Puck

review by Brian Charles Clark

After Dark
Haruki Murakami
Knopf, 2007

Haruki Murakami has always written fairly straightforward, declarative sentences. In his latest novel to be published in English, the Japanese writer’s prose is distilled down to its essence. This is not a trick of translation, as the Japanese title of the novel reveals: Afutadaku is as bare as its English counterpart and eerily suggests a universal language only spoken after the sun has gone down.

Indeed, Murakami is, as usual in his stories and novels, after some sort of universal experience. It’s just that this time the connections between people are thin, barely visible, worn down, it would seem, by years of abuse.

Murakami is anyway always interested in the sorts of connections that most people don’t see. “The gates between worlds” is perhaps his major theme, though a gate might be the bottom of a dry well (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle), the difference engine at work between the cerebral lobes of a character (Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World), or a painting (Kafka on the Shore). Hardly gates at all, really; let’s say then that his theme is the alchemical and surrealist one of “communicating vessels.” Read the rest of this entry »

Riverfalls remix by DJ Funken Wagnalls

I mixed up The Sea and Cake for an acidplanet contest back in 2003, but it was only posted on AP for a few days before I realized that I had entered it in the wrong category and took it down. Listening to it again for the first time in years, I still think it’s a good mix, so here you go: download or stream, as you please. You’ll find the original version of “Le Baron” on their One Bedroom album. Their new album, Everybody, was just released, with the usual lineup, on Thrill Jockey. Funkendub says check it out–they’re one of the best bands going.

From Cannon Beach we slithered down the coast a few miles to Arch Cape. We spent some time on Arcadia beach.

“The Oregon coast, adjacent to a coastal mountain range, is part of a relatively narrow continental margin where three tectonic plates converge: the Juan de Fuca plate, the smaller Gorda plate, and the North American Plate. The continental margin consists of the continental shelf, continental slope, and submarine canyons along the coast. Much of this area was above sea level during the last glacial period when coastal rivers cut into the land and delivered sediments to the deep ocean,” says the Oregon Coastal Atlas. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing on our journey along the Oregon coast, we stopped at a beach near Arch Cape, just south of Cannon Beach. More sea stacks, etc., all lovely.

We shot an educational science video which we hope you enjoy.

The Mistress of the Knavish Sprites and I are on the road again, this time in Cannon Beach, a lovely, well kept, flower-laden town filled with cottages that has had to become a tourist trap to survive. Ah, the nipping jaws of capitalism. The MKS says she finds it remarkable that the shopkeepers have not become jaded, even after what must be a long season for them. I reluctantly agree, even while noting all the “help wanted” notices which emphasize that the potential candidates for these low-paying service positions must be cheerful in the face of all retail tourism adversity. Not just capitalism, but new age capitalism is at work in this lovely town.

Plus, there’s the Haystack, a monolithic sea stack that makes this place an icon of the Pacific Northwest coast. (That said, this coast is loaded with sea stacks, conical protuberances that begin to glaze together into a single snapshot memory.) And after the furnace of the Palouse, it’s cool without testing one’s capacity for wardrobe. Then, too, the LBBs (little brown birds) are seemingly tame and all dogs that come here find themselves in a heaven of scent and surf.

But you’ve got to wonder about a town that names its main drag Hemlock. Is there a Socrates hidden in Cannon Beach’s closet?

Hemlock is lined with shops–far too many kitchy galleries–and motels. We’re staying at the Inn at the Village Centre, but it should be more properly called the Room at the Village Centre, as there’s only one. The Centre is one of those malls that stretches back into the lot, like a strip mall turned on its ear, and with maze-like obstructions thrown in for adventurous shopping fun. It’s always a hunt for hidden treasure here in Cannon Beach. Jennifer, the manager of the Inn, is a kindly, cheerful young woman with a couple kids she said we should “smack” if they get too loud. That hasn’t been necessary, though, as her children are like the birds, tame and cooing with the bliss of the good life. It’s summer, after all.
On the steps up into the new books bookstore (as opposed to Jupiter Books, which sells used, and is pretty cool, featuring a proprietor with a Carolinas lilt) we overheard a young woman on her cellphone.

