Desperate books aren't suited to desperate times

There's always been a place for apocalyptic tales in fiction and film ... from the Book of Revelations and Paradise Lost, to Mad Max and The Hunger Games. But an apocalyptic story set in an it-ain't-fantasy present—one that foregoes speculation, magic, and hyperbole—still gives me pause. Are readers really drawn to hopelessness fueled by authentic, looming calamity? What drives a skilled and visionary author to craft a novel in this vein?

Zeno Hintermeier, the protagonist of Ilija Trojanow’s The Lamentations of Zeno, compels questions like these. Zeno is a misanthrope’s misanthrope. Though his despair is no formula for winning friends or influencing others, he has come to gruff and despairing misanthropy honestly, by way of a loss that crushes hope of redemption. A German glaciologist, Zeno has lived to witness the death of the alpine glacier to which he devoted his scientific career. He loved “his” glacier. He lived for it, for charting its cold, its depth, its growth, its ablation. Yet the world’s rapid warming, brought on by humankind’s recklessly gluttonous appetites, has killed it.

I knelt next to one of the remnants, the ice under the sooty-black layer of dust was clean, I ran my fingers across the cold surface, then across my cheek, the way I always did, performing my ritual greeting. In the past I could plunge my arms into the fresh snow and bring up full scoops that made my hands so cold they would revitalize my face. I licked my index finger, it tasted like nothing. Only then did the first trivial thought occur to me: never again would I be able to fill plastic bottles with glacier water to sip so enjoyably at home. My host was standing next to his vehicle, I brusquely signaled for him to leave me alone. Then I lay down on the scree, all balled up, a picture of misery [...]

Undone by his loss, Zeno divorces his wife, abandons his university post, and signs onto an Antarctic cruise ship, the Hansen, as an expert guide. Well into his sixties, Zeno flees south to narrate the death of a continent for wealthy seniors who seek cocooned adventure, an edge-of-the-world voyage with a righteous frisson of environmentalist penance ... but no skimping on the creature comforts.

A map of the latitude-longitude coordinates that serve as chapter titles in The Lamentations of Zeno

The author and his protagonist don’t think much of the Hansen’s passengers. Set off by a section break composed of dot-and-dash Morse Code notation for the international distress signal, each chapter closes with a pile up of conversational shards, as if the reader is eavesdropping on flippant chatter Zeno hears as he passes through the cruise ship’s crowded bar, a dozen fragments of conversation at once. The effect is disorienting. To a reader who has developed even the least empathy for Trojanow’s protagonist, this oblivious refrain is grating or worse.

And there’s plenty of empathy possible. It’s not as though Zeno lacks reason to despair of humankind. It may not be heroic to throw in the towel, but it’s not so hard to understand either. Here he is, informing one of the Hansen’s passengers of the history of Grytviken, a former whaling station at the eastern edge of the cruise's route:

“That was the blubber cookery, Mrs. Morgenthau. First they carved the whales up here right where we are standing, then they extracted oil from the blubber in giant cookers.”

“That sounds like hard work.”

“Lucrative work. With high returns. In a good year they cooked away up to forty thousand whales.”

I politely take my leave, otherwise I’d have to explain how first the fur seals were skinned, until there weren’t any fur seals left, after that the elephant seals were killed for their blubber and the try-pots were heated with penguins when the fuel ran out, and when there weren’t any elephant seals left the penguins were rendered into oil. Everything was put to use—humans are always so eager to show Nature more efficient ways to manage her resources. I tramp across a gently sloping soccer field: the crooked goalposts a comforting sight. Slaughter by morning and soccer in the afternoon. Did the goalie’s hands stink? Were the striker’s shins streaked with blood? I leave because I know what they would say, the same thing everyone is always telling me: How come you have to be so negative? Why do you always insist on ruining the mood? [...]

Psychologists have been warning for years that people bombarded with dire descriptions about global warming tend to be repelled, not convinced or engaged. On the other hand, the facts about what climate change has done, is doing, and will do to the only planet we’ve got are … well, they’re dire. As an environmental activist, I identify strongly with Zeno’s despair. Yet Trojanow’s novel, honest and vivid as it is, no matter that it is leavened with richly ironic gallows humor, is not the kind of story that will wake and activate the masses.

The author seems to know this. Here is Zeno and his shipboard lover, Paulina, as the novel comes to a close:

“Hell is not a place,” I finally answer. “It’s the sum of all our lapses and failures.”

She looks at me confused, her fingers dig into the back of my hand, she presses her thumb so hard into the flesh below my thumb it hurts.

“The realization, much much too late that you didn’t do anything when you still could, when you still should have, that is hell. And there’s no escape.”

“I see,” she says, “you’re trying to reassure me.” She loosens her grip. “In your own weird way you’re trying to tell me you’re not going to hell.”

There aren't many boundaries that art can't cross: a tale of abject despair isn't even close to taboo. In fact, though I'm probably an outlier, I found The Lamentations of Zeno cathartic. Despair happens, and it often happens because life is desperate. Portraying that truth—head on, vividly, without flinching, without collapsing into mawkish, trivializing sentimentality at the end of a harrowing tale—is in itself an artistic achievement. And Zeno’s story is told masterfully. Trojanow’s prose is spare, evocative, pointed, and wry.

However.

I’m drawn to fiction that grapples with our damaged 21st century world and our deeply compromised place in it with some measure of grit. When I consider how to rally myself and others to live and act honorably in an era dominated by anthropogenic crises, it's clear that a path forward—determination, at least, if hope would strike too false a note—has to be woven into a narrative I would want to read or write.

I'm certainly drawn to a different tack than Ilija Trojanow’s. There's despair. And then there's facing the music, grim as it may be. As Samuel Beckett put it, at the end of his novel The Unnamable:

you must go on, I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on

I'm not prepared to abandon hope, without struggling to right what can still be righted. Not in life, and not in literature.




This post was originally published on Medium. Thanks to Google Maps for the rendering of Trojanow's lat-long chapter titles.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Grappling with climate change in U.S. cities: a pre-apocalyptic comic book, Warning from my Future Self
Pre-apocalyptic fiction: staving off catastrophe
Paris, the Pleistocene, and finding the grit to grapple with climate change
Pope Francis' environmental encyclical in four core themes

1999’s ‘Battle in Seattle’ set in lyrical prose, overconstructed allegory

What if a lyrically talented author gave readers a visceral view into how love and empathy drives activists to take great, disruptive risks?

Both my thumbs are up.

Okay. So now this: what if that author painted those activists into a vast and dramatic social landscape, but drew them in such broad and unapproachable strokes that only a very few readers could identify with their stories ... let alone find models, examples, or lessons applicable to readers' real worlds?

Hmmmm...

Sunil Yapa’s debut novel, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, is set on the afternoon of Nov 30, 1999, as confrontation peaked at the Seattle WTO protests. It’s a gorgeous, stream-of-consciousness tapestry depicting "the whole ugly beautiful thing" of an intricately interwoven globe, countless strands embodied by tens of thousands of demonstrators converging on one world-shaking afternoon at the tail end of the twentieth century.

