River of Play

Nativity

I just thought I'd mark another anniversary of the day of my birth. 

This year, I'm in yet another wild, turbulent place. But I've had a chance to read a couple of poetry books--Karen An-Hwei Lee's Ardor and Todd Boss's Yellowrocket. Two very different books, but both of them explore the kinds of ecologies we encounter in the 21st century. Pick up both. At once. Yes, you, you ecopoets.

Back in the Saddle--and Relaxing

AWP was last weekend, and it was...immense. I ran into Matt Buresci who told me that 8,500 people were there for the panels and the 700 tables and booths in the book fair. And this has been a goad for me to think about the Prairie Schooner brand, if you will. The good people at CLMP suggested a book to read, Buying In. So I'm reading the text. Very interesting stuff about the psychology of buying, and it raises intriguing questions about innovation v. novelty. 

The conference is a good place to meet old friends and to remind myself that there's a lot of light and smoke in literary publishing but very little that's all that interesting. I also noticed that our price point was a little steep for current economies. We'll see what the year brings. But the worst thing about the conference was my conveyance: a Jeep Compass. Nice enough on the inside, I suppose (though the cup holders were in terrible locations), but it maxed out at 20 mph on the highway. Oof. And don't get me started on the extensive blind spots. Cars around me would disappear entirely for miles at a time only to reappear when I needed to change lanes. 

Plus, did I mention the mileage? 

Which takes me off the AWP issue and onto the much more meaningful engagements of ecocriticism (oh, before we leave AWP: I did get a chance to meet up with some ASLE and Wofford folk). D handed me a rather appalling little board book when I got home. I Love You, Little One by Nancy Tafuri. In this book--firmly in the tradition of reassurance narratives--a variety of wild animals ask their mothers if their mothers in fact love them. We'll leave the talking animals aside and concentrate on their maternal responses. Yes, the mothers say, I love you like the pond/river/stars love you-- And there's the trouble. I finished each of those sentences while D was reading with "which is to say, not at all." I know for a fact that D loves Wendy more than the stars love her. The stars don't care. At all. Hell, the pond can drown you. And will, no matter how fond of it you are. I understand that we're talking about childhood treacle, but still. Not all the treacly books suggest dangerous attitudes. 

But the illustrations are nice.

We're Being Watched

Lordy, the post-avant has found us. Which is sort of what Skinner's all about, but Josh Corey went to the Brussels conference and has these reactions. Interesting stuff. I hope they hang around. 

In other news, the Chronicle of Higher Ed published the following piece (we'll see how long it lasts) in their August 1, 2008 issue. It shows us that the evolutionary ecocrits are taking a hard line and might not be doing well because of it. And there's some wrong-headed stuff in there (I mean, trying to see if anyone believes in the death of the author? Please. Seems to be missing the point that we don't need an biography to read a piece, and this lack of historical awareness will condemn this critic to the dustbin faster than his supposed political enemies). Anyway, the cognitive stuff is interesting and well worth paying attention to. 

Snap into this slim jim quick!

 Darwin to the Rescue

A group of scholars thinks evolutionary science can reinvigorate

literary studies

By BRITT PETERSON

In the face of any looming apocalypse, imagined or not, prophets abound. For the literary academy, which has been imagining its own demise for almost as long as it has been around, prophets seem always to look to science, with its soothing specificity and concreteness. As the modern discipline of literary criticism was forming in the early 20th century, scholars concentrated their efforts on philology, a study that was thought to be more systematic than pure literary analysis. When the New Critics made their debut in the 1920s and 30s, their goal was to give a quasi-scientific rigor to literary theory: to lay out in detail the formal attributes of a "good poem" and provide guidance as to how exactly one discovered them. Later the Canadian critic Northrop Frye, in his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, famously queried: "What if criticism is a science as well as an art?" And some of the poststructuralist thought that began to filter into America from France in the 1960s took as its bedrock linguistic and psychoanalytic theory.

But very few pro-science activists suggested that literary scholars should actually work the way scientists do, using such methods as accumulating data and forming and testing hypotheses. Even Frye argued that, while the critic should understand the natural sciences, "he need waste no time in emulating their methods. I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy's novels in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged." Over the last decade or so, however, a cadre of literary scholars has begun to encourage exactly that sort of procedure, and recently they have become very loud about it. The most prominent (at least in the nonacademic media) are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism. In the past few years, such critics have had the honor of a long, if quizzical, New York Times Magazine profile and, in May, a place on the Boston Globe's Ideas page, where Jonathan A. Gottschall, a leading proponent of Literary Darwinism and an adjunct English professor at Washington and Jefferson College, explained why the approach is for him, as he says, "the way and the light."

