Feeding at Dandelions

Today for perhaps an hour I pushed around our reel mower, which, for those not in the know, is a non-motorized affair -- an equivalent in yard care (vs. the various noisy and noisome affairs that destroy suburban and village peace, while consuming deep-drilled fuel) to the pencil, pen, and typewriter in writing (vs. the electric word processor which so many writers take skittering across a million electronic landscapes).

At some point while mowing, my eye lit upon a lone dandelion bloom, which had upon it a feeding Sulfur. A butterfly. Both dandelion and Sulfur fall within the category of Vagrant Organism, since both happen to flourish readily under the conditions Caucasian rule has imposed on this continent -- conditions which include disrupted and damaged soils, and a narrowed range of dominant plant types.

So my eye was caught by this sight which should be utterly commonplace -- "vulgar," perhaps, in an older usage -- of a vagrant insect feeding upon a vagrant forb's sunny blossom ...

When this thought intruded: "How beautiful."

Butterfly flew away. Lawnmower, pushed along by force of my legs and bare feet, beheaded weed.

Alas, poor Beauty! I knew her ... well, momentarily.

Various thoughts filled me. We have seen few or no dandelion blooms in our yard for a month or more -- until now, when a handful are appearing again, here and there. We missed dandelion season completely, in terms of wine making, even though both Martha and I made noises about wanting to make some again this year.

Reflecting on missing this window of opportunity made me think that the people who realize most clearly the fact that dandelion blooms are fleeting in their coming and going are the home winemakers -- the ones who prize them, and know how promptly they must seize their chance.

What an utter puzzle it is that our society prizes lawns and loathes flowers that might disturb that green expanse, when the flowers themselves last so short a time. What a puzzle it is, too, that our society lacks respect for something that attempts to disrupt our un-beauteous lives with beauty. The disrespect arises, perhaps, because the beauty being offered is so commonplace -- even if not so common as it should be ... at least along our village street, where deleterious and long-lived poisons have ruined matters for even our most commonplace butterflies: for on this July day one might walk past yard after yard before spotting any vegetative sustenance that a lowly Sulfur might need.

How strange it is, too, to feel a celebratory twinge at seeing a butterfly that commands little respect even from lepidopterists. Sulfurs survived in numbers through the post-WWII disaster of DDT application and have thus far survived the neonicotinoids and other synthetic world-wreckers that have been unleashed by our so-called "agricultural" industries; their larvae feed on common vagrant forbs, as well as on commercially planted ones; adults produce as many generations in a season as they can, with the thoughtless abandon so appropriate to the vagrant.

Yet I felt the celebratory twinge, because while I have been seeing a variety of "better" butterflies in our garden I have seen none of these unassuming creatures for quite some time.

The fact that the rich and powerful among North American humans want all aspects of life aligned with the interests of their infinitely expandable pocketbooks has made our continent an uncongenial place for the poor, the downtrodden, and a supposedly commonplace butterfly.

The rich and powerful, mind you, regard themselves as the Beautiful People.

This I might believe, did they feed at dandelions.

For some reason the further thought appeared in my mind on this July day that writers should be like weeds: tenacious; recurring despite discouragement and attack; blooming predictably yet also, if lucky, unpredictably at other times, in some years; and commonplace.

Commonplace? Naturally. And should not readers, too, be commonplace? And beautiful?

I dream of the years before DDT and Agent Orange and Roundup, before Monsanto and Dow Chemical and Scott, before chemical lawn services, before the monoculture farming of the entire inner North American craton, before the gas-powered grass-shearing abominations that await sunny afternoons in every garage ...

Of the years when one kind of winged beauty by countless millions filled the air by day, and another sort, by night -- all of them alert and attuned to their vast world, and all of them alighting to feed at the countless millions available to them, in every variety, of blooms.

Cheers ...

