The Orion Blog

Five Questions for Jeff Clements

February 21, 2012, by Scott Gast

In January 2010, in a court case known as Citizens United, the U.S. Supreme Court arrived at a 5-4 decision prohibiting government from assigning limits to corporate political spending. The decision, which will undoubtedly play a role in the drama of the 2012 presidential election, highlights a question at the core of the democratic process: should corporations enjoy the same free speech privileges as human beings? Jeff Clements doesn’t think so. An attorney and founder of the organization Free Speech for People, Clements has proposed a twenty-eighth amendment to the U.S. Constitution called the People’s Right Amendment, which would essentially reverse Citizens United. I spoke with Clements via e-mail about his new book, Corporations Are Not People, out now from Berrett-Koehler.

This book isn’t the only one to detail the dangers of corporate power, but it’s the only one I know that focuses on Citizens United. It’s a choice that feels deliberate. What is it about Citizens United that drew your attention?

Citizens United is a historic opportunity for winning fundamental change. By overturning a century of law that sought to keep corporate money out of elections, the Supreme Court made a very clear, loud, and dangerous statement about corporate power and American democracy. The vast majority of Americans know that this statement is wrong, and most people viscerally react against Citizens United—particularly as corporate money’s influence on the 2012 election continues to grow.

But the book is about much more than Citizens United, and much more than elections. Unchecked corporate power is an issue that affects everything: the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the jobs and wages we have, the communities we live in. This didn’t “just happen”—for more than thirty years, the so-called “corporate speech” doctrine at the heart of Citizens United has been used to strike down environmental laws, public health laws, and common sense regulations of Wall Street. As a result, our government is far more responsive to the largest corporations and the tiny slice of people that control them than they are to us. And we’re all much worse off as a result.

read more →

Echoes of a Primordial Kansas

February 16, 2012, by Karen Glaser

Karen Glaser’s photographs in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion (“Dark Sharks and Light Rays”) evoke a silent, shifting, near-alien world. The full series, which Glaser captured without a flash, was recently on display at the PHOTO gallery in Oakland; a selection from the series was also featured at the Corden/Potts gallery in San Francisco. We asked her about the creative impulse behind these remarkable and mysterious images. 

One of my favorite haunts as a kid was the dinosaur hall at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. About five years ago I visited the newly redesigned hall and a particular exhibit struck me: an underwater ocean scene—dark and dramatically lit—that reproduced the motion and quality of light shining above deep water. The whole food chain was represented, from scores of small fish hiding in one massive bait ball, to the large predator overhead. The drama of life and survival, unfolding. The exhibit’s label read: “The scene before you represents a moment in time about 83 million years ago in what is now western Kansas.”

“Dark Sharks and Light Rays” was photographed in waters that remind me of primordial western Kansas. Locations were in the Pacific off the Americas, specifically Cocos Island and the Galapagos. The boat crossing, on a live-aboard, from Punterenas, Costa Rica to remote Cocos, takes thirty-two to thirty-six hours.

My photographic process is pretty simple: I tuck away my ego, my senses alive and electrified, acutely aware that Mother Nature is in charge of these challenging and primeval waters. Then I react, photographing instinctually the magnificence going on all around.

View “Dark Sharks and Light Rays” in its entirety, with print descriptions, at www.karenglaserphotography.com

The Place Where I Write: Nico Alvarado

February 13, 2012, by Nico Alvarado

For ten months I stood at a retired wet bar in the basement of a postwar bungalow in Cincinnati and tried to write a novel. I had decided I was a cut-to-the-bone kind of writer, and I wanted to work someplace suitably severe. I wanted no windows, no chairs, nothing to distract from the terrible beauty of sentence-making. I wanted Sparta. So while my wife stayed upstairs at a desk, in a room with wood floors and natural light, each morning I descended the stained carpeted stairs to a barren cavern with a view of nothing. I piled the length of the bar with etiquette manuals, Edwardian memoirs, anthologies of classical poetry, a few reliable jumpstarters (Banville, Wodehouse, Nabokov, O’Toole—all my white guys), and set grimly to work. When my wife and daughter laughed and cooed upstairs, when they whacked tambourines and danced around to mariachi music, I sniffed and turned up the Mendelssohn. Every half hour or so I hurled myself to the floor and did pushups.

That was the first two months. I got up every day at dawn and wrote. I was so disciplined I wore a bald spot into the carpet. And what came out was—adequate. Characters ate and drank and conspired and made theoretically witty banter. They were doing what they were supposed to do, but it felt rigid and compulsory—sort of Spartan, actually.

