Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

Back in February, my wife and I took a long weekend out at the coast together, and, as we often do, we listened to an audiobook. Okay, most of an audiobook - we didn’t quite finish this one. I went ahead and got the physical book to read the ending. 

 

I almost wish I hadn’t bothered. I LOATHE the ending. And indeed, this book was a disappointment.

 

Not all books are winners, of course. We have had a few clunkers. The Maid, for example, is a book that I believe only made it through the editing process because the author edited it herself. I’m still salty about the plot holes, pointless twists, inconsistent characterization, and the mutilation of legal procedure. 

 

This book suffers from many of the same flaws. I find that these flaws are all too common these days in genre fiction, particularly fiction marketed toward women. 

 

[Fair disclosure: I whine a lot more about chick lit on this blog than bro lit, mostly because I avoid bro lit like the plague, whereas chick lit sometimes slips through my filters. I assume that the only reason that bro lit wouldn’t have the same flaws is because it doesn’t bother with characterization.] 

 

Perhaps I can give a general overview of the flaws that I see in books like this one:

1. Plot twists for the sake of plot twists.

2. Characters who, at the end of books, behave completely inconsistently with their natures as established earlier in the book.

3. Romance and sex that doesn’t do anything related to plot or characterization elsewhere.

4. Painfully obvious errors about important facts: legal procedure, science, history, etc.

5. Drama and trauma for their own sake.

 

I will probably think of some more, but those are the five that come to mind off the top of my head. 

 

Let me look at each in a little more depth. 

 

First, plot twists can be great, when done well. A true surprise, particularly in a genre that demands them, can be a thrill for the reader. 

 

However, twist after twist after twist just results in whiplash. It makes the plot more confusing, of course; but even more than that, it serves to cover for bad planning and writing. Compare, say, Agatha Christie, where one or two big twists are carefully set up, and presented in a way that the reader can look back and see the path in retrospect. 

 

For lesser writers, it feels like they mistake a bunch of twists and drama (see below) for an actual message - or even a coherent story. Just make a bunch of shit happen at the end, leaving the reader feeling…something. 

 

I see this very much like the big fight scene or explosion in an action movie (and presumably bro lit): It creates an effect, but doesn’t tell you much of anything. 

 

Far better is to carefully plan and plot your story - remember, this is a story and it needs a narrative arc in most cases to fulfill its purpose - and not rely on cheap tricks at the end. 

 

Don't just get your twists from the bargain bin at Hackney's Novel Shop. 

 

Second, I read fiction mostly for the characters, and how they grow and change, or at least how they react to the worlds they inhabit. If I preferred plot, I could just read genre fiction all the time. 

 

So it matters a LOT to me that characters be interesting, dynamic, and most of all consistent. 

 

The Maid is a perfectly awful example of how not to write a protagonist - she completely changes personality in the last part of the book. 

 

Don’t do that!

 

Your characters should come first, not your plot devices. I can’t remember who all has said it (I think a few good writers have used the line) but an author follows their characters around to see what they will do. 

 

This doesn’t mean characters can’t grow and change, but they shouldn’t change completely because the plot needs them to. 

 

Third, I have no objection to sex in books or movies. I can think of a number of really excellent sex scenes that I have read - almost entirely written by women, and many by queer authors, which I do not think is a coincidence. But in each case, the sex serves the plot and the characterization. It isn’t just fan service. 

 

I want to learn something about the characters from a sex scene. And I want any romance element to feel organic to the plot and characters, not something added on because it is what the writer thinks the reader demands. 

 

Also, I am pretty sure that most people - including the more interesting characters - don’t just get horny for an attractive person and go straight to bonking in short order. See above: character consistency.

 

Number four: oh GOD! Can people be bothered to fact check anymore? I’ll mention a few things specific to this book later, but this is a real pet peeve of mine. 

 

I’m sure it doesn’t help that I am (as this blog attests) broadly read and educated, and know at least something about a great many things. (See: Range by David Epstein) So, I am probably more likely than the average reader to notice elementary errors. 

 

But still: check your facts! Particularly if they are important to your plot. (Again, The Maid is an abomination.)

 

If you have a courtroom scene, have a lawyer check your facts. If you have a medical issue, check with someone who would know if you get it right.

 

And, in the case of this book, for fuck’s sake, don’t just watch The Day After Tomorrow and assume that you know all about climate change. 

 

Finally, sure, there is plenty of room for drama and trauma in a book. Just to give an effective example of each, there is so much drama in I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. But, it is YA, and the drama of that age is real. The drama serves the needs of the plot, even if I found it a bit exhausting. 

 

For trauma, just recently I read We Do Not Part, which is full of serious personal and national trauma for sure. But the trauma is what drives everything, so it serves the needs of the story. 

 

If you are just putting trauma in for effect, if it doesn’t really serve the story, then it won’t work. Don’t traumatize your characters just to get an emotional response. It should mean something. 

 

So, with that long preface, here is what the book is about:

 

Shearwater Island (based on Macquarie Island, south of New Zealand) is a remote island with a research base - and a seed vault. 

 

The book opens with a mysterious woman washing up on shore, barely alive. She is discovered by the family of four who lives in the lighthouse - dad and three kids. Everyone else connected with the base has disappeared.

 

It turns out that the woman, Rowen, has come looking for her husband, who worked at the base and stopped communicating months ago. 

 

So, what happened to him? And everyone else? I guess that is the mystery, which is eventually unveiled. 

 

And also, global warming, people isolated from each other, mental illness, sexual assault, and animals. None of which ever feel like fully developed ideas. 

 

The book is written from multiple points of view - short sections narrated by each of the five characters. This is hardly the only book written like this, and it can in fact work. 

