Monday, November 5, 2018

Nature Writing

Untitled, (c) Roger Hiorns 

This coming May I am teaching an intensive two-week seminar at Loyola on Nature Writing. I'm planning this course as I finish my new book, Searching for the Anthropocene. One of the strange things about thinking with the Anthropocene is that, as Bruno Latour and many others have pointed out, the terms 'Nature' and 'Culture' no longer hold up as distinct, discrete categories. Nature constantly collapses into Culture, and Culture turns out to be shot through with Nature. Is there even a 'subject' in this class, if we can't look at trees or birds and simply categorize them Nature? Or if we look down at ourselves, our own hands typing these very words on a weirdly illuminated metal and plastic box, and find ourselves unable to identify this operation as indisputably Culture? (An eyelash is lodged between the T and the Y keys; a minuscule insect is bumping against the glowing screen.) Latour calls this all Nature/Culture, but for this class we're going to linger on the 'Nature' side of this combine, and agitate it.

Nature Writing of course has long and fascinating literary traditions, and in my class we'll read some of the foundational texts, practice the forms & styles, and learn to identify the aesthetic trends and tricks that come from this archive. But then we'll also complicate this whole genre, and push ourselves to wonder what Nature Writing even is, once we've admitted the problem of the Anthropocene—a problem which implicates us and infiltrates the cracks of things at every turn.

Loyola's new May-term is a perfect space–time for experimenting with this topic. I plan to teach Nature Writing as a concentrated two-week course in the following format: We will spend the first week close reading and discussing a range of texts that provide students a basis in environmental literature and aesthetics, as well as in ecological thought. In that first week students will give presentations on the readings, by way of grasping the contours of these traditions and concepts. Students will also experiment with pithy forms of writing to try out, in their own words, what we are studying. We will then treat the second week as a workshop in which we travel to different locations around New Orleans and practice Nature Writing and eco-criticism: observing and documenting various landscapes and ecosystems while writing about the places we visit, along one dirty coast in the anthropocene. Destinations for the second week may include Audubon Park, The Fly (Mississippi River), City Park, Mid-City (the urban landscape), Louis Armstrong airport (urban liminal space), and possibly Jean Lafitte National Park. By the end of the second week, the students will have finished and pitched their work (creative or critical) to public venues for potential publication. As a Creative Arts & Cultures course, the course will be of use to students in need of a core requirement, but it will also be useful for English majors and minors, as well as for Environment Program majors and minors.




Friday, October 19, 2018

Welcome to the Airport of the Real

Early architectural rendering of the new MSY

I wrote a piece for The Atlantic about the new airport under construction in my hometown. The new terminal is intended to be a "world class" structure.

I started writing this piece to better understand how the new airport would balance our uniquely local vibe with the more generic demands that commercial flight requires. But the article evolved into something quite different: an inquiry into how airports—and new airport construction projects, specifically—need to be thought about alongside the effects of climate change.

The day the piece was published, a reporter from a local TV station contacted me and asked me a bunch of great questions about this topic, a topic that gets easily hyperbolic and misunderstood. I've been mulling over several of the reporter's queries that really demand a bit more explanation. So here are some follow-up questions to the piece, and my further thoughts on the matter:

Do I think it was a bad idea to spend $1 billion on this new airport?

No, I don't think it was a bad idea at all. It will most likely be a great airport, when it opens. I'm excited to use it. (Of course, it will probably have some early hiccups—don't expect it to be perfect.) Then, after a few months, travelers will simply use the airport, and gradually forget that it was ever new. I think it was a good idea that we didn't spend $5 billion or $10 billion on a big showy architectural spectacle—even if it might have looked cooler. One of the points of my piece is that maybe a world-class airport for today should be modest—and as much as $1 billion sounds like (and is) a lot of money, it's also not nearly as much as it could be for a new airport. (Even the sparkling hotel in the above sketch was scotched from the final plan.)

A lot of cities are undergoing airport renovations and are similarly threatened by rising sea levels. What makes New Orleans different? 

Climate change doesn't set New Orleans apart from all these other places—it connects us all more intimately and urgently. No city can make urban planning decisions as if they are isolated from the rest of the globe. What's different, perhaps, about New Orleans is that the city has experienced devastating storms and the effects of poor planning and drawn-out recovery, so we have all the more reason to be upfront, honest, and proactive about the likelihood of future disaster as we continue to build and live in this city that so many of us love. My piece ended up being nudged along by the nagging question of what it would even mean to build a new airport with climate change at the forefront of planning and construction. (And this is very much an open question.)

What advice would I give to the leaders involved in the new airport construction?

Perhaps there could be informational signage in the new terminal about rising sea levels, coastal erosion, or climate change. I know this seems counterintuitive to the promotional tenor expected within airports—but then, really, is it so different from the ad spots for the WWII Museum, just directed toward the future instead of the past? We could use the airport as a place for education and contemplation of how the world is changing around us, and how humans are implicated in these changes (whether or not we believe it). The word 'world' in "world class" airport might be something to take seriously as a topic to discuss, a dynamic thing not to be taken for granted or accepted as a given. In other words, our world class airport might offer an opportunity to reflect on the actual world, our temporary and fragile home.


the real new MSY, emerging from the swamp


*

I've also wanted to post a link to something else that came out recently, and now I will—because it's related. Here is a piece at Sierra that I wrote along with three of my wonderful students, in which we reflect together on our Environmental Theory course of Fall 2017.

