CONFERENCES, JOURNALS, PAPERS: PARAACADEMIA

Gradually, after years of monitoring H-Net mailing lists about various “disciplines” (arbitrarily agreed upon clusters of subject matter) and often benefiting just from reading reviews or descriptions of conferences with their calls for papers, I’ve realized that it is a parallel universe to the system of colleges and universities that control thought around the globe by certifying scholars and providing opportunities for them to meet.  Universities have now maximized their control enough to shut a lot of people out and throw even more into lifelong debt.

From Wikipedia:

H-Net ("Humanities and Social Sciences Online") is an interdisciplinary forum for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. It is best known for hosting electronic mailing lists organized by academic disciplines; according to the organization's website, H-Net lists reach over 100,000 subscribers in more than 90 countries.

The H-Net Network has grown until it is now endorsed by many academic professional organizations. Its over 180 topic- or discipline-specific lists are often the primary internet forum for scholars.

Don’t tell them how useful they are, or they’ll start begging for money the way the schools constantly nag their alumni.  (Oh, too late.  They do.  But at least I don’t have to pay tuition.)  Beyond the list-servs, this symbiotic world is also enormously expensive: the conferences are often in delightful places far enough away to put a burden on energy sources.  (Has anyone figured out the total jet fuel cost of a conference in Hawaii?)  Of course, one will need a place to stay.  One must be quite wealthy to attend or belong to an organization that will pay on your behalf.  If the latter, that organization will expect some say about which ones you can attend and what you can present there.

I’ve only attended two of these H conferences, both of them sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, one in Las Vegas and one in Calgary.  It was early in my return to Montana and I was still only in my Sixties, so I threw a mattress in the back of the pickup and drove there.  I didn’t have a network of people I could stay with because I wasn’t coming directly from the academic world.  It was 1980 when Hannah Grey said, "Welcome to the Company of Scholars" and put my MA "hood" over my head.

When I had been in the UU ministry, we had meetings like these all the time, though only a few were places to present papers.  Humptulips UUMA study group was one.  I wrote about the paper I presented at one meeting on this blog:  May 1, 2012:  “Male and Female Created He Them.”  The group assigned the topics, partly playfully, and assigned me to distinguish between the then “new” female-based theologies and traditional paternalistic theology, because I was so un-feminist. The work I did for that (we were expected to meet academic standards) has been a basic part of what I’ve done since.  But UU ministers are no longer “learned.”  Now they're therapeutic.

The other stream of this para-academic thought is journals, which are almost as expensive as travel to conferences, and the gate-keeping for these publications is partly secret.  The editors are announced, but articles are “curated” by secret peers.  That’s the theory.  In the first place the process is extremely slow, expensive in terms of time, but -- worse -- one is judged by rivals and older scholars one might be challenging.  There’s a bit of this is ordinary publishing done through academic publishers and even commercial publishers.  The stories of sabotage, feuds, and person-destroying vendettas abound.  The advancement of learning is not always a priority.

If a discipline is small and perhaps located in a regional or otherwise specialized area, there’s really no way to keep up the pretense that you don’t know who is reviewing your work and what their prejudices are.  Now there is a move towards open-journals which go online, perhaps even uncurated, with the reviewers named and publishing their comments.  This scary experiment is still in progress.  It resembles platforms for public writing like Edge.org, Aeon.com or Nautil.us with the comment function substituting for formal peer reviews.  They can be confusing, offensive, uninformed, and just add to the enormous amount of print -- which is only marginally improved by not being ink-on-paper.  Friendship networks still count large.  

Most people are still not sophisticated about using Skype or other online conference strategies.  I haven’t used them.  Technical savvy begins to be as much a barrier as lack of money.  Thank God (or whomever) for the used book market, although it means I’m looking at books already consumed and discarded as not that useful.  This means I’m working with . . . um . . . excretion, but we already know that’s fertile.  These days everyone is hurtling forward so quickly that they are skipping over material that would address some of the holes in their present arguments.

