November 20 - UVic Bookstore

The softcover version of a book I've been weighing for some time now, Timothy Morton's Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics ($26.50), was on the shelf at the UVic bookstore today when I wandered through to check if a book I'd ordered had arrived yet. (Nope.) Ecology Without Nature will have to hold me, I guess, until the April 2010 publication of Morton's next book, The Ecological Thought!

November 19 - Malahat Review booksale

I'm always happy to hand over some money to the Malahat Review, and it's especially important to support small Canadian magazines and journals now that the federal government will be cutting their subsidies if their subscription list is too short. Appalling but predictable behaviour from the federal Conservatives, I think. I bought a handful of books ($1 each unless otherwise noted), donated some extra cash, got cranky:

• 4 Poets: Daniela Elza, Peter Morin, Al Rempel, Onjana Yawnghwe
• Colin Browne, The Shovel
• Joan Crate, Suburban Legends
• Lorne Dufour, Jacob's Prayer: Loss and Resilience at Alkali Lake
• Donald A. Fraser, My Nugget Poke ($2)
• Tom Henry, Westcoasters: Boats That Built BC ($2)
• Don LePan, Animals (a novel launched just a couple of weeks ago)
• Charles Lillard, Circling North
• Garry Thomas Morse, Death in Vancouver
• Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
• Lloyd Ratzlaff, The Crow Who Tampered with Time

November 17 - Russell Books

They've done such a nice job with the renovation, Russell Books: they've gotten out of the way, and there's just a vast amount of room for books. After a great lunch at the Pink Bicycle yesterday (chanterelles and swiss on Vancouver Island beef), there was a detour to Russell Books -- new unless otherwise noted:

• Pamela Banting, ed., Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape ($9.99)
• Bruce Barcott, ed., Northwest Passages: A Literary Anthology of the Pacific Northwest, from Coyote Tales to Roadside Attractions ($9.99)
• Mark Hume, The Run of the River: Portraits of Eleven British Columbia Rivers ($7.99)
• CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader ($3.99 used, the right edition to fill out the boxed set I picked up some time ago)
• Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information ($9.99: McKibben watched all 24 hours of programming from all 93 cable channels available in Fairfax, Virginia, on May 3, 1990, and in this book sets what he learned in that "day" against what he learned from a day of camping about a week later)
• Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution ($9.99 -- "how the scientific revolution sanctioned the exploitation of nature, commercial expansion, and the subjugation of women," as the blurb puts it)
• Harry Robinson (with Wendy Wickwire), Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller ($7.99)
• Sound Heritage IV.2 (1975), special issue on Aural History, Regional Studies and Literature in British Columbia ($1.00 used, price inexplicable)
• Sound Heritage 33 (1981), issue written and edited by Bob Bossin, Settling Clayoquot ($6.99 used)

John Lent, Monet's Garden

The Okanagan: I grew up (sort of, for part of it) in the Shuswap, which is just beyond the northernmost point in the North Okanagan drainage. This year I've got a student who's reading literature from/about the Okanagan, and I'm enjoying the visits to places I knew fairly well but were just outside the range of my familiarity.

John Lent's linked short story collection Monet's Garden is this week's read. Vernon figures in several of the stories, as setting for some and as subtext for others. The book reminded me strongly of John Harris' Small Rain, which came out seven years earlier and is physically similar in size. Both of them use linked stories and flirt with autobiography in their approach, and both are anchored in a particular Canadian location.

But whereas Small Rain is fifteen stories marked as fiction and yet using the names of real people Harris knows (including a first-person narrator named "John Harris"), only two of Lent's stories here are openly nonfictional, and those are "Roofs" and "Roofs in the Heart." At least, I think they're nonfictional! The first is about a writer at a Banff retreat who goes home to Vernon for the weekends to plant flowers, and who on the drive back comes up with the idea of an Edmonton family consisting of parents plus three children, and all the stories are about this family. The second, the book's final story, includes the remark that "The voices that began in the car three months ago have stopped" (p.117). There are enough overlaps between the fictional and biographical families that it's clear Lent has been mining his past for material, but what writer doesn't do that, at least a little? Harris might be writing nonfiction and calling it fiction; Lent's writing fiction, though he might be using it to reflect on his own life.