 

But this actually is problematic in this particular kind of book. Not because there is a mystery, but because each of the characters knows the answer to some of the questions, but they don’t let the reader know what they know. 

 

Contrast this to the classic, The Moonstone, which likewise shifts points of view. But the reason it works is that we do get to go inside the heads of the characters, and know what they know. It is because the perspectives we get are from people who also do not know most of the facts that we get to see the mystery unfold just as they do.   

 

In this book, instead, every character is hiding their knowledge not just from each other, but from the reader. This to me was super frustrating. And unfair. If you want to write from the first person perspective, fine. But don’t have your narrator withhold key facts. 

 

And if you want multiple perspectives, fine. But don’t force the characters to not think about important things that they know that are relevant to the story they are telling. 

 

Now, about the five problematic writing issues, as applied to this book. I probably will give spoilers, and I don’t care, because I disliked the ending enough that I want to ruin it. 

 

First, stupid plot twists. 

 

This book would have been far better with one-quarter of the plot twists. They weren’t necessary, and seemed thrown in at the end to give a nail-biting episode of terror at the end. Oh, and also in the middle - there are several scenes seemingly calculated to be a set piece in the inevitable movie. 

 

And, like most situations in books or movies like this, they only happen because people do stupid things. Which, if it is a book about stupid people, might make sense. But when you have people who are supposedly highly competent making elementary errors and taking pointless risks (problem #2), it is clear that you are manufacturing plot twists for their own sake. 

 

I will also add that some of the twists are also there for the trauma and drama (problem #5), and result from bad errors about science (problem #4), and sometimes even for the sake of romantic frisson (problem #3). 

 

In this book, that means that you have people who somehow got selected for a remote research base - and are thus presumably sensible and competent - risking their own survival not once, but over and over and over. Inconsistent characterization. 

 

Also on that point is the way that as each revelation takes place, the characters seem to change their opinion of other characters. And not in the “now that I know that about you” way, but things like deciding one’s husband is a narcissist after spending the entire book talking about him in completely different terms. 

 

Related to that is the fact that the central romance seems implausible for either of the parties, given what we are shown of their personalities and situations. Maybe one could see Dominic wanting to bonk, but not Rowen. 

 

And then there is the bad science. And it starts off right away. In the cold waters we are talking about, there is zero chance someone would make it all the way to shore without freezing. Particularly since she allegedly came off a boat that sank soon afterward that nobody seems to have seen, despite seeing Rowen in the water. 

 

And it gets worse from there. Including the obligatory “people are going to drown” scene that I still can’t figure out the physics of. 

 

I mean, last I checked, water seeks its own level. So if there is a vent tube on the top of a hill, and the water is rising to the top of it (because global warming or something), that water should be rising outside of the tube too, right? If sea levels fill the vent, then the end of the vent where the would-be rescuers are standing should be flooded too, right? And where would they go after they get the people out of the tube? 

 

The whole scene makes zero sense. Sorry. 

 

And that’s even before you get to the problem of sea level rise. Yes, global warming will - and indeed already is - making sea levels rise. But not like several feet per hour! Or, as in the book, seemingly a hundred feet in a few short minutes. That’s not how it works. (I don’t care if you saw it in the movies.) 

 

Those are the big ones, but there are others. The seemingly sudden disintegration of infrastructure. The idea that an entire research station could go off line completely and suddenly, and nobody seems to notice or send a search party. The seeming lack of any organization or protocols for a research base. 

 

Or, even, children living there in the first place. I mean, there are places that do this, but they aren’t just one freaking family - there are schools and provisions for socialization, careful monitoring, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It would have been so easy to look this up. And, of course, with kids involved, you BET if a station went dark, there would have been a search sent out yesterday. 

 

We haven’t even gotten to the ending, which I already mentioned I hated. 

 

Shall we list a few reasons? 

 

Scientifically ludicrous. Out of character with the characters. Plot twists just to create drama and tension at the end. The old “woman sacrifices her life to save a child” trope that my wife loathed. Re-traumatized everyone who survived. 

 

And none of this was necessary at all. Any number of endings would have been better - and would also have potentially given some form of character development, catharsis, or something. Instead we got the Deux ex Tramica. (To butcher some innocent Latin…)

 

I am undoubtedly missing other things that annoyed me about the book. But I can’t bring myself to care enough to try to think of them. 

 

Perhaps what annoyed me the most, though, was just the lost opportunity. The setting was great, and some of the descriptions were evocative. One could have set a book here that took advantage of that. 

 

One could also have explored the themes of isolation through actual nuanced writing, rather than plot twists and drama. 

 

One could have done some research and spent more time thinking through a less sensationalist plot, and written a novel that would have had something to actually say. 

 

This is not that book, however, and that is disappointing. 

 

The Heroine With 1001 Faces by Maria Tatar

Source of book: I own this

 

Fairly often, my wife comes home with interesting books. She is as much of a reader as I am, and indeed married me in part because I am a reader. This book was one of them. This book is also my selection for Women's History Month this year. 

 

A quick glance at the title reveals two things about the book. First, it is a response to Joseph Campbell’s influential book on mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Second is a reference to the Arabian Nights, specifically the framing story of Scheherazade, the female storyteller, who uses her gift to save the young women terrorized and murdered by the jealous monarch. 

 

Although it has been over a decade since I read The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it has really stuck with me. The references in this book were familiar enough. I should also mention another book I read last year on stories that makes another part of the conversation, The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker. Consider these three as connected, different perspectives on stories and their meaning. 

