Grey Owl

Born an Englishman, he came alone to Canada at the age of 16. From that point on, he constantly tinkered with his identity and seldom went by his real name, Archie Belaney. He was a poseur, a bigamist, and a drunkard, but what he is best known for is his role as a conservationist.

He wrote four books, three of which appear in this volume, Collected Works of Grey Owl:

The Men of the Last Frontier (1931)
Pilgrims of the Wild (1934)
Sajo and the Beaver People (1935)

Sajo is a children's book. The rest -- including his last book, Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936) -- are memoirs that fall somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, for much of what he wrote about himself was made up. 

The book I enjoyed most in Collected Works is Pilgrims of the Wild, the first half of which is about the beaver kits that he and Anahareo adopted. He touched upon them in a chapter of Men of the Wild Frontier, but in his second book the writing is much more assured and a masterpiece of nature writing. His portrayal of the kits is tender enough to melt anyone's heart.

Biography

From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl (1990) by Donald B. Smith is the definitive biography, its name derived from the title of second chapter in Men of the Last Frontier. The footnotes alone take up 70 pages, yet it's not a tedious book.

Earlier contributions came from Thomas Raddall, who wrote a perceptive essay in his book Footsteps on Old Floors (1968), and from Lovat Dickson, Grey Owl's publisher, who wrote Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl (1973).

It was Dickson who arranged two wildly successful reading tours in England. Grey Owl was a gifted speaker, as was no more evident than when he gave a command performance for British royalty, and which so delighted young Princess Elizabeth that, as the talk drew to a close, she jumped up from her seat, clapped her hands, and urged him to continue. He took his leave of the king by touching his shoulder and saying, “Goodbye, brother.”

Anahareo

Anahareo deserves to be more well-known. She persuaded Grey Owl to save the kittens, McGinty and McGinnis, who so won their hearts that Grey Owl began his crusade to preserve the beaver, which had nearly been trapped out during the Depression. It was not until after his death in 1938 that she learned he was English.

Her memoir My Life with Grey Owl was published in 1940 by Lovat Dickson, who asked her to avoid mentioning the issue of Grey Owl's identity. Later this bothered her enough that she took to visiting libraries and tearing out the first chapter of the book.

In 1972 she published a revised version, Devil in Deerskins. In it she writes: "When finally I was convinced that Archie was English, I had the awful feeling that I had been married to a ghost."

Though wounded by the deception, she defended his legacy as a conservationist. At first glance the book's title seems like a rebuke, but in fact is a tribute, as Grey Owl planned to use that title for a final book in which he planned to reveal the truth about himself.

Later she married a Swedish count and in 1983, two years before her death, she received the Order of Canada.

Images

Collected Works, Land of Shadows, Wilderness Man, and Devil in Deerskins all contain several pages of B&W plates.

Two vintage film clips, both named "Beaver People," can be viewed at the National Film Board's website. One, at approximately 9 minutes in length, shows Anahareo interacting with beavers. The other, at approximately 16 minutes long, shows only Grey Owl and the beavers.

A 1999 movie, Grey Owl, directed by Richard Attenborough, was less than memorable, in part due to the miscasting of Pierce Brosnan as Grey Owl.

Casterologia

Many years ago I wrote a whimsical short story about a beaver family that meets up with Grey Owl and McGinnis. Entitled "Casterologia," it was published in the 1997 Spring issue of On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of Speculative Writing, along with this delightful illustration by James Beveridge.

The story concludes with a list of references, only one of which is made up:

Dallman, J.E. 1968. Giant Beaver from a Post-Woodfordian Lake. J. Mammal. 50: 826-830.

Heter, E.W. 1950. Transplanting Beaver by Airplane and Parachute. J Wildli. Manage. 14: 143-147.

Huey, S.W. and W.H. Wolfrum. 1956. Beaver-Trout Relations. Prog, Fish-cult. 18: 70-74.

Martin, H. 1892. Casterologia: Or the History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver. Wm. Drysdale Co., Montreal.