It's a typically dysfunctional family, the one whose life Lent chronicles here via fragment, and it has the standard appeal and lack thereof common to all such approaches. Every family is dysfunctional in its own way, of course, and every story needs some conflict, but I didn't find much unexpected here. It's a small-press book (from Thistledown in 1996, which continues to publish excellent work today), and it felt like some other small-press books I've read. More people need to read them, but I'm not sure how to get there!

And I'm not sure whether to recommend this book, either. It sounds like Lent's 2005 follow-up So It Won't Go Away continues the same exploration of the terrain between fiction and non-, so I might need to read that one before I can make a real judgement about this book. It's certainly neither forgettable nor a throw-away; Monet's Garden has some fine writing, and some of the character studies are especially good. Settings felt too often like catalogues of details to me, especially of commercial enterprises, though presumably that's part of the point. It belongs on my "good BC literature" shelves, definitely, but there's no ranking system within the domain of the shelves....

November 8 - Haunted Bookshop

Whenever I get out to Sidney BC, I make a point of zipping into the Haunted Bookshop. I say "zipping" because I usually have my seven-year-old in tow, and she's not all that patient when it's not her kind of bookstore! (Her kind of bookstore, we're there for hours. Something in the genes.)

Anyway, it's a great shop, but to my credit I managed not to buy the four-volume set of Nature Display'd (1736-1740), since it was after all priced at $1450.00 ("firm, no movement on price," said the fellow working the store yesterday). I'd call it overpriced, but I'm no antiquarian -- as keen as I am on the book.

Not overpriced, though, were a couple of books from the shop's seriously impressive collection of BC writing and BC history:

• Gilean Douglas, River for My Sidewalk ($8 -- she published it first under a male pseudonym in 1953, thinking no one would believe that a woman could survive in the wild like this)
• Howard White, The Men There Were Then ($10 -- 1st edition, near perfect condition, with a copy of the original 1983 press release from the publisher)

Douglas is a really great writer, in poetry as well as prose, and it's criminal that none of her own work is in print. (There's a selection of it in Lebowitz & Milton's Gilean Douglas: Writing Nature, Finding Home, but she deserves to be read in bulk rather than in essence.)

As for White, I've had a casual eye out for this book ever since I was first amazed by a short selection in the Tom Wayman-edited anthology Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job. You have to know that old-time loggers kept their axes incredibly sharp, and that they hung them from their belts with the blades uncovered:

...one time one man when he
turned to reach for his saw,
he brushed that razor sharp axe
and it slit his middle
right along the belt line for about eight inches.
It didn't bleed so much but
his intestines came looping down like bunting.
When we came with the stretcher this man
was under the cut crouched on his knees
delicately holding up these gut loops
one by one splashing sawdust off 'em
with water from his waterbag.
There are no men like that
around today. (Wayman p.67; White pp.32-33)

No, no there aren't men like that today. At least not in my house.

October 31 - Value Village

Killing time, as usual, and for some reason Value Village continues to be a reliable source of older BC writing:

• Ken Cathers, Images on Water (ninety-nine cents, for a 1976 poetry collection from Lantzville's wonderful Oolichan Books)
• Roderick Haig-Brown, Fisherman's Winter ($1.99, the one set about fishing the rivers of Chile and Argentina)
• John Hay, Nature's Year: The Seasons of Cape Cod ($1.99 for a 1961 nature-writing classic)
• Eric Nicol, Vancouver ($1.99 -- serious rather than humorous, but still the Nicol touch)
• Tom Parkin, Wet Coast Words (ninety-nine cents, for a BC "dictionary")

Don Gayton, Landscapes of the Interior

As I've confessed once already on this blog, I didn't get what Don Gayton was all about when I first came across his writing, in the form of The Wheatgrass Mechanism: Science and Imagination in the Western Canadian Landscape. The book wasn't helpful with what I was trying to accomplish academically at the time (a dissertation on nature in 18th-century British literature), and it didn't help me retain contact with my BC home landscapes while I lived in Edmonton, and for whatever reason, I sighed and put it aside. "Not my thing," was roughly my thinking at the time.

