The surprising nature of Love in Ursula K. Le Guin

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Hollywood producers might not agree, but there are many ways to fall in love. The majority of our popular culture reserves love for only a few kinds of relationships. The most common is of course those boy-meets-girl stories, heterosexual romantic ooh la la love. But there are others. Parents and kids are popular pairings for the language of love. LGBTQ romantic relationships are becoming more common every year, a sign that our collective understanding of romance is shifting and that, straight or queer, love is love.

But there are still some loves that just don’t really find a place to thrive in popular culture.

I was thinking about this while reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, the third book in her Earthsea Cycle. The books follow the adventures of the Archmage Sparrowhawk, the most powerful wizard of Earthsea. In book 1, A Wizard of Earthsea, Sparrohawk is a young man coming of age and into power, not yet the greatest wizard in the land. In book 2, The Tombs of Atuan, Sparrowhawk is a man, locked in an underground labyrinth, at the mercy of a priestess who becomes his friend and ally. In The Farthest Shore, age has caught up with the Archmage. He is old, and though his power remains, magic is now being pulled out of the world.

Each of these stories is, in their own way, a love story. In A Wizard of Earthsea, Sparrowhawk, an impetuous youth, must learn to love himself, and accept that he has both light and dark within him. In Tombs of Atuan, it is the priestess Tenar who is coming into adulthood; she and the wizard grow to trust and respect each other. Their relationship is never romantic, but their lives become wholly interdependent.

In The Farthest Shore, we get our clearest vision of love in the archipelago of Earthsea, as Le Guin provides a real, thriving love story. This is clear from the first scene of the book. The Archmage relaxes under a tree in the Court of the Fountain, a peaceful escape for the aging leader. Then comes Arren, a young noble, who seeks out the Archmage for aid. While Arren and Sparrowhawk discuss the problems that all of Earthsea are facing, the young Arren becomes enchanted by the man.

As their conversation comes to a close, Sparrowhawk places his hands on Arren’s back, gently leading the two out of the Court. ” He pushed Arren lightly between the shoulder blades,” Le Guin writes, “a familiarity no one had ever taken before, and which the young prince would have resented from anyone else; but he felt the Archmage’s touch as a thrill of glory. For Arren had fallen in love.”

Thus is Le Guin’s heartfelt story set: the 17-year old prince Arren and the old man Sparrowhawk, in love.

Le Guin portrays this scene in the language of the romance novel. As a child, Arren had “played at loving,” but had “never given himself entirely to anything.” Now, though, in Sparrowhawk’s presence, “the depths of him were wakened.” The author makes clear that the moment Arren falls in love is the moment that he becomes a man. “So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.”

So many sci-fi/fantasy authors conceive of complicated worlds, full of fascinating, challenging stories. But I think no SFF author conceives of more complicated vision of what it means to be human than Ursula K. Le Guin. Her imagination extends not only to the concepts and scenarios of SFF, but also to the conception of identity. What it means to enter into a relationship in a Le Guin story is always surprising. In her best work, race and gender and normative behaviors are almost non-existent.

The most obvious example of Le Guin’s imaginative turns on love and sex come in Left Hand of Darkness, where on the planet Winter distinctions between individual men and women are essentially non-existent. Each shifts their emotional and sexual identities, at times inseminating and at other times carrying offspring.

Where Left Hand goes for the deep dive, though, The Farthest Shore pulls back, exploring the subtleties of love not as sexual-there is almost no romantic love in The Earthsea Cycle-but as social, inter-generational, and unexpected. The language Le Guin uses to draw out the relationship of Sparrowhawk and Arren is passionate. They fight; Arren doubts his devotion, only to supplicate himself in apology for those doubts.

It is unqualified love between a young man and his mentor. And it makes reading Le Guin intriguing experience for those who undertake her work. Because in the midst of a fantasy series about wizards and dragons and lands of the dead, you just might come across an expression of love in science-fiction/fantasy that leaves you breathless.

Here, for example, when the companions have re-committed, and together reject the promise of eternal but empty life, in favor committing to travel together into death.

“Listen to me, Arren. You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself—safety forever? That is what they seek to do on Wathort and Lorbanery and elsewhere. That is the message that those who know how to hear have heard: By denying life you may deny death and live forever!—And this message I do not hear, Arren, for I will not hear it. I will not take the counsel of despair. I am deaf; I am blind. You are my guide. You in your innocence and your courage, in your unwisdom and your loyalty, you are my guide—the child I send before me into the dark. It is your fear, your pain, I follow. You have thought me harsh to you, Arren; you never knew how harsh I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps. And we must go on. We must go on. We must go all the way. We must come to the place where the sea runs dry and joy runs out, the place to which your motal terror draws you.”
“Where is it, my lord?”
“I do not know.”
“I cannot lead you there. But I will come with you.”

