Science and Human Nature Kavita Philips Logical Research

Cornell Univ. Library BUIK RATE Serials Dept. u. S. POSTAGE 1A K B 6466 paid 110 Olin Library Ithaca, NY 14853-5301 Perrri^ No. Ithaca, NY 1481C J 'vm. r ? The Newspaper the of The Literary Arts BOOKPRESS Volume 2, Number 7 September, 1992 Ithaca, New York COMPLIMENTARY Interview with Carl Sagan Science and Human Nature Kavita Philips logical research. Could you explain, reality? for a prospective reader of your bode, K.P. Would you say, then, that we K.P. In your forthcoming book, why you think an understanding of need to emphasize the importance Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, things like evolution and animal of science education not just because you describe a personal quest for an behavior is valuable, not just in we want to produce more scientists, understanding of the meaning of itself, but in the context of those but because this can play an essen­ human existence. You suggest that larger questions? tial part in the development of human we come closer to answering fun- C.S. This btxrk is the culmination of consciousness? damental questions such as "Who a 12-year effort. It’s just the first C.S. Absolutely. I think we’re all are we?” and “Why are we here?” step in our attempt to understand born scientists—science is our only through a richer understanding how we humans got into our birthright. I think you'd have to be of our place in nature. You and Ann present mess, and to ask the ques­ made out of wood not to wonder Druyan, then, with admirable clar­ tion: Can we get out? To do that we where humans came from, where ity, elegance, and humor, take the have to look at ourselves squarely in life comes from, where the earth lay reader through decades of bio- the mirror. comes from— which are mainstream The human species is only a scientific subjects. I’m not just few hundred thousand years old on talking about producing scientists INSIDE: an earth that’s a few billion years and engineers,* but producing old; w e’ve been around for only 1/ knowledgable citizens who can James Bay: 10,000th of the history of the earth, make intelligent decisions on how Strangers Devour of the history of life. But we have science and technology ought to be ancestors. In part, we must be the applied. Who makes these decisions? the Land way we are because of who our How many members of Congress page 3 ancestors were, what their evolution have any background at all in sci­ was like, what they had to adapt to, ence and technology? How does it and the nature of this evolutionary enter into our decisions about who Ornithological Art process. So part of our response to to vote for? Hardly at all. And yet page 4 your question is: How can we solve every day decisions involving our problems if we don't know who science and technology are made Narration and Indian we are? Not just what we pretend, that determine our future. This is not just what we wish we were, not just foolishness— it is surrendering Identity just the myths and fantasies that all the democratic process to a few page 7 cultures invent about who we are unelected technocrats. and where we came from, but the see Sagan, page 9 Carl Sagan The Ambivalence of Light No, But I Read Kevin Murphy the pure, clear word of James that we become aware of subtle­ the Movie Wright (to whom he wrote a dedi­ ties residing on and beneath its AS IF IT MATTERS catory poem in his first volume), ordinary surface (“and, plain as Donald Morton author believes, posits film as a si Eamon Grennan but not Wright’s austerity. In­ day, the emptiness at last”; “we of interest only as a “text” and coi Graywolf, $11.00 paper, 93 pp. stead, Grennan gives himself over are brought into the picture, into SEEING FILMS POLITICALLY sequcntly focuses entirely on “rear to an abundance of language and a kingdom / we might find under by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. ing” the internal movements of i Eamon Grennan’s poetry has metaphor, especially a rich palette our noses”). The result is a po­ State University of New York Press. chain of signification: the result great if somewhat paradoxical ap­ of synesthetic color, which he ap­ etry at once plain and luminous, Paper $16.95,267 pp. an inquiry only into how (and m peal. He discovers the mysterious plies brilliantly to advance the nu­ pedestrian and gorgeous. why) film comes to mean what and the radiant in what might eas­ ance and shape of his poems. Grennan is probably most Postmodern film theory — with seems to mean. The only “politics ily he passed by on the road, in the Where else would one find a bro­ familiar to American readers in a lot of help from poststructuralist that is ever discussed in contempt house, in the homely relations of ken cattle skull “ the colour of the pages of The New Yorker, literary theory — has made “seeing” rary film criticism and theory is thi family. The familiar, even the crushed almonds/ or washed out where he has been a regular films impossible. Instead of “see­ merely the politics of rhetoric. familial, increases in value and barley muslin” or a dead animal contributor for the past five years ing,” one now “reads” films. This notion of politics-as-dis intensity as Grennan focuses his on a newspaper “the colour of or so, but in fact, at least in terms Zavarzadeh’s book argues that this course is perhaps nowhere mor gaze and, following the advice candlewax and / bleached kid­ of education and publication, he shift, which is presented by film clearly at work than in the wa Van Gogh once gave, pays more ney”? Even those pigments ap­ is something of a dual national. theorists as a sign of the increasing postmodern film theory deals wit attention. In the description of a parently improvised on the spot As If It Matters, Grennan’s sec­ complexity and subtlety of film the question of “ideology.” In th walk home through rain, Grennan have complexion and complexity ond book of poems published in theory, is actually an ideological radical tradition of Marxism, ideo finds metaphors of his divided (“tea-brown trapezoids,” “matte the United States, was first pub­ alibi. It distracts attention from the ogy is a historical and politic; self along the road and in the air vanilla glitter,” “Naples yellow,” lished in Ireland by Peter Fallon’s ways films serve to produce class practice: ideology mystifies tt (“only the rain is real, the rest/ a “birchleaf green,” “brick-pink”), Gallery Press in 1991. (The first subjectivities and identities — posi­ dominant labor relations and, coi dream that leads me— half/ open giving each surface detail a ten­ American collection. What Light tions for “seeing” — that are neces­ sequently, the exploitation of tt wings, half stone— home”), or, in sion and texture. Grennan em­ There Is, published by North sary to produce a compliant labor workers through the extraction ( recounting an afternoon climbing beds these radiant details in a firm Point in 1989, contained poems force and instead puts the emphasis surplus labor is presented as trek with his son, he discovers his narrative line, and, along the way, from Wildly for Days [Gallery, on the “formal” and “rhetorical” natural and therefore inevitable ac own death. has a penchant for recycling a 1983] and What Light There Is analysis of the filmic As a result, the worker sees nothir In terms of style, he admires common or hackneyed phrase so see Ambivalence, page 5 “text” Postmodern film theory, the see Movie, page 14 September, 1992 page 2 the BOOKPRESS Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan A Preview of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Without exposure to the beasts hadows of Forgotten Ances­ may have gone almost as far as the most like men, it was difficult to tors, Carl Sagan and Ann Congo before returning. draw the’connection between beasts SDruyan's new book, is subtitled In the last of eighteen short and men. It was easier by far to A Search for Who We Are, and is paragraphs in his Periplus, Hanno imagine a separate creation of each the culmination of the authors’ 12- describes finding, just before species, with the less vivid similari­ year quest to arrive at a deeper turning back, an island in an ties between us and other animals understanding of what is human, African lake, (the suckling of the young, say, or what is male and female, why we are five toes on each foot) understood as so violent, so prone to unquestion­ full of wild men. By far the majority some trademark idiosyncracy of the ing obedience to authority. Posing of them were women with hairy Creator. The ape was as far below such questions as: What is the ori­ bodies. The interpreters called man, it was asserted, as man was gin o f consciousness? What obliga­ them “gorillas. ” below God. So, when, after the tion, if any, do we owe to the other Crusades, and especially beginning The males escaped by climbing animals with whom we share this in the seventeenth century, the West precipices and hurling stones. But planet? Is there something within came to know monkeys and apes us, some legacy of our distant past, the females were not so lucky. better, it was with a sense of em­ that threatens the future o f our spe­ barrassment, shame, a nervous cies? Shadows of Forgotten Ances­ We captured three women...who bit snigger — perhaps to disguise tors integrates the insights o f science and scratched...and did not want to the shock of recognition at the into a vision o f where we came from, follow. So we killed them and flayed family resemblance. who we are, and what our fate might them and took their skins to The Darwinian idea that mon­ be. Here are two brief excerpts from Carthage keys and apes are our closset rela­ chapters 15 and 17. tives brought the discomfort to the Modem scholars take these conscious level. You can still see Early in the fifth century B.C., Hanno beseiged and mutilated beings to be the unease today in the conventional of Carthage set sail into the Western either what we today call gorillas, or associations with the word “ape”: to Mediterranean with a fleet of 67 chimpanzees. One of Hanno’s de­ copy slavishly, to be outsized and ships, each with 50 oars, carrying tails, the throwing of stones by the Photograph: ©Marion Ettlinger brutal. To “go ape” is to revert, to altogether 30,000 men and women. males, suggests to us that they were Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan, authors of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. become wild, untamed. When we Or at least this is what he claimed in chimps. The Periplus is the earliest handle something idly, in an ex­ the Periplus — a chronicle that was firm historical account we have In ancient Greece and Rome the In India and ancient Egypt, posted in one of the many temples of a first contact between apes similarity of apes or monkeys with though, there were monkey-headed ploratory way, we’re “monkeying consecrated to the god Baal after his and humans. humans was well-known— indeed, gods, and in the latter large numbers around.” To “make a monkey” out return home. Sailing through the it was stressed by Aristotle' and of mummified baboons — indicat­ of someone is to humiliate him. A Straights of Gibraltar, he turned *** Galen. But this led to no speculations ing that they were cherished if not “little monkey” is a mischievous or south, establishing cities along the about common ancestry. The gods worshipped. A monkey apotheosis playful child. A “monkeyshine” is a West African coast as he went, in­ The ancient Mayan authors of the who had made humans were also in would have been unthinkable in the prank. To “go bananas” is to lose cluding present-day Agadir, Mo­ Popol Vuh considered monkeys to the habit of changing themselves post-classical W est— in part be­ control — reflecting the fact that rocco. Eventually, he came to a land be the product of the last botched into animals tcmpe or seduce young cause the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic monkeys and apes, who indeed love filled with crocodiles and hippo­ experiment conducted by the gods women: Like the centaurs and the religion came of age where bananas, are not subject to the same potami and many groups of people, before they finally got it right and Minotaur, the offspring of these nonhuman primates were rare or social restraints that we are. In some herders, some “wild men,” managed to create us. The gods unions were chimaeras, part beast, absent, but mainly because the Christian Europe in the Middle Ages some friendly, some not. The in­ meant well, but they were fallible, part human. Still, no ape chimaeras worship of animals (for example, and early Renaissance, monkeys and terpreters he had brought from Mo­ imperfect artisans. Humans are hard are prominent in the myths of Greece the Golden Calf of the Israelites) apes were emblematic of extreme rocco could not understand the to make. Many peoples in Africa, and Rome.______was singled out as an abomination: ugliness, of a doomed craving for languages spoken here. He sailed Central and South America, and the *“[An ape's] face resembles that of a man in They were pedaling away from ani­ the status of humans, of ill-gotten by what is now Senegal, Gambia, Indian subcontinent thought of apes many respects...[I]t has similar nostrils and mism as fast as they could. Apes wealth, of a vengeful disposition, of and Sierra Leone. He passed a great and monkeys as beings with some ears, and teeth like those of man, both front were not widely available for ex­ lust and foolishness and sloth. They mountain from which a fire reached deep connection to humans— aspir­ teeth and molars... [I]t has hands and fingers amination in Europe until about the were accessories — because of their “to heaven,” and from which, night ant humans, perhaps, or failed hu­ and nails like man, only that all these parts are sixteenth century; the so-called susceptibility to temptation — in the and day, “streams of fire flowed into mans, demoted for some grave somewhat more beast-like in appearance. Its Barbary ape of North Africa and “Fall of Man.” For their sins, it was the sea.” This is, almost certainly, transgression against divine law, or feet are exceptional...like large hands... (T]he Gibraltar — which is what Aristotle widely held, apes and monkeys de­ the Mt. Cameroon volcano just east voluntary exiles from the self-dis­ internal organs are found on dissection to and Galen apparently described — served to be subjugated by humans. of the delta of the River Niger. He cipline demanded by civilization. correspond to those of man.” is actually a monkey, a macaque. " see Shadows, page 10

