No one will care, but here is Part II at last.

Cardinal flowers earn their name with bright splashes of scarlet.

I recently read a novel by the philosopher Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle. It was brilliantly achieved, characters all quiveringly true to life, outcomes in suspense until the very end. A compelling fiction. Following my reading, I sought out the late Murdoch online and found a long interview she did with Bryan Magee, on the topic literature and philosophy. At the beginning, I noted that in mentioning philosophers in our “modern times” who were good writers, he named Bertrand Russell but omitted Henri Bergson, who also received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In naming earlier philosophers who were great writers, he included Nietzsche, my nemesis. 

 

Here are links to the interview. I followed Part I with interest and got a little way into Part II, but did not watch all five parts because, having only a couple of weeks ago read another book (nonfiction) that brought back my quarrel with Nietzsche, I wanted to write through my thoughts on philosophy as a personal quest rather than an abstract search, because (another because) in the opening part of their conversation, Murdoch and Magee agree that philosophy is impersonal and, unlike literature, does not involve the personality of the writer. 

I strongly disagree. 

Each weaves according to her nature.

I would say, on the contrary, that philosophy makes a pretense of being impersonal and that the writers of philosophy have all, until very recently, attempted to hide themselves behind language that strives to be objective and “universal.” Looking deeply at the problems on which different philosophers have focused, however, and their very different takes on those problems — not just writing style but the substance of their writing — shows obsessions and prejudices and hopes and fears bleeding through, and for me Nietzsche is a striking example.

As my subject heading to this post indicates, I doubt very many, if any, people will mind that it was way back in 2011 that I posted what I called Part I of my own Nietzsche story. If you want the background, here it is, yes, a full dozen years ago. 

For those not inclined to follow links, I'll summarize by saying that I was writing a chapter on Nietzsche in my dissertation on theories of metaphor and, bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt (following philosophy's "principle of charity," a principle more honored in the breach than in the observance), I was “bracketing” – setting to one side – all his troubling remarks on Jews, women, blacks, and others said to possess a “slave mentality” to focus exclusively on what he had to say about language. How much more generous could I be? 

 

When working on any long piece of writing (and writing a dissertation in philosophy typically stretches over a couple years or more), there is a frequent need to get up out of a chair and move around. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Hit the bars. Whatever it takes to jar the brain enough to get thoughts flowing again. In my case, one fateful day I was pacing back and forth in front of a friend’s bookshelves and pulled a book out almost at random, hardly thinking it would bear on my subject. The title intrigued me: Women and Pornography. The author was Susan Griffin. I opened somewhere in the middle, again at random, and began reading -- idly, at first.

Take a deep breath and plunge forward --

Susan Griffin never once cites Nietzsche in her book. His name does not appear. And yet I kept seeing that name on page after page as I read and as a knot of dread formed in my gut. 

 

In a chapter entitled “The Sacrificial Lamb” (I borrowed the book from interlibrary loan last month and copied the relevant pages), Griffin describes what she calls “the chauvinist mind.” writing 

 

…we discover that just as the racist is obsessed with a pornographic drama, the pornographer is obsessed with racism.

 

She cites the work of Lucy Dawidowicz who concluded, after studying a rock group that proclaimed itself the “master race” and after listing items found in a Hell’s Angel apartment, “Pornography and propaganda have reinforced each other over the decades.” The psychoanalytic term for what the chauvinist’s mind does is projection. What is feared and hated in the self is projected onto another. Here is Griffin again:

 

Over and over again the chauvinist draws a portrait of the other which reminds us of that part of his own mind he would deny and which he has made dark to himself. The other has appetite and instinct. The other has a body. The other has an emotional life, which is uncontrolled. And in the wake of this denied self, the chauvinist constructs a false self with which he himself identifies. 

 

Wherever we find the racist idea of another being as evil and inferior, we also discover a racial ideal of the self as superior, good, and righteous. 

 

Griffin, next page (162):

 

…The chauvinist cannot face the truth that the other he despises is himself. 

 

…The chauvinist insists upon an ultimate and defining difference between himself and the other. 

 

What is it that is feared in the self? Appetite, instinct, emotion, the body and its needs and urges. In short, the power of nature. Thus the “other” is to the chauvinist an “animal,” while he is not – or would have himself not be, but as that is impossible (he is, after all, “all too human”), “his mind is filled with contradiction.”

