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francesgregory's review
4.0
(mild spoiler alert)
i had a really difficult time putting this book down, or deciding whether i even liked the narrator, a cynical drug addled drunk recently incarcerated for pederasty and intoxicating a minor. usually i find rape/assault narratives as plot devices somewhat antiquated/infuriating, especially when it's used as a rouse to illicit some sort of "oh, this person is 'quirky' or 'edgy' and pushing against the norms of society" bullshit. i'm not sure my feelings about this resolved by the end, but i did finish the novel.
sometimes the narrators sour demeanor and descriptions of events read like try-hard attempts to develop a caricaturization of the region and its people, especially entwined with the layout of the book (the back and forth between the editor that constantly breaks up the text), but sometimes they were so dead on and funny that i couldn't help but continue reading.
this was an interesting follow up to "emerald city: an environmental history of seattle," as much of this book reads like real history of the region brought to cartoonish life.
and then there are gems like this:
"...I had the impression that I was finally understanding this region for the very first time. It was neither an Edenic natural paradise nor a smug, opportunist hub of commerce, but actually an accidental, brilliantly grotesque collision between the two. Again and again in the fine mist of sea and rain, huge stretches of forest or water would hypnotize me into a state of awed surrender, whether I saw the gloomy, totalitarian majesty of a stand of old Douglas firs or waves slashing a desolate, pebbly shore. Then all this would be interrupted suddenly by the baldness of a clear cut hill or the sinister, smoke-spewing stacks of the juggernaut of a power plant. Unlike the East, where, in many places, such sights had long ago tamed and supplanted nature, here the struggle aggressively raged in all its blatant and elemental vulgarity."
and
"This was a place--I finally had to admit--of violence and struggle, a thrillingly ugly battle between the land and humans that produced a rich, stupefying sensory experience. Here there would never be a chance for genuine order; only the snarl of nature echoed by the discontent of the human condition--and all of it hiding under a featureless mask of progressivism because the people here were well aware that their struggle could never be completely expressed in words."
in some ways the last pieces of the book remind me of a part of "emerald city" in which the author gives overwhelming agency to nature to rectify the intrusion of civilization on the west coast by liquefying the artificial mud blankets created by the regrades on the tideflats; this would be easily done during the looming earthquakes characteristic of the geology of the region and completely destroy downtown seattle. as a reader (i think) you are meant to realize that the perceived, tacit sterilization of the area is actually heavily shaped by the chaotic ecosystems that will not be, long term, contained by humans for commerce. this is all reinforced through repeated appearances by john zerzan's writings as well as the indigenous cyclical myths contemplated throughout.
second most interesting to me, i suppose, was that the author never makes excuses for himself or his history, but so vehemently loathes the ability of those in the pacific northwest middle and upper classes to tidy up their latent racism/classism/sexism/desire to dominate nature that he spends most of the story high out of his mind. as he further investigates the other methods of living deployed by those destroyed by industry and capitalism's clashes with nature, the region begins to cast a spell on him that ends ambiguously, as, according to the repeated themes of the book, it must.
i had a really difficult time putting this book down, or deciding whether i even liked the narrator, a cynical drug addled drunk recently incarcerated for pederasty and intoxicating a minor. usually i find rape/assault narratives as plot devices somewhat antiquated/infuriating, especially when it's used as a rouse to illicit some sort of "oh, this person is 'quirky' or 'edgy' and pushing against the norms of society" bullshit. i'm not sure my feelings about this resolved by the end, but i did finish the novel.
sometimes the narrators sour demeanor and descriptions of events read like try-hard attempts to develop a caricaturization of the region and its people, especially entwined with the layout of the book (the back and forth between the editor that constantly breaks up the text), but sometimes they were so dead on and funny that i couldn't help but continue reading.
this was an interesting follow up to "emerald city: an environmental history of seattle," as much of this book reads like real history of the region brought to cartoonish life.
and then there are gems like this:
"...I had the impression that I was finally understanding this region for the very first time. It was neither an Edenic natural paradise nor a smug, opportunist hub of commerce, but actually an accidental, brilliantly grotesque collision between the two. Again and again in the fine mist of sea and rain, huge stretches of forest or water would hypnotize me into a state of awed surrender, whether I saw the gloomy, totalitarian majesty of a stand of old Douglas firs or waves slashing a desolate, pebbly shore. Then all this would be interrupted suddenly by the baldness of a clear cut hill or the sinister, smoke-spewing stacks of the juggernaut of a power plant. Unlike the East, where, in many places, such sights had long ago tamed and supplanted nature, here the struggle aggressively raged in all its blatant and elemental vulgarity."
and
"This was a place--I finally had to admit--of violence and struggle, a thrillingly ugly battle between the land and humans that produced a rich, stupefying sensory experience. Here there would never be a chance for genuine order; only the snarl of nature echoed by the discontent of the human condition--and all of it hiding under a featureless mask of progressivism because the people here were well aware that their struggle could never be completely expressed in words."
in some ways the last pieces of the book remind me of a part of "emerald city" in which the author gives overwhelming agency to nature to rectify the intrusion of civilization on the west coast by liquefying the artificial mud blankets created by the regrades on the tideflats; this would be easily done during the looming earthquakes characteristic of the geology of the region and completely destroy downtown seattle. as a reader (i think) you are meant to realize that the perceived, tacit sterilization of the area is actually heavily shaped by the chaotic ecosystems that will not be, long term, contained by humans for commerce. this is all reinforced through repeated appearances by john zerzan's writings as well as the indigenous cyclical myths contemplated throughout.
second most interesting to me, i suppose, was that the author never makes excuses for himself or his history, but so vehemently loathes the ability of those in the pacific northwest middle and upper classes to tidy up their latent racism/classism/sexism/desire to dominate nature that he spends most of the story high out of his mind. as he further investigates the other methods of living deployed by those destroyed by industry and capitalism's clashes with nature, the region begins to cast a spell on him that ends ambiguously, as, according to the repeated themes of the book, it must.
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