Hi, Mom! It’s me! I’m in Cannon Beach. The air is so fresh.”

Earlier in the day I walked into Jupiter Books and the Carolina lilt of the bearded owner chortled, “That might be him now.” I did a double take, not really sure the remark was directed at me, even though the heads of the owner and his customers all turned and stared at me.

Freak! Old insecurities die hard.

“Just kidding,” he said. “I was telling them that I heard Terry Bishop had a place in town.”

“I am not he,” I said, to clear things up as quickly as possible. I wanted to browse on books like a manatee in the library of the sea.

Then I found, way in the back, precisely where you’d expect to find the poetry, some old copies of Talus and Scree, a lit zine that once published a poem of mine (in number 3). I’d been used as a conversational ploy, temporarily confused with a famous science fiction writer, and here was the proof of my obscurity in the who-knows-how-many-times-turned-over inventory of literary America.

Dara Cowell’s piece on Alternet about the genetic engineering of trees, “Frankenforest: GE Trees Threaten Ecosystem Collapse,” concerns me. Not because I’m in favor of genetically engineering plants or animals. To the contrary, I think it’s a bad idea and for all the reasons Cowell states–except, in my case, without the scare-language that permeates the piece.

What bugs me is that this yet another example of wild-eyed, doom-saying liberal anti-science journalism that (not surprisingly, considering it’s anti-science) ignores the science in favor of trying to scare the bejeezus out of us. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeanette Winterson, the British novelist, wonders in the Times of London (and which I found via BroneteBlog):

As the floodwaters rose around me and we sank in a summer of rain, I tried a kind of homeopathic charm; what books could I find on my shelves where floods and rain played a part?

Winterson rattles off the usual list of suspects, including the biblical flood story and (weirdly) the movie version of Frankenstein (which movie? and why not the novel?). What’s odd to me is that almost none of the academic eco-criticism types have picked up on climate as at least a viable leit motif for analysis. In my reading of gothic lit, climate and weather are veritable characters. Wouldn’t it be useful (something that is normally very difficult to say about contemporary literary studies) to analyze climate and weather in literature with an eye toward shedding some light on our current crisis, a crisis which, in our inability to do anything concrete about, is surely as much moral and psychological as scientific and economic?

I took a stab at it a couple years ago by presenting a paper at a low-level, regional MLA lit-studies conference. I was met with blank stares, for the most part, perhaps because I eschewed the jargon of the trade as much as possible. Because they could understand all the words I used, the audience may have felt talked down to. Or maybe it’s just a crappy paper. It certainly doesn’t delve deep enough into the implied thesis: that climate is a character or anyway a means of characterizing roles.

In any case, here’s the paper as presented at the conference in 2005. Perhaps it’ll be of some use to an eco-conscious scholar attempting to open the field of climatocriticism. Read the rest of this entry »

You have to ask of the solo insect, fly or bee: who do you work for?

insectophobia is killing my country.” (to paraphrase Graham Nash)

I just swatted a fly. A big, fat solo fly. (Need I say black?)

Can you believe something like one-third of the world’s energy out-take goes to ag inputs? Fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, jesus christ water. Most of that is nitrogen (fertilizer), because we kill the plants that fix the nitrogen and feed the insects that thwart the pests that kill the plants we really want to eat or process.

We are food miners and we don’t have enough insects. Damn.

Defective By Design writes:

The BBC should have chosen free and open standards that work well and are available today—software that you can install on every major operating system including Microsoft’s. Free software.

Instead, they have given Microsoft complete control.This deal isn’t about supporting Microsoft Windows users. It’s about excluding everyone who doesn’t use Microsoft Windows. It says that everyone who does not agree to use DRM and proprietary software made by Microsoft cannot view BBC TV programs over the Internet. Read more.