Of course, I regretted this greatly when I had the good fortune to read his most recent book Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden, which I enjoyed enormously. "Bugger," I thought, "gotta try Wheatgrass again."

And then this semester, Don Gayton was the Roderick Haig-Brown Writer in Residence at my university, while I'm teaching an upper-level English course in nature writing. He agreed to come speak with my class, and I prepped for the event by reading some of his work, including dipping back into Wheatgrass and (more importantly for this post) reading for the first time his Landscapes of the Interior: Re-Explorations of Nature and the Human Spirit.

This book should have been assigned reading in my nature writing course this semester, even if he hadn't come to speak with the class. Cast as a series of visits to places of remembered importance to him, Landscapes of the Interior gives its reader the best of Gayton as ecologist and Gayton as writer. He reflects persistently on the ways in which he's finding or creating meaning for himself in particular places, but he's also careful about the scientific information. On occasion, this means we get to watch an ecologist's mind get stuck on a problem, and I found that helpful in some complicated, rewarding ways.

In one passage set in a small coulee leading down to the Oldman River out of a Lethbridge suburb, for example, Gayton gets angry about a motorbike track that's torn up a small patch of topsoil that'd take a hundred years to replace. Ever the ecologist, though, he then remembers that the coulee is relatively young and hence subject to slumping and slides much more potent than the spinning wheel of a dirt-bike. (Indeed, there are fresh signs of slumping right in the same area.) Inspired by the ecosystem management conference from which he's cheerfully playing hooky, he can't help asking further questions beyond his ability to answer at this point:

Could ecosystem management define a sustainable level of soil disturbance, and a ratio between natural and anthropogenic disturbance?
What about the invading grasses that clog the hillsides around me? How could I put them into an ecosystem management framework? Could I somehow determine a natural, pre-European contact rate of new species invasion, and then make sure that the arrival of these alien bromes and fescues and agropyrons does not exceed that rate? (p.129)

In other words, it's not just that I'm congenitally slow to figure out the best way to do things. Sometimes it's just hard to figure things out. I know this, and yet it's nice to see the same predicament afflicting someone with the relevant skills and knowledge I wish I had.

As I dug back through this book for details to talk about here, I realized just how fully I've occupied Gayton's book these last days, as I slowly worked through it while fulfilling all those other tasks and obligations that fill my time. And I couldn't find a single key detail, since I appreciated the book so very much, so rather than a pivotal moment, here's something simply to chew on, instead:

In our society, there is an almost automatic reference to aboriginal or Far Eastern cultures whenever nature or land-based mysticism is considered. There is no question that that these cultures are far ahead of ours when it comes to spiritual connections to the landscape, but for us to concentrate so exclusively on foreign approaches amounts to an elaborate cop-out. By borrowing other peoples' rituals and approaches, which have little or no chance of serious, mainstream adoption, we neatly avoid the central question of building a spiritual connection to the land into our own culture. This is cultural appropriation of the worst kind. (p.120)

Patrick Lane, Red Dog, Red Dog

Biased? Moi?

It's not that colleague, friend, and book club compadre David Leach was ripped off in the recent Victoria Book Prize bikini competition ("aagh! my eyes, my eyes!"), because when the formerly punky and puckish young poet Patrick Lane, now a septuagenarian fully five years past qualifying for benefits from the Canada Pension Plan, got around to publishing his first novel, you knew he'd do something special with it, and he certainly has.