His comments have been receiving widespread attention in the blogosphere, perhaps because they touch a nerve: The idea that traditional literary studies are in decline, or already dead, is bandied about almost casually now. The symptoms are legion, from the discussion of books as an old technology to the tight job market and the increasing reliance on adjunct labor in the humanities. And, like Gottschall, many academics see literary theory as an alienating force that has driven students away from their disciplines, and splintered the disciplines to the point, sometimes, of outright war. Nonetheless, many literary scholars are skeptical of the idea that Literary Darwinism will save their sector of the academy. And some of the strongest criticism comes from those you might think would be allies — other members of the loosely defined group of literary critics breaking new ground with studies that incorporate scientific theory and even, in a few cases, empirical method. Literary Darwinists are "a very small group of people that position themselves as martyrs for the cause … because they expect to be berated by everyone else in the field," says Lisa Zunshine, an English professor at the University of Kentucky, who works with cognitive approaches to understanding literature. "But, in spite of the publicity that they're getting, I don't see that they're actually attracting so many people."

Literary Darwinists beg to differ. Gottschall's Globe article is a bracing manifesto, outlining the sad state of the literary academy and pointing to scientific method as the only life raft in sight.

"Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof," he writes. "The alternative is to let literary study keep withering away." He provides two demonstrations of his approach. The first is a study just published in the journal Human Nature, in which he collects accounts of beauty in fairy tales from around the world to test whether Western tales place an extraordinary importance on female beauty. The second is a comparison of reactions from "500 literary scholars and avid readers" to characters from 19th-century British novels to gauge whether the author is truly dead — in other words, whether the meaning of a text is derived primarily from each reader's particular experience, as cultural theory has had it.

The subjects of the two experiments are not accidental. Literary Darwinism conceives of itself as the primary opposition to cultural theory in all its forms: Marxism, poststructuralism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, and so forth. In the Literary Darwinist mind-set, cultural theory — subjective, deliberately obtuse, politicized, based on outmoded assumptions — is the disease that's stricken the academy, and scientific rigor is the cure. "Most of the big ideas in literary theory have been tried out and rejected in other disciplines. So psychoanalysis has no life in psychology anymore — it only exists in the humanities. Marxism has no life really in political theory or in economics classrooms," Gottschall says. "My point is, we start with these bad theories, and work founded on faulty premises is going to be faulty itself." Of course, the tests he cites in his Globe article find both the feminist critique of the Western tradition as having a unique focus on beauty and the poststructuralist idea of the "death of the author" to be false. (Not all Literary Darwinists subscribe to Gottschall's reliance on qualitative study; others treat scientific ideas more as a theoretical frame for reading than as a guide to method.)

Literary Darwinism is also garnering attention because it joins evolutionary-minded scholarship in various fields. Scholars like Gottschall; Joseph Carroll, of the University of Missouri at St. Louis; and the Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd, of the University of Auckland, have found much common ground with evolutionary psychologists. The 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking), by Steven Pinker, an evolutionary and cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, reads like a companion piece to Gottschall's and Carroll's writings: "The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised people are staying away in droves?" In a review last year in Philosophy and Literature of the seminal Literary Darwinist anthology, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Northwestern University Press, 2005), edited by Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, a biologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Pinker wrote that, despite several methodological concerns, he found the book "exciting." He added, "It isn't often that one can be present at the genesis of a new field of knowledge."