 

…He both longs for and fears the knowledge of the body. Nature is a part of him. He cannot divide what cannot be divided. His mind is in his body. His body thinks; his mind feels. From his body, nature renders meaning. He is trapped inside what he fears. 

 

Anyone who is still with me this far, if anyone is, might wonder what this has to do with language and metaphor. And didn’t I say I was going to set aside all that other stuff? The thing is, everything I set aside is still right there in the writings on language. That’s what filled me with such horror that I fell into a state of shock. 

Do you need refreshing, cool water? I do. Okay....

How so? The task Nietzsche set himself was to “recover” meanings he felt had been “lost,” and this largely involved discarding later meanings, which he regarded as “decadent.” To simplify, imagine a word as a playing card. It has two sides, two different meanings which may even stand in opposition to each other: one side, the “pure” side, “lost”; the other “decadent,” one he would overcome. (This is an oversimplification, obviously, because meanings are more often multiple than merely dual, but if you want a more complicated image, make one up yourself.) In recovering the lost meaning, Nietzsche would have stripped off the decadent meaning. -- But note the problem: the playing card still has two sides! There is no way to get down to a single side, no matter how many layers are stripped away. The task of recovering an imagined original purity of meaning is doomed. 

And yet nature goes on, unconcerned with our angst!

An obsession with purity is essential to racism, just as it is in countries where women must cover their faces and are forbidden to attend school or drive or even to appear in public. It is not the women who are obsessed with their purity but the men who make the laws, who see their own purity at risk if women are too free. 

 

Policing language is nothing new, either, and you can find examples all over the world. Historically, conquered peoples’ languages have been outlawed by conquerors; various countries strive to keep “foreign” words out of public discourse; and older generations object to new meanings the young attach to older words and phrases. But as I wrote in my dissertation, words are like horses and can be stolen and ridden by those other than self-acclaimed owners, and no one, not even Nietzsche, can ever have the “last word” on any particular meaning. Languages and cultures and meanings evolve, much as do living organisms.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra raved about clouds staining the “purity” of the sky. I ended my dissertation chapter on Nietzsche with the Gerard Manley poem "Pied Beauty." 

Glory be to God for dappled things—

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

       With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                     Praise Him.

 

Coming back now to my disagreement with Iris Murdoch, I offer for your consideration: Plato's rejection of the natural world as nothing but "appearance," reality being entirely and only eternal, ideal and unknowable (the life lessons the narrator draws from Plato are good ones, but do they need the metaphysics?); Schopenhauer's pessimism; Russell's frustration that philosophy could not be reduced to mathematics (this is my own view of him, so read him yourself to see what you think); Bergson's optimism and obsession with time; my own passionate love of natural ephemera and my Bergsonian-Heideggerian obsession with time. I confess I have not read Murdoch's philosophy, but I have no doubt her personality would reside in it, even if cloaked in mystifying universal terms. 

The images in today's post are from my personal life and surroundings, places and things I love, and my hope is that they will encourage philosophobes to come all the way with me, whether or not they slow down to muse or hurry to this final line.

Clouds add so much to the beauty of the sky.

Adding and Subtracting

Who was the first person to speak of sculpting marble as releasing the figure from the surrounding mass of stone? Looks like it was Michaelangelo. At least, he is first credited with the idea (I wonder if sculptors in the ancient world thought of their work that way), which has now become common currency among the public at large. But Michaelangelo’s way of seeing the task of a sculptor applies only to subtractive methods of sculpting, not to additive methods used by artists working in clay or wax, which naturally comes to my mind since the Artist in my life worked in wax. 

 

What occurred to me today, however, was a question about writing: Is writing additive or subtractive? The argument could go either way, couldn’t it?

 

Writing as an additive art: One begins with a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen. No words appear until the writer adds them. The result may fill hundreds of pages (forming a novel) or produce only a few lines surrounding by empty space (as in a haiku).

 

Writing as a subtractive art: Artists of the written word have at their disposal entire languages, and produce work by selecting words and sequences of words. In the editing process, what has been written in draft is often further pared down (e.g., eliminating an adverb by choosing a stronger verb).

 

Shall we take a vote? 

Sadly – and this really does make me sad; I shake my head in sorrow – as I was doing a search for additive vs. subtractive sculpture, wanting to include a link to a broader discussion, a site popped up with a woman’s face and an invitation to chat with her about my project, with the promise that a “completely original” essay could be written for me and delivered to me in three hours. That is, I could buy something and pretend it came out of my own head and heart. No, thank you. (And I want to add, “And you should be ashamed of yourself!”)