Owl, G. 1933. Sajo and the Beaver People. Macmillan, Toronto.

Studios, U. 1957-63. Leave it to Beaver. CBS and ABC.

Shakespeare, W. 1603. Hamlet, Prince of Beavers. Ling & Trundell, London.

Yellowknife

Recently I came across some promotional material that accompanied the publication of my novel Yellowknife, and liked it enough to revisit it here.

Oblomov

Usually I disregard the blurbs plastered on the covers and inside pages of books, but two on this one deserve notice.

Tolstoy on the front cover: "I am in rapture over Oblomov and keep rereading it."

And Chekhov on the back: "[Goncharov is] ten heads above me in talent."

Oblomov is a Russian couch potato, a flabby landowner who seldom leaves home and spends most of his day dozing in bed. Meek and gullible, he is an easy mark for his friend Tarantiev, who is as grasping and venal as any character in fiction.

His manservant Zakhar, who has dressed him since boyhood, is lazy, clumsy, petty, and loyal. Though he constantly complains about Oblomov, he defends him passionately if anyone else speaks ill of him.

Stolz is Oblomov's one true friend. Active, vigorous, hard-working, and well-travelled, he constantly urges Oblomov to get up off his butt and introduces him to a young woman named Olga. Love blooms and for a time Oblomov is transformed, but his inability to manage his own affairs dooms the relationship.

Though Olga ends up marrying Stolz, both remain devoted to Oblomov for his innocence and purity of heart.

Oblomov's Dream

One of the finest passages in the book is Oblomov's dream of his pampered youth and the simple happy lives of peasants on his family's estate. It describes an idyllic picture of Russian rural life.

Since Stolz and Oblomov grew up together, we also get a picture of Stolz's early home life and how different it was from Oblomov's. Stolz was taught to be self-reliant from an early age.

Analysis

It seemed obvious that the novel was intended as a criticism of the slothfulness of Russian nobility. In an Afterword novelist Mikhail Shishkin indicates this was the usual Soviet interpretation, but argues otherwise.

He states that the marriage of Stolz and Olga is doomed because Stolz is too preoccupied with material advancement. The part-German Stolz lacks the Russian soul that Oblomov and Olga share. Oblomov resists Stolz's advice because it is directed only at personal advancement. There is nothing noble or ideal in it, no higher cause to serve.

Translation

The translation by Marian Schwartz is a recent one and based on the 1862 version, whereas previous ones were based on an earlier edition.

The Jungle and the Damned

Published in 1952, explorer/adventurer Hassoldt Davis describes an expedition in French Guiana backed by France, UNESCO, the Explorers' Club, the New York Botanical Club, and others.

The book is divided into three sections roughly equal in length. "The Damned" comes first, and describes the infamous penal colony of Devil's Island, where Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned, and which was popularized by a book and film called Papillon.

The remaining two sections describe the ascent by canoe of the Maroni River, which forms the border between French Guiana and Suriname. The expedition's goal was to reach the Tumuc-Humacs, a mountain range near the border with Brazil where El Dorado was once thought to be located.

The book includes a map, 16 pages of black-and-white photos, and a useful introduction by Lawrence Millman, who says that Davis had "a passion for the bizarre and the grotesque, a passion that was to become one of his trademarks."

Davis mentions lepers and vampire bats, pirhanas (whom they frequently ate "to their suprise"), a vomiting contest, a test of manhood involving wasps one-and-a-half inches long, the singing of anacondas and an encounter with one that was 27 feet long.

Although the expedition did not quite reach the Tumuc-Humacs, it succeeded in its secondary goal of producing a film that was later released by Warner Brothers as Jungle Terror.

The book sent me scampering to Wikipedia where I learned that French Guiana, once a colony, is now a part of France and the European Union, and the location of a French and European spaceport. The Euro is its official currency.

Hemingway

There are some obvious parallels between Davis and Hemingway. Both were heavy-drinking Americans who thirsted after risky adventure.