But Literary Darwinists have been far less welcomed by mainstream literary theorists. Referring to the theory of the unity of scientific and literary knowledge in E.O. Wilson's 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard, wrote in 2005 that humanities departments "should definitely not want consilience, which is a bargain with the devil." While scientists have criticized the methods Gottschall uses in his experiments as not very scientific, literary scholars have often claimed that the concerns of Literary Darwinism are less than literary. Natalia Cecire, a literary blogger and graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote an impassioned denunciation: "For a literary critic, Gottschall seems alarmingly unaware of what it is that we actually do." Taking issue with his finding that Western society is not alone in its sexism, she charged, "I challenge Gottschall to come up with some citations of 'scholars' (plural) who have said that. Not Naomi Wolf: actual literary critics." The Literary Darwinists expect and almost court that type of dismissal. The scholars tend to see themselves as outsiders: denied jobs at prestigious universities, tenured positions, and grant money because of the iconoclastic nature of their work. Gottschall is still an adjunct, and he says he believes that no one of a "principally Darwinian bent" has tenure, except for those who originally started down a more-traditional path. "It is true that we are promoting views that seem disturbingly alien or threatening to most of the professors who serve on hiring committees, editorial boards, and who comprise the main pool of peer reviewers," he says. Carroll says that he is "looking forward" to the day when he can just "get down and do the work," instead of being forced to constantly explain and defend his approach.

Still, both Gottschall and Carroll are sure that their ideas will eventually gain mainstream credibility. Carroll talks about Literary Darwinism's exerting a "carrot and stick" influence on the literary academy: "The stick is that [mainstream academics are] going to feel more beleaguered and provincial and left out in the cold, and the carrot is that they're going to feel that here's something new to do." Gottschall adds: "I think that ambitious young scholars, graduate students and so forth, will see something of glamour in here, something that can motivate their studies. And there will probably be resistance against it too, but again, I have confidence in the ideas, and I think they'll win out."

A less-expected attack, however, comes from similarly marginalized scholars who, like Kentucky's Zunshine, study related fields like cognitive theory and empirical literary research. Like the Literary Darwinists, such scholars, to varying degrees, work at the juncture of literary theory and scientific methods. Those who turn to cognitive theory fit into several different subfields, including literary critics who use empirical data, collaborating with neuroscientists and experimental psychologists to study the connections between brain function and reading. Some adherents, like Nancy Easterlin, of the University of New Orleans, draw both on cognitive theory and evolutionary psychology in their work. Easterlin works with a broad assortment of approaches, including Darwinist-based feminism and what she calls "cognitive ecocriticism." It is the pro-science literary scholars who don't use evolutionary psychology who tend to be the most skeptical that the Literary Darwinists will succeed in transforming literary studies forever.

For some of the literary scholars who use cognitive science, that is because their background incorporates cultural theory as well as science, and they're wary of junking 30 years of new thinking. F. Elizabeth Hart, an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut who has a background in Renaissance literature and an interest in how cognitive theory affects, for example, conceptions of metaphor, says she mistrusts an approach that so de-emphasizes the effect of culture on the individual. "We have to find a theory that creates or explains or allows for an interface between the individual as an agent and the — to use a Marxist phrase — superstructure that bears down on the individual. You have to have a model that accounts for both," she says. Zunshine accuses the Literary Darwinists of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater. … It's somewhat ridiculous to say that scientific method can help us to shed light on all of the questions that literary theory has been engaged with."

The Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti, now at Stanford University, isn't in the field of cognitive literary studies, but his work frequently gets lumped in with the empiricists because of its particularly scientific and mathematical nature. He has been writing about the connections between evolution and literary theory for many years. He reiterates in an e-mail message the argument that Literary Darwinism doesn't address literary form, that it's concerned with external issues that avoid literature's literary nature: "If Literary Darwinism manages to improve the way to understand and explain literary form, then it will be a great step forward, but if it eludes form, or just doesn't 'see' it, then it will mean exactly nothing." Joseph P. Tabbi, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies the intersections between cognitive theory and 20th-century literature, says of Gottschall's fairy-tales experiment: "If you're interested in questions of sexism, you need to look at more than expressions of stereotypes; you need to look at the way that the narrative is shaped; you need to look at questions of closure in narrative, questions of sequence, and questions that fall into the category of narratology. I'm not sure that by taking samples and doing statistical processing that you're going to get very far." D.T. Max, the author of the New York Times Magazine article, got at that objection when he wrote, "I don't think even by stretching one's imagination primates evoke 'The Waste Land' or 'Finnegan's Wake.' Tone, point of view, reliability of the narrator — these are literary tropes that often elude Literary Darwinists."