The novel's protagonist is Victor, a detached, apolitical, biracial nineteen year old with a shadily-scored stash of weed for sale. Victor has wandered the globe witnessing a web of human hurt since ditching his Seattle home and his enraged adoptive father three years before. As Yapa's tale opens Victor has returned, and sets out to look for customers among the protesters filling Seattle's downtown. Alas, none are interested in pot or even sympathetic to pot dealers. His failure to drum up business leads Victor to King (an erstwhile Earth Liberation Front arsonist who helped destroy a ski resort in Vail the year before) and John Henry (her lover, a cerebral activist with a Christlike commitment to nonviolence). Though a reader would be hard-pressed to explain why, Victor changes course dramatically, abandoning his retail ambitions and throwing down with the WTO protesters, setting the stage for confrontation with three of the book’s other principals: two beat cops and Seattle’s melancholic, befuddled, yet stubbornly authoritarian police chief.

Yapa’s novel paints the suffering caused by globalized capitalism’s exploitation across a vast canvas of humanity, and brings vividly to life how witness of "what pain their life caused in the world" crystallizes into empathic activist resolve:

No way to undo the world where they lived in a shack made of loose boards, a family of six in a shack the size of a car on blocks, and in her life anytime she wanted she could sleep in an apartment where she turned hot water on and off and stepped from the shower and toweled dry thinking about what to eat for breakfast.

How easy to slip into that life where she had a closet for her clothes and a closet for food and how easy to believe this was somehow normal. That’s what got King. Because where was the logic in the thing?

The author lays out his scenes impressionistically; while he succeeds in gestalt, his prose frequently trips over itself, muddying the narrative. The novel’s plot is intricate and sometimes exhilarating, but it is subverted by improbably-coincidental overconstruction, and by voyeuristic immersion in out-of-control police violence. I found it hard to grit my teeth through Yapa's prolonged, cinematically sensual portrayal of police brutality that rivaled the ugliest scenes in A Clockwork Orange.

Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, a seventy year old Sri Lankan Deputy Minister is the novel’s seventh principal. He has flown into Seattle to collect a signature from then-POTUS Bill Clinton that will enable his country to join the WTO. With a diplomat’s calm, and an intricately informed history entwined with neighbors and university colleagues who morphed into the Buddhist mobs that burned, raped, maimed, and murdered their Tamil neighbors as Sri Lanka’s civil war ignited in the 1980s, Charles gives a judicious perspective on the protesters:

Charles Wickramsinghe was surprised to feel a widening respect. A respect with more than a pinch of regret. Because how wrong had he been? To think they knew nothing. To dismiss them. All these thoughtful young people striding toward the gates of capitalism -- they had taken Gandhi’s hunger strike and arrived at this.

And yet.

In the end I couldn't identify with characters whose experience of and relationship with the world they inhabit is presented in fleeting, fragmented glimpses. I found Victor, King, John Henry, Bishop, Park, Ju, and Charles more credible as allegory than as individuals. It was hard to swallow that their collective history encompassed the Oklahoma City bombing, impoverished young women begging for change in India and Peru, the Rodney King riots, the ELF arson in Vail, farmworkers striking in Watsonville, Shanghai's behind-the-flash backstreets, Seattle's gay pride parade, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, 'zine culture, the writings of Che Guevara and Mumia Abu-Jamal, storefront preaching, Fort Benning's School of the Americas ... pretty much the whole globalized ball of wax. Not that it couldn't be so. But the fictional-fact that these seven characters touched all that history makes for a fistful of narrative conveniences too many.

Does Sunil Yapa see and render the true, zero-degrees-of-separation relationships between everything and everyone in this interconnected century? He does. A reader stands in awe of his synthetic vision. But even as I tumbled voraciously through his pages I was disappointed to find no credible character with whom to identify, and -- especially for readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of both political economy and mass protest -- little to establish a grounded footing in the world that the novel portrays.

On the other hand: just because it can't stand alone as a key to understanding the roiling conflicts of our current century does not diminish the insight and value of Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. I’m glad to have read it, and look forward to the author's future work.



An earlier version of this post was published in the Spring 2016 issue of UltraViolet, the newsletter of LAGAI - Queer Insurrection.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Paris, the Pleistocene, and finding the grit to grapple with climate change
Activist fiction: it's about engagement, not about The Issue
Sticking your neck out
Robert Redford, the Weather Underground, and why we read books
Everything relates to everything else

Paris, the Pleistocene, and finding the grit to grapple with climate change

The U.N.F.C.C.C.'s 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) in Paris concluded last week with an agreement among 195 countries that climate change is a problem and that it must be solved. Parties to the agreement agreed they might agree in a future meeting to commit sufficiently to the problem's solution to actually solve it, but they aren't committing themselves yet. The 195 nations agree that the solutions they've been discussing aren't adequate to the existential vastness of the problem, but that they'll try harder. In the future.

I believe the Paris agreement (of which the above tongue-in-cheek summary is only that) is about as good as anyone with their feet on the ground could have expected. After all, this was a negotiation that could only succeed by satisfying representatives of nearly two hundred sovereign nations.

Depending on who else you ask, the Paris agreement is universal and ambitious (Al Gore in The Guardian: may have signaled an end to the fossil fuel era); the beginning of the beginning (the NY Times editorial board: Now comes the hard part); a fraud (James Hansen in The Guardian: no action, just promises); or a vast left-wing conspiracy (blowhard and outlier Cal Thomas of Fox News: In my opinion, belief in "climate change" is on a par with childhood faith in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy).

During the COP21 conference in Paris, I stayed put here in California and read a slim volume of what you might call speculative non-fiction: In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: Global Warming, the Origins of the First Americans, and the Terrible Beasts of the Pleistocene. The book was written by Doug Peacock, the indomitable author of Grizzly Years and the late Edward Abbey's real-life model for George Washington Hayduke III of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

In this latest of his calls from the wild, Peacock considers evidence of the multiple routes that might have opened the unglaciated heart of North America to humans some 12-14,000 years ago, during a prior period of titanic climate shifts ... a period in which "35 genera of mostly-large animals suddenly disappear from the earth." Filling out the thin material evidence of human culture from this pre-historical period, the author and "renegade naturalist" calls on his own decades of experience in wilderness environments, and encounters with wild predators on both sides of the Bering Strait, to imagine human life during a time of massive shifts in climate, terrain, food resources, and bioscape.

Why this exercise, and why now? In Peacock's own words:

We sense big changes are coming but for now life is good. Yet the threat is real. The precise problem seems to be that modern humans have difficulty perceiving their own true long-term self-interests; we don't quite see the evolving threat to our survival as a civilization or a species. There's no Pleistocene lion lurking in the gulch. But beyond the false invulnerability of our clever technology and the insulation of our material comfort, here prowls the beast of our time.

