For the Birds

 
For the Birds

Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze

by Elizabeth Cherry

Rutgers University Press

2019

 

 

A few years ago, my friend Liz Cherry wrote a book about birdwatchers. For the Birds is an ethnographic study of people who enjoy birdwatching as a hobby. Cherry spent 3 years going on weekly birding walks with several local Audubon Society chapters, attended a number of special birding events during that time, and interviewed about 30 birdwatchers.

 
The first thing I learned is that I should probably say that Cherry studied 'birders' rather than 'birdwatchers,' since that's how the hobbyists prefer to identify themselves. I also learned just how popular a hobby it is, with something like 30% of American adults over the age off 55 participating to some extent. (It's less popular among younger people.)

 
Cherry argues that birders, especially ones who go on weekly Audubon Society walks, develop what she calls the 'naturalist gaze' as a result of their hobby. The naturalist gaze is a way of looking at the world that is attuned to the sight  (and sound!) of birds and their habitat. It incorporates advice about what to pay attention to, knowledge about the meanings of the things seen, and standards for evaluating how things could be better. Cherry describes what the birders learn, how they learn it, and what the consequences are.
 

The initial chapters primarily focus on Cherry's ethnographic observations about what birders do and how they learn to do it. Color photographs taken on bird walks enliven the text by illustrating birds that are mentioned as they appear in nature.

 
In addition to learning how to see and identify birds, birders start learning about birds, which affects the way they think about them. Initially, birders might want to see 'rare' or very brightly colored birds, but as they learn, they start to appreciate the common birds that they're able to see every day, and the plain-looking birds that are at home in their native environment.

 
Birders make moral judgments, scorning 'bad birds' like European Starlings and House Sparrows, which are invasive, non-native species that were brought to North America in the 1800s, and cowbirds, which lay their eggs in other birds' nests.

 
Many birders participate in citizen science efforts, like the annual Christmas Bird Count, initially developed to supplant traditional Christmas bird shoots. Although scientists who don't use citizen data (and birders who don't have scientific training) tend to be instinctively skeptical of the quality of data collected by citizen science, Cherry finds that birders are quite conscientious, and the data they collect is of high quality. And because of their numbers, professional ornithologists could never come close to matching their currently available data without the efforts of citizen scientists.

 
Birders also tend to become interested in environmental conservation as a consequence of their affinity for birds. They often grow native plants and set up feeders and nest boxes in their yards. They also often become interested in habitat preservation and restoration, and may become involved in activism, especially at the local level. One finding that surprised Cherry though, is that relatively few birders are vegetarians, although this dietary change would impact natural habitat.

7th Time Loop 1

 
 

7th Time Loop 1

The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!

by Touko Amekawa

art by Hinoki Kino

Seven Seas

2022

 

 

Did I say I was taking a break from manga? Apparently it was a very short break. One of my coworkers recommended (and lent me her copies of) 7th Time Loop. It's still coming out, so I'm only going to read the first two volumes for now. Next month I'll also start another series that I've been wanting to read.

The first volume of 7th Time Loop introduces the series premise. Rishe is minor royalty who was engaged to the crown prince of her kingdom. On her 15th birthday, he publicly breaks up with her, denounces her for imaginary crimes, (which is what makes her a villainess I suppose,) and exiles her from the kingdom. She connects with some traveling merchants, learns the trade, and then dies in a war on her 20th birthday.

And then she's reincarnated, right at the moment of the breakup! In her second life, Rishe becomes a botanist and herbalist. Again she dies on her 20th birthday, and again, she's reincarnated at the moment when her fiance exiles her. In another life she's a maid, and in her sixth life, she lives dresses as a man and becomes a knight. This time she doesn't just die in the war, she's killed personally by the dread emperor Alexander who started it by overthrowing his own father.

At the start of her seventh life, which will be the focus on the series, presumably, Rishe must be subjectively about 45 years old, although of course she's reincarnated back into her 15 year-old body. As she's fleeing the palace, she runs into a young, visiting, Prince Alexander. He falls in love at first sight, and since Rishe's just been very publicly dumped, asks her to marry him instead. Rishe initially resists. From her perspective, future Alexander just killed her a few minutes ago. He's carrying the same sword. She also realizes that all her deaths have been the result of his war.