And still others attack the Literary Darwinists on the other flank, prying apart their scientific credentials. While some who call themselves Literary Darwinists do have a scientific background — and several scientists wrote articles for The Literary Animal, including E.O. Wilson — many in the group have no background in statistics or evolutionary biology, and they frequently work alone instead of in groups with scientists, unlike many of the cognitive theorists and empirical literary critics. (Carroll said that he recently gave himself "a crash course" in statistical analysis, but neither he nor Gottschall has any official training.) Alan Richardson, an English professor at Boston College who works with cognitive theory, writes in an e-mail message that the work he's seen from the evolutionary literary theorists "is riddled with basic errors in study design and methodology."

David Miall, a professor of English and film studies at the University of Alberta who teams up with a psychologist to perform empirical studies of reader response to texts, says that, with the Literary Darwinists, "what you've got is just another way of coming up with interpretations of texts, and I'm not sure we need that, so urgently … unless they really have something new to tell us about the nature of the text. And if there is something new, there should be a way of validating it empirically. So in that sense, their resistance to doing empirical studies seems to be a real disability. It's disappointing that they don't go to that next stage." Miall's recommendation would be to test empirically whether readers are actually influenced to think about the mating strategies and other evolutionary patterns that the Darwinists read into the works they examine.

Both Gottschall and Carroll are used to responding to such critiques and do so pre-emptively in most of their publications. In an upcoming issue of the journal Style, Carroll will take on some 30 scholars about various aspects of Literary Darwinism. As for the question of whether its approach can fully get at literary problems, Gottschall writes in his forthcoming book, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan): "I suspect that there will always be vital humanities questions that deflect every tool and device in science's organon. Moreover, I do not mean to hint that sound qualitative studies cannot help us generate more reliable knowledge."

Gottschall's essay in The Literary Animal also includes an extended defense of using quantitative methods for literary studies, alleging that, over the history of human knowledge, many fields (including medicine and sociology) have resisted the importation of statistical analysis: "Critically, the point is not that investigators in these fields eventually discovered that everything could be reduced to numbers after all. Rather, they came to realize that quantitative and qualitative tools were both utterly indispensable for a reasonably complete exploration of their fields, each set of tools being appropriate for different types of questions." (Despite that conciliatory stance in print, however, in person Gottschall often seems to be choking back a complete denunciation of traditional literary studies, saying qualifiedly, "I'm not quite calling for total disciplinary annihilation and genocide.")

The proponents of Literary Darwinism have also taken on the question of its scientific rigor. Carroll says, "A lot of people do say that, and one of the responses to it is that people who say that haven't read most of the stuff they're rejecting." Gottschall points out that much of his writing has been published in scientific journals. He admits, however, that under the name of Literary Darwinism "there's also a lot of crap. There really has been a lot of crap. Now the question is, what does that prove? Does it really prove that it's futile and jihadist and all of that? Or does it prove that we need to do a better job? Because you can also go out and find hugely depressing lists of problems in quantitative approaches."

As to whether Literary Darwinism will save literary criticism, opinions are split there too. Indeed, other scholars of scientific theory and empiricist research seem far less morbid on the subject than Gottschall and Carroll. Many see the numbers increasing in their own specialties; it's not unusual to hear stories about scholars in the field of cognitive theory and literary studies, for example, who have been laboring in isolation for decades now getting greater recognition from their colleagues, professional institutions, and academic publishers. For them the future looks far brighter than it seems for the evolutionary literary theorists, perhaps because the field of cognitive studies outside the literary sphere is so hot. Zunshine, in fact, sees Literary Darwinism as a force that could add to the joblessness and hopelessness of students and professors, instead of vice versa: "Say I am a professor of English, I have graduate students, and I tell them: You have to forget about everything that your colleagues have been working on for the last 30 years because it's all literary theory, it's all wrong, and now you have this new scientific approach that you use. Now let me ask you, what would happen if a graduate student who hears this goes on the job market?"

Even mainstream scholars who have proclaimed the end of literary studies are wary of the solution offered by Literary Darwinism. William Deresiewicz, a former associate professor of English at Yale University, wrote a gloomy article in The Nation that is frequently cited as evidence of the apocalypse by Gottschall. Deresiewicz says, "This is not to say that some of those methods can't be useful; I'm not going to make an a priori statement like that. But I worry that they proceed from a failure or an unwillingness to recognize or see that science and literature represent different areas of knowledge."