[...] The central issue of my generation is the human perpetrated wound we have inflicted against the life-support systems of the earth, whose collective injuries are increasingly visible today as climate change. Should humans push through another population bottleneck, we will drag down much of the wild earth and almost all the large animals with us. And that's the rub: not that it's unfair, which it is, but whether people can thrive without the habitats in which our human intelligence evolved, that gave rise to that bend of mind we call consciousness? Homo sapiens evolved in wilderness landscapes that are in part still with us; can we hope to endure when that homeland vanishes?

The argument laid out by In the Shadow of the Sabertooth... supposes that it's already too late, that humans have acted and will act too slowly and tentatively to throttle back the effects of the Anthropocene sufficiently to save human civilization as we know it; and considers how humankind might survive a radically unwelcome reconfiguration of our planet.

It has been my purpose in exploring the earliest colonization of the Americas -- a story constructed of interpreted scientific investigations and reconstructed tales of adventure -- to ask questions that appear relevant to the 21st century -- an effort to draw the Pleistocene past into the present day climate change at every appropriate twist in the trail.

I believe in the value of wilderness and it is that wildness which bridges these two worlds. The greatest wilderness ever glimpsed by humans was the uninhabited Americas at the time of first entry into the New World. We are all children of the Pleistocene: Will we dare face the hot future with the ballast of those pilgrims who charged out of the Ice Age?

Peacock projects a future that, should it come to pass, will validate James Hansen's furious disappointment with the recently-concluded talks in Paris. I am temperamentally inclined to foresee that dark future myself. But at the same time I would like to believe -- and I think there is still some ground for believing -- that we remain, today, on a cusp that might yet tip Earth toward a less-decimated future.

And I believe that while there's hope, there's obligation to act to realize it.

That's the theme at the core of my own recently-published novel, Consequence, which I am honored to report made Doug Peacock's reading list earlier this year. I was further honored to hear from the author of In the Shadow of the Sabertooth that, in his judgment, we are writing on the same page, as it were. Doug Peacock on Consequence, circa last month:

Here is a carefully crafted book about the necessity, and danger, of taking personal action in the 21st century. “History,” writes Chris Kalman, the protagonist of Consequence, “will be determined by those who act,” and that war today is for nothing less than Life on Earth—an ambitious undertaking. 

The book’s own cast live in an activist collective—a rarity these days except perhaps, as set, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Steve Masover’s characters ooze humanity; their daily conversations are filled with Dostoyevskian struggles, often wrapped around the morality of civil disobedience and violence. Yet these portraits are finely drawn, never caricature. Consequence swims in an abundance of precise technical detail—much like Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. This thriller is not nearly as esoteric as it might sound: what keeps you turning pages is Masover’s decency toward his characters and their story. The communal life is neither precious nor romanticized. 

The villain of Consequence happens to be genetic engineering but it could have been any current social or environmental issue. The premise, absolutely believable today, is that life on the planet is threatened and that battle waged by this novel’s characters will make a difference. And why not? Our world can snap on a single violent moment folded into the approaching horrors of global warming. 

This is a human story shot in the ass with ideas. 

“If  we allow life on Earth to be destroyed by human negligence,” writes Kalman, “morally the human race will have failed.”

This month's climate agreement is a shot over the bow of the twenty-first century. If Paris was anything real -- anything more than a conclave of yammering, impotent diplomats -- it is the beginning of a monumentally difficult journey, dwarfed only by the draconian horror humankind will face should we fail to embark upon and complete it. As the Editorial Board of the NY Times put it:

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, described the agreement as a “historical turning point.” Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, called it a “monumental success for the planet and its people.” Whether it turns out to be either of those things depends largely on what the individual signatories are willing to put into it. This is an agreement built firmly on science, but also on the hope that the enthusiasm generated in Paris will translate into concrete measures across the globe that will, in fact, prevent the worst consequences of climate change.

Let's keep life on Earth from being destroyed by human negligence, shall we?



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Northern California mobilizes for climate action as Paris talks near
Pope Francis' environmental encyclical in four core themes
Asking the wrong questions about GMOs for disinformation and profit
The fossil fuel industry and the free sump that is our atmosphere: Zing!


Thanks to John Englart (Takver) for his image Shoes in Place de la Republique - Climate of Peace #climat2paix, via Flickr under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Radical Storytelling: Howard Zinn Book Fair photos and video

Here are some photos and video from Sunday's (2nd annual) Howard Zinn Book Fair, held at the Mission campus of City College of San Francisco.

At the fair I shared a table with authors Kate Raphael and Barbara Rhine; and participated in a panel titled Radical Storytelling: Writing Activism into Fiction with Diana Block, Kate Raphael, and Starhawk.

Setting up our table

Anticipating the crowds: Barbara Rhine (Tell No Lies), Kate Raphael (Murder Under the Bridge), and me (Consequence)

Before the panel began

Kate introducing Radical Storytelling: Writing Activism Into Fiction (see/hear Kate's intro on YouTube).

Here's what I had to say about Consequence in my allotted ten minutes, including a reading from Chapter 31:

Kate reads from Murder Under the Bridge

Not an empty seat in the house

Starhawk spoke generously about Murder Under the Bridge and Consequence (she had not yet read Diana's Clandestine Occupations), then read from her forthcoming novel City of Refuge, a sequel to The Fifth Sacred Thing 

Great conversations, all day long...

Thanks especially to James, and to Andy and Patrick of The Green Arcade bookstore, for organizing a terrific book fair. I'm looking forward to #3!


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Howard Zinn Book Fair returns to San Francisco on Sunday Nov 15th
Launch party photos
Pre-apocalyptic fiction: staving off catastrophe



Thanks to Matthew Felix Sun for his always-excellent and reliable photojournalism...

Activist fiction: it's about engagement, not about The Issue

Mysteries are about solving fictionalized real-world puzzles, most often crimes. In fiction categorized as "romance" characters seek, find, lose, and rediscover fulfillment through relationships with an often-idealized other. "Christian fiction" aims to promote behavior, ethics, and beliefs that align with the author's concept of Christianity. "Cli fi" (climate fiction) portrays a world as the author perceives it has been or or anticipates it will be affected by climate change / global warming. Eco-fiction prominently features any of a range of environmental or ecological issues -- recently, I've become interested in a Google+ Group that exchanges posts on these topics; Eco-themes in literature and the arts.

These are all helpful categories. People who want to explore characters and situations that orbit crime, romantic love, Christianity, climate change, or environmental themes can more easily find books they want to read by sifting through their category of choice, as opposed to slogging through the vast and chaotic universe of 129,864,880 books (as of ~5 years ago) from which one could conceivably choose reading material.

But "activist fiction" is an ill-defined category with an unfocused and prejudicially skewed reputation.