A major humanities enterprise in Montana is history and fiction about the people and place.  Yet the graduates of the state universities don’t know foundational publications or basic disciplines.  They rush after the trendy issues and they are fed the favorite hobby horses of their professors who don't even get out of the university town.  “News” paper print and local bookstores are far too influenced by commercial motives and that just emphasizes the trend.  Strangely, professors come in from other parts of the world, hired because they know theory rather than the territory.  Theories tend to be transient.   But locals drop out whole categories of writing because they aren’t socially endorsed:  gays, blacks, Metis, the Goths, Canadian writing about the same shared ecosystem as Montana. 

But I’m wandering.  Statewide teachers’ meetings are coming up.  They are highly political -- labor union attitudes vs. professional associations.  Administrators hate them because they can’t monitor what is said.  Anyway, this is hunting season and cattle shipping season.  Teachers’ meetings make a nice gap in the calendar, but unless the faculty is wearing GPS anklets, there is no way to tell where they really are.  That’s not my topic, though I know a lot of funny stories.

People in a thinly populated place where even the libraries can be a little limited, H-Net is a god-send now that there is Internet access to the major campus conversations.  Much of what is happening is cross-disciplinary under a meta-topic.  Right now everyone is trying to understand neuroresearch, so it’s necessary to chase neurotheology, neuroanthropology, neuroarcheology, neuroliterature, neurosociology, neuropsychoanalysis back to their roots as 19th century categories.  Then we’ve got to reflect on whether boundaries and methods need to be revised.  It’s deeper than the earlier gender-realizations when we moved from binary to fluid, from forcing everything to one end or the other of the spectrum.  We haven’t finished dealing with that yet.  Some of us will die clutching binaries.  (Life/death.)

In fact, the computer has opened the world in another way: daylighting practices that are widespread but cloaked.  Some say the real reason for the Rentboy.com raid, which took all the computers and other client registers to secret police locations, was that governmental and corporation names of some prominence were included.  An interesting and powerful threat at the moment is the publication of all the names of members of the Ku Klux Klan.  They may have seen it coming -- they have been trying to redefine themselves.  “Fifty Shades of Gray” was nothing.  “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” was as world-shaking as Kinsey.  No one had known what people were up to.

Can you hear me now?

What will be revealed when the data from African smart-phones are accumulated and interpreted this way?  We already know how deeply we are changed by knowing what our international leaders and their secret squads are saying to each other.  We can only hope it will change them as well.

Society is changing so rapidly now that the academic world can’t keep up.  This parallel stream of thought represented by conferences, journals and papers is helping.  It is a way of joining into the conversation and understanding if one has the chops for it.  Usually that’s indicated by a diploma degree, but not necessarily.  Some people with paper entitlement are sitting it out.

Others blog.  Try this one for some excellent thoughts.  https://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/about/

THE UNDERGROUND, THE BEAT POETS, AND CANNIBALISM: WHAT INTELLECTUALS DISCUSS

The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment is a list serv I’ve followed for more than a decade.  It has changed over the years.  Just now a member has challenged the lack of online “discussion” which I suppose might be interpreted as a lack of argument or personal opinion.  Instead, the complainant, who was immediately joined by a few others, says the listserv is dominated by appeals for textbook ideas for courses, or book announcements (sometimes written by members) or a constant stream of Calls for Papers (CFPs).  Granting that it’s true, and also it’s true that we’ve become kind of humorless, what I think I’m hearing is loneliness.  I am not lonely.  I do not want to be argued down.

ASLE folks in person.

I’m doing a cut-and-paste of three recent CFP’s so you can see them, because I suspect that most people don’t even realize that intense and gifted people are closely scrutinizing these topics.  Personally, I learn a lot just from reading the thinking that went into framing the question, though there’s no chance at all of me attending, much less submitting a paper.  That’s about all this particular post of mine is: samples of what I read daily and sometimes respond to here.  But I know some of my readers are active participants, so I left the particulars at the end intact.

