Wealth in Words

Incredible Good Fortune, a collection of poetry by Ursula K. LeGuin

I worship the ground Ursula LeGuin walks on, the paper she writes on, the air she breathes... OK that's going a bit too far, but she is definitely way up there on my list of favourite writers. The poems in this collection are a delight to read, to savour, to meditate upon.

The publisher's website has this to say about LeGuin's latest volume of poetry:

Passionate, humanitarian, and sensuously aware of the world's vitality, Le Guin's work can also be melancholy, playful, and dreamlike. Full of insight, humor, and wisdom, this collection includes close observations of day-to-day life, reflections on childhood and growing older, and explorations of myth and fable.

There's beauty in this book, and philosophy, and social comment, and political analysis of class, gender and race relations, and joy, and sorrow, and the heart of the human condition.

And it's Ursula K. LeGuin. My words are not enough - read hers.

A Few Bad Apples?

Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture

A collection of essays written in 2004, following the release in print and over the Internet of the horrifyingly iconic photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners and their torturers in Abu Ghraib; authors include Barabara Ehrenreich, Meron Benvenisti, Mark Danner, David Levi Strauss, Richard Grossinger, John Gray, David Matlin, Charles Stein and Brooke Warner.

There's a lot to consider in these early responses to the full-scale confirmation of what almost everyone on the Left believed was happening, and almost everyone else didn't want to think about. There's also a lot to think about when one considers that, two years later, after the trials and the court-martials and all the public finger-pointing and denying, it's almost certainly still happening.

The essays that directly address the experiences of the known victims of torture, and that investigate the philosophies and pragmatics that lead to an acceptance of the use of torture, are harrowing and enraging. They explode the myth of the "few bad apples" - as if anyone actually believed that in the first place.

Of particular interest is "Abu Ghraib: The Surround" by David Matlin, which places the torture of military prisoners within the greater context of the "normalization of prison and its economics" in the United States. Matlin notes that over the past 20 years, the prison population of the US has quadrupled (from 582,000 in 1980 to more than 2.1 million in 2000) and questions the relationship between a domestic culture of punitive cruelty and a military culture of torture and abuse.

Also of interest is Barbara Ehrenreich's essay, "Feminism's Assumptions Upended," which discusses the involvement of women - from Pfc Lynndie England to Brigadier General Janis Karpinsky and Major General Barbara Fast - in the atrocities of Abu Ghraib (and other military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, let's not forget the prisons from which no photos have emerged). Ehrenreich argues that this marks the death-knell of the strain of feminism that posits women as inherently less violent and more "moral" than men.

What we have learned from Abu Ghraib, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn't mean that gender equality isn't worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman's right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It's just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world.

In an early attempt to explore the possible implications of the revelation of the use of Torture at Abu Ghraib, Mark Danner closes his essay "The Logic of Torture" by looking at what comes next, after the first responses.

Over the next weeks and months, Americans will decide how to confront what their fellow citizens did at Abu Ghraib, and what they go on doing at Bagram and Guantanamo and other secret prisons. By their actions they will decide whether they will begin to close the growing difference between what Americans say they are and what they actually do. Iraqis and others around the world will be watching to see whether all the torture will be stopped and whether those truly responsible for it, military and civilian, will be punished. This is, after all, as our President never tires of saying, a war of ideas. Now, as the photographs of Abu Ghraib make clear, it has also become a struggle over what, if anything, really does represent America.

Two years later, it's not looking much better.

A Light in the Shadows

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Almost every political activist I know, has experienced the feeling of being overwhelmed by what sometimes seems to be an insurmountable task, feeling helpless in the face of so many struggles that need energy, commitment, voice and action, feeling despair that any progress will ever be made against the massive social, cultural, political, economic structures and institutions that support the status quo.

With her book Hope in the Dark,Rebecca Solnit has written an antidote to all that. This is a book by an activist, for activists, about activism.

Canadian writer/activist Linda McQuaig is quoted on the back cover of my edition of the book, saying:

In this compelling book, Rebecca Solnit reminds us of an important truth we often lose sight of: political activism can - and does - change the world.

After reading the book, I can certainly agree that for activists, and especially those finding themselves teetering on the verge of feeling overwhelmed and burnt-out, this is indeed an important truth that needs to be said every once in a while, and Solnit says it well.

Solnit writes passionately about something we all need a healthy dose of - hope.

...hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. ...hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. ... To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.