The longer I spent down there, the less it looked like Sparta and the more it looked like The Silence of the Lambs. The naked bulb overhead cast a sickly light. Wires dangled lewdly from the creaking floor joists. The wall I stared at was streaked with a mysterious, possibly disgusting wetness. The bar itself—homemade of plywood and glass brick, with a faux-leather bumper, a little out of plumb—began to feel haunted. Under it were red lights, long dead, that would have bathed the patrons in a bloody glow. What weird bacchanals had unfolded here in the first, heady days of the Ford Administration? I heard strains of Three Dog Night on the hi-fi, saw the walls mossy with sweat, smelled something funky.

read more →

Punishing Protest: Live Web Event with Patrick Shea, February 21

February 07, 2012, by Orion staff

Is the U.S. justice system about justice or law? Activists like Tim DeChristopher, who was recently sentenced to prison, are regularly punished by the courts for their acts of civil disobedience. As Tim tells Terry Tempest Williams in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion, “They’re trying to make an example out of me to scare other people into obedience.”

On February 21, at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, join a free, live web discussion on the punishing of protest, featuring Tim DeChristopher’s attorney, Patrick Shea, and Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild.

During the event, Shea will share his experience defending Tim against a government prosecution, and Bhogosian will talk about the Guild’s defense of Occupy encampments for the last several months, as well as her books The Policing of Political Speech and Punishing Protest. The event is free and open to all, but registration is required—please register here.

Orion hosts live web events every month. Sign up to be alerted by e-mail when a new one is announced.

The Place Where I Write: Eva Hooker

February 02, 2012, by Eva Hooker

My winter writing place is a small library table next to a leaky window. My black cat usually manages to squeeze her furry self between my teacup and laptop. A painting by Margo Hoff of the lake in winter hangs over my desk. Cobalt blue, its primary color. I live in a 19th century building, the oldest dorm on campus. It is a quiet place. I have teaching days and writing days.  When I write at this desk, everything else hits the floor. First year papers, student poems, bills to pay, recipes, lists: the paper miscellany I seem to pile up in the academic year.

In summer, I write in an old cottage on Madeline Island that faces six of the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. I usually write upstairs (first draft) under the skylight. From my desk (an old sewing machine with a top), I can see the bald eagle fly over at noon—her shadow first, then, the full soar. Otherwise, I don’t see much. Good for “privacy” of the muse.

I make revisions out on the screen porch. A pair of phoebes nests in the upper right hand corner of the porch. The male flies back and forth bringing food. A lot of singing goes on around 4 p.m.

The screen porch is a distracting place: boats, woodpeckers, branches breaking (bears at lunch). The woods murmur, even seem to hum on a warm day. The summer sun comes off the lake in layers. I try to attend its edge, its energy, its sprawl: except there were light, there could be no shadow.

I need shadow to make. I need light to make.

Careful work, this.

read more →

Meet the Selection Committee for the 2012 Orion Book Award

January 31, 2012, by H. Emerson Blake

We receive a lot of books at the Orion office, and for years we lamented that so few of them received the attention they deserve—especially those books that work in the Orion-ish vein of rebuilding an emotional, personal connection between people and nature.

And so in 2007 we inaugurated the Orion Book Award, which recognizes five books—a winner and four finalists—that stand out among the many books about nature and environment published each year.

The selection of the winner and finalists is overseen by a five-person committee that changes annually and is made up of people known for their work in the world of literature and communicating about nature. This year’s Selection Committee consists of:

• Steve Curwood, Executive Producer and Host of Living on Earth.

• Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

• Rob Spillman, Editor of Tin House and the Executive Editor of Tin House Books.

• Cheryl Strayed, author of a novel, Torch. Her memoir, Wild, will be published in 2012.

• And me, Orion’s Editor-in-Chief.

Five finalists for the 2012 Orion Book Award will be announced in March, and the winning title will be announced in April. Keep an eye on this blog for more information about the award and the books the Selection Committee is looking at.

