Animal Inventory: Towards the end of the book, you state that we need “to finally get past ourselves and our story and, through acts of deep, interspecies empathy…to become a part of [other animals’] story (p 175).” On the one hand this seems like a simple request, but on the other hand this requires a radical shift in perspective. Can you explain what you mean by this?

Charles Siebert: In one sense this involves us human beings collectively coming down off of our high horse, if you’ll excuse the old expression. The more we begin to see and understand ourselves as one more extension of the greater biological forces that created and control all life on earth, rather than as beings apart, entities anointed by some higher authority, the more the “inter-species empathy” I speak of, or what Gay Bradshaw calls the “trans-species psyche”, will be allowed to flourish. This will all still bring us to the same tough decisions and compromises that I alluded to earlier, but what a better premise it is to approach them from such a new collective interspecies empathy, as opposed to the ongoing parochial factionalism rooted in old rival religions and the false notion of human exclusivity.

The problem inheres in the notion of simplicity: if both its preferred subject and its preferred approach are simple, what is it that justifies the minimalist enterprise? In other words, what saves minimalism from banality? For Nicholas Serota and Richard Francis, the answer lies in the fact that minimalism reinvests the ordinary with interest and attempts to persuade us that the apparent banality of our quotidian experience deserves immediate, direct examination: “By shifting emphasis so emphatically to direct experience Minimalist art makes a clear statement about the nature of reality. Its apparent simplicity is the result of rigorous focusing, the elimination of distraction. It is neither simple nor empty, cold nor obscure. Minimalism reorders values. It locates profound experience in ordinary experience” (Saltzman).

~ Warren Motte, Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature

Finding Our Sea Legs is currently in its final edits, and should be published by the shiny, new Kingston University Press towards the end of the year. The book is about ethics, experience and storytelling, and explores how stories might be capable of giving us a way of thinking through ethical experience without recourse to the language of certainty. It also features, amongst other things – more nautical metaphors than you could ever wish for; curious tales of talking fish; a contest between Immanuel Kant and a palmwine-stealing god from Maluku, East Indonesia; and a flock of philosophical woodpeckers.

~ Will Buckingham @ thinkBuddha

I’ve never visited the Faroe Islands, but my old best friend, Eric, has. He studied abroad in Denmark. He never watched them hunt puffins, but he watched them hunt whales. Each summer, men in boats drive migrating pilot whales to the shore. After the whales are beached, other men rush into the freezing water and use knives to sever a massive artery. The bay fills with whale blood. Many activist groups disagree with the hunt. They call it barbaric and boycott Faroese cod. They live in New York, Berlin, London, and most of them work in offices.

I work in a cube on the fifteenth floor of a building downtown. In a good wind, the building sways. During a real storm, when the rain beats hard against the windows, you can look out and almost pretend that you’re on a boat. But in my cube, I face a wall. I have to stand at the enormous windows in a conference room and coax the bay or the low clouds into a raging sea.

@ AGNI

It’s been clear for a while, at least since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last fall, that what we have to fear above all is hope itself. Attempts to trust that the worst is over and to stop frightening ourselves seem doomed to propel us into yet worse disappointment. We are not only unhappy, but—believing calm and happiness to be the norm—unhappy that we’re unhappy.

It’s time to recognize how odd and counterproductive is the optimism on which we have grown up. For the last 200 years, despite occasional shocks, the Western world has been dominated by a belief in progress, based on its extraordinary scientific and entrepreneurial achievements. But from a broader historical perspective, this optimism is an anomaly. Humans have spent the greater part of their existence drawing a curious comfort from expecting the worst. In the West, lessons in pessimism derive from two sources: Roman Stoic philosophy and Christianity. It may be time to remind ourselves of a few of their lessons—not to add to our misery but to alleviate our injured surprise and sorrow.

~ Alain de Botton

Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger.

~ Verlyn Klinkenborg

Perhaps I’ll reread Timothy today.

I’m dying very quickly, and the sweet chemicals in candy and diet sodas are comforting, so the first thing I think about is if there would be a convenience store nearby, so deep in the woods. Nobody believes that I’m dying from such a sad, and rare disorder – one that doesn’t have a name. Only the doctor knows what is really wrong with me, but he says there is no name for this fatal illness.

Sometimes, he’ll begin “you see…” then, change the trail of the conversation to something as impersonal as the local deer population crisis.

~ Meg Pokrass @ Monkeybicycle

The principal hallmarks of Echenoz’s style are his laconism, his dry wit, and the precision with which he chooses words and images. Each of his novels puts pungent and multilayered ironies into play, complementing and destabilizing one another simultaneously, and consequently demanding that the reader remain very much on the alert. These are not books to be read in a hammock on balmy summer afternoons. Despite that, Echenoz has also become recognized as one of the best storytellers among the “serious” novelists of his generation. Beginning to write when the very idea of plot in the novel was a bitterly embattled one, Echenoz has shown that an attention to novelistic intrigue is by no means incompatible with an experimentalist impulse. Quite to the contrary in fact, plot drives these texts in the first instance, and thus enables other kinds of innovations on the level of technique and theme.

~ Reading Jean Echenoz

Tin House: The narrator of Erased lives in an imagined town called St. Nils, but during the narrative he travels to Cleveland, Ohio, a real place. Why did you choose to move him from an imagined place to a real one? Why not two imagined places, or two real ones?

Jim Krusoe: All my characters seem to inhabit St. Nils at one time or another during their lives, so that part came easily. I stick them there because I’m not a naturalistic writer, and it’s helpful for me to use an unincorporated (so to speak) place setting. I did grow up in Cleveland, however, and left it when I went to college, so the Cleveland in Erased is as imaginary, in its way, as St. Nils, but there is also a note or two of truth: On the one hand, the years I spent in Ohio were the unhappiest of my life, but on the other, I think that for most people, including me, the place where they grow up becomes, when recollected, a kind of Eden, a magic world, because everything happens for the first time. Everything is fresh. Everything makes an impression. Somehow these two conflicting versions of Cleveland have merged inside this novel.

June tell me about how the land bear down upon us. How an awful shifting happen after Increase Darrow cut the ground and set his hands inside it and deliver a way our bodies not all the way ready for. A swelling and weeping after he turn the fields out and shift the streambeds by a new course. Nevermind what long buried lyssa might rise from below the skunk cabbage and squaw. Nevermind what burning ocean smell ought to tell you somewhat aint right. Because the young apple trees grow hale in their long rows set so and so to the sun and the planets. Stakes and trellises keep such awful spines upright. Without weight or anchor their scaffold limbs grow at near right angles. Buds form and open years before they should. Increase Darrow call an end to the old trees what only bear every other year in favor of the new trees what bear every harvest and so speed up their cycle and come so fast they might just one day fruit and bloom all to once. The sun touch them first. The rain always. And color them a green so rude your stomach turn to witness. They know more than trees should to sacrifice a wholeness for a strength they gain by growing rifts in their bark on purpose. Form their limbs in ways to harbor the ladybirds and pirate bugs and lacewings what eat red mites and green and woolly aphids. Surrender leaves for midges and spiders to nest in. A few apples for wasps to lay their eggs. All the good bugs. And all the great storms what mend up the coast lose their grip upon the land overnight or drift out to sea. Or fush out to naught before they even get here. Or dont even come til after harvest when all the apples already picked and gathered safe inside the dug out cellars. The first snows come lighter than blankets. Deer lay down beneath the canopies. Bears sleep in the grass.

~ Bear Kirkpatrick @ Unsaid (via)