She reminds us of the victories that have been achieved, and of the apparent failures that have gone on, unexpected, to create groundswells of action and support that carry the hope of victories still to come. She tells about the countless small struggles that have led to modest steps forward, that when combined with all the other modest steps that have been taken, turn into a slow forward march.

At the same time, she points out some of the ways that activists on the Left have sometimes made the picture grimmer and the prospects dimmer that they are - or might be. As Solnit notes, in a world where news so often means bad news, it's easy to look around and see only the things that are going wrong - and it's tempting to focus on the worst possible case scenario, particularly when there's a chance that the more dire the prediction, the more attention can be won to the cause. We can so easily program ourselves to see only the things that must be done, and not those that have been, at least in some way, been achieved.

The book also contains a gentle critique of certain mindsets that can be found within the Left - the quest for perfection and the reluctance to form working coalitions with potential allies we may not consider ideologically "correct" among them - and that sometimes make the struggle harder than it needs to be.

Finally, she reminds us that so often, the actions that make us despair occur in the spotlight where we can't help but see them and the consequences they bring with them, while the actions that will bring about change are happening in the shadows, where no one is looking.

The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don't know yet whether they will have any effect, in the people you haven't heard of yet who will be the next Cesar Chavez, the next Noam Chomsky, the next Cindy Sheehan, or become something you cannot yet imagine. In this epic struggle between the light and the dark, it's the dark side - that of the anonymous, the unseen, the officially powerless, the visionaries and subversives in the shadows - that we must hope for.

I know that I'm going to be looking at this book again in times to come, whenever things start to seem insurmountable. Because there's always a need for hope in the dark.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

The Sandman Papers: An Exploration of the Sandman Mythology, ed. Joe Sanders

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman - taking the entire run of the comic series as a whole - is a remarkable work. The individual stories within the arc of the work are intelligent, entertaining, highly literate examinations of interesting and often powerful themes and ideas. The characters are intriguing, fascinating. The plots are occasionally straightforward, more often intricate and entrancing. Plus it's fun to read and it looks cool.

So it's no wonder that The Sandman has achieved that lofty status which demands that people start writing critical papers about it. Which is where The Sandman Papers comes in.

The critical essays collected in this volume cover a range of topics, and the success of the collection can be seen in the fact that, having read the papers, I now want to go back read The Sandman again so I can "talk back" to the essayists in my mind, and decide whether I agree with their insights and arguments or not.

As with any critical collection, I found some essays of greater interest than others. As one might expect, having a deep appreciation for the works of Shakespeare, I was particularly interested in the essays that focused on Gaiman's use of the Stratford Bard as a character, and riffed on the themes of some of his plays. In choosing to incorporate "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest" within the narrative of The Sandman, Gaiman makes possible multiple levels of exploration of the themes of dream and reality, creation and creator, as is made evident in the three Shakespeare-themed essays in this collection:

"Of Stories and Storytellers in Gaiman and Vess's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'" by Joe Sanders
"Prospero Framed in Neil Gaiman's 'The Wake'" by Joan Gordan
"Aether/Ore: The Dreamworld Descends to Earth" by Alan Levitan

I also enjoyed Leonora Soledad a Paula's "Imaginary Places and Fantastic Narratives: Reading Borges Through The Sandman," particularly since she mentions some of the same echoes of Borges' writing that struck me in my reading of The Sandman, such as the resonance between Gaiman's depiction of Destiny's garden in "A Season of Mists" and Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths."

One essay in the collection has left me spinning the wheels in my braincage over something that's also an issue in the Joss Whedon universe - what type of character does the author choose to kill when someone "has to die." In Whedon's buffyverse it was Tara, the wholly good and apparently expendable lesbian. In Gaiman's "A Game of You," it's Wanda, a transwoman, and Maisie, a black woman, and the only black character.

David Bratman devotes a large part of his essay "A Game of You - Yes, You" to countering arguments made by Samuel Delany (in the introduction to "A Game of You") and writer Rachel Pollack that the deaths of Wanda and Maisie raise questions of how queer characters and characters of colour are presented in cultural products. Bratman argues that Wanda has to die because she is the character we are most engaged with, that we experience her struggles all the more intensely by seeing her die, seeing her identity erased in the funeral her family gives her, and then seeing her in Barbie's dream, imaged as a "pretty" and apparently female-bodied woman - a Real Girl at last, but only after she's safely dead. Bratman gives a little space to Maisie's death too, but his only counter to the criticism that here is another Magical Negro who dies to save the white main character is that other characters die too - those other characters being Wanda, the talking animals, and the male villain.