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WWI trench warfare.

"Ecology and War: "In the Trenches: Ecological Subtexts of War and Protest Literature"

In honor of the centenary of World War I, this panel aims to address the part that ecology and other environmental images/narratives play in capturing the tensions and terrors of war, conflict, protest, and resistance. The concept of the trench inspires the topic of this panel, as the trench was conceived of as a way to protect combatants from death and/or disfigurement. Those that resorted to "trench warfare" overlooked the fact that in protecting soldiers from the scars of war, the trenches would instead indefinitely scar the earth. We can see this most evidently in the fields of France where the deep wounds in the ground are still healing, now grown over and caved in as the land reclaims itself for its own. In keeping with the conference theme of "underground," we will be exploring how the various parties within a conflict -- from the combatants on the battlefield, to the citizen opponents and enemies of the state -- must seek shelter within the earth, either metaphorically (as in political parties that must "go underground" to survive) or literally (for example, the poets of the Great War who wrote from the trenches). 

An anthology of poems and "comics"

The panel is open for broad, global interpretations of the relationship between war, literature, and ecology; scholars of all geographies and languages are welcome to submit to the panel. As we are in the centenary years of the fighting of World War I, papers on the literature of the Great War are of particular interest, but are not intended to be the sole focus of the panel. Please submit 250-word abstract and brief bio, along with any audiovisual specifications that would be needed for the presentation to the chair before November 1, 2014. For any inquiries and to submit to the panel, please send all correspondence to Anna Hiller at Idaho State University  (hillanna@isu.edu) . 

Anna E. Hiller, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Spanish

Department of Languages & Literatures

Idaho State University

Pocatello, ID  83209

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"Fractured Ecopoetics from the Beat Underground"

As direct heirs to Dostoyevsky's bleak vision in Notes from the Underground, the Beat Generation also wrote from the cultural and poetic underground of the twentieth century at a pivotal moment of transition in Zeitgeist.  As avant-garde, subterranean writers, the experimental lifestyle and poetics of the Beats were forces that shaped one of the most important forms of contemporary subculture—a fact that has been largely recognized.  However, a fact that has remained mostly unrecognized to this day is that Beat experimental procedures, from sketching composition to cut-ups and Buddhist-inspired poetics—also belong to the precursor forces that fractured the pastoral and the romantic, and laid the groundwork for contemporary forays into the territory of wild radical avant-garde ecopoetics.  

Indeed, with the exception of Gary Snyder, what the Beat Generation brings to ecopoetics has been largely disregarded.  Yet, the Beats' grounding in the urban, the toxic, the "wilderness of the mind," and the experimentally aesthetic offers a fluid poetics of field-being that invites us to rethink both physical and mental ecologies, as well as the link between them.  

Open to both scholars and practising poets/artists, this panel wishes to explore how the Beat underground and its experimental practices are soils nourishing and renewing our understanding of experimental ecopoetics and its contemporary offshoots.  Papers/creative contributions investigating, but not limited to—the following questions are sought: 

• To what extent do concepts like composting, accretion, sedimentation, recycling, waste, rhyzomatic proliferation, fractals, fracking, and others help us to understand Beat poetics as an ecopoetics?

• Conversely, to what extent do Beat poetics anticipate/partake of some of the varieties of radical landscape poetry today and wild avant-garde experimental practices (including digital poetry)?

• How do Beat writings fracture, bend, and renew the pastoral into the post-pastoral, the romantic into the post-romantic?  To what extent do Beat writings mesh with the concept(s) of "dark ecology"?

• What light do Beat experimental practices throw on the question of  flow and fracture between eco-aesthetics and eco-ethics? 

• How do the shifting structures, processes, and material agencies underground help us to understand the Beat underground better in terms of a transitional avant-garde formation?  And by extension, how does the physical underground below our feet help us rethink the avant-garde and the cultural underground?  How can we reconceptualize the avant-garde and its different waves anew by using material underground forces as a reading grid?

