The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford

In the last few years, largely because of Jenn, I’ve been coming around to the belief that a lot of the best literature being written these days, at least by Americans, is speculative. We hosted Tananarive Due at our bookstore around the time The Living Blood came out, and always regretted that we didn’t have the chance to host Octavia Butler. We’ve each read a lot of Neil Gaiman, and especially prize the Sandman graphic novel series and the stories in Smoke and Mirrors. Jenn is a big fan of Ursula K. Leguin’s The Left Hand of Darkness -- one of the many books I’ve read out loud to her—and she introduced me to the work of Ted Chiang, who immediately became one of my favorite writers. We both greatly enjoyed Margaret Atwood’s funny/horrible apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, and noticed that “mainstream” writers these days, like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, may have one foot firmly planted in sci-fi.

Now, again thanks to Jenn, I’ve discovered the work of Jeffrey Ford, which is giving me the tingling sensation that lets me know I may have to read all of it. Fortunately, Jeffrey Ford is much more prolific than Ted Chiang, so there’s a lot to look forward to. The Drowned Life, his latest collection, highlights his extraordinary range, his wild imagination, his character-drawing gifts (not always a strength in sci-fi), and his ability to handle the whimsical as well as the creepy. These stories appeared in places I’ve never heard of, or heard of only recently: anthologies from Nightshade Books and Social Disease Press, and magazines like Journal of Mythic Arts (now defunct) and Subterranean Magazine.

The story I will probably remember longest from this book is “The Night Whiskey.” It begins with a scene in which a young man is learning from an older man how to use a padded pole to push drunks out of the limbs of trees so they will land safely in the back of a pickup truck. A light-hearted small-town tale, apparently, except that the drunks aren’t really drunks. They have been chosen by lottery to drink the “black whiskey” that is brewed from a plant called the deathberry. From there, things get steadily darker and more interesting.

How well does Ford write? Here’s his description of the deathberry plant:

The Harvest centered on an odd little berry that, as far as I know, grows nowhere else in the world. The natives had called it vachimi atatsi, but because of its shiny black hue and the nature of its growth, the settlers had renamed it the deathberry..... If you were out hunting in the woods and you came across, say, a dead deer, which had not been touched by coyotes or wolves, you could be certain that the deceased creature would eventually sprout a small hedge from its rotted gut before autumn and that the long thin branches would be thick with juicy black berries.... Instances of this weren’t common but I’d seen it firsthand a couple of times in my youth—a rotting body, head maybe already turning to skull, and out of the belly like a green explosion, a wild spray of long thin branches tipped with atoms of black like tiny marbles, bobbing in the breeze. It was a frightening sight to behold for the first time, and as I overheard Lester Bildab, a man who foraged for the deathberry, tell my father once, “No matter how many times I see it, I still get a little chill in the backbone.”

Reading Moby-Dick

I’ve been reading Moby-Dick for the first time since college, and enjoying it more than I did then. It helps to be reading it for pleasure, without a deadline, without the pressure of tests and term papers, and the need to hunt for symbols and allusions. It helps to know what’s going to happen—anyone who’s waiting too impatiently for the white whale to appear is not going to have a good time—and it helps to be reading the University of California edition, with its beautiful typography and a hundred woodcuts by Barry Moser. Moser wisely avoids picturing the characters, but his illustrations of New Bedford streets, whale skeletons, and the specialized gear of a 19th century whaler add to your understanding.

It’s not the melodramatic scenes in Moby-Dick that I like the most, when Ahab nails the doubloon to the mast, or when the Satanic Fedallah makes his predictions, or when Ahab and the others launch into soliloquies that stir together King Lear, Milton, and the King James Bible. In these Melville comes too close to making the story what Ishmael himself calls (in chapter 45) “a hideous and intolerable allegory.”

I much prefer the early chapters before the Pequod sets sail, as Ishmael is getting to know Queequeg, or the glimpses of newborn whales and their mothers in chapter 87, or quieter passages that mingle philosophy and nature, like this from chapter 58:

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return.