Some might say a story whose characters are political activists is "activist fiction" (think Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, or Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation). Others might assert that if a novel's theme is politically charged and the characters, narrator, and/or author more-or-less take a position, it's "activist fiction" (think Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, George Orwell's 1984, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, or Darragh McKeon's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air). Perhaps the narrowest and least helpful definition of the category is one that casts any novel written by an author who is also a political activist as "activist fiction" (think James Baldwin, Jean Genet, or Nadine Gordimer).

To me, "activist fiction" tells stories about people who engage with the world from a point of view that seeks to understand (and often influence) its political dimensions.

Of course, "about people who engage with the world" is a generic definition of almost any story with a character and a setting. And my definition isn't very helpful until the word "political" is unpacked a bit. What I mean by it, in this context, is close to how Merriam Webster defines politics in the word's broadest senses and as it is least closely bound to formal government:

2: political actions, practices, or policies
5a: the total complex of relations between people living in society

The key for me: "activist fiction" is about a type of person and a range of modes of engaging with the world, rather than about any particular issue. It's about the human experience of those engagements ... not the war, environmental disaster, or draconian government that provides a situation or setting that anchors the fiction.

To give illustrative examples, I'm going to use three books published or scheduled for publication this Fall ... the authors, not coincidentally, are three of four panelists slated to discuss Radical Storytelling: Writing Activism Into Fiction at this year's Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco. One of those authors is yours truly.

Clandestine Occupations: An Imaginary History, by Diana Block, describes pivotal relationships and dramatic decisions taken by women who support the Puerto Rican independence movement and those imprisoned for their part in it. Love, loyalty, risk, succor, abandonment, fear, betrayal, and forgiveness are the human dimensions of stories that play out in interlinked episodes over the course of forty years. The novel's drama revolves around and is propelled by the characters' involvement in a political struggle, but commitment to an independent Puerto Rico is the ocean Block's characters swim in -- they don't spend a great many pages explaining that the ocean is wet.

Murder under the Bridge: A Palestine Mystery, by Kate Raphael, is a straight-up detective story set in one of the most contested social and political environments on the planet: the Palestinian West Bank overlaid by Israel's occupation. The bones of Raphael's story follow the contour of most any detective story: a body is found; police go about discovering who murdered the victim. What makes her novel different from any murder mystery you're likely to have read is that the detective is Rania, a Palestinian woman with a young son and a life dedicated to building her people's governing institutions as a member of Fatah (the party of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas). Rania teams up with Chloe, a Jewish-American lesbian activist, to discover who done it. Grassroots activism occurs at the edges of the novel: a confrontation with bulldozers, for example, when Israelis are dispatched to uproot a grove of olive trees that belong to Palestinian farmers; or Chloe's attempts to ward off Israeli soldiers' attacks on unarmed Palestinian boys through her witnessing presence as "an international." But the real political power and fascination of Murder Under the Bridge occurs in its nuanced portrayal of daily routines and relationships among family members and villagers in the West Bank -- a view of everyday life that is hard to find in polarized media portrayals of occupied Palestine. Perhaps most gripping of all, readers are introduced to the sordid underbelly of human trafficking that satisfies Israeli appetites for service workers, nannies, and prostitutes, same old horrifying same old across continents and millennia; and the similarly familiar and discomfiting intimacy between war criminals and peace activists. Murder Under the Bridge is activist fiction because it portrays regular people butting their heads against social constraint, military control, and political power in pursuit of justice.

Consequence, by Steve Masover (a.k.a. moi), portrays a collective household of friends and political activists who engage in nonviolent "direct action" protest. The collective, dubbed the Triangle, engages in a diverse range of progressive political issues; in the novel's timeframe they are preparing to protest genetic engineering's environmental dangers, at an international meeting of biotech companies and scientists taking place at San Francisco's convention center. One member of the Triangle is drawn into a clandestine plot to destroy a agricultural biotech research facility under construction in the midwest. In Consequence, the issue (genetic engineering) is not nearly so central as the question of how grassroots activists can and should balance commitment to nonviolent tactics with actions that call dramatic attention to issues that won't get media attention unless and until protest escalates. As Oscar-nominated director Sam Green put it, "Consequence asks thorny, essential questions about personal responsibility and the role of violence in movements for social change."

---

To hear more from Diana, Kate, prolific author and celebrated activist-pagan Starhawk, and me about how books portray the engaged and engaging lives of activists please join us at our November 15th panel Radical Storytelling: Writing Activism Into Fiction at this year's Howard Zinn Book Fair at the City College Mission Campus in San Francisco (1125 Valencia St, near 24th St. BART; map).

Radical Storytelling: Writing Activism Into Fiction kicks off at 11:00 am on November 15th. I'll be tabling at the fair as well, so if you're in the Bay Area come by, say hello, and check out some of the other excellent books and panels on offer!



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Launch party photos
Sticking your neck out
Pre-apocalyptic fiction: staving off catastrophe
Robert Redford, the Weather Underground, and why we read books


Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the public domain image of the painting La liberté guidant le peuple by Eugène Delacroix.

When tree flakes make governments quake (it's Banned Books Week!)

Somehow or other I managed to release Consequence during Banned Books Week, the American Library Association's annual celebration of the freedom to read -- this year that'd be Sept 27 - Oct 3. So I had a good look at the books on Wikipedia's list of books banned by governments (as opposed to the site's list of books that are challenged by miscellaneous groups and agencies).

Bans on books in this list for their supposed "obscenity" just make my eyes roll. Not that such bans aren't foolish and narrow-minded and culturally reductive. It's just that thinking of, say, Joyce's Ulysses or Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales or the Fifty Shades... books as obscene in the age of ubiquitous online pornography strikes me as more than a little bit futile, dated, and out-and-out silly.

Here are books that stood out for me in Wikipedia's list:

1. Rights of Man (1791), Thomas Paine
2. The Jungle (1906), Upton Sinclair
3. The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck
4. Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell
5. El Señor Presidente (1946), Miguel Ángel Asturias
6. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell
7. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), Alexander Solzhenitsyn
8. The Gulag Archipelago (1973), Alexander Solzhenitsyn
9. Burger's Daughter (1979), Nadine Gordimer
10. July's People (1981), Nadine Gordimer

What do these books have in common? What I see is that these are books that were banned because they made governments or social elites worry about their grip on power and privilege.

• Thomas Paine's Rights of Man was banned first in the U.K. (which charged the author for supporting the French Revolution); then in Tzarist Russia following the Decembrist uprising in 1825. The monarchists worried when Paine's ideas -- particularly that "a general revolution in the principle and construction of Governments is necessary" -- circulated among the masses.
• Similarly, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and The Gulag Archipelago offended and threatened post-Tsar autocrats in the U.S.S.R.
• Upton Sinclair's The Jungle -- which portrayed the exploitation of immigrants in industrialized U.S. cities and the horrors of the early 20th century meat-packing industry -- struck the autocrats in East Germany as "inimical to communism." Whatever that might mean, exactly.
• Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter and July's People threatened the apartheid South African state by critiquing its brutal institutionalized racism.
• In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck gave a clear-eyed view of how California received refugees from the collapsed farming communities of Dustbowl-era middle America: inhumanely and selfishly. (Sound familiar?) In any case, the people of Kern County didn't like how Steinbeck portrayed them.
• Miguel Ángel Asturias, in El Señor Presidente, described the dictatorship of his native Guatamala so incisively that the country's autocrats prohibited its publication for thirteen years.