Please send 300 word abstracts for 15 minute papers & a biosketch to both Franca Bellarsi (fbellars@ulb.ac.be) and Chad Weidner (c.weidner@ucr.nl) by 20 October 2014.

Dr. Franca Bellarsi

Associate Professor (English and American Literature)

Université Libre de Bruxelles

CP 175

+ 32 (0)2 650 67 47

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It's not just an idea.

“What Lies Beneath the Clothes of Culture? Cannibalism in Fiction” 

ASLE 2015 Call for Presentation Abstracts for an organized panel submission

11th Biennial Conference, June 23-27, 2015 in Moscow, Idaho

CFP Deadline: November 30, 2014

From ancient Greek myths to 21st century post-apocalyptic novels, cannibalism abounds, forcing us to reconsider easy binaries of self and other or civilized “us” and a savage “them.” As Maggie Kilgour argues in From Communion to Cannibalism, incorporation—the most basic example of which is eating—“depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside; but in the act itself that opposition disappears,  dissolving the structure it appears to produce”. What, then, when the food being eaten is human flesh?

This panel proposes to examine the various ways literature explores acts of cannibalism to break down notions of absolute difference and articulate the dual fears of anthropophagy: the fear of being cannibalized and the fear of becoming cannibal, the fear of becoming human meat and the fear of eating it. Often considered the demarcation of civilization and barbarism, cannibalism in fact explores the problem of our status as human beings who become hungry: the specter of our common animality. As Simon Estok points out, “Cannibalism is an unambiguously ecocritical issue.”  One cannot be a cannibal without also being human, and meat cannot be but human flesh to mark the consumer of it “cannibal.”

Following the conference theme, then, this panel explores “the importance of experiences that lie beneath (and before and after) the shiny edifices of progress, rationality, and industry […]. to consider what lies beneath us” in terms of culture, definitions of humanity, and what makes us human via explorations of fictional anthropophagy and what those representations mean.

Please see http://www.asle.org/site/conferences/biennial/ for the full conference description and keynote speakers. 

Please submit 300-word abstracts of proposed 15-minute presentations to Sarah E. McFarland ( mcfarlands@nsula.edu) by November 30, 2014. Questions are welcome!

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As constant readers will know, I’ve already written about some of these concepts.  They seem to be the shared product of people going deeper into thought about the world, almost Jungian as a shared unconscious.  

Sometimes I get exasperated that all these highly educated academics DO is talk and fly around from one nice place to another to have conversations.  But I appreciate the fact that this hermit has the chance to consider such issues.  I don’t necessarily have to be there.  And I don’t necessarily want to argue about the topics.  I am solitary but not lonely.  

PROM NIGHT AND THE WATER IS RISING

Front yard  4/26

Back yard  4/26

This morning the cats and I rose to discover that the white stretch limousine parked across the street as part of preparations for prom night in Valier was covered with snow and the trees and bushes everywhere were bowed over with their snow load.  I knew the forecast, had seen the building cloud snow-shelf behind the Rockies, and have lived through many of these Spring monsoon snows, but I was still startled.  It’s not cold and the snow is already melting enough to chute off the trees and roofs.  Soon it will be only ermine trim, like that on the theatrical homemade crowns for the prom King and Queen.  

People who haven’t lived here long will joke about global warming (bring it on!) and the farmers will smile about the moisture.  When I drove to Cut Bank a few days ago in a howling, pounding high wind, there was one section where a newly plowed field was so dry that it was blowing so much dirt across the road that the road was hard to see.  The topsoil of that field is now in Minneapolis.

On the environmental listserv for the organization called the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, a professor has posted a question both ethical and strategic.  She wants to know how to handle the teaching of research and empirically-based thought in general writing courses when the topic is climate change.  Because her community adamantly and sometimes angrily opposes the idea.  

