I've been meaning to write a quick review about Demon Copperhead, because I LOVE THIS BOOK, but it's taken me awhile to get around to it. First of all I was knocked flat by the voice, had the wind clean knocked out of me, so I had to build in some recovery time there, just basically recovering from the sheer awesomeness of this book. And then, yeah, I've been busy getting my soul sucked out by the CDA, the Corporate Dementors of America. 

A more current reference from Severence: I don't know what my Innie has been up to but it's really taking it outa me. 

******** 

So these are the things I really liked about Demon Copperhead. 

1) It's funny. The narrator is priceless. From the first page. "First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let's just say out of it." 

And it continues with a wondrous description of the birth scene: 

"On any other day they'd have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog breath- air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she'd be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she's captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it's going down. This is an eighteen-year-old gril we're discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to sow, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and finer her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl tile, worming and shoving around because I'm still inside the sack that babies float in pre-real-life." 

Okay, so there's a lot going on here. Beginning with the voice of Demon. Observational, poetic, self-aware and miraculously sustained for 548 pages. The voice of Demon educates us to the dialect and local color, but it's never obscure or so hard to read that you need to go back and read it again. And it's deceptively literate, as in being actual literature. Note all of the references to water and the sea in just this one first paragraph. Mom is the captain of a sinking ship... the fetus is barging it's way out. This is foreshadowing folks–Demon has a yen for the ocean, and spends the entire book trying to get there, to get back to that sack of salt water, just floating and comfortable. 

The second thing that I really like about the book is the description of the Appalachian culture - including and especially Melungeons–which I had no idea about, and how the Appalachian regional underclass has been Demon-ized and hillbilly-ized and exploited and held down. I learned so much from this book. I really did. I can't stop thinking about it. Demon Copperhead did what books should do: Provided insight through the use of story, giving you a more in-depth understanding than any set of statistics or news story ever could. I'm incrementally better and more compassionate person because I read this book and met these characters.  

Thirdly, I really fell in love with the good characters, and as for the bad characters, they were all real enough to hate. 

Fourthly, the description of the opiate epidemic was spot on, both at a macro and micro level. BK showed us the impact on the culture, but also what it's like to be strung out. The characterization of addiction and recovery was 98.6% correct, and that is not always true in books and the media. I've got a little experience in this area, and she nailed it. It's a good companion piece to Dopesick. 

Fiftly, the story really kept moving. It's a good story, with a beginning, middle and end. All that stuff we learn in writer school. It's all there, without calling too much attention to itself. This is an author at the "top of her craft" if anyone's quoting me. 

Lastly, Barbara Kingsolver transparently executes a point-by-point retelling of David Copperfield; a modern prism through which to view our current culturally  enforced poverty and systemic dis-entitlement. This isn't just a cute literary trick, it's illuminating and powerful social criticism. "Hey the same dehumanizing forces of unbridled heartless capitalism  unleashed by the British Empire during the industrial revolution England are alive and well and creating misery right here in Coal Country." (And it our cities, etc.) 

I have a good friend that just bought a farm half way between Knoxville and Nashville. His favorite book is A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. I think I'll go visit him. I hope he reads this book. And we can talk about it while drinking ice tea and watching as the fireflies come out as dusk falls. Did I also really loved Demon's awareness of nature and sense of displacement when he goes to the city? I felt like that when I left the Pacific Northwest. Like a walk in the woods, the digressions are really the point. What were we talking about? 

Oh yeah, this is one great book. 

***** 

addendumb. 

I finally got one comment on something I wrote on this under-publicized public leaving of mine. A visitor to Camp Pen Cramp!  The visitor scrawled something on the outhouse wall, something to the effect of: "very cool, a bit random, a lot of typos, are you okay?"

That's a lot to respond to, ya really packed a lot into one sentence. But I'll try. 

1) "Very cool." - thanks! 
2) "A bit random" - that's absolutely the point of the joke, thanks for catching on. I feel heard. 
3) "A lot of typos" -  yeah, it's all sort of in process. Apologies. 
4) "Are you okay?" - thanks for your concern. Much better than I probably sound, and definitely better than I deserve to be, on the average. Hope you're ok, too. 

****
Anyway, so ecstatic that I may have had one reader, this one time, for these very personal writings. Invite your friends ... IF you have any friends that read. I know readers are in short supply, but come one, come all to Camp Pencramp. (Pronounced, Comh-PenCRAH.) Leave more cryptic anonymous notes. Roast some marshmallows. Sings some songs. Tell some jokes. Have a good time. 

*****

I know it's tough to believe, but I write for a living. It's my job. So the last thing I want to do during my free time is sit at a computer and type. 

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My mom loved literature and she was a voracious reader. She's in memory care now, and maybe we should have seen it coming.  She always had a tough time putting her thoughts into words.( I'm sure she had some sort of learning disability. Born in 1939, she of course pre-dated all the fancy diagnoses we have now. My grandma Dorothy, my mother's mother, used to simply say, "Well, she _did_ have a long birth.")
 
And whenever my mother would encounter a piece of art, or film or writing that was thought-provoking, she would squint into the distance, nod her head meaningfully and say, "It's ... interesting."
 
With Creation Lake, I have my mother's voice in my head. And Creation Lake _is_ interesting–an interesting book full of interesting dialogue, interesting characters, interesting observations on leftist cults, interesting thoughts on European food and wine and convenience stores, neolithic cave drawings, Neanderthals, medieval history (including a tangent about a mysterious subculture of untouchables called The Cagots), and some deep reflections on the end of history which unfortunately for us seems to be about right about now.
 
I liked this book a lot, and I like it more the more I think about it. It's 'voicey,' fun and thought-provoking, if not exactly thoughtful. It plays with the heaviest ideas we have weighing on our hearts and minds, with the absentminded lightness of a cat playing with a toy.
 
But I don't want people to dismiss it because it's playful. If this was the first Rachel Kushner book you ever read, I'm concerned that you might just say, along with my Mom, "well, that's interesting," and not feel obligated to read another Rachel Kushner book.
 
So I've put together this nifty ad hoc guide to the books of Rachel Kushner, and the order I would recommend reading them. (time permitting, I mean who has time for books).  
 