Books -- black ink daubed on bleached tree-flakes -- are more powerful than their constituent parts might suggest. They have been used to great effect to expose ugly truths about power. The examples above are just a tiny fraction of a very long list of books that have guided and strengthened people in resisting constraints on their self-determination. For those who wield power, this has been and continues to be a problem. For the rest of us, it's something closer to salvation.

I think it's a happy coincidence that my novel makes its debut during a week when readers consider the written word's power to overturn an intolerable, seemingly implacable status quo. The characters in Consequence would likely agree.

Related posts on One Finger Typing:

Hanging friends' art in fiction
Robert Redford, the Weather Underground, and why we read books
Surveillance and power through fiction and fact: Max Barry's "Lexicon"
Banned books week: Joyce's Ulysses

CONSEQUENCE has arrived

(I can't tell you how much I've wanted to type that blog title ... for a very long time.)

And it's so: Consequence is available now!

Readers can find my debut novel online, on the shelf at selected stores, and by special order at any bookstore in the U.S. The book is available in paperback and e-book formats.

Here again is the capsule description:

San Francisco activist Christopher Kalman has little to show for years spent organizing non-violent marches, speak-outs, blockades, and shutdowns for social and environmental justice. When a shadowy eco-saboteur proposes an attack on genetically engineered agriculture, Christopher is ripe to be drawn into a more dangerous game. His certainty that humankind stands on the brink of ecological ruin drives Christopher to reckless acts and rash alliances, pitting grave personal risk against conscientious passion.

Online vendors include Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple's iTunes store, Kobo, and Smashwords. Amazon and Barnes and Noble sell Consequence both as a paperback and an e-book.

Most any bookstore in the U.S. (and many abroad) can special-order Consequence in paperback if they're not already carrying it: please ask!

If you're in the East Bay -- and can't hold out until my launch party on October 18th (RSVP on Facebook) -- you can find Consequence on the shelf at Diesel Books, Moe's, any of the three Pegasus stores, or Books Inc on Shattuck @ Vine.

In San Francisco, try Modern Times or Books Inc at Opera Plaza.

Wherever you are, if you read Consequence and like it, please consider posting your review and rating on Amazon and Goodreads -- or wherever you like to post about what you read -- and sharing it with your social networks.

Here's what some early readers thought:

“I couldn’t put Consequence down! Masover vividly evokes San Francisco’s radical sub-culture in this tautly authentic and finely-crafted novel. Consequence asks thorny, essential questions about personal responsibility and the role of violence in movements for social change.”

—Sam Green, Academy Award-nominated director of The Weather Underground

“Consequence is a great read, full of building tension and excitement, written by someone who really knows the activist scene, with its moral dilemmas and its ideals. But this isn’t just a book about activists—Masover writes about conflicts central to the human situation.”

—Starhawk, author of The Spiral Dance and The Fifth Sacred Thing

“. . . exciting . . . a great read . . . reminiscent of The Monkey Wrench Gang.”

—Scoop Nisker, author of If You Don’t Like the News, Go Out and Make Some of Your Own

Let me know what you think of the book: here in the comments, on my Facebook page, or by posting a private message from my web site. I'll be posting some of my ideas about Consequence over the coming weeks, and would welcome your questions.




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Hanging friends' art in fiction
It's a book! CONSEQUENCE coming in October [...]
Pre-apocalyptic fiction: The Jaguar's Children by John Vaillant

Pope Francis' environmental encyclical in four core themes

There's plenty that has already been written and excerpted from Pope Francis' encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si': On Care for our Common Home, in the ten weeks since it was published by the Vatican on 24 May. But I took my time reading through the full text (in English translation), and am only now ready to shine my own small light on this deep and comprehensive text by the spiritual leader of some 1.25 billion people. I'm not a Catholic or Christian myself, and disagree strongly with some of the Church's teachings, but Pope Francis got to the heart of several existential problems facing humankind, touching on fundamental themes that he argued and illustrated in ways that speak to audiences well beyond the bounds of Christendom.

It turns out that Bill McKibben too is only now weighing in on Laudato Si', in his piece The Pope and The Planet in the current, 13 Aug issue of the New York Review of Books [article is behind a pay wall]. As McKibben describes the encyclical:

Instead of a narrow and focused contribution to the climate debate, it turns out to be nothing less than a sweeping, radical, and highly persuasive critique of how we inhabit this planet--an ecological critique, yes, but also a moral, social, economic, and spiritual commentary.

I agree.

After reading it through I see the text (which I will no doubt re-read) emphasizing four core themes, though they don't encompass all of what Pope Francis has to say in Laudato Si':

1. Humankind is a peer among living beings in the material world
2. Shared responsibility is the ethos required to sustain our common home
3. We can't rely merely on markets and engineering to resolve the present crises
4. Synthesis -- not reductive analysis -- is the path to true understanding

To condense down the many of Pope Francis' 246 paragraphs I highlighted as I read Laudato Si' to produce something even vaguely blog-post size, I had no choice but to leave out richly-thought and clearly-articulated stretches of Pope Francis' prose. The 17 trimmed paragraphs below add up to a bit more than four percent of the full encyclical; I encourage everyone I'm capable of encouraging to read the entire document. It's 82 pages in PDF format. A full consideration of the breadth and complexity of the Pope's thinking is well worth the investment of time and attention.

In the excerpts below, the cited numerals [in square brackets] refer to the numbered paragraphs of Pope Francis' encyclical. I have omitted endnote references published in the original.


Humankind is a peer among living beings in the material world

The current pope took his name to align his papacy with St. Francis of Assisi, and is the first pope to have taken the name Francis. Early in his encyclical on the environment, Pope Francis clearly draws the link between his theme and the beloved patron saint of animals and the environment:

Francis helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology, and take us to the heart of what it is to be human. Just as happens when we fall in love with someone, whenever he would gaze at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals, he burst into song, drawing all other creatures into his praise. [...] His response to the world around him was so much more than intellectual appreciation or economic calculus, for to him each and every creature was a sister united to him by bonds of affection. That is why he felt called to care for all that exists. [...] If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled. [11]

Greater investment needs to be made in research aimed at understanding more fully the functioning of ecosystems and adequately analyzing the different variables associated with any significant modification of the environment. Because all creatures are connected, each must be cherished with love and respect, for all of us as living creatures are dependent on one another. [...] [42]

This is a key perspective, for Pope Francis and for all humanity: we are an integral part of Earth, and the purpose of its diverse beings, aspects, and materials is not to 'serve' humankind in any subsidiary way. We are co-equal, interdependent inhabitants -- not rulers or masters. Much follows from adoption of this considered, honest humility.


