Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 3. Bleeding Earth

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle (both reviewed earlier); Bleeding Earth (reviewed here); The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

Robb is an environmentalist who works at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency which is friendly to farmers, not to the environment. Robb meets DoAnna, who owns a large farm and does everything environmentally wrong. But she knows it and asks Robb for advice. He gives her more advice (such as “Get rid of your cows”) than she wants. But he nearly convinces her to be an eco-farmer until she catches him trespassing on her land to get runoff water samples to identify her farm as a major source of pollution. They had just started to be friends…

Robb loses his job even before DoAnna files a complaint about his trespassing. Depressed and sleepy, he parks his car at a rest stop and falls asleep. He awakens during a severe dust storm and finds DoAnna has prepared him a picnic lunch. She is now convinced he is right—our farms are blowing away in the wind—and she hires him as a full-time advisor on how to make her farm into an eco-farm. They soon become lovers.

Running an eco-farm turns out to be nightmarishly difficult, especially the way Robb and DoAnna do it. The project (raising hemp) fails. They have to start over—but how? They blame each other for what has happened. A summer storm brings on a mud-fight, which leaves them laughing and loving once again.

This story is of particular interest to readers interested in science who may not realize how difficult it is to turn a conventional, pesticide-and-herbicide farm into a “green” farm. It also shows the NRCS is caught in a delicate spot: they have to enforce environmental laws without alienating farms whose cooperation with conservation programs is, after all, voluntary. If being “eco-friendly” were easy, all farmers would have done it already. Rice, far from being a raging environmentalist, seems to understand this.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part two.

This novel, which I introduced previously (cover), introduces some very serious issues, even though the author treats them with humor.

First, racism. Rea and her mother are full-blood Cherokee, while Earl is a white racist. (He obviously wasn’t when he first married the mother. Rice leaves this unexplained.) The way Rea describes it, white people see Native Americans as “dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the rez in flyover country.” Can’t get much worse than this, can it?

Yes, it can.

Not only is the racism contemporaneous but extends also into the past. Most white people (as Rea explains, echoing the words of Rice’s nonfiction book Forgotten Landscapes) see Natives as, at least in the past, savage hunter-gatherers. But many tribes, including Rea’s Cherokee tribe, fed large populations from big farms, and lived in big cities—some of them the biggest in the world a few centuries ago. Whites see themselves as not only being but having always been the forefront of civilization.

And there’s more. The adoption of Native children by white parents sounds like a good idea, only it resulted in the erosion of Native cultures, even when the white parents had the best of intentions. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act directly addressed this problem. You can read about it in at least two novels by Barbara Kingsolver.

The second issue is the oppression of women. Earl is not only violent toward Rea but also intends to rape her—and would have, were it not for the intervention of poison ivy. One of the reasons Rea loves Marten is, as she says, “You know how to grab a woman by the part of her body that matters most—her brain.” Rea becomes something of a heroine among women and among Cherokees, although she was just trying to live her life.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy

How could you resist a book with a title like this?

Here is the author’s summary from the Amazon website:

“Marten, a young scientist, meets Rea, a stunningly beautiful young Cherokee woman who works at her family’s convenience store. To their mutual surprise, Marten and Rea kiss within minutes of meeting. Her bitter white stepfather, Earl, forbids her to get an education. But Marten discovers Rea’s secret place down by the river where she reads and writes. This soon becomes their love nest. Marten helps Rea get involved in his research on poison ivy. She keeps a vial of urushiol, the active ingredient in poison ivy sap. Marten and Rea get married.

“Rea knows her stepfather intends, someday, to rape her. Only someday is now. Earl removes the bolt from Rea’s bedroom door. She and her mother decide to move in with Marten right away. They go to Earl’s house when they think he is away, but he is there and tries to rape Rea. During the commotion, Rea pours the urushiol extract into Earl’s whiskey, which he drinks. Urushiol takes a couple of days to induce inflammation. When Earl later pursues Marten into the swamp, he falls in and drowns because the inflammation—from inside his throat—has closed off his breathing.

“Police investigations slowly piece the story together. The Cherokee tribal defense attorney at the preliminary hearing claims Rea acted in self-defense, but the District Attorney establishes that urushiol acts slowly—a couple of days—thus Rea’s act of keeping the urushiol in her drawer was premeditated. Despite the background of vocal tribal support, Rea goes on trial for manslaughter.”

Like other Stan Rice novels, this one has a lot of science in it, but in a fun way that most readers can understand. And it also tackles some big questions—another feature typical of Rice novels. Come to think of it, I have never seen a Stan Rice novel that you can just sit back and leave your brain off the hook. As a reader of this blog, you might like this.

Is there such a thing as True Love? Or Love At First Sight? Most scientists would say no. Among them are the offbeat, weird mathematicians Conway and Thurman, and the narrator, Marten, a botanist, all of them at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. Conway and Thurman figure out the incredible mathematical odds against the existence of True Love. And it is a calculation that readers can understand, not just something like Spock coming up with a probability estimate as if by magic.

No such thing as True Love? At least, this is what Marten thinks until he meets Rea and instantly falls for her. And she for him. They seem as different from one another as anyone can be: he is an academic, she works at an interstate C-store. But it turns out this poor woman has an insatiable thirst for science and nature; she just has never had the opportunity to pursue it, other than secretly reading books of which her bitter white stepfather Earl disapproves. You know, evolution and all that. As quickly as she falls in love with Marten, she also realizes he might be her escape from Earl and his willful ignorance.