1) The Mars Room (excellent, required reading)
2) The Hard Crowd (extra credit–you can also read an essay or two)
3) Telex From Cuba (extra credit, but good)
4) The Flamethrowers (awesome, required reading)
5) Creation Lake (yep, so now you're ready.)
 
#1 - The Mars Room is a tight, well-crafted narrative with a topical theme - it's the story of a woman, Romy, incarcerated in a women's prison in California San Joaquin Valley. Romy is serving a life sentence for killing the man that was stalking her. The Mars Room is everything fiction should be. After you're done, you'll feel like you've done a life sentence in a high security women's prison in the Central Valley–all without having to kill any abusive men or anything. You'll be a better person.
 
#2 – The Hard Crowd is the book that really sunk the hook for me. Rachel grew up in a time in San Francisco that was very much like the Seattle I grew up in. She was emmeshed in the alt/west coast punk sensibilities of the time and had dangerous creative friends who made just living their life an art form. She went to college (Berkley) while remaining part of this culture–it was all just grist for the mill. Because Rachel Kushner is a woman, and her breakout novel was in 2008, as opposed to the 90's and her protagonists are young women, people seem to think she's some sort up-and-comer "cool girl writer." In my view, she's a writer of ideas, part of the great class of 199– ... David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Frantzen, Donna Tartt, Eggers, Lethem, Rachel Kushner. These are the writers I run with; they are philosophically, emotionally as much a part of my development as Sonic Youth and Spike Jonze and the cigarette burns on Kurt Cobain's sweaters and the Gun Club and some other bands you've never heard of. We have a collective Gen-X sensibility that was something once and a fittingly less-than-zero now. I never finish writing anything, but this is my tribe, and we hold the collective keys to all mythologies. We find the same things beautiful and/or funny or both.  
 
#3 – Telex From Cuba is the story of the plantation families that had to leave when Castro comes to power. It's super solid and well-researched. It fills in a little piece of western hemisphere history that a lot of people including myself, know nothing about. ; I think it was her first book; it is very good though not quite great if only because it lacks the singularly unforgettable character of her other books. Nonetheless, it will enrich your life and help you to have insights that other mere non-book-reading mortals don't.
 
#4 – I would read The Flamethrowers next. This is RK's opus. It's the story of a young woman who grows up in Nevada. She's a bit of what used to be called a tomboy– she grows up working on motorcycles with her Dad and is absolutely fearless. She leaves home and (part 1) races motorcycles in speed trials on the salt flats and then (part 2) moves to NYC to become part of the arts scene where she starts dating the ne'er-do-well scion of a rich Italian industrialist and (part 3) ends up in Italy being ignored and resented by his rich effed-up family. Along the way, you have this sort of dispassionate look at desert landscapes and hot rod life on the Salt Flats; NYC 70's underground art and music scene before moving on to the gorgeous monied villas counterpointed with the social upheavals of '70's Italy. We see it all through the lens of "Reno" – the young woman whose name you never know– in fact, you know nothing about her other than what you gather from how people react to her. As a narrative technique, it's an extraordinary tightrope walk, but Rachel K makes it effortless as a Simone Biles doing, I don't know, something that would be easy for Simone Biles, like tree pose. Or something.
 
Okay! So now you're as prepared as an Eagle Scout and have all the context you need.
 
For one thing, the interior narration style of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers will help you to "get" Sadie and Creation Lake. No one does women narrators like Rachel K – but it's just a book, with a distinct voice and character. And since Romy and Reno and Sadie are all different enough that you won't conflate the protagonist of Creation Lake with the author and believe that since the narrator is shallow and mercenary and "cool" that the author is 34 years old and mercenary and cool.
 
Secondly, after reading her other books, you'll understand that this is a writer at the top of her powers. The book has a sort of subtle authority-in-repose. I mean, this is just part of my personal approach to creative offerings, but when, say, the Coen Brothers put out a movie like A Serious Man I don't ask, man what's up with that ending? Parking lot, whaa? I just assume the Bros know what the F they're doing and give it a think. An easier analogy might be, I don't think for a second that Picasso didn't know how to draw. If Rachel Kushner breaking conventions or going against type, it's a choice. On one hand, sure, the narrator Sadie does meander and sometimes repeat and loop on themes. Other women's appearances and alcohol, for example. But what questions does that raise, beyond the obvious observation that minds do indeed wander and repeat themselves? There is possibility that the reader is being messed with a little; that despite the overall straightforwardness of the narrative, there's a cubist/aburdist moment here and there. Just maybe we're being asked to bring our own context, both personal and societal to the book. So for me, this isn't ENGL 621 though of course where every book is a chance for critic to flex and dissect. (I'm looking at you, London Review of Books, don't embarrass yourself.)*
 
The raw materials here - Sadie, the oddly too real secret agent, the leftist commune, the unflattering look at Europe and late-stage capitalism and later stage idealism, the man in the cave, the historical meanderings. We're all struggling with these questions. The struggle needs to happen. Can we do more than retreat? Every judgement, every critique is a mirror after all. If I think Sadie is a nympho, maybe I look at my own relationships to sex. If Sadie is despicable, perhaps investigate my own misogynistic tendencies. If she's sympathetic, maybe I'm hurt and wondering why no one says hey, why are you doing all this self-destructive, self-defeating behaviors? Need someone to talk to? Etc.
                                                                                                                            
 
It should be obvious by now that I really like Rachel Kushner as a writer. I'm invested in people liking this book. I want everyone to get it, to be in on the joke–as much of it as I'm getting, anyway. That's all.
                                                                                                                                                           
Notes on Structure and Style
 
The book is written in short chapters. You're in Sadie's head, and hers only, for the duration. It's a modified stream-of-consciousness. You get nothing from other characters and no helpful backstory about Sadie either–other than cases that come to mind while she's doing her secret-agent surveille-and-subvert thing. You're learning things about her and about the world as she observes them, circa 2013, rural France. She likes French wine better than Italian. She is not overly charmed by the postcard version of Europe but helps us sees the trashy rural convenience store reality. You can really feel the joy of the writer in the short chapter format. It's like someone smart talking to you with little punchy stories about a sort of business trip, that add up, one after another, to raise questions which creates a kind of forward propulsion. What's going to happen? Is anything going to happen? In the New York Times profile, Rachel Kushner says that she wrote it faster (it took her 14 months) and “It was the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything in my life,” she said. “When I was writing that book, I do think that I preferred the world that I had made.”
 
