Snowpacked Mystic

Patricia Fargnoli, Winter: Poems

Winter usually hits Patricia Fargnoli’s adoptive New Hampshire home like a doubled fist, pounding neighborhoods and shrouding the countryside in heavy weather and long nights. People flee indoors, venturing out only with great deliberation and purpose. That is the winter in Fargnoli’s latest collection, not necessarily ice and wind, though she has that; but the enforced isolation, the period when people must keep alone with their own thoughts.

Unlike other prominent poets, Patricia Fargnoli came to poetry relatively late. She published her first collection in 1999, after a long, successful career in psychotherapy and social work. This gives her work a remarkable tone, simultaneously youthful and brimming with experiment, yet seasoned by life and hard experience. She’s both the kid testing her poetic limits, and the grande dame bestowing accumulated wisdom, as in “Winter Grace”:

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and known it for its transience.

This imagery, at once somehow obviously true yet uniquely her own, bespeaks Fargnoli’s greater themes. Winter happens in intimate moments, times when people know one another in greatest depth, or face themselves wholly. Winter’s isolation, its enforced confidences, make people doff their masks. Repeatedly throughout this collection, Fargnoli describes what happens when people stop pretending and be who they are, including (perhaps especially) herself.

In keeping with this theme, Fargnoli judiciously decides which poetic conventions merit her loyalty. She mostly eschews rhyme, as contemporary poets generally do, but occasionally dances very close to it, when sound help emphasize her theme. (She shows remarkable awareness of words as units of sound, not just meaning, one of my pet issues.) And she wrestles stanzaic forms to serve her ends, as in “Plea to the Missing God”:

I am confined here living alone
indigent and like a snail.

They say you are loving. I salute you.
Here among the action of the wind

will your voice come to me?
Is it only echo, echo?

Will you say nothing
across the bones of what is hidden?

I am pregnant with words, please answer me.

That ragged single line dangling after those two-line stanzas jabs like a coffin nail, emphasizing the incompleteness that drives Fargnoli to write. Fargnoli’s heartfelt agnostic prayer thus physically recreates the feeling of desperation we all feel when isolation drives us to cry out into the dark. We don’t know, maybe actively disbelieve, whether anybody’s listening, but we recognize ourselves as incomplete, and in that moment, recognition is enough.

>Not that Fargnoli is utterly detached and bereft. Besides encounters with other humans, Fargnoli remains in constant conversation with other minds that aren’t always corporeally present. Her verses banter across distance and time with other poets; she cites Tomas Tranströmer, Ruth Stone, Charles Wright, and Thomas Merton, among others. Sometimes she builds upon themes other poets buried in her soul; other times, she disputes with them, struggling for closure.

In these poems, “winter” isn’t always literally present. “Glosa,” Fargnoli’s answer poem to Thomas Merton, depicts a sunlit outdoor encounter, verdant with Spanish splendor. Yet she concludes by emphasizing: this happened in the past. It’s done now. We were together in summer; it’s winter now, and I recall our encounter privately, knowing we’ll never recapture that single moment again. This winter isn’t a season, it’s a phase of life.
Fargnoli’s best poems have a hazy, dreamlike quality, moments that matter because they exist entirely within us. Several poems explicitly depict dreams, like “Dreamwork,” wherein a dream of intimate connection haunts Fargnoli long after she awakens. Others have dreamy hints, questioning whether we’re awake in a particular moment, like this from “Bellows Falls”:

Outside again. No one’s on the sidewalk.
Perhaps the cold keeps them in?
Or something else?
Then one old man comes from the north,
black overcoat, black stocking hat, tortoise shell cane
he taps on the walk like the Knock Code.
As he nears, he speaks, a low voice
as if you weren’t entirely meant to hear.

Fargnoli’s Winter is bleak, ghostly, and alone. Yet it brims with life, because humans inject themselves into the vacuum. This gives her work a mystical quality, yet it’s a mysticism that doesn’t reach for invisible worlds; Fargnoli seeks communion with another human soul, or with her own shadow spirit. She invites us into moments of stunning, unadorned intimacy. And she asks us to confront ourselves, too.

Waiting for Sherlock Season 3?

Jack Taylor, TV3 Ireland
Jack Irish, ABC1 Australia

The worldwide success of Moffat and Gatiss’ Sherlock hasn’t gone unnoticed by other film producers. Particularly the ninety-minute feature format, which permits greater character development and delightfully creepy slow-burn tension. So while we giddily anticipate Sherlock’s third-season debut in January, consider these two international mystery film series, which utilize a similar format.