 

One more bit of trivia I might add is that the author’s name is an indication of her ancestry: she is indeed a descendent of the Tatars, the Turkic speaking nomadic people who you can find referenced in history and literature whenever the eastern edge of Europe or the Asian steppes are mentioned. That fact has nothing to do with the book, per se, but I found it interesting. 

 

For anyone who has read Campbell and Booker, it is already apparent that both of them write from a male-centered perspective. As establishment men, who lived in a patriarchal culture, and indeed a patriarchal cultural tradition, this is no surprise. 

 

Tatar, in contrast, brings a female perspective to the discussion, examining how women understand and tell stories. The book was published in 2021, so it is quite recent, and thus tackles contemporary movements like #metoo and MAGA. 

 

There are a lot of great passages in the book, which I will try to highlight. First, though, I want to give a bit of an overview of the ground covered. 

 

Do not expect a sweeping examination of mythology or stories like in Campbell or Booker. This is a significantly shorter book. Instead, expect a specific conversation - and rebuttal - of some of their claims. 

 

The first chapter looks at heroes, and the way that they have tended to be exalted while heroines have been marginalized. That’s an oversimplification, but the author does have a good point that heroines have always existed - they just haven’t gotten the attention. 

 

The second looks at the silencing of female voices, from the endemic sexual assault to the myths about silenced women. 

 

The third examines fairy tales - and not the Disneyfied versions, but the originals, told by women, and often containing cautions about violent and abusive men. 

 

The fourth looks at two areas where heroines started to become mainstream: stories about female writers (Little Women was the OG) and female detectives. Through these stories, women found voices in ways that were previously denied them. 

 

The fifth continues the idea, looking at Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman, and the 20th Century’s explosion in strong female characters. 

 

Finally, the sixth chapter examines the trickster character - traditionally male, but now open to female versions as well. 

 

Again, not exactly a systematic examination of the topic, but a look at specific issues. 

 

Before I dive into my favorite lines, I want to mention that I have always loved female protagonists. 

 

As a child, I identified more with Wendy than Peter Pan, preferred Nancy Drew to the Hardy Boys (although I read both), loved Anne of Green Gables and Harriet the Spy and a whole bunch of other female-driven books. 

 

So, I would say that I was on the one hand a bit unusual for a boy, but also that my own life was enriched by my identification across the gender lines. I am cishet, to be clear, and don’t identify as a woman or non-binary. Instead, I see the common humanity in female characters, and see my resemblance to them as human beings. My personality is definitely more Anne than Gilbert - that’s probably the best way to explain it. 

 

Regular readers of my blog will know that I read a lot of female authors, and a lot of books with female protagonists. This is intentional, but also a natural outgrowth of my love of the female perspective and my embrace of the feminine side of my nature. 

 

The book opens with a few quotes. I want to highlight two of them, in conversation.

 

“Unhappy is the land that is in need of heroes.” ~ Bertold Brecht

 

“Pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn’t know it has lots and what they look like.” ~ Rebecca Solnit

 

Solnit is one of the badass prophets of our time - I have greatly enjoyed her writing the last several years. You can read my post about A Paradise Built in Hell, or her latest essay on the nature of power if you want an introduction.

 

She is right, though. Heroes are all around us, every day. They just don’t look like chest-beating masculine sorts. They are health workers like my wife, teachers, protesters, everyday people making the world a better place. 

 

“What about the women?” This book tries to answer the question posed by Campbell’s student in a different way, by showing that the women in the mythological and literary imagination have been more than mothers and protectors. They too have been on quests, but they have also flown under the radar, performing stealth operations and quietly seeking justice, righting wrongs, repairing the fraying edges of the social fabric, or simply struggling to survive rather than returning back home with what Campbell calls boons and elixirs. They wear curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and we shall see how women’s connections to knowledge, linked to sin and transgression and often censured as prying, is in fact often symptomatic of empathy, care, and concern. 

 

This idea that female curiosity is a virtue, rather than a vice, runs throughout the book. (And I very much have to agree with that.) 

 

Later in the book, there is a Stephen Fry quote that I love, and I think exemplifies why fundamentalism, which is anti-intellectualism and anti-curiosity, is such an evil way of living. 

“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.” 

 

The author expands on this a bit further:

 

What will emerge in the pages that follow is an understanding of heroism that is driven less by empathy than by attentive care, an affect that is triggered by openness to the world, followed by curiosity and concern about those who inhabit it. Lack of curiosity becomes, then, the greatest sin, a failure to acknowledge the presence of others and to care about the circumstances and conditions of their lives. Is it possible that our new attentiveness to the value of empathy has been fueled by the heroism of women from times past, women who had themselves been marginalized and disenfranchised but still cared deeply about those who had been crushed and enslaved, beaten down and brought to heel? 

 

In our era of MAGA with its “empathy is a sin” and “violence solves everything” and “blame those people for our own problems,” this female curiosity and care is a powerful antidote. In particular, the use of words rather than weapons is the way that those of us with less power fight for justice. As a writer, not a fighter, this is my way of being. 

 

As I was writing this book, it only gradually dawned on me that heroines were habitually bent on social missions, trying to rescue, restore, or fix things, with words as their only weapons. 

 

As an example of this use of words, Tatar examines the British version of the Bluebeard tale, “Mr. Fox.” In that one, the heroine, having discovered the brutality of her fiancé, uses her skill with words (and a carefully purloined severed hand…) to bring Mr. Fox to justice. 

 

(Coincidentally, I recently read a book that makes use of the Mr. Fox legend in a striking and imaginative way, But Not Too Bold.) 

 

This is just one of many fairy tales - again, stories told by women - with a theme of domestic violence and a female escape using her wits and words. 

