Natural Acts

Our book today is “Natural Acts” by David Quammen, and it’s a peppy and heartening little masterpiece.

The field of natural history – a field this book adorns – is gratuitously freighted with literary masterpieces. This is understandable in a way, of course: great minds all start out as young people, and all right-thinking young people are fascinated with the natural world around them. Our young friend Elmo has the brain capacity of a Cray computer and the literary talent of a young Robert Silverberg (strange as it feels for those of us who are accustomed to thinking of Robert Silverberg as a ‘young’ Robert Silverberg … alas, hippy afros fade, and even wunderkinds grow older), but he has felt the sublime wonder of working back to stillness in a natural setting and simply watching as wild wonderful things resume their private activities all around him.

We here at Stevereads have also experienced this, and joyfully: swimming with whales off the coast of Hawaii, knowing the whole time that they were studying us out of simple curiosity; standing on an icebound ridge in Alberta, watching young timber wolves cavort in play under a dying sun; hearing the gorgeous melody of the ‘dawn chorus’ of birdsong on a beautiful chilly morning in the lovely countryside of Kent … the experience is the same, the wonderful rush of viscerally, visually understanding that nature, the wild world, happens without humans, happens all the time around them with no more notice of their bus and trains schedules than of their literary journals (or – gasp – their blogs).

Every naturalist knows these things (even the ones who learned them through the blast of a gun, although Elmo might be slow to allow for that), and quite a few of them have wanted nothing more than to write something that captured their experience. But precious few of them have had the literary ability to pull it off. This has resulted in a vast library of very dull books written about very fascinating things, a curious phenomenon found only in this particular branch of the sciences. Old little libraries dotted around the country have shelves filled with books titled something like “Sixty Years in the Yukon” or “Boating on the Danube” that were written by people who saw and experienced untold wonders (many of which have since vanished from a world increasingly bent on killing its wonders), and yet the books themselves are gaspingly dull. For every William Bartram, there are sixty prospectors with leaden prose styles. For every Theodore Roosevelt, there are eighty cowpokes who couldn’t write a compelling sentence if their lice-infested heads hung in the balance.

Still, there have been giants. Aristotle was one, and of course Darwin was another. William Beebe was one such, and in his own way so was the verbose Stephen Jay Gould. And surely one of the 20th century’s giants is David Quammen.

And Natural Acts is one of his peppiest essay collections (most of these first saw print while Outside magazine was lucky enough to have Quammen writing for it regularly). A collection as zestily written as this one tempts even our steely will here at Stevereads to simply quote its best bits for the next two hours, and we shall only partially resist. The urge anybody feels when they read this book (or, for that matter, most of Quammen’s other books) is to rush up to the next person they see and urge it upon them, and we see no reason to falsify that urge by substituting our own prose, brilliant though it is. Sometimes quoting an author is the best way to recommend him.

For instance, here’s Quammen on bats:

“Clearly the bat has captured human imaginations, and that may be because it seems triply oxymoronic: a flying mammal that sees in the dark by listening to its own silent screams. It is in truth an extraordinary animal, equipped with some startlingly sophisticated evolutionary adaptations, and represented around the world by a wild variety of different forms. If the bat is grotesquely improbable, so is Pablo Picasso.”

And here he is on the disturbing (to humans, anyway) personal presence of the octopus:

One of [Jacques] Cousteau’s assistants adds: ‘I have often had the impression that they are reflecting.’ Other divers and lab researchers make the same sort of comment, describing the same eerie sense of encounter, recognition, even mutuality. Lately I’ve had occasion to experience it myself, during three evenings of octopus-watching in a small university room filled with quietly gurgling tanks: the potent, expressive gaze of the octopus. These animals don’t just gape at you glossily, like a walleye. They make eye contact, as though they are someone you should know.”

And then there’s this, on the often sadistic playfulness exhibited by crows and ravens, a trait we’ve mentioned once or twice here at Stevereads:

“There is also an element of the practical jokester. Of the Indian house crow, Wilmore says: ‘… this Crow has a sense of humor, and revels in the discomfort caused by its playful tweaking at the tails of other birds, and at the ears of sleeping cows and dogs; it also pecks the toes of flying foxes as they hang sleeping in their roosts.’ This crow is a laff riot. Another of Wilmore’s favorite species amuses itself, she says, by ‘dropping down on sleeping rabbits and rapping them over the skull or settling on drowsy cattle and startling them.’ What we have here is actually a distinct subcategory of playfulness known, where I come from at least, as Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’.