“Galway is the graveyard of ambition.” So moans Jack Taylor (Iain Glen, latterly of Game of Thrones) in the first of three feature-length films. Taylor, a former senior lawman, drinks himself numb to squelch the realization that he’s only marginally above the criminals he pursues. People hire this desperate ex-copper to find what they cannot, because he’s good; but they hire him out of desperation, because he destroys and saves in equal measure.

Based on Ken Bruen’s novels, Jack Taylor follows its hero through Galway, Ireland, a city roughly the size of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and about that far outside the mainstream. Bruen’s Galway is deeply divided between its workaday masses and its casually violent undercurrents. These undercurrents include both organized crime and the Garda Síochána, Ireland’s nationally centralized police, whose omerta culture chillingly resembles the criminals they’re sworn to apprehend.

Taylor has a talent for finding what others want hidden. So when somebody asks him to uncover, say, a missing daughter, he accidentally uncovers the links between a Galway philanthropist and Sarajevo’s bleak history. Or when he tries to track a name the Catholic Church wants bleached from the tragedy of the Magdalene laundries, he reveals the secret his own mother shrouds behind cynical bluster and casual wrath.

Iain Glen as Jack Taylor

While Taylor resembles conventional noir detectives in certain ways—drunkenness, suppressed rage, frank sexual swagger—he lacks certain boilerplates we’ve come to expect. He isn’t a skilled fighter, for instance, and tends to get his ass kicked. He can’t act remorselessly, and tends to flagellate himself for unavoidable circumstances. And his practiced cynicism cracks under pressure. This makes him more volatile than stereotypical PI’s, and victory is never completely certain.

Jack Irish avoids Taylor’s suffering by not pretending he has his shit together. Guy Pearce (Felicia from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) plays Irish as a fragmented amateur, a relic who can’t reconcile himself with his past. Yet some vestige of his former honorable self keeps poking through, and when common decency calls, he acts. Unfortunately, his actions inevitably put others in harm’s way.

Jeffrey Walker’s feature-length adaptations actually make Peter Temple’s first two Jack Irish thrillers less bleak than the novels. Though that may be hard to believe: these movies present Melbourne, Australia, as a seething cauldron of official corruption, far-reaching secrets, and daring daylight violence. But Walker also elides portions of Irish’s personal history that might be too painful for television. Which says plenty, since Walker doesn’t hesitate to torture Irish, or by extension us.

Guy Pearce as Jack Irish

A former criminal attorney, Irish maintains his license, but spends his days collecting mob debts and fixing horse races. At night, he’s apprenticed to a local master woodworker. All this to numb the pain of his wife’s murder by a disgruntled client. Irish admits being a former alcoholic; now his intensive work schedule lets him maintain his protracted “dry drunk.” Not that anything actually numbs the pain.

Irish wants to forget his former life. But  intrudes upon his present, reminding him that debts don’t vanish just because he reinvented himself. When an old client dies clutching exculpatory evidence, he must revisit the law career he’s tried to obliterate. And when a family friend needs help finding a dissipated son, Irish discovers connections between his own history and Australia’s deep secrets. Nothing in Jack Irish’s world is ever simple; crimes’ connections run to the very bottom, and very top.

Both these film series brim with adult themes, including violence, language, and sex. Jack Taylor politely demurs from showing excessive skin, but Jack Irish revels in Australia’s well-known love of shock, and uses nudity as cinematic sucker-punch. That’s why you’ve never seen these movies on American TV, and why they aren’t suitable for young children. But their rich story development and savvy cinematic storytelling make them great grown-up fare after bedtime.

American networks once had smart movie-length mysteries like Columbo and early Quincy that accomplished the same artistic goals these series do. Yet somehow American TV hasn’t heeded Sherlock’s clarion call like other nations have. We’d love more elaborate storytelling with more fully realized characters, too! Well, until our networks recognize this unmet need, we’ll continue shopping globally for intelligent, ambitious thrillers like these two.

Getting Old Beats the Alternative

Alex Zhavoronkov, The Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform the Global Economy

I’ve received some criticism for this week’s review of Alex Zhavoronkov’s The Ageless Generation, from others who’ve read the book. Some criticism has been public, some private. Most of it, however, purports that I’ve misrepresented Zhavoronkov’s science, particularly his rebuttal of claims that human overpopulation has catastrophic environmental consequences. I usually don’t answer such criticisms, but this topic matters enough, I’ll make an exception.