 

This post was NOT written by “artificial intelligence” (I always want to call AI “so-called”) but by one aging, human, small town bookseller, musing (as she so frequently does) on the subject of words. I have had guest bloggers write occasional posts, but they are all real people, too, presenting their own thoughts and words. Comments by real people, willing to write and speak for themselves, are always welcome, too. 

 

If you comment, how will I know you are real? You can verify my reality by stopping in at Dog Ears Books, 106 Waukazoo Street, in Northport, Michigan, because mine is a real bookstore, an open shop, where you get to see and touch the books in person before you buy. What a concept! Real indie bookstores – adding to the lives of community for hundreds of years! Dog Ears Books hasn’t been around as long as Livraria Bertrand, but we are celebrating our 30^th birthday this summer, so do stop by when you’re in the neighborhood.

This was 2015. Still have the same sandwich board in 2023.

Omigod! Another BOOK???

View from the first juniper --

My previous post told of a climbing adventure Sunny Juliet and I had on Saturday morning after I admitted that, before our adventure, I had “gotten up on the wrong side of the bed,” as my parents used to express morning crabbiness. Returning to the cabin post-adventure, then, with no possibility of a coffee house visit in town, would I also return to crabbiness? That was the big question! I had no social plans for the day, and no plans for further adventures, so the danger was real. I busied myself by starting to cook a pot of lentils to stave off bad temper, but the success of this plan would depend on the success of the lentils….

 

Ah-ha! Suddenly I remembered that the day was Saturday, not Sunday, and that meant there might be something in my mailbox down the road! Purposely stretching out the period of anticipation, however, I chopped onion and carrot to add to the lentils, adding also dissolved tamarind paste, Better than Bouillon (chicken flavor), and plenty of curry powder. Swept the floor. Picked up a book. 

I love USPS, and they do an excellent job here!

Because, you see, if the mailbox is empty on Saturday, all hope must be deferred until Monday; but until my key unlocks the box, hope can imagine a happy outcome. Is Schrodinger’s cat dead or alive? Is my mailbox empty, or does it hold a surprise to gladden my heart? Possibilities exist, if only in the mind, until a box is opened, so why hurry, since one possibility is always disappointment? 

 

(Please note I do not say the mailbox was both empty and containing a surprise, any more than I say the cat in Schrodinger’s closed was both alive and dead until the box was opened. This frequent interpretive error of a famous argument in physics is made by those who do not recognize the argument as a reductio ad absurdum. Thank you very much!)

 

Cut to the chase. Waiting for me on Saturday was not emptiness but a book I had ordered from Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Note: When I order online, I always try to order from real bookstores.) Carry the package back to the cabin. Remove brown cardboard. Next, open the book! Again, a range of possibilities presents. Will I be made happy? Disappointed? Left indifferent?

 

Flashback. One or two friends had posted links on Facebook to the personal home library of the late Dr. Richard Macksey, humanities professor at Johns Hopkins University. Seductive images of the library made me want to know more about Richard Macksey, and after I’d read about his life and work, naturally I wanted a book he’d written, which is how this particular volume came to be in my mailbox on Saturday. 

 

Not one you would have chosen?

The book. What I found at Midtown Scholar was a paperback edition of the proceedings of an international symposium on structuralism convened at Johns Hopkins in 1966 – not only papers presented but discussion following each presentation – with, thanks to Richard Macksey, an all-star multidisciplinary cast: René Girard, Richard Macksey, Charles Morazé, Georges Poulet, Eugenio Donato, Lucien Goldmann, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Jean Hippolite, Jacques Lacan, Guy Rosolato, Neville Dyson-Hudson, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Nicolas Ruwet, to give the names in the order in which they appear on the book’s cover. The book itself is The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism & the Sciences of Man.

 

Reminder and disclaimer. I was never an English major, please recall. Reading literary and art criticism can put me off, and writing it (I learned early on, when given such an assignment, not to choose work I loved!) I found downright painful. One graduate class in Philosophy of Literature and a semester as a teaching assistant in Philosophy of Film, with another in Philosophy of Art – that is the extent of my formal background in criticism. Graduate classes in philosophy in the late 1980s, however, introduced me to Foucault and Derrida, structuralism and deconstruction. But that’s all, and it was not a road I traveled very far.