The list, for all its sophistication, calls it “global warming” but it is far more than that when one gets into research about what many people now call "global climate change".  It’s even more than that.  Heat=energy and it is the retention and driving convection of that energy that interacts with geology to create the mammoth planetary currents of air and water through the oceans and across the continents.  You've heard of the Japanese current?

Bangladesh

Coping with the rise in sea level caused by melting of ice at the poles will be major, because humans have always built along waterways and some countries (Bangladesh) will disappear underwater.  Already villages in Alaska have had to move.  Loss of permafrost, the depletion of the glaciers that feed major rivers, general shifting of tornado "alleys" and increased intensity of droughts and hurricanes, deaths of forests, expanding territories for disease and their vectors, extinction of species like polar bears and penguin, loss of fish due to the failure of water column turnover -- it’s enough, as one of the respondents said, “to make semi-grown men cry.”  And that happens.  I’ve seen it.  Of course, grown men and women often fly into a rage when they realize the real nature and dimension of the problem.

ASLE conference panel

The inquiring professor wanted to know how she could keep from being shifted from classification as a dependable teacher to being considered a trouble-making activist and therefore losing her job, as well as short-changing the education of the students.  Those latter may not give up the pursuit of money and refocus on saving the world, but they will be a different kind of voter.  That will make some politicians very angry.

Therefore, I will shield the identity of the professor who said, “If institutional priorities . . . can [make] top-down changes in curriculum occur which would make GW education more than optional, and I don't know what to do about this, particularly in regions where a) the majority culture is skeptical of or indifferent to GW and b) where the institution wants/needs as many enrollees as possible to generate funds, and therefore seeks to exclude all Negativity.

“Your questions bring up lots of other thorny issues, e.g., what channels of future activism can the teacher actually offer the motivated student?  What psychological effect will a continual focus, however realistic, on a problem generating hopelessness have on the person "just starting out" in adulthood (I assume here the "traditional" student)?  As we sing 'roun here, "Everybody wants to go to heaven/But nobody wants to die."  For this innerness of global warming awareness I strongly recommend the new book by Steven Pavlos Holmes, exploring personal responses to gw.”   

Steven Pavlos Holmes, Independent Scholar

“Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming” by Steven Pavlos Holmes.  On Amazon for about ten bucks or Kindle.  I ordered a used paperback, my usual standard.  I had thought that this climate change was moving slowly enough that at 75 years old, I would be gone.  I don’t have children.  Now it appears that the beginning has already begun.  Just not this snowstorm, not even this dust storm, and the snowpack on the Rockies is “normal”-and-above for the time period in which we’ve been keeping records.  But there are other things to consider.

An Australian fire whirl

If something drowns Bangladesh, if something forces an Alaskan fishing village to move, if something caves off the sides of mountains and changes the intensity of cyclones in Kansas and turns Australia into a holocaust -- it changes me, too, because everything is connected.  This is grain country and we know that the profit of our grain depends on the world climate -- not just in terms of rain and sun, but also in terms of politics.  What happens to the Ukraine happens to our wheat elevators.   The markets are the same. 

One of the first responses is to compensate by evading expensive regulations, particularly when owners are faraway (not in physical danger) and workers are local (in danger), which is the case with many of the services in our area.

“A Minnesota-based agriculture company was fined $211,000 by federal safety regulators who said Wednesday it had repeatedly failed to ensure workers weren't exposed to grain-dust hazards in Montana.

“CHS Inc. was cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 19 workplace safety violations at grain elevators in Cut Bank, Glendive, Denton and Valier. A company spokeswoman said CHS will challenge the violations.

“Three were repeat violations, including failing to test the air quality in work spaces for potentially explosive grain dust, hazardous gases or lack of oxygen, regulators said.

“Dust from grain in elevators is considered highly combustible and can be more explosive than coal dust, Funke said.

“Fourteen of the violations alleged against CHS were classified as serious, meaning there was a substantial probability of a worker death or injury.”