But Rishe also wonders if she could influence Alexander to not attempt his coup. She realizes his country is one she's always wanted to travel to, and never had the chance. And she realizes, based on the way her life in each reincarnation has taken wildly different turns based on decisions she makes relatively early on, that if she doesn't marry him in this life, she'll never get another opportunity. So she agrees, although she insists on a chaste courtship.

Rishe initially impresses Alexander with the evidence of her martial training. On the ride back to his country, she also uses her herbalism to save some people from being poisoned by bandits. There's a running plot thread, which I guess gives the series its title, that Rishe has promised herself to take it easy and relax in this life, so she keeps announcing that she won't do any work or take on any responsibility, but then when she is gifted a manor house to live in, she cleans the whole thing herself, because having worked as a lady's maid, she can't bear to force that work on anyone else.

At this point, the series seems light and comedic. Rishe and Alexander seem like they will probably go from him having a one-sided crush on her to some sort of mutual attraction. Rishe will probably continue to declare herself lazy while astonishing everyone with her work ethic and multiple careers' worth of specialist knowledge. And I suspect Rishe will try to understand Alexander's relationship with his father, and try to figure out if there's any way to keep the relatively nice seeming young man she's now engaged to from becoming the bloody-minded warmonger whose patricidal violence has killed her six times previously.

Forest Hills Bootleg Society

 

 
Forest Hills Bootleg Society

by Dave Baker and Nicole Goux

Atheneum Books

2022

 

 

Forest Hills Bootleg Society is a graphic novel set in the early 2000s, in the window of time when media existed on DVDs instead of VHS, but before you could stream or easily download films from the internet. Four high school friends try to buy bootleg copies of a couple kid-friendly Studio Ghibli films ... and end up with some very sexy, very adult hentai instead. (Which raises some confusing and conflicting emotions for them!) They decide to try burning bootleg copies of their own, and selling them to high school boys. What could possibly go wrong?

Brooke, Kelly, and Melissa go to the Forest Hills Christian Academy. Maggie lives in town, but goes to the public high school - she's also the only devout Christian among them. Maggie is also also the other girls' source for a car (her mom's) and a computer to burn the discs (her mom's ex-boyfriend's.) Kelly and Melissa are roommates. Brooke and Kelly are secretly dating. Melissa is extra-secretly crushing on Kelly. Adding money to the mix makes everything more complicated.

Brooke wants to use the status that comes from having money to become friends with the popular girls - which provides the popular girls with another way to take advantage of her. Kelly wants to watch more anime, learn to drawn anime, and figure out her feelings for Brooke and Melissa. Melissa wants to spend more time with Kelly, and also wants cool jackets like the popular girls wear (even as she scorns Brooke for wanting to be popular.) And poor Maggie just wants to be with her friends and go along with whatever they're doing, even though she has serious moral qualms about every aspect of their plan.

In addition to their interpersonal conflict within the friend group, there's dramatic tension and irony arising from the fact that they feel invincible and able to sell as many bootleg DVDs as they can burn, while we in the audience know that they can't possibly avoid getting into some kind of trouble, and that the more they sell, the more likely they are to get caught. Baker and Goux opt for psychological realism over wish fulfillment, so although we might want the girls to be spared from unhappiness ... well, that's not really what high school is like, is it?

The interior art is black and white with two shades of green instead of grayscale - a lighter yellowish-green and a darker blueish-green. In the afterward, Baker and Goux said they wanted to achieve something like a sepia-tone effect to signal that their story is set in the past. It reminded me of the earliest computer monitors. One thing that impressed me was a few instances where Baker and Goux managed to achieve an effect like a montage sequence in a film, by filling a page or two-page spread with dozens of small, irregular panels. One scene shows all the boys who bought DVDs being shocked, then aroused by the hentai. Another shows Brooke and Kelly surreptitiously holding hands at a youth-group meeting, while everyone else is watching the pastor.

There's not a narrator like you would get in a purely textual book, but there is an omniscient voice that appears in text bubbles to give information about the characters. Initially just information about the girls, facts like their handedness, their desires, their insecurities. We get a running count of how many times Brooke and Kelly have kissed. It reminded me of the rapid-fire narration in Amelie. We also get page-length asides telling more about the girls' history and emotions. Each is lonely, and each is only partially able to feel enough connection to the others to assuage that loneliness. Later other students get the same treatment. In some cases these are one-off factoids that simply establish that the girls are not the only ones with secrets, doubts, rich inner lives. A few of the side characters get plots of their own that unfold in the background of the girls' story, including Maggie's mom.