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. ' Joel Ray sault on Cree culture and land called what it means to be divorced from a it a “salutary shock.” When 10,000 relationship with nature based on STRANGERS DEVOUR caribou were drowned during the bedrock survival knowledge and THE LAND flooding of the Caniapscau River, respect for the other forms of life By Boyce Richardson Hydro-Quebec called it an act of upon which one's own life depends. Chelsea Green Publishing Co. God. (Which God? the Crees must And the other dimensions of Cree revised edition, 376 pp.; wonder.) Recently the Cree have society that Richardson has learned paper $14.95 begun to fight back against plans for about? They include familiar Indian foreword by Winona LaDuke further dams on the Great Whale, values that remain alive today in Kapashesit Nottaway, Broadback, and Rupert many places on our continent: a rivers, and government and business spiritual and practical apprehension ournalist and filmmaker Boyce groups in the province have assailed of the interrelation of humans, ani­ Richardson first visited the Cree them as an “aristocracy,” questioned mals, water, and land; a consequent JIndians of northern Quebec whether they are true Quebeckers, ethic of sharing and interdepen­ twenty years ago. Though the and attacked them for embarrassing dency; and a nonproprietary form of settlements in the southerly areas of Quebec before the world. Hostility shifting land ownership that looks to Mistissini, Chibougamau, and toward them right now seems at a future generations — the very Waswinipi showed the depressing dangerous pitch. “stewardship,” in a word, that en­ effects of increased contact with Strangers Devour the Land, vironmentalists have insisted is the white mining and logging interests published by Knopf in 1976 and path “civilized” society must pursue. and tourist hunters, the northern­ reissued with a 1991 epilogue by Underlying this ecological practice most Crees were still pretty much Chelsea Green of Vermont last year, of life is an organic sense of history living a centuries-old hunting and is urgent reading for anyone who — of the culture, the family, and the fishing life. Before 1972 there were wants to understand how this disaster individual — reflected in communal no Cree chiefs, and the scattered but came about. Especially important stories, and in keen individual interdependent family groups that are its account of Cree history and memories of past hunting seasons, moved around the land had never culture in northern Quebec, its close- past epic journeys. Flowing from met in formal council. Cree liveli­ up view of the traditional hunting that sense of history, and from the hood depended almost entirely on and fishing life, and — for white needs of survival, is a daily atten­ the spring and fall goose hunts, on environmentalists — its implicit tiveness which in turn sharpens the summer fishing in the rivers, and on redefinition of the word “environ­ memory. Cree knowledge includes winter hunting and trapping of rab­ ment,” which has largely been too a sense of large patterns of space bits, beaver, caribou, bear, and emptied of the human. For an in­ and time, and especially an appre­ moose. The winter sojourns on dustrial society struggling to un­ ciation of forces beyond human traplines — reached by canoe and derstand its own woes, Richardson control, these apprehensions mani­ on foot — lasted nine months, dur­ offers the example of a people living festing themselves in as humorous a ing which time the Cree families today, not many miles from us, who Job Bearskin, "one of the most impressive men I have ever met," a moral and grasp o f the absurd as that o f any also prepared beaver pelts for sale to understand what living in balance spiritual leader among Fort George/Chisasibi people until his death in 1989. postmodern novelist. Some, puzzled the Hudson Bay Company for with nature means and who are and wanting more aggressive action supplemental income for provisions. snuggling to preserve a vision of life in a victory that was overturned as played out in politics and eco­ from the Cree against Hydro-Que­ In 1972 this hard but rich sub­ that makes sense. within a week by a higher court), in nomics; about human experimenta­ bec, call this their “resignation.” sistence life was profoundly chal­ Richardson came to a confer­ which we hear Indians answering tion; about invidious distinctions Indeed Cree behavior, based on these lenged when Quebec announced that ence on James Bay at Cornell last puzzling white lawyers’ questions between animals and humans; about values, is so modest of ambition that it would appropriate hundreds of October, and showed his film about quantities and numbers, and right and wrong action; and about we may see it as passivity; but that is thousands o f square miles for the “Flooding Job’s Garden,” which outraged scientists detailing the the meanings of words like “ani­ inherent in a view of the world as building erf dams on ten of the largest gave “before” and “after” views of likely effects of the dams on hu­ mal,” “environment,” and “civiliza­ unpredictable and requiring constant rivers to generate electricity for the the rivers, the black spruce forests, mans, animals, land, and water. The tion,” and how they are manipulated. alertness — a healthy realism about southern province and the north­ and the moss-covered taiga of court transcripts acquaint us also (White men “break words with their limits that is critical to survival. (But eastern US. Today, after a tremen­ northern Quebec. During the con­ (thankfully) with skilled and com­ teeth and spit them on the ground,” then passivity can hardly explain the dous struggle between the Cree and ference speakers pointed out that the mitted white people who are says an Indian in Bernard Malamud’s Crees’ accomplishment in organiz­ the governments of Canada and Indians were fighting for all of us, struggling with the Cree to assure The People.) ing to stop New York from import­ Quebec, three huge dams are oper­ and while reflex tempted me to marie that their culture can survive. The Strangers is no treatise or po­ ing further Hydro-Quebec power.) ating, four more are in progress, five this down as mere activist rhetoric, I alternation of court transcripts with lemic, however. Rather it is a narra­ The Inuit of northern Quebec 3/4-million-volt power lines carry recalled standing in a field in northern the narrative of Richardson’s time tive about a city white man who are also threatened by the new 12,000 megawatts of power south, New York fifteen years ago with in the bash boldly contrasts industrial encounters a foreign and hidden life projects, and in my memory the most and there are permanent stations of Mohawk and Seneca Indians who and subsistence world views, and in the wilderness, and discovers powerful counter-image to the white workers throughout the were trying to help farmers stop the is an effective variant of the something he must share. He makes headlong electrical life we pursue is Cree territory. Another 15,000 first power line interconnecting with fictional technique whereby modem his view plain in the acknowledg­ a scene from a 1970 Canadian film: megawatts are planned. In newly Quebec. It was white farm land these life is viewed by a completely ments: “I will never be able to repay an Inuit seal hunter waiting patiendy built settlements Crees now struggle Indians were defending, and several other intelligence. adequately Job Bearskin, of Fort in disguise next to a seal hole, for the to survive in a cash economy, some went to jail for it. Good books often “For a white man to penetrate George, and Sam Blacksmith, of seal to emerge again — and then, live on welfare, and all contend with don’t teach new things so much as into the world of a Cree hunter,” Mistassini, who welcomed me on sixteen hours later, missing the seal the medical and social consequences they remind us of important things says Richardson, “is not easy.” A their land, and looked after me, and when it comes. However much we of white encroachment: increased we once knew and have forgotten; notable quality of this book is its taught me that life has other may agree with Richardson that we suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism, Richardson’s beautiful and disturb­ humility; Richardson approaches the dimensions than those I had wouldn’t want to live this way, one methylmercury poisoning, and the ing book did this — and it stimulated Cree as a respectful observer of an previously comprehended.” thing he accomplishes in this book is overwhelming demands of new further reading that has helped me ethical culture superior in many ways White men and women have to convince us how well the Cree bureaucracies imposed as a result of see the more important patterns that to his own; he stands aside for the often come away from contact with families live during their nine months the 1975 James Bay- Northern Que­ connect native peoples, and that Cree people to speak often and at Indian cultures feeling deep attrac­ in the bush, missed animals and all. bec Agreement, by which the Cree distinguish them from us. length about their way of living. In tion to them, and uncertainty about were “compensated” for their loss. The bulk of Strangers Devour bringing us close to diem, he obliges their own. Some have forsaken white *** In less than one generation, then, the Land describes three trips that us in turn to examine our own cul­ culture to live in these other dimen­ the Cree people have been forced Richardson made to the Cree terri­ ture, and to consider its decline. He sions of time, space, and value. The time is autumn, 1972, at into ways of living that for whites tory, culminating in a stay with has us wondering, as we see the Richardson is not one of these; in a Lac Trefart north of the Eastmair evolved over centuries. Perhaps several families in the bush during wholeness and harmony of Cree wry assertion of his “objectivity,” River in northern Quebec. The te­ fanners who have been forced off the winter of 1972-73. He lived on family life in the bush — and its he said at Cornell that he had no pees have been erected, a bear trap their land in the past two decades the La Grande River and at Lac sheer physicalness — about our own interest in living like the Cree, that has been set, Abraham Voyageui can appreciate what has happened to Trefart with Crees as they built tepees endurance, patience, and stability. he was neither a canoeist nor hunter, returns periodically with pike, trout, the Cree, but probably most and a large half-timber lodge; as Continued confrontation of the indeed had never hunted. With this whitefish, and sturgeon to be smoked Americans are in the dark about this they hunted and trapped beaver, issues raised by the James Bay de­ he raised, I think, a painfully diffi­ for later use. Once the freeze cranes, cataclysm. Quebec's attitude toward caribou, rabbit, moose, and bear; as velopment schemes is as important cult question that is important to then will begin the earnest hunting it all is well expressed in Hydro- they gathered for singing and stories, for us as for the Cree. For embedded address: How can we benefit as a for moose and caribou and bear, and Quebec’s response to the methyl- and for solemn discussion about the in this twenty-year conflict are urgent culture from a society whose life we for small game such as beaver to mercury poisoning: well, they’ll just-proposed dams. The narrative questions about industrial society’s cannot truly share? keep the three families (sixteen have to stop eating fish for a while. of these visits alternates with tran­ own health and welfare. They are Certainly the Cree traditional people) alive for nine months. The government anthro-apologist sa c ts from the (Tee’s 1972-73 court questions about scientific/techno- life as experienced by Richardson After his first week or so at the who gave his imprimatur to the as­ challenge to Hydro-Quebec (ending logical impacts on ethics, especially can help white readers comprehend see Hunter, page 12 page 4 the BOOKPRESS September, 1992

Off Campus Bird Art Takes Flight

Alan Singer Woodson Art Museum has been duction, leaving us to guess at the At The Bookery organizing exhibitions and publish­ paintings and prints from Asian MASTERPIECES OF ing books and catalogs — most no­ masters who had a deep and abiding BIRD ART tably the book Birds In Art: The love and interest for birds in nature by Roger Pasquier and Masters, and recently the catalog (in particular, the prints of Ando The "Off Campus at the Bookery" lecture John Farrand, Jr. Naturally Drawn, drawings from the Hiroshige). And given the authors’ Abbeville Press, NYC museum’s own collection. By being Eurocentric point of view, is there series continued last month with about $85.00 involved in this way, the museum any apparent reason to skip over the William H. Gass who read from his art of such artists as Albrecht Durer, forthcoming novel, The Tunnel. BIRDS IN ART: or Joseph Mallord Turner, among The Masters others, who have produced brilliant B 1 R D A R T by Inga Brynildson and watercolors of birds? .,rg ry' A f'/'p . /tft' September 13 Woody Hagge Mostly, Masterpieces of Bird Paul West will read from Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Art is about the production of art for Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin the "plates” of specialized books, and sign copies of his just about $25.00 hence the chapters are grouped ac­ published novel, Love's cording to a chronological history of Mansion. West will be BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA printing media: woodcut, wood and novelist in residence and by Bruun, Robbins, Singer and Zim metal engraving, lithography, and visiting professor of En­ Golden Guide by finally offset lithography. Line art, Western Printing, NYC printed at first with woodcuts and glish at Brown University about $10.00 wood engravings of birds by such this fall. artists as Thomas Bewick in the Sprouting up in towns across 1700s, was very popular and inex­ the country is an art movement pensive to produce. loiter, such art­ bom from the work of painters and gives important recognition to the ists as Jacque Barraband, Alexander sculptors, with the support of an artists, many of whom have devoted Wilson, and Audubon produced unholy alliance of hunters and con­ their life’s work to the service of art lavish albums printed with copper­ October 4 servationists, publishers and politi­ and science. plate engravings that were all hand- cians. Because this art movement The artists featured in the colored. When we think of William Goldsmith, will exists outside the normal channels museum’s annual "Birds in Art" Audubon’s work, routinely we en­ speak on "Politics, Poverty of the contemporary art museum exhibitions, demonstrate their ap­ vision the Havell edition prints and and the City" and will sign and gallery system, you are not preciation of the legacy left behind not the original watercolors they are copies of his recent book likely to have read about it unless by the pioneer of the field, John based upon. It would have been Separate Societies: you subscribe to the glossy publi­ James Audubon. In the 19th century, instructive for the authors to have cation Wildlife Art News, or have Audubon set the standard, gaining made a comparison between the Poverty and Inequality in come upon one of the traveling singular international recognition for prints and the watercolors as U.S. Cities. Goldsmith shows sent out by the nation’s flag­ his work as the explorer and artist Audubon painted them. teaches City and Regional ship institution: The Leigh Yawkey whose watercolors were translated When they were originally is­ Planning at Cornell. Woodson Art Museum of into his maximum opus. Birds o f sued, the portfolios by artists such as Wausau, Wisconsin. America. Many have come to re­ Audubon (1785-1851), John Gould Wildlife ait, and more specifi­ gard Audubon as something of a (1804-81), and Edward U ar (1812- cally bird art, is not a major move­ catalyst in the movement toward 88) were usually sold to wealthy ment you might read about in the conservation of our national wild­ patrons by subscription. However, November 15 pages of the New York Times. life; he has become an icon — both aside from servicing the tastes of the Dr. Peter W. Nathanielsz However, across the US there is a as an artist and consummate de­ bibliophile, bird art also had a mis­ receptive but decentralized audi­ signer, and as an ornithologist with will read from his up sion to accomplish: depicting all the ence and a number of publishers a focus on preservation. known species of birds to inform the coming book Life Before willing to promote an interest in Audubon’s contribution to art scientific and lay community and Birth and A Time To Be nature artists. This is a movement belongs to a tradition discussed by fulfill the taxonomic system pro­ Born. Nathanielsz is that has gained acceptance from Roger Pasquier and John Farrand, mulgated by Linneaus. In addition Director of the Laboratory many who would not nonmally have Jr. in their recent coffee table book, to describing birds for science, art­ an interest in contemporary art. Masterpieces of Bird Art. Many of for Pregnancy and ists were employed to render por­ Perhaps this work fills a need for a the artists and books included in traits of birds for the first popular Newborn research at subject — a fragment of nature Masterpieces are relatively obscure, identification guides. Now 150 years Cornell University portrayed with unusual attention to perhaps because collectors and the later, these tasks are still underway. detail and realism that does not rare book sections of museums and The authors’ energies seem to threaten, but rather enhances libraries have been loathe to bring flag in the last section of Master­ our lives. these jewels into the light. (New pieces o f Bird Art, devoted to the 20th While this art movement will interest from collectors helped fuel century, and lapses in chronology not change the course of history, the heat wave in the art market of the become most egregious. Why the All events are held Sundays at 4 p.m. like, say, Cubism or Impression­ mid-1980’s, driving up the prices of authors choose to spend valuable in Bookery Il's new lecture space. ism, and the names of the artists the prints and illustrated books fea­ space on the wooden Allan Brooks, may not be familiar, there are tured in Masterpieces.) I am not at and overlook the work of C.F. The Bookery is located in paintings and sculptures being made all sure, however, that the chosen Tunnicliffe, whose watercolors in A the DeWitt Building, not only in this country, but around examples in the present volume give Sketchbook o f Birds have grace and 215 N. Cayuga St., Ithaca, NY 14850. the world, that satisfy a growing the balanced historical overview that life, is a mystery. In the section on group of collectors. Acknowledg­ might have been hoped for. For the birth of the field guide, the authors For more information call (607) 273 - 5055 ing this, and becoming a focal point example, the authors mention only give Roger Tory Peterson due credit for this activity, the Leigh Yawkey one Japanese artist in their intro­ see Flight, page 15 r ------! For only $7.50, send to: the next ten issues of the BOOKPRESS the BOOKPRESS DeWitt Building, 215 N. Cayuga St., Paper will be delivered to your home! Ithaca, NY 14850 N a m e :_ Worth Address:. Clipping P hone:______(VISA / MC / Discover, Check or money order payable to the BOOKPRESS)

