Puck

Richard Powers is a master of sleight-of-hand. He writes novels full of science but escapes being called a science fiction writer. In Generosity: An Enhancement, the latest novel by the MacArthur “genius” grant and National Book Award winner (for The Echo Maker), Powers feints and flourishes in order to — presto-magico — pull together two seemingly unrelated themes: genetic engineering and creative nonfiction.

In Powers’ hands, the relation between the two themes is laid bare: they both are concerned with the nature, manipulation, and enhancement of reality. In recent years, we’ve seen the formerly innocuous genre of memoir mutate into the high-stakes blockbuster industry of creative nonfiction. And woe unto he who fudges the truth in his memoir, who tells a lie, however small. What used to be par for the course in memoir is now a cardinal sin: remember James Frey and A Million Little Pieces? Read the rest of this entry »

I just found a couple more reviews of On Joanna Russ, to which I contributed an essay. This review is by Paul Kincaid, and was featured on The SF Site; snip:

Anyone who came into science fiction during the late 60s and 70s would have been aware of Joanna Russ. Even if you never read any of her relatively few novels or stories, you couldn’t avoid the name. Of the three great women writers who did so much to transform science fiction at this time, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Russ, Russ was far and away the most controversial. So much so that it was known for her name to be greeted with boos at an sf convention, and believe me even in the conservative world of fandom that was unusual.

Joanna Russ is an incredibly important figure in the history of science fiction and the author of a couple of novels and several short stories that deserve to endure. This beautifully produced collection of essays is a fitting tribute to her, and even those who know Russ’s work well will learn from many of these essays. Even so, this is still only telling part of the story about an elusive and complex writer. We’d be better off if all her work were back in print, but until that happens this is a superb reminder of what a valuable and important writer she is.

The other review is by Cheryl Morgan who makes a point about book reviewing that is near and dear to my heart; snip:

it occurs to me that those people who complain that book reviews should always be neutral and objective, and not bring in the reviewers personal viewpoint in any way, are very like those people who claim that books that have no obvious character ethnicity (and are therefore default white) are good because they are “colorblind”. If you get criticized for standing out from the cultural norm it is probably because you have said something interesting and subversive.

You enter the moment of the “naked lunch” when you realize just what that is quivering at the end of your fork. We’ve been staring at that living, gelatinous mass for 50 years now – and we still don’t know what it is.

It’s a novel. It’s a poem. It’s (as one shrill Amazon reviewer has it) the ranting of a LIBERAL ATHEIST JUNKY. It’s (drug-induced or not, take your pick) stream-of-consciousness. It’s the first prose cut-up. It’s pornography. It’s the end (or beginning) of (post-)modernism. It’s The Bomb, it’s a how-to-be-a-writer manual. Here’s the definitive answer to all that: Yes, it is. Naked Lunch is all that and more.

Naked Lunch is one of the most written-about books of the twentieth century. It’s up there with Ulysses and The Wasteland for the title of “book most likely to generate a graduate thesis.” That’s because, like those other two, it’s an open text: you’re quite likely to find there precisely what you go looking for.

Everything, that is (as a different Amazon reviewer complained) except stuff about lunch and nudity: “doesn’t anybody like to eat in the nude?” Read the rest of this entry »

Wino, the Seattle-based magazine for wine lovers with an attitude, has just posted my latest column on the science of wine and the importance of micronutrients on grapes.

When humans don’t get enough zinc, we can get sick with cancer and suffer immune-system dysfunction. The same is true of plants. Micronutrients such as boron, zinc and copper, although only a tiny part of a plant’s diet, can have a profound effect on the plant’s health.

via Higher Learning: A Pinch of This, a Dash of That -.

This post is especially for Zoe over at Zoe in Wonderland. If you haven’t checked out her site (it’s in Puck’s blog roll), I highly recommend it as a source of wondrous, fantastical art and writing.

There’s a new paper on the sources of inspiration for the famous works of the mathematician Charles Dodgson — better known to most of us as Lewis Carrol, author of the Alice books.

In an article in New Scientist, doctor of philosophy student and literary scholar Melanie Bayley proposes that Dodgson wrote his books as an attack on the new-fangled mathematics making headway in his day. Dodgson was a conservative geometer, Bayley claims, who was deeply upset by the seemingly arbitrary manipulation of numbers and, especially, figures:

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the…  scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Bayley points out that, surprisingly (though not really, considering the great divide between the arts and sciences), there are few critical works on Dodgson that take into account the fact that he was a mathematician. Bayley goes a long way toward remedying that situation. Her piece should be a model for literary scholars who turn a blind eye toward science and math when commenting on literature.

Dan o’ Xark! has an interesting piece on narrative journalism and its evolution. I’ve commented on Dan’s thinking before and admire his intellectual creativity and restlessness.