There are also some parallels between this book and The Green Hills of Africa. Both are written in the first person and set within a few degrees of the equator, though on different continents. Both men were accompanied by their second wives, and both marriages later came to an end. Davis drank cognac, Hemingway whiskey and German beer. 

Unsurprisingly, they knew each other. However -- as Millman points out -- Hemingway "went to great lengths to prove that he was a war hero," while Davis actually was one. During WWII he fought with the Free French army in Africa and Europe, and was awarded the Legion of Honour and twice the Croix de guerre.

The cover shows a detail from "Tropical Forest" by Henri Rousseau.

Figures in a Landscape

Essays 2001-2016

Aspects of Paul Theroux's writing that I've always enjoyed are his astute observations, his acerbic jabs, and the vast range of his reading.

A self-confessed graphomaniac, he opens the book with an obscure quote from the bible (Habakkuk) and towards the end mentions a favourite book, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents.

His command of language is impressive without being pedantic. "Overegged" (used twice) is a delightful new word I learned. Its meaning was easy to guess at, or so I thought until trying it out on my wife. She figured it had something to do with a failed recipe.

Writers

Approximately a third of the 30 pieces are about writers -- Henry David Thoreau, Hunter Thompson, Joseph Conrad, E.B. White, Paul Bowles, Somerset Maugham, Harper Lee -- as well as:
 
Oliver Sacks - a brilliant man whose oddities make him resemble some of his patients. Theroux describes a walk around the streets of New York with him and one of his patients, a gifted artist with Tourette syndrome. Theroux observes Sacks observing how the patient interacts with others, including Theroux.

Graham Greene - one of the longest and most interesting entries consists of three articles grouped under the general heading of "Greeneland." One is about Greene himself, while the others focus on two of his books, Journey without Maps and The Comedians.

Muriel Spark - after reading this piece I rushed out and bought one of her novels.

Georges Simenon - predicted that he would win the "Swedish lottery" and was outraged when Camus did. Theroux remarks that there are interesting similarities in their work.

Travel

The core of the travel articles are set in Africa and include "Stanley: The Ultimate African Explorer," and Theroux's observations about Greene's African experiences.

In "The Rock Star's Burden" Theroux blasts aid projects, believing they do more harm than good, and takes specific aim at Bono's involvement, ridiculing "his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a ten-gallon hat, which he frequently talks through." (Dervla Murphy, in an Irish Times review of Figures in a Landscape, agrees with this assessment.) And when Theroux sees Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Sudan, "the image that sprang to my mind was of Tarzan and Jane." These views are dramatized in his novel, The Lower River.

Another accusatory piece is "The Seizures in Zimbabwe," which first appeared as the epilogue to the paperback edition of Dark Star Safari. It refers to farmers being forced off their farms and the country's resulting economic collapse. "Seizure" in this respect has a double meaning.

Autobiographical Musings

The last piece in the book is entitled "The Trouble with Autobiography," in which he writes:

I have no intention of writing an autobiography, and as for allowing others to practice what Kipling called "the higher cannibalism" on me (Henry James called biographers "post-mortem exploiters"), I plan to frustrate them by putting obstacles in their way.

He then gives a brief but interesting survey of autobiographies by major writers, noting their evasions, omissions, and falsifications, but at the end confesses, "The more I reflect on my life, the greater the appeal of the autobiographical novel." The book's final sentence: "Therefore, when my Copperfield beckoned, I wrote Mother Land."

In fact, there are many items of an autobiographical nature in the book, and include pieces on living in England and Hawaii, raising geese, collecting art, travelling in dangerous places, a narrow escape from a sexual predator in New York, and "My Life as a Reader."

The article on England (where Theroux lived for 18 years as an official alien) veers between the hilarious and the horrific (riots, bombings). "I learned to smile the ambiguous alien smile when English people said, 'America's so violent.'

One of the longest articles in the book concerns his father who, though born in Massachusetts, spoke French with a Quebecois accent (much like Kerouac, I assume). Theroux incorporated aspects of him in Allie Fox, the protagonist of The Mosquito Coast.