 

Back to the book. Richard Macksey’s opening remarks to the assembled group bore the title “Lions and Squares.” It was – I suppose predictably and appropriately – academic, historic, and jargon-studded. It was fine. It did the job. My heart was not set on fire, but neither did I regret having ordered the volume. I read on….

 

I should probably re-read, “Tiresias and the Critic,” presented by René Girard, and before doing that should re-read Oedipus Rex, but as there was no discussion following that short piece, I moved on to Charles Morazé on “Literary Invention,” in which he proposed to question “the relationship of literary invention to invention in general.” Both the paper and the discussion following leaned on a distinction between invention and discovery, and I found myself smiling at the discussion, so familiar from my graduate school years. I was reading happily, crabbiness banished.

 

Jackpot!

Then came “Criticism and Interiority.” At first the paper’s title gave me a sinking feeling, a feeling that could be named the “Anticipation of No Fun at All.” How wrong that prediction was, and how glad I was to have been wrong! Why was I never introduced before to Georges Poulet? Here is how he begins:

 

At the beginning of Mallarmé’s unfinished story Igitur there is the description of an empty room, in the middle of which, on a table, there is an open book. This seems to me the situation of every book, until someone comes and begins to read it. Books are objects. On a table, on shelves, in store windows, they wait for someone to come and deliver them from their materiality, from their immobility. When I see them on display, I look at them as I would at animals for sale, kept in little cages…. They wait. Are they aware that an act of man might suddenly transform their existence? Read me, they seem to say. I find it hard to resist their appeal. No, books are not just objects among others. 

 

This man is speaking my language! And while his position becomes increasingly complicated as he proceeds, I was with him all the way. He speaks of how, when we read, the mind of the author enters our own. We think the writer’s thoughts – or they think us – but we are not thereby invaded. No, in the intimacy of reading, “I begin to share the use of my consciousness…” as the author and I “…start having a common consciousness.” From his personal experience, Poulet says,

 

Thus I often have the impression, while reading, of simply witnessing an action which at the same time concerns and yet does not concern me. This provokes a certain feeling of surprise within me. I am a consciousness astonished by an existence which is not mine, but which I experience as though it were mine. 

 

Haven’t you felt this, too, at times? “Lost in a book,” now and then you remember that you are reading, that you are not the character with whom you identify or the author of the characters, that you are holding in your hands a physical object, a book, and that the words on the page are creating visions in your mind. Really, it is astonishing, is it not?

 

I will not attempt a complete exposition of the ideas in Poulet’s paper, as I’ve probably lost 95% of my readers by now, anyway, and you few stalwarts hungry for more can treat yourselves to reading his works firsthand. But first, just a little more, because I find this so delicious. Poulet draws a contrast between two kinds of critics, one who loses their [you see? I can use current pronouns, though it still goes against the grain!] own consciousness in that of the writer, the other who refuses such identification altogether. The first kind of critical thought (I might say ‘reception) he calls ‘sensuous,’ the second ‘clear.’

 

…In either case, the act of reading has delivered me from egocentricity. Another’s thought inhabits me or haunts me, but in the first case I lose myself into that alien world, and in the other I keep my distance and refuse to identify. Extreme closeness and extreme detachment have then the same regrettable effect of making me fall short of the total critical act: that is to say, the exploration of that mysterious interrelationship [my emphasis added] which, through the mediation of reading and of language, is established to our mutual satisfaction between the work read and myself. 

 

He then suggests – perfect, I say! – combining the two methods “through a kind of reciprocation and alternation,” and I am delighted! Well, there is much more about subjects and objects, subjectivity and objectivity, but I leave it to you who are interested to follow up with primary sources. 

 

The first question asked of Georges Poulet in the discussion that followed his presentation was how, if at all, reading was to be differentiated from understanding another’s speech, and while acknowledging the fundamental similarity in the two cases, Poulet pointed out that in conversation, two or more participants are not only listening but also themselves speaking,

 

…and when we speak, we don’t listen. Thus very often, conversation, instead of becoming an inquiry in which someone who listens (or who reads) strives to identify himself with the thought of someone who speaks (or writes), becomes instead, quite to the contrary, a sort of battle….