We must go all the way.

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It’s very hard to hear, but Ursula K. Le Guin is right about Amazon

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Ursula K. Le Guin is worried about books. The problem, to oversimplify, is Amazon.

Le Guin, the sci-fi legend and author of Left Hand of Darkness, the Earthsea series, and dozens of other titles, has been raising the Amazon issue for some time now. Last year, when she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she used her speech to share her concerns about the publishing industry, citing a recent instance when a profiteering retailer tried “to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa.”

Her speech last year did not name Amazon, but the meaning wasn’t difficult to to parse: Amazon, and the power it maintains over publishers, is dramatically altering the landscape of what is written, published, and read. It’s not just Le Guin that’s making this claim. For years, publishers have feared the effects of Amazon, which operates essentially without competition. Last year’s stand-off between Hachette and Amazon realized many of those fears. Publishers need the online retail giant, and Amazon abuses that need for profit.

But Le Guin, a legend in her field with nothing to fear from Amazon, has been taking the fight to the public whenever she can. She did so again this week, in a blog post at Book View Cafe titled Up the Amazon with the BS Machine, in which Le Guin spells out how the world’s largest bookseller uses Best Seller lists to manipulate and abuse writers, publishers, and readers.

Here is Le Guin on the quality of work being produced in the era of Amazon:

If you want to sell cheap and fast, as Amazon does, you have to sell big. Books written to be best sellers can be written fast, sold cheap, dumped fast: the perfect commodity for growth capitalism.
The readability of many best sellers is much like the edibility of junk food. Agribusiness and the food packagers sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we come to think that’s what food is. Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is.
I believe that reading only packaged microwavable fiction ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes the mind obese. Fortunately, I also know that many human beings have an innate resistance to baloney and a taste for quality rooted deeper than even marketing can reach.

Book readers will recognize the truth of Le Guin’s words here. Many (though not all) books that arrive on best seller lists are empty calories, the microwave burrito of fiction. They serve a purpose: good enough, easy, and capable of providing minimum necessary energy to get through the afternoon. There’s delight, but no effort, and very little reward other than satisfying an instant craving.

But they are not the life-giving, enriching experience of a well-prepared meal.

The cause of this books as burritos mentality is growth capitalism, which requires new Best Sellers to replace old ones, and old ones to be discarded.

Consistent in its denial of human reality, growth capitalism thinks only in the present tense, ignores the past, and limits its future to the current quarter. To the BS machine, the only value of a book is its current salability. Growth of capital depends on rapid turnover, so the BS machine not only isn’t geared to allow for durability, but actually discourages it. Fading BSs must be replaced constantly by fresh ones in order to keep corporate profits up.

The opposition force to the BS Machine is independent book sellers willing to sell books non-BS Machine produced titles. And publishing companies wiling to take chances on books without a clear marketability.

As a book dealer and publisher, Amazon wants no competitors, admits no responsibilities, and takes no risks.
Its ideal book is a safe commodity, a commercial product written to the specifications of the current market, that will hit the BS list, get to the top, and vanish. Sell it fast, sell it cheap, dump it, sell the next thing. No book has value in itself, only as it makes profit. Quick obsolescence, disposability — the creation of trash — is an essential element of the BS machine. Amazon exploits the cycle of instant satisfaction/endless dissatisfaction. Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

This is some harsh stuff. Le Guin creates a line here that many-myself included-will find difficult to hold. But the lodestone of her argument holds: Amazon is a limiting force in the world of books.

It creates a retail space that seems open and welcoming, but has no accountability to creators, publishers, or quality. Convenience and whole-sale prices are available (and they are VERY ENTICING), but they come at the cost of discovery. And that’s a very great cost.

It’s also important to keep in mind what is not said in this argument. Le Guin does not direct readers away from reading Best Sellers. And if she did, she would be wrong to do so. Readers should read anything they want, and damn anyone who says otherwise. Le Guin, though, is not doing so. She may think much of the BS machine produces trash, but the trash is a result of a broken, one-sided system. Le Guin is not out to condemn readers. She’s targeting the retailer that controls the industry.

Independent Bookstores are still in operation. They are even thriving. And they sell a lot books you might enjoy discovering. But if not, they sell your Best Sellers, too. Le Guin is not calling on readers to stop reading the Best Seller list. She’s telling people to buy your books at bookstores. That simple act could be enough to change the very nature of the Best Seller Machine.

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Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

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by Deborah Krieger

Dad’s tone changed. “I suppose someone put you up to it,” he said. “You’ve always been a follower.”

In Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, it’s made immediately clear that Rosemary Cooke is not your ordinary protagonist. From the opening of the story, with the flinty, detached way she begins her narration, the way the story begins self-consciously right in the middle, it’s as if we are watching her struggle to tell us her story in real time. Rosemary is not quite sure how to engage with the reader. She’s not sure why she’s become, in her eyes, the imitation of a real person. Why is Rosemary Cooke this way? Why does she feel the need to disappear? And why does she feel like a fraud?

I found We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves while in Princeton, New Jersey, exploring the town before I spent a week working with the Princeton University Art Museum. Basking in the bright 30-degree weather, I wandered into Labyrinth Books. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but as I’d been thinking about this topic for a while previously, I asked the employee sitting behind the desk to see if she could find me a book with a female protagonist, a coming-of-age narrative arc, and a sense of humor (though the last was more negotiable). After several minutes of looking and enlisting the expertise of another Labyrinth employee, she brought me Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I opened the book and was hooked by its elegant, breezy opening pages. (The mention of a chimpanzee on the back cover did not dampen my interest, either.)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves chronicles Rosemary’s downward spiral, from a happy early childhood with her family in Bloomington, Indiana, to the event in her life that changed her into the wallflower she has become. She’s estranged her from her father; her older brother Lowell has disappeared, and her mother has faded into a shadow of her former self. The novel opens with Rosemary in college, treading water, directionless, rudderless; while spending a night in jail, she takes us back to her past, to where all the troubles began.

Rosemary describes with beautiful, impressionistic language the happy, busy, exciting life she lived with her family. As Rosemary describes her past bit by bit, the journey back in time unfolds delicately like a paper fortune-teller, the truth of her story coming into focus layer by later until we as the readers learn about the event that turned her from a strong-willed, talkative child, from an active participant in the world, into the “follower” she is today.

The “twist” of the story (it’s on the back of the book so its not really a spoiler) is that Rosemary’s sister Fern is not really her sister, but is in fact a chimpanzee that her family has been raising alongside their children. In the manner of Dr. Kellogg’s experiments, Rosemary’s father and his students have been studying the ability of chimps to assimilate to human life. During those years Rosemary and Fern were raised as sisters—as twins, treated with equal amounts of love and indulgence. As Rosemary and Fern are raised side-by-side, Rosemary finds herself developing more chimp-like qualities, qualities that isolate her from her classmates, qualities she must begin to learn to curtail in an attempt to seem more human.

The key event in the novel that leads to Rosemary’s change from vivacious to withdrawn is referenced in oblique, offhand comments. Then it shocks you with its sadness: Rosemary was sent to stay with her grandparents for a week, and when she returned Fern was gone. She later learns that Fern was sent away for good, to live among other chimps, locked away in a cage instead of as a member of a household in the manner to which she had been accustomed. The reason why Fern was removed from the family is in turn revealed bit by bit until its most tragic, if slightly obvious, revelation. And soon after, Rosemary’s brother runs away,

It is clear that due to her detachment and painful, severed connection to her “sister” that Rosemary feels inhuman, a “monkey girl” pretending to be human.

Once the book returns to the present, Rosemary chronicles her downward spiral over the course of a few days, beginning with the news that her missing brother has come to see her at school, which forces her to come to terms with the truth of her family’s past, her brother’s present, and why she came to UC Davis in the first place.

Fowler, who is best known for The Jane Austen Book Club, has created a protagonist I find relatable and tragic, and a novel worthy of the character of Rosemary. According to Fowler, the inspiration for the novel came from an experiment that actually happened in the 1930s, where a chimp was raised in a human family and studied alongside human children. Fowler seems to have done her research, both on how chimps act, learn, and grow in this sort of environment, and what happens to these chimps once the experiment is done. It is this aspect of the story that is truly shocking and sad, and much of the end of the novel is dedicated towards grappling with the questions of how animals are treated.

While I didn’t expect to be called upon to consider the humanity of chimps when I walked into Labyrinth Books, looking for my female-led coming of age story, I got what I came for—and then some. Ultimately, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves ends up asking the reader to ponder: How close is animal intelligence to human intelligence? What does it mean to be truly human? And what constitutes a true family, however strange it may be?

Deborah Krieger wrote this article for The Stake. Deborah is a junior at Swarthmore College, studying art history, film and media studies, and German. She has written for Hyperallergic, the Northwestern Art Review, Printeresting, and Title Magazine. She also runs her own art blog I on the Arts, and is attempting to learn to tweet at @DebOnTheArts.”

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Arthur Weasley, Climate Champion

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by Bethany Taylor

In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Mr. Weasely—a nice reasonable man, who in our world would probably be a big-hearted engineering geek, wearing a sweater and setting up solar panels on The Burrow decades before anyone else, sort of like Jimmy Carter—reprimands his daughter: “‘Ginny!’ said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. ‘Haven’t I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brains?’”