This is a book that's probably appropriate for older teens, in high school. All the swear words are censored by the classic technique replacing the letters of the words with symbols. We see homophobic bullying, racist bullying, fat-shaming masquerading as friendly-concern. Aside from kissing, we only see implications of sexuality, or the moment before something happens, with only a facial expression or the suggestion of movement to indicate what will come next. Considering that the whole plot revolves around teenagers being surprised by and then sharing pornographic images, I would trust teens to know when they're ready to encounter a story where people do that. It's something much easier to do today than it was in the early 2000s, and I suspect that some teens might welcome a book that takes the power of sexual imagery seriously, both as something people might seek out, and as something that might affect them in ways they weren't prepared for.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

 
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
by Italo Calvino

translated by William Weaver

Harcourt Brace

1969 and 1973, reprinted 1976

 

 

The Castle of Crossed Destinies is like Italo Calvino's Canterbury Tales or his Decameron, although unfortunately, I only mean that in terms of form and content, not quality. This is not Calvino's best work.
 
Calvino is known for using gimmicks and tricks to provide structure to his work, and then to tell stories within the lattice his rules have established. In this case, he takes a deck of tarot cards, lays them out in a grid, then tries to come up with sensible stories by following one card to the next, up and down the columns, and across the rows.
 
In fact, he performs this party trick twice, once using an Italian tarot deck as his inspiration, and then again using a French deck with different art. (I believe that these two novellas were originally published separately; in English they only appear in a combined edition.) His second attempt is notably better than the first.
 
So, the conceit here is that Calvino and other storytellers are in a castle or tavern, they are all rendered mute, and they take turns telling their stories by laying out the tarot cards. Calvino interprets what they must mean, and we are led to believe that everyone in the castle has the same interpretive experience and achieves the same understanding. Then, once the grid is finished, Calvino looks at the completed layout and sees other possible stories.
 
Also, the interpretations are supposed to be based less on the traditional symbolic meaning of the card and more on its specific artistic rendering. Aiding this process is the fact that on each page, images of the cards mentioned on that page are reproduced in the side margin. It both makes the book visually very interesting to look at, and being able to see the cards he's describing definitely enhances the reading experience. Once the full tarot grid is assembled, that's reproduced too, once for each version. This is what the French tarot grid looks like:

 

 
In the first version, Calvino spends so much time explaining how he slowly, haltingly, confusedly moves from looking at the card art and watching the storytellers' facial expressions and body language to arriving at a narrative that the stories are overwhelmed by his imaginary translation of their telling. In the second version, he still points to specifics in the art a lot, but gets out of his own way a bit more, which helps a lot.
 
The images on tarot cards are meant to be archetypal, and Calvino's stories all feature archetypal medieval characters - though the plots tend to go off the rails compared to the originals, and they often end in chaos, either with an apocalyptic disaster, or else with several stories converging until it seems like every character is the same character and every tale is the same tale.
 
So we get a lot of knights and queens, nuns and alchemists, Faust and Parsifal, Hamlet, Merlin, the paladin Roland. Angelic women, Death, and the Devil all show up repeatedly. We don't get much in the way of characterization or interiority. What the cards produce are characters and events, not really motive or psychology. Whenever Calvino stops narrating the translation process, the plots can move at a breakneck pace.
 
As a thought experiment, this is interesting. As a work of fiction, I don't think it's particularly successful. Calvino's playfulness, his allusions to classic literature, and his subversion of traditional story endings are all kind of fun, but for me, they were outweighed by the belabored way he showed his work of moving from card to text.

Ducks

 

Ducks
Two Years in the Oil Sands

Drawn & Quarterly

2022

 

 

Ducks is a graphic memoir by Kate Beaton, author of the Hark! A Vagrant webcomics. I absolutely love her silly little comics, poking gentle fun at history and literature. I believe she's also written a pair of children's books about kings and ponies. So a 400 page memoir about the time she spent working in the Canadian oil industry to pay off her student loans is something of a departure from the work she's most famous for. It is depressing and bleak, and a work of unreciprocated empathy for the men who work there full-time. And it is a masterpiece, a thoughtful and mature work by an artist at the top of her form.

 

At first glance, Ducks resembles Beaton's other projects. The character drawings have her signature look, and she paces her storytelling so that each page or 2-page spread contains a single complete vignette. But this is a different sort of story. Beaton catalogs her personal experiences, but she also examines the economic and geographic inequalities that send so many people like her, from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in the east, over to dangerous and demanding (but well-paid) blue collar jobs in Alberta in the west.