For page after page, he’s like this: funny, insightful, and empathetic. His essays go by like the happiest of quick dreams, and his longer works wear their considerable learning so lightly they uniformly invite the reader, like having a happy, enthusiastic guest at dinner who just happens to know more than you do about komodo dragons, or coyotes, or jellyfish. Quammen’s writing approaches the natural world with the unembarrassed open-eyed wonder of the very young, and through his words, every reader is encouraged to do likewise.

So exit the computer for a moment, go outside, and look around for some leaping, living nonhuman thing. Once you’ve walked far enough to find one, stand still for a few minutes and just watch it, with no hurry in your head and no harm in your heart. Then when you’re done, come back inside and pull this book down off your shelves (or order it online, if you must). We here at Stevereads heartily recommend it.

Penny Press! New Yorker!

Quite a lot to cover in the new issue of Harper's!

A quiet little grace note is found early in the issue: a small excerpt from a 1962 letter Rose Kennedy wrote to her son:

Dear Jack,
In looking over my old diary, I found that you were urged on one occasion, when you were five years old, to wish for a happy death. But you turned down this suggestion and said that you would like to wish for two dogs instead. So do not blame the Bouviers if John has similar ideas.

Much love, dear Jack.

Of course the editors chose it for the chill of foreshadowing we all get from knowing that President Kennedy's death was by no means a happy one. But we here at Stevereads were more struck by the ballsy overreach of the young JFK's alternate wish - not one but two dogs. Exceedingly good instincts, even for a five year old.

Alas, there are no good instincts on display in the John Updike short story in the same issue. Many of you will already know that Updike is something of a stalking-horse here at Stevereads, but even so, this story, "Kinderscenen," hits a new low. Not only does one of America's Literary Lions win the prize for being the ONE MILLIONTH person to compare the lit tip of a cigarette seen in the evening to some kind of star (now that we've hit ONE MILLION, can we declare a moratorium?), but he manages to turn in a story that has: no dialogue, no characterizations, no plot, no climax, no original ideas, and no beauty of language.

We here at Stevereads renew our fervent plea to Mr. Updike: die already! Your one-trick pony, your schtick? We've GOT it. No reason for you to stick around. As soon as you're dead, as soon as the requisite encomiums have been aired in all the right places (Time magazine's sub-lead: "The Shakespeare of Suburbia"), we can all have the happy experience of watching one after another of your tired, witless books pop out of print. "The Centaur" (about middle class malaise)? You're off to the races. "Witches of Eastwick" (about middle class malaise)? You're exorcised. "Bech" (about middle class malaise)? You're not a book anymore.

Fortunately, the burst of irritation over the fact that Harper's would give space to Updike's dithering senility is counterbalanced by their running of a book review written by the great David Quammen.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the man, Quammen is one of the greatest 'nature writers' currently living (his only serious contender in our opinion is Bernd Heinrich). He's mastered a narrative voice that's the perfect blend of learning and conversation - reading him is, literally, always a pleasure.

(those of you who don't own a copy of at least one of his books - especially "Natural Acts" and "Song of the Dodo" - hie thee hence and obtain them immediately ... well, not immediately - wait until I'm done edumicating you, and THEN hie thee hence)

Quammen here reviews two big fat Darwin collections, "Darwin: The Indelible Stamp" (edited by James Watson) and "From So Simple a Beginning" (edited by Edward O. Wilson), and as usual, he delivers the goods. Almost any other writer would have taken the occasion to bloviate about the life and ideas of Darwin (usually mangling both in the process), only tacking on some perfunctory comments about the actual books under review at the very end.

Quammen does write a little about Darwin and his theories (so clearly and engagingly that you wish he'd written more), but he spends far more time actually talking about the two books - and about their respective editors. We learn something of the history of Watson and Wilson, some of the bad blood between them, and something of the publishing-house manuevering that led there to be two such nearly-identical books issued at the same time.

Quammen's piece has only one flaw. At one point he writes:

"Other choices for a Darwin omnibus might have been better, even assuming that four was the right and only number. Why not include his engaging, poignant, admirably self-critical Autobiography?"

Why not indeed! If Quammen had checked around a little bit more, he'd have discovered that big, evil ol' Barnes & Noble publishes "The Darwin Compendium," which DOES include the Autobiography, in addition to the four texts shared by the books under review. Wilson's book is $40. Watson's book is $30. The Barnes & Noble book is also $30 and gives you one-fifth more for your money. Damn those big-box retailers!

Quammen (we're considering starting every paragraph of this entire entry with 'Quammen') points out that there are innumerable editions of Darwin's works out there, and that seems as opportune a place as any to plug the Whitestar edition of "Voyage of the Beagle." It's part of their 'Adventure Classics Series,' and it's the neatest, most hand-friendly edition out there!