So I'm rolling along with Sadie, driving through the French countryside, reading Bruno's emails, plotting and planning, and remembering sometimes, and then at a certain point, you stop trusting the narrator. And I don't mean that Sadie's the traditional modernist "unreliable narrator." What I mean is this: we're all used to reading books about a likeable young woman overcoming the odds in a male dominated society, except ... this strong young woman is a paid operative actively undermining the sort of eco-conscious actions that I, the progressive reader, believe in. And she's getting paid a lot of money to do it. She's just in it for the money.
 
So I begin to question and get a little uncomfortable: Sadie keeps on keepin' on, making insightful funny observations and saying smart things, but are they really? I want to be on her side, because I'm insightful and smart and cool too, and I want to be on the side of the underdog manic pixie dream girl secret agent, but I soon realize her point of view defaults to a cold and mercenary perspective. On top of that, she has an expensive boob job and her attractiveness–for her–is just another weapon in her arsenal. I thought secret agents were supposed to be like a cross between James Bond and Charlie's Angels and AOC. Sadie Smith is not as cool as I thought; just cold. And we never learn why, other than to hear her recount other operations that went sideways. We can guess, of course, from the collective experience of all attractive women growing up in the USA. She's hard-boiled because we ordered our eggs that way.
 
Operationally and structurally speaking, there is a second narrator as well. Bruno is–I'm not joking–an old leftist philosopher who lives in a cave and comes out to eat and send long diatribes via email. He's the sagely elder statesman of group, and ironically, the least ridiculous character. (I know nothing about French leftist politics but he's apparently based on a real person, or at least the people he references are real.) His emails–which Sadie intercepts with her spy skills–form a parallel, and very compelling second narrative. He writes about Neanderthals, and whether they were depressed and smoked; if prehistoric cave paintings were maps of the heavens; he writes a lot about Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and of how the skills that made us the sole surviving. He writes about the reductive/expansive clarity one experiences in the absence of light and sound. Down in the caves he hears things. Voices. The voices of the past and the geographically distant are all present, alive and comingling. This is the Lake of Creation, where the name of the novel comes from. Sadie gets curious and digs into his personal history. His tractor rolled over which killed his young daughter when she was eight years old. Since then, he had progressively retreated from modernity. First, into the barn and then into the darkness of this neolithic cave. Sadie looks forward with anticipation to reading these emails and so do we. It's another device that moves the narrative forward. What will Bruno say next? The promise seems to be that he will eventually come to some sort of insight that will not only give the book a robust philosophical conclusion but will help guide us all - the anarchists of the commune, Sadie, all of us purposeless present-day humans.  
 
Something about the characters.
 
We've talked about Sadie and also Bruno. In addition, tare the upper middle-class French intellectual besties, Pascal and Lucien. Lucien is a filmmaker. Sadie manipulates and uses him to get to Pascal, who is the leader of the leftists. And then there are the various eco-radical residents, ex-residents and wanna-be residents of the commune. The outsiders are the most compelling. Like the aging homeless couple hanging around town.  Sadie calls "The Maos" because they wear Mao hats. There's another older woman who got booted from the commune because she was too loud and old. She's bitter, sort of crazy and sees right through Sadie and keeps a truffle pig in her trunk. And then there's an American ex-con with New York accent and a beer gut who's doesn't really know French but seems to be the only true baddass who lives at the commune. (And in the end, seems to be the only one with any street smarts.) If you want a more professional-ish rundown, feel free to check some other reviews online.
 
The plot is actually a "plot."
 
Most of the rising action of the book takes place in a rural part of France, the Guyenne, which I looked up on Google Maps to confirm if it's real. It's kinda between Bordeaux and Toulouse. Sadie Smith, is hired to infiltrate the group and monitor them. If they haven't already done something stupid enough to get themselves in trouble with the powers-that-be, she's has 'carte blanche' to instigate something so that the right-wing police state can do what it does best: send in the cops. As the book progresses, we learn about her other "missions" in the past. She infiltrates a biker gang, become the leader's "old lady" at the age of 23. She manipulates a naive young man to buy explosives, for which he gets sent to jail. This case gets thrown out on charges of entrapment, for which she loses her government job, and goes freelance after that.
 
Sadie's circuitous way in: She gets Lucien, the best friend of the commune's leader, to fall in love with her. Lucian is a French filmmaker and French and romantic and maybe just dumb. She says she's a dogwalker and he doesn't ask any questions. Why would he; she gets the hot girl bypass.
 
When Lucien gets into production on his movie project, she's able to activate her true intention: she heads off to meet Pascal and supposedly help with some translations at the commune out in the country. That transition is a little blurry, but once again she gets the hot-girl gby
 
After some refreshingly un-charming accounts of the French countryside, she arrives and sets up shop in an old farmhouse owned by Lucien's family. We get the low down on how the commune works. Here in the cloistered commune environment–no surprise–they've imported a class-based system. Ahhh, zee French. We get to know the various duties that people perform and the associated hierarchies. There are the intellectual elite, the Sorbonne-style upper middle class French intellectual types who hang out in the library. The Thinkers. There are the carpenters and guys that do the building. These are the doers. Because they haven't been to college, Pascal and team look down their narrow noses but of course rely upon Rene and his crew to do any actual work. Finally, predictably, though everyone is ostensibly equal, it's the young women who get stuck doing the cleaning, the cooking, and watching the kids.  
 
The head carpenter is a very French, masculine homme called Rene (what else?) with his shocking-blue French eyes and sensual smelling armpits and his sexy breath of beer and cigarettes. He and Sadie have an ongoing affair that is disturbing in its physicality and lovelessness. And I don't mean it's too graphic, it's just a bit too real. The sex that Sadie wants to have with Rene is as straightforward and functional as the sex she doesn't want to have with Lucien. Both relationships make you wish you were a eunuch or a monk; preferably both.  
 