But Leach's book Fatal Tide is also pretty special, though, as the good people at the Banff Mountain Book Festival saw fit to notice this year by giving it a Special Jury Prize (even if they decided to give the Oscar itself to Sid Marty's fascinating but flawed Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek).

But the Victoria Book Prize is an odd beast, lumping together five books written by people currently living in Victoria and aimed at adults (loosely defined as anyone not targetted by children's books, for whom there's a separate award). So you get three fiction books, a collection of poetry by the lovely and talented Patricia Young, plus some nonfiction thing about a guy dying in an extreme sports event.

(Mind you, I may need to read Dede Crane's nominated short story collection The Cult of Quick Repair, or her earlier novel Sympathy. Here's what she says on the Coteau Books site about finding her voice as a writer: "Moving to Vancouver Island was the final other catalyst. There was something about the power of the land here, in particular the trees, that urged voice. I know this may sound strange but unlike the east coast where the forest isn't wild anymore, the trees here still have stories to tell. And they want them told." Where does one start with a comment like that?)

It doesn't sound like I'm deferring judgment on Lane's novel, does it? Oh, it does? Right then.

I should have learned by now, but the stupid blurb made me resist this book fiercely:

A richly textured portrait of a time and a place [Vernon BC, 1958], filled with moments of harrowing violence and breathtaking descriptions of the natural world, Red Dog, Red Dog is a deeply moving novel about the legacies of the past and the possibilities of salvation that is marked by stunning writing and an utterly compelling and original story.

Now, if I want more cheese than could possibly be good for you, I go to Pagliacci's for a Hemingway Short Story and the chocolate cheesecake. A blurb like this, not so much what I go for.

Because of this blurb, I kept comparing it to other novels as I read, and it was distracting. Really I was thinking of those that reveal violence as a kind of family inheritance; that portray marginal agrarian communities; that include parents whose breakdowns are slow enough to span an adolescent's move into adulthood. The list wasn't a short one, even if Lane was doing a good job with the task. And there's not much sense that things happen in a "natural world," in most of the definitions of the term that make sense. And those gratuitous adverbs "richly," "deeply," and "utterly" really are, well, gratuitous.

Lane's a fine writer, and there's some wonderful prose in this book. His characters are complex and memorable (if at times either almost entirely inscrutable or seemingly automatic in their responses to stimuli), the violence is just as harrowing as promised by the blurb, and there's a note of authenticity to the portrayed existence that makes this a pretty special book.

But that blurb kept nagging at me. If it's not Patrick Lane (or "Pat Lane," as one hears his friends call him at readings and such like), with the machinery behind him to generate a bulletproof blurb like this from McClelland & Stewart -- I don't know that this book makes the award circuit. Good stuff, sure, but there's plenty of good stuff out there.

And since I'm being unfair already, here's a snippy editorial note to end on: On page 126, when Lane's talking about Western movies, he mentions John Wayne as a key image, plus "Henry Ford somewhere out there waiting." I'm assuming he meant John Ford, but maybe there's a rightness to mentioning Henry here that I missed....

Oct. 22 - UVic Bookstore

One of these books I needed (the expensive one), but the Hurt Penguins sale was on....

• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism ($26)
• William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse: Across America by Boat ($3.99, mostly following Lewis & Clark or Henry Hudson, from New York Harbor to Astoria, Oregon)
• Stephen J. Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 ($2.99 -- forest fire history)

Oct. 20 - Fort Street Cafe

I went to a wonderful reading event last night, featuring Vanessa Winn (The Chief Factor's Daughter), Des Kennedy (Patrick's Mountain), Theresa Kishkan (The Age of Waterlilies) and Anik See (Postcard & Other Stories). There were 35 or so people there, and I really enjoyed myself -- great to meet Anik and Theresa (here and here), whose work I've so appreciated, and who were just lovely to talk to.

