Dark Mountain Anthology Published

For several years now, I have published most of my writing with the Dark Mountain group in England. I suppose it doesn't make much sense as a publishing decision. They can't afford to pay authors anything yet, and the issues are mainly distributed in England, so very few people I knew could read them.

I was sure, though, from the first time I read the Dark Mountain manifesto -- and then Paul Kingsnorth's essays (which I still think are the best writing that has come out of this collective) -- that this was the right place for me. Since then, except for magazine contract work, I haven't published my writing elsewhere because I know that most of it wouldn't exist if it wasn't for this community.

Still, I always wished the books were easier to find in America. Now Chelsea Green -- one of our last truly independent publishers -- has put out an anthology of work from the issues that Dark Mountain has published so far. The book includes my essay on the Mahabharata, "Strange Children," and an interview I did with Dmitry Orlov.

I haven't read the whole volume yet, but have already found much writing that it is an honor to share space with: Jason Benton's "Prospecting for Equanimity," about the progressive desecration of his family's land in Western Pennsylvania; "Shikataganai," Florence Caplow's essay on a garden built by an unknown prisoner in Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp; and Persephone Pearl's short piece on the death of the last passenger pigeon, which felt like a haunting and completely realized version of a story I had tried to write many years ago.

I often have this feeling reading the work in Dark Mountain -- of encountering other people succeeding at things that I had botched. But instead of wounded vanity I always felt gratitude that it had finally been gotten right, nevermind by who.

Anyway, please buy the book. If any of my work from the past few years interests you, you will find much more to appreciate inside these pages. You can get it from Chelsea Green (currently at a discount), or from your local bookstore. Or, you know, that other place.

Some New Publications

A few pieces of mine have been published. Most aren't available online, but can hopefully be tracked down by the determined.

I have a piece in the current issue (March/April 2016) of Horticulture magazine. The piece discusses "Liberty Tea," the variety of native American plants used by the American colonists after the boycott on imported British tea began.

I think I first read about New Jersey tea (Ceanothus americanus) in Alan Hall's excellent (and out-of-print) Wild Food Trailguide, and about sweet fern and spicebush tea in Leda Meredith's excellent Northeast Foraging from Timber Press. Meredith's book is one of the best foraging guides you can buy, even if you aren't in the Northeast, and almost everything I've read of hers shows care and deep knowledge.

Speaking of foraging, I had a piece on the pawpaw (one of America's most delicious and little-eaten fruits) in the Cincinnati Magazine blog, and will have a longer article in Edible Ohio Valley in late summer / early fall, when pawpaws are in season. Anyone who subscribes to Cincinnati should also check out the dining section; I have an occasional restaurant review in there. Thanks for reading.

At the Mercy of Fools: Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Diary

An essay I wrote on Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantanamo Diary was published a few weeks ago on the Dark Mountain site, and then again on Counterpunch. I happened to listen to 1984 on CD during a recent move, and a conversation took place between the two books in my head which eventually resulted in this essay.

Everyone should read Slahi's book. I promise I am not doing it any favors out of a sense of the injustice being done to this man; it really is extraordinary.

Two New Interviews: Lewis Hyde and Stephen Harrod Buhner

Things have been quiet with me recently, but two interviews I did over the past few years were recently published.

An interview with Lewis Hyde was published in the online section of The Believer. A few years ago, I biked over to his place in Cambridge to talk, and he was immensely friendly and generous. His books are mysterious little presences in our culture, because they're not the sort of thing that anyone is supposed to be able to write any more, nor is there supposed to be an audience for them. But—there they are. Everything he has written is worth reading, but The Gift and Trickster Makes This World are particularly wonderful.

The second interview is with Stephen Harrod Buhner, which came out in the December issue of The Sun, which I have been trying to crack for a good decade. You can read a portion of the interview online. Stephen gets particular thanks for putting up with like eight rounds of follow ups.

As far as I can tell, the unsolicited arrival of Ensouling Language in the mail many years ago was the moment when I turned onto the road I've been walking ever since. Farther and farther away from the mainstream of our culture, it turns out, but I get faint smells on the breeze occasionally (water? trees?) that tell me I'm heading in the right direction.

Looking at the review I wrote of his work in 2010 makes me a little embarrassed now. I was clinging to all sorts of old opinions, because I thought abandoning them would take me too far beyond what was considered serious and respectable. Well, little by little, the increasingly useless tokens of respectability fall away, and Stephen's work is still there, one of the real guides to the way ahead. I hope both interviews are good introductions to these writers, and make you curious to read more if you haven't dipped into their work already. Thanks,

Akshay

Stop Here, by Beverly Gologorsky

I find it hard to get interested in most new novels, and feel guilty about this because I aspire to write such books myself, and can easily imagine a reader coming across my unwritten novel and thinking, “Jesus, more of this stuff.” American literary fiction, written and read largely by the comfortable, is a net that keeps hauling up far more than can be healthily consumed of certain species of story.