Harry Potter is not commonly placed in the canon of stories addressing the slippery scourge of climate change altering our world in manifold and insidious ways. Yet, when it comes to the absolute basics—a dark threat to a good world, the ferocity of love as our strongest weapon—there is a good deal of common ground. Voldemort spews evil and hate into the world by making people feel alone and unloved. Climate change is a product of churning human lives trying to make, own, use, and be enough, (spewing fossil fuels in the process.) These are not entirely dissimilar forces in the world—fictional Wizard or real Muggle.

Let’s replace the idea of Dark Lord-ish magic with the reality of nasty unknowns buried in a cultural pattern of convenience and over-consumption of resources that is causing climate change. The break room at my work, for example, has a coffee machine that takes in little foil and plastic pods of coffee grounds and spits out piping hot coffee a few seconds later. I don’t see where the water comes from, where the heat comes from, or where the plastic pods go.

In essence, I can’t see where this convenient—friendly-as-Tom-Riddle’s-diary—machine keeps its brains. This seems bad. Even if there isn’t a corporeal basilisk lurking around, I have the sense that I am being hypnotized and participating in something I don’t like.

I’ve had Mr. Weasley stuck in my head for a few weeks now, reminding me to look for the brains. Further, if I can’t find or don’t like the brains, then I am trying to eliminate and reduce my reliance on whatever nefarious good or service this sneaky-brained contraption may provide.

I am not fully there. Yet. But looking for the brains feels like a start, and with something as dour and daunting as climate change, that’s basically the same sort of shot in the arm as calling Voldemort Voldemort.

Bethany Taylor lives in New England, blogs and blogs at Granite Bunny and Hothouse Magazine, works as a farmer and a librarian, and generally tries to have a good time saving the world and writing about it.

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The Backlist: Sophie’s Choice and reading Holocaust Fiction in the summer

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by Ruth Rosengren

*editor’s note: This post discusses plot details of the novel, including the titular choice that Sophie faces in the books conclusion

The cover of the book looks like a dime-store romance: a fair woman with red lips and a gauzy blouse is being kissed on the cheek by a mustachioed man with a mop of dark hair: Sophie’s Choice. (Later I learned it was the poster for the 1982 film, and that it’s actually Meryl Streep and Kevin Klein on the cover.) It was in one of many boxes of my husband’s books — books we were sorting into keep and give-away piles. He handed it to me, and said, “I’m pretty sure intro philosophy classes read this.” “Really? A novel?” I questioned. But I was intrigued and set it aside to crack later that evening. I had heard the title, but didn’t know anything about it. Nor didn’t know of Styron’s work.

Exactly one month later, as I finish the 620th page, I set it down just as Ben walked in the room. He asks, “So, how was it?” I sigh. “Devastating. Perfect. It couldn’t have ended any other way.”

The book opens with a narrator named Stingo who is telling about a story that took place 20 years prior. The year is 1967, but he writes of his life in 1947 – just two years after WWII had ended. In 1947, Stingo is 22-years-old. He is a recent transplant to New York (from the South), has just been fired from a publishing firm, and decides to move out to Brooklyn to become a writer. He rents a room in a house, and it is here he meets Sophie. Sophie is an Auschwitz survivor.

Stingo takes his time telling Sophie’s story. Or rather, Stingo allows Sophie time to tell her story. During many points during the unfolding, Stingo says something like “I must tell this part of her story fully, so that you’ll better understand the events that follow”, or “There’s more to this part of the story, but I must tell it later. I have to continue with this other part of the story first.” This technique — which in no way did I see as a cheap trick — created suspense. I trusted him to tell the story in the right way, perhaps because he is a writer. (Styron, you’re a genius.)

And so, the story of Sophie, unfolds ever so delicately throughout the book. How she, a Pole, is captured and sent to Auschwitz. How, because she is fluent in four languages (Polish, Russian, German, and French), becomes Hoss’ translator. (Rudolf Hoss, in fact, was the chief commandant of Auschwitz and who developed new techniques for extermination with the type of gas, and the architecture of the gas chambers.)

The lines between fact and fiction are blurred. From history, we know about Rudolf Hoss. But in the novel, we learn about Hoss through letters that Sophie is translating and transcribing for him. One afternoon while she taps out the words he is speaking, she is horrified to learn of his plans to build gas chambers. We also learn about this time that Sophie has a son who is at Auschwitz too, in a part of the camp just for children. She feels guilt at being part of this evil machine – for writing these letters for Hoss – but knows she might be able to get close to him and convince him to free her son.

I was astounded by the complexity of Sophie’s character, and the situation she’s in is both heartbreaking and a mark of genius by Styron. In order for Styron to get into Hoss’ office, he needed a character who could reveal Hoss’ plans. It couldn’t have been a Jew – a Jew would not have been allowed this “opportunity”.