J L_ page 5 few years ago Denis Donoghue, in a scathing review of one of Ambivalence John Updike’s novels, did what Walt Whitman said you continued from page 1 should never do: argue concerning God. Unfurling the skull [Gallery, 1989].) A native of Dublin, Grennan received both and crossbones of an unrepentant Catholic sensibility, a B.A. and an M.A. from University College Dublin, then Donoghue savaged Updike’s understanding of the deity in his continued his studies at Harvard. He began teaching at Vassar novels as that of a soothing and convenient psychotherapist, in 1974, shortly after finishing his Ph.D., and has ferried back saying flat out that the sensuousness of Updike’s supple and forth between Poughkeepsie and Ireland since. sentences was not and could not be a substitute for asking the As in the poetry of other contemporary Irish poets, such hard questions. While Grennan (thank goodness) has neither as Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland (who have also taught the critical irascibility of Donoghue nor the stylistic prurience and published here), there is a deep matrix of family value and of Updike, there is much in his poems that pits a rigorous (I’m nostalgia informing the poems of this volume. But Grennan’s tempted to call it Irish Catholic) drive for moral clarity — focus on the domestic, if that’s what it should be called, seems inevitably focused on or circling around the shifting notion of to have misled some of his early admirers. Richard Wilbur’s home — against a real desire, or more accurately a real need, and J.D. McClatchy’s blurbs on Grennan’s first volume speak to capture the repose of the moment and press it to the senses. about Grennan’s giving us the “fullness” of the ordinary The section headings of this volume, “Compass Readings” morning world and providing “some rare and affecting dis­ and “Things in the Flesh,” speak to this counterbalancing of coveries for us all” (W.S. Merwin’s comments on the first moral orientation and sensual praise. The tension and the collection were unintelligible; his blurb on the second says ambiguity inherent in these competing urgencies surface most only that it contains some of Grennan’s “most telling work” concretely in “Breakfast Room,” a poem appropriately split [??]). This kind of gloss, while increasing sales in the in half, one part adream in language, the other riveted to the Sentimentally Uplifting section of the bookshops at the mall, gorgeous details of Pierre Bonnard’s painting of the quickly reduces Grennan to a kind of bard of the kitchen and same name. backyard, swooning before his teakettle or compost bin. • Cover illustration by Edvard Munch, Rather than move from Bonnard's painting to a broader Grennan, however, is unlike his Irish counterparts in Moonlight (Night in Saint-Cloud) meditation on experience (the predictable strategy), Grennan some very fundamental ways. Poets like Heaney or Boland, familial and sensuous moments that Grennan chooses to takes as his point o f departure the resonance o f the phrase reacting to the exigencies of Ireland, both political and sexual, illuminate is the large, potentially overwhelming darkness “breakfast room,” as if language itself were the repository have found in an exploration of their respective familial and which renders those moments the more brilliant, because the of hope: gender alliances a source of collective strength and clarifica­ more transitory. This darkscape, if one could call it that, tion. But Grennan has come of age as much in America as looms behind and over Grennan’s color-radiant creations The words have always stirred a sudden in Ireland. His divorce from his first wife and the subsequent suggesting that everything he writes is written on water and surge of light, an air of new beginnings, something shattering of his family, in ways both direct and oblique, have that any appreciation of his parents, his children, his home neat and simple, affected the tone and content of both his American collections. (wherever that may be, as Elizabeth Bishop says) must inevi­ a space both elemental and domestic — because, perhaps, William Carlos Williams once suggested that divorce is the tably lead to an acknowledgment of his own inadequacy. they bear a sort of innocent sheen sign of knowledge in our times, and Grennan continues to From this perspective a poem like “Compass Reading,” from of privilege, a room so set apart school his intelligence through the consequences of that which Grennan gleans the sardonic title of the present volume, for an event so ordinary, a glimmer of ritual painful insight in this latest bode of poems. In a poem such as seems more like an expansion of James Wright’s famous “I where mostly we know only broken facts, bits and pieces “Breaking Points” the image of a friend splitting logs sets off have wasted my life” than a celebration of the beauties of the stumbling numbly into one another. an inward journey back to the “polished pine floor/ scattered backyard (“These days/1 seem as heartless as a lock/ that is all with the bits and pieces/1 was taking with me” after ten years innards and bitter tongue:/ wherever my ears go/ they hear The passage plays out a kind of modus scribendi for Grennan, of marriage. Again, in “Station” Grennan considers the nothing but clocks ticking, each tick/ a distinct penetration of limning not only his conscious focus on the elemental and impossibility (as he did in “Traveller'’ in What Light There Is) air, a pulsebeat/ greeting its own goodbye”). Along these domestic but also his understanding that intimate language, of sending his son off yet again to the other house, the mother’s lines, too, Grennan chooses Edvard Munch’s “Moonlight like the intimate nooks of a house, opens out into a space house, and senses the hopeless inadequacy of words: “What (Night in Saint-Cloud),” surely one of the most pensive and where one can reconnoiter the stuporous shambles of an ails our hearts? Mine/ aching in vain for the words/ to make brooding artworks of the past century, as the cover for this exterior life and recapture, or at least clarify, a yearning for an sense of our life together.” collection of light-drenched poems. interior sense of emotional and moral integrity. The section In this sense, always hovering in the background of the There is in this book a tension of another sort as well. A see Ambivalence, page 8 Taking Note: Food For Thought From Poets' Notebooks ...and

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N a m e ______;______t______L- Kitchen Open 7 Days 11 AM -12:30 AM — All Major 224 E. State St. A d d ress______272-2212 Credit Cards page 6 the BOOKPRESS September, 1992 Tilting the Mirror Jeanne Mac kin equivalent of a pianist standing in about Harry and Hilly. Not to say he mid-concert and reminding the au­ is the narrator — he isn’t. It is a LOVE’S MANSION dience that Bach himself sometimes third-person narration, but it is tak­ by Paul West faltered with this piece, and then ing place within Clive’s imagina­ Random House $22.90 sitting down and resuming play. A tion, a fact that West prefers we do novice could never get away with it. not forget i n u v —«*CV V I’ve never understood why it Paul West is as for from being a Telling the story of his father’s cci* c»c* 5- «l«® . miva nky »• i* « was considered derogatory to say of novice as any writer can hope to award-winning childhood essay on T* qc*cupr.' ir.comil' »u* «• — iiTrvvta.tov» u-.n-vtai.f.v* ___ a magician’s work “It is all done get. A Guggenheim Fellow and “Happiness,” the author says, “Clive 'tUt! «GCU OU tJJC ZCK.CU' ----U-.U..I.T1V"* with mirrors.” As if trickery and recipient of several important nodded at the accuracy of his Atz«ou lii.otii.uuO* nznaijX iM.tpom jaiX to (a qocniHGUiaa WUi o t illusion were synonymous. They literary awards, he has written more impersonation, or so he saw it; to nqq uu gnqio uwututl cou»uio> are not. One is merely a practical than a dozen novels, including Rat writing for Harry he found his mind §terc*y G2t>‘ tu UU X u td.G5Siruti «,!SX "S J joke; die other is an ait that has much Man o f Paris, The Very Rich Hours a sudden erudite blaze of love.” Later a— (miKVji* uu iatO* i, v' V! in common with fiction. o f Count von Stauffenberg, The Place in the novel, imagining his father at tv narfe. Fiction uses verbal mirrors to in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, and war, handling machine-guns, “Clive »te (nar'rat, na ratO, v.r., create not the world as it is or was, Lord Byron’s Doctor, in addition to caught his father in the act of |*ed, -rat-Ing. 1. to tell (a story but as one person has imagined it several books of nonfiction. He being prudish and smiled, telling esp. in an interesting way. and now wishes us, the readers, to knows his craft. In fact, his work himself sex was much more than Id an audio running commei (a documentary film or tele- see it. Most writers set for them­ probably helps set standards for merely plunging....” Further yet into program), usually without be- selves a primary goal of making the contemporary fiction. the novel, and even more tellingly, bn the screen. — n a rriv - readers forget that this is illusion, So why, in this latest novel, West writes, “Clive understood how — nar'ra-tor, nar'rat er, n. that it is done with mirrors, so that does this master illusionist set out to Harry had felt, even if he was in­ ; describe, recount, relate, the reader’s imagination, set free but destroy his own illusion? Trust him. venting it.” (n a r'o tiv), n. 1. a story oj narrowly herded by the writer’s He has his reasons, and excellent The love story is a complicated 'feriences, etc. 2. the artg sentences, suspends disbelief, and ones at that. While his other works and courageous one. The compli­ larrating. — ctdj. 3« believes fully in the illusion of have been set in Hitler’s Germany, cations do not arise from manufac­ ratios the fiction. postwar Paris, 19th-century Europe tured twistings and turnings of a Most writers. But not, in the and other locales, this latest work contrived plot, but from the tension case of Love's Mansion, Paul West. is set in England, West’s birthplace, that arises from those moments of A mature, fully-realized writer of during his own parents’ lifetime. tilting the mirror. It is not the love considerable talent, West challenges The creator of fiction is writing very, story of Harry and Hilly, but the love Photograph: Kathy Morris this notion of fiction as suspended very close to home in this work. story of Harry and Hilly as imagined disbelief in his latest novel. He Love’s Mansion is, as the title by their son, Clive, and written by fiction writer, in tackling a subject low consummation — those long invites the reader to participate in suggests, a love story. It’s the story the author, West. this close, this important, is years of day to day — with the eager the act of creation, of illusion, by of Harry and Hilly, two English West and Clive have enough in reluctant to create a fiction so anticipations of courtship. And it reminding the reader throughout the children from the same village who common that this novel could, to seamless that it obliterates its own neatly balances Harry and Hilly, novel that this is a creation, not a grow up together, survive World some extent, be accused of underlying reality. When the mirror never making one subservient to the history. At appropriate and well­ War I separately, and then spend the committing autobiography. It is, to tilts, we see a son imagining parents other in terms of storytelling. It is spaced intervals, he tilts the mirrors, rest of their lives together, eventually some degree, the story of West’s who really existed, who truly, at the story of a couple, of a family, and as it were, to reveal the conjurer/ hinging into the world two children: own parents and childhood, and that some earlier moment in time, the fact that West can write as con­ writer behind them. It is an auda­ a daughter, Kotch, and a son, Clive. accounts for the revelation of the handled machine-guns or played vincingly about music and woman cious technique — the verbal Clive is the imaginer of this novel illusionist behind his illusions. The Bach and twined fingers together as about war and man shows the as they walked side by side. By elasticity of his imagination sacrificing illusion, West gives and skills. greater substance to Harry and Nor does West ignore such tried Hilly. This technique is, ultimately, and proven attention-getting, 1993, Ithaca’s Orchestra an act of homage to a beloved page-turning techniques as the family from the son they created. occasional moment of humor, hor­ Some writers, when beginning ror, or mystery. There’s the Will Select a New Music their careers, stay close to shore, mysterious von Kaiserstein who writing about themselves and their keeps popping up, and Mrs. You are invited to audition immediate surroundings, not daring Featherstonehaugh, who keeps fall­ deep waters and a larger world till ing down. There’s the story of how Director. the six world-class finalists. they have gained greater Hilly, like Penelope, defers other experience...or perhaps lost some suitors till Harry returns from the The 1992/1993 Season of the EPENING CONCERT of their narcissism. West’s career war, and the stray of how Harry, in Cayuga Chamber Orchestra. Thursday, September 17 has followed a different course. Now all innocence, goes out on war mis­ Subscribe today and Jere Lantz, Conductor that he has successfully written sions with officers leading, and in­ Malcolm Bilson, Fortepiano the larger world, he is setting his evitably returns, dragging the Watch the Stars Come Out. sights on himself and his own remains of the killed officer behind: beginnings. He is revealing his own Call 607/273-8981 “Wherever he went, with his offic­ source, his own creation of himself ers’-mess calling book enclosing his for ticket information or a season brochure. CAYUGA as son and writer. record of the Gregorian chant, he Or write to CCO, 109 E. Seneca St., CHAMBER Equally important, though, is met with nothing but courtesy, Ithaca, NY 14850 RCHESTRA the fact that the tilting mirrors especially from officers, who re­ & also remind us that Love’s Mansion fused to accompany him anywhere, is meant as fiction, as creation, not whereas the other ranks, so-called, re-creation. Significantly early in thought of him as a hero, a man For Your D elightful this novel, West writes, “He was likely to become prime minister or Differences in reading them, inventing after their something, one who understood like 6KEA7ME KiDS example, as if both Hilly and Harry a lion in a zoo how the led felt Toys sad Gifts for Imaginative Children Middle Eastern and were literature, unable to fight the about their leaders.” Vegetarian Cuisine presumptive inroads of the reader’s And there is always the West — Infant/Preschool mind. The temptation was to give prose, energetic, innovative, — Science Experience the difference today them a lovelier life than they had caressing, and challenging, to pull had, but the chore was to record us forward. The pacing, especially — Arts/Crafts FEATURING their happiness....” toward the end when the story Live Music — Outdoor That is the paradox of this novel. becomes that of Clive and Hilly af­ Every Thurs. Night The more the illusion of it is ter Harry’s death, achieves the stately Many Parents' Choice An expanded beer and wine list revealed, the stronger the fiction rhythms of a well-played piece of award winning toys becomes. West has attempted the classical music. ultimate illusion of fiction, and he Love’s Mansion captures and C? Cafe has carried it off. It is a book, a imprisons us within the story till the moment in a career, and a goal that illusionist is ready to relinquish us. any writer could well and Join us for deservingly take great pride in. Lunch • Dinner VISA & Beyond that, though, this novel MasterCard Comers Community Center or Sunday Brunch is a piece of lovely storytelling. As Jeanne MacldnS most recent novel is The Queen’s War (St. Martin’s (where parking is never a problem) Open llam-9pm a love story, it courageously bal­ ances the trials and terrors that fol- Press). She lives in Ithaca, NY. 2 5 7 -5 8 3 4 _____ 404 eddy st. ithaca 273-2847 page 7 Narration and Indian Identity Neil Schmitz entrance to Letchworth State Park, expressivity in English (or French was a Mesquakie settlement. or Spanish) was forced, extracted, Canisteo, in south central New Y ak, transcribed, and for the most part BLACK EAGLE CHILD, THE and Tionesta, on the Allegany River ignorantly presented, and this might FACEPAINT NARRATIVES in western Pennsylvania, were the be the first time in American litera­ by Ray A. Young Bear other Mesquakie settlements. In ture that Indian knowledge reveals University of Iowa Press, 261 pp. 1760, a Moravian missionary, itself, not recollectively but dy­ $24.95 Christian Frederick Post, glimpsed namically, in its own terms. the Canisteo Mesquakie at council Throughout Black Eagle Child, with Shawnee and the Iroquois Edgar Bearchild refers to his grand­ The Mesquakie, People of the Mingo. “The Muscocky,” he wrote, mother as “Nokomis,” using the Red Earth, generally known as the “call themselves the Father of all Anishinaabe name Longfellow made Fox, were an avant-garde Algonquin Natiois, some of their Chiefs I saw so familiar in Hiawatha. It is a little people who steadfastly resisted amongst the French at Fort Du irony that resonates. French expansion into the Missis­ Quesne, their Cloaths were trimm’d Ray Young Bear’s writing poses sippi River Valley in the first half of all over with Gold and Silver, & one the question even as it declares the the 18th century. Their strongholds of them had a great Star on his Coat; solution: “There had to be an imme­ were in the Fox River Valley of they look’d very angry at me as if diate/ return to the Old Ways/ begin­ northern Wisconsin, which was then they wood have devour’d me.” In ning from the bottom/ up.” The the expressway from the Great Lakes 1779, the Genesee Mesquakie were question isn’t really given as a ques­ to the Mississippi River. Mesquakie in the field with the Seneca fighting tion, but is implicit. “Throughout resistance infuriated the French, who General John Sullivan’s invading Illustration: Joanna Sheldon the twenty years I have been involved were frontally engaged fighting the American Revolutionary army. The Black Hawk’s 1833 account of the ingly small request. The survival of with writing,” Young Bear writes in Iroquois, so in 1701-16, and again in main body of the surviving Sauk resistance. the tribe was contingent on our own the Afterword, “I have attempted to 1721-38, the French launched nu­ Mesquakie, after long and arduous Thomas Forsyth, an eminent adherence to the spectacular Gifts maintain a delicate equilibrium with merous genocidal campaigns against conflict with Thomas Jefferson’s Jacksonian Indianist, tried in 1827 given long ago.” Black Eagle Child my tribal homeland’s history and the Wisconsin Mesquakie. Louis agents, then Andrew Jackson’s, lost to penetrate the inner workings of positions itself to convey the trans­ geographic surroundings and the XV decreed: “His Majesty will re­ their extensive four-cornered terri­ Mesquakie life. “They hold their ference of the Principal Belief, the world that changes its face along its ward the officer who will reduce, or tory (Minnesota/Wisconsin/Iowa/ meetings in secret, and whatever original structure of authority in borders.” rather, destroy them.” Ilinois) and came finally to hold a passes among them at their meetings, Mesquakie life: The movement from the first Charlevoix, whose History o f small settlement in Tama County, is never spoken of by any of them section, “The Well-Off Man New France (1744) is the classic central Iowa. elsewhere. I have given myself much The common BEC man or woman/ Church,” to the second section, “Gift work on the subject, couldn’t use the Ray A. Young Bear’s Black trouble to find out the particulars of had no right to define and dictate of the Star Medicine,” describes the Wisconsin expressway to the Mis­ Eagle Child, The Facepaint Narra­ this society, but have been able to policy./ They sought the advice of central action of Black Eagle Child, sissippi and New Orleans in 1720 tives is a Mesquakie text, a collection succeed in a very small part only.” hereditary leaders/in absentia, and establishing the two worlds Edgar because the Mesquakie had shut it of stories and poems whose con­ Fred McTaggart’s poignant Wolf they grew more determined/ than Bearchild lives in. It begins with a down. The Mesquakie, he wrote, nective ligament is the “word jour­ That / Am, In Search of the Red ever that all problems were attrib­ tawdry Thanksgiving party at the were like vermin, hard to extermi­ ney” of the narrator to his poetic Earth People (1976) begins with this utable/to the lack of divine lead­ Weeping Willow Elementary nate. In the two so-called Fox Wars, vocation. In the Tama Settlement, admission: “I did not succeed as a ership./ In their opinion elections School, and a grieving analysis of the Mesquakie valiantly endured the principal site of Black Eagle collector and scholar of Mesquakie were over with./ With divine intra-tribal conflict, the “internalized epic sieges, suffered massacres, and Child, Edgar Bearchild articulates folklore.” Though respectful and leadership, the Black Eagle Child/ agony” that “led us to hurt/or seri­ still struck back in force, stymieing the glorious Mesquakie past and the earnestly admiring, McTaggart “was Nation would grow strong again. ously injure one another for no rea­ the oncoming French. Long before hard Mesquakie present. Partly told a few stories...not as examples son/ other than sheer disgust in being Pontiac and Tecumseh, Mesquakie written in Mesquakie, the text is of traditional stories but almost as The present flood of Native Indians.” Then it takes us that same leaders were devising a pan-Indian accessible, despite everything that riddles to help me understand American writing constantly re­ evening to a Mesquakie peyote cer­ strategy, spiritual as well as military, is thorny, difficult, obscure, and in­ something about what I was doing minds us how little we know of the emony where, in the play of to meet the European invasion; they explicable about the Mesquakie, for and why.” different Indian histories. Louise storytelling, vision, confession, and were in touch with the coastal Anglo-Americans (especially lo- Conservative Mesquakie ide­ Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor let us in catharsis, Edgar Bearchild achieves Abenaki, and had secret compacts wans). With its allusions to complex ology drives Black Eagle Child. “It on that which is Anishinaabe, which the rapture of reconnection, and re­ with the Iroquois. tribal divisions and ancient feuding, was a forceful impetus upon the we now discover has an extensive turns to the archaic. What has hith­ In 1712 and 1730, remnant and its underlying mindset informed clans to honor the Creator’s ancient literature in English, the literature erto been humorously reported, the Mesquakie bands, fleeing the by life in the settlement, Young wishes,” Edgar Bearchild tells us. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow pil­ sociable feeling of tribal together­ French, took refuge in Iroquoia. Bear’s text is turned from us even as “Considering the sacrifices made in laged for his Song o f Hiawatha. ness, suddenly becomes an ecstasy Squawkie Hill, at the Mount Morris it addresses us, bringing to mind order that we may be, it was a seem- Almost all previous Indian see Narration, page 15