Now, I respect and enjoy Gaiman's work, and in a world where everyone else (especially everyone else writing from a position of serious privilege, such as white and either heterosexual or passing males) wasn't busy killing off the queer, trans and non-white characters in their work, I would have a different reaction. but the problem is that everyone else is killing off those characters, when they write them in at all. So - I disagree strongly with Bratman's arguments in this essay.

But that's why one reads critical essays - to look at arguments, and decide whether you agree with them or not.

There are a number of other interesting essays in the collection as well, exploring all sorts of things, from Orientalism in "Ramadan" and female power in "The Kindly Ones" to the implications of Dream's wardrobe. There's probably something for just about any fan of The Sandman.

To the Cottage

Rest Harrow, by Janice Kulyk Keefer

This is the first book I've read by Canadian author and scholar Janice Kulyk Keefer, and while it was a good read, I'm not so sure I'm going to go looking for anything else she's written (though if I'm handed another of her books by someone, I'm not going to toss it away unread either). In short, she's written a book that's interesting enough to amuse me, but it's not enough to leave me panting for more. Although perhaps it's not totally fair to judge an acclaimed writer on just one book.

Part of my response comes. I think, from my reaction to the main character, which was essentially one of deepening impatience. The plot summary quoted below fails to express just how painful it was at times waiting for Anna to get off her ass and stop dithering around.

A Canadian professor on sabbatical, gathering material for a biography on Virginia Woolf, Anna ensconces herself at Rest Harrow, a cottage in the English countryside not far from where Woolf spent her last years. Anna's desire is to cut herself off from other people, including her lover, Luke. But her life becomes entangled with an exceptional cast of local characters, and Anna's attempt at control--sealing off her private world--is shattered. She is confronted by her self, as past and present pain explode to the surface, and by an England that bears little resemblance to the country of her imagination. Yet in the depths of Anna's uncertainties is the promise of a new beginning.

Also - and this may be my overwhelming inclination to read a queer subtext into everything talking - to me, Anna reads completely as a woman who hasn't yet come out to herself, but has reached the point where she either has to come out or explode. And the author dangles that possibility in front of us for a while, and then sends Anna back to a comfortable, if not entirely conventional, heterosexuality.

There are a number of other female characters in the book, and honestly, I was more interested in their stories (and wanted to read much more about some of them) than I was in Anna.

But I must also admit that the Virginia Woolf references are fun.

In retrospect, I probably would have been able to deal with the dithering if Anna had ended up queer, or if the author had given me more of the stories of some of the other women characters in the book. But that's not the novel she wanted to write.

Who is Jasper Fforde…

... and why does he write such unclassifiably fascinating novels? I really can't answer this question, but I'm very glad that he does.

Imagine a universe in which books are very, very important (instead of various Christian fundamentalists going door-to-door proselytising, in Mr. Fforde's universe, that knock on the door is likely to be from someone trying to convince you that it was Roger Bacon who wrote the play attributed to Shakespeare). And their characters really do have lives of their own. And the government would actually need to have a force of special operatives, including time travel operatives (as well as many other strange things) in order to prevent people from messing around with the Shakespearean canon, or kidnapping Jane Eyre.

That's just the tip of the iceberg of strangeness gone far beyond simple absurdism that is to be found in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next mysteries:

The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten

It's also a world in which werewolves and other such creatures exist, dodos and Neanderthals have been resurrected via genetic engineering, the Crimean War is still being fought in the 1980s, and... well, I really could go on and on, but that would take a lot of space and time.

And I haven't even gotten to the best things about the books. They are funny. Hilariously, screamingly, quite literally ROTLFMAO funny. They are also delightfully vicious satires on just about everything, from afternoon tea to fascist governments and megalithic global corporations. And there's a literary pun, reference, parallel or allusion in almost every paragraph.

Mr. Fforde has obligingly provided links to reviews of all the books on his own website, which you are invited to peruse if you want to see how other people have tried to describe them.

But I heartily recommend that you just read the books. Because no one can really describe them.

A Word of Explanation

No, I didn't read all the books I've just posted comments about in the past few days. The comments were written over the past several weeks, about books I've read at various times over the past several months. I'd posted them to LJ as I wrote them, but due to some incorrect settings, they did not appear on anyone's friends' list. So I've deleted and reposted them.

Since I don't quite recall when the first of the unseen posts was made, you might be seeing one or more of these twice. Alternatively, I might not have gone back far enough, so if you're really interested, you could look at earlier posts in my journal to see if you missed anything.