Despite all of her advanced listening tech and skills, no one is saying or doing anything too revolutionary. The commune itself is as harmless as homogenized milk that will eventually get spilled. Pascal does more pontificating than agitating. And Bruno turns out to be a world-weary nonviolent Gandhian at heart, so inevitably, Sadie needs to agitate the agitators and she goes to work.
 
That's enough. Deux pouces vers le haut. Cinq étoiles. You should read it.
 
            *******
 
There was a lot of anticipatory chatter about the book. Rachel Kushner even got a New York Times front-page-of-the-arts-section profile. I tried to stay away from the reviews because I didn't want to get tilted or to receive any spoilers. I like to come to things clean. However, I did read most of a review in the London Review of Books and I skimmed the review in the New Yorker, which I will go back and read. Both reviews were ambivalent at best and the LRB was starkly harsh. It began with bemoaning how our short attention-span culture has infiltrated novel writing. In classic LRB style, they had hired someone to skewer the book because they really have it in for Gen X Americans like Kushner, Franzen and David Foster Wallace.* I really love the LRB but I'm guessing ours is an asymmetrical relationship. I'll bet they don't even like Iggy Pop or the Butthole Surfers, either.
 
And just a few final notes.
 
This book is a poppy narrative, a quick read, with subtle post-novel tendencies. There's some sly social commentary going on, but in a post-ironic way that's easy to miss. Here's what I mean by that: up till now, social commentary might take the form of parody. It could be bitter, it could by dry and observational, it could highly comedic or delivered deadpan. But irony is useless when people really think fluoride makes frogs gay. So we need a new way to point out what's funny. Irony is just too cute, with its just-so jabs and witty rejoinders. What we need now is something French and absurdist; as random and as dumb as the guy who used to run Miss America now running America. 
 
 (As a side note, it helps to imagine the characters in every made-for-TV drama that passes for news to be played by Jerry Lewis or Marcel Marceau.)
 
The book is about subversives being subverted, and in further act of subterfuge, I believe that the book itself subverts our expectations of how a young woman narrator should behave, of what a secret agent should be, of what tourist-trampled Europe is supposed to be, of what left wing idealists are supposed to be, and in the end, of what a novel is supposed to be. It's a little bit of a subversion of the current zeitgeist (which imho, doesn't really have much of a geist at all) of youth when we think we know it all, of idealism, and finally, of the species formerly known as mankind. Another sort of post-novel novel that it reminds me of: The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy. This book set up certain mysteries and plays with expectations in the same way. We expect the mystery to be solved, but maybe that's not the way life works. We expect the old wise guy to give us the answers, but maybe it's still not time yet. Maybe we're too late stage ... everything ... for Aesops fables and "just-so" stories, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Maybe shit just happens. It leaves us with more questions than answers. And that's how it should be. Keep questioning. We are meant to be as curious as even soul-dead sleuthin' Sadie is when she goes looking for Bruno, and as disappointed when he doesn't appear. Another profitless prophet. Apparently, e can't retreat to the past, either. We gotta find a new path to the waterfall.
 
Right now, we should be questioning–how's it going? How's it working for me? Maybe we are all Sadie, getting paid by The Man, perform daily acts of just to get paid. Or, if we're employed in what appears to be an organization dedicated to good, how are our modes of change working? Are we getting anywhere? Without a workable vision of utopia, if idealism itself is so coldly and inevitably always undermined? how do we move forward to a post-(you fill in the blankness) world?
 
Or have we all just given up and I'm gonna get mine while the ship goes down. That, too be honest, is the most terrifying prospect of all.
 
Though it's set in 2013, Creation Lake is a child of the times. It has the same vertiginous dream logic that I get by just looking around at how people act, both on-screen and off, circa 2024. Reality is the monster on our trail and we are powerless to move and run. Wake me up. While I'm writing this, someone on the plane is watching The Walking Dead. That show seemed to go on and on and - against the odds, with all the zombies around, I take it. Never appealed to me really. We would rather imagine zombies coming back from the dead and attacking us, when the real issue is we are at war with ourselves. That's the real end-times statement, isn't it? Humans have won the battle for survival against the other humanoids and all the megafauna, and now we are, and remain, forever at war with ourselves. If history is our future, and I wish it wasn't, then this doesn't end well.
 
Someone else is texting on their phone, which, unknown to them, distracts me, setting off my misokinesia, which is a new word I learned on r/Reddit, in my searching for a solution to my misophonia. Misokinesia isn't a word of course but I knew immediately what that meant. Hatred of small repetitive movements. Nowadays I need blinders as well as earplugs. So I just put my hat on sideways. I'm too old to give a shit.
 
Maybe I should live in a cave like Bruno, just another aging broken idealist. Or maybe I'll end up in a hillside villa overlooking a deserted cove in Spain, like Sadie.
 
We are self-sabotaging people who all together make a self-sabotaging society.  
 
Put the last touches on this, Thursday November 7, 2024.
 
Well, as my Mom would say, "This should be interesting."
______________________________________________________________________________
 
*Okay, so in true David Foster Wallace fashion, I'm laying a footnote on ya. So, I did just recently re-subscribe to the LRB so I searched the archives and found an incredibly bitter and unkind review of Infinite Jest from 1996. It didn't just pan David Foster Wallace, but lampooned Frantzen as well. I honestly didn't remember too much of Infinite Jest so it was good to get a recap, bitter as it was. One hilarious thing, was that the three things the reviewer pointed out as being most ridiculous, or "Well, duh." were 1) DFW's take on the video phones. 2) DFW's take on monetizing everything, and 3) the main premise of the book, the Monty Python concept of The Killing Joke - (also a band name from back then) or Infinite Jest. The Entertainment that kills. And these are pretty much my favorite prescient things about Infinite Jest and elements that I often point out as his being brilliant and to know enough about human nature to predict the future.
 
1) in the case of video phones, he talked about how everyone got video phones to begin with, but then they missed being able to do anything, like sit on the can, while they were talking on the phone. And then everyone got bummed out because they didn't look great all of the time on video phones. So they started just putting up the best picture of themselves. And then they said to themselves, why stop there? And started putting up a picture of their favorite famous movie star or whatever as an avatar. And then everyone just went back to not using video phones. This of course, isn't exactly right, but does roughly predict our behaviors not just on video calls, but on Zoom and social media and everything that is messing people up nowadays.
 