Friendship, Kingsley Amis, and Gravy Planet

George Zebrowski kindly pointed out to me comments in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois and published in 2011, that seemed somewhat unfair to him. Early this month when looking for something else, I happened upon the fact that I could read Dozois's paragraph by means of Google's literary-property-transgression service, and found these words:

"Kornbluth is a complex, fascinating, and immensely talented figure now in danger of being forgotten, certainly a worthwhile figure for a biological study and critical reassessment if there ever was one. Unfortunately, clouds of controversy have swirled around the book from its release, mostly for the intensely unflattering portrait it paints of Kornbluth's friend and lifelong collaborator Frederik Pohl, which have caused Pohl to vehemently deny the veracity of many of Rich's 'facts'——all of which has cast something of a shadow over what by rights should have been one of the preeminent genre nonfiction books of the year."

Is "biological" a Google artifact? I hope so.

What I wrote about in my book, of course, I based on archived physical correspondence: facts——not, as Dozois puts it, "facts."

Dozois thinks it unfortunate that "clouds of controversy have swirled around the book from its release." May I say that too few clouds swirled? I had expected something other than utter silence about the nature of Pohl's acts, some of which I found despicable, and some, horrifying.

Why, for instance, did no stir erupt among science fiction readers who respect Hugo Award history and integrity, that among Kornbluth's multiple finished stories at his death was one entitled "The Meeting"?

Apparently some off-radar consternation did arise, in private channels, concerning Pohl's appropriation of Phil Klass's memorial volume: for Pohl did write briefly, if inadequately, about this issue on his blog. In public, however, to my knowledge, no such stir arose.

It does disturb me that Dozois joins miscellaneous dismissive commentators who assume they know more than does the biographer. His words here, "friend and lifelong collaborator," are akin to Patrick Casey's SFRA review comment on my book——that "the one-dimensional depiction of Pohl ignores the fact that Kornbluth remained friends and even partners with Pohl for the majority of his life." This seems to be all people "know" about Kornbluth, and all they want to know, since they persist in parading it as if displaying a great acquisition of knowledge. I wish these people would find a way to document this: for what I found in the correspondence was a frayed, contentious, occasionally ugly and several times completely broken relationship. Pohl in particular engaged in behavior that struck me, and strikes me, as unfriendly in the extreme——even at a moment when Kornbluth was in need of help; and his behavior after Cyril's death I find, as I noted, despicable.

Is friendship like a road of trust, with two lanes moving thoughts and goods in opposite but equivalent ways? Does it include some balance of giving and taking, offering and accepting?

If so, I find it difficult finding, at any point during the relationship between Kornbluth and Pohl, from the late 1930s into the 1950s, real evidence of a two-way friendship.

Kornbluth did evince feelings of friendship toward Pohl, at times, in various degrees: for he did give amply into the relationship. As Merril said of him, Cyril felt loyalty. The sense of old Futurian ties did persist in his heart.

We know this because Cyril wrote Gravy Planet to keep Fred out jail.

This knowledge we have from MacLean. We have it, too, from Klass.

How grand a gift this was! What utter, selfless generosity!

Yet before and after that supreme gift Pohl regarded self before others. He regarded Pohl above Kornbluth. He certainly regarded his own financial wants above those whose finances he held in his keeping.

We know his attitude went unchanged, moreover——for he never responded to Cyril's generosity with a return gift.

When Kingsley Amis made his famous, mistaken assessment, Pohl might have seized the moment to give something in return to Kornbluth. How small a gesture it would have been, to demur——simply to admit that Kornbluth was the one most responsible for the writing Amis admired.

How small a gesture——yet how grandly and warmly it would have reflected back upon him!

In 1952, with money from Gravy Planet, Pohl repaid some debts to society——and to some degree healed wounds he had inflicted upon a circle of writers. He found himself in the position to do so, however, only through having incurred an immense new debt to a fellow-worker.

He seemed not to understand that the new debt had no less reality than the old ones. Having avoided jail ended the matter in his mind, to all appearances.

Then in 1960 Amis calmly dismissed Kornbluth as "prolific and competent" and, on the other hand, spoke of seeing "pure Pohl" in The Space Merchants.