And perhaps no other author has so successfully waited to reveal the book’s title only after reading 95% of the pages. Sophie’s choice is revealed on page 590 of a 620 page book. Sophie recounts her arriving at Auschwitz with her two children – her 10-year-old son, and her 7-year-old daughter. The SS officer she greets off the train says to her: “You make keep one of your children. The other one will have to go. Which one will you choose?” And her forced choice will haunt and grieve her for the rest of her life.

This book was very much alive for me during the month in which I read it (perhaps one of the greatest blessings a writer can offer), and after I read this scene, I had to set the book down and walk away. Mostly just to breathe and process. And at that moment, it made complete sense why the book not only had to be written by a 42-year-old man, but also from the perspective of a 22-year-old male, who basically just lusted after Sophie for the bulk of the book. His escapades, his fantasies needed to be there, to counteract the heft of Auschwitz.

At the beginning of the book, you know Stingo knows of Auschwitz, but you get the sense that he doesn’t know about it like we know about it today. He writes that he needs this time – these two decades — to process Sophie’s story. And maybe he chose to narrate it from 1967 because that was the year George Steiner wrote about the Holocaust and Styron wanted to criticize Steiner’s work. The fact that Styron wrote (or at least published) the book in 1979 suggests he could have picked any year between 1947 and 1979 to use as the narrator’s point of reference, but he choose 1967 – interestingly enough, a few years before the term “Holocaust” was used in popularity. I don’t mean to belabor this timeline, but the element of time in relation to understanding is the foundation of this work.

About half-way through the book, Stingo — the 42-year-old Stingo — reads George Steiner’s Language and Silence and he too becomes obsessed with time relation:

“On the first day of April, 1923…as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas. I was eating myself nearly sick with bananas, the reason being that in the coming hour I was to take a physical examination for entrance into the Marine Corps. At the age of seventeen, already over six feet tall but weighing only 122 pounds, I knew I had to put on three more pounds to satisfy the minimum weight requirement….On that day I had not heard of Auschwitz, nor of any concentration camp, nor of the mass destruction of the European Jews, nor even much about the Nazis. For me, the enemy in that global war was the Japanese.”

These pages gut-punched me. For most of us today, we learn about the Holocaust quite early. I was eleven in 1992, when the Holocaust museum opened in D.C. In 1993, Schindler’s List came out. In 1994, I was in a summer dramatics camp about WWII, and had the honor of meeting an Auschwitz survivor, Gerda Weissmann Klein. For the next few years, I read any novel about WWII I could get my hands on. You could say it was fashionable (grotesquely so) to know about the Holocaust. And then, in 2002, I went to Auschwitz as a tourist. This is absurd. It’s absurd that sixty years is the only thing that separated the days of genocide and tourism on that land.

At some point I learned that it’s not Sophie’s Choice that is read by philosophy classes, but Sophie’s World. If I had been told the book was about a Holocaust survivor, would I have still read it? Probably not; at least not as my summer read. But it’s not just about a Holocaust survivor. It’s about a man’s grasp at understanding the Holocaust.

The middle-aged Stingo/Styron writes:

“I cannot accept Steiner’s suggestion that silence is the answer, that it is best ‘not to add the trivia of literary, sociological debate to the unspeakable.’ Nor do I agree with the idea that ‘in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent.’ I find a touch of piety in this, especially inasmuch as Steiner has not remained silent. And surely, almost cosmic in its incomprehensibility as it may appear, the embodiment of evil which Auschwitz has become remains impenetrable only so long as we shrink from trying to penetrate it, however inadequately; and Steiner himself adds immediately that the next best is ‘to try and understand.’ I have thought that it might be possible to make a stab at understanding Auschwitz by trying to understand Sophie, who to say the least was a cluster of contradictions. Although she was not Jewish, she had suffered as much as any Jew who has survived the same afflictions, and — as I think will be made plain — had in certain profound ways had suffered more than most.”

I read that as a charge as I finished the book. That I might “try and understand.”

Ruth Rosengren is a novice gardener, a pretty good project manager, a decent pianist, and always a writer. Follow her @ruthstp for a bit of everything.

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The Stake Podcast Episode 5: Should Pop Culture Grow Up?

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AO Scott thinks Adulthood in American Culture is Dead. Chris, Andrew and Chris ask the next question: How do we define adulthood? Is the debate about art and adulthood the same old generational debate, or is there something unique about our current pop culture climate? After the break we discuss the role of the critic in the era of Fandom and art as a outlet for pleasure. Has the value of criticism declined? Has that changed the quality of literature and film and television? Plus our best and worst of the week.

Listen to Episode 5 on Libsyn, or subscribe to The Stake Podcast on iTunes.

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How to Read Moby-Dick

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by Bethany Taylor

While out walking my dog very early one morning I ran into a frantic woman, beseeching directions to Starbucks.