This book is Theroux's third collection of essays. The dust jacket photo from his first collection, Sunrise with Sea Monsters: Travels and Discoveries 1964-1984, is below left. The one from this book is below right.

Wilderness Tips

The title hooked me. I immediately wanted to see Atwood's take on such a Canadian subject, especially given her close association with the outdoors. In Negotiating with the Dead she writes:

At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown.

I found another of her books, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, to be a useful companion. It consists of four lectures she gave at Oxford in 1991, the same year Wilderness Tips was published. The lectures are on Sir John Franklin's last expedition, Grey Owl, the Wendigo, and women in CanLit.

Wilderness Tips contains 10 stories that portray a society morally adrift. All take place mainly in Toronto or in nearby cottage country.  The three I liked best all have an outdoor connection.

Wilderness Tips

There's a passing reference to the title story in Strange Things. Atwood says it includes a character who, like Grey Owl, wants to be an Indian, but in fact he's only a minor figure. The central character is a refugee named George who comes from a strife-torn European country. He speaks several languages but is still learning the finer points of English, as when he puzzles over a book with the name as the title of the story:

"Wilderness" he knew, but "tips"? He was not immediately sure whether this word was a verb or a noun. There were asparagus tips, as he knew from menus, and when he was getting into the canoe that afternoon in his slippery leather-soled city shoes Prue had said, "Be careful, it tips."

The setting is a summer cottage belonging to the family of George's wife. The cottage has the same name as a popular 19th-century Canadian novel, Wacousta, which Atwood discusses in her Grey Owl lecture. The title character in that book is an Englishman who disguises himself as an Indian in order to wreak revenge on his enemies.

George has come to Canada not to dress up as an Indian or to seek revenge. Rather, his masquerade as a charming and successful businessman hides a sinister past. The name he goes by, "George," is only an approximation of his difficult-to-pronounce given name.

George takes one more look at the paper. Quebec is talking Separatism; there are Mohawks behind the barricades near Montreal, and people are throwing stones at them; word is the country is falling apart. George is not worried: he's been in countries that were falling apart before. There can be opportunities.

The Age Of Lead

The main character has the same given name as Franklin's wife, Jane. She is watching a TV show about his last expedition. Forensic analysis of sailors buried on Beechey Island in the High Arctic revealed they were suffering from lead poisoning, the source apparently the solder used to seal their tinned food supply. It muddled the thinking of everyone on the expedition and contributed to its demise.

Jane's life has some disquieting parallels with the lost expedition. Her travels resemble the confused wanderings of the crew, and her material possessions are not unlike the useless items the sailors dragged along with them in their final overland trek and then discarded. Many of her friends are dying.

It was as if they had been weakened by some mysterious agent, a thing like colourless gas, scentless and invisible, so that any germ that happened along could invade their bodies, take them over.

"The Age of Lead" was inspired by the forensic discoveries described in Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger. In 2004 a new edition appeared with an introduction by Atwood and a quote from "The Age of Lead." In 2015 a book co-authored by Beattie, Franklin's Lost Ship: The Historic Discovery of HMS Erebus, includes quotes from Strange Things.

In Moving Targets, Atwood describes a visit she made to Beechey Island and how she carried away a pebble that she subsequently buried in Gwendolyn MacEwen Park in Toronto. MacEwen was a friend and author of a verse drama, "Terror and Erebus," which was broadcast on CBC Radio.

Of all the stories in this volume, "The Age of Lead" made the most appearances in magazines before being reprinted in Wilderness Tips: twice in the UK and once each in Canada, Germany, Australia and the US.  

Death by Landscape

My favourite story in the book begins by invoking the Group of Seven, whose landscapes are not done "in the old tidy European sense." They rarely include people or animals, and are often so stylized they are almost abstract.

The story centres around two girls attending a summer camp that encourages faux-Indian rituals. It's called Camp Manitou, and before a canoe trip they are urged to bring back "much wampum" and "many scalps."