Amis also described Kornbluth's The Syndic as "a chronicle of minor wars following upon a major one." So did Pohl read that absurdly off-base summary and think that no one, surely, would take seriously the comment about "pure Pohl"? I rather doubt it——especially since, a few pages before, Amis had written those words that have appeared on so many book covers: "Frederik Pohl, the most consistently able writer science fiction, in the modern sense, has yet produced."

I find it quite interesting to discover, in glancing back through pages in New Maps of Hell, that Kingsley Amis engaged in a mistaken attribution. Take these observations from his discussion of the The Space Merchants, about the protagonist "escaping finally to a Venus uncontaminated by Fowler Schocken and his friends from an Earth that is still largely under the sway of the old régime. The closing scenes, on which I suspect the hand of Kornbluth lies heavy, offer little but adequate excitement and are not altogether a conclusion to the issues raised in the opening chapters."

Why does this catch my eye now? As readers of my essay in Cascadia Subduction Zone will be aware, after publication of C.M. Kornbluth I learned that older readers within the science fiction field had fallen into the habit of talking about and praising The Space Merchants even though they had never read the book. They had read only the magazine serial named Gravy Planet.

Amis seems to have been one such. He read the version that came out of Kornbluth's typewriter——not the gutted and sexually sophomorized book, which came out of Pohl's, and which lacks those "closing scenes" of "little but adequate excitement."

This discovery does give me a feeling of relief. How in the world, I have sometimes wondered, could Amis have liked The Space Merchants so well?

I doubt he would have. Instead, he enjoyed Gravy Planet, wrote about it with some penetration, and attributed it to Pohl——thus adding to the debt the latter felt needed no repayment.

Cheers ...

(Amis, by the way, took particular interest in "The Midas Plague." Pohl once wrote to Kornbluth acknowledging that the latter contributed many bits of "business" to that story, even though publicly the former never held the story out as collaborative. Strangely, I just looked in C.M. Kornbluth and found only one reference to that story in the index——which means I failed to include that information, misplaced the relevant document copy or notes during writing, or simply missed indexing it. Any one is possible.)

On Richard Bowes, Poem-Writing, and "Jacket Jackson"

I have been thinking lately of words Rick Bowes penned about a collaboration of ours entitled "Jacket Jackson."

That oddball novelet has reappeared thanks to Fairwood Press——in Rick's collection If Angels Fight.

I read the book in its entirety earlier this month. Since I had been away from his fiction for several years, due mainly to being preoccupied with a reading programme that kept me mostly clear of the contemporary, in returning to Bowes's stories I was returning to a too-long set-aside pleasure.

I find it interesting how well several of these stories still stand on their own: for these became parts of novels, and lost their separate identities within greater wholes. I had not revisited them since enjoying and admiring his novels Minions of the Moon and From the Files of the Time Rangers. Yet qualities that made the short works attractive, in those times before the novels existed, remain unchanged. In particular the allusive texture of his sentences retains its power to take the reader in several directions at once: forward in story-time; and backwards or, it often feels, inwards into now-fading personal-historical memory. It does one or both of these while conveying hints concerning a larger understanding of the contemporary-fantasy worlds in which Bowes's characters and readers find themselves.

The peculiar flavor of Bowes stories arises in part from the aspect that makes me want to call them nonfiction fantasies: for they open the way photo albums do (or did, in days when people kept photo albums), in presenting discrete moments, one after another, from a fixed and absolute past.

The turning of album pages, the succession of tableaus, the procession of frozen moments: it goes on, utterly believable because, whatever limits or distortions might have arisen in the pointing of lens or eye, a focus upon a truth centers each record or memory.

Photographs make past moments part of our contemporary moments——and so they offer means for achieving an immediacy that is layered with public or private history. The note in a Bowes story that gives it its contemporary feeling arises because the story usually involves factually recent events and perspectives, and because a common, Bowesian narrator, who lives within the stories' lead characters, is there turning photograph album pages before or behind their eyes, and before and behind the reader's.

For those various narrators, moreover, the contemporary moment being witnessed, remembered, or forgotten may be found in 1950, 1980, or 2010——one at a time, or all at once.

(For these or similar reasons, the use that Classical gods make of photographs works effectively upon the reader, in the wonderful novelet "The Mask of the Rex"——just as it works effectively upon the other characters in the story.)