Andrew Delbanco, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and author of the 1999 New York Review of Books article "The Decline and Fall of Literature," calls his attitude "cautiously open skepticism. The kind of reductionist stuff that I could imagine coming out of this would seem to me to be moving in exactly the wrong direction. But I don't think one should close one's mind to it."

For the Literary Darwinists, however, the urgency is so high that they see their work, whatever its flaws, as the literary academy's last, best hope — if, of course, it has the courage to embrace the inevitable. "We're desperate," says Gottschall. "The field is really, really desperate. Morale is so bad. No one really knows what to do. Everyone is saying what I am, in some way — they have the same critique, the same feeling that our old ways are just plain spent. "But when it comes down to how to solve these problems, how to win back relevance and consequence in the world, how to secure a place for the discipline in the future, people are pretty timid about these more aggressive solutions."

Britt Peterson is assistant managing editor of The New Republic.

________________________________________

http://chronicle.com

Section: The Chronicle Review

Volume 54, Issue 47, Page B7

Clearinghouse Post

I'm here at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference working the magazine table. Zero sales, but lots of smiling at random people, one of whom admitted that, although living just up the road in Omaha, she had no idea about our magazine. Never heard of it. Well. Good luck with that writing thing, y'know?

Right. So. D and I were out late watching "Taming of the Shrew" at Flatwater Shakespeare last night. Not a bad production, and imaginatively set in the Wild West. Except the boys from Pisa were supposed to actually be from Pisa. So, yes, accents. Italian immigrant accents. One of which was so bad that when he started to speak I instead watched the barn swallows dart in and out of one of the former horse stalls. The big question I have is this: Was Shakespeare serious? I'm inclined to think that even the big summing up at the end is tongue in cheek. Otherwise the play seems like a wild misjudgment on the part of an otherwise shrewd observer of human nature. 

While you consider that, I have a couple of wacky links that have intrigued me recently:

We are the universe: here and here. Cue up Joni Mitchell...

Fantasy apartment. Unless you're hugely wealthy, so, yes, one more reason to be jealous. Or find wonders in your own life. 

Pressures on public transport? You don't say. But funding is always nice. 

Oh, and happy Father's Day. A complicated little holiday...

Always Already Absent

I've been reading The World Without Us recently. What's particularly fun about this book is the dizzying speed at which he travels among geologic eras, deftly sketching the circumstances of that time. Climate change figures into his discussion of the timing of the next ice age, and he outlines how ice ages happen on this planet, the periodicity of them, their impact on various creatures (including proto and early humans), the role of volcanism and its CO₂ releases, and suggests that humans are the equivalent of a three hundred year period of active volcanoes. 

Especially compelling to me, however, as a writer and a sucker for narrative, are some descriptions of prehistoric humans. Two quick examples. First, we apparently discovered that you could bang rocks together and get an edge. Fantastic. At some some point, someone discovered that you could sharpen (very loosely defined) both sides of the edge; think kitchen knife. And then they discovered a way to reproduce the effect uniformly. And then they proceeded to do so for many thousands of years. Second, someone convinced a band of northeast Asian tribesfolk to take advantage of the retreated ice (and how can you not see this as the hand of some brutal god, right?) to move across to a pair of continents where nobody else like you was. Refinements of the point: who lead this? Did they say that the gods were calling them? I imagine someone made a counter-claim that was as least as strong... And this dear fellow. And others like them. How do you hold a group together? How large was the group? Note, also, that we managed to thrive here. We have much tastier coffee, too. 

On the Highway

Back from Kansas. Nice little town, though much smaller than Lincoln, which is only readily apparent when you stop for gas and the agricultural vehicles pull up at the next pump and the dude with the shit-covered boots asks what kind of car you're driving (for the record, a Scion Xa).

The K State students were great. Worried, worried, worried about what they needed to do to get published (short, and only, answer: send a lot of stuff out, read even more, write better. Rinse and repeat.). The university put me up in the Holiday Inn across from campus (you can even see my sixth floor room in the pictures here), so I got a chance to walk around the area. Nicely hilly. Lots of student rental houses. And Aggieville, with its little shops and beer trough bars.

The road down and back took me through the Tuttle Creek State Park, which is lovely--a sort of mix of plains and arroyo country. Sadly, the park is in total disrepair, at least from a human perspective. The turkeys, meadowlarks, hawks, snakes, golden eagles, deer, squirrels--you get the picture--were having a grand time with the crumbling roads and decaying picnic sites. If you want to do a post-apocalyptic road movie, I have just the site for you. In searching for an actual "wildlife area," I drove several miles down a long dirt road. Windows down, roadsounds and birdsong the only noise, I passed only one other person on the road. Wonderful sidetrack, and I never did find the "wildlife area."

