Huckleberry People
Again foul weather shall not change my mind,
But in the shade I will believe what in the sun I loved.
Thoreau*
Saw Karen Fowler and Kim Stanley Robinson read tonight up on campus (to a creative writing class, but open to the public as well), sat grinning through it like a fangirl. KSR read excerpts from the Science in the Capital series, which I found entertaining when I plowed through it last year, but just entertaining, and nothing like the dreaming/critical thinking to which his Three Californias series had set me (more below).
But tonight's encounter has given me a new view of what's actually interesting about his recent work: a speculative, journalistic investigation into the interstitial, which can characterize people, settings, ways of making a living, etc. In the case of environments: those forgotten spaces between an apartment complex and a freeway entrance - variously shaped polygons of real estate that have escaped notice (or were somehow beneath it), on which people surreptitiously erect living structures. [A friend in Santa Barbara recounted finding one such structure, dug into the ground and camouflaged with a weed-embroidered tarp (neat as a pin inside, she said, ship-shape). She left it as she found it.] Robinson's depictions on those kinds of people and places seems newly interesting to me, somehow different from a neo-beat aesthetic - less blindly celebratory (as some of the trustfund-anarchist-rail-riding hobo kids here in Santa Cruz are wont to be). A kind of anti-exceptionalism, maybe. In his interactions with the students afterward, he emphasized the perfect ordinariness of Thoreau, a guy who lived in a small town, in a suburb, grappling with the same kinds of issues we do today: what is our relation to stuff around us? How do we negotiate with our people and our stuff?
A few remarkable phrases: Thoreau as "the Philosopher of the Forest-at-the-Edge-of-Town"; his protagonist Frank, considering the speed and sophistication of the autonomic body as it runs, characterizing himself as "the inadvertent jailer of a mute genius"; on the varieties of "dumpster purists" among the ferals/freegans; quoting Thoreau, in his arguments with Emerson, on "huckleberry people." Huckleberry people - interstitials - freegans. I have met me some dumpster purists, I do assure you.
I love his early experiment the Three Californias trilogy. Three different post-apocalyptic narratives: a straightforward narrative of tribal culture arising post apocalypse [The Wild Shore], dystopia [The Gold Coast], and what he refers to somehwere as a hesitant utopia [Pacific Edge], which I think is very much in conversation with Samuel Delany's Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, that most frustrating and delightful rehash of The Rake's Progress. That last one I keep returning to.
I went up to him afterward, and did my fangirl squee thing. I told him we share a dissertation committee member (DT), which was very cool to relate (KSR's diss was on Philip K Dick, and I have yet to get my hands on it - BUT! I am newly motivated). I enthused over his portrayal of the freegans in the Science in the Capital series, told him about this group of people somewhere on the east coast (S. Carolina I think it was?) who are doing the same kind of pavement-ridding depicted in Pacific Edge, in these burnt-out abandonned industrial areas (wish I could find their website, but my google-fu is lacking). Recommended that he stop in at the local anarchist library/hang-out here, etc. Gave him the namaste-hands thing at the end of the conversation, rode home grinning. Wish I had told him how much I love his post-brain-injury Saxifrage Russel (in the Mars Trilogy), returning to language with a fascination for naming all the wavelengths of the visible spectrum (even the difference between .59 microns and .6). Thisness.
Also: my bikelight nearly fell off while I was still coming down off campus, while barreling through a particularly dark passage of road with overhanging redwoods. Exciting for a minute, flying nearly blind through a curve!, and I was glad for the moonlight after. Beautiful cold night, clear all the way to Monterey.
-----
*(that one's for you, grashupfer)
But in the shade I will believe what in the sun I loved.
Thoreau*
Saw Karen Fowler and Kim Stanley Robinson read tonight up on campus (to a creative writing class, but open to the public as well), sat grinning through it like a fangirl. KSR read excerpts from the Science in the Capital series, which I found entertaining when I plowed through it last year, but just entertaining, and nothing like the dreaming/critical thinking to which his Three Californias series had set me (more below).
But tonight's encounter has given me a new view of what's actually interesting about his recent work: a speculative, journalistic investigation into the interstitial, which can characterize people, settings, ways of making a living, etc. In the case of environments: those forgotten spaces between an apartment complex and a freeway entrance - variously shaped polygons of real estate that have escaped notice (or were somehow beneath it), on which people surreptitiously erect living structures. [A friend in Santa Barbara recounted finding one such structure, dug into the ground and camouflaged with a weed-embroidered tarp (neat as a pin inside, she said, ship-shape). She left it as she found it.] Robinson's depictions on those kinds of people and places seems newly interesting to me, somehow different from a neo-beat aesthetic - less blindly celebratory (as some of the trustfund-anarchist-rail-riding hobo kids here in Santa Cruz are wont to be). A kind of anti-exceptionalism, maybe. In his interactions with the students afterward, he emphasized the perfect ordinariness of Thoreau, a guy who lived in a small town, in a suburb, grappling with the same kinds of issues we do today: what is our relation to stuff around us? How do we negotiate with our people and our stuff?
A few remarkable phrases: Thoreau as "the Philosopher of the Forest-at-the-Edge-of-Town"; his protagonist Frank, considering the speed and sophistication of the autonomic body as it runs, characterizing himself as "the inadvertent jailer of a mute genius"; on the varieties of "dumpster purists" among the ferals/freegans; quoting Thoreau, in his arguments with Emerson, on "huckleberry people." Huckleberry people - interstitials - freegans. I have met me some dumpster purists, I do assure you.
I love his early experiment the Three Californias trilogy. Three different post-apocalyptic narratives: a straightforward narrative of tribal culture arising post apocalypse [The Wild Shore], dystopia [The Gold Coast], and what he refers to somehwere as a hesitant utopia [Pacific Edge], which I think is very much in conversation with Samuel Delany's Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, that most frustrating and delightful rehash of The Rake's Progress. That last one I keep returning to.
I went up to him afterward, and did my fangirl squee thing. I told him we share a dissertation committee member (DT), which was very cool to relate (KSR's diss was on Philip K Dick, and I have yet to get my hands on it - BUT! I am newly motivated). I enthused over his portrayal of the freegans in the Science in the Capital series, told him about this group of people somewhere on the east coast (S. Carolina I think it was?) who are doing the same kind of pavement-ridding depicted in Pacific Edge, in these burnt-out abandonned industrial areas (wish I could find their website, but my google-fu is lacking). Recommended that he stop in at the local anarchist library/hang-out here, etc. Gave him the namaste-hands thing at the end of the conversation, rode home grinning. Wish I had told him how much I love his post-brain-injury Saxifrage Russel (in the Mars Trilogy), returning to language with a fascination for naming all the wavelengths of the visible spectrum (even the difference between .59 microns and .6). Thisness.
Also: my bikelight nearly fell off while I was still coming down off campus, while barreling through a particularly dark passage of road with overhanging redwoods. Exciting for a minute, flying nearly blind through a curve!, and I was glad for the moonlight after. Beautiful cold night, clear all the way to Monterey.
-----
*(that one's for you, grashupfer)