Book #27 of 2020: Horizon by Barry Lopez

"You can say their names as they were beads on a rosary or something, remind yourself of Sojourner Truth, remind yourself of Whitman, remind yourself of the writings of Thomas Jefferson about "the rights of man," even though he didn't get the implication of what he was saying. There's a connected set of figures, a repository of dynamic, moving, conflicted, half-wrong-all-the-time figures who are trying to sort through the values that would make human life possible. And we at this moment particularly need them."  Robert Hass interview, The Paris Review Summer 2020

Barry Lopez takes us on a journey around the world to places he's visited. Along the way he thinks deeply about heroic figures and their ambiguity: sea-faring explorers, Arctic adventurers, settlers in the Outback, theorists and philosophers, industrialists and artists. Lopez, who has himself journeyed widely and inhabited extreme environments and written thoughtfully about his experiences, is troubled by the state of Earth and the systems of oppression and exploitation many of his childhood heroes opened up with their exploration. We move from the Arctic Circle to the Galapagos, from Africa to Australia, and finally to Antarctica. There are moments in the Pacific Northwest and Asia and South America sprinkled throughout. There are many troubling questions raised, and no answers. Hence the title Horizon. A horizon is of course a physical boundary--the rim past which one can't see. Lopez at a young age was inspired by explorers to go past physical horizons and discover and experience as much as possible. But there is also the horizon of time: what comes next, now that the Earth has been "ravished and plundered, ripped and bit, tied with fences" in the words of Jim Morrison.

Lopez posits that indigenous wisdom and voices likely point the way to a healthier and more just future. My favorite character from the book is Ranald McDonald. Lopez uses McDonald and his motivations and exploits to counterbalance Captain James Cook, who Lopez still wants to admire despite some obvious imperialist flaws. By rescuing indigenous voices and heroes, by privileging them now before its too late, we might be able to prevent the next horizon from being a tip over into global catastrophe.

The latest books: 21 so far in 2019

Just reading books by Jung or Jungians or memoirs of the individuation process by those who work with Jungians causes me to have delicious and mysterious dreams. I've been doing a lot of dreamwork with the Shadow, Anima, and Mother archetype lately.

The best bits of this book are those which use Biblical stories and religious symbols to explain Jungian concepts. And the best of those is the discussion of Job. Probably only interesting or useful if you're fairly deep in the Jungiverse.



There are several reviewers on Amazon who trashed this book because it's called "AMERICAN" short stories but there's a lot of stories about Africans, Asians, gray parrots, etc. Make the Best American Short Stories the Best Again! Whatever. I used to read these annuals religiously but stopped about 20 years ago; thought I should see what was happening with the short story lately.

I found this collection was excellent and interesting BECAUSE it didn't feature the painfully empty interior lives of a series of alienated suburban white people who had never even heard of Marx or Sartre or Chomsky and were unable to find a theorist to diagnose their malaise in US Weekly and People magazines. And the story about the parrot, narrated by a parrot, is an all-time great I can use with my middle school students. One of the classic devastating last lines!

 

Having met James Ellroy, and having spoken with him about JFK conspiracy books and novels, and having watched him scrawl "Blood rage rules!" in my copy of his American Tabloid, and having enjoyed several of his books, I thought I'd give the latest prisoner turned literary darling a shot. Cherry is a worthy first effort. Sometimes the narrator's voice is searing, clear, and white-hot, and that voice carries you along and surprises you with what captures the narrator's attention, and the curious tidbits he knows about literature and history sprinkled into the junky talk and soldier lingo. There is a lot of blood rage here, or at least blood hunger.

But other times the voice is clumsy and the narrator becomes a familiar type (I lived in West Baltimore for years--I saw these guys and gals daily. The reality of this "familiar type" is quite real to me). If you've read or seen The Corner you have heard this story. If you read Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone you've heard this story and met this character. You need some humor to sustain the plot, the way Trainspotting is just fucking awful and then awfully funny and then just awful again. Cherry has a lot of the awful but loses its sardonic humor at some point.

I dunno why I'm nitpicking a pretty strong first novel--it just feels like I've read this before, and done better. But the descriptions of the Iraq War and its consequences and the attitudes of the soldiers are top-notch. The first half of the book is very strong. Something about the narrator and the characters just can't sustain the second half.

 

Just great. Points out the resurgence of Native American population numbers, and while the well-documented and notorious facts of centuries of ethnic cleansing and genocide are noted and examined here, the book is mostly concerned with celebrating survival--and despite the grim data, a great deal of success. A really fantastic historic overview of government policy and indigenous response, of activism and combat, of submission and fealty and betrayal. The Epilogue is some deep shit.

Book 2 of 2018

Sometimes I miss working in the book industry. I'll stop simply meandering through whatever books I happen to have decided to read, and suddenly I'll choose to read a buzz book--something that's hot and current. The kind of book I miss because I'm not stacking it in mass quantities on a table or end cap display, and because I don't listen to NPR or watch C-SPAN book shows anymore.

And THIS? THIS is a hot book? THIS?

Synopsis: A whiny, entitled, pseudo-intellectual European dripping with privilege sets about recording his youth and young adulthood and how banal and empty everything is, except for exposure to some art, music, and writing. Everyone is fake and meaningless. We all inhabit a bleak Bergman film where the characters each get to shred themselves and their personae in 15-minute monologues filmed in stark black-and-white close-ups. He calls his work what Hitler called his work in order to underscore some devastating truths or realizations which actually never materialize in the text.

The suburbs are soul-sucking. The middle class are adrift and alienated from their labor, their families, and nature. The death of God and tradition has been replaced with the ascendance of death and materialism unto death.

Yawn.

MY struggle was getting through this monstrosity. And yet there are some quite good passages, passages where Karl Ove is really honest and his writing (in translation) has conveyed a common experience of our era in an interesting way.

But there's not enough there here. And more volumes? Really? FOUR more? Oh hell no...