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caul of wrinkles—/ wears an air faintly/ human, almost John but also, irresistibly, the four fields of Ireland, still Ambivalence ancestral.”). Looking closer, he sees the dog has a frayed ensnarled in apocalyptic, neighborly murder. noose around his neck, which his owner must have used to As with the imagery earlier in the poem, Grennan’s continuedfrom page 5 hang or drown him “until the snapping and jerking stopped.” saddling the haycocks in penitential sackcloth conjures up yet fills out the scene of a public breakfast room with its “murmur The sense of betrayed intimacy proliferates with religious again an image which asserts and undermines the sanctimo­ of voices” and “discretion’s homely music of spoons on ironies as he notes the implications of the adroit knot: “Such niousness that both sides claim in Ireland’s fratricidal struggle. saucers,” then closes with an imagined interior exchange of a neat knot: someone knelt/ safely down to do it, pushing those Grennan has noted that he had, among other things, Seamus first-time lovers meeting in shy visual reunion over this public ears back/ with familiar fingers. The drag end/ now a seaweed Heaney’s bog poems in mind when he wrote this poem, and table, their eyes wording the secret, unspoken hope of their tangle around legs/ stretched against their last leash.” As one can quickly see the parallels in presentation. More previous night’s love-making: “Nothing has ever pleased me Grennan meditates on the death’s head of the dog, he contrasts broadly, though, Grennan shares with Heaney a reliance on more/than how your naked shoulders and the small of your back/ lay on my spread hands; your earlobe, tongue, wide eyes/ entering half-frightened mine in the dark. ” The second section of the poem at first sensuously evokes the apparently parallel world of the Bonnard painting with its “impeccable ordinary order” of the breakfast room: “teapot, cream pitcher, sugarbowl, china cup/ and scalloped saucer, the half glass of raspberry juice, / bread in yellow napkins, that heaped dish/ of purple figs and a peach.” In many ways, the choice of Bonnard seems peculiarly suited to Grennan’s concerns; Bonnard’s intimate domestic scenes and striking use of color lend themselves readily to Grennan’s subject and method. But the focus quickly shifts to the woman standing “almost out of the picture” whose posture and attitude suggest, at least to Grennan, rigid accusation: “her eyes and strict lips/ asking directly, You think this/ changes anything?" The italicized quotations from each section enact a psychomachia of Grennan’s own invention, pitting fragile and pristine sen­ suality against unyielding moral stricture, but the collision of the two produces a kind of double (or doubling) vision as the focus shifts to the outside:

Beyond the window a stone balustrade, and beyond that nature’s bluegreen tangle tangles with the light that’s melting one thing into another — blue, scrubbed green, strawgold, a house with a white and lilac roof at the dead end of a sunstreaked avenue on which the trees are blobs of turquoise.

At poem’s end there is a tentative affirmation of the “ambiva­ lence of light, its double tongue o f detail and the world at large,” but this acceptance is a “pause” and not a resolution. Illustration: Fernando Llosa This is a very rich and deeply conflicted poem, one whose inward antagonisms reveal much about the animus of its peace to the “racket world of feel and fragrance” on the the imagery and iconography o f a Catholicism that neither Grennan’s poetry. beach where the live dog “throbbing/ with habit” once bent poet accepts dogmatically to shape both the meaning and the This intense and interior preoccupation may partly ac­ (presumably down to receive the fatal noose) and the quick aspiration of their poems. (I should add that this is not always count for what, given the free-for-all currently taking place in children now shriek by, both staring at and avoid: successful: at the end of one poem, when Grennan says that a Ireland over literature and politics, seems a curious absence before them. The parallel between the fateful ha flock of geese were spread across the sky “like a slung rosary,” in his work — there are almost no poems explicitly addressed of the dog and the innocent fright and defier I winced.) to the “troubles” of his divided country. He writes with hope children at their games engulfs Grennan as he enh For all the political despair of this single poem, though, of black South Africans in “Colour Shot” and admires the (“I go in over my head/ in stillness”) and the lar; the organizing matrix of the collection is Grennan’s focus on political courage of the Russian poet Evgenii Rein in “Rights.” tions of the scene ignite in the poem’s final ima; family. The book begins with ’Two Climbing,” an account of Closer to Ireland, though, in “One Morning during the Elec­ ascending and descending Mt. Tully in the west of Ireland tions,” Grennan consciously turns away from “Something and see with his son Conor, and closes with “Two Gathering,” a unspeakable in the state” echoed on the radio to glean on the behind the body and the barefoot children meditation on family, “on all the buried codes/ that bind us sunlit hills the more speakable, if more enigmatic, images of how on the bent horizon to the west in a knot even time/ cannot untangle,” prompted by harvesting cloudshadows and the sudden black hum of flies (this poem is a sudden flowering shaft of sunlight shore mussels with his daughter Kate near Grennan’s summer reminiscent of “A Closer Look” in What Light There Is, picks out four pale haycocks cottage in Ireland. This paternal framing intensifies the addressed to Peter Fallon apparently in explanation of saddled in sackcloth poem which is at the volume’s dead center, an elegy Grennan’s reluctance to immolate his poetry on the altar of and makes of them a flared quartet to Grennan’s father, “Walk, Night Falling, Memory Irish politics). Still, when this poet turns his focus on his of gospel horses — rearing up, of My Father.” native land, as he does in “Sea Dog,” the metaphor is pecu­ heading for us. The poem, following the pace and lengthening stanzas liarly Grennan’s, and the effect is devastating. of a meditative walk downhill into town, then uphill home, Using the discovery of a dog’s sea-picked carcass on the Now it is the entire horizon or country which is “bent,” and he has as its triggering image a “cairn of fresh-cut logs” which beach as his point of departure, Grennan describes the cadaver sees over the bones of the dog and the children at play give off a glow of “broken but transfigured flesh.” The collage before him in eerie precision, saving the telling detail for last (Grennan’s familial lens) sunlight illuminating four haycocks which follows conjures both the image and the anguish (“The skull— /bonnetted, gap-toothed, tapering/ trimly to a to the west, which suggest not only the four horsemen of St see Ambivalence, page 9 Finish Carpentry Gil's Book Loft • remodeling kitchens & baths Quality Used Books... Every Sunday night we feature • commercial work Records, Ephemera and Fine Art the cuisine of a different w 82 Court Street, 2nd Floor nationality or ethnic group Binghamton, NY 13901, Peter Silag (607) 771-6800 1-659-3059 Gil Williams, Prop.

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watching his mother and another woman I watch them — fallen angels the size Ambivalence in long white dresses and broad straw hats and shade of communion wafers — beat recline in a rowing-boat on the Boyne dusted wings against the screen, flinging continued from page 8 near Navan; how the boat rocked themselves at this impossible light. Grennan retains concerning his father: side to side, the women smiling and My father meeting me years ago talking in low voices, and him Despite his desire to receive, or to impart, religious consola­ off a train at Kingsbridge: greenish sitting by himself on the bank tion in the face of this loss, for those ghostly wings to break tweed cap, tan gaberdine, leaning in a pool of sunshine, his little feet through the screen, he is left with only his and his father’s on a rolled umbrella, the sun barely reaching the cool water. I remember earthly memory and an implicit sense that he must create the in his eyes, the brown planes of his face how the nurses swaddled his condition of love from what remains, “this impossible light” in shadow, and all of a sudden thin legs in elastic bandages, keeping him For Grennan, that must be in the writing of poems, to return old. The distance between us together for a day or two. again and again to wrest moments of meaning, of connected­ closes to an awkward, stumbling ness, from the inevitability of extinction. short embrace. Little left The women in white dresses in his father’s memory and the It is entirely appropriate, then, that the poem which attendant nurses in Grennan’s show us converging generations: immediately follows this elegy, opening the second half of the but bits and pieces: pints in Healy’s as his father remembered the innocent repose of his childhood, collection, is a meditation on the motives and purposes of art. before tea; a drive with visitors so Grennan, the child, remembers his father swaddled, In this poem, “The Cave Painters,” Grennan imagines the to the Sally Gap; my daughter making vulnerable, transitory. circumstances that led prehistoric humans to paint their im­ game with his glasses; the transatlantic calls The poem’s final stanza begins “Uphill again,” but it ages on dark stone. Given the range and power of As If It for an anniversary, birthday, will always be an uphill climb toward home now, an utterly Matters— and it must matter— it is only fair to let Grennan or to the hospital necessary but utterly unachieveable goal since home (like have the last word as to what may have driven him to write this before his operations. Gatsby’s light) must remain at some deep interior point in stunning collection of poems. the past. The abundance of religious imagery in the stanza The pain contained in the enjambment of the lines and and the allusion to “the night voices/ at their prayers and We know stanzas is poignant, and Grennan's deft use of the turns in free panicky conjurations” reveal how deeply Grennan wants this they went with guttering rushlight verse, both here and elsewhere in the book, provides a fertile conjuration to take on the weight and specific gravity of into the dark; came to terms tension between the integrity of the isolated line and the prayer. What remains is to acknowledge, against the flicker with the given world; must have had ease of the informal, meditative sentences. of the night fireflies, “just how large the dark is.” The poem — as their hands moved steadily As he recalls his father’s last days in the hospital, he lights closes on a note of great yearning and great futility: by spiderlight — one desire on one image, “my hand/ helping his hand/ hold the glass we’d recognize: they would, before going on of water,” which introduces the transfiguration of memory And now beyond this border zone, this nowhere in the poem: new moonlight casts across this that is now here, leave something And one memory shaking summer world a thin upright and bright behind them in the dark. he kept coming back to: translucent skin of snow; on ghostly wings •fr being a child in a white frock white moths brush by. Indoors again, Kevin Murphy is a professor o f English at Ithaca College.