Looking back on this, Lois, finds it disquieting. She knows too much about Indians: this is why. She knows for instance that they should not even be called Indians, and that they have enough worries without other people taking their names and dressing up as them. It has all been a form of stealing.

While on the canoe trip, Lois's friend disappears without a trace. The last that is heard of her is a shout: "Not a scream. More like a cry of surprise, cut off too soon. Short, like a dog's bark."

Possible explanations include suicide, foul play, and a bear attack. Another might be the Wendigo, a mythical monster discussed in Strange Things.

I doubt that I'll be able to look at another Group of Seven landscape without thinking of this story. 

The Other Stories

The ones I like best are:

"Isis in Darkness" - A man falls under the spell of a brilliant but mysterious poet whose work makes him feel “his own careful talent shrivelling to the size of a dried bean.” He ends up toiling fruitlessly in academia while she accumulates fame until her final unsettling appearance. (It's been suggested that MacEwen was the model for the poet.)

"The Bog Man" -  Another exhumed man, this time from a bog in Scotland. A woman has taken as a lover her archeology prof, "the first who did not treat sex as some kind of panty raid."

"Uncles" - The daughter of a war widow works her way up in a newspaper and endures snide sexual innuendo from male colleagues. After she makes the jump to TV and achieves fame, she is attacked in a book by the only former colleague she respected. The story ends with an imagined scene of incomprehensible misogyny.

Consider the Lobster

These ten pieces of journalism were written between 1994 and 2005, and range in length from 6 to 79 pages. Language, both written and spoken, is a major concern.

There are reviews of a novel, a dictionary, and the "breathtakingly insipid autobiography" of former tennis star Traci Austin, as well as general discussions of Updike, Kafka, and Dostoevsky.

The spoken word is dealt with not only in the dictionary piece, but also in articles about a radio talk show host and the Republican leadership campaign of 2000.

Interest in language can also be detected in the coverage of porn film awards in 1998 and the reactions of people in Bloomington Illinois during 9-11.

Following are the pieces I enjoyed most. They are also among the longest in the book. Greater lengths allow for the exploration of complex subjects and a fiendish indulgence in footnotes that are often lengthy, numerous, and themselves footnoted.

Frequent use of acronyms is another characteristic of DFW's style.

Consider the Lobster - A report on the Maine Lobster Festival. You can listen to DFW reading this essay on Youtube.

...lobsters are basically giant sea insects.

Authority and American Usage - An appreciation of Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of American Usage along with an erudite and entertaining discussion of "Usage Wars." First appeared in Harper's.

...there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person.

Up, Simba - Seven days on the campaign trail with John McCain during his quest for the Republican nomination for President, and the ugly mudslinging that took place before the pivotal vote in South Carolina. Bush is referred to as Bush2 or the Shrub, and Al Gore as "amazingly lifelike." This is longest piece in the book and was written on assignment for Rolling Stone.

By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky - An appreciation of Joseph Frank's massive biography leads to a knowledgeable discussion of Dostoevsky.

"One sign of the formidable problems in translating literary Russian is the fact that lots of FMD's books have alternate English titles -- the first version of Notes from Underground I ever read called itself Memoirs from a Dark Cellar."

Host - In 2004 DFW spent two months shadowing the controversial and much-fired radio talk show host John Ziegler at KFI in Southern California. It's easily the most eccentric piece in the book, for DFW not only delves into Ziegler's history and attributes as a successful host, but also the technical aspects of how the show is produced, along with an analysis of why such shows are popular and their position in the political spectrum.

The opportunity for digressions is so rich that instead of footnoting DFW uses a sort of two-dimensional hypertext. Reading it is an unique experience, though the format would be exhausting in a longer work.

The article is still available on the Atlantic Monthly's website, though it has been altered to make it more reader-friendly.

After DFW died in 2008, Zeigler wrote an editorial slamming the piece for its "inaccuracies and distortions" and called DFW "overrated" as a writer. One useful piece of information he gives is that DFW made some additions to the piece for its inclusion in Consider the Lobster.

