(Most of) the humans are dead

I first learned of James Howard Kunstler back in the 1990s when a friend sent me a galley copy of Home From Nowhere. That nonfiction book was a revelation, explaining why suburban sprawl is depressing and more traditional architecture and urban development is not (in other words, why I had chosen to live in Old Town Key West instead of Weston). I feel a little reactionary about it and I'm not against everything modern but in the Jane Jacobs / Le Corbusier divide, I'm on Jane's side all the way. I noted that Kunstler was, at that point, primarily a novelist but was grateful that he had chosen to write, and write well, about urban planning, a subject in which I have always taken a small but persistent geeky interest. * Since then, I have followed Kunstler's career as a polemicist about the coming post-oil world -- which he thinks is coming a lot sooner than the rest of us are prepared for -- and occasionally looked in on his blog (which has the endearing name of Clusterf**k Nation). But I had never read any of his fiction. Until recently, when dystopia became a topic of interest. Not just because of earthquakes, volcanoes and oil spills although that certainly all seems to make one think post-apocalyptically. And my sister mentioned she had been reading Kunstler's novel World Made By Hand. So I ordered it up via interlibrary loan (thanks again, Alachua County!).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1BdQcJ2ZYY&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

The story is set in an unspecified but obviously near future, when America has essentially fallen apart and reverted to a pre-industrial society after oil wars, nuclear bombs and a lethal flu epidemic. The setting is Union Grove, New York, an upstate small town that has survived better than most but is starting to fall apart.

As I started the book, I found the exposition a bit heavyhanded -- it was nice to learn what had happened to the world I knew, but it didn't make sense for the narrator to be explaining it all. Soon enough, though, I was caught up in the story and I wound up reading it in one giant gulp -- I love it when you catch a wave on a book like that (it helped that it was a Sunday of a holiday weekend) and it was especially nice after my recent reading experience. I had trouble catching on with The Difference Engine and I'm reading American Gods according to the One Book One Twitter schedule, which is two to three chapters a week.

One thing Kunstler does especially well is capture both the attractions and the difficulties of a post-industrial society, where you grow and make the things you eat and use. I felt this same pull of longing at the end of Julian Barnes' satirical England, England, where England has devolved into a similar state. Maybe it reminded me a bit of my rural childhood where my family did grow food and put up preserves and raise sheep and make clothes and know how to build a lot of things. But Kunstler is also realistic about the problems of life without clean water, power, antibiotics, a reliable system of law enforcement and justice, etc. Lots to think about, and a good story to carry you along. I'm giving it four stars.

A sequel called The Witch of Hebron is being published in September and I happened to snag a galley copy of that the other day, and I'll be reading that, too. Not sure if I have the fortitude to take on Kunstler's most recent nonfiction, The Long Emergency. It's weak and probably dumb to practice denial when you live on a low-lying island at the end of a 120-mile road smack in the middle of Hurricane Alley. I know this. I just don't know what I can do beyond vote for the right people and practice my own minor acts of sustainability like riding my bike and recycling and drying the clothes on a rack instead of the dryer. I know I should think about these things more and make my opinions heard, but I also know that if I engage I will start feeling simultaneously responsible, enraged and powerless -- which is no way to live and a big reason I left journalism.

Speaking of denial, in case anyone is wondering what's up with the music video it's obviously not directly connected but you have to love the Flight of the Conchords take on futurism -- especially the binary solo, which appears here in the credits. This might be playing the acoustic guitar while the Gulf of Mexico burns, but so be it.

* Stealing a move from Citizen Reader here and adding a footnote for something too long to include in the mainbar -- one of my favorite parts of Home From Nowhere is the two theories proposed by California architect Peter Calthorpe for why midcentury development got so damned ugly. Theory 1, the Stroke Theory: During World War II, the entire Western world went through such trauma that we, as a society, suffered the civic equivalent of a stroke and couldn't get it together to use our brains and hearts on this stuff so we just threw up a bunch of ugly, junky crap. Theory 2, the Stupor Theory: During World War II, G.I.'s had the adventures of their lives (at least the ones who survived) and when they returned their everyday lives were so stultifying and depressing by contrast that they spent the rest of their adult lives drunk and just threw up a bunch of ugly, junky crap. Either one works for me.