 

Here, now, re-reading, I pause. [Pause. What do you think?] Because when I read history or opinion of any kind, I read not to lose myself (as in reading a novel or a poem) but as if I am a participant in a conversation, agreeing and disagreeing, questioning, objecting – in short, definitely keeping my distance. As when I read this very paper! But this is not a major disagreement….

 

Only one more bit that I can’t stop before including: In response to a philosophical question from James Edie, Poulet addresses an implied side issue: 

 

Am I “for” or am I “against” structuralism? I simply do not know; it is not for me to say; it is for the structuralists themselves. For my own part, sometimes I feel rather alien to the abstract and to the voluntarily objective way in which these structuralists express their own discoveries, and sometimes I am even shocked by that position. Sometimes I am shocked especially by their air of objectivity (I think particularly of one of them whom I consider a friend). I am particularly shocked when he claims to arrive thereby at scientific attitudes. I must confess that, to my own mind, very clearly, very definitely, criticism has the character of knowledge, but it is not a kind of scientific knowledge, and I have to decline very strongly the name of Scientist. I am not a scientist and I do not think that any true critic when he is making an act of criticism can be a scientist. [Again, the emphasis added is my own.] 

 

Well, my love only deepens with the statement quoted above. Not all knowledge should be called science, and science does not exhaust all the possibilities of knowledge. Thank you, Monsieur Poulet, for knowing so clearly where you stand and for allowing me, in reading your words, to stand with you!

 

And, once again, I echo fervently the words of the fictional Roger Mifflin, “Thank God I am a bookseller!” Magic and mystery are on every page of every book!

 

Postscript on Wednesday: 

 

State of the Union address: I listened and was very, very proud of President Biden, both for what he said and how he said it. At the same time, I couldn’t help remembering that last year David and I listened together, and that brought tears to my eyes. Several times the president made a joke, and I thought of how important a sense of humor was to David, in his friends and in anyone who intersected with his life. I also noted times when we both would have said, “Yes!” to the president’s statements. (Unlike me, my husband always listened quietly to political speeches, saving his comments for afterward, so with him I tried to do the same.) I remembered how David’s opinion of the president (make no mistake: we both voted for him!) rose considerably after the State of the Nation address. This year again, the president showed dignity, strength, and resolve. He did not avoid controversial subjects, either. The office of the president is strong and honorable under this president.

 

Throughout the year, President Biden is not always in our faces from one day to the next and acting like the “great and powerful Oz." No, he is a team player -- but he is also a strong leader, and when he does speak out, he speaks out strongly. 

 

David, I miss you! I wish we could have listened together again this year! Hope for my country, hope for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren — that’s what I got out of President Biden’s State of the Union address, and I know I am not alone. 

Keep calm. Carry on.

More Dog Tales -- and Dog Tails

At an earlier time in history in the British Isles, 

 

...[D]rover’s dogs and many farm dogs were referred to as ‘curs’ by reason of having their tails cut off or ‘curtailed.’ The tail docking ceased but the name remained until the beginning of this [20^th] century. At one time [in England] all dogs were liable to a tax, but a shepherd’s dog was exempt if it had its tail docked, and should these dogs trespass en route or in the course of their normal duties as sheep or farm dogs the distinctive mark of the docked tail would save them from the wrath of the gamekeeper, as it was believed that docking slowed down their agility when chasing or killing game. However, this tax failed in its purpose and was abolished…. A new tax on dogs was introduced in 1796 … revised in 1878, and again the shepherd’s dog became exempt.

 

-      Iris Combe, Border Collies (Faber & Faber, London & Boston, 1978

 

Isn’t that an interesting bit of historic lore? It really puts to rest all the specious reasons given for docking tails in modern times, explanations shown up by this historic note as nothing but after-the-fact rationalizations for doing something that was done for a very specific financial purpose at one time in English history. You can still read, online and elsewhere that the tail of, for example, an Australian shepherd is at risk in the field and that docking is done to avoid injury. Ha! Why wouldn’t the tails of all dogs be at risk in the field? It never made sense to me.

 

I am reminded of a story. There was once a housewife who always cut off the end of the ham before she put it in the oven. When her husband asked the reason, she said her mother had always done it. Finally she asked her mother for the reason. “Oh, my roasting pan was too small for a big ham,” the mother replied. 

 

With a bigger roasting pan, the end of the ham need not be cut off. 

 

Without the general dog tax and exemption for farm dogs, there is no reason to dock dogs’ tails.