Zhavoronkov attempts to forestall environmentalist arguments at around the one-quarter mark by citing Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and Fairfield Osborne’s Our Plundered Planet, famous tracts written before most living readers were born, purporting humanity’s imminent demise due to overpopulation. Ehrlich in particular remains a popular kicking boy for technological cheerleaders, because his dire scaremongering failed to materialize. Naysayers face only one setback: Ehrlich’s apocalyptic prophecy didn’t fail.

Okay, we don’t live on a planet desertified by overpopulation, although human population has doubled since Ehrlich’s book debuted in 1968. The Pope hasn’t certified birth control, our seas aren’t dead, and massive die-backs haven’t commenced. Ehrlich’s alarmism proved founded on poorly sublimated racism and sketchy understanding of human demography. This makes Ehrlich, and his fellow neo-Malthusians, look like screaming Chicken Littles at best.

But many of Ehrlich’s forecasts have transpired, though in less horrifying terms. In India, ancient forests have been clear-cut for firewood. China, for the first time in history, became a net food importer in 2008. Famine has been averted by broadening democracy and improved agricultural technology, but that technology relies on petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides, and oil-burning heavy equipment. And petroleum is not infinite.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013 seethes with articles about damage humans have inflicted on nature. Not potential damages projected by mathematical models or computer simulations, but real damage that has already happened, and continues right now. Species extinction, habitat blight, resource depletion, and environmental degradation which will take millennia to repair: it’s all happening now. And we’re causing it, you and I.

It doesn’t have to happen this way. Amending how we utilize resources, including human labor, could not only change the consequences we inflict upon our environment, it could improve human quality of life. According to the UN World Health Organization, ensuring girls have adequate education between ages 10 and 14 leads to smaller family sizes, reduced resource consumption, and greater prosperity. This is a matter of will, not technology.

I reiterate, Zhavoronkov’s prognostications on increased human life expectancy are both solid and exciting. I look forward eagerly to seeing what possibilities arise when humans reliably exceed the century mark. But such changes will have ripples outside standard economics. Zhavoronkov never says anything outright wrong in his entire book. But he suffers from excessively narrow focus, excluding important questions that exceed his domain.

Even within his domain, Zhavoronkov’s reasoning reveals limitations. An NBC report this week reveals that chronic disease, not old age, has driven up American medical costs, the exact opposite of Zhavaronkov’s claim. This sounds like an argument for universal health care, not redefining old age. Considering that children as young as ten now receive treatment for what we once called Adult-Onset Diabetes, public health at all ages should receive greater priority.

And while Zhavoronkov’s right that we must revamp our public pension system, what happened to private pensions? In 1975, half of all workers had some form of employer-funded old-age pension; today, that number stands at about one-sixth, mostly public sector workers. Private workers mainly have employee-funded 401(k) accounts. After the Enron collapse of 2001 and housing bubble collapse in 2008 hollowed out many 401(k) accounts, that’s hardly an adequate exchange.

I wanted to avoid this, but I’ll continue. Extending workers’ productive lives past eighty sounds fun for lab researchers, professors, entrepreneurs, or lawmakers. But in two years at the factory, I’ve visibly aged. My beard has gone patchy grey, I have crows’ feet, and I’ve become bald. My voice has grown hoarse, I have tendonitis in my right wrist and arch, and after an eight-hour shift, I limp. Some kinds of work age you terribly. The idea of doing this work as a great-grandfather is horrifying.

Alex Zhavoronkov presents a prospect for revitalizing American and international society, by keeping people productive longer. This sounds great. But such changes have consequences beyond themselves. We cannot change something so fundamental as productive lifespan, and expect the future to essentially resemble the past. I’d rather plan for the most likely consequences now, than get blindsided after it’s too late to change our minds.

Must the Old Always Get Older?

Alex Zhavoronkov, The Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform the Global Economy

On page one, Alex Zhavoronkov boldly declares: “We will soon be able to slow the aging process itself.” Period. No qualifiers, maybes, or squeamish half-committed circumlocution. That boldness is initially refreshing in contemporary pop nonfiction, which too often meekly tries to forestall counterclaims. Except it quickly becomes clear why authors use qualifier language, because Zhavoronkov sweepingly excludes important implications arising from his thesis.

Dr. Zhavoronkov, a pathbreaking gerontologist and international éminence grise, details how recent innovations in anti-aging medicine, and breakthroughs expected anon, will change human expectations of old age and retirement. Instead of seniors getting older and more decrepit, their pensions burdening society’s safety net, new science will extend citizens’ productive years. Zhavoronkov predicts five to ten year gains initially, and much greater increases soon thereafter.

