Category Archives: Environmentalism
Ruth Ozeki: Zen and Politics
December 18, 2013 Reading the papers for “American Literature in the World,” I’m struck by how few wrote on My Year of Meats. Did people think it was too political, with too much of an agenda, out to get … Continue reading
Animals in Chicago
November 6, 2013 It seems right that the theme this year for the Chicago Humanities Festival should be “Animals: What Makes us Human.” This city, after all, used to be called (and maybe is still called) hog butcher for … Continue reading
Ilium, Iowa City: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
October 23, 2013 For someone interested in the twentieth-century epic, Slaughterhouse Five is a no-brainer. How else would one call a story set in Ilium, talking about war, about death and the counterfactual? But did I ever stop to think about … Continue reading
Brazil: Karen Tei Yamashita, Elizabeth Bishop
April 24, 2013 Both write about human efforts that come to nothing. Bishop’s Manuelzinho begins bravely, planting gardens that ravish the eye: beds of cabbages edged with red carnations, lettuces with alyssum. But then “silver umbrella ants arrive,/ or it … Continue reading
Ishmael Reed’s Canada: black, Jewish, indigenous
February 20, 2013 Ishmael Reed isn’t into tragedy, so Flight to Canada is funny about the African-American presence up North. Raven Quickskill is there of course, having flown in “non-stop/ Jumbo jet this A.M. Had Champagne/ Compliments of the Cap’n/ … Continue reading
Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens: Books of the Dead
December 26, 1012 There’s a picture of the two of them – Stevens standing at the back, and Rukeyser seated in front with Marianne Moore. To the left of him from where they were, and to the left of … Continue reading
Edward Weston, Walt Whitman: Grass
November 7, 2012 Whitman, poet of New Jersey and New York. Also poet of grass, the force of demographics, what comes up from the ground. He would have been unsurprised by Hurricane Sandy, or by the rising sea levels … Continue reading
Unending Katrina: Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun
October 31, 2012 I never made it to the World Humanities Forum, a small story in a big storm. New Orleans and New York: this is the tale of two cities that is now unfolding. I wish I could say: … Continue reading
Rob Nixon: Slow Violence
January 11, 2012 The last day of the MLA: anyone still around? But it was one of the best panels I’d been to. A resonant title: “Velocities of Ecocriticism.” A full audience. And three great papers: Ursula Heise, Timothy Morton, … Continue reading