First, I have a very wigglesome tuxedo cat on my lap. . . who's also a vampire. Ah. Now I can type.
So I'm biking home yesterday from the bike supply shop (Cycle Works). I've got two new brake pads, which is good. I'd forgotten my helmet when I left home--why? Who knows. I had thought, 'Well, now, this'll be the day I actually take a tumbe for the first time in forever. I must be careful.' So I'm being careful. The bike path goes along the sidewalk for a while and I'm sitting up to stretch and--Yikes! Bad pavement! Since my hands weren't on the grips. . . And the story morphs into a taiji moment. Years of breakfalls and other training kick in. I remember thinking, 'This is gonna hurt.' I landed mostly on my left, rolled up onto my back, kept my chin tucked to my chest (never did my head hit the sidewalk), and caught the bike with my legs. For an observer, then, it went from me being on top of the bike to the bike being on top of me. My left wrist is pretty sore and tender, but no swelling. Some abrasions on my left knee and right calf, but no active bleeding. Mostly, I feel a bit stupid.
On to my intellectual life, now. The Greg Garrard off to the left there is a nice book summarizing positions in the ecocrit movement--as you might expect from Routledge. You want a nice, quick overview? Here's your book. Plus, you get Britishisms in the writing, which is always adorable. He doesn't take on the Darwinian theorists (or, as they've begun calling themselves, ethological theorists) which works just fine. He discusses the apparent fetishization of creative nonfiction among the ecocrit folk but takes his own examples from a variety of genres and writers (novels, poetry, et al), even considering Delillo's White Noise.
Another book I'm working through is the Ashbery to your left. I really enjoy his poetry for about half an hour before I start to wander. So I'm making sure to take this a bit at a time. I find myself wondering how you revise this kind of work. The individual sentences and lines, though, are marvelous. Smooth. Rhythmic. They lead you on all by themselves for a long time before you get to the "Wait. What?" moment.
Lastly, the Goldberg is deliciously scary. I read stuff like this because it's far more frightening to me than, say, Stephen King. And similarly a bit over the top. She does a nice job connecting some of the dots--how James Dobson and others keep the leaders of megachurches all in contact with each other--and explaining for urban, secular liberals how those same churches run silent get out the vote campaigns (from the pulpit and by phone, no mailings or canvassing). But she's also out to get people all freaked out and wacky. There's a sort of breathless "can you believe they think this?" quality to the book. My own relationship to the material is that I grew up in the communities she's describing. My parents had Dare to Discipline on their bookshelf. Probably still do. They cluck over the allegations on Paul Harvey. They attend a megachurch--or used to. They don't listen to Limbaugh and mostly seem content with a secular society. Although--and D asked this yesterday--I think they'd be more than happy to see a "Christ-centered" nation. They are young-earthers, too. Just to throw that out there, but they think that "having dominion over the earth" means being environmentally responsible. So they're an odd pair. Still, the Goldberg is a quick, fun read, especially if you want to be indignant.