Waiting for the oil

This is not book related but it is writing (by me) so I'm posting it here. Plus it's my blog, dammit. My second Letter from Key West for WLRN's Under the Sun ran this morning -- and will run again at 5:44 p.m. today (Thursday 5/27) on WLRN, which is 91.3 in Miami, 100.5 Key West and online at www.wlrn.org. It's not as fun a subject as my first piece for Under the Sun, but it's something that's been all of our minds around here recently so I figured I'd say it.

Journalists and murderers

I post today not to report on any books I have finished since my last entry (though I am closing in on Elif Batuman's The Possessed practically as we speak) but because I just finished what felt like a book, Janet Malcolm's piece "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" in the May 3 edition of The New Yorker. The thing was 29 copy-dense New Yorker pages long. I wish there were a word for the nonfiction equivalent of a novella, because that's what it is. Ostensibly, it's an account of the murder trial of a woman named Mazoltuv Borukhova, who was accused of employing an assassin to kill her estranged husband. Because it's Janet Malcolm it goes off into digressions on the nature of court trials and, especially, on the nature of journalism. Malcolm first came to my attention in 1989 when her two-part piece, "The Journalist and the Murderer," ran in The New Yorker. That piece, later published as a book, recounts the relationship between journalist Joe McGinnis and the subject of his best-selling book, "Fatal Vision," convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. Malcolm's book has a first line many journalists of that era soon learned by heart, especially impressionable 21-year-old aspiring journalists (whether they wanted to or not): "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

OK, so Malcolm views journalism as an ongoing act of seduction and betrayal between subject/source and writer -- but she includes herself in the latter category. And has herself been accused of some ugly behavior, specifically by Jeffrey Masson about a book she wrote on psychiatry, another of her obsessions. To her -- and I think she's right -- it all comes down to constructing narratives. Especially in heavily disputed cases like murder trials, the side with the plausible, authoritative narrative wins. As it happens, that rarely is the defense.

Malcolm's accounts of sitting through a trial are good, especially on the inherent drama of the set-up -- adversarial sides, the judge looming over everything, supposedly impartial although you can frequently sense which attorneys he or she views with favor. And she nails the weird camaraderie that develops among those attending a long trial together -- journalists and court personnel and families of the victim and/or defendant. It's like being shipwrecked, or stuck on an elevator. (Actually I was stuck on an elevator a couple months ago. That was a lot worse.) She is adept at going back and explaining background on the subjects, their community of Bukharan Jews -- who happened to come from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, a place I had never given a second's thought to but that also happens to figure largely in the book I am just finishing, Batuman's "The Possessed." Totally beside the point, but how weird is that? And the piece is worth reading just for the totally unexpected and bizarre left turn it takes (but doesn't follow) after Malcolm's telephone discussion with one of the witnesses. Stuff like that does happen and it rarely gets captured in conventional trial coverage because 1) it doesn't fit in 15 inches of copy and 2) it's not determinative to the trial's progress or outcome.

Malcolm is quite sympathetic to the defense, and honest about it, not that she seems to believe Bukharova is innocent of the charge against her, but because she is clearly the underdog in a system that claims to presume innocence and treat all equally. Malcolm notes several times that the prosecutor refers to Bukharova, a physician, as "Miss" instead of "Dr." Malcolm even calls herself "Ms. Defense Juror," imagining herself as a potential juror during the voir dire phase. (Who cares about the drama of voir dire except people stuck in courtrooms? Kudos to Malcolm for making the process interesting, which it is -- but only about 2 percent of it.)

I enjoyed the piece -- I kept reading all those 30 pages even though I was pretty damned sure about the outcome of the trial -- and I'm a Malcolm fan going back to the Journalist and the Murderer. I especially liked her book on the struggle over Sylvia Plath's legacy and literary reputation, "The Silent Woman." I think of her and Joan Didion as similar writers (I wonder how they'd feel about the comparison? Maybe they'd hate it.) Both are incredibly intelligent, insightful women -- and I think being women matters a lot in their choice of subject matter and approach. Both step back and analyze events that are covered in daily newspapers and other media, but take care to look at the way the stories are perceived, and why. I usually recognize the story they are telling, and realize yes, that was there all along, and I knew it, thank you, thank you for pointing that out. And there's some level at which both are drawing from the journalist's eternal well of newsworthiness: gossip, dirt -- murders, politics, literary celebrity. The fact that they do it in polished prose in places like The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books makes me feel all educated and high-minded while reading it. But it's still dirt.