Meanwhile, if you want to find out about the reality of life for most black Americans (and happen not to be black yourself); or the collapse of our small towns and the despoiling of their land; or the burgeoning prison state, you mostly have to read nonfiction, or track down a handful of decent documentaries and television shows. To readers who are interested in these “social justice” issues only in the most abstract sense, I say—wait a little while, their problems will soon be yours, and you will have much to learn from the ways that the poor, poised on the lip of the great American meat grinder, have always managed to cope with them.

There are many burrs in this grinder, but one of the biggest is war, and ours are still fought mostly by lower-class whites. (Joe Bageant covered his portion of this ground, in essays and a memoir, as well as anyone.) Beverly Gologorsky, in her novel Stop Here, focuses on the toll of war for women—raising young children with husbands gone, dead, or returned with what was once known as “soldier’s heart” and is now blandly known as PTSD. Whatever one calls what they return with, these men are just a piece of a bad luck or some internal axe-blow away from collapse. Meanwhile, someone has to keep stringing together inconvenient shifts, pouring the coffee and putting out the meals, and Stop Here is about them.

The book revolves around the waitresses and cooks at a Long Island diner. Almost every character—except for their boss who vociferously supports our troops and the people who send them into danger—has been intimately affected by one of America’s recent engagements. (Lest this seem unrealistic, or like an exercise in sociology, I encourage you to read this article by Gologorsky, which first drew me to the novel, on the effect of war on the people in the neighborhood where she grew up.) One mother is trying to dissuade her daughter from joining up, another has a husband falling apart from worry about a child in Afghanistan, another is a widow raising a young son with the father dead in Iraq.

The repetition of themes frankly made some of the characters hard to keep straight. After I finished the book, I was talking about it with my wife, but couldn’t remember exactly which problems Mila and Darla and Shelly and Ava were having. And indeed, Gologorsky is not brilliant at individual portraiture. One problem is she has little knack for realistic dialogue. I kept coming up short against lines that it was unlikely these characters would say, and a few that absolutely no one would say (the word “hauntingly” actually comes out of one fictional mouth). The most finely differentiated characters—Sylvie, a former actress in an unhappy marriage to the diner owner, and Rosalyn, a waitress who earns extra money as an escort—are also the ones who feel like they could easily belong in hundreds of other novels.

It is the swirl of other women that, for me, set Stop Here apart—the ones I had trouble keeping straight, all similarly hemmed in by not having much money, only a few types of available work, and obligation after obligation to handle with only modest help from each other and a family member or two. But they are by no means powerless, because they know from long experience how to manage decently with very little, and handle heartbreak as a matter of routine. Gologorsky’s dialogue, I think, stems from the desire to make her characters as eloquent as they deserve to be, so even if it doesn’t always sit easily on the page, the impulse is honorable and I can let it go.

One scene gets at everything that is working and not working in this short book. A cook at the diner, Bruce, is terrified because his liberal daughter has gone off on what seems to be a fairly pointless peace mission to the Middle East. His daughter has promised to e-mail him every few days to tell him that she’s OK, but a week has gone by now without a message. The father, living in a community where disaster is being continually braced for—and with good reason, because it will eventually arrive—goes to visit the wealthy parents of one of the boys on this trip to see if they have heard anything.

The parents are ludicrous caricatures from some 30s comedy of upper-class society, and address each other by “Mr.” and “Mrs.” They haven’t heard from their son either and aren’t at all worried—he regularly doesn’t write, and after all, it’s quite unlikely that something would happen. And if something did, of course, it would be a tragedy, not an utterly expected blow. Bruce can’t even be angry at these people. When he is telling his girlfriend this story later, he says that it felt like these people are, somehow, innocent.

I went to a wedding recently filled with people who were, either by birth or by passage through a handful of elite universities, from the approximate stratum of Mr. and Mrs., and this word—innocent—kept ringing through my mind. Gologorsky had gotten, not the particulars, but the larger truth of the situation just right; these people really did live in a world where disaster was not a possibility. The worst that could happen to a person was the somewhat untimely death of a parent. (You need to be from certain strata to even have the concept of an untimely death.) And as I spent time in this crowd—with their intelligence, and energy, and enterprise, and loveliness—something about them actually scared me, because it seemed like they had no idea how much had to be sacrificed to keep their lives going on in this way; and also—this is the scary part—no idea how fragile it all was, and is, because such sacrifices by their very nature cannot be demanded from other people or the earth for long.