2) In Infinite Jest, even the years are sponsored. I think it takes place in the Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar. Every year a certain product is placed in Lady Liberty's hand, instead of the torch. There had been the year of the Tucks Medicated pad, etc. Nowadays, every inch of everything is branded like a NASCAR car.
 
3) And finally, what is social media if not the killing entertainment, that we can't let go? So compelling that we can't stop looking. It's killing our kids, killing us in cars. We can't even walk the fucking dog anymore without staring crook-necked at the phone the whole time.
 
When I was in 6th grade I was in this "class for the gifted" where they showed us this movie called Future Shock about people's inability to deal with the pace of modern change. We have upped the voltage considerably.
 
The only thing really that's different from Infinite Jest is that the future we're living in is in some ways worse, some ways better and honestly weirder across the board.
 
As for the review of Creation Lake, I skimmed it before reading - This LRB reviewer found the Sadie - the main character – distinctly vapid. Talking about her fake breasts and how sorry she feels for the young mother with the sagging breasts. What the reviewer didn't also mention as context that Sadie is a having a shallow and very physical affair with the woman's husband. That's a Woke Fashion Don't!
 
My immediate intuition was that the LRB reviewer just didn't get it. That maybe the character – a 34-year-old attractive sisgender wanna-be secret agent who thinks she's pulling one over on everyone – is exactly a sendup of self-involved too-cool-for-school tendencies. And after reading the book, my suspicions were confirmed. Though RK isn't taking a swipe at millennials, per se, what she's pointing out is that we're all a bit vacuous, perhaps and undermining our best efforts to be our best. 
 
I personally think when you're a young novelist fresh out of the Iowa Writer's Conference or wherever and you're stewing in your little midwestern swamp, you should approach a writer of RK's talent and track record with a little respect. Everyone's got their own POV, certainly, but the best thing with a writer of RK's caliber is to look at in in context of her output, and learn.
 
 
*******
 
Yet Another Addendum
 
On Thursday, November 21st, 2024 we went to see Rachel Kushner in conversation with Jake Silverstein at the local Unitarian Church here in Montclair, NJ. She's three months or so into a non-stop book tour and they spoke almost exclusively about Creation Lake. Jake Silverstein is the editor in chief of the NY Times Magazine and kind of a heavy hitter. I thought maybe he would talk a little more but he sat back and let Rachel carry the evening. She was more than patient with the questions, and quite transparently enjoy herself. I felt a little bit self-consciously coda about Montclair's light turnout. The room was only about 2/3 full and mostly older folks at that but they took it in stride, making light jokes about the rain–what a relief, it's been months!–and growing up in Unitarian Churches where they were always having bake sales for Nicaragua. In addition she referenced that she'd had an earlier engagement at NYU, so I felt assured she'd had her "cool kids" talk for the day.
 
As it turned out, there were a few there were some artsy/rebel types sprinkled in with the older folks, that surfaced through the questions at the end, regarding cameos by French novelists and the NY art scene. She really brightened up at the last question from the audience, about a NY art persona named Fuque (?) pronouned Fuck-you, which is a lovely little stunt to play on the tongue. So who knows, gray hair and wrinkles can hide an edge, as evidenced by my present obsession with Pippa Garner.
 
Overall, the reassuring and instructive.
 
Right off the bat, just to get it out of the way almost, she characterized Sadie as a "Devil" and utterly unlike herself, the author. In fact, it seems that the narrator Sadie was a complete foil to what the author was really interested in, which was the leftist/anarchist commune and the ideas of Bruno.
 
One mild surprise: She only read only passage, the part where Bruno is talking about being underground and the voices etc and he characterizes it as a Lake of Creation - so now I know where the name came from. I looked for the exact pages until I decided that I was procrastinating and stopped.  
 
And I had one quibble - Rachel and Jake talked a lot about betrayal as a theme. My take is that Sadie had no one to betray, because that's just the way she was built. Built for mischief, without a conscience or much of an interior emotional life. I still think theme of the book is subversion, whether it's all the characters out to subvert the government, or a person subverting them, or subverting our expectations about what a hottie secret agent is supposed to be.  
 
According to the Oxford Dictionary, to subvert is to "undermine the power and authority of an established system, or institution," and I would extend that too people and principles or ideas.
 
Maybe it's just on my mind, because subversion just seems to be going around nowdays.
 
Much of the book was based on time spent in rural France. The truffle pig. The prehistoric objects pulled from the earth and displayed by a farmer. Also, the he writer in the book is a real person, that was researching a book that had similar incident - dairy farmers standing up against the government.
 
With any good writer, they not only entertain, but show you how to see the world. Patti Smith being a prime example of that. Rachel Kushner wanted to write a book with these elements and brought it to life with a sort of writerly hodge-podge, a dream logic. Even Sadie is roughly based on a British male agent who infiltrated these groups and had affairs with some of the women. Who sued the British government. And then the agent did too, because he was - I mean, I should follow this up, but Rachel Kushner said he sued the British government for putting him in a position where he could fall in love.
 
Dangerous business, this subversion.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Here's a professional review of Wellness from the New York Times .... it's a little critical of the "Just so" tidiness but fair. I'm glad I'm not a critic with my innate distaste for criticism. 

Here's an interview from the Chicago Review of Books with the author Nathan Hill: 

(which I will read eventually) 

And here are few of my rambles. 

Wellness.
 
A wonderful book of modern life, covering the period from say, 1992 grungey/artistic Chicago up to the modern day, with all the issues that effect our “Wellness” – the internet, knowing too much, trying to control our feelings, our unresolved past, raising kids, the pilot light going out on the romance in our marriage as life becomes a co-managed business enterprise.
 
And it’s all seen through the eyes of a couple that my wife, rightly and accurately, keeps saying “are a lot like us.”
 
Of course, when the husband is obsessed with porn, and overly needy, I wonder, what is she _really_ trying to say?
 
My wife read Wellness with her women’s reading group and then recommended it to me. I’d just finished reading Zone of Interest, which made me fall in love with Martin Amis all over again and made me hate the normalizing of insanity with a burning clarity. But it was a good bounce back from something so dark. 
 