Zhavoronkov’s predictions are wholly exciting, especially since they’re backed with robust science. Rather than simple entropy, as many assume, aging proves predicated on complex networks of biological functions nobody suspected just ten years ago. Treatments exist, or will soon exist, for the most common causes of declining productivity, including arthritis, dementia, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Practical application of radical anti-aging treatments may begin imminently.

These predictions, delivered in Zhavoronkov’s scientifically precise but upbeat style, gets the blood pumping. Who wouldn’t rather keep making stuff and paying taxes than commence a leisurely stroll toward morbidity? (That’s rhetorical. Don’t answer that.) Problems arise, though, when Zhavoronkov explains how redefining age will change society. He basically lays a ruler against the upward arc of the last fifty years, draws a line out to infinity, and shouts “Yippee!”

I can’t buy that. Zhavoronkov’s calculus incorporates medicine, neoclassical economics, and nothing else. I’ve read too much physical and social science to accept this narrow forecast. Start with how we’ll power this research, and feed and employ workers remaining productive well into their eighties. (Assume changing birth rates lag behind mortality, which seems likely.) This requires energy, which currently means hydrocarbons. More people working longer will burn more carbon, with tragically predictable long-term consequences.

Zhavoronkov’s predictions will draw natural comparisons to Ben Bova and Ray Kurzweil, who’ve both described their vision for humans’ imminent transcendence of death. But James Howard Kunstler and others criticize these authors’ perspectives as shortsighted, since they implicitly assume nigh-unlimited potential energy for human use, which current science denies. I’d go one step further: all three authors assume we’ll have someplace to put these numberless immortals.

Humans, pursuing their appetites, have muddied the air, clear-cut jungles, silted rivers, acidified seawater, and caused massive species extinction. Society’s status quo already requires unsustainable inputs and discharges revolting waste into our air, water, and soil. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, new technology doesn’t guarantee we’ll use it any better than our old technology. A larger population, living longer, must change its ways or humanity’s terrestrial future looks bleak indeed.

Even Zhavoronkov’s key thesis, that youthful seniors can keep working productively, assumes the economy can absorb them. That’s hardly proven. It could simply compound mass unemployment, or worse. If seasoned workers maintain fresh-faced vigor into their eighties, this will impact actual young workers who, lacking experience, will find doors shut. This could extend adolescent dependency beyond young workers’ peak childbearing years. Zhavoronkov addresses this possibility in one sentence, in parentheses.

I could continue, but it gets nitpicky. Let me name one last risk. New pharmaceuticals generally start out very expensive, and remain so while the market will bear it. Imagine wealthy bosses, banksters, and connected government officials can afford these treatments and bestride the earth for (Zhavoronkov suggests) up to 160 years, while ordinary workers continue to peter out around 65. What prevents that devolving into drug-fueled, age-based peonage?

None of this negates Zhavoronkov’s science. Imagine what humans could accomplish with added decades to learn, dream, and build. If we could manage the Pandora’s Box Zhavoronkov’s science implies, the hypothetical possibilities truly make the heart soar. If we leave St. Augustine out of the discussion, the capacity for what humans could accomplish if we postpone death make everything in prior human history look small, purblind, and cribbed.

Rather, Zhavoronkov needs a Freeman Dyson or a Harlan Ellison to co-author his social vision, helping imagine ramifications beyond his areas of expertise. Zhavoronkov’s prose brims with potential, but he just ignores entire scientific and humanistic disciplines in crafting his rosy future. We must anticipate all potential outcomes, and read his words in context. Because we’ll either face the future we plan and build, or the future that finds us despite our denial.


Coda: After reading this review, Zhavoronkov sent me the following e-mail:

Hi Kevin,

I would like to thank you for posting a comprehensive and objective review of the Ageless Generation. It is a great pleasure to "meet" a high–level intellectual and well-versed in a variety of disciplines these days. Let me know if I can ever be of assistance.

Regards,
Alex

I want to publicly acknowledge Dr. Zhavoronkov for this message. After recent conflicts with authors who couldn't take criticism, it's refreshing to hear from an author confident enough to receive a review like this with grace and aplomb. Alex Zhavoronkov is a gentleman and a scientist, in the truest sense of those words, and while I cannot overlook his omissions, I find his science, and the man himself, solid enough to recommend both for curious, intellectually engaged readers.

Thank you, Dr. Zhavoronkov. Writers like you make reviewing a truly rewarding avocation.