Stop Here is a book about people who are conscious of fragility, because for them the brink is always in plain sight, and they have no illusions that this country is running in any way for their benefit. Spend some time in this situation and you develop certain skills.

Here are a few of the important ones from the novel: How to keep dignity and sanity alive when mostly powerless, how to stay awake and hopeful enough to notice an opportunity for escape when it arrives (Gologorsky knows this one well, and it keeps the novel from being merely depressing)—and, finally, how to keep going when you lose something that you didn’t think you could live without.

You can sense, in certain people you meet, that while healing from wounds that have incapacitated others, something has been figured out about how and why to keep going. These people can be found anywhere, but for simple statistical reasons are often present in the social classes that America has decided to maim in the course of its ordinary economic and military functioning. There, in the gray neighborhoods, along with the innumerable victims, you can find a few people quietly picking their way through the wreckage and living on what can be salvaged, from the Haitian woman foraging greens by the drainage ditch (who was a little bemused by my interest) to the old man who collects the furniture that people are throwing away for want of a little work with a hammer.

Notice them—that is one of thoughts I carried with me after finishing this fine novel—they are more interesting than you imagine, and might know some things that you badly need to learn.

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.

War with the Newts, by Karel Čapek

This review appeared first on the Dark Mountain blog, but it fits with what I usually publish here, so I thought I would post it again. Robert Wechsler, who publishes the novel as well as several other excellent volumes of Czech literature in translation, did point out in the comments that Čapek's last novel, which I thought had never made it to English, was completed by his wife and published in 1941 as The Cheat. Čapek is an author I've felt very close to recently, so I'm sure the book is worth seeking out.

The best way for this 1936 Czech novel to find its readers is simply to describe the plot.

In an isolated corner of the South Seas, a Dutch captain discovers an unknown species of newt swimming in the shallow waters of a cove which the locals have always avoided. When the captain docks on a neighboring island, the newts seem fascinated by him and strangely able to decipher his signals. The adults, who are almost four feet tall, have a build something like human children, and when on land walk on their hind legs. From the captain’s instructions, the newts bring up some pearl oysters, and the creatures even prove able to use his blade to open up the shells themselves.

Despite these skills, the newts have remained trapped in the cove for untold centuries, because they cannot swim in the open ocean and their population is kept in check by the sharks who come by regularly to devour them.

A scheme occurs to the captain, based both on greed and what seems to him like compassion. With the help of a Czech industrialist, the captain begins to transport the newts out of their cove using a tank on his boat. He spreads them to other local shallows where they can thrive unmolested. In return, the newts collect the pearls that human divers have been unable to reach.

Without frequent visits from sharks, the newts multiply at an astonishing rate (one female can release hundreds of viable eggs). Soon, predictably, they have gathered so many pearls that the bottom drops out of the market. By this point, though, it has been discovered that the newts, given tools and a bare diet, are excellent at a variety of underwater work: excavating harbors, shaping and extending coastlines, and other tasks useful for modern nation states.

Under the direction of a syndicate, huge numbers of newts are now bred and shipped around the world. Countries with coastlines begin rapidly expanding their borders, dredging and reclaiming enormous stretches of land. Fantasies of new continents rising out of the waters begin to circulate—why, after all, should so much space in the oceans and seas be wasted when it could be put to man’s use?

Troubling moral questions arise as the worker newts show increasing levels of sophistication. Scientists maintain that newt behavior is mere mechanical imitation, but soon this becomes impossible to accept. Expert opinions in the novel are constantly, drastically wrong, but no one ever admits a mistake. Instead, people simply move forward into a world where everyone now believes the opposite of what was once maintained.

Things move so quickly that the reshaping of the planet is far along before people can even begin to absorb what has happened. Is it defensible to use newts as slaves? Might there be problems with changing the shape of coastlines? Do these creatures have souls? (Čapek’s invented reply for George Bernard Shaw: “They certainly have no soul. In this they resemble man.”) Newt questions are hotly debated, and these discussions change things a little (schools for newts, more humane working conditions) but the reformers are a few people rowing chaotically on a ship in full sail intent on moving in only one direction. Anxiety only reaches a noticeable level when there are newts blanketing the coastline of every nation, with tools and underwater explosives at their disposal.

A levee breaks in New Orleans, flooding the city. There are other accidents, new inundations, and a sense of things falling mysteriously apart, but no one suspects the newts are behind the problems until they release a statement. They bear humans no ill will; they simply have needs of their own.