Nestled among stories built upon this layered contemporaneity, "Jacket Jackson" may seem out of place. Clearly Rick thought otherwise, though, in including it. As fiction the story works for the same reason it fails: it is a mixed-up extemporaneous extravaganza pasted together by two congenial but quite different writers. (This wonderfully disastrous approach I recommend to anyone). It contains some layered contemporaneity but features above all one location, or quasi-location, that is utterly non-contemporary, utterly unrooted, utterly ridiculous——and utterly central to the tale ... if we dare call it a tale. Whatever regrets I might have about this extravaganza meet their answer in the fact that, as this collection makes clear, the mercurial humor that is so strongly a part of Rick Bowes the human being seems only weakly a part of Richard Bowes the writer. Yet the fact that I wrote some absurd passages in "Jacket Jackson" allows me to state that I wrote only some.

How clearly I remember dwelling upon Rick's contributions, when the steadily enlarging manuscript would make its return trip to me. I would do so with great pleasure: for he was playing offbeat melodies so well that they were irritatingly funny.

Rick in his introduction to this story mentions the poems that are a part of it: "Like magic Mark produced them whenever we decided one was necessary (and even once or twice when I just wanted to see another one)." Rick did contribute in this area, as in all others: for I sent him masses of lines, often barely poetical——and he neatly edited them with the sense of compression that is his and that gives much of his writing such pithy character; and he worked at them with a certain musical sense. Bowes would have nowhere near the stature he does had he failed at developing his voice. Voice arises from one's sense of phrasing, duration, rhythm and miscellaneous other concerns that may rate more attention from the average musician than from the average writer but receive it in equal measure from an accomplished writer.

Those words of Rick's that I have dwelled on in recent weeks I quoted above: "Like magic." In my past half-year of consciously returning to basics, where I could, and trying to rebuild my craft on a more secure basis, in a sense I have returned to a practice I developed in the 1980s, with regards to poems——a practice of revisiting my lines again and again. These days I find I must keep doing so until I can determine if I actually have even the seeds of a poem. Yet in those trickle-downer years my ability to separate valid lines from invalid often fell short. What Rick says is, in a real sense, true: for I can conjure words at a moment's notice, let them flow, and then be done with it. For probably the major part of my writing life, however, I have not known exactly what to do with the resulting abundance.

The advantage (or dis-) that occurs in collaboration is that one can send random verbal efflorescences to one's collaborator without taking the time to taste, to savor——to see what of it might be broth and what, gray water (harmless, and not odious, but not what we would call an addition to a soup).

These days I find myself spending at least days, often weeks and sometimes months working at a poem. Not constantly; more off and on. When I was first thinking of writing on this subject, two weeks ago, I jotted a line that came to mind, depicting the aim of the process: "Going past the obvious and discovering the empty spots you are always littering into your words." The feeling has grown on me that I have written countless poems that I have left unwritten. The "written" form that appears on the page, no matter how often revised, only appears to be what it might have been. The poem itself lies somewhere within or behind the page——unseen.

"Jacket Jackson" features for a foreground character a young poet, Christopher, who ends as a loser after a chaotic series of colorful complications. I had started aiming at something different, for his fate——as did Christopher himself, as a character. (He did enjoy an odd, unpredictable life, somewhere in that unknown place in-between our two Richian and Bowesian writing realms.)

Had I not been within a lost period myself, when I was surrounding myself yet again with nebulous, hastily swirling words, might I have given Christopher actual poems? And had I done so, might his creative power as the maker, the creator, of an utterly non-contemporary and nonsensically underpopulated city——the City of Castoff Futures——have stood unshakably, to have triumphed in the end?

I suppose nothing would have saved Christopher. He was an improvisor——reflecting the fact that Rick and I were improvisors.

Christopher created a city of nursery-rhyme idealism ...

And we two created an oddly amusing, picturesque ruin of a story.

Ruins do draw the curious, as you know ...

And look: here I am drawn back to gaze upon this one, yet again ...

Cheers ...