The Year's Best Alice Munro

Elizabeth Strout (editor), The Best American Short Stories 2013

Every year, after I finish reading The Best American Short Stories annual edition, somebody inevitably asks: “Was it any good?” As though that’s a yes-or-no question. I usually respond with: “Depends. What’re you looking for?” Every year seems dominated by some theme, some insight that doesn’t reveal itself initially, but only after scrutinizing multiple stories. This year, your response will depend on how much you like Alice Munro.

Munro became the first Canadian Nobel Laureate in Literature two days after this collection shipped. Pretty good for an author who only writes short stories, in a market where short fiction venues haven’t weathered the digital revolution well. If short fiction has any future in today’s marketplace, it’ll come from authors absorbing Munro’s influence. American literature once needed a thousand Mark Twains; today it needs ten-thousand Alice Munros.

Well, this collection offers twenty, including Munro herself. Ironically, Munro’s contribution to this year’s collection, “Train,” is perhaps the most conventional story I’ve read from her. It has her accustomed generational sweep, and eschews climactic peaks, preferring gradual revelatory patterns. Yet she retains a sequential narrative and keeps focus on one defining character. It’s surprisingly linear from today’s most quintessentially non-linear narrative artist.

Though this year’s other featured authors don’t merely mimic Munro, her influence pervades this collection. Like Munro, most of these authors favor introspective narratives that resemble one character’s personal memoirs, rather than action- or dialog-driven external events. Two stories even utilize the diary format. And most authors eschew Freytag’s Pyramid, the movement from exposition to climax to denouement, which one of my writing mentors called the “Male Orgasmic Story Model.”

Instead, Munro and her votaries favor an arc of realization, as characters gradually uncover some concealed truth about who they are. Rather than one glaring moment when truth becomes unavoidable, these stories preponderantly prefer the friction that, with time, produces a pearl. Narrative becomes the process of discovery, not the history of moments. As Lorrie Moore puts it herein, “Mutilation was a language. And vice versa.”

Alice Munro

Different authors use this arc to different purposes. Karl Taro Greenfeld, in “Horned Man,” gradually builds a Poe-ish tension that, in its final moments, never gets resolved, leaving savory dread in readers’ brains. Kirsten Valdez Quade’s “Nemecia” unpacks the influence two cousins exercised on each other, growing up Spanish in the English-speaking southwest. These stories showcase a dark side to what we might call Munrovian fiction.

Authors like Daniel Alarcón and Suzanne Rivecca display another face. Nobody would mistake any story herein for Pollyannaism, and only fools would seek happy endings between these covers; yet these authors refute hip nihilism. Rivecca’s “Philanthropy” describes the healing a social worker begins when she stops playing socially acceptable roles. Alarcón’s “The Provincials,” though, shows a young actor beginning maturity when he chooses what adult role he wants to play.

Not every author handles Munrovian influence equally well. George Saunders, in “The Semplica Girls Diary,” starts an interesting story rolling, poses timely questions… then just stops. I’m reminded of that advice so often given undergraduates: “This story ends where it should be beginning.” David Means’ “The Chair” features a protagonist who receives a spectacular narrative opportunity, but, largely finishes where he began, resisting any opportunity for Munro’s powerful revelatory arc.

If this collection suffers one notable weakness, I’d cite narrow aesthetic diversity. Of the twenty stories, two magazines, The New Yorker and Granta, contribute nine. The remaining eleven come from generously sponsored glossy magazines; quirky, experimental lit rags stuff the Honorable Mention section. This perhaps explains the preponderance of white and Hispanic authors, particularly semi-celebrities like Jim Shepard and Junot Díaz. (Didja ever think any critic would disparage Hispanic privilege?)

Of these twenty authors, ten teach university-level creative writing. Though I’m nobody to condemn academic writers, this seems a remarkable number, representing prestigious schools like MIT, Vanderbilt, and Stanford. Alice Munro just writes, that’s what she does, and it shows in her distinct vernacular style, which other authors mimic, but seldom capture. Does this reflect the editor’s horizons, or does it reflect who has time to write in today’s economy?

Notwithstanding such momentary hiccups, this year’s eminently readable collection collects prime examples, from today’s prestigious names and looming stars. All “best of” collections have subjective views, reflecting the anthologizer as much as the market. But in today’s turbulent magazine market, this collection demonstrates two important, almost inarguable facts: first, short fiction retains its place in cultural discourse. Second, we have seen the future, and it looks like Alice Munro.