Because it’s about real, modern family life and there’s no magic or technical trickery it invites comparison to Jonathan Frantzen. The comparison is apt, particularly when it comes to the near-parody arch-realness of the situations the characters find themselves in. LIke when Elizabeth, reads every study to be the perfect mom to her quirky kid, and all the kid still wants to eat is Kraft mac-and-cheese. Or when they get invited by a couple with an open marriage to a sex club for swingers etc and it ends up that this mismatch of a couple – she’s 26 and he’s this muscle bound middle aged guy – take them each aside and show them who they are with clarity.
 
The overall structure start with their romantic meeting, and then does a bunch of flashbacks to bring us to the present, A  tipping point- the tipping point? - in their relationship, when the magic is gone. 
 
Jack grew up on a farm in Kansas. Undersized and unwanted by everyone but his older boho sister, who comes to visit and inspire, he becomes an artist and moves to Chicago. 

Elisabeth is a child of privilege who wants nothing of her family's ill-begotten money. 

Both Family-of-Origin stories are cartoonishly effed up. Jack's mother never wanted him and let's him know; Elisabeth's father is threatened by her academic prowess and competes with her in really messed up ways. 

As pointed out in the NY Times review, some very important plot points are withheld, that explain much. 

Verdict - great, compelling read with alot to say about this situation we've all got ourselves into. So this is "Wellness" - with the internet and all of our ... whatever, intermittent fasting and optimizing and workouts. 

​Enough. 
 
 
 
 

What do you even write after reading something like this. As the main character says at some point Thomsen: “I used to be numb; now I’m raw.”

Here's the New Yorker's review from ten years ago, written by Joyce Carol Oates

I read it - with some misgiving, considering the subject matter – because I wanted to read it before the movie. As a narrative it really moved and I believe I learned something new, if in the details, perhaps, though of course the Big Why always eludes. 

So instead of critiquing the movie, I'll critique the critique - I think JCO misses the main insight - how do we normalize the unspeakable? How can we live our family lives, and go on doing our day-to-day mundanities, eating, sleeping, celebrating holidays, engaging small talk and having affairs, when the very air we breathe smells like the stench of dead bodies? 

With everything we know and learned and asked and read about the Holocaust, that's a question that hasn't been asked - as far as I know. What about the kids, the wife, the veneer of normalacy over genocide? 

In the end, maybe the answer is, we can normalize any sort of insanity, given time. And so it's best to stop it when it's still small. 

Here's the movie trailer, which ​I will get back to you on. 

I miss Martin Amis. 

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880 pages and surprisingly readable, considering the length and topic. What it is, big picture, is a near-future dystopian sci-fi novel based on a what we all hope is a worst case scenario for Global warming. The book follows four-to-five groups of characters through the impending global calamity. One is a over-sexed uber-charismatic activist earth mama and her adoring grad-school creative writer partner (obviously a stand in for the writer, he has the last word) – they end up running an organization called A Fierce Blue Fire, that manages to create a coalition of right wing republicans and environmental The second is a brilliant eco-biologist modeler of things like methane hydrates being released from the ocean floor - among other things accelerating the cascading effects of climate change; three, is a brilliant Muslim-America computer whiz, creating algorithms for betting on the NBA, finances, and global environmental collapse; he ends up being a consultant/lobbyist in in Washington and gives us a glimpse into that world; thThere's a white trash meth addict that's sort of the roadkill on the highway to the capitalist future; and then there's a underground network of "eco-terrorists" sort of like the 60's Weathermen and finally there's even a an advertising art director. 

So, with all of these separate threads, the book takes a while to set up and get rolling. About 180 pages. There are a number of reviews online where people say "I didn't have any idea what was going on for the first 200 pages but hang in there!" And it is worth the ride. Some of the characters are a bit cringey, admittedly. No one is either not incredibly hot, or brilliant and usually both. Kate Morris, the hot earth mama activist is sort of the leftist version of the pixie dream girl and the fact that she can't stop fucking everyone in sight is a transparently literary symbol - of course she stands for irrepressible, fecund nature. Her writer-boy sidekick is a bit prissy. But aren't we all. But that's about where the negativity ends. For the most part the characters are likeable and smart and though the narrative and language pushes the boundaries of believability - especially in the case of Ashir Al-Hasan, the mathemetican/consultant to DC insiders. But while the language may push the bounds of credulity, the circumstances and storyline, unfortunately, do not. The way the carbon interests double down. The way environmentalism is coopted in the name of "environmental security." How the oligarchical interests-that-be capitalize on the fear and diminishing resources to tighten their grip on control and elevate profits. The widening gap between the haves and have-nots. The public acceptance of what is deemed acceptable in terms of gun violence, misinformation and cataclysmic weather events. 

Some low lights. 
A fire takes out LA. one of the characters pulls some strings so that they can take a FEMA-style suburban into the firestorm to save his daughter. This is one of the most action-movie type sequences in the book and Markley pulls it off with room to spare. 

The rising sea levels, the hurricanes, the dust storms.  

The fact that only a black woman republican president can get through an environmental legislation, which is then gutted because of a an eco-terrorist event. Actually, worse than gutted; it becomes a stealth delivery device allowing surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus and all sorts of vile acts in the name of democracy - all from a gay, good looking ex-military cowboy senator-cum-president who made all of his money in private security; 

The capitol is taken over by environmentalists. Like if Jan 6 had worked, but non-violent Burning Man. But then of course it gets uglier than ugly. 

The rise of an ultra right charismatic Christian leader who holds his gatherings in a a VR "Worlde" - these worldes are a big thing and most people are retreating into these alternate realities. 

And meanwhile, the weather just keeps getting hotter, more unpredictably disastrous and the seas keep rising. 

In the end, people sorta have to come around and he cobbles together what has to pass for a happy ending. 

But it's a mess. And honestly, the book reflects the messiness. It jumps narrators and at times, devolves into a pastiche of New Yorker articles, mindover asides, Congressional white papers, tabloid headlines ... but it all works. Some of the commentary on pop culture is even "lol." The stuff we fiddle with while the world burns. 