The Cask of Purple ... and Poe's Prose

The other day my eye caught on a line written by a writer with experience, who was giving advice to one without:

"I can't advise on how to make one's writing more Poe-like because I don't admire purple prose."

It being his birthday today I feel it only fitting to let Poe's prematurely buried spirit utter its "Nemo me impune lacessit." To say Poe's prose is purple is to call it, as this writer also does, "the overwrought, some say hysterical, prose of Poe." This writer offers it as representing one end of the writing spectrum, with the "minimalist approach as used by Carver and at his best Hemingway" as the other.

To say some among Poe's narrators are overwrought and sometimes hysterical seems to me fine, as a statement. So does saying that some among Poe's narrators are saturated with rationality. We could also say that some are murderous, because of their being actually murderers; or that some are witty. Poe himself takes no place among the characters in his stories. His stories require that their narrators be someone other than Edgar, in order to work.

Clearly Poe put words in his narrators' mouths, or writing hands. I hope no one sees this as a damning observation: for he did so with a fine command of his materials.

Clearly, too, Poe worked in a literary atmosphere influenced by the Gothic; and his genius likely found this influence inescapable because complete escape offered no particular attractions. Yet his vision arose from within a sphere of other influences, as well, including that of Milton—although some readers may regard Milton, too, as "overwrought."

In any case, even if an author's narrator's expressions might seem to do violet violence to the English tongue, for someone to take that one narrator's narrative rhetoric from among the variety to be found within that author's works, and then to glue that particular rhetoric-name as a generalization upon that author's prose, strikes me as unfair to the author, and unbecoming to the one so gluing.

One might as well call "The Cask of Amontillado" purple in its prose because its hapless character Fortunato, who is not the narrator, in essence purples himself with wine.

Poe's prose offers many examples of his utter clarity of expression, as well as his economy of expression. These should offer correction enough to any accusation of purpleness in his prose.

(At a time when I was reading more Hemingway than I have in recent years I happened to read "Amontillado" for what seemed the first time. It may well have been my first time as an adult reader. I recall clearly my impression upon emerging from it that Hemingway would never have become the writer he did without Poe's story to point American letters in the direction it did.)

While as a reader I relish some wildly absurd passages in Poe's stories, I cannot call his prose in general wildly absurd, even as to its content. The absurd, however, has its place as a technique in his tool box. Similarly we would find Gothic excess to be a technique in his tool box. Similarly, too, we would find expressive restraint.

Among his stories we encounter some among the most analytically constructed works we ever will. In thinking and speaking about Poe we need to keep in mind his distinct and distinctive grasp of literary craft.

Grapes going into a crush destined to become Amontillado, by the way, I imagine must be darkly purple. Any excess of color falls away, however, by the time of casking. This happens to some degree naturally during the wine-making process.

Yet it happens to some degree, too, thanks to the skill of the winemaker.

Cheers ...

Thoughts on a December 31

This morning I donned black rubber gloves and performed a delicate operation. The manual typewriter I have been using daily has been producing quite light type upon the page; and I needed to address some envelopes. So I changed the nylon ribbon.

This operation would seem ordinary to more people had a formal philosophy arisen, in response to Modern and Age of the Masses excesses, dedicated to understanding concepts of sufficiency and adequacy.

I say this because while changing the typewriter ribbon my mind filled with thoughts relating to some reading I did yesterday evening about catastrophic climate change, and the possibility of its occurrence soon. Our Mass Age already ranks as a geologic moment of mass extinction. With methane eruptions from the sea floor on the increase, a percentage of scientists see no reason to think humankind can avoid attending this particular party.

That old exhortation hits home: "Party till you drop."

I regard the typewriter as a sufficient and adequate tool for part of my daily work. Likewise the pencil—in my hand as I write these words. Later I will use the computer to edit and then post this entry, assuming I deem it worthy. In other words, I am still contributing to the energy-use landslide that has led us, in the end, to methane eruptions. All the same, in this process I have clung to methods that have served me my entire life, as they did prior generations.

My thoughts this morning led me simply to this: that if more people had clung to old tools that are sufficient and adequate, we might have delayed this outcome—by minutes, hours, days, years ...