 

Tail docking and ear cropping has been illegal in England and Wales since 2007. In the U.S., anyway, the AKA breed standard for the border collie includes a moderately long tail, set low and sweeping upward at the end; the standard for the Australian shepherd, on the other hand, is for a tail “straight, docked or naturally bobbed, not to exceed four inches in length.”

 

Border collie: long, sweeping tail

Aussie: short or no tail

 

Both are working breeds, so why the tail distinction today between the two? Despite the old tax, it seems peculiar that any dog bred and used for farm work and driving livestock and geese would have its tail bobbed if indeed the tail were as important to the dog’s work as Iris Combe clearly considered it.

 

This [the tail] constitutes the extra braking and balancing power of a collie moving and stopping at speed.  … Shepherds often remark that the brains are in the tail.

 

Our Sarah, though I always thought of her as more Aussie, was a mix of Aussie and border collie and had what filled out to become, as she grew from puppyhood to maturity, a beautiful plumy tail. I was always glad that her tail had not been docked when she was a puppy. My sympathy is all with English law on this matter. 

Peasy does not have much of a tail at all, but he may not have suffered having his tail docked. A naturally bobbed tail is less common in border collies than in Aussies, but sometimes there is a DNA variant in one of the genes, and that could have been the case with Peasy. Then, if he is a border collie – or more border than Aussie -- since border collies are supposed to have tails, and since breeding two dogs with the variant can be lethal to puppies in utero, little Peasy’s short, stumpy tail would have made him less desirable.

Do naturally bobtailed dogs or dogs with docked tails do less well in agility? Are they at a disadvantage when working with stock? I’ve read opinions both ways on that question. One disadvantage of tailless dogs that does seems probable, though, is the part that dogs’ tails play in doggie social signaling. Both Iris Combe and Temple Grandin make this point.

 

Back to the question of why breeders want to see tails in one working breed and not in another, we have to remember that “purebred” show dogs, outside of the world of livestock, are a very modern concern. At one time, every sheep-raising region in Great Britain bred its own regional strain of sheepdog. ‘Sheepdog,’ a generic term, needs no explanation, but what about ‘collie’? Here is another gem from Iris Combe:

 

The old Gaelic rural term for anything useful is ‘collie’ and for anything black is ‘coly.’ I refer here to the sort of Gaelic dialect as spoken among farming folk, not the true Gaelic language as found in textbooks. … So a collie dog was a useful farm dog, and in Scotland the names of many farm utensils are prefixed by the word ‘collie.’ 

 

Border collies are said to be wary and reserved with strangers. Peasy is certainly wary and reserved, to put it mildly, when meeting new people for the first time -- which has only happened twice so far in these strange COVID times -- and that could be another reason he was in the county facility for so long. I thought it could take days or even weeks before he would trust us. But, surprise! Peasy took to having a family the way a duck takes to water! He is inordinately cuddly, extremely affectionate, and could hardly be more eager to please. He is getting the hang of basic commands and has learned to “Wait!” for permission before going through an open door or diving into his dinner. 

 

It is a big responsibility, adopting and raising any dog, but especially one of the herding breeds, and Peasy is much more of a challenge than our laid-back Sarah was. Here are parting words of advice from Iris Combe:

 

…Your puppy was born with a certain personality which he will possess all his life, but the formation of his general character will, through training and association with you, reflect some of your personality as well. It is very true to say that some dogs are like their owners; see to it that this is a compliment in your own case. The choice and opportunity lie with you.

 

 

Book Review: MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW

Snow was falling in Northport on Thursday afternoon, sometimes blowing horizontally down Waukazoo Street, with the temperature hovering right around the freezing mark when one of my customers arrived to pick up her special order. The book she had ordered sounded so intriguing that I’d ordered a second copy, and later that afternoon I began reading. 

The central character, Evan Whitesky, up in northern Ontario, is on the trail of a moose.

He had been out since early morning and had been tracking this particular bull since around noon. The fall hunt was drawing to a close, and he still wanted to put more food away. Food from the South was expensive and never so good, or as satisfying, as the meat he could bring in himself.  

- Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow

Evan takes pride in providing for his partner and their two young children. An accomplished hunter and fisherman, he has put away enough protein for the winter to have plenty to share with his parents, and when Evan joins his father in cleaning a hide, the two men envision future moccasins. The Whitesky family is better prepared than some others on the reserve for life without hydro power.

