the book club: May 2006 Archives

Glen gave a very interesting paper about the PR strategies of the Humane Society of the US and the National Forest Service regarding bear hunting/trapping in Maine and coyote hunting in Vermont. All of us got to practice recognizing our own biases and trying to learn to talk without our own propagandistic rhetoric! One of the questions I posed was whether this either/or dualism is a false dichotomy: can one be both in support of animal rights and in support of hunting?

If you're interested in coyotes, one of the storylines in Prodigal Summer, a wonderful novel by Barbara Kingsolver, concerns a forest service naturalist who has a love affair with a bounty hunter. There's an incredible section in there about the role of the predator in maintaining biological diversity and ecological balance.

I didn't write much about it when I listened to it on tape. There is one hint about wildness and another hint in this prayer for life offered up by the naturalist.

As reported (unscientifically) in the NYTimes Book Review section.

In an essay about this quest, the writing is characterized as "a hybrid (crossbred of romance and reportage, high philosophy and low gossip, wishful thinking and hard-nosed skepticism)," possibly suggesting a mix-n-match style to aspiring writers in any genre. In addition to forcing questions about cultural assumptions we must wonder, as suggested by A. O. Scott, "in the age of James Frey, reality television and phantom W.M.D.'s, what do we mean by 'fiction'?"

Perhaps the meteoric rise of the winner, Beloved, by Toni Morrison is because of what Scott labels its "essential conservatism...which aimed not to displace or overthrow its beloved precursors, but to complete and to some extent correct them." Perhaps, despite the rhetoric of its radicalness at the time, it wasn't "too" radical and thus discountable, but still far enough within the system to be eventually accepted by it? Did Morrison find that delicate balance between activism that inspires and that which triggers backlash?

Scott also identifies a preoccupation with the recent past as a theme in American novels: "how heavily the past lies." This might be one way to characterize the discipline of communication in a nutshell, for good or ill. :-/ That, and its opposite: how lightly the future calls.