What he’s up to in this piece is arguing for an end (or at least an alternative) to long-form narrative journalism in favor of…. something else.

Journalism schools have taught view-from-nowhere, AP Style-compliant, mass-media-voice long-form feature writing for decades, and readers just aren’t interested. Educating another generation of students to file 75-inch profiles of local United Way executives, written for the annual press contest judges who determine next-year’s promotions, just isn’t much of an answer to the market-side questions that demand our attention.

True enough. But the really interesting point he makes comes a bit further down:

Classic narrative follows a subject through a conflict to a resolution. And if our primary means of understanding something as complex as global warming is just a series of narratives about conflict, then we’re not going to make much progress. This is one reason why American mainstream news organizations kept emphasizing critics of global warming, even though the most credible peer-reviewed studies favored the anthropogenic warming theory championed by Al Gore…. We didn’t need better narrative journalism about global warming, we needed less of it. We needed a way of communicating that encouraged the evaluation of facts instead of the balancing of rhetoric. It’s a shift that requires a radically different theory of the press.

It’s difficult to see how a “different theory of the press” is going to change something that has nothing, really, to do with the press and everything to do with cognition. You can present things in ways that encourage an evaluation of facts (e.g., charts and graphs or, as Dan suggests by way of example, box scores), but we’re still going to contextualize those facts by way of a conflict-driven narrative.

If the facts don’t move us, we don’t care. And in order to be moved, in order for facts to move, they must in some way, an engine-like way, face resistance. We need to at least imagine counterfactuals: I’m not here, I’m there, in that person’s shoes.

So Dan’s example of the critics of global warming getting face time in the media makes sense. If you want to do something about it, start by reporting from the critics’ point of view: the climate isn’t changing, you report, and then give many column inches to the critics of that view.

Dan argues that, without box scores,

how many at-bats would never have been recorded for future historians because they didn’t fit into the narrative the writer picked as he hammered out a story on deadline?

Fair enough. But those historians will do nothing with that information without first recontextualizing it as conflict-driven narrative. Indeed, lovers of baseball routinely recontextualize box scores, mentally pitting pitcher against batter and so on.

It’s not journalism that needs to evolve to address your concerns, Dan; it’s the human brain that must change.

I’ve just learned that writer Ray Federman passed away. I spent a delightful quarter studying literature and creative writing with Ray in the mid-1980s at UC San Diego. My friend Shawn Rider, who studied with Ray at the University of Idaho in the early years of this century, created a code poem tribute to the beloved novelist.

Ray Federman

KJ recently passed her exam so is now a certified Sustainable Building Advisor. To celebrate her success, we started a new blog called Smart Energy Advisor. We think of it as “fun with sustainable building.” It’s all that, plus our dream-home wish list and more.

We hope you’ll check it out, leave comments and suggests topics for us to post about. Or, as with Puck, submit an article or photo yourself!

Nisi Shawl’s novella, “Good Boy,” is a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. “Good Boy” appears in Nisi’s 2008 book, Filter House, which has already made a lot of folks’ best-of lists — including mine. Good luck, Nisi!

L. Timmel Duchamp wrote a great review of On Joanna Russ, the literary-critical anthology which I’m a part of.  The review just went up on Strange Horizons. Duchamp writes,

the realization struck me that the collection’s essays could be divided into those that, on the one hand, seek to smooth over Russ’s angry edges and those that, on the other, attend closely and carefully to all that is uncomfortable and challenging in Russ’s work. Such a division, however, would create so sharp a difference between critical approaches that I had to wonder: does recognition of the angry edges in Russ’s work matter? Ought critics to engage directly with them? Psychological experiments have shown that subjects more easily recognize anger in men’s faces than in women’s, confirming feminist observations that women’s anger is commonly treated as derisory, unnecessary, or unwarranted. What, then, is a (feminist) reader to make of a critic’s ignoring or patronizing of that anger?

I’m not sure Duchamp ever really answers that question in her review. Speaking for myself, I felt that Russ’s anger is at the core of her work, that it truly does matter, that her anger is what makes her work sing, and so I tried to honor it as well as I could. Her’s what Duchamp says about my piece:

The final piece in the book, Brian Charles Clark’s “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ” is more a paean to Russ’s fiction than an essay. It leaps and soars over the (topological) surface of Russ’s fiction at speed, sampling literary and theoretical allusions even more promiscuously than Butler’s essay does, with manic energy and delight, never lighting on the surface for more than an instant. While Butler’s essay invokes Cixous’s style, Clark’s, never burdened by the gravid weight of critical pretension, actually emulates it. Clark’s essay serves as a coda, taking the book out on an appreciative—even ecstatic—note of Russ’s still-standing challenge.