Shared responsibility is the ethos required to sustain our common home

The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change. [...] Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home. [13]

Climate change is a global problem with grave implications [...]. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades. [...] There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. [...] Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded. [25]

[...] A true “ecological debt” exists, particularly between the global north and south, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment, and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time. [...] The warming caused by huge consumption on the part of some rich countries has repercussions on the poorest areas of the world, especially Africa [...]. [51]

It is remarkable how weak international political responses have been. The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance. There are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up trumping the common good and manipulating information so that their own plans will not be affected. [...] [54]

The current global situation engenders a feeling of instability and uncertainty, which in turn becomes “a seedbed for collective selfishness”. When people become self-centred and self-enclosed, their greed increases. The emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume. It becomes almost impossible to accept the limits imposed by reality. In this horizon, a genuine sense of the common good also disappears. [...] Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction. [204]

Not everyone is called to engage directly in political life. Society is also enriched by a countless array of organizations which work to promote the common good and to defend the environment, whether natural or urban. Some, for example, show concern for a public place (a building, a fountain, an abandoned monument, a landscape, a square), and strive to protect, restore, improve or beautify it as something belonging to everyone. Around these community actions, relationships develop or are recovered and a new social fabric emerges. [...] [232]

Environmental catastrophe will not be averted unless we each and all pull the weight we are capable of and responsible for pulling.

We can't rely merely on markets and engineering to resolve the present crises

That is to say, real solutions will necessarily be disruptive to how people in developed nations live.

[...] Human beings must intervene when a geosystem reaches a critical state. But nowadays, such intervention in nature has become more and more frequent. As a consequence, serious problems arise, leading to further interventions; human activity becomes ubiquitous, with all the risks which this entails. Often a vicious circle results, as human intervention to resolve a problem further aggravates the situation. [...] We must be grateful for the praiseworthy efforts being made by scientists and engineers dedicated to finding solutions to man-made problems. But a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly. [...] [34]

Whether believers or not, we are agreed today that the earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone. [...] The principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and “the first principle of the whole ethical and social order”. The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property. [...] This calls into serious question the unjust habits of a part of humanity. [93]

The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. [...] Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit. [106]

[...] The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings. Finance overwhelms the real economy. [...] Some circles maintain that current economics and technology will solve all environmental problems, and argue, in popular and non-technical terms, that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market growth. [...] Their behaviour shows that for them maximizing profits is enough. Yet by itself the market cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion. [109]

[...] Once more, we need to reject a magical conception of the market, which would suggest that problems can be solved simply by an increase in the profits of companies or individuals. Is it realistic to hope that those who are obsessed with maximizing profits will stop to reflect on the environmental damage which they will leave behind for future generations? Where profits alone count, there can be no thinking about the rhythms of nature, its phases of decay and regeneration, or the complexity of ecosystems which may be gravely upset by human intervention. Moreover, biodiversity is considered at most a deposit of economic resources available for exploitation, with no serious thought for the real value of things, their significance for persons and cultures, or the concerns and needs of the poor. [190]

Synthesis -- not reductive analysis -- is the path to true understanding

This fundamental concept is not unrelated to the first theme I called out (Humankind is a peer among living beings in the material world). Pope Francis nailed it, particularly in his section titled The Globalization of the Technocratic Paradigm:

It can be said that many problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build. [107]

Although no conclusive proof exists that GM cereals may be harmful to human beings, and in some regions their use has brought about economic growth which has helped to resolve problems, there remain a number of significant difficulties which should not be underestimated. In many places, following the introduction of these crops, productive land is concentrated in the hands of a few owners due to “the progressive disappearance of small producers, who, as a consequence of the loss of the exploited lands, are obliged to withdraw from direct production”. [...] The expansion of these crops has the effect of destroying the complex network of ecosystems, diminishing the diversity of production and affecting regional economies, now and in the future. [...] [134]

[...] It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected. [...] Just as the different aspects of the planet – physical, chemical and biological – are interrelated, so too living species are part of a network which we will never fully explore and understand. [...] It follows that the fragmentation of knowledge and the isolation of bits of information can actually become a form of ignorance, unless they are integrated into a broader vision of reality. [138]

[...] By learning to see and appreciate beauty, we learn to reject self-interested pragmatism. If someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple. If we want to bring about deep change, we need to realize that certain mindsets really do influence our behaviour. Our efforts at education will be inadequate and ineffectual unless we strive to promote a new way of thinking about human beings, life, society and our relationship with nature. Otherwise, the paradigm of consumerism will continue to advance, with the help of the media and the highly effective workings of the market. [204]

* * *

To conclude with McKibben, again from The Pope and The Planet:

[...] at least since the Buddha, a line of spiritual leaders has offered a reasonably coherent and remarkably similar critique of who we are and how we live. The greatest of those critics was perhaps Jesus, but the line continues through Francis’s great namesake, and through Thoreau, and Gandhi, and many others. Mostly, of course, we’ve paid them devoted lip service and gone on living largely as before.

But lip service isn't going to work this time around, devoted or not. Rejecting leaders and pundits (McKibben names Thatcher, Reagan, and David Brooks) who "summon the worst in us and assume that will eventually solve our problems," McKibben rightly observes that:

Pope Francis, in a moment of great crisis, speaks instead to who we could be individually and more importantly as a species. As the data suggest, this may be the only option we have left.

Related posts from One Finger Typing:
Oil trains, coal trains: extractive economics vs. people and place
Asking the wrong questions about GMOs for disinformation and profit
The fossil fuel industry and the free sump that is our atmosphere: Zing!
Weather? Climate? Change?


Thanks to Agência Brasil, via Wikimedia, for the image of Pope Francis at Vargihna, Brazil.

It's a book! CONSEQUENCE coming in October - Goodreads Giveaway starts today.

Have I mentioned I've been writing a novel?

(Oh. I have. Forty-seven times in five and a half years of One Finger Typing, if the Unix utilities tr, grep, and wc are to be trusted.)

Well, then...

Ten weeks and counting 'til the official release date (29 September), I'm elated to announce that the finish line is visible at the end of the tunnel: my debut novel Consequence will be in readers' hands, Kindles, Nooks, iDevices, phones, and tablets by early October, in paperback and e-book editions.

If you read posts on One Finger Typing recently you may have already noticed the image of Consequence and link in the sidebar these past several weeks. But let's cut to the chase ... the capsule description from the book's back cover:

San Francisco activist Christopher Kalman has little to show for years spent organizing non-violent marches, speak-outs, blockades, and shutdowns for social and environmental justice. When a shadowy eco-saboteur proposes an attack on genetically engineered agriculture, Christopher is ripe to be drawn into a more dangerous game. His certainty that humankind stands on the brink of ecological ruin drives Christopher to reckless acts and rash alliances, pitting grave personal risk against conscientious passion.

Here's how early endorsers have responded to the novel (these also from the back-cover):

"I couldn’t put Consequence down! Masover ... asks thorny, essential questions about personal responsibility and the role of violence in movements for social change."