And yet. This time, I felt just the tiniest bit irritated with Malcolm as she spoke about -- and for -- journalists. She wasn't condescending or nasty about the inkstained wretches who covered the trial and had to file daily for the New York Post, the Daily News, the Times and Forest Hills Ledger. I agree with most of what she said about journalists being more collegial than competitive, and I believe her on the nature of the coverage they produced. I think she ascribes too much malice to the profession in general -- that journalists enjoy torturing people and like covering trials because the attorneys do the torturing for you and all you have to do is write it down. I loved covering trials because of the drama she describes -- and because people were under oath and had to answer uncomfortable questions in a public forum, on the record -- but mostly because the trials you choose to cover generally contain an amazing story -- a great narrative, as Malcolm knows (and it's the reason she was sitting there in that Queens courtroom). I think journalists get off on being in on the story more than torturing their subjects. Maybe Malcolm thinks that's the same thing, but I don't. And I just feel, as a former daily copy toiler myself, a bit resentful at someone from The New Yorker speaking for journalists. It's kind of like a Harvard professor pronouncing about teaching. Well, yes, what you do is teach -- but you do it in conditions that are so far removed from what the vast majority of the profession does that I'm not sure you really get it. I doubt Malcolm ever had to cover a zoning hearing, or worry about coming up with a story for that day no matter if there were something newsworthy that you could have done in seven and a half hours or not, or feel the gut-clenching fear of being assigned to cover some breaking news event and knowing that her job (or at least future advancement prospects) were on the line if she didn't at least match and preferably beat the competition. It's really hard to do that. (I won't even go into whether Malcolm has ever had to cover two murder trials at the same time -- and then get yelled at by the boss because she didn't drop everything to write about the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue having been shot locally. Yes, I'm looking at you, John.) Daily journalism doesn't leave you much time to sit around and ponder the way you're constructing the narrative or the role you're playing in the justice system or society in general.

I guess that's why we have The New Yorker and Malcolm and I'm damned glad we do. I just felt, as she was sitting in the trial sympathizing with the defense that I was sitting there, too -- sympathizing with the daily reporters.

Update: I'm not the only one taking special notice of this story (no surprise, given how self-obsessed media types are) -- here's David Carr's blog post about it in the Times. He argues that Malcolm's identification with Borokhuva's "otherness" is part of the piece, if not its driving motive: "Let’s just say that she may have been one of the reporters covering the trial at the Queens Supreme Court in Kew Gardens last March, but she was not and never has been, part of the press corps."

March madness

No not that kind of March madness. But somehow, during this last month, I managed to read a lot. Not sure if I'll be able to keep this up but I've decided to take a more traditional book blogging approach and start posting reviews/opinions on my reading as I go. I'll use the grading system of my alma mater, the University of Massachusetts, where we did not mess around with plus and minus signs:. So here's a roundup of my March reading, starting with the most recent (technically finished April 1 but it was 3 a.m. and I read most of it in March so there): The Ghost by Robert Harris -- political thriller, which I checked out from the Key West Library. I started reading this on my lunch hour last Saturday, got half way through very quickly then realized that we planned to see the Roman Polanski movie based on the book, currently playing at The Tropic -- and that the point of movies like this is suspense. So I stopped reading and saw the movie, then returned to the book. I thought the movie was good, though not necessarily worth the rave reviews it received -- I think people are just thrilled to see a thriller that's not a shoot 'em up or that bears some resemblance to reality. In general, I preferred the book -- the characters were more nuanced, especially Adam Lang, and the big reveal felt more obvious and silly in the movie. I've read Pompeii by Harris and plan to read more of his historical fiction. AB

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins -- young adult fantasy/dystopia fiction that I checked out from the library. The second in her Hunger Games series, which I picked up because of a rave review on Citizen Reader and because I'm scouting dystopia lit for a future Literary Seminar -- and I think it would be particularly cool to get some YA writers in there, since fantasy including dystopian fantasy seems to be huge in that area now. Maybe it always has been (LeGuin, L'Engle, even Tolkein and Lewis and Pullman if you want to extend the boundaries). Anyway it was GREAT -- now I'm lining up with all the others waiting for the third installment in the trilogy, Mockingjay, which is to be published this summer. A

