Body back from vacation–brain to follow shortly.
First of all, welcome to 2008. I had hoped to stay in the habit of updating while away on vacation, but I’ve been without an internet connection since the day after the rebirth of Sol Invictus. While I don’t get to stay on top of the goings on in the Blag-o-Blag, there is definitely something to be said for not having the whole of the Internet there to distract ones self from just enjoying other things (like a big stack of books, the beach, and birdwatching).
As some of you might remember, I jumped on the Phillip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy bandwagon, and I finished reading the third volume last week. Like I’ve already said, it is an all-around excellent adventure story and was worth the read for the entertainment value alone. The last few chapters, though, suffer from a fairly common annoyance in young adult literature with moral–it stops to explain it. I’m not a huge fan of allegory, and some of my favorite moments in reading came from the forwards to Tolkein’s The Two Towers and Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness in which the authors proclaim their hatred for prescriptive interpretations of literature. I want to be allowed to put the meaning I enjoy in the books I read, so I found the drawn-out conclusion to The Amber Spyglass tiresome, but more tolerable since its prescriptions more or less coincided with the interpretation I would have reached on my own (hint: Pullman is himself a humanist).
Following the adventures of His Dark Materials, I took up reading Edward Abbey’s 1975 book The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been on my to-read list for some time now, dating back to my time as a self-proclaimed Deep Ecologist. The book inspired the foundation of Earth First!, and it is definitely a call to action, but I didn’t come away from it feeling that it was promoting a particular viewpoint–just action as opposed to inaction. Each character in the eponymous gang has a different attitude or set of ideals that they follow, one even has a collection of R. Buckminster Fuller and Paulo Soleri books, so it references two of histories environmentalists I respect most (although not exactly favorably). I’d have to give the book a glowing recommendation, though. It’s chocked full of crazy ideas, which, if I do say so myself, are some of the best kinds of ideas available on the market today.
As usual, my yearly winter vacation has been full of reading and daydreaming. I’ve been filled with the desire to attempt to buy some wilderness, completely inaccessible by automobile, and build myself a dome a la Bucky Fuller out in the middle of nowhere. Because I do have to say I enjoy my wilderness, and much like an addictive substance, the one’s available to me are becoming less and less satisfactory. If you want in on the action, let me know. We’ll build an Arcology! Anyway, this lengthy piece of mostly incoherent whimsy was brought to you by a couple 14 hour car rides and having the sense baked out of me on the beach and in a swamp watching birds. I’ll return to my usual, more professional cadence in a day or two. Hope you all had wonderful holiday seasons.
Tags: literature