While on this trek, I listened to Dawkins' The God Delusion. Fantastic book, especially if you find yourself awestruck before creation but don't feel like reaching out for a personal god makes any sense. Particularly useful is his discussion on pantheism.

It's been a week, so I thought I'd leave a longish post. I'm now into the writing of the comps (very similar to the running of the bulls and/or brides), so I'll probably have more "thinkish" posts coming. As well as comments on books like Elizabeth Bradfield's Interpretive Work and Philip Metres To See the Earth.

Since My Last Confession

In a peculiar, yet reassuring, confluence of technology and the environment, our DSL service pretty much drops out during sustained rain. Take this weekend, for instance. Lots of rain. Little or no internet service. I'm trying to catch up.

So. Saturday night. Games in the basement apartment. We were five, all told, and managed to get in two games: Ticket to Ride (which went pretty well, even with two new players) and a run through the new-to-everyone High School Drama (which took a while to get going--the rules aren't very clear--and was interrupted by pizza). The basement has a low ceiling and dead bugs, but works well for quick set-up and take-down. It also allows the possibility of long games, or games that can be set up and walked away from.

Comps-wise, I'm reading Robinson Jeffers and The Elephants Teach. I like Jeffers's short lyrics and his burgeoning misanthropy is both fun and disturbing to read. Elephants has a both detailed and broad look at the history of creative writing within English studies (CW is older than you might think; English is younger). This book should be required reading for MFA instructors and grad students.

And I'll leave it at that.

Bridging

I’m still sorting out how to respond to this development in Lincoln. Part of me says, ah, yes, excellent: a geothermal community. And in Nebraska! Amazing. But look at the fine print. It’s a traditional subdivision—or a traditional contemporary subdivision—with its homeowner’s association, a very peculiar sort of NGO. This is not a place built to be a community, in other words. It can’t. It has coercion built right in.

I'm trying to figure out who the target market is. Hippies? But look at the homeowners agreement. The stolid middle class? But it's geothermal. From the pictures, it looks like grandparents and deer It certainly isn't an intentional community. Hell, it might not even be real.

Ecology of Friendgroups

The Anniversary Party was one of the first films shot to digital video. It’s in essence a small project, though the cast is amazing. The structure is almost Shakespearean. A group of friends gathers for—wait for it—an anniversary party. Relationships and difficulties get revealed through dialogue. The setting is an expensive house set up in one of the canyons in the area around L. A., and most of the action takes place in these interiors. Halfway through the movie, the people who are still at the party take ecstasy. Not exactly fairy dust, but it will have to do.

In the sense that it’s a movie driven by dialogue, it moves slowly. In the sense that it’s working hard to reveal character and motivation through that dialogue in only slightly stretched time, it moves quickly. A lot happens, but very little is resolved. I always leave movies like these a little stunned, not least because of its rarity in the US film industry.

Traveling at Home

Rick Bass, in an interview in Sidney Dobrin and Christopher Keller’s Writing Environments, argues that while writing in a single place, a place we don’t move from, can be a good thing, it can be stultifying. Writers (as well as others) must remain curious and continue to explore (64). It’s easy to be shocked and startled by the new, the novel, in ideas, art, and landscape. One of the possible challenges in writing from a place you know all too well is complacency. This doesn’t follow inevitably, of course, but it’s an important caution. Since I’m talking about ecopoetics, I think this is good place to point out that the ecology bit of the title of the practice can lead us in a useful direction. Good science also requires this curiosity and dedication to pushing the limits of knowledge further.

Relatedly, the new and novel can overwhelm so that we’re left admiring surfaces while gaining the limited understanding and knowledge of the tourist. The long-term resident will know what issues have been important to the community over time (community meant to embrace non-human nature, here) and who is connected to what positions, actions, and so on. But I think that these kinds of knowledge are available. Historical, political, economic research will reveal much. Fieldwork still more, different information. I have two questions out of this: Can (or even should) the newcomer gain the same knowledge as the long-term resident? And what’s our responsibility as writers, scholars, teachers?