Filtration of Grand Contamination Utilizing Existing Local Natural Resources

Evacuated in masks

Police waving us through

Behind, the empty maze of the town

The tree-tops and church spire above the smog

 

Its up to them now

Left in the small and seldom parks

Token plantings or contested

Borderlines rife with sycamore and ash.

 

Cemeteries, those left-lone tomb walks

Under the grand span of holm oaks

And cedars around the walls to block off.

Now each crack and cleft

Is for seed and root;

Each mausoleum corner waiting

To host shoots.

 

Gardens; how easily the delineations of property

Will be broken, eaten, slipped through.

Pavers obscured by the tide of green to come;

Where bramble will rove over fences it shall protect

The giants of tomorrow germinating underneath.

 

Their offspring

Sure to rise hungry for air

Vagrant in once-fussed lawns

 

Once harangued,

Always cut and poisoned

And bled and eaten and pulled

Now, Emperor.

 

Surrounded by concrete and none

With the power to freedom

But themselves

 

Though the smog blocks light

They rise above;

Weaknesses none, save staticity.

 

 

Though they, our half-thought

Grand-forebears, are saviours of breath

The engines of their pores and photosynthesis

Pumping overbearing carbon into oxygen and moisture

And locking or digesting impurities

 

I am not so sure

They will be happy re-contained

When we are given

The all-clear.

 

Cormac McCarthy- The Crossing

The UK editions of Cormac McCarthy's work
are unfortunately very ugly

 I've been quite a McCarthy fan for a while now- I'd put my top three as The Road, Blood Meridian and Outer Dark. I found it rare so far (though I haven't read everything the late author wrote) to dislike one of his novels (though I didn't feel much of a spark with The Orchard Keeper.) This text, The Crossing, took me a long time to finish. I personally kept becoming detached from certain threads of the story and then at another attempt became swept up again.

    Despite being the second in the Border Trilogy it's stylistically and thematically very different from All the Pretty Horses, and felt like, despite great moments of violence and evil among the beatific wild countryside and romance in ATPH, a trek towards a lonesome mountain populated only with hidden darknesses and the philosophical grit of those who have had to bear witness.

    In these short reviews I attempt to give my honest take without spoiling much in the hopes you will be enticed to read- but at the same time, if you have read the text, that you will find something written here to compliment your own readings. 

   The first main section concerns Billy Parham taking a wolf he has trapped back into Mexico. I found this section really rubbed me the wrong way; the whole ordeal comes across as immensely uncomfortable, painful and maddening for the poor wolf, and we are never given much of a solid reason as to why Billy feels such a need to disappear for so long without telling anyone to take the wolf back to where it had just come from. America, the land across the border, then is the place where wolves can't be, where they cannot belong even though this wolf has made it, has naturally ranged into the territory. National borders mean nothing to such an animal. The permeability and nonsense of the border becomes more and more apparent as the text continues. Reading the story of the wolf, I thought many times of Aldo Leopold's book A Sand County Almanac, especially the essay 'Thinking Like a Mountain' in which Leopold comes to recognise the importance and wonder in every animal and how they fit into the natural world. 

    After the wolf's story, Billy wanders deep into Mexico, meeting proper wildernesses, human evils, and hearing of a nation racked by war and revolution. Everytime he re-emerges in the States, he finds that the border does not necessarily define a land where these things happen from one where they don't; on one of his later re-entries of the US, he learns after a time that America has joined WWII. I don't know how to explain it but in this book and also All the Pretty Horses I feel as though Mexico is portrayed as this older country, and the USA as younger, a whippersnapper. Perhaps in The Crossing it is in part because Billy meeting veterans of a previous war, only to emerge stateside and meet the young men newly enlisted; he has met their destinies in reverse.

    A random note, but, despite having grand moments of pain, anguish, hunger, and strife, generally when people meet Billy he is given extraordinary hospitality, often even from some of the most poverty-stricken people he meets, and in some cases even though he may not behave honestly back. Perhaps he appears as angelic, a very young white boy in rags on horseback- or, like the wolf met unto him through but a look in the eye, when they meet his own they can see the eye of the storm that sits within him. 

    

Don DeLillo- White Noise

Library copy from the university I work at now. I'd read DeLillo's Point Omega and The Body Artist for my Literature degree years ago, and liked them both, but especially The Body Artist. Both of these books are novellas really, and it took me a long time to finally break in to any of DeLillo's chunkier texts, even when the premises really caught me. 

I fell into a reading rhythm with White Noise as a text of episodes; of anecdote's and events that begin and end in chapters and that shuffle a main story along. These 'episodes' each feel like they're wrapping up an exaggerated occurrence or description of, for want of a better word, postmodern America. Ridiculous but believable events over and over. Straight from the off, with the convoy of gleaming station wagons of parents dropping their children off to university, like a herd or natural events not to be missed, described with hilarity and aptness; a favourite description is of the fathers as having "something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage."

The core of the book is a search for an avoidance or meaning in the fear of death, that I felt was such a burden for Jack Gladney and his partner Babette because in this era of American suburbiana, so much else has been taken care of or rendered obsolete that there are not other things to worry about. There is no feeling of impoverishment in their lives, despite their positions as multi-divorcees. The big catastrophic event in the second section is mostly void of worry about impending death, even though it could potentially be a cause; it almost happily fills the void Jack & Babette usually have empty for fear of death.

Despite this morbid preoccupation of the main characters, it's hard to mirror their philosophical dread as the world of the book is sodden, overloaded, infested, with stimuli. Radios and televisions are always on, overheard. Adverts and packaging instructions bleed into the text. Artificial habitats and occasions spawned from a docile consumer culture manifest into hypnotising tableaus, fit for a cosmic bird watcher distracted by human life for a moment.

Streams of information and data gathering stitch the book together; products promise more, Jack and Murray as academics endlessly look for meaning out in it; in Jack's case in Hitler studies, a field he discovered, and Murray in cultural niches, such as a seminar he runs on car crashes. The safe zones of the 'Airborne Toxic Event' are run by SIMUVAC, Simulated Evacuation, seeking more data rather than looking at the event head on. 

The world of White Noise, like our own, is a pastiche of headache-inducing stimuli, of searches for meaning and attempts at making it solid, of fear and confusion in a Western-bloc microcosm. I don't want to spoil anything, but readers of The Body Artist might enjoy one of DeLillo's spectres, the not-suggested supernatural presence, the figure who is the malady of the text in spirit, like a postmodern Dickensian ghost. 

Sjón- From the Mouth of the Whale

My parting gift to you, man, is this vision of yourself. p.7

Picked up on a whim from a charity shop (Tenovus in Easton- always a winner) as I read the blurb and realised i'd never read any Icelandic literature- turned out to be a signed copy! 

I personally found the experimental style a little hard to get through, but I also felt it did give a sense of how the story is intended to be received; the trailing remembrances of an old, exiled and isolated man who has spent a lifetime trying to unravel worldly mysteries, but seemingly left befuddled and perplexed by it all. 

I enjoyed the thread carried throughout of searching for, defining and solving the problem of monsters, which was lifted by the era chosen; a Christianized pagan land removed enough from it's continental colonizer for barbarism to go unchecked; the otherworldy, Norse/Icelandic feeling retelling of God creating man has this new creature portrayed as grotesque and unnatural. Throughout then, the immorality and monstrosity of man flourishes. The natural world blends seamlessly with mythologization.