I had forgotten too, how much humor there is in Moby-Dick. Here’s just one example from chapter 101:

The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for certain, how that was. They had dumplings, too; small, but substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread—but that couldn’t be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the only fresh fare they had.

It was impossible not to think of Captain Aubrey’s joke that in the navy you must always prefer the lesser of two weevils.

You don’t know what’s going to happen

Note: My post on Season of Migration to the North is now up at Words Without Borders.

I recently read The Business of Books by André Schiffrin, managing director of Pantheon for thirty years and founder of The New Press. The state of the book business is a depressing topic, and I don’t want to go into it here — though Schiffrin’s book is an excellent concise account of what the relentless pursuit of the bottom line has done to publishers, bookstores, books, and readers.

Here I’d just like to record a simple yet powerful idea that Schiffrin’s book shares with several others that I’ve reviewed or blogged about: You don’t know what’s going to happen.

For generations, publishers have understood that most books will not make money. A few of them will, and those books will subsidize the rest. With luck, the publisher may turn a modest profit at the end of the year. As Schiffrin describes it, the “illiterate businessmen” who have taken over most of the book business had a brainstorm something like this: “Why should we publish books that are going to lose money? Let’s just concentrate on the books that are going to be bestsellers. We can afford to pay big advances for books like that, and with the money we save we can pay ourselves like oil executives.”

It didn’t work. Why not? Because nobody knows which books are going to be bestsellers. So the megapublishers end up in bidding wars over books that will never pay back their advances. Meanwhile the remaining small publishers continue to publish books that they think are original, intriguing, or beautiful. And every so often a book like that sells a lot of copies.

In a similar way, Andrew Tobias’s book The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need, as well as more scholarly works like A Random Walk Down Wall Street, argues that investors simply do not know what the stock market is going to do, or which companies will go up or down. The average investor is therefore better off buying an index fund (which represents a cross-section of the market) and leaving it alone.

Even a hedge fund titan like George Soros has a healthy respect for uncertainty, attributing much of his success to the idea of what he calls “radical fallibility.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that most financial risk comes in the form of unpredictable events that he calls Black Swans. And James Surowiecki shows in The Wisdom of Crowds that diverse groups of people often make more accurate predictions and assessments than the “experts” do. (In a similar way, I heard Lani Guinier on TV the other day arguing that when companies give tests to prospective employees, they shouldn’t just hire the people with the highest test scores. They should also hire the people who got the right answers to questions that most of the others got wrong.)

It’s uncomfortable to realize that you don’t know what’s going to happen. But in business, investing, and perhaps in life it can be disastrous to fool yourself into thinking that you do.

Three Undergrads Remain in Prison

In recent years I’ve gotten used to the idea that anything I put on the Internet will stay up there indefinitely, available to anyone. But it’s been startling to see that newspapers and other organizations have been diligently going through their crumbling archives and posting material that was created long before the Internet was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. For instance, details of my two weeks of incarceration following a 1977 protest at the Seabrook nuclear power plant are now readily available.

Along the same lines, searching the New York Times database sometimes turns up some startlingly old material, like this 1891 article about a murder prompted in part by the summer heat:

When two respectable and middle-aged citizens so infuriate themselves in a difference originally arising from the waywardness of chickens as to arm themselves with revolvers and start out for mutual extermination, their conduct takes on the proportions of a “difficulty,” and seems much more congenial to the lowlands of Alabama or the bayous of Louisiana than to the cool and umbrageous borders of the Hudson River.

Zimbabwe money

Some time ago I blogged about developments in Zimbabwe, and included a link to a twenty-dollar Zimbabwean bill. Strangely enough, that link has become one of the most popular items on this blog. So in response to demand, I’ve scanned some of the Zimbabwean currency I collected during my six months there in 1990, and my return visit in 1993. At the time, the twenty-dollar bill was the biggest denomination the government printed.

The extent of the economic devastation in Zimbabwe can be seen at Wikipedia, where a $100 billion note is pictured with the three eggs it could purchase when it was issued.