gravity, for example. In watching Cosmos I was amazed in over 60 countries by well over sue. My point of view is that it’s just Sagan K.P. I’d like to go a little further into to find that I understood what you 400 million people must say some­ something you do as a citizen. In a your efforts to disseminate scientific were saying. You stimulated that thing about people’s hunger to learn democracy the last thing you want to continuedfrom page 1 ideas. You’ve said about science childhood ambition to science that I science, and how poorly the schools do is to leave such matters to the K.P. You’ve talked about origins, fiction that "one of the great benefits thought I had lost forever. I’m now and mass media are doing in pro­ leaders, especially leaders as and the meaning of life, and the role of science fiction is that it can con­ going back to college” or, “I’m now viding science at a level that people incompetent as w e’ve had in the of science in understanding these. vey bits and pieces, hints and phrases, reading textbooks; I’ve decided I’m can find interesting. recent past. Do you think, then, that science ought of knowledge unknown or inacces­ not going to live my life without K.P. In addition to your writing, you There are other issues now that to occupy the social and moral po­ sible to the reader.” Isn’t there a science.” There are literally hun­ and your wife Ann Druyan have we’re involved in. The global en­ sition that religion once did? danger that scattered, suggestive bits dreds of professional scientists, been involved in political activism. vironment is the most serious long­ CJS. I don’t see how science can of information mystify rather than young ones, in the world today who Could you tell us something about term threat to the largest number of appropriate the moral role of reli­ elucidate? Produce awe and wonder decided to become scientists from the issues? people. These days one of the things gion. It can teach us skepticism. It at the expense of clarity and insight? watching Cosmos. I know this from C.S. In the ‘80s there were many that Annie and I are attempting is to can teach us what constitutes ad­ Could a similar charge perhaps be meeting or being written to by them. issues to be worried about, including bring scientists and religious leaders equate evidence for belief. But it leveled at a television series like So I don’t think Cosmos had any the cult of greed fostered by the together on environmental ques­ can’t tell us what to do. It can’t Cosmos—that, by giving snippets of negative influence. It’s not a course Reagan administration. But the tions—and that’s going quite well. convert an “is” into an "ought.” This scientific information mixed up wih in physics, astronomy, or biology, clearest danger was the threat of K.P. Isn’t it difficult to deal with has traditionally been the role of snippets of the history of western and never pretended to be. But it nuclear war. So we spent a lot of our philosophical and ideological con­ religion. But all sorts of religions civilization, along with artist’s ren­ does connect the findings of science time on that issue, trying to organize tradictions between scientific and counsel all sorts of different behav­ ditions and computer simulations of with deep human aspirations, and some of the debate on Star Wars, religious world views? ior, and they often contradict one outer space, the effect produced is conveys not just some of the content nuclear winter, and opposing US C.S. We do have deep differences. another. Is it plausible that all the one of religious awe rather than of science, but also some of its underground nuclear testing, espe­ Scientists believe that claims of precepts of the past are still valid scientific curiosity? methods. One of the things that we cially in the face of a voluntary knowledge have to be subjected to today, despite the massive changes C.S. We received many thousands tried to stress in the episode on Soviet moratorium. the same standards of skeptical in the society, demographics, and of letters from viewers of Cosmos. Johannes Kepler was the importance Annie and I were arrested sev­ scrutiny in religion as anywhere else. technology? How do we decide what Of the many I read, a common re­ of skepticism, and of believing the eral times at the Nevada nuclear test But we all inhabit the same rules we should obey? Yes, science sponse— often from women— was data even if they fail to conform to site. We organized three of the largest environment, and the same planet, is essential for everybody to know something like this: “When I was a your deepest hopes. If Cosmos did acts of nonviolent civil disobedience and have the same goals for and it does approach some of the child I was interested in science. But nothing but teach a little scientific against US nuclear testing. It was a preserving it for future generations. mythic aspects of religion. On the in school they taught me that it was skepticism, as we did with astrology, wonderful experience and a great So we have no difficulty working other hand, it doesn’t by itself es­ beyond me, that I just didn’t have with UFOs, with several other areas opportunity to meet all sorts of together on these issues. Sometimes tablish a morality. It’s also not very the intellectual capability for it. So of pseudoscience. I’d be quite happy. people, especially physicians who there are problems with language, satisfying to pray to the law of I’ve gone and done something else. The fact that Cosmos has been seen were strongly motivated on that is­ see Sagan, page II SOLA' ART GALLERY Coffees Japanese Agnes Denes of ffrtsh-roasted _ Prints A Retrospective the (work from 1967 to 1992) W o rld O August 18—October 25 Oriental Panel Discussion and Reception: September 19 Rugs The Gourmet's Delight Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Cornell University Ithaca, New York fine cheeses spiees & teas Hand Craft Jewelry The Johnson Museum announces the publication of the monograph Agnes Denes chocolates kitchenware 208 pages, over 200 color and black-and- deluxe edition with original lithograph, Sept. 15-Oct. 10 white reproductions, introduction by signed, numbered by the artist. To order, WhoUsafe Coffee Prices Avaifa6(e Al Brown, Photographer Thomas W. Leavitt, writings by the artist, write or call Johnson Museum, Cornell Triphammer Mall A Retrospective essays by Peter Selz, Donald Kuspit, University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4001, Ithaca. \Y Lowery Stokes Sims, and Robert Hobbs. (607) 255-6464. Prepublication discount ((107) 257-2660 DeWitt Mall • Ithaca, NY • 272-6552 Hardbound and paperback editions; 200 th ro u g h Sept. 18. 10-6 M aa-Sat, 10-6 F rl Mon - Sat 10:30 - 5:30, Sun 12 - 3 page 10 the BOOKPRESS September, 1992

the chimpanzees? I can never care for seeing things ten meters or more from branch to the parents, perhaps to avoid the Shadows And if he did describe it, even that force me to entertain branch — that put champion human temptations of incest. Adult males obliquely, did he not run a certain low thoughts of my Nature. / gymnasts to shame. Gibbons are, and females behave pretty much continuedfrom page 2 risk — that his readers would con­ don't know how it is with others, but apparently without exception, mo­ alike, and have nearly equal social We seem to have weighed these clude he approved what he was I confess freely to you, I could nogamous. They marry for life. status. Primalologists describe the beings down with a heavy burden of chronicling? Or more than “ap­ never look long upon a monkey They produce haunting songs heard females as “codominant,” and the symbols, metaphors, allegories, proved.” What had drawn him to without very Mortifying Reflec­ a kilometer or more away. Adult partners in a marriage as “relaxed” and projections of our own fears chimpanzees in the first place? Why tions; tho / never heard any thing males often sing long solos in the and “tolerant.” about ourselves, did he insist on writing about them? to the Contrary, why that darkness just before sunrise. Bach­ Gibbon life seems downright i Were there no worthier matters de­ Creature is not Originally o f a Dis­ elors sing longer than old married operatic. It’s easy to conjure up • *** serving of his attention? Perhaps, he tinct Species. males, and at a different time of day. feverish love solos, duets sung in felt obliged to ensure that even a praise of marital felicity, and ritual Before the outside world knew casual reader would note the great intimidation chants cast into the anything of his long effort to under­ distance separating Thomas Savage forest night: “We’re here, we’re stand evolution, Darwin wrote tele­ from the subjects of his study.* tough, we sing good songs. Better graphically in his 1838 “M” leave our turf alone.” Perhaps there notebook: “Origin of man now *** are gibbon Verdis singing power- proved...He who understands ba­ transfer arias, rich with pathos, boon would do more towards meta­ William Congreve was the soulful lamentations on the passing physics than [the philosopher John] leading playwright of the English of glory and of time. Locke.” But what does it mean to comedy of manners around the turn Or consider the bonobo. This is understand a baboon? of the Eighteenth Century. The a reclusive species or subspecies of One of the earliest scientific monarchy had been restored after a chimpanzee that lives in a single studies of the chimpanzee in its bloody struggle with the Puritan group in Central Africa, south of the natural African habitat was made by religious schismatics who gave their Zaire River. Bonobos have certain Thomas N. Savage, a Boston phy­ name to rigidity on sexual morality. traits that render them convention­ sician. Writing in early Victorian Each age is repelled by the excesses ally ineligible for the local zoo, which times, he concluded: of the last, so this was a time of may be one reason that they’re not moral permissiveness, at least among nearly so well known as the common They exhibit a remarkable degree o f the dominant elite. Their sigh of chimp w e’ve described in the pre­ intelligence in their habits, and, on relief was almost audible. But ceding chapters. Bonobos, given the part of the mother, much affec­ Congreve was not their apologist. the Linnaean name Pan paniscus, are tion for their young...[But] they are His ironical and satirical with was also called pygmy chimpanzees; very filthy in their habits... It is a directed at the pretensions, affecta­ they’re smaller and more slender tradition with the natives generally tions, hypocrisies, and cynicisms of and their faces protrude less than the here, that they were once members his a g e __but, especially, at the usual variety, Pan troglodytes, which of their own tribe: that for their prevailing sexual mores. Here, for we’ll here and there continue to de­ depraved habits they were expelled example, are three fragments of rul­ scribe simply as chimpanzees." from all human society, and, that ing-class dialogue from his The Way Bonobos often stand up and walk on through an obstinate indulgence of o f the World: two legs. (They have a kind of their vile propensities, they have webbing of skin between their sec­ degenerated into their present state [OJne makes lovers as fast as one ond and third toes.) They stride with and organisation. pleases, and they live as long as one their shoulders squared and do not pleases, and they die as soon as one slouch as much as chimps do. ‘When Something was bothering Tho­ pleases: and then, if one pleases, bonobos stand upright, “ writes de mas N. Savage, M.D. “Filthy,” one makes more. Waal, “they look as if they had “depraved,” “vile,” and “degener­ walked straight out of an artist’s Jacket art by Kinuko Craft, Jacket Design by Eyetooth Design Inc. ate” are terms of abuse, not scien­ You should have just so much dis­ impression of prehistoric man.” tific description. What was Savage’s gust for your husband as may be Somehow, the sexual imbroglios Wives prefer duets with their hus­ Unlike chimp females, among problem? Sex. Chimpanzees have sufficient tctoic makeu tyoui relish your of upper-class twits that he bands. Widows bear their grief in whom estrus is advertised and is a an obsessive, unselfconscious pre­ lover. chronicled did not generate as silence and sing no more. time of pronounced sexual recep­ occupation with sex that seems to many Mortifying Reflections as a Gibbons are also territorial and tivity, bonobo females display have been more than Savage could Isay that a man may as soon make a visit to the zoo. Plays such as tiieir matins serve to keep intruders genital swellings about half the time; bear. Their zesty promiscuity may friend by his wit, or a fortune by his Congreve’s were themselves being away. A nuclear family, typically and they’re nearly always attractive include dozens of seemingly indis­ honesty, as win a woman with plain criticized as breaking down “the parents and two children, tends to to the adult males. We recall that criminate heterosexual copulations dealing and sincerity. Distinctions between Man and Beast. control a small turf. Defense of the common chimps, Pan troglodytes, a day, routine close mutual genital Goats and Monkeys, if they could home territory is accomplished not like almost all animals, have sex inspections, and what at first looks Bearing in mind Congreve’s role speak, would express their Brutality so much by throwing stones or rain­ with the male entering the female’s very much like rampant male homo­ as daring social critic of in such Language as This.” Mon­ ing blows as by singing anthems. vagina from behind, his front against sexuality. This was a time when sexual manners, now consider this keys were beginning to bother Euro­ Perhaps there are cadences, timbres, her back. But in bonobos, about a proper young ladies were abjured excerpt from a 1695 letter he wrote peans. And Congreve put his finger frequencies, and amplitudes that quarter of the time, the matings are not to inquire too closely into the to the critic John Dennis:______on the problem: What does it say other gibbons, contemplating a little face-to-face. This is the position the stamens and pistils — “the private ’ Savage also wrote the first systematic ac­ about us if monkeys and apes are our poaching, find especially impres­ females seem to prefer, probably parts” — of flowers; the renowned count of gorillas in the wild, and was respon­ close relatives? sive and daunting. At least some­ because their clitorises are large and critic John Ruskin would later sible for the modem use of the ancient North times, an aging father will confer positioned far forward compared to harumph, “With these obscene pro­ African word “gorilla.” He took pains to ------* ------responsibility for territorial defense chimps. Bonobos indicate their cesses and prurient apparitions, the repudiate popular notions of gorillas carrying on his adolescent son, passing the mutual attraction by prolonged gaz­ gentle and happy scholar of flowers off attractive women for unspeakable pur­ Consider the gibbon. Itspreter- patriotic torch on to the younger ing into one another’s eyes, a has notliing to do.” How was a poses — the theme echoed a century later to naturally long arms permit it to make generation. In other equally poi­ ♦Those who study chimps and bonobos, so proper Bostonian physician to de­ enormous public acclaim in the motion pic­ great balletic leaps through the gnant instances, adolescents are the joke goes, are called panthropologists. scribe what he had witnessed among ture, King Kong. canopy of the forest — sometimes banished from the home territory by see Shadows, page 11 Ithaca Piano Rebuilders "Those in the public school reform movement have Rebuilt and Reconditioned Pianos 272-6547 some important things to learn from what Waldorf educators have been doing for many years." Pianos Tuned, Bought, 310 4th St. Ithaca Sold or Moved — Ernest Boyer, President (Off Hancock St. 2 Carnegie Foundation for the Complete Rebuilding Services Blocks From Rt. 13) Advancement of Teaching Available. No Job too 9- 5 Weekdays Big or too Small. 10- 2 Saturdays WALDORF SCHOOLS

