Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Hypothetical Review of Hypothetical Book

Charles Orr’s blog The Hypothetical Library featured a new hypothetical book by Lydia Millet and her husband Kierán Suckling called Apocalypse Animals. I couldn’t resist the temptation to hypothetically review it. All quotes therein are hypothetical.

Apocalypse Animals

Lydia Millet and Kierán Suckling

Hypothetical Library, ∞ pages, HC

©2010 Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Lydia Millet is probably best known for her fictional works, How The Dead Dream, Oh, Pure and Radiant Heart, and My Happy Life, which won the 2003 Pen-USA Award. Kierán Suckling is executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, the leading U.S. nonprofit on protecting endangered species.

Marriage partners themselves, Millet and Suckling have recreated what amounts to the pitch-perfect pillow whisperings of Rudyard Kipling’s The White Seal, and Jonah immediately after being thrust from the belly of the whale, were they married.

This is not for the faint of heart. What does a thorough disappearance look like? Millet and Suckling’s decision to focus solely on the ugly creatures in their debut non-fiction title Apocalypse Animals highlights their empathic acuity, as well as, and perhaps most importantly, our revulsion/deification of certain lives above others.

How lacking does the Alabama Cave Fish feel when her favourite eyeless flatworm is extinguished from the bowels of the earth? The book signals a mis-step in our concept of hierarchy, and food chain, as we come to understand the level of awareness of this tragically blind and translucent fish. Which of us is blind, for instance? What have we extinguished in ourselves that has led to the mass extinguishings on our planet? These are the complex questions with which Suckling and Millet grapple.

By the end of Apocalypse Animals the mind shifts. One cannot read—without some acknowledgement of the disparity in our corporeal yearnings—such sentences as:

“The fish nuzzled one another and shared what little food there was, noticing the other fishes, finally, by smell and vibration, and swishing over to drop morsels along the patient queue.”

We cannot any longer assess intelligence, wisdom, sympathy in light of this book. And we begin to know where we chart in the lives of those we daily affect: we do not chart. We are the sad, lacking lineage that, out of a hunger for power and beauty above sense and enlightenment, has lost sight, and become invisible to all the other creatures. We are not adored or reviled, and so, as the authors suggest in one poignant encounter with an alligator snapping turtle, “We feel ignored and ignorant, when such a creature does not even register us standing there. We have invented colonialism but not a way to communicate this idea to the animals. For them, we do not exist.”

The tragedy is that our actions impinge on their lives fatally. We have failed to consider the large picture in our acquisitional questing. From greed comes, eventually, nothing. So buy this book. Read it. Evolve!

48 hour interview: Antanas Sileika and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Open Book Toronto has this wonderful initiative in which they put a couple of writers/publishers/editors/book designer in the same cyber-room for a fixed period of time and let them have at it. Although Antanas and I both teach, we decided not to talk about that and so we talked about writing and risk, writing and history, writing and publishing. Here is a snippet:

“There was an article by Ian Brown in the Globe this weekend about the Olympics in which a quip from Bruce Kidd, the dean of the faculty of education and health at The University of Toronto stood out for me: “High Performance sport has become so podium focused that it has become impermeable to the curriculum of Olympism.”

Just change “sport” for “fiction writing” and “Olympism” to “Literature.” I do not know exactly what the curriculum of fiction might be in Canada, but I feel that perhaps the focus should shift back in that direction, whatever it may be. Fiction should be manifesting from rocks we writers dare turn over, from what ugliness we can shine light on and therefore, by the recreation, make something meaningful.

Of course as many risks as we may want to take as writers, we have to consider the gate-keepers in all this, we have to ask ourselves what will be publishable in our country.”

Here is the full article.

Writer’s Talk interviews Lynda Barry

Writer’s Talk: Writing through Reading is an online course offered by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer through The New York Times Knowledge Network and the University of Toronto School for Continuing Studies. The premise of the course is to study craft through fiction. The premise is enhanced by online visits by the authors themselves. This term Lynda Barry visited and charmed us completely with her unique approach to writing and her generosity. The Q&A is student led and is particular in its direction. The students were focused on the child’s perspective and illustration as they read Lynda Barry’s intense adolescent vision, Cruddy.

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Prince Harry in Afghanistan

If you look closely, you will see that Prince Harry’s feet are resting on a war carpet. This is a map rug showing the exodus of Russian forces from Afghanistan circa 1989. I have a rug very similar to this one.