Another consequence is a deepening wedge between two demographics in a state where liberal populations are concentrated in the scenic and university towns and conservative people are spread across the rural landscape.  So there are climate rallies to support clean-energy in 13 communities today: Bigfork, Billings, Bozeman, Columbia Falls, Great Falls, Hamilton, Helena, Kalispell, Lame Deer, Missoula, Pablo, Red Lodge and Whitefish.  NOT Cut Bank, Glendive, Denton and Valier.  (The rumor that a coal company arranged for this snowfall is only a bitter joke.)  

From my point of view it's a very interesting development that the Native American people, who have been scorned in small town settings but championed by universities and environmentalists, are now arriving at a position where they can provide payback politically.  Consider the impact on negotiations over irrigation water rights to Birch Creek, which divides Valier from the Blackfeet Reservation.  Consider frakking.  Consider wind farms.

Prom tonight -- then what?

As is often remarked, the only real constant is constant change and as grain farmers know, life is always a trade-off between givens and surprises.  Culture can foster collaborative changes in attitude or it can ignite wars.  Both are happening.  This is not a simple squabble over where to set the planetary thermostat.  

PROPHETS

Prophetic

Pastoral

When I think about ministry, there are a few binary forces that I come back to again and again.  One is the tension between the prophetic role (railing against what is wrong as well as an impassioned plea to do what is right) and the pastoral role (expressing unconditional love as well as urging healing -- not “providing” it.  Everyone has to heal themselves.)

Another is the tension between the survival of the individual and the survival of the group.  If an individual threatens a group, that person will be expelled or destroyed.  Another puzzle is how to manage the three inevitable groups within any larger group: the one that wants to keep the group the same, the one that wants to go back to yesterday and the one that wants to explore the future.

An individual has addressed the listserv of a group I belong to that considers the environment, usually from a progressive and appreciative stance.  www.asle.org

Members are mostly academic but not exclusively -- just print based and more mellow than they used to be.  They have never tried to push me out, though I’m quite different from most of them.  In the last few days they have been “challenged,” to use a euphemism, by a man in the grip of outrage and indignation whose subject seems to slide around a bit.  For a while I thought he was a young man, but now it appears he’s in late middle age and -- this is a technical term -- “thrashing.”  That is, to a stage where he has nothing to lose so has become profane, outrageous, reckless in his desperation.  The most obvious indicator of this is that this environmental group is simply not equipped to deal with any of the things he says he’s fighting:  unjust firing of teachers, low pay for adjunct faculty, the victimization of the weak by the powerful, and the rot of universities through athletics, money and the politics of the larger culture.  

An unjust society is a worthy cause and a classic one.  If one has the endurance and equity of Mandela, the world can be changed.  But if one is truly an isolated sorehead, one will be crushed and shoved aside.  The forces that come to bear on Obama -- contempt, false accusation, opposition even when accommodated, stigma -- are present everywhere.  The sources go deeply into the early evolution of patterns for survival, maybe pre-hominid.  Certainly the Abrahamic traditions preserve as many examples of this howling in the wilderness as of an alternative, which is seclusion.  (My choice.)

What IS a just society?  The problem is that justice cannot be “one size fits all.”  Justice for a child has to be different from that for an adult; justice for a scholar is different from justice for a soldier on the battlefield.  What the group thinks is justice may only mean death to the individual.  The most consistent understanding of prophesy is that somehow the prophet has access to a “higher” understanding of what will happen in the future, often based on communication with a higher power that solves the dilemmas of our given world by calling us to a sublime, transcendent reality where the terms of justice are entirely different.  What that transcendent world and the terms of that justice might look like is the problem, but they tend to involve the removal of limits, an abundance that erases competition.  

Our individual survival as creatures is dependent on niches and interdependence.  Much as vegans might long for a world where no animal eats another, the carnivores cannot be eliminated, the parasites must live on something, there cannot be birth without death, and change will always be destruction to those who are destroyed, either directly or through habitat.  There is only one planet, though today we chafe against that limit.

Barry Greer in happy days.