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins -- first in the series above, and also good especially at creating a believable world and a believable voice for its protagonist -- the book is first person from the perspective of a 16-year-old girl who has taken responsibility for her family after her father's death in a mine accident. I'll admit at first I had a little trouble warming to the story and was irritated by the misuse of "I" in the objective case a couple times, which is silly because people especially youngsters do it all the time now and hey this book is in the future so by then it could be the accepted usage. It's just a dumb grammar peeve of mine. But by the middle of the book I was there with Katniss as she attempts to navigate survival for herself and her family and deal with the weirdnesses of the world she's born into. AB

Unicorn's Blood by Patricia Finney -- historical fiction, Tudor thriller (Elizabeth again), sequel to Firedrake's Eye and even better -- perhaps because it has Elizabeth as what appears to be a real character -- and provides a sensible explanation for her vacillation and then reaction to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Finney's really good and I look forward to the last (so far) in this series, Gloriana's Torch, and hope she's writing more though she's got a couple other series going, too. I did give myself a start by looking her up on the Internet and seeing an online biography in which her politics are described as "right-wing." Huh? Conservative, sure, but right wing from my left wing perspective is Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin/teabagger territory. This upset me for a couple days until I decided 1) this website was far from definitive and 2) who cares since I'm reading her for entertainment and not political insight. Still, it did make me think about what baggage I'm bringing to my reading and my opinion of writers. AB

Chef by Jaspreet Singh -- literary adult fiction, picked up an ARC at the library, interested because we're doing food as our topic for the 2011 Literary Seminar. It's one of those nice, slim novels and I thought it was really good. A young man, son of a Sikh officer who is killed in the disputed Kashmir region between India and Pakistan, winds up there himself as an assistant chef to the commanding officer. Really well done and I love discovering a new writer. A

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore -- literary adult fiction, read an advanced review copy that I can't remember how I got hold of, was disappointed possibly because my expectations for Moore are impossibly high. Her previous work, the short story collection Birds of America, is one of my favorite books. This one seemed to walk the line between realism and satire, not always perfectly, and stretched plausibility in some of its events (no spoilers but one or two of the plot points, OK, but ALL of them? Really?). Still, Moore is a fantastic writer and it kept me going. I'm going to give it a B.

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher -- young adult fantasy fiction, got it from the public library, loved it. In an alternate future world, the haves live in a sort of Amish fantasy land while the have-nots are in a prison that, as far as they know, constitutes the entire world (Incarceron). A young woman, the daughter of the warden, catches on that Incarceron is not the paradise she has been told and makes contact with a young man inmate attempting to escape. First of a planned trilogy, natch. AB

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom -- historical fiction, Tudor thriller (Henry VIII), got from interlibrary loan via the public library, liked it very much. It may have suffered by comparison to my recent reading of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel -- I'm still thinking of Thomas Cromwell as a sympathetic or at least understandable character whose POV I was inhabiting there so having him as the remorseless puppetmaster seems a little simple. B

Firedrake's Eye by Patricia Finney -- historical fiction, Tudor thriller (Elizabeth I), got it from the public library, liked it very much. First in the series followed by Unicorn's Blood (see above). A little complex with sections narrated by a crazy person, but I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out what was going on. AB

My YA kick looks to continue -- I've gotten hold of the third installment in Linda Buckley Archer's Gideon trilogy, called The Time Quake, and also came across a book called Beautiful Creatures which Amazon called one of its best of 2009 -- that looks to be more paranormal than dystopian -- I'm looking forward to it because in one online review, the writer was castigating herself for reading the Twilight series before this because this was so much better. It justifies my procrastination in reading Twilight; I suspect the writing will irritate me too much. Also high on my current TBR pile is The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian -- in May the library's Book Bites Book Club will be viewing "The Great Gatsby" and reading Gatsby and this book, which features characters and settings from Fitzgerald's novel. On the nonfiction side, I've picked up The Possessed by Elif Batuman and so far like it very much.

Oh yeah, and that library school thing, too, including a final research paper.

Best of the best

I'm a sucker for those Best Books and various awards -- and wouldn't you know the fine folks at the Williamsburg (Va.) Regional Library, in their really impressive blog, Blogging For A Good Book, have created a megalist of the best of the best. Check it out -- and if you're in Key West you can check out a lot of them from the library. I'm not going to go through and figure out exactly which of these titles we have but most of them look mighty familiar. I can tell you for sure that we have the top fiction title, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, and the top nonfiction book, Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. One of the real pleasures of my job is coming across blogs like this -- it's so great to see there are librarians -- and readers in general -- out there who love books, love reading, and love sharing what they know.