I'd say it's required reading. It's well-researched and has given my own personal views on the environment, technology, social and political behaviors and policies and the economic/financial fallout and ramifications for our "way of life"

I only wish the near future dystopia painted in this brave book weren't all-too-plausible. 

As always, let's hope for the best, focus on what's good in people but be realistic and prepare for the worst. 

Here's the NY Times Review for a more professionalish take. 



 

It's been a bit since I've finished this. let's see what I can remember. "The Dutch actually founded New York. Did you know it was originally called New Amsterdam." 

Not using exclamation points. Trying to keep my dignity. 

Take two, the write-up begins in earnest. 

Everyone knows that New York was originally New Amsterdam. But the premise of this well-researched book by Russell Shorto is that New York was "New York" way before it was English or certainly, American - briefly the capitol, actually and the seat of government when General Washington originally took office. 

Unlike the colonies founded by by the Puritans, New Amsterdam was always a diverse, unruly place of barter and quick deals, whores and bankers. And this is because it was founded by the Dutch who at this time were Europes only Republic and as an outpost of the Dutch West India company, New Amsterdam brought all of that along with it. 

I liked Russell Shorto's writing. I would definitely read something else by him. It's shocking that his book came out in 2004 - seems like a lifetime ago ... and for my kids and I, it kinda was. 

Anyway, the book is based on a lot of new research that was happening because of the work of Charles Gehring, the director of the New Netherland Project, devoted 30 years to translating the manuscript of Duth records of the New Netherland colony - that were all hard to read because they were in Middle Dutch or something like that. 

The dramatic tension of the book comes from the rivalry of Peter Stuyvesant, who we have all heard of, and Adriaen Van der Donck, who none of us have heard of. Peter Stuyvesant was the authoritative Governor of the New Netherland Colony. Adriaen Van der Donck was a young Junker (landed gentleman) who had gone to school at Leiden, and studied law. He was an advocate of the people and of making New Netherland a free colony with the citizens enjoying full rights of the Dutch people back home, and not just an trading outpost for the Dutch West India company. He even went back to Holland to plead his case before the council at Den Hague. Things were looking good, too, but then William II, Stadtholder, a sort of honorific King, decided he'd had enough republicanism for awhile and set 10,000 troops to take over Amsterdam and Van der Donck's case was pushed aside. 

Van der Donck also wrote an account of the plants and people of the new world, which would have probably been revered as a classic if written in English; instead it has been sort of buried under the silt of time. 

Here's the wiki page if you want to know more. Giving it a once over, I think it's mostly taken from Shorto's book - so good for him. 

Russell Shorto does a great job of drawing out the characters - I imagine from pretty slim pickings. Gets a little dry in the middle, but closes strong. 

I opened this book with some trepidation, almost annoyance. Here comes another tome to legitimize a pod-guru's personal brand. Just give me the Cliff notes, I thought. But what I didn't anticipate was how interesting the background science would be. Dr. Attia begins by saying that other people that claim people can actually live longer is selling a line of goods. Mostly snake oil. The way that our cells break down, no one is going to be living to 200 or whatever. What he's really interested in is not longevity per say, but the quality of your life while you're living it. What he's talking about is Healthspan vs. Lifesapan. He even has a helpful graph that shows with a x-axis line that stays more bulbously elevated for longer with a steep drop off that visually describes the goal of keeping your mental faculties and physical mobility for longer. 

The other theme he seeds early on is medicine 2.0 vs. 3.0 with medicine 2.0 basically treating the sickness and prolonging a life of misery, while "medicine 3.0" gets ahead of the game and is healthy based and preventive. Thinks ahead, rather than forecast, it back-casts - what do you want the last ten years of your life to look like? In a catching chapter in which they analyze the habits and DNA of a collection of people that reached their 100th year, he asks, what does it take to win the Centenarian Olympics? 

How do we avoid what he calls the four horsemen - Diabetes, Heart Disease, Cancer and Dementia and   - the four things that Centenarians seem to be able to put off for 10, 20 years or in fact, avoid altogether. And then he goes into each of the four horsemen, chapter by chapter. 

But they're basically all related. In fact, having messed up blood glucose due to ingesting too much fructose not only directly to type two diabetes, it contributes to heart disease, cancer and dementia. 

He told the story of doing an operation where a guy that didn't drink still had a fatty liver on the verge of cirrhosis - basically because he drank 10 cokes a day. 

He really breaks down how our modern diet is to sugar heavy, and our bodies don't know what to do with it. We need to have sub-cutaneous fat, but when those reserves are full, the body starts storing fat elsewhere. And when it gets trained to do that, 

Type 2 Diabetes. Interestingly, it's a little more complicated than "eating fat" = fat in my blood. "good" cholesterol v "bad" cholesterol. It's more about training your body to burn fat. 

An Immense World, How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. 

In a sentence, this book is a sense by sense exploration of how animals sense the world differently than us. Sight, smell, feel, taste, electrosense, magnet-sense, etc. For example, we all know that dogs hear better than us. And that eagles see better than us. But it's not that simple. What the author does is break down every animals world view into a specific "Umwelt" or how they apprehend the world. There are chapters devoted to Smells and Tastes, Light, Pain, Head, Contact and Flow, Surface Vibrations, Sound, Echoes, Electric Fields, Magnetic Fields, Uniting the Senses.

Scallops have little eyes all around the outside of their shells that sense light. Butterflies can taste the things they land on with their feet. Catfish can taste the water around them with their skin. A chameleon's eyes move independently so it can see forward and back - and plenty of animals see different parts of the light spectrum than we do. In fact, many have ultraviolet markings that we can't see - like hummingbirds.

Bats can sense the infrared heat emanating from warm bodies, and of course use echolocation to hunt. 

Otters and seals use their whiskers to sense the water-trails of fish and can track prey even when blinded - as can the bumps on an alligator's snout. 

Elephants can identify the tread of familiar elephants through the pads of their feet. Whales can communicate using low-pitched infrasonic calls. It's conjectured that in quieter times, they could communicate across entire oceans. 

And it's not just that some animals have different seeing or smelling or taste than we do - they have entirely different senses that we don't - like echolocation, and migrating birds can sense the the earth's magnetic fields - and we're not even sure how. Loggerhead turtles can do this, too. 