So this man, Barry Greer (you could buy his books on Amazon  http://www.amazon.com/Barry-Greer/e/B004M7MHBW), is clearly intense by temperament and chooses “hot” topics.  He is a provocateur.  He argues that he is inspired (technical term meaning grasping a higher meaning not necessarily available to others) and has suffered for it, while tyrants have gone unchecked -- indeed rewarded.  His example is Graham Spanier.  Hard to argue.  The guy is currently facing trial for four felonies.

Graham Spanier

Barry's martyr is Bernard Malamud, fired by Spanier years ago.  I guess Barry thought that ASLE would be interested in the currently expanding split between university administration and faculty, esp. faculty with a creative skew.  

The inner gnawing of prophets is that the voice they hear from another world might simply be a symptom of schizophrenia.  Even Jesus was taunted by Satan.  So they tend to seek confirmation from others they respect or love.  Few are able to wander in the wilderness with no income, no safety, starving and ragged.  But their need can be interpreted -- esp. by those who are comfortable -- as just a racket, a pesky seeking of attention, an unjustified interruption.  They see the sky-wheels of Ezekiel’s chariot as really just sun-dogs, common this time of year.

But who can get any work done with some thunderer making wheel tracks back and forth across the sky?  Esp. if the prophet loses his balance and begin to insult those down there in the fields, patronizing them and berating them for not being more responsive, as though they were members of a bonehead English comp class.  The trouble with most prophets is that they have no strategy, and they are no good at seduction.  And they don’t think about sex as an academic third rail.  (Spanier’s upcoming trial is related to the Sandusky coverup.)  Mention sex and all the tenured faculty are outta there.   Greer was blocked from posting on the listserv. Maybe he expected that -- even wanted it to happen.  

This is a time when expanded awareness and rising expectations have thrown many people under the chariot wheels in an emotional sense.  How much can we hear about unjustified suffering and not be affected?  This means that the need for pastoral support is high, and yet to many people that feels like a compromise, a surrender to the control of others, a compromise of the vision.  Luckily, helpful pastoral people write books.  No one has to know you read them.  Still, that’s not as effective as someone simply noticing and listening -- isn’t that the best definition of intimacy?  

The person on this planet I most dearly love is also the most prophetic.  The friendship exists on both levels (includes the pastoral) and that’s the way it should be.  He performs the valuable service of jolting me out of any grandiose narcissistic notions I have of saving other people, which is often a paradoxical blindness to what needs to be done.  Human life is full of injustice and persecution.  It is also full of generosity and joy.  A million sermons on this topic at Winter Solstice.  We live the contradictions every day, esp. this far north on the prairie. 

Maybe we did the wrong thing when it came to Barry Greer.  On the other hand, he's a provocateur, a gamer.  (He says "satirist."  I say Napi.)  On the one hand, he says this reflection is merely a "nice try."  On the other hand, he's sent me four books of his for free.  So who won?

MARTIN MURIE, HERO

"A slight sag in the top wire.

Someone has stepped over, or was it just a range cow scratching its hide?

Great swatches of dark and of light, familiar and yet not quite,

and the lights and darks shift as if nothing is totalized, nothing locked in.

The winds, they touch your face differently,

they leave a tangy taste."

from the poem " Fences" by Martin Murie.


It was quiet from Yellow Springs and now I know why. Martin Murie has passed on to a heaven that surely must have packrats in it. “Packrat” was sort of his Internet avatar except that he operated mostly by snail mail. http://www.packratnest.com/ His strength was not innovation and splash, but rather a steady reminding presence: tenacious, relentless. Long before eBooks, Martin was self-publishing books he got printed locally and personally distributed through the upper New York area and on the web. Not just to bookstores, but to bait shops, service stations, antique stores, and whatever unlikely places he could find where people might pick up a book. They were engaging tales of guys working together to do good.