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thing as a middle ground in the abor­ the technology to preserve it outside one in which rhesus monkeys were possible to have a viable cross be­ Sagan tion controversy. On the one hand, of the womb, but that as soon as we rewarded for inflicting electric tween a human aind a chimp? Then you might argue that it’s nonsense to do have the technology killing it shocks on other monkeys) without does that offspring have all human continued from page 9 claim that one day before a baby is becomes a moral crime. That just commenting on the ethical choices rights? Half of human rights? How but we manage to work them out. bom it has no claims to life, but the doesn’t make sense. Therefore, we involved in conducting such experi­ do we decide? It’s astonishing that K.P. I’ve heard that you’ve spoken next day—once it’s out of the explore the possibility that there is ments. 99.6% of the chimp’s active genes at pro-choice rallies. Would you uterus— it has all sorts of rights. It’s some compromise, which, needless C.S. No, you’re mistaken. We do— are identical to ours. Identical! So, is summarize your position on the same baby. On the other hand, it to say, offends the partisans of both in that case we say that our own there a sharp boundary between abortion? is equally specious to claim that a extremes. I think it’s possible that in moral sympathies do not lie with the whatever it is that makes us worthy C.S. OK, but please bear in mind fertilized egg or an embryo or a fetus the long term, the uneasy compro­ scientists, but with the macaques of special legal protection and the that this is just the flavor of the in the first two or three months of mise will have to consider when a who would rather go hungry than rights of chimps, who are our closest argument, without much of the con­ pregnancy is a human being. Clearly fetus develops characteristically hurt their fellows. Those experi­ biological relatives? text and supporting data. Annie and it’s not. What defines us are our human capabilities. ments teach us something very im­ Suppose that the genetic dif­ I wrote an article on abortion for higher brain functions that are not K.P. You have suggested, if we use portant, though. ference between you and me is ten Parade magazine which included a developed at two or three months— neo-cortical development as a K.P. Would you develop the tension times less than the genetic difference 900 number—readers could call to in fact, you could argue not even 4 or touchstone, that along with a ban on between two positions here: one that between me and the chimp. Is that express their opinions. 300,000 5 months. third-trimester abortions should go supports equal rights for animals factor of ten everything that counts people called in, despite the cost of The Supreme Court’s touch­ a right-to-life law for animals of and people, and the other that sees as far as legal protection goes? What a few dollars to make the call. That’s stone is “viability.” But viability is equivalent intelligence, such as animal experiments as essential for if it were not a factor of ten— what if an indication of how volatile and a technologically dependent state dolphins and chimps. Yet, in Shad­ “scientific progress?” it were a factor of five? Or two? impassioned the issue is. Our ap­ and it cannot be that it’s all right to ows, you make numerous references C.S. Yes, there’s no question that Where is the point when the proach was to ask if there is such a kill a fetus as long as we don’t have to experiments on animals (such as there is a tension. What if it were see Sagan, page 13

for chimps — although these obser­ food or for attractive males; it seems sponse on meeting unfamiliar gibbons and the bonobos. Indeed, vations are for bonobos in captivity, to be a way of reducing tension. In humans, as we ourselves w e’re far more closely related Shadows where they may have more time on times of stress, a bonobo male will experienced, is a very chimp-like, to the apes than to the monkeys. Continued from page 10 their hands or more need for mutual spread his legs and present his and adequately intimidating, charg­ Chimps and bonobos are certainly practice which precedes almost all comfort than when they are free. penis to his adversary in a ing display. members of the same genus and, their matings, and which is unknown Less than a year after giving friendly gesture. Grooming is most frequent according to some taxonomic clas­ among common chimps. The initia­ birth, bonobo females are ready Despite these differences in between males and females and least sifications, even the same species. tion of sexual activity among the to resume their lives of sexual nuance, bonobos are still chimpan­ common between males and males, Given that, it’s startling how differ­ bonobos is mutual, unlike the chimps abandon; it takes 3 to 6 years for zees. There’s a male dominance the reverse of chimp practice. The ent they are from one another. Per­ where it is peremptory and nearly chimp females. hierarchy, although not nearly as grin serves not mainly as a gesture haps many of the distinctions always by the males. While in gen­ Bonobos use sexual stimulation pronounced as among common of submission, but performs a between the two — ranging from the eral, especially in larger social con­ in everyday life for many purposes chimps; dominant males have pref­ range of functions similar to those frequency increased variety, and so­ texts, male bonobos dominate besides mere satisfaction of the erotic erential access to females, although of the human smile. Male bonding cial utility of sex to the relatively females, this is not always the case, impulse — for quieting infants (a males do not always dominate fe­ is much weaker than in chimp higher status of females — are due especially when they’re alone to­ practice said once to have flourished males; there are submissive gestures society, and the social position of to the evolution in the bonobos of a gether. At night, in the forest canopy, also among Chinese grandmothers), and greetings; the size of groups is females much stronger. Certain new step: abandoning the monthly a male and a female will sometimes as a means of resolving conflict about the same as with chimps, a mothers and sons associate closely badge of ovulation, graduating from snuggle up together in the same nest among adults of the same sex, few dozen; adolescent females wan­ until the son becomes an adult; estrus. Perhaps when ovulation is of leaves. Adult chimps never do. as barter for food, and as a generic, der over to adjacent groups; the among chimps the relationship not evident at a glance, females can The sexual activity of common all-purpose approach to social males preferentially hunt animal tends more often to be broken off be viewed as more than sexual chimps, which by human standards bonding and community organiza­ prey, although apparently not in when the young male reaches ado­ property. seems obsessive to the point of ma­ tion. Less than a third of the sexual hunting parties; males are propor­ lescence. Social skills for resolving The primates are so rich in nia, is almost puritanical by bonobo contacts among bonobos involve tionately larger than the females by conflicts are much more highly de­ potential that even a small change standards. The average number of adults of opposite sexes. Males about the same ratio as among veloped among the bonobos than in anatomy or physiology may penile thrusts in an average copula­ will rub rumps together or engage in chimps; and encounters between among the chimps, and dominant provide an aperture to a universe tion — a measure of sexual intensity oral sex in ways unheard of among groups sometimes become violent individuals are much more generous never dreamt of in the rude that primatologists are drawn to, in the more prudish chimps; females — although groups may also, on in making peace with their sleeping pallets made each night in part because it can be quantified — will rub their genitalia together, and encountering one another, behave adversaries. the low branches of the once-vast is around 45 for bonobos, compared sometimes prefer it to heterosexual very peaceably and laid back. If we feel a certain revulsion at tropical forests. to less than 10 for chimps. The contacts. Females characteristically Infanticide and all other killing of having hamadryas baboons as number of copulations per hour is engage in genital rubbing just be­ bonobo by bonobo are, so far, relatives, we may take some comfort 2 ‘/jtimes greater for bonobos than fore they’re about to compete for unknown. Their standard initial re­ from our connection with the +

