The writings on offer are not those we have often grown up with but those which can make us feel grown-ups.
If you believe that we, as a civilization, are at a juncture from where the future looks certainly bleak, this title-less book is for you. If you are close to being convinced that tainted vision of the world is loaded with untrustworthy subjectivity, the writings in the book can surely stir your latent imagination. And, lastly, if you are not overtly averse to Ralph W Emerson’s words that ‘the end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization', the uncivilized writings – and poetry – in this volume will surely make you sit up, think and take note of. Dark Mountain (written as DaRk) stretches beyond what Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon called `bounded rationality' - the limited capacity of the human mind to comprehend objectivity.
It is an enormously rewarding read but not an easy one. While some sections are easy to comprehend, others sections could be strenuous. Partly because you suddenly find yourself entering a world which you never thought it existed and partly because we are conditioned to reject what lies beyond our cognitive world. The way one looks at it, Dark Mountain could either be a book of despair or a testimony of hope. Undoubtedly, however, it could easily be the first step towards ‘unlearning’ – a rediscovery of ‘self’ which is not the ‘self’ that modern economics has taught us we have.
Launched in 2009, this is the fourth book from the project that grew out of a feeling that contemporary literature and art were failing to respond honestly or adequately to the scale of our entwined ecological, economic and social crises. A growing group of writers, artists and thinkers contribute to each volume. The stories they offer are not those we have often grown up with but those which can make us feel grown-ups. 'If you are seeing the people by what they don’t have, then you are not seeing them'. The thrust of the argument is to see beyond, as there is a world waiting to be explored, perceived and understood.
Dark Mountain questions our faith in progress and our unending belief in being control of literally everything. There is little sign of this myth crumbing any time soon, though. Yet, there is a need to acknowledge that we are living through uncertain times and that we alone have to deal with the consequences. Dark Mountain is a unique undertaking that nobody knows where it will lead to. Yet, it may be worth being part of this process of un-civilization.
DaRk Mountain Book 4
by Dark Mountain Project, UK
Extent: 320, Price: £15.99
(Readers can help themselves learn more about the project by visiting http://dark-mountain.net/)
There is nothing absurd or off-limits in the world of science.
The title of this book might sound like an oddity, scandalizing reader on the impropriety of the question. Could it not have been one of those questions left unsaid and unexplored? Not for evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering though, who considers nothing absurd or off-limits in the world of science. Impolite it might sound, the salacious query led to incredible evolutionary insights that surprisingly began to attract scientific attention only recently. Dangling precariously outside the human body, human phallus is considered a highly specialized tool manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.
Taking readers on a bold and captivating journey, Bering seeks answers to some of the most taboo questions: Why is it pretty big in comparison to the privates of other apes? Why does it have a distinct mushroom-capped glans? Why are the unattractive testicles uneven in size? Quoting extensively from published research by Gordon Gallup and others, the author concludes that size not only helps stretch its reach inside the female body but together with the bulbous glans it performs what in the field of evolutionary psychology is called ‘reverse engineering’.
Considered to be a by-product of adaptation that gives humans a competitive edge in terms of their reproductive success, reverse engineering performs a special removal service by expunging any foreign sperms lying in there. The penis may have evolved its shape to lessen the chances of one becoming the unwitting surrogate father to another man’s kid. It might shock those who consider our species as being blissfully monogamous, but some degree of fooling around has been there ever since.
Drawing from his published essays in Scientific American and Slate magazines, Bering presents a selection of astounding oddities of human sexuality that can enliven any drink party. From examining male reproductive anatomy to exploring dirty brain science and from intriguing sexual fetishes to the Gayer science and more, the book offers as much hard science as entertaining speculation within the framework of evolutionary psychology. Despite some of its outrageous conclusions, the book is worth an exhilarating ride.
Himself a gay, Bering considers this ‘condition’ to be one of the reasons why the brain of a gay person is as slow as molasses when it comes to finding a way around. Never ask a gay man for directions. How to distinguish a gay person from a straight man? Evidence suggests that gay people produce different armpit odors from straight people and that these scents are detectable. If nothing more, Bering has been successful in arousing curiosity around some of those aspects of everyday existence that rarely merit popular imagination.
I am confused whether or not to recommend this delightfully readable book. All I can say is: Ball’s in your court!
Why is the Penis shaped like that?
by Jesse Bering
Transworld Books, UK
Extent: 350, Price: £8.99
Las Vegas, the Sin City, has altered perceptions: gambling substitutes for income, night is interchangeable with day and, the scale of excess refutes the idea of scarcity
It is a poignant tale of greed, chicanery, betrayal and manipulation which created an edifice of affluence in the middle of a desert. The public-private plunder had the sanction of the State for robbing the natives of their rich cultural inheritance. It was a misfortune that the natives were sitting atop the biggest coal reserves of the time that the political-industrial complex had aimed to wrest.
Projected to the outside world as an epic struggle over land between two Indian tribes, it has instead been a divide-and-conquer game played in disguise by the powerful and the corrupt. Judith Nies narrates the shocking facts behind the making of Las Vegas, the gambling capital, where the dark markets of America intersect with the upper world markets of ‘free-market capitalism’. Set in the late 19th Century, the phenomenon of usurping rights of indigenous people by giant corporations has continued ever since. In what was termed ‘low-intensity conflict’, thousand of tribes were driven away at gunpoint to labor camps, their sheep slaughtered and their children jailed.
Unreal City is a chilling account of the tribes’ struggle and the right amount of wrong by the government to edge out the so-called impoverished societies for the subsequent creation of Las Vegas, the Sin City, which has only altered perceptions: gambling substitutes for income, night is interchangeable with day and, the scale of excess refutes the idea of scarcity. But it is the scarcity that is haunting the city that gets 39 million fun-loving visitors each year. Having sucked it’s deep aquifers and with shrinking Lake Mead (created by the Hoover Dam) on the Colorado river not able to meet the city’s allocation, a multi-billion dollar water pipeline has been planned to tap a mountain aquifer 250 miles away to not only keep fifty golf courses green but to keep the showers and flushes running in fourteen of the largest hotels in the city. There is nothing ‘real’ about the city.
Award-winning author Judith Nies questions the wisdom behind the incredible cost of sustaining an unreal city. Located in the middle of the Mohave Desert, a water-guzzling city with just four inches of annual rainfall can only suck the nearby rivers and far-off aquifers dry. Shockingly, the new pipeline to feed the Sin City will be the only project in the world that lifts water twenty-nine hundred feet. Curiously, the city residents don’t seem anxious (like most urbanites elsewhere in the world) about where they get their water from, but support the political-business nexus that controls infrastructure. At the end, it is the business that flourishes at the cost of problems which only continue to amplify. No wonder, company like Bechtel, which started with two mules and a slip grader in 1898, is now one the largest multinational corporations.
Written with passion and precision, Unreal City is a painstaking work that narrates the undertold story of (mindless) development albeit euphemism for deceit, betrayal, corruption and despoliation. Apparently written for the North American audience, the first of the three sections of Unreal City may remain somewhat of a geographical puzzle for readers elsewhere. Rich in detail, Judith Nies painstaking narrative raises uncomfortable question which are often considered ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘anti-national’.
The Unreal City
by Judith Nies
Nation Books, New York
Extent: 292, Price: US$25.99