Speaking of hand-friendly things, Garrett Keizer's 'Notebook' essay, "Loaded," trots out the subject of GUNS in America, with decidedly weird result (we're more than halfway convinced that the piece's title also refers to the author's condition while he was writing it).

The piece confers a vertiginous feeling while being read: you sense immediately that the author, however many good or bad points he's making, isn't really in full control of himself, and sometimes his prose just slips away from him:

"I continue to believe that if the mass of Americans refused to earn or spend a dollar for a single day following a fishy election - no matter whose guy won - by the dawn's early light we would behold our country."

Or this:

"Give me some people who are not so evolved that they have forgotten what it is to stand firm under fire or even to squat near the fire in a cave."

Um, what the eff?

Still, he does makes some interesting points, none moreso than this:

"There are nearly 1.4 million active troops in the U.S. armed forces; there are an estimated 200 million guns in private hands. The war over the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment is effectively over."

This strikes us as true, as far as it goes. Nothing can ever be done about the vast inundation of guns in this country (my esteemed colleague the Reichmarshal would, I'm sure, maintain that nothing SHOULD be done about it). But just because one side wins doesn't mean one side is right, nor does it somehow legitimize a false reading of the Constitution.

The Second Amendment protects the rights of Americans to bear arms - in the service of a state militia. Period. Not in the service of a state militia - and other cases as deemed needful. ONLY in a state militia. There's absolutely no getting around what the text actually says.

But Keizer is right: the debate is largely moot. America is a gun-crazy country, and no amount of argument is going to change that.

But even so, it should be illegal for a civilian to own automatic assault weapons, and that doesn't have anything to do with the Second Amendment - that's just public safety common sense. Owning a gun that has no practical purpose but to kill someone (a gun that fires enough rounds per second to atomize a game animal, for instance, so there goes that excuse) should be de facto illegal, since murder and attempted murder are illegal. Drug dealers are imprisoned on charges of INTENT to distribute, and no drug-lobbies squeal in their defense. Because it's perfectly sensible: if you have forty bricks of heroin in your basement, you're OBVIOUSLY planning to distribute heroin. Likewise, if you own an automated assault-weapon, you're OBVIOUSLY planning to shoot somebody with it. Only a card-carrying gun-nut would argue your innocence (cue the card-carrying gun-nuts! Incoming!).

But the centerpiece of this issue is Jeff Sharlet's long essay "Through a Glass, Darkly - How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history."

Sharlet is a fantastic writer, and he's got a fantastic story and knows it. He manages to get religious fundamentalists to say the looniest things on the record (I know, I know - no big feat there), and his piece has the lilt and fluency of all really good essays.

Our enjoyment of it only came to a screeching halt once - but what a halt! Imagine the spectrum of our responses when we read this:

"In the pantheon of fundamentalist history, the man revered above all others is General Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, perhaps the most brilliant military commander in American history and certainly the most pious."

(the fingers go numb with disbelief even whilst typing the words)

It's a little tricky to know whether Sharlet is writing this in his own voice or extendedly paraphrasing the mindset of his fundamentalist subjects, but in either case, when we read the above quote during a quiet lunch at our club, our cry of alarm expelled half a croissant from our mouth and sent it pinging across the table and caromming off the nose of poor Dana Thayer Alsop opposite us.

'Perhaps the most brilliant commander in American history'? Jackson? What on Gawd's green earth?

Ladies and gentlemen, listen carefully: MICHAEL Jackson would have made a better commander than Stonewall ever was. And pious? Maybe so, but with the purity of mind reserved only for full-blown sociopaths.

Virtually his entire military career veers drunkenly between slaughtering innocents, disobeying orders, and bungling battles. During the Mexican War, he killed far more innocent civilians than enemy soldiers. And during the Civil War, he was guilty of the very first mortal sin any combat general can commit: he was unreliable.

Time and again - at Mechanicsville and Gaine's Mill and many other crucial battles - Jackson showed up grossly late, and more than once he followed this up by being conspicuously no help once he finally got there.

Had he not been shot and killed by his own pickets (Sharlet repeats the historical line that this was accidental ... we here at Stevereads will only point out that Jackson drove his men like they were pack mules and almost always made them pray, sometimes for hours, before breakfast), Jackson would almost certainly have led the Confederacy into some cataclysmic military mistake. Hell, even dead he managed to do that: for what were Robert E. Lee's disasterous tactics at Gettysburg but pages taken from Jackson's book?

Of course, none of this even touches on the most hateful thing about Stonewall Jackson: he, like every other Confederate general, was first and foremost a traitor. Jackson was vain, histrionic, psychotic, and inept - but even if he'd been 'brilliant' (like, it must be said, Lee), he'd still have deserved a public hanging (like, it must be said, Lee) for taking up arms against his country.

And he hated dogs, too.