 

Another fascinating passage in this chapter is one that notes that much of what the old heroes go through seems to be family dysfunction and toxic masculinity. (My older two kids, when they were in high school, pretty much eviscerated Odysseus and the rest of the Greek heroes for this very reason.) A book from the 1930s on the hero is mentioned as:

 

[E]mphasizing once again less heroic struggles than family conflict (we are back in the domain of ordeals rather than adventures), always based on a troubled and troubling male developmental model, one that can quickly become emblematic of what today, in a stroke of deep irony, we no longer lionize but call toxic masculinity. Myths have been said to enact repressed wishes and have a profoundly antisocial dimension; hence the deep paradox of enshrining as cultural heroes men who have living embodiments of social pathologies.

 

I also noted this interesting passage about how the shift from an oral tradition to a written one allowed more subtlety in storytelling. 

 

Shining Achilles, clever Odysseus - let us remember that these heroes, almost always described with ennobling epithets, emerged from story and song at a time when the spoken word was the only means of transmission. Heroes had to be larger than life, with stereotypical traits that made it easier to learn their stories by heart. Superhuman beings solved a problem in a sense, for they were not just larger than life, but also all action, in ways that allowed their stories to circulate with ease, to replicate, and to endure in oral-aural cultures. With the introduction of writing and printing, characters began to lead more complex, subtle, and nuanced lives in psychological terms, and interiority became the hallmark of great fiction. 

 

In the chapter about the silencing of female voices, some of the more horrifying myths are examined: Philomena the most familiar perhaps. But even she finds a way of telling her truth: through textiles. 

 

How strange and yet also how logical it is that so many of our metaphors for storytelling are drawn from the discursive field of textile production. We weave plots, spin stories, fabricate tales, or tell yarns - a reminder of how the work of our hands produced social spaces that promoted the exchange of stories, first perhaps in the form of chitchat, gossip, and news, then in the shape of narratives and other dense golden nuggets of entertaining wisdom passed down from one generation to the next. 

 

It is no surprise that the story of Scheherazade is featured in the book. She is in many ways the most classic and complete version of the female storyteller, the one who counters the brutality and stupidity of toxic masculinity with words. 

 

What is less well known is that what most of us have read is nowhere near the complete Arabian Nights. The original has a lot of sex to go with its violence, and it was banned as obscene at various times. 

 

The collection’s frame narrative is anything but child friendly and stands as a stark reminder that what we think of as fairy tales for the young were in fact what John Updike correctly called “the television and pornography of any earlier age.”

 

 A Kay Nielsen illustration referenced in the book

 

The discussion of Wonder Woman is a good contrast. Rather than the relative passivity of female characters, she is as active as any man. Here, Campbell doesn’t come off that well, as his idea of how females are or should be is as passive being. 

 

“Look at the images of the male. They are always doing something, they’re always representing something: they are in action,” Joseph Campbell remarked when talking about the art of the Paleolithic era. By contrast the female figures of the era are “simply standing female nudes.” “Their power is in their body,” he added, and “their being and their presence.” He worried about the “very important problems” that emerge when women believe their value lies in achievement rather than simply “being.” 

 

Yuck. (That’s from an interview, by the way, not his book.) In another interview, with Bill Moyers (who I am not a fan of, for reasons illustrated in this conversation), he made some pretty offensive and retrogressive claims. 

 

Both Campbell and Moyers believed that women could become true heroes by giving birth. Childbirth was the equivalent of the hero’s ordeal. “What is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of live…Woman is what it is all about - the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment.” Boys, by contrast, deprived of the opportunity to give birth, turn into “servants of something greater” once they grow up. 

 

William Marston, who created Wonder Woman, had a better perspective:

 

“Not even girls want to be girls,” Marston complained, “so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power.” 

 

You think? 

 

This reflects a number of conversations I have had with antifeminist family and acquaintances, who bristled at the idea that women might have the right to adventures, to action, to achievement. Rather, their value resided (as Campbell claimed) in their bodies, their ability to reproduce the species, their “being.” This is, of course, not how women are, or how they have lived their lives through most of history. It is a misogynist myth. No wonder young girls want better. (See also: The Second Sex for more on this idea that women exist to make babies while only males get to transcend and become fully human.) 

 

It should be no surprise that Hitler’s “put da wimmins back in da home” program, Kinder, Kuche, und Kirche comes into this discussion - it is the recurrent idea of all authoritarians (including MAGA) that women need to “know their place” which is in the home cranking out babies. 

 

Wonder Woman, interestingly enough, did a lot of her best work, not through violence, but through stuff that is dismissed as “woke” these days:

 

Wonder Woman fights evil and injustice at all levels by organizing strikes, boycotting products, and leading political rallies. She ends the excesses of profiteering on the part of a milk trust that has been raising the price of its products and starving American children. She becomes a labor activist who works to double the salaries of underpaid clerks at Bullfinch’s Department Stores. 

 

In other words, the kind of fighting for justice women have always done. 

 

There is also a great discussion of the way that the story of Eve has been corrupted into a way to blame women for everything evil in the world. (This is one of my biggest beefs with Evangelical theology. It is fundamentally bigoted and dishonest.) See also: Pandora. 

 

The book references Stephen Greenblatt’s excellent book on the Adam and Eve myth, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, which I wrote about a couple years ago. Tatar points out the way that the actual story has been twisted to mean something different from what it says. Recall that the forbidden fruit is knowledge. In light of our evolutionary history, this is a parable of humans developing sentience before we had the moral capability of managing our powers.

 

Recall, however, that the serpent tempts Eve with nothing but knowledge: “Your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Eve has done little more than accept the invitation to become a sentient being endowed with moral awareness and wisdom, and yet she is likened to the serpent, indeed in some cases she is the real serpent.