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with it. It is this image of life that how much could it matter if the required to obtain a living. 5.000 people contains the spatial Hunter Strangers celebrates. hydro projects, which would pre­ Richardson talks about the maps and temporal memory of perhaps “It is a common experience in sumably bring them many more in their heads being far more inter­ 100.000 square miles. It is this continued from page 3 many parts of the weald,” Richardson “benefits” of civilization, went for­ esting than the paper maps we have memory, too, that is in danger Cree bunting camp, soon after writes, “that the mental and physical ward? This argument still nags even made. We look at the maps of Que­ of being wiped out, within a genera­ the men have built a large half­ health of an indigenous people that in the minds of many whites who bec and see immense space, but that tion or two. And this memory in a timber lodge, and the women and has come into contact with a power­ believe they are sympathetic to the is all. The mental maps of the Cree large way defines the culture — is children have made it into a warm, ful technology declines in direct pro­ Cree. If Indians use snowmobiles are made up of landmarks (rocks, the culture. clean home for the winter, portion to the degree of that contact” and shop at the store and work in the trees, blazed trails), and watermarks The religious dimension of the Richardson writes: After his troubling time in the subsistence hunting life, central to southern settlements, where this The James Baj Development Project the older generation’s conception Though the autumn is a quiet contact had wreaked the most havoc, and practice, is being lost to the and unspectacular time in a hunting Richardson says “it took me quite a younger, even those who go periodi­ & camp, we had seen enough of the time to leam” that the Indians living Hudson cally into the bush after their lengthy men [Sam Blacksmith, Ronnie Jolly, in tents along the northern road were Bay sojourns in the south. (Cree youth Abraham Voyageur] to appreciate not living in squalor but were among educated in white schools are poorly their supreme competence.... the richest people in North America. fitted for either traditional Cree or We understood that we would The Cree had this vast world in the modem white culture. If they return never be able to see the forest as they bush — animals to feed them and to the bush at all, it is often with a saw it. We were blind, and would provide materials for snowshoes and degraded appreciation of their par­ remain blind, to the many signs of other necessities, trees to build ents’ lives, which they have been life that lay around them as they lodges, to make canoes and rafts. taught are valueless. Some of the walked through the trees. The irony When Richardson enters a warm most wrenching passages in the book and tragedy of their situation was lodge, he smells the pine boughs on have to do with this loss of genera­ that the outside world remained the floor and the beaver slowly tional continuity.) This is the cen­ ignorant of their enormous capaci­ simmering over the fire. Later he tral loss, which makes it profoundly ties: however masterful the men hears Sam Blacksmith play his sa­ hard to contest white culture — for might be in this environment, it was cred drum to celebrate the killing of the sense of the ecology of land and obvious...that if they were to end a moose, and in another place he water and animals and humans in­ up in a smalt Canadian town or hears Samson Nahacappo tell a hi­ volves a religious obligation to na­ village as government policy would larious myth-story about a great flood ture through a world of spirits who have them do, they would be quali­ — the assembled relatives and friends control what happens, and who will fied for nothing except perhaps to laughing with pleasure at the long send trouble if you desecrate the collect garbage. impromptu analogy with the geese, beaver, caribou, and bear foolishness of Hydro-Quebec. through some thoughtless act of tak­ Later, standing with his friend and These families, shy with whites ing without giving back. Once this translator Philip Awashish on a river and considered passive by them, are religious center is gone, and the fa­ miles from the camp, Richardson capable of feats, Richardson learns, milial, and the continuity of genera­ apprehends another critical fact: that whites would consider heroic, tions, “anything is possible.” and yet they are simply part of every­ In turn, for us, once Indian eco­ On that rough day we seemed to day living. Their trips to the traplines logical knowledge — spiritual yet be far from anyone.... For perhaps involve canoeing upriver and por­ based on a simple and eloquent the first time in my life I was taging with heavy equipment for bodily equation (are not spirit and alone...with the elements. That is hundreds of miles. One hunter, body one?) — is lost, white reliance the normal and desired condition o f Stephen Tapiatic, testified in the on numbers, exact quantities, takes life for hunters and trappers, those Montreal hearing that he had walked it place. We admit the folly of this men who, as Willie Awashish told and canoed from James Bay to the with bitter witticisms — “Nature me, live in their totally spiritual Labrador coast (like crossing Eu­ Map: QDon Marietta bats last,” “You can’t fool Mother world, and though I was slightly rope in bitter cold and heavy snow) From Strangers Devour The Land Earth,” and so forth. Though it may frightened by the immensity of the — not once but twice. He had walked be an embarrassing idea for many wilderness, the power of the and canoed the 500 miles from Fort summer for the white society and (streams, lakes, bays, rapids), spe­ “civilized” whites to handle (we winds,...the surge of the waters,...! George to Caniapscau Lake about send their kids to white schools, cific places on the earth, held in the could stand to rewrite our defini­ was nevertheless awed that such a ten times (not, for the Cree, unusual). why do they need to hunt? memory for use. It is startling to tions of “civility” and “civilization,” place still existed in this overcrowded For many white Quebeckers the One might ask, by what right realize how much detail the Crees as well as of “environment”), at bot­ world, and that people were alive utterly different logic and coherence do we ask this question? must hold in their heads; a trapline, tom survival is a matter of need who knew how to survive in it. and satisfactions of Cree life seem Many whites also resent the the territory where two or three balanced with love and reciproca­ intolerable. (Once we erase the Cree, Cree having so much land, without families will hunt for nine months, tion. The Cree know about this These passages pinpoint two put them in history books and an­ understanding that such large is about 20 by 30 miles, 600 square need, and how it must be met. If the important themes in this book. First thropological studies, their indepen­ areas in fragile boreal forests and miles. They know this territory inti­ beaver or caribou go away for a few is white Quebec’s ignorance of the dence, {Hide, and self-sufficiency can taiga can support only a few mately, because they need to know years, they will return and even stick Crees, and its refusal to accept Cree no longer trouble our brilliant people. We have imposed our sense it in order to survive. Moreover, around given your willingness to do knowledge of their own lives and technodreams.) Indeed the James of space — the Ungava Peninsula they know not only their own something for them and their gen­ lands (especially plain in the hear­ Bay Development Corporation’s seems limitless to us, whereas to the traplines but those of friends or rela­ erations — not hunt them for more ing transcripts, and in Richardson’s lawyers’ strategy in the 1972 hear­ Cree it is finite. They know the land tives who invite them to hunt while than you need, and treat their bones history of the increasing incursions ing was primarily to attack the no­ is finite because they are in it all the they let their own hunting land lie with respect (something aesthetic, of tourist hunters, miners, and dam tion that the Cree were essentially time — and some years it does not fallow for a year or two. (The Cree something pleasing to the spirit of workers). Second is that independent of white culture. If you yield what they need to live. All know the signs of animal decline, the animal) after the flesh has “people...were alive who knew how could show that they were already these thousands of square miles and the injunction not to overhunt is been eaten. to survive in it,’’ human beings in an corrupted by white technology — are in a critical sense small to a prime tenet of their religion.) In The white man who knows the “environment” who are still living airplanes, outboards, skidoos — then them because so much of it is the north, then, a group of less than see Hunter, page 16 WANTED: Automobile Literature Sonic Holography Receiver 1900-1975 HEAR TODAY, CARVER 80 watt / channel WALTER MILLER PLAY 6 audio inputs 6710 Brooklawn Parkway Syracuse, NY 13211 TOMORROW 3 video inputs PH: 315-432-8282 Most special orders remote control I buy salas brochures, repair manuals, parts catalogs, placed by 2 p.m. 3-dimensional sound owner's manuals, showroom Items or any literature arrive at your door $ 5 9 9 .0 0 pertaining to automobiles. I travel to purchase literature. the next business fig? HR-742/HR-732 day. Call 607 272-8262 For the Best Quality in Home and Car Stereo 20,000 Titles MclNTOSH • YAMAHA • SHERWOOD • KLIPSCH • NAD • NAKAMICHI g ) Top H at BOSTON ACOUSTICS • PIONEER • CARVER • PHOENIX ■ MONSTER in stock, including KICKER • MTX . ADI ENERGY • QUART . ADCOM . 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other important issue. doubt part of the reason for its suc­ contextualized, not de- nuclear weapons before “they” do— Sagan K.P. Are you a vegetarian? cess. It’s not absolute; it’s sometimes contextualized. So knowledge from the Americans because of the Nazis, C.S. No. honored more in the breach than in the perspective of women’s lives, or the Soviets because of the Ameri­ continued from page 11 K.P. Getting back to the question of the observance, but it works. I don’t other marginal groups... cans, the Japanese, there was even a protection we ordinarily extend to the scientific method. In Cosmos, know of any more powerful claim to C.S. I don’t understand. I mean, do call to make Yugoslavian nuclear humans—or claim we do, obviously commenting on the threat of nuclear knowledge than the scientific an experiment in elementary phys­ weapons. Everybody believed that very imperfectly—applies to other war, you said: “We accepted the method. ics. Tell me how women get differ­ their own nation of course is morally animals? Put another way, since we products of science; we rejected its K.P. There are those who are using ent results in the laboratory than superior and should have nuclear are certainly related to animals— methods.” What is the scientific radical skepticism to critique the men, in the same experiment. weapons first we’re all kin—doesn’t even the most method? Is it universal, transcend­ scientific method. I’m thinking of K.P. Evelyn Keller argues that We’re humans; we grow up in humble of animals deserve some ing historical, cultural, and ethnic feminist philosophers, such as Barbara McClintock discovered the societies, we’re affected by nation­ degree of protection? Is that degree divisions? Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, genetic transposition in com because alism, we have prejudices involving of protection proportional to its gen­ C.S. I know there are many people and others. Sandra Harding suggests her approach to the subject was our sex and the ethnic group we’re eral similarity to us? Why are we the who think that science is merely a that “women and men cannot un­ radically different from men’s. bom into, and so on. That’s our touchstone? It’s so characteristically tool of those in power that invents derstand or explain the world we C.S. The males were obsessed with nature. It’s important to understand chauvinistic of us to make such a fancy reasons to justify the status live in or the real choices we have as nuclear genes, and she provided one that. If we understand it we can do definition! I don’t claim to have the quo. There’s no question that sci­ long as the sciences describe the of the first good pieces of evidence something about it But none of this, answer to this. But these are some ence sometimes does that—scien­ world primarily from the perspec­ for cytoplasmic genes. A very im­ it seems to me, calls into question of the ways I would approach tists are human beings, they can be tives of the lives of the dominant portant discovery. How is that con­ the skeptical tradition of science. the question. bribed and cajoled just like every­ groups.” What implications does this nected with her being a woman? K.P. So the idea you’re suggesting On the animal experimentation body else, they grow up in a culture have for your belief in the univer­ Suppose she were a member of some is that scientific experiments give us issue: on the one hand there is need­ and accept its assumptions sality of science, and the scientific other oppressed group, would we data; we, then, as human beings, as less cruelty—and if it’s truly need­ uncritically as children. At the same method? then say, “Oh this is a typical Native members of ethnic groups, genders, less, then let’s not do it. On the other time, science has some fundamen­ C.S. First of all, I know of no more American insight”? This argument, couch them in metaphors. These hand, there are essential things we tally powerful methods attached to effective weapon against sexism than I think, is fundamentally tangential metaphors are informed by who we need to leam about ourselves, es­ it— more powerful than any other science. Second, it’s sort of a curi­ to how science works. are, where we stand, but... sential cures to desperately danger­ field that alleges a claim to knowl­ ous question considering that you Of course there are gender C.S. Yes, what feels right, what ous human illnesses, millions of edge. The way I look at it, science didn’t invite my co-author to join us perspectives. Take an example we makes sense to us— and all kinds of ** babies saved because of animal ex­ represents a delicate balance between in this interview. [Kavita Philips talk about in Shadows, the idea of prejudices come in at that point. But periments. I would not want to be a heroic openness to all ideas and was assigned by the editors to the heroic sperm and the passive science is open to debate; the women the one who would tell the parents of possibilities and the most rigorous inverview Carl Sagan only.] But egg, which is a view so natural for who saw that failure in the male egg/ a sick baby that I am so opposed to skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old apply this “radical skepticism” to male scientists. The sperm are sperm metaphors wrote papers and animal experiments that I am happy and new. Some people are comfort­ quantum mechanics for me. What “fighting” each other to get to the talked to the people in the laborato­ to condemn their baby to death. You able only with the first approach and does the “lives of dominant groups” egg, the egg is sitting there, hoping ries, and now you can see a transition have to be very sure before you can others only with the second. Many have to do with quantum mechanics? for a handsome suitor.... And then it in the literature. The men are finally make such a judgment—and I am by are simply comfortable with what Or any other areas of physics or was found in some species that the paying attention. And it’s only a few no means sure. they’ve been taught, and don’t want mathematics? egg is calling to the sperm, that it’s years ago, maybe a decade, that the As on the abortion issue, here is any painful debate. K.P. Well, Andrew Pickering, in sending out all sorts of chemical data themselves were obtained. It a difficult compromise that has to be Some scientists, for example, Constructing Quarks, a history of messages, that the sperm is loaded doesn’t seem to me a disaster. It’s made, and both extremes are worried are happy to spend their whole ca­ elementary particle physics, argues with all sorts of odor sensors, very just that humans are fallible. Who about the slippery slope— that the reers in finding out what’s wrong that scientific debates in particle similar to those in the human nose, figured otherwise? The important moment you move one micron off with the ideas of others. Newton physics were resolved not only on that the egg casts out a line to grab fact is that we’re able to change our the ideological position, you will made the famous remark, “If I’ve the basis of the facts, but that “cul­ the sperm and reel it in, that the minds in response to evidence. then effortlessly slide all the way to accomplished anything it’s by tural” differences among the groups sperm are in many cases bumbling, K.P. So, language, metaphor, and the hateful opposing point of view. standing on the shoulders of giants.” of scientists— (heir access to power, incompetent, and it’s the eggs doing prejudice are just an overlay that we Yet, as in many human interactions, I have a physicist friend in the to funding—determined the out­ all the hard work. Now that is a impose on scientific fact? the middle ground is what you have skeptical tradition whose self- come. perspective, even when the data C.S. Yes. Of course, the design of to find evaluation is: “If I’ve accomplished C.S. Oh, of course, but that’s not supported it, that many men some­ experiments can involve prejudices, K.P. Are cows, sheep, goats, and anything it’s by peering over the true to the scientific ideal, that’s just how didn’t see. The words were not especially in the social sciences. chickens “similar enough” to us so shoulders of dwarfs.” A very hostile human nature. Would we be closer forthcoming to describe the reality There’s no question about that. To that we ought not to eat them? and arrogant approach, but still, it’s to the truth if we abandoned the that their own experiments made give you an example from my own C.S. Are rutabaga, broccoli, carrots, an essential part of science: the rigor, scientific ideal? Obviously not. evident. It took women to grab them experience: In the first IQ test I ever and cabbages? How would you de­ the freedom to criticize, the nominal There’s a tension between the by the collar and say, “Hey now, just took, there were sketches of objects, cide? We humans have been hunting ethic of being willing to surrender fallibilities and cupidities of human a minute, you’re not saying this in and you had to choose from a list animals for as long as we’ve been on your most deeply held opinions if beings and this grand, sometimes the right way.” what they were. One of them was a earth. The defining phrase that an­ the facts warrant. That is to my mind emotionally difficult to apply, It’s not that women and men torus, and the correct answer was a thropologists use for humans in a the key aspect of science, even if it’s counsel of the scientific method. But performed different experiments to napkin ring. I was a poor kid in state before civilization is “hunter- imperfectly applied. Max Planck said the fact that humans are fallible look at how the eggs call out to the Brooklyn; I had never seen a napkin gatherers.” Our interest in meat goes it would take a generation before doesn’t weaken the validity of the sperm; where our self-interests are ring, so I got that question wrong. very deep. Of course there have been physicists were willing to accept scientific method; instead it under­ involved, of course we make mis­ Now, was that a failure of us kids prominent reactions to it (India is an quantum mechanics— even though scores that the error-correcting ma­ takes, we can be misled, or fool who had never seen napkin rings, or obvious example), often tied to high it explained aspects of the world that chinery of science is critical to our ourselves. a failure of those who designed the religious principles. But, you know, nobody could explain otherwise. survival and well-being. You can see that most easily in test? Was there something wrong there may even be physiological There is in scientists, as in everybody K.P. But feminists argue from the scientists who provide weapons with the way the question was asked, reasons some people want to eat else, a conservative streak, an un­ “partial persectives” for “situated for nations of the most diverse reflecting the prejudice of those who meat. On the other hand, what do the willingness to shake the foundations; knowledges” (Donna Haraway’s ideological stripes, every one of them designed the test? I wouldn’t say cows, sheep, and goats have to say if s part of human nature. But science, terms). Sandra Harding has argued convinced that he or she is doing the conscious prejudice, but it was a about it? Is it right to raise them in more than any other field, is willing that the very notion of objectivity right thing. All those people who flawed question. Racist and other concentration camps for animals so to make those fundamental reex­ needs to be examined—that we need went to their governments in 1939 assumptions in IQ tests are now well that humans can eat them? It’s an­ aminations and that is without a to talk about objectivity that’s and ‘40 saying “we must develop see Sagan, page 16

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Scotti loses his sive character. It treats Hitchcock continuedfrom page 1 as saying that the only radicality that not as a reactionary director, but as a unusual about his position in the a film can offer is in its “formal master self-reflexive filmmaker. social division of labor in fact he is research” into the material specificity This is the kind of reading that grateful that he has a job! In of films (meaning their materiality Zavarzadeh calls “subtle” reading postmodern film theory — follow­ as texts). To analyze ideolbgy — a manuever that introduces so ing the lead of such neo- and post- therefore, we have to give up the many factors into the act of under­ Marxists as Gramsci, and Laclau notion of truth/falsehood and instead standing that it eventually becomes and Mouffe as well as such theorists pay close attention to the mechanics impossible to “conclude” anything of “discourse” as Foucault and of meaning — how truth-effects are about the operation of economic, Derrida — ideology has come to constructed in film and other texts of political, and cultural processes. In mean not so much a politico-histori­ culture. This reactionary “formal­ such subtle readings, every process cal practice that conceals class re­ ism,” Zavarzadeh argues, blocks any is both identical to “itself’ (Vertigo lations but simply the means by radical form of “ideology critique” is patriarchal) and “othef ’ than itself which culture represents its beliefs of film which might demonstrate (Vertigo is a critique of patriarchy) and ideas. In other words, in why (and not simply how truth ef­ — which is to say that all social postmodern theory “ideology” is no fects are produced and allow one to processes are reversible so that it is longer an “explanatory” concept but get at the larger class differences — finally impossible to discern who is merely a “descriptive” term of get at, that is to say, the fabric of the exploited and who the exploiter. analysis. To “explain” is to be “nor­ social relations under capitalism. Zavarzadeh argues strongly against mative,” and since postmodern Instead of a radical critique of this form of subtlety by insisting that theory regards all normative acts as ideology, postmodern film theory a form of strategic crudeness is ultimately an appeal to “absolute” offers an immanent critique of ide- necessary to indicate that in spite of truth and therefore a violent form of ology-as-discourse. In other words, all their complexity and seeming “totalizing,” explanation itself has it analyzes the rhetoric of the film as undecidability and heterogeneity, all to be rejected. This rejection of a text and shows how the process of social practices and processes — ideology as an index of social power signification — the movement of Illustration: Benn T.F. Nadelman such as, for example, patriarchy — and difference is a hallmark of bour­ signs in the film text—not only pro­ are, in a class society, informed by geois film theory. Zavarzadeh in duce ideological effects (“truths”) to communicate coherently and “identity” as a masculine subject, the global logic of domination and fact shows how a humanist film critic but also, in a self-deconstructive with certainty. becomes part of the otherness of exploitation. He proposes “seeing” like D. J. Andrew (Concepts in Film move, dismantle those ideological Zavarzadeh argues that this idea woman, by discovering that he re­ films as an act through which the Theory) and his supposed opponent, effects, revealing the undecidability of film as a self-reflexive sembles Madeline in an “intoler­ viewer gets hold of this global logic Stephen Heath, a poststructuralist of the proposed “truths.” In this deconstructive activity is complicit able” way. This recognition is through ideology critique. film theorist (“On Screen, In Frame: manner, the formalism of with the logic of wage labor and intolerable because patriarchy’s While the “subtle” postmodern Film and Ideology”), actually close postmodern film theory negates the capital. In part he makes his case by power depends on it being what it is “reading” presents itself as “radical,” ranks, when it cranes to politics, and film ’s historicity and brackets its discussing an influential in an absolutely clear manner, Zavarzadeh further argues, it is in attack the radical Marxist practice political effects in helping to form postmodernist “reading” of without any doubts or hesitations. fact complicitous with the status quo of ideology (critique). class identities: the film becomes a Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In her discus­ Any hesitation in patriarchy reveals because it denies that there is any The social theory behind this self-constituted, transhistorical arti­ sion Tani Modleski argues that the the faultlines and discrepancies of ground upon which one can speak weakened postmodern notion of fact which narrates its own internal film’s seemingly secure (“decid­ its ideology — exposes the very about patriarchy with any certainty. ideology is that advanced Western history and allegorizes its own in­ able”) patriarchal ideology actually seams, fissures, and folds that If it is nothing other than a “text,” democracies are already — happily ability to state anything with cer­ “exceeds” itself and in an act of self- undo it. then patriarchy is basically a narra­ — post-class, post-ideological so­ tainty. Whatever it says, it also deconstfuction becomes differential According to Zavarzadeh, such tive marked by the contradictions cieties. Being merely “descriptive” un-says. Film, in other words, is a and “undecidable.” In her view, in a “reading” turns Vertigo into a and conflicts that are produced in all (and not “normative”), ideology is space of the sheer playfulness of Vertigo the “masculine” turns out to complex “text” in order to divert see Movie, page 15