My reflexive internal response was, “I’m sorry to tell you this, ma’am, but he went down aboard the Pequod,” but I kept the joke to myself, stifled my giggles, and directed the woman towards the coffee shop.

For the most part, everything I’ve ever read about Moby-Dick has been either beautiful and solemn like a dull sermon, or dismissive of it as a baggy boring relic of bygone days. The book invites comparisons to the whale itself: the sheer size and density, a brick of over 600 page, as though its treasures must be gleaned from crosshatched ink scars carved in white slabbed pages.

For many, it is A Book To Be Read, almost a Jonahian duty that cannot be shirked lest the gods be angered, an Ahab-like quest to conquer this giant behemoth of the literary seas, something that must be done and probably won’t be enjoyed. (That was, essentially, how I read Moby-Dick the first time—for literary bragging rights. I’m now trying to be less of a snob and more of an enthusiastic circus barker for its wonders.)

Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, Why Read Moby-Dick, touches on a lot of the lofty themes, joyfully and correctly christening the book one of the great bibles of the American canon for the richness of the language, the scope of its tropes, the seemingly unedited wildness of its narrative structure. Others will talk about the raw masculinity of the book (there are some lady whales mentioned once, and Aunt Charity, but otherwise, this is a book of dudes.)

There are also the sexual currents of Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship. And the Manifest Destiny parallels of Ahab as captain of a ship on a quest for an elusive and diminishing resource. And a beautiful elegy for the practical work of a bygone industry. And the eternal struggle of Man versus Nature and Man versus Fate. And the bewitching Romance of the sea.

And, because the book’s dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne furthers interest in the possibility that Hawthorne and Melville may have been lovers, Moby-Dick swims into the queer canon. And the almost chewable, delicious density of the language makes it a pretty pleasant read-aloud (especially if you can track down the recordings of Leonard Nimoy doing so over Paul Winter’s whale recordings!) And, at the simplest, it is a good read because it is a bunch of men on a journey they do not understand but go through the traditions and motions of, even as its futility looms, much like, say, life.

Evidence of all of those and many other points of view can be found. It is a big and wandering book, room exists for all comers and interpretations. And, if any of those themes are the reasons that compel you to read this book, go for it and I wish you many barrels of that sweet intellectual oil to light your way.

For my part, though, I love it because it is equal parts wry humor and transcendent poetry.

It is in the balance—like a sperm whale head and a right whale head hanging on either side to balance, practically, the keel and, spiritually, the omens of a ship—that the truest delight lies.

Past Ishmael and the calling of him that opens Moby-Dick, it is in the next lines that I really find myself bound to the book…”whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet…—then I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”

Yup. Ishmael has a black moodiness and misanthropy that can only be cured by taking off to a wild place. I am eternally loving to anyone who has that kernel in their soul. It is the familiar hyperbolic drama of so many people I know and so many moods I’ve had that Ishmael melted into my heart faster than he warms up to Queequeg at The Spouter Inn. I feel a companionable protectiveness for Ishmael, even if he is more than a little priggish and pompous at times. And in Ishmael’s odd formality, in Melville’s treatment of Ishmael as narrator, there is an extraordinary amount of humor to be found.

I get the sense that Melville is at once deadly earnest about everything that actually matters, and also caustically mocking those who would profess to be serious about these same things. The sections where many readers get lost—the history of whaling, the folios of cataloging of whales, the biology of whales, etc.—are utterly priceless when read as if Melville is pulling your leg. There are some species of whales he mentions, but doesn’t describe, because either he or a convenient friend from Nantucket doesn’t like that kind of whale. And others that he seems to invent, simply because someone he knows knows someone who once heard that something like this whale might exist.

It isn’t scientific, it isn’t accurate, it isn’t historical. It is hysterical. (Like Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, Melville/Ishmael leave whales as fish.)

And then, after all the Nantucketers calling Queequeg “Quohog” and witty mocking of pirates and prayers over angelic sharks and passages about which philosophers which whale species would most prefer and cox-worthy threats that the mates make to urge their crews after the whales and the Ylvis-like line of “but then again, what has the whale to say?” there will be a paragraph or chapter so heart-stoppingly beautiful that I feel like I am spinning on one thin pegleg, my naked heart open to the sharks below.

There is beauty and terror when the little whaling boats are penned in by a wall of whales in The Grand Armada chapter. The Try-Works, when the Pequod is lit up at night to render the sperm oil, is a gorgeous vision of something that seems heavenly and hellish and holy—like being caught in a lightning storm. A Squeeze of the Hand is one of the most sensual things I have ever read. The description of Queequeg’s homeland, “It is not down on any map; true places never are” are words I would (appropriately) consider tattooing on my own skin.