Eulogy for a Northern Short-Tailed Shrew in the Driveway Of a Town West of Chicago

January 30, 2012, by Brian Doyle

Who almost certainly did not call himself (or herself, I could not bring myself
To quite that level of examination of the deceased, gender identity is complex
Enough while you are alive, and moot afterwards) northern, or short-tailed, or
Blarina brevicauda, or anything we would understand. Almost certainly he, or
She, spoke one or more languages of his or her own tribe and clan, and maybe
A trading jargon among the smaller predatory species, and a bit of the victims’
Vocabularies—speaking a little grasshopper or mouse would be advantageous,
You would think; enough to read sign. There are so many vocabularies, finally.
We don’t think about this. We are a self-absorbed species. I guess all creatures
Are self-interested, for understandable reasons, but maybe the whole evolution
Thing for us is to find a way past that, you know? Can it be that this ostensible
Dominion, as we called it, leaning on the authorless Book for moral legitimacy,
Was not about authority and power and control, and shepherding and corralling
As it was slowly coming to grips with how much we don’t know? Like shrews:
You have to admit that for all the things we know about shrews we don’t know
Hardly a thing. Their kings and visionaries, their sagas and nations, their spirits
Measured not by our sense of religion and prayer but by theirs. What a frontier!
And here lieth one, himself or herself an unknown country. The sucklings loved,
The songs sang, the stories told in tunnels beneath the flowers, the sidewalk;
All of this and so much more utterly beyond my ken, and I thought I was subtle,
Foolish mammal that I am. But maybe this death is more than only terrific news
For the recycling crews in the grass; maybe it is an illuminatory event. Isn’t that
Possible? And not just for me and you but for all of us? Ah, it’s so easy to sneer,
But how much more interesting to not; to ponder a world made billions of times
More dense, wild, riveting, astounding, webbed; a world like it might have been
Imagined, once, beyond our own imagination; or still is being imagined; perhaps
By us. Could it be that every time we say god we’re talking to our secret selves?

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author of ten books, including, most recently, the novel Mink River.

Five Questions for Luis Alberto Urrea

January 25, 2012, by Jennifer Sahn

Luis Alberto Urrea (pronounced oo-RAY-uh, FYI) is a cultural and literary shape shifter. Born in Tijuana, Mexico, to a Mexican father and an American mother, he has received critical acclaim for his fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as awards far too numerous to name (inquiring minds, go here). Many consider Urrea to be the Latino bad boy of the literary establishment, a title he sports with pride. His first piece for Orion, “Working the Line,” was accompanied by a collection of photos from the borderlands by David Taylor. It was followed by his rollicking short story “The Southside Raza Image Federation Corps of Discovery.” When Luis accepted our invitation to become an Orion columnist I was so excited that I ran around the office giving high-fives. His column The Wastelander will appear thrice yearly, beginning with his inaugural offering, “Night Shift,” in the January/February 2012 issue.

Is The Wastelander man, myth, or legend?

The Wastelander is man, myth, and legend. I stumbled on the phrase in a used book of synonyms from the ’50s. I guess “wastelander” was hip-talk for writer. Aha, I thought. That’s me. It resonated and became a code word for a prose-sketching style a la Kerouac—fleet wild visions of the speeding landscape as I hurtled around on my journeys. And dang if I didn’t write most happily in…well…wastelands. So it permeated my more formal prose, too.

If The Wastelander can be said to have a beat, what would that be?

The beat of The Wastelander is the clickety-clack of freight train wheels on a long dry weedy stretch of old rails; it’s the screaking of a pump-jack nodding all night in West Texas; it’s the clocking of Harry Dean Stanton’s bootheels on some hardpan out there; it’s the slow moan of border wind through a chain-link fence.

Why do these down-and-out places appeal to you so strongly? Or are they trying to suck you in?

The wastelands appeal to me for their freedom. And their ghosts. Man, it’s haunted out there. Dead tech, abandoned gas stations, that ruined motel near the Pecos full from wall to wall with bones that could be deer, could be human. I myself am a wasteland; got a desert in me that yearns for a rainforest. You can’t be from the Mexican border and the beat-down barrio and not find some kind of frightening comfort in gravel lots.

In the inaugural installment of the The Wastelander, feces play a starring role. And yet your desire is to bestow dignity on places like this glorified RV parking lot. How do you navigate that narrative tension?

If we look to the Gospel of St. James (Brown), we find him telling Maceo Parker, “Whatsoever it is, it’s got to be funky.” Amen to that. Was it Chekhov who said that feces were as important as roses to a chemist? That’s us. Things are sacred, even when we can’t see it. And holy fire is found not on the mountaintop, not in the rays of the apocalyptic sunset, but down here…in the mud. If you find dignity and sacredness here in the funk, then you have really found something. Something real.

Can you describe some landscapes and characters readers can expect to encounter in future installments of The Wastelander?

In future Wastelanders, I am attacked by an alligator because I pissed on her eggs in the wicked swamp. We will stand in the Tijuana garbage dump and ponder why its trash pickers are no less noble than our heroic sod busters of western American lore—Wastelanders both, who lived in the same damned house. Love the gravel lots, y’all. Love the big empty wind.

Jennifer Sahn is editor of Orion.