 

In contrast to the misogynistic interpretation, an open-minded reading of Genesis reveals that it is in fact the men who follow up their fall with ever-escalating violence and homicide until God finally has enough and causes the Flood. It isn’t curious women, but toxic men, who choose to use sentience and moral awareness to do evil to each other. 

 

The author also notes the obvious: just as in the Bluebeard story, God creates an obvious setup, where humans will inevitably be curious. And is that actually a bad thing? Or was it just unfortunate that humans got ahead of their ability to act in accordance with their knowledge. 

 

It is more than likely to the credit of all humans that we have an incorrigible urge to defy orders and prohibitions issued without any explanatory context, especially when there is the added temptation of a key dangling right before our eyes. 

 

Do not forget either that it is Bluebeard’s wife’s curiosity that ends up saving her in the end. 

 

Next up is the cultural change that occurred during the 19th Century. 

 

Louisa May Alcott’s books marked a shift in children’s literature, away from moral instruction on behalf of adults, and toward a view of literature as being for children. 

 

Alcott was conspiring with children against adults, as Roald Dahl once claimed he had done while writing books for children. Alcott turned her back on a robust literary tradition that had made as its goal the spiritual uplift of children and the taming of their unruly instincts. Children’s literature, with many strokes of Alcott’s pen, turned into something for children rather than for their own good. 

 

I previously mentioned my love of Nancy Drew as a kid. There is an extended discussion of her, and why she became incredibly popular. One thing I did not know was that the books were banned at libraries back in the day. Not my local libraries, though - I checked a bunch out! Apparently, even the New York Public Library refused to carry them until the mid-1970s. By the time I was reading, in the 80s, things had loosened up. 

 

Moral panics are nothing new, I guess…

 

Agatha Christie was another author I read a lot of as a kid. So the discussion of Miss Marple and other old lady detectives was fun. I also thought the quote by Christie herself was interesting, as an example of how even one of the best-selling authors of all time still dealt with gendered expectations. 

 

“The best time to plan a book is while you are doing the dishes.”

 

Female tricksters are the subject of another great discussion. Like the straight-up heroines like Wonder Woman, they too are obsessed with justice. But they are also more ambiguous in gender expression, particularly in light of culture. 

 

Thus, as the author puts it, female tricksters reject “victimization, physical weakness, and household drudgery.” They act more “masculine,” so to speak. 

 

Interestingly, the traditional male trickster - guys like Loki - also blurred gender lines. (In one episode, Loki finds himself pregnant - it’s an interesting story.) The common thread in male and female tricksters is a certain androgyny. 

 

I’ll end with a couple of ideas to ponder. 

 

Once we begin to look at the classic stories told and retold in our culture and experience them from the perspective of figures on the sidelines - slaves, concubines, sacrificial lambs, misfits, all those on the losing side of history - we are suddenly cut loose from the obligation to admire, worship, and venerate. Instead, we become radically inventive, seeing things differently and finding new ways of reading the stories and histories in which they appear. 

 

Related to this is that I discovered a few myth retellings by women that I have added to my reading list. Stay tuned…

 

The book includes at the end an extended discussion of the ways in which real-life women have found their outlets. Historically, nursing has been one of them. (I am married to a nurse, so I know.) 

 

There is a quote by Florence Nightingale that is interesting. She believed that a lack of an outlet for women would lead to madness. And, if the 1950s were any indication, this very much happens. 

 

Instead, Nightingale believed that it was crucial for women to have a calling in which they could exercise “passion, intellect, and moral activity.” 

 

This, perhaps, is at the crux of the issue, isn’t it?

 

Men are not the only humans who need this. Women do too. They need the opportunity to be the heroines, to have their quests, their ordeals, their chance to do good in the world using their passion, their intellect, and their moral fiber. 

 

That’s what feminism is about, and why I support it. We are all human, and should have the opportunities to live as fully human. 

 

Give this book a read. I think it is helpful to have read Campbell, but not necessary. And celebrate the heroines we all have in our lives. 

Einstein's Fridge by Paul Sen

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book is one of the best non-academic science books I have read. It is all about the history of thermodynamics from Carnot to the (more or less) present. The strength of the book is the way it explains concepts clearly and simply, yet with the detail necessary for a true explanation, not just a hand wave. 

 

I want to mention in connection with this book, Carlo Rovelli’s classic, The Order of Time, which I read last year. The latter book is definitely a bit more complicated and goes really deep into the nature of time and its relationship to entropy, so I think that it might be a good idea to read Einstein’s Fridge first, to get the thermodynamic background. If you are already a science nerd, perhaps this isn’t necessary, but I do think this book is an excellent foundation for understanding. 

 

I’m not going to get too much into the details of the book itself, because no explanation I could give would be as good as the ones in the book. 

 

I will just give a bit of an overview, some of my favorite stuff, and a few quotes. 

 

First, the existence of the universe as we know it is the result of uneven distribution of entropy. Areas of low entropy enable energy (and matter, which is another form of energy) to flow to areas of higher entropy. This flow enables work, time, and what we experience as existence. (As I said, if you want your mind bent significantly, read the Rovelli book.) 

 

The book starts, therefore, with the first investigations of thermodynamics, which started with the steam engine. Like a certain amount of science, this was driven by economics - how to make engines more efficient. But inquiring minds always go beyond the immediate problem to explore the why and how of our universe. And also, one can often make a profit with inferior technology.

 

Then as now, commercial success was not necessarily aligned with innovation.

 

Likewise, the book notes that some scientific developments go by unnoticed for decades, because they don’t yet have the practical results.

