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Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming by Steven Pavlos Holmes, ed.

2014; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 88; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2014.0260

1945-8134

John Calderazzo,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

120 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews Lotería Jarocha is a collection of sixty block prints corresponding to a son jarocho, each with an accompanying prose description. The descriptions and the illustrations are whimsical. For example, “Cascabel,” which means “rattlesnake” in English , describes a son that includes elements of flamenco while incorporating a musical instrument sounding like a snake’s rattle. Dempster’s linoleum block print illustrates the musical instrument, but instead of appearing as a rattlesnake’s tail and rattle, it has the shape of a human heart. The son itself incorporates elements of seventeenth-century Andalucian Spain and a passionate dance performed by women. Lotería Jarocha reminds one of the deeply liberating and subversive nature of folklore and folkloric production . Subversion occurs on several levels. An example is “El Jarabe Loco” (The crazy elixir), a son that can be dated back to the seventeenth century with lyrics that refer to an elixir created by Lucifer to revive the dead. The idea that the underworld generates life is profoundly subversive . So, too, is the practice of performing this son, which encourages anarchic sessions that could go on for hours, where singers improvise. Folklore fashions a unique collective culture and unites a community with its songs, patterns, art, and beliefs. For example, “El Fandanguito ” (The little fandango) is not just a son but also a dance form that provides the foundation of many of the characteristic sones jarochos. While the fandango clearly hails originally from Spain, once arrived and situated in Veracruz, the son was appropriated and modified and continues to evolve and reflect new generations. In addition to the sixty prints and descriptions of sones, Dempster’s book comes with a CD collection of recordings of sones, some with traditional lyrics and others with new ones written by Kali Niño. Written and performed by both Dempster and Niño, the songs allow the listener to hear the intersections of cultures that come together in the sones and the humor and ironies expressed both in lyrics and in the way that the European, African, and indigenous melodies, harmonies, and rhythms comment on the original. Dempster’s collection of songs, linoleum prints, and prose descriptions create an amazing reminder that it is an error to treat folklore as simply sentimental material to be preserved as cultural history. Lotería Jarocha joyously posits folklore as resistance to a monolithic way of thinking or expressing oneself and an embrace of community and cultural diversity. Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming. Steven Pavlos Holmes, ed. Salt Lake City, Utah. Torrey House Press. 2013. isbn 9781937226275 Until recently, writers in the United States have found it difficult to put a human face on climate change. After all, invisible greenhouse gases lack the photogenic villainy of soot-dark pollution. Rising seas reveal themselves only gradually or far away— say, in ever-suffering Bangladesh. Even Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, those Twin Towers of environmental vulnerability and so many individual tales of woe, can’t be directly or solely blamed on our warming planet. Fiction writers have tried to humanize this slow-motion catastrophe. Environmental literature scholar Adam Trexler has compiled a list of three hundred-plus novels published in English from 1962 to 2011 that at least mention climate change. Many of them, like the trilogy of sciencefiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, employ apocalypse or the future to make their point. Good news for clifi fans, but who is exploring the here and now of ordinary people? Enter the wide-ranging and honest voices in this smartly edited collection . These are poets and essayists whom editor Steven Pavlos Holmes calls “our emotional and cultural first responders” who tell us “what it feels like” and what it means to live in what some scientists now call the Anthropocene, a world genuinely altered by humans. Most of the contributors are not famous. And if some of them, like Alaskan Marybeth Holleman, employ familiar images such as stranded polar bears, they do it with a thoughtfulness that lends new life to their subject. Holleman is struck by how global warming, unlike other environmental problems facing animals, leaves us almost no room to...