Theresa's daughter seemed nice, but she was awfully embarrassed by Theresa's decision to read the naughty bits out of the novel....

Since I already owned The Age of Waterlilies, and the other two didn't appeal to me as much, I picked up only Anik See's Postcard & Other Stories, from Freehand Books and sold to me by the attending bookseller Cadboro Bay Books. Looking forward to digging in!

Oct 16 - subTEXT

A few things as I wandered by in a daze today, clutching a square of marshmallow, peanut butter, and corn flakes:

• Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston ($11 -- a classic, of its kind obviously...)
• Brian Fawcett, The Secret Journal of Alexander Mackenzie ($3 -- a collection of typically oddball Fawcett short stories)
• Sonnet L'Abbe, Killarnoe ($9 -- a wonderful poet)
• Charles G.D. Roberts, The Heart of the Ancient Wood ($6 -- a repeat buy, to my horror)
• Paul St. Pierre, Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse ($2 -- there's not enough Chilcotin literature on anyone's shelf)

Oct 9 - United Way

Stupid United Way booksale. A simple "Last day - by donation!" sign shouldn't have such power:

• Doug Cuthand, Tapwe: Selected Columns of Doug Cuthand (the thoughtful and provocative Cree journalist from Saskatchewan, whose colums I so often appreciate on the rare times I see them in the Times-Colonist)
• Ivan Doig, Dancing at the Rascal Fair
• Brian Fawcett, Local Matters: A Defence of Dooney's Cafe and Other Non-Globalized Places, People, and Ideas (sample line: "Siding with environmentalists doesn't fool me into trusting them, or, for that matter, liking them" [92])
• The Best of Granta Travel (1991)
• Vid Ingelevics, Hunter : Gatherer (exhibition gallery from the Southern Alberta Art Gallery & the Tom Thomson Art Gallery -- mostly photos of woodpiles!)
• Hugh MacLennan (text), The Colours of Canada (another entry in my growing pile of 60s/70s coffee-table books about Canadian nature, to set against my similarly growing pile of Sierra Club photo-books)
• ed. Wells, Velie, & Walker, Appleseeds and Beercans: Man and Nature in Literature (a 1974 anthology)

Oct 7 - United Way

Stupid charity booksales. I mean, they drag down the profit margin of second-hand bookstores, unless the booksellers show up to clean the place out themselves and so take the profit for themselves; they hit at purveyors of new books as well; and there's no cut heading the direction of the authors from them, either.

I've tried to swear off them before, but ... stupid booksales. This week, the United Way has taken over part of UVic's McPherson Library, and in consequence I've lightened their load by 23 books at a toonie apiece:

• Luanne Armstrong, The Bone House (an environmental justice / global warming novel set in BC)
• Philippe Bourseiller, 365 Ways to Save the Earth (a stunningly photographed and appallingly self-congratulatory chunk of decadence appropriate to the last days of Rome)
• Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season (a Montana novel, 1909)
• J. Claude Evans, With Respect for Nature: Living as Part of the Natural World (existentialism meets environmental ethics -- I think)
• Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850
• Kitty Fitzgerald, Pigtopia (the novel of a man who's been born with a disfigurement and spends his time with pigs -- "a species-bridging combination of animal intuition and human wisdom," says Salon)
• The Fraser River (a 1979 "special publication of Beautiful British Columbia magazine")
• ed. Dennis Gruending, The Middle of Nowhere: Rediscovering Saskatchewan
• ed. Daniel Halpern, On Nature: Nature, Landscape, and Natural History (a classic 1987 anthology)
• Roy Kiyooka, Pacific Rim Letters (ed. Smaro Kamboureli)
• Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, The Lovely and the Wild (a mostly self-taught naturalist's life in Ontario's Pimisi Bay)
• Adam Lewis, Sockeye: The Adams River Run
• ed. Emilio F. Moran & Elinor Ostrom, Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Human-Environment Interactions in Forest Ecosystems (a little light reading from MIT Press)
• Farley Mowat, A Whale for the Killing
• Henry Petroski, To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (yeah, I don't know why either)
• Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings
• Helene M.E. Schalkwijk-Barendsen, Mushrooms of Western Canada
• Sierra Club Books, Galapagos: The Flow of Wildness (both volumes, naturally. Sigh)
• Joan Skogan, Voyages at Sea with Strangers (memoir of a fisheries observer on non-Canadian boats off the West Coast)
• Craig B. Stanford, Chimpanzee and Red Colobus: The Ecology of Predator and Prey
• Aaron Sussman & Ruth Goode, The Magic of Walking (front cover: "The most complete guide ever published to the joys of walking--for pleasure, for health, for serenity--in city, in country, in America and abroad. Plus a glorious ramble through the literature of walking")