Corporations, of course, could not allow any such clinging. Small businesses could, back when sufficiency and adequacy registered more readily upon our ethical, moral and pragmatic senses, or outlooks.

At this point anything we can do may be too little. Those of us who have lived small lives—who have ranked among the poor, from the view of greater society—wonder sometimes what more we can do. We already have led lives guided, in part, by principles formed around the notion that society has taken a decided turn toward waste, toward the synthetic, toward the exploitive—toward corporate, not public, health at the expense of the individual, and at the expense of our world. We have felt ourselves surrounded at nearly all times by others who have bought into a way of life created and promoted by corporations.

What we can do to decrease carbon emissions, in terms of changing personal practices, seems trivial compared to what these others might do—if they, for instance, suddenly as a mass rejected feedlot beef. Would they do such a thing, though? No. For too many, the time when it is verifiably too late will arrive as an inconvenience they will feel sure someone will fix.

I write these thoughts (beginning thoughts, late thoughts—take your choice) at a time traditionally observed by the making of resolutions. Happy New Year! A calendar disappears from the wall.

Yet around this time, too, falls the ancient Saturnalia when the poor and powerless symbolically acquire all they lack.

In Van Wyck Brooks's writings I encountered the notion of Pelagian optimism. It sticks in my mind, lately.

Said Pelagius: "If I ought, I can."

I leave it at that.

Notes on Genetic and Poetic Languages

I read the recent news from University of Washington about the discovery that genetic structures use two languages. The previously known language involved "codons." The new one involves "duons," which are dual-use codons.

My first thought? That the corporate drones who have committed genetic manipulation will not bat an eyelash. So they fiddled like children with their building blocks, and never realized those blocks had an alphabet printed on them? What does it matter? They made money and will make yet more. Having done their bit for the dehumanization of agriculture they will sleep like babies.

Ortega y Gasset may have been correct that our scientists are "barbarians"——specialists who know a great deal about one thing. The scientists I have known have tended to be actual scientists in the older sense of being natural philosophers. If not directly engaged in a process of discovery, they at least felt innately drawn to that process, as part of their participation in a tradition of humanism; and they stood apart from the funnel-eyed engineers and technicians required by corporate industry.

Yet funnel-eyed uni-directionalist drones must be in good supply; and our education system seems set on producing even more, to judge from statements I read earlier this year, somewhere, about the end result of the "No Child Left Behind" directive ... disastrous results, to my mind: for this system teaches students that to succeed they must make points, rather than make sense.

Schools now are turning children into the equivalents of those websites that have keywords but no content, except advertisements.

I possess no deep understanding of codons and duons——nor even a shallow understanding, from the point of view of the biologist. Yet the literary ordering of words we call poetry offers me a way of thinking about these notions. For a gene is a thing as well as a type of a thing——and also an expression: for surely even a corporate drone cannot sever a gene from its expression ... not even with that Orwellian-sounding technique that I came across in during random reading recently: that of "silencing" genes. (Next they will be "disappearing" genes.)

Similarly poetry is a thing, and a type of thing——and an expression.

Northrop Frye aptly observes that poetry has two languages: so you might think in terms of two languages being spoken simultaneously by a poem that is "viable"——if you will allow me the botanical word. Frye noted that one reads, hears or understands not only the language of the poet's writing but also the language of poetry itself. You might say the poem gives voice to the poet's creative individuality while also giving voice to poetic tradition. We might take away a particular sense from the first expression, and a universal sense from the second——even though the poet is as much a participant in universal creative process as s/he is a separate individual——and even though our poetic tradition is not at all universal but rather a particular playing ground of interactions between writers and readers ... simply the current moment of ongoing process.

A Second Second, and Product vs. Process

The thought occurs to me that this second "language" of the duons may well itself prove to be a composite of two languages. I think of the language within ourselves that we use in setting our actions or behavior: for I do think we are all like William Dean Howells's character who discovered "that two strains of blood were striving in (him) for mastery ... paternal and maternal." (Brooks has a similar point to make about American character, in terms of conflicting maternal and paternal influences.) Blake knew as well as did Hegel that without conflict there is no growth; and this language of our actions and behaviors seems inextricably tied to our growth.