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BLUE FOX USED BOOKS & RECORDS AVAILABLE SOON AT BOOKERY II 104 N. Aurora St., Ithaca • 272-5186 • Mon .-Sat. 10-6; Sun. 11-5 Personal Checks or Credit Cards Are Welcome. DEWITT MALL - ITHACA • 607-273-5055 page 15 life, Euro-America, is simply op­ as, with classic Mesquakie rigor, it Mesquakie out of their Oklahoma Narration pressive. Carson Two Red Foot, a challenges the bicultural condition. exile in 1856 back to the midwest Classifieds kind of modem Dark Circling Cloud, In the peyote ceremony “word river country of Iowa. He is a poet, continued from page 7 tells Edgar Bearchild: “Often I think songs” can be “switched into En­ whose first major collection, The of rapport. "Our collective perspec­ that the only true merriment and glish, invoking Jesus Christ.” The Invisible Musician, appeared in tives became concentric.” Dark religious strength I underwent elder Facepaint, Ted Facepaint’s 1990. Wherever you are in Black SMEDLEY'S BOOKSHOP: Circling Cloud, the ancestor to whom occurred during my youth and early grandfather, who directs the ritual, Eagle Child, there is poetic clarity. Ithaca’s feminist bookstore. star medicine was first given, manhood. All else has been a long dressed “in a dark blue suit and pants Driving through the Iowa night with Books and much more. addresses Edgar Bearchild, and uncomfortable adjustment to being with gray pinstripes,” looks like Ted Facepaint and visiting Ontario 307 W. State Street, speaks through him, the text in this an Indian, Ene note w iyani, in the someone “from the notorious A1 Indians, Edgar Bearchild reflects: (607) 273 - 2325. instance absolutely bilingual — world of the white man.” Capone era.” Norman Green “Although we were together as Indi- Mesquakie first, then English. It is the purity and splendor of Thunder has an “oily Elvis Presley ans/in the crude automobile and “These young people are kind for that which is Mesquakie that really hairdo” and wears an “Hawaiian throughout/ the country —related in ART-DRAWING & remembering us,” he says, in En­ matters in Black Eagle Child. Here, floral-print shirt.” There’s all this dialects and customs-W we were PAINTING LESSONS: glish, “you will receive our bless­ indeed, is a nationalism as fiercely Euro-American stuff: objects, con­ like rural farmsteads separated/ from Private or semiprivate. ing.” intractable as Irish nationalism, and cepts, tropes, shirts and suits, and it each other by infinite miles.” My studio or your home. So intensely is Edgar the same paradox, exquisite alien­ is all nonessential, secondary, alter­ + Credentials: Teaching Artist Bearchild’s vision realized that it ation in the language of the native, put on. Southern Tier Institute for unbalances the text. Everything that conqueror. Ray Young Bear’s text Ray A. Young Bear is the great- Neil Schmitz is a writer who lives in Arts in Education, CSMA, follows repeats or elaborates on it. tries to strike a new balance of lin­ great-grandson of Ma mwi wa ni kc, Buffalo, NY. Kaleidoscope - Teaching all The other world, ordinary settlement guistic and formal elements, even the young chief who led the mediums, all ages and all levels. Benn Nadelman (607) 277 - 7544. and indicating where the original printmaking surveyed by our Flight works could be viewed, as is major museums. Bird art has standard for most art books. lingered in a kind of art historical CUSTOM FRAMING continued from page 4 The fact is that few museums or limbo — thought of as scientific AND MATTING: and they remind us also of the institutions have regular illustration by the mainstream art Bevelled Mirrors, French achievement of Don R. Eckelberry, exhibitions of the best ornithologi­ world, used as a descriptive Matting, Painted Bevels, whose art has the sensual feeling so cal art (a couple of local exceptions appendage in popular guide books, Shadow Boxes, Custom close to that of Louis Agassiz are the Laboratory of Ornithology and tolerated by some Easel Backs, Canvas Fuertes. But they totally ignore the at Cornell, and the Genesee County ornithologists to grace the pages of Stretching, Framing of contribution made by Arthur Singer, Museum, near Rochester). Most their book-length treatises. Needlework and Fabric Art. and the many books he has illus­ 1 *7 - museum-goers might find an Fortunately, bird and wildlife i 14 The Frame Shop, 414 W. trated, including the popular field 1 ; j i Audubon, or a hummingbird art has an audience and is being Buffalo St., Ithaca, NY guide, Birds o f North America. painting by Martin Johnson Heade, collected and appreciated by 14850. Ph. 272 -1 3 5 0 . Equally curious is the absence or perhaps the rare inclusion of a wide public who finds its love "We Take the Time." of any mention of the art of Guy a work by the Swedish painter of the outdoors enhanced by Coheleach, or Robert Bateman, to Bruno Liljefors — whose work many prints and books that depict nature. WANTED: name two painters who have added hold to be the best of the genre. French language lessons. distinction to the growing corpus of EXPANDED, revised edition There has also been scant critical Amy (607)272-1751 wildlife art. Finally, it would have appraisal of ornithological art been useful to have had captions Cover illustration: Arthur Singer and its relationship to the larger Alan Singer is a writer and artist accompanying each illustrated work Fine work unmentioned in MOBA. fields of painting, sculpture, and who lives in Rochester, NY New Alexandrian • Bookstore • • Gallery • rejecting postmodernism but taking ply undertaking discursive reverse cant ideological negotiations of • Cafe • it as the historical moment in which readings of the operation of power culture take place. SUMMER Movie our practices are conducted, in specific localities. Against the In scope alone. Seeing Films WORKSHOPS continued from page 14 Zavarzadeh opens up a space for a Foucauldian view, Zavarzadeh ar­ Politically is an extraordinary book: different kind of postmodernism. gues for maintaining the binary, its topics range form film and film acts of signification. The most ef­ Intro to Jung fective and radical way to combat Following Teresa Ebert, he proposes powerful/powerless, because he theory to postmodemity, social patriarchy is by pointing to its in­ that there is a fundamental differ­ believes binaries are the outcome of theory, and psychoanalysis to Meditation for Couples Marxism and Marxist cultural stud­ stability as a text that is, by showing ence between a politically opposi­ social contradictions and not the Autobiographical Writing that patriarchy is self-differential, tional resistance postmodernism and effects of contradictory textualities: ies. But what is most significant is always already at war with itself, the dominant ludic porno which is they can be made to disappear not by that the book appeared at all: in an Readers' Group always in the process of only concerned with showing over acts of deconstruction but only by academic market dominated by self-deconstruction so that there is and over again that culture is merely changing the social structure that postmodernist theorists, it has be­ Please come in to register no need for intervention from a language effect. produces them. come almost impossible to get books 110 N. Cayuga Street, 2nd floor “outside” through collective One of the principal strategies In order to demonstrate that of this kind published. A passionate 272-1663 human action. of ludic porno is to focus on the power is produced on a global level, book, its passion is not that of The aim of Seeing Films Po­ voluntaristic agency of the individual Zavarzadeh introduces an analytical Barthesian “jouissance” but rather litically is to go beyond “reading” and thus to emphasize the impor­ strategy that he calls “renarrating.” the passion of a “partisan” — r The BOOKPRESS ~~j films subtly and simply analyzing tance of the discursive “resistance” Through the strategy of renarrating, inseparable from a rational the playfulness of their signs. The of the reading subject to mitigate the Zavarzadeh shows how the locally argument for the importance of the CLASSIFIEDS book argues that one should “see” effects of the domination of existing “meaningful” narrative of a par­ socio-historical “seeing” of films. ______l films in their class and historical power relations. In postmodern film ticular film actually suppresses an­ To help us “see,”. Seeing Films $5.50 fo the first 10 contexts. However, since the cat­ theory, “power” is generally other narrative which is a tale of Politically produces concepts and words, $.20 each I egories of “class,” “history,” and understood as theorized by global class conflicts and social re­ strategies that are excluded form additional word. “opposition” are among the very Foucault, who asserts that there is pression. Renarration points to this the mainstream “reading” of films. Display advertising in ones deconstructed by postmodern no such binary as the powerful and supressed narrative and its social It will thus help a new generation classifieds: $12.00 per I theory, Zavarzadeh must move to a the powerless and that power is a logic by demonstrating that the of culture critics and film “see-ers” column inch aesthetic logic (the value most whose voices are suppressed today broad theoretical level and put the diffused, dispersed, and readily re­ (1 column inch = 15/8" I dominant understanding of versible social practice that perme­ privileged in postmodern film by the hegemony of the postmodern postmodernism in question. In a ates all localities of daily life. The theory) is finally an alibi of ideology. formalism in the academy and width x 1" depth. | long chapter called “Pleasure, Re­ most effective mode of “resistance” In this way, the book offers a sus­ elsewhere. Already in its second sistance and the Ludic to such power is to “textualize” it, to tained and comprehensive ideology printing, the book promises to Postmodernism,” instead of show that it is groundless and thus critique not only of a number of become a theoretically and For more information | deconstructing the terms of unjustified — i.e. unethical. The contemporary “trivial” films, but politically invaluable resource in contact the BOOKPRESS | postmodernism by showing their Foucaldian imperative then is to just also of postmodernism and coming years. (607) 277-2254, or send your | epistemological undecidability, he read and to read justly. T his, ac­ postmodern film theory as well. The classifieds to +~- on the contrary demonstrates the cording to Zavarzadeh, privileges a emphasis on the “trivial,” DeWitt Building, political logic that has made voluntaristic subject who is so pro­ Zavarzadeh explains, is necessary 215 N. Cayuga St, postmodernism necessary for sus­ duced as to believe that one can because it is in the space of the Donald Morton is a professor of Ithaca, NY 14850. taining late capitalist liberalism. Not change the social practices by sim- trivial that some of the most signifi­ English at Syracuse University.

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,r HjKSSttiess when they talk about the when they lost their canoe — also tive for the Cree, if they lose this are humans presently living on this Hunter ti'1and. Also it distinguishes them emphasizes Speers’ assertion that battle for full rights to their hunting continent in balance with the land from us in a critical way. They know there is almost never an accident grounds, and to an undisturbed and animals. It is, I think, a far continued from page 12 they are quite far out. They can’t among the Cree when they are continuation of their culture, is res­ greater psychic necessity than the Cree best, perhaps, is Glen Speers, depend on a plane or snowmobile in the bush. ervation life, humiliatin dependency, need — which white environmen­ the Hudson Bay Company factor for evacuation if they are injured; (As I read this book I recalled increased medical and social dis­ talism has been shakily built who has worked with them for 25 they can’t swim (not that it would headlines about the deer hunters tress; it is happening already, has on —to know there is simply years. He says two important things matter in the cold northern in New York — shooting them­ been since the mines and logging wdemess, alone. in the book. First, with an admira­ waters); they know they must pro­ selves, relatives, strangers, putting and tourist hunting and the first We cannot reshape our lives tion that almost embarrasses him, vide food each day. Richardson’s shotgun plugs through nearby dams. Do we not know well enough by contemplating wilderness “you will find no finer people any­ understanding of all this is reflected houses and cars — a terrible and about reservation life in this coun­ uninhabited by humans. But con­ where.” Second, “they are very cau in his beginning the book with a frightening parody of subsistence try? (Those who do not should read, templating the spiritual economy of tious, because when they are in the story about a dangerous accident hunting culture.) for example, Peter Matthiessen’s In a people who take just enough from bush, they know they are quite that is averted by the skill, intelli­ The struggle over James Bay is the Spirit o f Crazy Horse.) nature, and who always reciprocate, far out.” gence, and patience of the hunter a profound test of our culture’s in­ Several Cree leaders have put may give us a living example of This last comment illuminates Isaiah Awashish (Philip’s father). tentions toward all the Indians of it very directly: “Are the people great value. the strange (to us) “resignation” of The story of Isaiah and his youngest this continent, and of our willing­ in your cities willing to change •F the Cree, as well as their generosity, son Willie — they were nearly ness to act on what we admit was a their lives to help us save ours?” Joel Ray is an editor of the the humor of their stories, and their stranded on an island in the rapids great historical wrong. The alterna­ But also: We need to knowthere Bookpress and a freelance writer.

science is about. we put all our eggs in one cultural for hunter-gatherers. For selfish rea­ might have learned, all sorts of Sagan K.P. Could we pursue the idea of basket—not mainly because of the sons, you ought to protect them and insights into ourselves that “difference” a little more? Your ethnic pride that many people have their way of life. we might have gotten from that continued from page 13 writing is part of what you in their own culture, but again Beyond that, there’s the society, are unavailable. known. I doubt that the designers characterize as a search for our because of human fallibility. We obvious point that people enjoy There is a tension, as there is intended consciously to foist erro­ common origins. In a suggestive simply don’t know which cultures their cultures and value them. in all of these difficult issues neous data on the public. They’ve episode of Cosmos you remarked and traditions may prove to be There’s something atrocious about you’ve raised, between making a certainly been embarrassed by the that if an extraterrestrial were to important for our future. saying, “I’m sorry your culture global community that works, flaws in the test. They couldn’t help visit Earth, it would be struck more For example, it is stupid for us doesn’t produce weapons well and preserving ethnic diversity on themselves— they grew up in a racist by the similarities between to kill off the remaining enough, and therefore you must the local level. It’s not impossible society, and the biased questions cultures than by the differences. hunter-gatherers— because they adopt my culture and especially my to do both. It does mean that you seemed reasonable to them. But if You express hope for peace, in your have important insights into not just technology, under threat of can't be a cultural fundamentalist decisions on jobs, promotions, or latest work, Shadows, because you where we came from and who we extermination.” This has been the and say that the global society personal worth are based on such feel that we are gradually becoming are, but also there may be clues to trend of Western culture. You can is simply incompatible with tests, a monstrous injustice is perpe­ an “intercommunicating planetary how we should arrange our societies see it clearly in the case of the diversity. You cannot say that these trated. species.” In this vision of unity in the future. I don’t say that a Conquistadores and Aztec Mexico. ethnic groups are irrelevant and How do we approach this and peace, what role do the real hunter-gatherer lifestyle is possible Aztec civilization collapsed—they therefore should be allowed to question? We point out the defi­ differences between cultures play? on a planet with 6 billion people. had better calendars, Albrecht wither away. In a realistic world ciencies. And then, they change. I Or do you believe that once we get But if we spent 99.9% of our Diirer was knocked out by their we must find a compromise. by no means hold any brief for IQ to that stage there will be no tenure on Earth in such a state it’s art, but the Spanish had better tests as an infallible judge of intelli­ really significant differences fantastically stupid to lose access weapons. So that very rich culture, + gence, but they have become less between cultures/ethnic groups/ to that information. We need it. with all its powers and glories, parochial because of such criticism. political worldviews? Never mind if you don’t have a deficiencies and evils, is gone. Kavita Philips is a writer who That kind of criticism is what C.S. I think it would be a disaster if compassionate bone in your body And all sorts of answers that we lives in Ithaca.

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