But, my personal favorite is Ahab, sneaking up on deck to beseech a dead sperm whale’s head to give up the secrets of the deep: “Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Those saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other when heaven seemed false to them…thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”

I get shivers. The recognition that there is power in the wild unknown that would split planets and mend broken hearts and comfort grieving sleepless mothers. I believe this, and I hadn’t expected to find that emotional resonance in this book. Because, along with the humor being sidelined in the cultural conversation of Moby-Dick, people forget to tell you that this book will find a soft space near your heart and bury at least one harpoon in your soul.

Bethany Taylor lives in New England, blogs and blogs at Granite Bunny and Hothouse Magazine, works as a farmer and a librarian, and generally tries to have a good time saving the world and writing about it.

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The Backlist: M.T. Anderson’s Feed

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It’s been 12 years since Feed was released. I was a senior in college in 2002, and I imagine Feed would have felt unrecognizable at the time. Tech hardwired into the brain creating a 24-hour live-feed connection to the internet? Come on. I hadn’t even heard of wi-fi back then. Today, though, Feed just seems inevitable. Our brains may not have the chip, but many of us are pretty much wired to the feed already; the rest cannot be far behind.

Science-fiction stories are built upon two equally important foundations: the conceptual science & technology that underlies the plot, and the events and human emotions involved that move the story. These elements may combine in endless variations and with varying levels of success. In the novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, the conceptual sci-fi plot device exists completely offstage, concluding before the story’s beginning. We never see the tech that left the world in ruins, but the events and human emotions are powerful in part because of that absence.

Conversely, Andrew Niccol’s film In Time creates a stunning technological concept of currency through life-span and the economic inequality that results, but fails to build a successful human story worthy to carry the technology to any satisfying place.

If the best science-fiction stories, then, naturally interweave a creative science-fiction plot device and a touching human story, then Feed is a master-stroke. In Feed, the human and the science & technology are literally inextricable from one another. The tech is the feed, and the feed is implanted in the brain. Lose one, and you lose both.

This is not the first time such a confluence has occurred. There are great and famous examples throughout sci-fi of this mingling. Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep and the film it inspired, Blade Runner, are perhaps the most famous.

But that it has been done before does not lessen the achievement of Feed. Besides, it hasn’t been done quite like this before.

**

The opening ceremonies of the World Cup in Brasil featured a man, paralyzed since birth, wearing a metallic, bionic exoskeleton wired to his brain, which he controlled with his thoughts. He used this machine-extension of his body to walk and strike a soccer ball.

**

Feed is a funny and tragic teen-romance. That it is a young-adult novel I suppose bears mentioning, but should in no way bring with it any pre-judgment of readers. Whatever one might think about YA Literature, love it or hate it or just don’t give a damn, Feed qualifies as an excellent read by any merit. The romance involved in Feed involves two teenagers, and in that fashion, it is YA. But beyond that, and perhaps it’s commitment to social awkwardness, it has few YA credentials.

The story of Feed is this: a teenage boy named Titus visits the moon on spring break (which totally sucked) where he meets a teenage girl named Violet. They visit a nightclub, where a ‘terrorist’ hacks into their feeds and creates a constant refrain of anarchist messages, causing Titus, Violet and their friends to go into ‘mal,’ and pass out.

Out of this a romance blossoms. Titus is wealthy and lives high in the clouds, literally. Titus has a successful father who is rarely around. Meaning Titus has money and the freedom to do pretty much whatever he wants. With money comes the feed. The feed is a chip, implanted physically into the body, creating a bio-mechanical online interface right inside the brain.

For Titus, the feed is natural: implanted at birth and state of the art. Not so, Violet. Violet is poor; her parents are academics and she is home-schooled. Her home is on the ground-a shock to Titus. Her parents rejected the feed when it was first created, and neither have the implant. But not wanting to disadvantage their daughter, they buy her a feed when she’s a young girl, and have it implanted much later than is recommended.

Opposite sides of the tracks, you know, star-crossed young lovers, and, as must be the case, doomed.

***

Rasmussen College in Minnesota recently announced as part of their Flex Choice option a series of courses that are taught not by teachers but are played as video games. Online “game-based courses — with no instructors” are perhaps the logical next step.

***

There’s a great deal at play in Feed. Anderson plays freely with philosophy and the implications of identity and memory, for example. There’s also the play of language and the creation of a youthful alter-language in the feed (think, Clockwork Orange). But my favorite characteristic of Feed is the satire of American consumer culture. It’s not accidental that the fall of the US coincides with a time when shopping becomes an inescapable human activity.

Well, shopping on the feed is not really shopping so much as it is brand management. Brand management is now an integrated part of the individual human experience. Brand profiles are online for every person who has a feed, and advertising happens on the individual level. What you listen to, where you go, what you buy, all such information is accessible to the corporations operating on the feed (again, hello now).