– Sam Green, Academy Award-nominated director of The Weather Underground

"Consequence is a great read, full of building tension and excitement ... Masover writes about conflicts central to the human situation."

– Starhawk, author of The Spiral Dance and The Fifth Sacred Thing

Over the coming weeks I'll occasionally post book news here, but a more complete announcement stream will be posted to my Author Page on Facebook, which I invite you to "Like" if you want to keep an eye on notifications about the book's launch party, readings, interviews, book fair appearances, panels, and so forth.

(You can also subscribe to my mailing list to receive a modest number of notifications via e-mail.)

One more thing, hot off the press this morning:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Consequence

by Steve Masover

Giveaway ends August 11, 2015.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

If you have an itch to read Consequence early, there's a giveaway for that. Beginning today you can sign-up for a chance to win an advance-reader copy (ARC) on Goodreads. All you have to do to enter is be (or become) a Goodreads reader -- it's free -- and click the Enter Giveaway link above (or on Goodreads' Consequence page) before the giveaway ends.

Whenever you read Consequence, I hope that you'll leave reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads to let other readers know what you think.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Pre-apocalyptic fiction: The Jaguar's Children by John Vaillant
Robert Redford, the Weather Underground, and why we read books
Dystopias in fiction
Allusion in fiction

Pre-apocalyptic fiction: The Jaguar's Children by John Vaillant

Peter Heller is the author of a finely crafted, deeply melancholy, but -- against type! -- hopeful post-apocalyptic novel The Dog Stars, published to wide and well-deserved acclaim in 2012. Heller was at Diesel Books in Oakland last month to read from the newly-released paperback of his second work of fiction, The Painter, where I met and spoke to him as his audience arrived.

Because he asked (another Diesel Books regular having already told him I am a writer), I described my forthcoming novel Consequence, and in the course of our conversation I categorized it as "pre-apocalyptic fiction." The concept seemed to intrigue Heller, and when I described my book's focus on a community of San Francisco activists organizing against the proliferation of genetically-engineered agriculture he told me about a book he recently blurbed: John Vaillant's The Jaguar's Children. I put it in my queue immediately.

The Jaguar's Children is told by Héctor María de la Soledad Lázaro González from the inside of a welded-shut water truck transporting Héctor; an old friend and agricultural scientist César, whom he has only recently found after a long separation; and a company of fellow border-crossers. Following a mechanical breakdown, their coyotes have abandoned the truck and its human prisoners to a slow, tortured descent toward death-by-dehydration in the Arizona desert. Héctor narrates his tale as a series of text and voice recordings queued up in a cell phone, in the hope that sufficient signal will be miraculously regained that he can transmit to an unknown, desperately hoped-for rescuer. Late in the novel we learn that the phone -- César's -- carries the last surviving copy of research that proves the biotech company SantaMaize has released a genetically modified variant of corn that will wipe out genetic diversity that indigenous farmers have depended on for thousands of years, and transform Mexico's self-sufficient communities into indentured servants of agribusiness ... which is why César and Héctor have fled Mexico in the first place, pursued by thuggish enforcers in the service of SantaMaize.

Vaillant's work is set in a pre-apocalyptic, present-day world: amid brutal genocide in Mexico and Central America, fueled by drug cartels and boughten police; among desperate rivers of immigrants to the United States, driven by otherwise inescapable violence and poverty into the predatory clutches of coyotes, who rob then abandon them to die in desert borderlands; and in the shadow of a corporate oligarchy hellbent on destroying indigenous people, culture, deeply-rooted agricultural practice, and land in order to accrue profit and power that dwarfs the crude ambitions of druglords.

Does any of that setting sound familiar? Maybe that’s because you've read about the fictional world of The Jaguar's Children in the reputable, non-fiction press. The chaos and savagery in which Vaillant has set his novel is happening. Today. Now.

That's the thing about "pre-apocalyptic fiction," as I conceive it. It isn't nearly so speculative as its darker, post-apocalyptic cousins. It takes place in a world that has already come into being, not a world that might come to pass. And its heroes are the women and men who are doing what they can to turn the apocalyptic tide.

At a demonstration in support of fossil fuels divestment yesterday on the UC Berkeley campus, I was talking to a fellow-activist and retired psychiatrist about current fascination with post-apocalyptic fiction. My own theory, I told him, is that novels of this sort function in the same way that dreams do: they permit people to grapple with issues, conflicts, and fears that are too overwhelming to confront in real or waking life.

Pre-apocalyptic fiction, on the other hand, like The Jaguar's Children and Consequence, portray real people overcoming fears from which one might naturally and normally hide, in order to confront forces that are -- in real life, today and now -- propelling humanity and all living beings toward an apocalyptic precipice.

Pre-apocalyptic fiction dramatizes the heroism that surrounds us -- in real life -- from Vandana Shiva's "fiery opposition to globalization and to the use of genetically modified crops" described by Michael Specter in The New Yorker last year ("Seeds of Doubt," 25 Aug 2014); to the pacifist anti-nuclear heroines and heroes of the Plowshares movement, described in that same magazine by Eric Schlosser last month ("Break-In at Y-12," 9 March 2015).

As John Vaillant has proven in The Jaguar's Children, these dramas are the stuff that compelling fiction is made of.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Asking the wrong questions about GMOs for disinformation and profit
Teju Cole's Open City: protagonist as open book or guarded guide?
Surveillance and power through fiction and fact: Max Barry's "Lexicon"
Tinkering: on bookstore serendipity and novels that show what it is to be alive
Robert Redford, the Weather Underground, and why we read books

Pushing the envelope: love story, with transman

Sunshine Mugrabi's memoir, When my Boyfriend was a Girl, is a love story. In many respects it's a conventional love story: two people meet, there's chemistry, each has reservations about wading in too deep or too fast. One gets over those reservations before the other, arguments ensue, tension escalates ... and maybe they make it, maybe they don't.

But this memoir has a twist. And that the title gives away the nature of that twist doesn't diminish the freshness, honesty, surprise, or emotional resonance of its story. Not a whit. Because the two things that matter most about When my Boyfriend was a Girl are:

1. it's a conventional love story about people who most readers won't easily imagine in a conventional relationship: a bisexual woman, and an FTM transsexual; and,
2. it richly illustrates why those categories -- bisexual woman, FTM transsexual -- are not the defining elements in a human love story.

The memoir, published just last month, is well written and tightly paced. As dramatic narrative, it zigged and zagged -- between obstacles Sunshine and Leor encountered and the ways they found to surmount them -- a little too predictably for my taste; but as I read I weighed the book's narrative structure against the truth that zigzag is how relationships unfold in the real world. More importantly, that very same dramatic 'ordinariness' goes to the heart of the book's core message: a relationship with a transsexual is, well, a relationship.