Because I wrote reviews of each of them, he sent me free copies. I expect that some day they will be invaluable in terms of dollars, quite aside from their invaluable content. For one thing Martin is connected to the history of environmentalism through his parents. See http://www.madeinwyoming.net/profiles/Murie.php and http://www.muriecenter.org/ The elder Muries were founders of modern conservation and environmentalist thought and organizations (The Wilderness Society), sometimes enduring harsh opinions when they were ahead of their times, as when they advocated for wolves.

It’s not easy to be the son of such people. I encourage readers to research the elder Muries separately but in addition to Martin, who made his own way. Martin’s earliest summer years were passed in the bottom of a drift boat so far to the north that his mother had to drape the boat with netting to keep the mosquitoes from carrying him off. His father was combing the watery country around them, making early waterfowl counts. Mardi’s account is in "Two in the Far North." (53 used copies for sale beginning at $2.37 on Amazon.) Some of Martin’s books are there as well, though you can probably still buy them through his website.

I didn’t know the following until I read the story in the Yellow Springs, Ohio, newspaper. This town is rather like Concord, a haven for artists, thinkers, and crafts people like Alison, who is a weaver. It is what Deleuzeguattari would call a rhizome.

Village veterans remember wars

By Megan Bachman Published: November 11, 2010

Former Antioch professor Martin Murie lives daily with the reminder of his service in World War II, having lost his right eye in the mountains of Italy. Like many veterans, he finds his memories difficult to live with. “I keep meeting veterans and we don’t talk much about the war — it’s just too painful,” he said. After stays in various hospitals after the war, Murie had to hitchhike and hop freight trains to get back home to Wyoming, where he gave the Purple Heart he was awarded for his injury to his mother. He also received a silver star for killing an enemy machine gunner, who was firing at his comrades, with one shot from his M1 rifle. Murie studied philosophy and literature at Antioch on the GI bill and later became a professor. Now he’s an anti-war protester and member of Veterans for Peace. “For the rest of my life — I can’t forget it, and that’s why I go to Yellow Springs every Saturday and I really am a vehement anti-war veteran,” said Murie, who commutes from Xenia to attend a weekly peace protest in Yellow Springs. “War is not the answer, we just can’t go on with it.”

Until aging forced a return to the Yellow Springs community, Martin and Alison lived in near-wilderness, as has been the custom of the family. Every weekend, too hot or too cold or pleasant, they demonstrated for peace, standing on street corners with signs. Sentries for peace. And over the years they formed a community of like-minded, tough-minded people, who had decided to draw the line.

What I learned from Martin and am only realizing now is that bearing witness is one justification for self-publishing. The academic world can be as stifling as the commercial world, but personally making books, writing columns, maintaining websites, telling stories can feed the enormous spiritual hunger that seems to be driving many people in a time when no religious institution is prepared to make the changes necessary to get the message out. Let alone figuring out what the message IS.

Martin had no doubt about the message. It is that the natural world is us and we are it. All our understanding and all our passion comes from being out on the land, afoot, storing up what we can. Loren Eiseley (Martin often reminded me of him) once wrote a little fantasy about breaking open a packrat’s nest and falling back to make room for all the cultural artifacts that fall out. Instead of spoons and combs, out fell concertos and fine paintings. You can imagine your own list of what you’d put in your packrat nest. That’s part of what writers do.

I met Martin on the listserv called “Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment,” asle@interversity.org ,one of the earlier and most persisting of the environmental lists. In fact, so long that since the Nineties it has been possible to see a generation turn over. The WWII people have nearly all left us now. The WWI people who were so germinal are gone. The Civil War people exist only in books. Out of their trauma came determination to make the world a better place, to become living examples of the Bioneer principles: everything is connected, everything is living, everything is changing.

We so hate it when that change means a loss, which it often does. But war teaches about death and as Raven, Martin’s daughter, emailed me, “ A massive tree is down. The forest floor is lit with a new light, and we are trying to adjust to it.” A person is just one element in an ecology. Martin is not gone but only transformed. And he transformed some of the rest of us. That’s how an ecology works.