Climate change is not just a trendy topic or an abstract concern. It's a vital issue that a lot of my students are earnestly thinking about as they consider their futures. So I feel like it's part of my duty to teach and write with the realities of our world in mind, for the generations ahead that will live on this planet and hopefully learn to better coexist with the myriad other species and things that dwell here with us.




Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Jami Attenberg twitter essay

I taught this twitter thread in my "Writing the Short Essay" workshop at Loyola: 


(My student Ryan Mayer's marked up class handout.)

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Projects unfinished, finished



During my sabbatical year up in Michigan I collected shotgun shells off the bottoms of some of my favorite lakes in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. As I waded these shorelines fly fishing, I gathered dozens of the plastic and metal cylindrical amalgams in varying colors: red and green 12-gauge, yellow and blue 20-guage, darker red 4.10s…even the improbably thick 10-gauge shell, black—remnants of massive firepower expended on waterfowl, the casings then left to decompose at a hyper-objective rate.


I was vaguely planning to create some sort of art piece out of these spent shells, something that would reflect on waste and gun culture while also turning this detritus of hunting into something surprising, even something weirdly aesthetic. But I could never quite get it together. The shotgun shells kept accumulating, and each time I harvested a batch I got more depressed about them. Not just about how they were cast off and left, littering the shorelines and swaying in the shallows—that was part of it—but also about how they acted as small yet vivid reminders of a more embroiled and ugly knot in contemporary U.S. culture: the perceived right to bear arms, the shootings and murders that inevitably occur every month or so, and our seemingly futile ability to address this issue in any measured or meaningful way.

I did finish other projects that year, though. I finished my book Airportness, and also put together my new book The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth, which publishes this week.


In this book I brought together a bunch of pieces I'd written about teaching literature over the years, and I framed these essays with new material that I wrote while up in Michigan. You can read an excerpt from this book at the Paris Review, and another one at Literary Hub. I answered some questions about the book for Inside Higher Ed, and I wrote a post about the book for the Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog.

These are strange and gloomy times for those of us in the humanities and language studies. So much potential for thoughtful intervention, redress, and creativity—and so much flagrant scorning of what we do, from various sectors both in and outside the academy. I hope that readers find solidarity in my new book, and maybe even a modicum of inspiration to keep doing this work. I talk to my students a lot about the importance of finishing projects, but also about letting some projects go unfinished, allowing projects to get rejected or passed over, too. I find that having multiple, overlapping (if sometimes fuzzily related) projects at any given moment helps me actually finish some things. Then, the other things can slide off into the murk of memory and time.






Monday, February 26, 2018

Deliverables


“Let’s work really hard today—your parents are eager for deliverables.” 

I couldn't believe it when I saw this Edward Koren cartoon, which appeared in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Koren’s illustration shows circular tables of little kids working on various projects with scissors, glue, papers, and tape. The teacher, towering overhead, urges them on, calling for “deliverables.” Impersonal business-speak in the kindergarten classroom! Gross!

The problem is that if you’ve read Malcolm Harris’s new book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, or even if you’ve just been around a lower school classroom recently, the joke falls flat. The picture is all too real. And it doesn't stop at lower school. I wrote a review essay about Harris's terrific book for Public Books.

I've also been reading Nicholson Baker's amazing Substitute, which is eerily akin to Kids These Days. I say "also reading" because it's a serious slog: over 700 pages, recounting around thirty days of working as a substitute teacher in a public school system in Maine—each day meticulously, Bakerly detailed. It's fascinating and disturbing, with iPads becoming an increasingly ominous minor character as the book unfolds.

Speaking of deliverables, but hopefully not the gross kind, we're about to publish four new books in the Object Lessons series—Luggage, Souvenir, Rust, and Burger—bringing us up to 35 since we published our first four volumes in January 2015. I wrote a conversation essay with two of our recent authors, Anna Leahy (Tumor) and Susan Harlan (Luggage), about what it's like to write (and edit) these slim books. The piece is up at the Essay Daily.

I also wrote a piece on jet engines for our series, at The Atlantic. This piece was thrilling to write, on the heels of one of our NEH workshops and on a high from the scintillating energy of our participants and The Atlantic boardroom, where we held the event.

Some of my recent essays and other spurs are starting to converge around a new book idea, a book I'm thinking of calling Future Proof: Anthropocene Remains. I can feel it taking shape...it's coming together in my mind....

Friday, February 2, 2018

Advance praise for The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth


The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth captures the essence of what it is like to experience the wildness of the 21st century as an observant, thinking human. The banalities of everyday life mix here with the political urgencies and mediatic confusion of our age. Schaberg has sketched a convincing portrait of this unsettling moment.”

—Christy Wampole, Associate Professor of French, Princeton University, USA, and author of Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor


“In this book Christopher Schaberg asks us to consider the work of literature not so much as an antidote to ‘post-truth’ political culture in the USA as an alternative way of life. Here literature figures as lively engagement with the world, a practice of enthusiasm and commitment.

—Stephanie LeMenager, Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor in English and American Literature, University of Oregon, and author of Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century


“This rapidly cascading kaleidoscope of lovely readings and thoughts about reading, by the generous and imaginatively mercurial Christopher Schaberg, amounts to a guidebook for the significance of the Humanities in visualizing different futures.”

—Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University, and author of Humankind


Publishing this coming July! Pre-order today.