literature" or whatever it was), which I never returned and discovered years later was full of wonderful stories.

The Dark Mountain book, too, is a pleasure to hold and look through. Pretty much everything I have read so far—the essays by Hannah Lewis and Charlotte Du Cann, the interviews—has been worthwhile, and "Dark Ecology," an essay by Paul Kingsnorth, is on its own worth the price of admission.

Or would have been, had I paid for the book—they sent me a copy for free because it contains some of my work, an interview with the writer Dmitry Orlov, who currently lives in Boston and sat down with me for coffee a few months ago. For the curious, this lecture is probably a good introduction to his work, and his book, Reinventing Collapse, is well worth reading.

Orlov is a formidable man, and our interview is a little dance between my not particularly well-informed good spirits (for whatever reason, I am happy most of the time), and his dark, witty, and more knowledgeable analyses. A sample:

AA: A quote from your book: “We may be hurtling towards environmental doom and, thankfully, never quite get there because of resource depletion...” This might be a mystical question, but is there some sense in which the planet will not allow itself to be destroyed? Do you have any sort of faith in that?

DO: No. We could generate gas by setting spent coal pits on fire. That will take care of the rest of the ecosystem. We could have open pit nuclear reactors using not just the spent fuel, but the nuclear weapons. We could make the whole place radioactive just for the sake of keeping the industrial systems and the military systems going a little longer. There's really no limit to human stupidity. If people set their minds to destroying this planet, I'm sure they'll manage to do it.

Any of my readers who have been interested in the reviews I've published with Dark Mountain would, I think, find the book worth owning. It is a little expensive, especially for people outside the U.K., but it's a beautifully produced volume, one that I'm proud to be part of. Like "Voyage to Literature," I think you won't regret keeping it around.