Rod McKuen sold millions of poetry books in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a regular on late-night TV. He released dozens of albums, wrote songs for Sinatra, and was nominated for two Oscars. He was a flashpoint in the battle between highbrow and lowbrow, with devotees revering his plain-spoken honesty and Dick Cavett mockingly calling him “the most understood poet in America.” Every year on his birthday, he sold out Carnegie Hall.
But by the time I was a teenager, he had completely vanished from the cultural landscape. I only know of him because I spent the entire 1990s in thrift stores and used bookshops, and everywhere I went, I saw Rod McKuen’s name. His chiseled face stared out at me from abandoned hardcovers, torn paperbacks, and dusty record albums, all adorned with the most ’70s fonts you ever saw. He wore a turtleneck and luxurious blond hair on the cover of Come to Me in Silence. He reclined on a sandy beach on the front of Seasons in the Sun. On one paperback he stared out to sea and the title of the book told me just how he felt: Alone…
We often conceive of domestication as a process involving humans taming, penning or manipulating animals and plants. Domestication turned wild sheep species into livestock, wolves into pets, and weeds into cereal crops. It also transformed whole landscapes, as people learned to domesticate forests, grasslands, jungles and coastlines. But this is not a process that belongs to the distant past. Newer forms of domestication are still emerging as rural landscapes are turned into fields of solar panels, coastlines into concrete seawalls, and former deserts into forests. Each transformation is designed to serve human needs: to increase biomass, reduce food insecurity or sequester carbon. And, in each, domination appears to flow in one direction. Humans domesticate. But can domestication flow the other way?
In the months since my daughter started at her Montessori school, I'd become somewhat fixated on her lunchbox. When we enrolled, along with information about schedules and what to do in case of illness, the school sent us studiously healthy guidelines about what to pack for lunch: vegetables, fruit, whole grains, protein, and absolutely no packaged snack foods or sweets — in other words what many parents aspire to feed their kids, and what few toddlers actually like to eat. Reading through the list, I couldn't help but think of Alice Waters' descriptions from "The Art of Simple Food" of the elegant school lunches she made for her daughter: "Instead of sweets, I would send along fresh fruit, ripe and irresistible." This was our California cultural inheritance.
I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I’d noticed it, it disappeared.
I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
Set on an old Georgia turpentine farm in 1989, Andy Davidson’s third horror novel, “The Hollow Kind,” presents a shape-shifting beast only to ask if the threat to these characters actually comes from within. Nellie Gardner has just moved back to her ancestral hometown in rural Baxter County with her 11-year-old son, Max, and not much else — they left everything behind in South Carolina to flee her abusive husband. She’s come to claim her inheritance: a house and a thousand acres of pine forest called Redfern Hill, which has been left to her by her grandfather August Redfern. The land became his 70 years earlier, through a dowry from his father-in-law, George Baxter, a carpetbagger who bought it for 10 cents an acre during Reconstruction. For all its past profitability, now the trees have “gory black cavities up and down their trunks where, too many times, the bark was hacked and rehacked to extract the resin and the pines, over too many years, were tricked and tricked again into healing themselves.” From the beginning of this powerful gothic ghost story, it’s clear the real legacy Nellie is inheriting is one of intergenerational greed, and danger.