 

Hindsight, however, is no guide to how Bernoulli’s contemporaries responded to “the kinetic theory of gases.” The truth is eighteenth-century physicists paid it little heed. Perhaps without any urgent need for scientific inquiry - improving steam engines, say - they had no need to do so. It is a prime example of how a scientific theory, however good it is, may disappear from view if it has no cultural, social, or economic relevance to society. Bernoulli’s writings on heat were written over a century too early. 

 

With hindsight, we can see that humans can fly because of his insights. (To name just one…)

 

By the end of the book, we are talking about how entropy relates to black holes and event horizons - and that whole discussion is fascinating as well. It also ties in with another fun science book I read years ago, The Little Book of Black Holes. The universe is weird and fascinating. 

 

It may come as a surprise to some, but we really didn’t have the first two laws of thermodynamics until 1865. That’s not much more than 150 years ago. And yet they underpin literally all of the technology we take for granted today. 

 

One thing I very much liked about the book was that it highlighted some of the scientists that you don’t tend to read about much in school textbooks. To be clear, these are very important people in the history of science, but are unjustly neglected for some reason. 

 

Two in particular that I noted were Ludwig Boltzmann, who among other things, applied statistics to the study of thermodynamics, insisted that atoms and molecules were real in an era when that idea was unpopular, and first anticipated the idea of the Big Bang - a beginning of the universe. 

 

His life ended tragically, unfortunately. He was already likely bipolar, and took criticism very hard. Max Plank, who would eventually come around to agreeing with Boltzmann, was a particularly harsh critic. During an episode of depression, Boltzmann committed suicide, failing to live long enough to have his ideas thoroughly vindicated. 

 

Although I knew his name - I’m a nerd - I didn’t realize how much of what we now take for granted in our science of molecules in motion and heat transfer originated with him. 

 

He also has a badass quote in the book:

 

“It must be splendid to command millions of people in great national ventures, to lead a hundred thousand to victory in battle. But it seems to me greater still to discover fundamental truths in a very modest room with very modest means - truths that will still be foundations of human knowledge when the memory of these battles is painstakingly preserved only in the archives of the historian.” 

 

The other name that I was glad to see was Emmy Noether. Women tend to get the short shrift when it comes to credit for science, although I note that there has been some progress on this lately. Her story is full of the usual bullshit - she was forbidden to get her university degree despite being brilliant, sexism plagued her existence her entire life, and the scientific establishment ignored her work even as it was acknowledged as important. 

 

I probably can’t explain her major insight all that well, but Einstein credited her work as foundational for much of his. (Richard Feynman, who should have known better, failed to credit her while citing her theorem of symmetry and conserved quantities.) 

 

As the book puts it, despite being relatively unknown, “much of the work underpinning modern particle physics derives from Noether’s theorem.” 

 

Another point in the book that seems relevant is this one:

 

[S]ometimes, as important as who writes the words is who reads them.

 

One group of readers and writers who doesn’t come off well in this book are the philosophers. All too often, they were in conflict with the scientists, particularly when it came to the idea of the heat death of the universe. Again, we can turn to Boltzmann for a pithy quote.

 

“Shouldn’t the irresistible urge to philosophize be compared to the vomiting caused by migraines?”

 

One of the most mind-bending chapters is the one on information and entropy. If you want to really go down the rabbit hole, this one is for you. Storing information takes energy - just look at the AI data farms for an idea how much. But even if the physical storage took zero energy, it is established that the information itself requires energy and an increase in entropy. As I said, this is crazy stuff. 

 

There are a couple of things from this chapter that I want to note. 

 

First is the insight from Claude Shannon (who worked extensively with Alan Turing) on communication. 

 

ALL communication is encrypted. 

 

Think about that for a minute. As you read my blog, we communicate because both you and I have the encryption key: a knowledge of the English language and the knowledge of the visual or audible symbols we use to represent it. 

 

The other bit I found fascinating is the passage on how living organisms process information. The act of reproduction is itself an information transfer at the cellular level. 

 

The book talks about the abundant and common bacterium, E. Coli. We have many millions of these in our intestines - they are a real part of us and our function. Because they are easy to study, they were used to calculate the amount of information needed for their reproductive process. Then, by measuring the reproduction rate and the energy consumed, they were able to calculate how much energy that information processing took. 

 

Shockingly, it turns out that E. Coli is incredibly efficient compared to human-built computers. Even our most efficient calculation devices use 10,000 times as much energy for each bit of information processed. That’s crazy!

 

There is so much more in this book, of course. Anyone with an interest in science will find it fascinating. 

 

I’ll end with one last thing, from the epilogue. The author notes that we have known about the mechanism of the greenhouse effect and the problem of spewing carbon dioxide from fossil fuels into our atmosphere for more than 200 years. The alarm was first raised in the 1860s by John Tyndall, who did experiments proving the way carbon dioxide blocks infrared. By 1917, Alexander Graham Bell was advocating for replacing fossil fuels with solar power. This all is nothing new.

 

The author notes that one major reason he wrote the book is that he felt that general ignorance of thermodynamics was one reason that the special interests who preserve the subsidies for fossil fuels (including these days, Trump and his goons) are able to deceive the public. 

 

Educating people on the science is important. Educated and informed people are more likely to understand reality and act in accordance with it. 

 

So, I too will promote this book. Educate yourself. Don’t fall for the propaganda. Build a better world. 

 

Cane by Jean Toomer

Source of book: I own this

 

This book is one of my two official reads for Black History Month. Too many concerts meant it took me a while to get to and finish, so this is a bit late. 