A missing satellite signal brings the first hardship: no morning television for the children and no Internet signal for their elders. Electric power lasts a little longer before it too goes out, but people on the remote, isolated reserve have experienced power outages before and know how to cope until the electricity comes back on. They remind each other that the old ones in times past lived without electric lights and television. When there is no signal for their cell phones, some still have landlines — until these, too, fall dead.

It is the beginning of winter, so the Council needs to plan for the future as well as for the immediate situation. Without regular deliveries of fuel and food from the South, they have enough diesel to run a generator until late February, if everyone cooperates in conserving energy, and with foresight they have stockpiled a cache of canned foods for just this sort of emergency, but surviving the immediate emergency is only the first step, and the future is unclear.

Three more cold nights passed. The generator power would only last so long. The chief called another emergency meeting at the band office…. There was still no communication with anyone in the outside world.

The world of the novel is circumscribed from the outset. Its remote backstory is one of displacement — from the Great Lakes region to the south, the people had been forced to the harsher north — the nearer backstory one of dependence on regular deliveries of groceries and fuel. But that was then, and this is now, and the demands of now throw the people back on traditional ways of life and traditional values that some have been practicing all along and others need to learn.

Peshawbestown dancers in Northport

Evan has been going to school, informally, with his elders: learning the people’s language, he and Nicole are teaching it to their children, and, somewhat awkwardly, using the native words he knows interspersed with English, he speaks traditional prayers on the appropriate occasions. His parents’ knowledge of old ways is augmented by stories and lessons given him by the band’s oldest member, a woman in her late eighties. He hunts and shares with those in need, and he is learning to pray.

Aileen brought the flickering orange light under the carefully piled sage in the shell, and the medicine caught fire. She let it burn for a few seconds before blowing it out. Thick grey smoke billowed from the shell….

One-way “contact” with the outside world comes only three times in the novel, in quietly escalating pitch. First, a homecoming: Two young members of the band arrive on snowmobiles, having fled the chaos of the town below, which is also without power or grid infrastructure and where people are panicking and growing violent. Next, an intruder: A large, dangerous-looking white man, Justin Scott, has followed the trail of the returning young men and requests asylum, promising to pull his weight on the hunt. Finally, a while later, four more white refugees turn up and are taken in, nominally by the band, more immediately by Scott. What will the presence of these outsiders, especially the frightening and mysterious Scott, mean in this tight-knit community?

Words and phrases of Anishinaabemowin are a natural fit in Rice’s characters’ speech and are generally translated immediately, so a reader unfamiliar with the language can understand and perhaps learn a little along the way. Dreams are handled naturally, as well, either told by one dreamer to another character or presented without transition but also without confusion. When the legendary windigo enters the story, it does so naturally and quietly at first, without undue drama and literary special effects, so that we are gradually prepared for its full-blown presence.

Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, like Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, imagines a world suddenly bereft of electricity, electronic and digital devices, and energy systems we take for granted in our daily lives, but the imagined worlds of the two novels are very different. In the Mandel novel, we roam cities and countryside with groups of wandering Shakespearean players, a “family” brought together by interest and necessity rather than inheritance, and in the end the world as we know it is restored. The people in Rice’s world, many of them related to each other by blood, remain in place. We follow their lives in that place through the first hard winter and leave them in the spring following their second winter, the latter — and the longer-term future — left to our imaginations. 

Both novels, you might say, are stories of post-apocalyptic survival, but Rice’s character Aileen dismisses the apocalyptic notion. She has heard of the notion from young people but puts no credence in it.

“Yes, apocalypse! What a silly word. I can tell you there’s no word like that in Ojibwe. Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders, anyway. 

Evan nodded, giving the elder his full attention. 

“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here.” 

We’ve always survived, and we always will, Aileen tells Evan. 

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States presents the past of the North American continent from a perspective not taught in schools with curricula set in place by whites, and Moon of the Crusted Snow presents a possible future from a non-white point of view — one possible non-white point of view, of course. That Rice’s compelling story is told in beautiful language with sympathetic characters in a setting not difficult to imagine as the first real snow blows into northern Michigan seared it into my brain, and I recommend it for your winter reading, wherever you live and whatever your ethnic background or connection to the virtual world.

Our reading world is enriched as more voices come to be heard in fiction from different cultural, ethnic, and historical perspectives.