Tristram Shandy

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 

Odd, rambling, tedious, erudite, bawdy, absurd, chaotic, baffling, shrewd, peculiar, pointless, obscene, sentimental, shocking, encyclopedic, exasperating, psychological, postmodern, metafictive...

Just some of the adjectives that have been flung at a book first published in nine volumes over a period of seven years, beginning in 1759.

Graphical and typographical hijinks are two of the book's most original features, but they also make it tricky to typeset and ensure that no two editions are exactly alike.

If you're contemplating reading it in e-book form, make sure these features are present. Any version without them is abridged and sadly incomplete.

Vol. I Ch. 12

Two black pages mourn the death of Parson Yorick, who is nevertheless around to deliver the final line of the book, identifying it as a "COCK and BULL" story.

Vol. III Ch. 11

Latin and Greek quotations are sprinkled throughout the book, with two large chunks of Latin handled in parallel with their English translations on facing pages. Another, Slawkengergius's Tale, appears at the start of Vol. IV.

     Vol. III Ch. 20

"The Author's PREFACE" appears here.

 Vol. III Ch. 37

Perhaps the two most famous pages in the book, colour in hardcover, grayscale in paperback, with the images varying by publisher. According to The Atlantic, the marbled pages "helped define the art of the modern novel." Follow the link to see more.

              

Vol. IV Ch. 24

 This chapter has been torn out by the narrator. In my old Penguin edition the pagination obligingly skips from 300 to 311.

Vol. VI Ch. 38

A page is left blank with the following appeal to the (male) reader to create his own image of Widow Wadman:

"...call for pen and ink—here’s paper ready to your hand.——Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind——as like your mistress as you can——as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you—’tis all one to me——please but your own fancy in it."

Vol. VI Ch. 40

Diagrams that illustrate the meandering plot in the first five volumes.

Vol. IX Ch. 4

Corporal Trim's illustration of an unmarried man's freedom, echoing an earlier comment by Tristram's father, that a married man will never be able "to lie diagonally in his bed again as long as he lives."

Vol. IX Ch. 18 - 20

By today's standards, charges of lewdness seem greatly inflated, especially when some are so obscure they require an editor's explanation, or when scenes are left completely to the reader's imagination.

Here, two pages (one each for chapters 18 and 19) are left discretely blank when Uncle Toby endeavours to satisfy Widow Wadman's curiosity about the wound in his groin.

One of the funniest scenes in the book occurs immediately afterwards at the beginning of Chapter 20:

Asterisks

Throughout the book, Sterne's coy use of asterisks is prodigal. The exact number may vary with different editions.  In one I counted 616 of them.

****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Dash It All

Sterne's dashes are even more prolific. He uses them mainly as punctuation but also as embellishments -- approximately 4500 times!

Fingers

Readers are given the finger three times, twice in Vol. II and once in Vol. IV.

Footnotes & Endnotes

Sterne uses footnotes throughout (the first novelist to do so?) but some are obscure and need explaining in the endnotes (if your edition has them). My old Penguin edition has 44 pages of them.

______________________________

 

 The movie version, which is about the making of the movie, reflects the novel, which is about the writing of the novel.

In the bonus features Stephen Fry, who plays Parson Yorick, visits Shandy Hall and learns about the strange after-life adventures of Sterne's mortal remains.

Shandy Hall - where Sterne lived and wrote

Asterisk* The Centre for the Study and Development of Narrative - located at Shandy Hall

Google & The Space Merchants

 

Recently I reread a science fiction novel published in 1953. It satirizes the advertising industry by imagining such grotesqueries as the marketing of cigarettes for children (Kiddiebut) and a coffee product (Coffiest) adulterated with a habit-forming alkaloid.