How can I help but think that this newly identified second genetic language is inextricably tied not to stasis and unchanging form but to action and behavior——and growth?

Of course, that this second duality would be literally maternal and paternal seems reasonably possible.

Yet another way to think of the situation comes also from Frye. He draws a distinction between attitudes: the Aristotelian, which regards literature as product, versus the Longinian, which views literature as process. A product has static and fixed qualities among its attributes. We might think, metaphorically, of codons being related to product. A process, in contrast, must have unstable, changing aspects among its attributes. So we might think of the dual-language codons now called duons as being related to process.

The genetic modifiers (I mean those who modify genes ... although I can think of endless modifiers for these corporate drones——such as "rash," "dangerous," "unthinking," "human-culture-threatening," etc.) would fix the world into a particular set of regulated patterns, so that agriculture could be reduced even further from being a process and toward being production line.

Wilder Thoughts ...

In the absence of those "two strains of blood," expression would seem a one-way street; and in nature how many one-way streets are there?

Think about this carefully. (I insert here a small tribute to late professor of philosophy Scott Crom, who urged on me caution when nearing the specter of determinism.) For what is "expression"? The production of oils from seeds, I suppose is one answer——useful, but not part of the ongoing give-and-take dialog of a conscious being with its universe.

A microcosmic theory will arise eventually that will ascribe consciousness to the gene——and why not? At its scale the gene must exhibit something akin to the complexities of piscine, reptilian, avian or mammalian nervous centers.

And if such a theory should arise then the purveyors of genetically modified organisms, and their hired guns and ill-inspired drones, may well find themselves suddenly ranking alongside slave-dealers of a previous century.

A thought to consider...

Gene expression should be free. If gene expression cannot remain free then human expression cannot remain free.

I pose this without too many hesitations, except for my use of "expression." You may know why: that sense of the non-communicativeness of "expression." So how about this.

Gene communication must remain free. If gene communication cannot remain free, then human communication cannot remain free.

Cheers ...

An Essay on Women's Speculative Poetry

In the continuing spirit of catching up on matters ...

My lengthy essay "The Transformations of Speculative Poetry: On Wiscon Panels in 2008 and 2013," appears in the September issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.

The essay has three sections that follow a somewhat logical progression, but that also reflect a sequence of events and memories. It includes as well reflections and reflective discoveries of the sort that move a writer through an essay.

I begin by thinking back to a panel at the 2008 Wiscon. This portion includes thoughts on Minnesota poets and on panel participants Terry Garey and Amal El-Mohtar. Reflecting on Garey's contributions prompted thoughts on a generation divide that is marked by a change in small-press publishing.

I speak then of meeting Kathryn Rantala, and being reminded by her of an aspect of speculative poetry that spoke, and speaks, to both of us. This leads me to explore speculative poetry's place in a larger literary historical order. These thoughts will likely come across as overly condensed to most readers, for they certainly do to me. I do believe, however, I convey my understanding of the form's situation.

I conclude with an account of the panel "Women's Speculative Poetry Now," which took place in May this year. This section draws upon notes I took, based on comments by participants El-Mohtar, Shira Lipkin, Sofia Samatar and Lesley Wheeler.

Please note that I make no mention of the strange conjunction of misunderstanding and personal politics that seems to have taken place at another poetry event at that same Wiscon, of which I was ignorant.

One sentence in the printed version appears in a way that leaves me, at least, thinking it makes no sense. In mid-first-column, page 24, the line should read, "Science fiction, a late Modern form, in the Age of the Masses rejected its Symbolist beginnings and became a literary game ..." Or it could read, "In the Age of the Masses, the late-Modern form of science fiction rejected ..." Or some such. If I punctuated it in my original manuscript the way it appears here, the reader's confusion may be laid at my door.

Weightless Books makes this issue, number 301 (26:1), available. My thanks especially to David G. Hartwell and Kevin J. Maroney.

Cheers ...