Consider how the author treats physical love. Here's a beautifully lyrical passage, one of my favorite in the memoir:

When I crawl back in beside him he is lying on his side, his breathing now heavier, coming out thick like a train engine. With my arm across his waist his warm hand takes hold of mine. I inch closer, pressing my body against his naked back. Dreams invade my brain, of dresses and high heels. I yawn and press myself closer to him. The curve of his waist is reassuring to me, a shape I've come to know and love. All we have is now, I tell myself. The darkness coils around us and I fall fast asleep.

Full disclosure: Sunshine is an old friend. We've known each other since the late 1980s, when we lived together for a couple of years in a communal house in Berkeley. More to the point of this post, Sunshine and I were both a part of the Oakland/Berkeley chapter of a 90s-era activist group called Queer Nation -- we called ourselves Queer Nation - East Bay. Queer Nation chapters sprang up all around the country around that time, modeled on the original founded in New York in response to violence -- physical and rhetorical -- against gay men and lesbians.

Queer Nation was all about pushing the envelope. Our core M.O. was to pick a public space that wasn't known for being friendly to displays of same-sex affection, show up without prior notice, and flamboyantly make out. Public transit stations, pubs, malls, bowling alleys... Sometimes we made a point of picking places where someone or a couple had been hassled or assaulted for Living While Queer.

Here's Sunshine -- neé Dewitt -- from a cover article about Queer Nation - East Bay published in the weekly East Bay Express on 15 Feb 1991. (The article, Loud and Queer by Linnea Due, is a great read, but too far back to be available in the paper's on-line archive.)

Sunshine Dewitt, her easy-to-read expressions radiating both her humor and her passionate commitment, describes the action at Raleigh's, a bar and café on Telegraph Avenue. "Raleigh's has these big picture windows facing the street, so that action was really successful just on the level of visibility. We were forcing people who claimed to be tolerant -- whatever that means -- to really see us. People are so clever at avoiding gay people in action, and this was one time we were in their faces, they had to see us, and it just upset people so much. It really did start a controversy. There was that article in the Daily Cal afterward, ranting that we were trying to imitate straight people by kissing in public. As we walked in there, I watched a straight couple kissing, and I thought, well, obviously kissing is allowed in here. It was just so powerful to see two men kissing after seeing the same boring image of a man and a woman, a man and a woman..."

The group of QNEB activists being interviewed (in my living room) goes on to explain how most of us took exception to UC Berkeley's student newspaper, the Daily Cal, characterizing our activity as imitating straight people. Then the article's author quoted yours truly:

Queer Nation goes out into places that are predominantly straight, where gay people don't normally congregate as queer people, but it's not so we can be like straight people. If we can pass as straight people, we can go anywhere. Everybody's known that as long as queer people have existed, you can go anywhere as long as you don't show who you are. The point of Queer Nation is to make it possible for us to go places and be ourselves ...

And a few paragraphs later, Sunshine again:

"We will never assimilate," Sunshine says. "That's the thing for me. We're not going to look the way straight people want us to look; we're not going to act they way they want us to act."

We were a couple of decades younger then, and more prone to making absolutist pronouncements than we might be today. And while it's true there are plenty of people and governments still arduously channeling the spirits of Anita Bryant and Jesse Helms, nowadays queer people and culture are a lot more visible in movies, television, music, and books ... and most of us feel safer -- if not necessarily safe -- when being ourselves in many major urban environments and in some smaller cities and towns in the U.S. In places where, in the 1990s, we couldn't comfortably or safely hold hands on the sidewalk or make out in a college bar, we can now choose to get married.

When my Boyfriend was a Girl acknowledges the conflicted feelings that many queer activists who came up and out in the '70s, '80s, and '90s hold about 'mainstream' goals like winning the right to marry or serve openly in the military. When Sunshine first broached the topic of marrying Leor (and Leor first shied away from marriage), that goal was still aspirational in the U.S for same-sex couples (which isn't a category Sunshine and Leor fit, by the way).

Here, from the memoir's seventh chapter:

In these dark days before gay marriage is legal in any state of the U.S., I know I have a bit of a tough case to make to Leor, who will no doubt play the solidarity with our gay and lesbian allies card. So I begin to amass a large and growing arsenal of good reasons why we should consider getting married. [...] Yet, I know in my heart that Leor and I would be breaking some major, unwritten rule if we were to take advantage of the fact that we could pass ourselves off as a straight couple in the eyes of the law.

Sunshine's focus on The Marriage Question was -- for me, during the hours I was immersed in reading When my Boyfriend was a Girl -- the least compelling aspect of her memoir. But unlike a large number of LBGTQ people, marriage was never important to me. My partner and I had been together for a month shy of fifteen years when the Supreme Court ruled last June for same-sex marriage in a pair of major victories for the gay-rights movement, as Adam Liptak of the NY Times put it. I'm not saying I was indifferent to the ruling -- far from it. I was and remain glad that same-sex couples who do wish to are now (and finally) able to marry. For myself, however, I never longed for a government-issued certificate to ratify my commitments.

For Sunshine and Leor, the question of marriage was a lot more complicated than it could ever be for two male or two female partners. Here, from near the end of the book:

"Leor, I don't know if I can go on," I say. "It's just too hard to be in this limbo. Everyone we know is tying the knot. Straight, gay, whatever else. If you don't want that..."

"We can't be what marriage is about," he says, cutting me off. "Can't you see that?"

A single tear slips down his cheek. The sight makes my heart lurch inside me [...]

Later, much later, I will recognize how difficult it was for him to say these words to me. To say out loud that he can't live up to the fantasy I have built of what and who I want him to be. That he fears the pressure on him to be the husband I expect. That as a differently gendered person, he would never be the man I thought I wanted.

If I were to wish for one thing more from this memoir, it would be just that: more. Especially, I'd wish for more of Leor's experience as his relationship with Sunshine evolves.

After finishing the the last page of her postscript, I gave a lot of thought to the author's decision to focus so tightly on the question whether she (bisexual woman) would marry her beloved (FTM transexual). Leaving my own ideas about marriage aside, I realized that this authorial decision makes shrewd emotional and rhetorical sense.

Here's the thing: for the overwhelming majority of people of all sexes and sexualities, marriage is a familiar and significant aspect of life and culture. Most people grow up expecting or hoping to marry, and (according to U.S. census data) most people do so. And, hey, I cry at weddings myself! Making a lifelong pledge is a big, deep deal ... even if married partners' promises don't always last as intended, when a couple makes them they are sincere and moving expressions of love, loyalty, and commitment to honor and care for another person.

Tying the freighted question of making and celebrating commitment to another human being to the trajectory of Sunshine and Leor's relationship makes their love accessible. That accessibility extends even to readers who have never knowingly met a transexual, and imagine that loving such a person is radically different from love as they conceive and experience it.

To paraphrase a famous literary lesbian, When my Boyfriend was a Girl makes crystal clear that however unique the particulars of a relationship, a marriage is a marriage is a marriage.

And in making that case, Sunshine Mugrabi is still pushing the envelope.



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