It was first serialized in a pulp magazine under the title Gravy Planet. One of the co-authors, Frederik Pohl, described in a memoir (The Way the Future Was) the difficulty of getting it published in book form. He was told by a friend and editor:

"Fred, look. I don't know how to tell you this, but it's no good. There are a couple of good ideas, sure. But you don't know how to handle them. What you need is some good professional writer to pull the whole thing together."

Eventually the book found a publisher and is now considered a classic. It's still in print, and according to Pohl has been published in 25 languages. Due to the clunky plot, however, I tend to agree with Pohl's friend, but there is one bit that has stayed with me ever since I first read it, the part where an advertising executive refers to "safety cranks" stopping them from projecting "messages on aircar windows," and mentions "a system that projects direct on the retina of the eye."

I was thinking about this as I read Steven Levy's book about Google. We don't have aircars yet, but will Google be able to resist projecting their search engine results onto the windows of their driverless vehicles? And as far as directing them onto a person's retina, is that not what Google Glass does?

In the Plex

The book was published in 2011 (before the development of the two products mentioned above), and the title comes from the name of Google's headquarters, Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. I'll skip over the development of the search engine and the incredible wealth it's generated by monetizing searches, other than to give a quote that provides historical perspective:

Though the Internet was different from other media, most Internet companies were still selling ads the way Madison Avenue had always done it. Google saw the entire exchange differently. Advertising in Google was less comparable to television or print than it was to computer dating.

An interesting part of Google's success is its vertical integration. It is the world's largest manufacturer of computers and owns "more fibre than anyone else on the planet." Google's hunger for data is due to the constant need to feed its search engine and provide expanding markets to its advertisers. The ultimate goal is "organizing all the information in the world."

Parts that I found especially interesting:

• the setting up data centres in Brussels and Oregon
• the development of Gmail, Chrome, and Android
• the gobbling up of other companies including Blogger, Picasa, and Youtube ("after Google itself...the most popular search engine in the world")
• clashes with Apple and Microsoft
• the competitive threat posed by Facebook
• an entire chapter on Google's failed expansion into China
• the fiasco resulting from Google's attempt to digitize every book in existence

Privacy

Google faced privacy concerns over its storing of searches and emails belonging to people with Gmail accounts. Even more alarming was its acquisition of DoubleClick, an ad network that "radically broadened the scope of the information Google collected about everyone's browsing activity."

Using DoubleClick in conjunction with its own search engine gave Google "an omniscient cookie" that "provided a potentially voluminous amount of information about its users and their interests, virtually all of it compiled by stealth."

There is much to admire in a firm whose unofficial motto is "Don't Be Evil," and in the unconventional business practices of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. (For example, doors set on sawhorses serve as desks.) Yet it could also be argued that Google has more than a passing resemblance to the advertising agencies in The Space Merchants.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Google is stalking me, which is why I've stopped using it.

Res Telluris RIP

Last year Res Telluris, the publisher of my novel Yellowknife, closed up shop and shut down its webpage. However, copies can still be purchased (from me) by clicking on the Paypal button to the right. You do not need to have a Paypal account -- you can use your credit card instead.

The cost is $20 Canadian and includes shipping. Trade paperback, 287 pages.

Or you can obtain a PDF copy of the book at no charge by emailing me at

Below are some comments from bloggers that appeared on the Res Telluris website:

Pickle Me This           
"The real joy in this novel, however, lies in the sharp, acerbic writing."    

Book Zombie 
"...no matter how great the characters and storyline are, the truly outstanding aspect of Yellowknife is the writing."

Brown Paper     
"At its most accessible, the novel is a hilarious satire, silly and absurd, but signs are scattered throughout the text indicating something deep down and more profound..."

evening all afternoon       
"One of the things I loved about it is the way in which Zipp conjures a bizarre, surreal atmosphere without (usually) straying across the line into magical realism."    

Bookchase
"Yellowknife, much like the early novels of John Irving, is not the kind of book that a reviewer can ruin for its readers by revealing a key spoiler or two. There is just too much going on, too many stories being told as the characters come and go, interacting with each other and recombining in ways that are sometimes simultaneously surreal and brutally realistic."