Rebecca Solnit: Orwell's Roses
Not really a biography, but an exploration of certain aspects of Orwell's
attitudes and behavior aside from his writing life. Is that vague enough for you? Okay, how 'bout: Solnit's starting point is roses Orwell planted in a garden he kept during one of the happiest times of his life. Solnit uses the garden as the opening to discover Orwell's attitude towards pleasure. As she says, many readers have the impression Orwell espouses grim commitment to principle in even grimmer circumstances. However, the biographical details she lays out for us, held up to Orwell's writings, show his conviction that access to privacy, nature, and pleasurable pastimes are all at the core of any meaningful resistance to totalitarianism. A charming book, it does a good job of humanizing Orwell while showing how his thinking is far more germane than commentators realize as they attach the label "Orwellian" to the day's news. (Bonus points for a mention of Robert Macfarlane.)
Robert Pogue Harrison: Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
A dense academic treatment of a literary theme, traced from Gilgamesh to modern times. The theme is the town/forest dynamic, which Harrison shows to be no mere opposition, but rather an ever-fruitful relationship with shifting tensions, a relationship that constantly tests civilization's ideas and images about what it means to be civil, human, mortal - - - all the big stuff. Harrison's command of the material he uses as examples varies, but is never weak; seldom does he generalize. Implicit in every chapter: "we" need the forest, but the forest, preceding our existence, does not need us.
Carol Adams: The Sexual Politics of Meat
Thirty years ago, when I was in grad school and this book was published, it was frequently cited as the ne plus ultra of political correctness, a phrase now superseded by "woke." Just as 99.99% of those who now decry the 1619 Project as woke CRT have not read it, those who snickered then while saying "Sexual Politics of Meat" didn't read the book. I may have snickered myself. This year I finally read it. It is excellent. It may be a minor spoiler to say Adams's text is not the dense, jargon-filled prose we might expect, though I found that a pleasant surprise.
By now we've all heard plenty about the environmental and ethical cases against meat as it's produced and consumed in industrialized countries. Adams doesn't spend much time with all that; what she does is show how popular culture images of the animals we eat, the process of producing meat from them, and the circumstances in which we eat meat are all enmeshed with images of women's bodies and human sexuality. This enmeshment creates mutual reinforcement of all those activities as they are practiced, while obscuring and erasing the violence which, in the case of meat production, is inherent, and which, in the case of sexual violence against women, is a problem we would rather not see or hear about, let alone make powerful changes of cultural scope to address. Adams had me engaged with her discussions of the appearance of vegetarianism in Euroamerican literature from the late 18th century to the present, but she really hooked me when she explicated a typical dinner table argument between vegetarian guests and meat-eating (+ meat-serving) hosts.
No comments:
Post a Comment