 

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of the Harlem Renaissance. It is probably not a coincidence that the great flowering of African-American art, music, and literature during the 1920s and 30s coincided with the rise of the 2nd Ku Klux Klan. Which “caused” the other is probably a pointless question - one could simply go with Newton’s Third Law and leave it at that. 

 

In any case, these opposing forces of good and evil represented in their own ways the future course of the United States, with recurring episodes of racial hatred on the part of bigoted and hate-filled white people backlashing against social and economic gains by black people. But also, the Harlem Renaissance was hugely influential not only in the black culture of the future, but indeed in American culture of the future. 

 

Jazz and blues would form the basis of whole genres of music to come, including Rock and Roll. Poets such as Langston Hughes would create uniquely American forms of expression that would influence future poets, white and black, for the next 100 and more years. Black artists would bring a vibrancy and sense of motion that would influence popular art and design. 

 

And novelists would integrate literature, demanding fully-realized black characters, the diversity of our nation, and consciousness of race and class be a part of any true American literature of the future. To read Harlem Renaissance literature is to realize how deeply its ideas have penetrated our culture, and changed it for the better. 

 

I recommend checking out my index of Black History Month selections, which includes the list of works by black authors I have written about on this blog. There are a lot of Harlem Renaissance authors represented. 

 

***

 

Just a couple of recent non-literature arts from the Harlem Renaissance I want to mention:

 

My wife and I visited NYC in 2024, and got to see the Met’s exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance. It was fantastic, and one of the best things we saw there. Unfortunately, I can’t find a page with all the artwork on it, but you can probably use the guide online to find pictures. There is a video tour on Youtube as well, I believe. 

 

More recently, I got to play Harlem by Duke Ellington with the Sequoia Symphony Orchestra. It’s a fabulous work, which I had previously heard at the Hollywood Bowl. 

 

***

 

The Library of America recently released a two-volume set of Harlem Renaissance novels. This is in addition to their other volumes for specific authors. I made a rare splurge on a new book, and got it. 

 

I plan to read through it over the next few years, so stay tuned. 

 

***

 National Portrait Gallery

Jean Toomer was an interesting character. And Cane is an unusual book. 

 

Toomer was born Nathan Pinckback Toomer, but went by Jean (Eugene) after his father abandoned the family, because his mother hated the association. 

 

Because Toomer’s parents were of mixed race - although his father was born enslaved - his appearance was fairly “white.” His mother was a descendant of the “Free People of Color,” and was also very light skinned. 

 

This led to Toomer struggling with identity. Legally, he was black. Physically, he could pass for white. Even though he contributed to the Harlem Renaissance, he distanced himself from it. He chose to identify as “American” rather than black, and I can’t really blame him. In a very real way, he was as American as they came - an amalgam of races, not any one thing. 

 

His childhood and formative years likewise failed to categorize him entirely. At times he attended all-black segregated schools. But he also attended an all-white school. Which, therefore wasn’t all white, I guess? 

 

He would marry two white women, both with essentially the same name, which is an odd coincidence. (Margery and Marjorie) His first wife died in childbirth, alas.

 

The draft board listed him as black. The census listed him as white, as does his death certificate, while his birth certificate has him as “mulatto.” 

 

So what was he? Socially, he sometimes passed as white. It seems he didn’t specifically try to, but he didn’t try not to, if you know what I mean. Don’t ask, don’t tell. 

 

As I said, I can see his problem. He didn’t look “black” enough to fit in with African American society. But he was legally “black” under the “one drop rule.” I very much sympathize with his desire to be just “American” - a new race, if you will. If racism were not a continuing issue, perhaps we could all acknowledge that Americans aren’t really black and white - we are brown and beige and every shade in between. 

 

***

 

Having introduced Toomer, let me talk a bit about the book. 

 

It is difficult to classify the book as any one genre. It was written during and about Toomer’s time spent teaching at a segregated black school in Georgia. It combines poetry with prose vignettes, fiction with autobiography, and narrative with drama. 

 

In between the prose sections, there are poems. Most of the prose sections are vignettes, fairly short stories about various people. These are often situated on the race line, with interracial relationships (in a time when that was dangerous), conflict between black and white, ambiguous racial ancestry, and more. The characters are memorable, and the writing excellent. 

 

Toward the end of the book, there are two prose sections that are different. First is “Bona and Paul,” which is longer than all except the last section, and contains an interesting use of the format of drama to have the two main characters show their inner thoughts. 

 

The other is the novella-length story, Kabnis, which has multiple chapters, is somewhat autobiographical, and combines the forms of narrative and drama. It feels a bit like a play, but with extended description that is part of the story itself. It is hard to describe, but interesting to read. 

 

Overall, Cane, was a good read, thoughtful and nuanced, with good characterization, interesting settings, and a real look at a particular place and time. 

 

I find it interesting that Toomer himself thought it failed to capture what he wanted. Critics mostly liked it, but it didn’t catch on with the public at the time, perhaps because it didn’t tell the story that was expected. It wasn’t “racial” in the way that many white readers were comfortable with, but it also wasn’t exactly typical of works written by black people for black people. 

 

Later readers and critics would come to realize how underrated it was. And also forward looking - a kind of bridge between writers like Edgar Lee Masters and early James Joyce to more experimental modernism. 

 

The title refers to the “cane country” of Georgia, and all of the vignettes, stories, and poems are really about the setting as much as the people. The land and its inhabitants are all connected. 

 

I was somewhat surprised at how much I liked the poetry. I was expecting a novel, but found some incredible lyrics. 

 

There are a few I want to feature, as well as some passages that I thought were particularly excellent. 

 

First up, the poetry:

 

Reapers

 

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones

Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones

In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,

And start their silent swinging, one by one.

Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,

And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,

His belly close to ground. I see the blade,

Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade. 

 

Face

 

Hair - 

silver-gray,

like streams of stars,

Brows - 

recurved canoes

quivered by the ripples blown by pain,

Her eyes - 

mist of tears

condensing on the flesh below

And her channeled muscles

are cluster grapes of sorrow

purple in the evening sun

nearly ripe for worms.

 

Georgia Dusk

 

The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue

   The setting sun, too indolent to hold

   A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,   

Passively darkens for night’s barbecue,

 

A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,   

   An orgy for some genius of the South

   With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,   

Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

 

The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,

   And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,

   Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill   

Their early promise of a bumper crop.

 

Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile

   Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low   

   Where only chips and stumps are left to show   

The solid proof of former domicile.

 

Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,   

   Race memories of king and caravan,

   High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,

Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp.

 

Their voices rise. . . the pine trees are guitars,   

   Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . .   

   Their voices rise . . the chorus of the cane

Is caroling a vesper to the stars . .

 

O singers, resinous and soft your songs

   Above the sacred whisper of the pines,

   Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,

Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.

 

And this one, which is just gorgeous:

 

Her Lips Are Copper Wire

 

whisper of yellow globes

gleaming on lamp-posts that sway

like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog

 

and let your breath be moist against me

like bright beads on yellow globes

 

telephone the power-house

that the main wires are insulate

 

(her words play softly up and down

dewy corridors of billboards)

 

then with your tongue remove the tape

and press your lips to mine

till they are incandescent

 

I could literally have quoted all of the poems. They were uniformly excellent. 

 

Next are my favorite passages of prose. 

 

This one is the opening of “Fern.” 

 

Face flowed into her eyes. Flowed in soft cream foam and plaintive ripples, in such a way that wherever your glance may momentarily have rested, it immediately thereafter wavered in the direction of her eyes. The soft suggestion of down slightly darkened, like the shadow of a bird’s wing might, the creamy brown color of her upper lip. 

 

As I mentioned, in “Bona and Paul,” about an ambivalent relationship, the characters express their thoughts in a drama-like format. 

 

Bona: He is a harvest moon. He is an autumn leaf. 

 

Paul, like Toomer, is of ambiguous race. The other characters speculate about whether he is black or white. Art, Paul’s roommate, is one of them. 

 

Queer about him. I could stick up for if he’d only come out, one way or the other, and tell a feller. 

 

You see this not only in matters of race, (“what are you, anyway?”) but also gender. As more of your younger people embrace non-binary gender expression, you see the usual demand, “Are you a woman or a man?” along with attempts to legislate clothing along a binary. As humans, we have a tendency to categorize, and all too often those who do not fit a category cause others discomfort. 

 

But, as in the question of Paul’s race, the problem isn’t the answer - it is the question itself. Paul is Paul, regardless of whether society calls him black or white. 

 

Kabnis is an interesting slice of Georgia life, and has autobiographical elements. There are a few fascinating lines in this one. For example, Kabnis’ sleepless night, where his brain goes around in circles. 

 

“Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you? God, he doesn’t exist, but nevertheless He is ugly. Hence, what comes from Him is ugly. Lynchers and business men, and that cockroach Hanby, especially. How come that he gets to be the principal of a school?” 

 

Religion - and the contrasting styles of North and South, play a key role in the story. I noted the use of a peculiarly Southern expression, the “Amen Corner.” 

 

There is a continual tension in the story between those two styles, as well as the inherent issues of the enslaver’s religion. Even today, you find white “christians” calling black Christianity heretical, in no small part because it doesn’t sanctify white supremacy. (See: MacArthur, John.) Father John, an elderly man with significant disabilities, talks rarely. In one crazy scene involving a basement party, sex workers, and Father John, there is this conversation: 

 

Father John: Th sin whats fixed . . . (Hesitates.)

Carrie K. (restraining a comment from Kabnis): Go on, Father.

Father John: . . . upon th white folks-

Kabnis: Suppose youre talking about that bastard race thats roaming round the country. It looks like sin, if thats what y mean. Give us somethin new and up t date.

Father John: -f telling Jesus - lies. O th sin th white folks ‘mitted when they made th Bible lie.

 

That line has stuck with me. It really is the most succinct description of the great sin of white Evangelicalism. They made the Bible lie. They made it say that God prefers white people, and blesses the oppressions of the past and present. There is nothing I hate worse than being lied to, and this is one of the worst lies I was told. And the main reason I will never return to Evangelicalism. 

 

Toomer doesn’t seem to be particularly pro-religion in this book, and it is hard to blame him. In this story alone, he points out the self-righteousness of white people, of course, but also the fact that within the Southern black church, those who do the most evil during the week are the most pious on Sunday. The businessmen who get rich off the backs of the poor buy off the consciences. The drunks pray the loudest. The women who sleep around cry and wail and draw attention to themselves. It all seems to Kabnis/Toomer that it is a scam, a rip-off that distracts from the real needs people have and the real injustices in society. He isn’t exactly wrong.

 

It has at least been refreshing to see the reinvigoration of genuine religion as a response to Trump and MAGA and the rest of the present-day Klan. Perhaps there is hope that it will be more than therapy for guilty personal consciences and more of a public conscience holding the rich and powerful accountable for their evil. We will see, I guess. 

 

Again, this was a good book. It was very different from the usual, but the whole was a coherent picture of a time and place, and an impressionist exploration of humans and their relationships to each other and their place. 

 

I definitely recommend further exploration of the Harlem Renaissance - art, music, poetry, and literature. It was a tremendous moment that has left its trace on American culture in so many ways.