The Summer before the Dark

Last Updated on Friday, 20 January 2012 02:03 Written by Barb Wednesday, 05 February 2020 20:55

"Inner-space fiction" that's a good word for Doris Lessing's work.  Psychological fiction.  Gut-level, intuitive, unconscious, so much so that it feels as natural as water when she describes even the disjointed dreams of her heros.

I loved this novel.  I liked living in someone else's head for a few days.  And she's so good at it that it's as convincing as reading your own thoughts.  It carries you along so effortlessly.  So much so that it's slightly disturbing when you find you're following her thoughts so easily right up into the part where she (kind of) goes insane!  (I'm not sure she was really insane.  She had definitely wandered outside the bounds of polite society, but her perception of reality was dead on the whole time.)

She discovers the tremulousness of identity when she finds after being sick for a while that she's lost a lot of weight, her hair's dry and the color's gone out revealing her natural grey, her face is sunken and sallow, her clothes don't fit... in short, everything about her appearance that defined her as an upper-middle class woman dutifully fulfilling her role as wife and mother has gone.  She walks the streets, sees a friend she's known for twenty years and not a hint of recognition.  Men don't see her anymore.  She was accustomed to being a pretty woman, one used to the attention of old men.  All that's gone.  She's completely invisible.  She plays with that awhile then she finds new clothes that fit better, ties her grey hair back so it's not so wild anymore, sorta does herself up again and voila! it's all back.  Her old self.  She is visible again.  She puts this mask on and off again, proving to herself how ethereal it is:

A famous African hunter describes how, when hunting, he kept the shape of the duiker or deer somewhere behind his eyes and this inner print fitted over the camoflauged beasts there were so hard to see among their patterns of light and shade: but in this way he did see them easily.

A woman walking in a sagging dress, with a heavy walk, and her hair -this above all- not conforming to the prints made by fashion, is not "set" to attract men's s-x.  The same woman in a dress cut in this or that way, walking with her inner thermostat set just so- and click, she's fitting the pattern.

Men's attention is stimulated by signals no more complicated that what leads the gosling and for all her adult life, her s-xual life, ... she had been conforming, twitching like a puppet on those strings..." [p 186 Vintage ed.(US)]

 

Read more: The Summer before the Dark

The Shock Doctrine

Last Updated on Wednesday, 02 February 2011 21:00 Written by Barb Wednesday, 10 October 2007 00:00

Milton Friedman, one of the most famous economists of the 20th century, was a big believer in the power of crises (of the economic sort) to induce a generalized state of shock in a population.  A crisis makes people vulnerable and desperate and thereby opens them up to ideas and changes that might not be in their best interests --such as the restructuring of their economy to a format more beneficial to Western industrialized super powers (e.g. us!).

"Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change" he said.

Friedman was talking about economic crises but natural disasters can do the same thing: terrorize a population, make them desperate and open the doors of opportunity for the economic restructuring of a society.  Naomi Klein explains it all in her new book The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism.

When [a] crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, [Friedman] was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the "tyranny of the status quo".

Some examples:

After the 1973 coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende, 50,000 people were tortured, 80,000 imprisoned, unknown numbers of folks were disappeared and the income of the wealthy rose 83%.

Read more: The Shock Doctrine

Omnivore's Dilemma

Last Updated on Wednesday, 02 February 2011 21:01 Written by Barb Monday, 27 August 2007 00:00

I'm so swamped with reading these days. I haven't been writing as much.  I think it's just the natural cycle of creativity.  There can be no output without input and I'm just in an input stage right now.  I don't feel badly about not writing as long as I'm taking things/information/ideas in.  Consuming books and movies.  Right now I'm ingesting a lot of books, some junk, some educational and interesting.  And this one to the left here is by far the most interesting.

If you haven't picked up a copy yet, wowza! Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma will knock your socks off.  I can't put it down.  It's a fascinating journey about what we eat and why and you don't have to be a nutritionist or a farmer to be interested.  We all eat.  And eating, as the author makes us realize throughout the course of the book is a political act, a matter of life and death in so many direct and indirect ways.

Read more: Omnivore's Dilemma

We have always lived in the castle

Written by Barb Thursday, 26 April 2007 00:00

If you like Shirley Jackson and her grotesque images of humanity, if you're feeling cynical about human society, or just like twisted and stunted characters, check this out. Best known for the creepy short story The Lottery, her novel We have Always Lived in the Castle is another story about the cruelty of humankind, the incessant social pressure of small towns to keep their members in line and the temptation it all produces to wall yourself off in a castle and never come out! The story is told by a mentally disturbed narrator which provides the reader with an uncomfortable though thrilling closeness to insanity and neurosis and not a small part of the creepiness of the novel is produced by this technique. Jackson is a genius of the most recessed and hidden parts of the human psyche and this novel is one of her best.