Did I already say, stupid charity booksales?

Laurie Ricou, Salal

Even though there's no way I could possibly have imagined that this book wasn't targetted specifically at me, I delayed picking up Laurie Ricou's thoughtful volume Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory. If I'm being petty, I don't see why it's as pricy at is; $34.95 for a trade paperback from NeWest Press is a little high.

Of course it's worth every penny, I can say without doubt now I've read it, but I imagine I'll still waffle at a bookstore in front of the next $30-plus book I next covet. An embarrassment, is what I am.

Salal, as Ricou explains fairly early on, reproduces in two ways. First, its tasty furred blue-black berries contain innumerable small seeds inside sticky seedpods; to collect one gram of seeds, you'd need 7687 of them (p.49). Second, and more interestingly, it spreads through rhizomes, which are like underground salal branches just aching to pop back through the surface and start sprouting leaves. The rhizomes spread clones of the original shrub, obviously, so some salal patches, genetically speaking, are actually very large individual shrubs. Both these reproductive techniques are part of this book's structure. There are 26 chapters, averaging fewer than 10 pages in length, thus hearkening to the size and number of salal's seeds, but the titles of 25 of them are verbs in the "-ing" form -- Depending, Arranging, Inhabiting, and so on -- thus reaching back to the progressive, expansive mode of the rhizome.

This book works hard to mimic elements of salal, Ricou at times making quiet fun even of his self-consciousness about this approach. The book is itself a saunter, as Thoreau used the term in his classic essay "Walking." Ricou documents his ongoing research, his conversations with those more knowledgeable than he is (which turns out to be almost everyone he meets), his stray encounters with either just the word or the plant itself. His inclusion of his research assistants as characters in the book is a useful exemplum of this method, now that I think of it; there's a serious attempt at equality in Salal that reminds me of environmental justice's emphasis on community.

But so that I don't go on all morning about this book, I'm stopping now. Great fun, well worth the money, and it fully repays any amount of time you shower on it.

Madeleine L'Engle, Many Waters

Though I do have a strong recollection of reading her Wrinkle in Time , I just don't recall reading Madeleine L'Engle's Many Waters. Maybe I didn't finish the series, but that's not like me. Instead, I think it got suppressed in the great Nietzschean anti-Christian period of my late teens -- it hasn't prevented the occasional hymn from bubbling up from my time in a nominally Anglican boarding school, but who knows?

Fascinating book, though. L'Engle sends the two Murry twins, Dennys and Sandy, across space/time to what appears to be immediately before the Flood. They do their best not to be killed, and not to interfere too much in what's going on, but times are odd. People are tiny but ancient; mythical animals aren't mythical; and our boys spend a fair bit of time worrying about terrorists. The book is from 1986, so it makes sense that it's terrorism primarily rather than environmental degradation, though eco-terror's part of their worries as well.

All of L'Engle's books tie up awfully neatly at the end, and that's a little unsatisfying for most people older than about 11, but still. A fast read that uses an intriguing approach to hit some relevant topics.