No need for alarm. We have no hostile intentions towards you. We only need more water, more coasts, more shallows to live in. There are many of us. There’s no longer enough room for us on your coasts. That’s why we have to dismantle your continents. We shall turn them all into bays and islands. In this way the overall length of the world’s shoreline can be increased by a factor of five. We shall construct new shallows. We cannot live in the deep ocean. We shall need your continents as fill-in material.

The newts still require humans, of course, for surplus food, metals, and other land-based raw materials (perhaps they also find us charming, like pandas, and wouldn’t want to be entirely without us). When denied these materials, the newts are quite willing to use violence.

On one level, they have learned these habits from years of human tyranny, but the novel also hints at another explanation, the same one that Leopold Kohr would advance a few decades later in The Breakdown of Nations—once a certain critical mass of power has been reached, in terms of numbers and technological sophistication, power-hungry, expansionist behavior seems to develop almost spontaneously. It is the only way that massive systems can absorb the resources they need to keep functioning.

As with lemmings and arctic grass, the planet’s ecosystem in Čapek’s world has become so simplified (newts, humans, and the things they eat and need) that it can only be moving towards a pattern of seesawing crashes. Most countries, nevertheless, keep selling the newts weapons and food. It would, after all, be an economic catastrophe not to. Water begins to spread across every continent, and the remaining humans are pushed higher and higher into the mountains...

When War with the Newts was published in 1936, it was seen as a simple parable about the Nazi threat. As a writer in Czechoslovakia, which had existed precariously as a republic for less than two decades, Čapek was acutely conscious of this danger—but if the newts began as the Nazis in his imagination, they soon sent branches in all directions to become one of literature’s great protean symbols. At different points in the novel, for example, the newts call up both the people on whom the Nazis conducted their experiments and the torturers themselves. Every time the book threatens to become schematic, it slithers away and turns into something else.

I have ruined nothing by describing the plot. The delight of the novel lies in the little eddies and swirls around the narrative—from the mating rituals of the newts, which Čapek catalogs in a few magical pages, to the pamphlet welcoming newt dominion in which I saw a few of my own ideas perceptively mocked.

War with the Newts is not all sophisticated parodies of Spengler, though; in addition to being smart, it is also quite engagingly stupid, with jokes about Hollywood starlets and various farcical footnotes. Part of this is a canny narrative strategy where the book slowly lifts itself out of the frivolity in which prosperous humanity has been drowsing—but it is also something simpler: why not make a silly joke, even in your serious book, if one occurs to you? Unlike the largely humorless, almost oppressive greatness of writers who feel that they speak for nations—like, say, Thomas Mann, a contemporary who admired this novel—Čapek’s pages are lit with a kind of elfin spirit.

As I was reading this book, I kept being reminded of Leopold Kohr, that defender of little states who grew up a few hours from the Czech border. In both writers I recognized the same unwillingness to keep delight out of their pages, even when the ideas within point again and again to an impending collapse—the shared conviction, useful for sanity in bad times, that the most natural and becoming expression of the human face is a smile.

While reading his books, I find it worth remembering that Čapek was often in immense pain—he suffered from severe inflammation of the spine from the time he was a child. In the last story of Tales from Two Pockets, Čapek’s brilliant collection of mystery stories, a narrator who suffered in this way writes:

“I’ve had such respect, such a reverence in me; everything seems more important to me now…each little thing and each human being, do you understand? Everything has enormous value. Whenever I see a sunset, I tell myself it was worth that incredible pain. And people, their work, their ordinary lives…all of it has value because of that pain. And I know it’s a terrible and unspeakable price to pay—but I truly believe that it isn’t some evil or punishment; it’s only pain, and it serves to…to give life this enormous worth—“ Mr Skrivanek stopped, not knowing how to go on.

As the country’s best-known writer, Čapek lobbied for the great powers to resist the Nazis’ demands for Czechoslovakia’s border territories. After Munich, he told a friend, “My world has died. I no longer have any reason to write.”

I can believe that, in a dark mood, he said this and meant it, but it wasn’t true. Čapek knew he would be arrested as soon as the Nazis invaded (he was, in fact, second on their list), but spent the days before the inevitable invasion trying to rescue his beloved garden from heavy autumn rains. He also worked for long stretches on his last, unfinished novel, which has never been translated into English, and spent late nights talking with friends. What else, after all, are you supposed to do?

Čapek caught a bad cold in the garden and didn’t bother to rest. A few days before the Nazis swept into his country, he died at home, spared an execution or a likely death in one of the camps—like this novel, one of literature’s small mercies.