 

Beaton also looks at the gender inequality that structures the experiences of women working in these labor camps, where they are outnumbered 50-to-1, and where whatever fraction of the men engage in sexual harassment (half? less?) are numerous enough that she is stared at, propositioned, and verbally harassed all day every day; numerous enough that men pop into her room whenever her door is unlocked, and her door-handle rattles in the night as they check to see if they can get in under cover of dark; that she is assaulted more than once by men who suffer no consequences for their actions. 

 

Other reviews mention the harassment, but to my mind, it is the thing this book is about, even as she addresses other topics. She remembers incident after incident, recounts anecdote after anecdote. Across the 400-pages, most of them show her being harassed, or show her trying to process and understand it.

 

Katie has just finished college, and wants to try to become a professional artist, but thinks that to do that, she needs to pay off her student loans so she'll have the financial room to take risks. Everyone in Nova Scotia grows up knowing of relatives who went west, where the jobs are, to provide for their families, and so she decides to do the same. 

 

Katie gets advised to try for a job in the tool crib, where she will check out and receive back equipment from the people working in the field, and she manages to get hired for a spot. Initially she also waitresses in town to help cover the costs of her travel and rent. The harassment at work is immediate, overwhelming, bewildering, and when she tries to ask some of the older women about it, they tell her it's a compliment, tell her to toughen up, try to set her up on dates with some of the younger men.

 

There are plenty of men who are polite to her, who show surprising kindness when she needs it most, like working a shift on Christmas. There are men who are her friends. But day in and day out, her most common experience with men is them sexually harassing her.

 

Katie moves to a new company to make more money, faster. She's going to be living onsite at a work camp, where her lodging and meals will be free. The men there are lonelier, more desperate, more willing to violate her boundaries. 

 

Katie starts to help her older sister and one of her college friends get jobs in the admin office. She's insistent that they not work exposed in the tool crib, like she does. Between then and when they arrive, she is sexually assaulted, twice, at weekend parties. She becomes understandably depressed and anxious. She blames herself, and feels responsible for what she's bringing her sister and friend into.

 

After the other two arrive, Katie's not alone, and she feels better for awhile. Her sister confronts her about her depression, and she tells her what happened. She takes a break to work at a museum, but can't afford both rent and her loan payments, and so returns, this time to an office job too. In the office, she is more insulated from the harassment, although it never really stops. She has space to think, and tells her friend what happened too.

 

While Katie is working in the office, another company, the first one she worked for, is responsible for a major spill that kills thousands of ducks. The incident that radicalizes her more is seeing a video of a First Nations woman talking about how the oil industry is operating on, polluting, ruining her people's land, and making her people sick. Katie realizes that she has participated in this harm, a fact that Beaton also grapples with in the author's note at the end.

 

Later Katie and her friend begin trying to tell their stories of being harassed. Many are unsympathetic. Others seem quick to want salacious detail, and to demonize the men. Katie refuses to speak to a reporter like that - she blames the working conditions and the companies who create them, and thinks that middle-class men from the city would act the same if put in the same environment. She doesn't want to hurt men like her dad, cousins, uncles, by helping to stereotype them based on region, ruralness, and social class. Nor does she want to defame the many men who've been kind to her here. As Katie's friend tells her, it's a shame her empathy for the men isn't reciprocated in their behavior toward her.

 

Eventually, Katie pays off her loans and returns home immediately, moving back in with her parents with no more debt, but also nothing in the bank.

 

Throughout the work, we see Katie and others comment on all the dust they're breathing, the chemicals they're exposed to. We see them worry about the long-term effects. In the author's note at the end, we learn that someone who appears prominently in the story got cancer around the time Beaton began writing this book, and died young before it was published.

 

One of Katie's, and I suppose Beaton's, preoccupations throughout the book is the question of why so many of the men act the way they do. Katie does not want to be flirted with by people who she wouldn't like back home, people who wouldn't like her back at their home, if she weren't one of the only women they ever see, people who she thinks really don't like her, but are just bored and desperately lonely, and want to use her as a means to an end. Unlike Katie, most of the workers, men and women alike aren't there for just a few years. The question of who you are at work versus who you are back home becomes more complex when home becomes a place you only get to visit, and work becomes the place you live.