Many insects and birds communicated with sounds we can't hear or - this was an ear-opener - through the vibrations of plants leaves. They can communicate with potential mates, or feel the approach of chewing prey. 

Some animals are insensitive to cold so that they can hibernate all winter and the naked mole rat doesn't feel burn from the chemical that makes chilis hot. 

This one made me appreciate what it means to share our planet with animals. And made me rethink what it means to be human. That sounds a bit dramatic, and it wasn't like a complete 180 degree change in my thinking - but it reinforced much of what I already felt and taught me many new specifics.

I guess every book changes your life just a little. But this one can change your life for good, and for the good. There isn't a day when I don't think about what I learned from this book and how it opened my senses to a more open and nuanced way of perceiving the world around me. As I ride my bike along Highland, I feel the wind on my skin - the coldness and the breeze. I hear the wind in the trees and birds. If it's dark - as it is at this time of year, I'm ware of the lights and distance sounds of traffic and trains. I think about how those noises affect the animals that I can't see, driving them further into darkness. 

I think about it when I'm running or riding my bike in the pre-dawn darkness - when I see the deer, rabbits and the occasional fox gliding silently in the distance. 

And finally, I think about it a lot when I'm writing about my time sailing with my father, and all the senses that go into boat racing - sight, sound, feel and most importantly the feel of the boat under me, which is a combination of balance, proprioception and the feel of motion and micro-impacts of wave action and the tug of wind and current – proprioception, I term I've been introduced to by doing yoga with my online teacher, Flo Niedheimer, of Breathe and Flow.

This book taught me about senses I don't have an expanded the imagination. And it made me more thoughtful about the senses that I do have. 

I went out to see my mother recently - she has dementia now, and she always had some neurological quirks - left-right problems, and prone to malapropisms. Watch out for the presbyterian in the crosswalk, that kinda stuff. But I was about to take the learning from this book and apply it to the fact that she was able to helm a dragon class racing sailboat for years - because she rode horses. The connection to the sailboat was the same - a feel thing that transcended logic and what we think of as the normal senses. 

It was a good moment, to watch her light up. 

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I've just been on a winning streak when it comes to Nature books lately. This book was inspiring at a number of depths. One, it was just really well written - some excellent turns of phrase, full of mellowed and mature pacing and alliteration. He doesn't lay it on too distractingly quick from cover-to-cover, but here's how it starts: 

The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree. Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. Gold of standing corn, green of fresh hay-rows, black of rooks on stubble fields. Somewhere down on lower ground an unseen fire is burning, its smoke a column. A child drips stones one by one into a metal bucket, ting, ting, ting.   

Follow a path through fields, past a hill to the east that is marked by a line of nine round burial barrows, nubbing the land like the bones of a spine. Three horses in a glinting cloud of flies, stock-still but for the swish of a tail, the twitch of a head. 

Over a stile in a limestone wall and along a stream to a thicketed dip from which grows the ancient ash. It's crown flourishes skywards into weather. It's long boughs lean low around. Its roots reach far underground. 

Swallows curve and dart, feathers flashing. Martins criss-cross the middle air. A swan flies high and south on creaking wings. This upper world is very beautiful. 

Near the ash's base it's trunk splits into a rough rift, just wide enough that a person might slip into the tree's hollow heart – and there drop into the dark space that opens below. The rift's edges are smoothed to a shine by those who have gone this way before, passing through the old ash to enter the underland. 

So, that's how it starts. And as you can probable judge from the title, the book is both a travel narrative and an exploration of ideas as well. The other enviable and admirable part of the book is that it's a personal adventure – without being wearily self-involved. He's a professor but a real Indiana Jones, in the sense that he goes caving and climbing and is reflective about it - as well as having the historical and literary recall to create deeply meaningful context. Thirdly, the book is admirable in it's message and purpose. He lays out the effects of the global warming and the Anthropocene in striking, emotionally impactful and let's face it - terrifying ways. Because it's effing well researched - you're seeing it through his eyes – and it's true. 

The book is broken up into three parts: Seeing (Britain), Hiding (Europe), and Haunting (The North). 

In the first part, the author takes us underground in the Mendips in Somerset in a journey back in time. "'Mendip is mining country ... it's also caving country. But above all it's burial country. There are hundreds of Bronze Age funeral barrows ... some joined with monuments and henges into large-scale ritual complexes. He then visits Boulby, Yorkshire to visit a deep Potash (used in fertilizers as a potassium source) mining site which stretches far out under the English Channel and houses a scientific lab here they can measure neutrinos. The last place he goes is Epping Forest, London for a meditation on the organic networks of fungus that connect forests. (This was also a theme in the Overstory.) 

In Part Two, Rob MacFarlane goes to Paris to explore the catecombs, to the Italy-Slovenia border near Trieste. This area is called the Karst Plateauwhere the limestone underland is filled with 10,000 caves and tunnels and even rivers such as the Timavo which is sort of a real-life Lethe – a starless river. The final section takes us to the Slovenian Highlands - to the Alpine border between Austria and Italy and Slovenia, which has caves that were embedded fortifications during WWI & WWII as well as sinkholes in the ground where people where thrown in, tortured and half-alive. Breathtaking atrocities. To turn Trumps phrase on it's head, "There were horrible people on both sides." 

The final section takes us North - to view caves with Neolithic Art, to the glaciers of Greenland and finally to a deep burial site for Nuclear Waste. The section where he solo hikes to the neolithic cave to see the red dancing figures on the walls – I won't forget the images for a long time. The wildness of the Norway Coast, the plastic trash bobbing in the water, the Maelstrom, and the Cave Itself. Neither will forget his descriptions of Greenland, with its immense yet receding glaciers to be traversed, the hiking on the Knud Rassmussen, the calving face of the glacier, the blue ice, the Moulin he repels into. 

I could see myself doing this/I would never do this. 

And finally, the visit to the burial site for nuclear waste - at first, it's all trepidation and condemnation, but there's a wonderful passage where he gets sympathetic and homely - the plastic chairs, the work that goes into it - people doing the best they can to protect the world and future generations. 

An ambitiously conceived project. Part travelogue and en exploration of what the underland means to us - as well as the traces we leave there.  Highly recommended. 

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