Thus walking through a nightclub is like walking through an advertisement. Clothes are worn by paid models, while the feed promotes the products you are seeing directly to the brain. Buy before you leave for an extra discount! Shipped to your hotel for next day enjoyment!

This satirical play on American consumerism allows Anderson to make direct statements of social commentary. (“We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away”). But more biting, and more fun, are the times when Anderson hooks readers directly into the feed, providing asides outside the narrative, selling television shows and commercial goods directly to our brains.

Anderson uses these asides as a way to highlight and denigrate the consumerist tendencies of the culture at large, and in them is a clear kinship with Don Delillo’s White Noise. What complicates Feed‘s ad-noise though, are the times when actual news breaks through the advertising stream. These news breaks inform readers of the world’s activities beyond the feed. And they do not look good.

***

Marrying soft robotics with biological components such cells and tissues, researches in Illinois and created a new generation of muscle-powered biological robots, or “bio-bots.”

***

Biology is what makes Feed special.

This is a book about living a life in and out of the feed. About being a person in the world, literally, while being always at least one step removed from the world, digitally. When a feed support agent chimes into your chat-link to tell you about a product that matches your purchasing history or music profile, who is she talking to, you? Or your feed?

Everything about Feed, the shopping, the travel, the conversation, is the feed. You are your feed. You, your memories, it’s all linked to your brain. If the brain has a glitch as a result of the feed and your memories are lost, what have you lost? Your brain, it turns out. Everything, even the feed, is biology.

If we think we are immortal in our youth, how much more so in our feeds must we feel so. But you cannot escape your biology. The slow climax of Feed is built on this reality. There’s a scene in the final third of the novel, when M.T. Anderson forces Titus to acknowledge some of his cruel behavior towards Violet. Titus’ friend Quendy, who has taken to mixing fake lesions with her real ones in embrace of the latest fashion, tells him to not be a selfish, moping bum. “She’s the one who this is happening to.”

It’s a moving exchange; my favorite in the book and one that young readers should take to heart. After it occurs, though, comes another subtle moment, the kind Anderson slips in just after the “moments” we look for as readers. Anderson uses these times when we are coming down from the emotive heights to remind readers what is really at stake. A young woman in a collapsing world, covered in lesions, comforts her friend. As Quendy pats Titus on the knee, Anderson writes: “Through the holes in her hand, the blood in her veins was blue.”

The Backlist features in-depth appreciations of classic books in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, and crime genres. Click for more in the Backlist series.

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Reading Advice for James Franco

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Today James Franco did a shelf awareness, discussing the books he’s reading now, and what’s had a lasting impact on his life. In the US we adore our celebrities, and look to them as models, for better or worse. Any opportunity celebrities take to talk about literature, then, and about reading for the sake of reading is an unqualified good. The titles Franco lists brought me back about 7 years or so, to a conversation I remember engaging frequently during and after grad school.

I love reading and always have. Since I was a kiddo. I grew up on comics, fantasy series and mass market sci-fi from the 60s and 70s that my dad collected (like, thousands). I then went full literary snob sometime around the end of high-school. I studied literature in school and graduate school. Books are in my blood and I am always interested in what people read, and how people present reading to the public at large.

At one point in my life (around 25 or so) I realized that, for all my years of reading, almost everything I had read (almost) was by white men. Great stuff, mind you. Books I loved and still love dearly. But a pretty limited perspective on the world. I mean white men are just one category of humans, and if you only allow one human perspective to make you who you are, not only will you never see beyond yourself, but you’ll never really get to see why you are not getting the whole picture.

I thought: this is stupid. I’m already a white male. It’s the only perspective I actually know that I know. Why am I only reading the one human perspective that I already occupy? Isn’t this why I read? To get away from me? So I reconciled it by deliberately reading non-white male authors.

Whatever you want to read, you can find perspective. Comics or poetry or genre or literary fiction. I exchanged Asimov for Bulter and Le Guin, and McCarthy for Carol Shields, and Whitman for the Harlem Renaissance, and Brubaker and Bendis for Kelly Sue DeConnick.

Not exclusively. I still read those guys. Asimov and McCarthy and Brubaker and Bendis are still masters and worth reading. But I read them for years. Now, they’re in the minority.

For this, I’m a better reader and a better human. I think so anyway. So. I thought I’d take the time this morning and pass this advice to you, James Franco. Mix up your bookshelf. Add some diversity, for its own sake, James. Everything’s better that way. Everything.

Advice like this may seem obvious and a bore, but it always comes with push back. And that push back is a reminder that this advice still needs stating outright. Mr. Franco, read more women and more people of color. If you already do this, add that to your public life so that the fans you have know you do it, and that it matters. Because it matters.

Also, you should read Infinite Jest. It’s hilarious, and beautiful, and worth it.

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