So the conflict and plot are set up right away. Marten loses Rea almost as soon as he meets her. How far would you go to find someone you had just begun to love a few minutes previously? And then he has to rescue her from her oppressive life.

I think the readers of this blog would enjoy a novel in which scientists are real people, and non-scientists are frequently smart too.

Meet Me in Strasbourg, Romance Novel from which You Must Confront Important Issues

In case you think that serious issues are the very thing that you are trying to get away from when you read fiction, particularly a romance, Meet Me in Strasbourg by Stan Rice might convince you otherwise. But if you like to avoid serious issues, you probably would not be reading this blog.

Two of the issues are hunger and medical debt, both of which are major crises in American life.

Other important issues involve race and ethnicity. Even romance writers feel obligated to throw in some racial diversity, but it is seldom related to the plot. Tony is Native American, and Aimée is Jewish. Tony and Aimée do indeed find one another in Strasbourg, leading to a happy ending.

But a couple of things, related to ethnicity, remain unresolved, in this novel as in life.

First, although Native Americans such as myself are a nearly invisible minority in America, we are completely unknown in France. I have to explain over and over to my new acquaintances that I am partie du tribu amerindien Cherokee, qui habite en Amerique. The French have stereotypes of Native Americans that resemble those of white Americans in the 1950s. Americans don’t like to think about Natives, because they feel guilty; but in France, Native Americans are still a humorous stereotype.

And while Hitler and La Seconde Guerre Mondiale are long past, there still are some secret Nazis in Strasbourg, maybe even more than in America. They kick over tombstones and spray-paint synagogues. At least they don’t shoot anyone.

I think the readers of this blog would enjoy Meet Me in Strasbourg by Stan Rice. Just don’t expect it to be escapism.

 

Meet Me in Strasbourg: A Romance Novel from Which You Can Learn a Lot about Music

I gave the background of this novel in an earlier blog post.

To many people, music is just a pleasant background noise. Occasionally a good tune will stick in a person’s mind. But in this novel, Meet Me in Strasbourg, Tony’s experiences will show you how the more you know about music, the more meaningful it becomes, until it encapsulates your life. Examples include:

• The novel is centered around Die Winterreise, a song cycle by Franz Schubert which, like other Schubert song cycles, is about a lovelorn wanderer mourning the rejection of his love. Die Winterreise begins with the wanderer going to his love’s house to bid farewell to it. Then he sings about one thing after another that reminds him of how miserable he is. At the end, he gives up and joins with a penniless organ-grinder (Der Leiermann) on the street. Only Schubert’s astonishing music can rescue this poetry from utter depression. As the principal characters Tony and Aimée develop their friendship and love, their direction is certainly not that of Schubert’s wanderer. They swear that there will be no Leiermann for them! Then circumstances beyond their control intervene and crash their comfortable love.
• Tony composes band music, just good enough to perform. Having composed wind ensemble music myself, rather indifferently, I can testify that it is a very difficult task.
• Tony plays the recorder, and this music plays an essential role in bringing him and Aimée together.
• In a concert, the band plays an arrangement of the medieval hymn Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, which has (as many of you can attest) an almost magical effect upon the mind. Its climax verse is “And the powers of Hell shall vanish as the darkness fades away.” Is this really true? The stirring music forces the question upon the minds of Tony and Aimée. I will write about this in my other blog, the one devoted to religion.

One could almost believe that, in Meet Me in Strasbourg, by Stan Rice, music is not a background but a character.

Meet Me in Strasbourg, an Intellectual Romance Novel

Normally, to call a novel, especially a romance novel, intellectual is the kiss of death. But if you dislike intellectual novels, you wouldn’t be reading this blog. I want to tell you about a romance novel that is anything but formulaic: Meet Me in Strasbourg, a novel by Stan Rice. The readers of this blog are interested in science and the life of the mind, things that do not usually show up in romances. Romances often have gorgeous or strikingly handsome protagonists; not this one. These characters are appealing because of their minds.

 

Here is the author’s summary, taken from the Amazon site:

“When the university-bound Native American science student Tony encounters the brilliant and painfully shy French humanities student Aimée in California, he has no idea that their love would drag him halfway around the world.

Tony and Aimée discover their shared passion for music, particularly the love-lieder of Schubert, and then for one another. Tony quickly leaves the social circle that scorned Aimée for her plainness and quietness and becomes her defender and protector. And does she need protection—from the poverty and malnutrition of living alone with her unlucky father, and from her father’s unscrupulous associates in the shadowy world of smuggling. Aimée (French for beloved) finally discovers what it is like to be loved. Just when her joy seems inevitable, she and her father disappear. Tony alters the entire course of his life to go look for her in France.”

Both Tony and Aimée are happy intellectuals. At first, their different kinds of intelligence begins to drive them apart. Every novel has to have some tension that drives the main characters apart before bringing them back together. Tony criticized Aimée’s stories in a creative writing class, and found himself having to apologize to her. A thoughtless joke also made her run from him. But even after they had become engaged, Tony continued to make mistakes that were well intentioned but created stress, such as when he wrote a solo for the painfully shy Aimée in a band piece. He meant it as a tribute to her—the piece was based upon the world’s oldest love song, from Babylonia—but ended up making her into a spectacle, which she hated more than anything else.

It is not intensely intellectual. If intensely intellectual is what you want, you should read the novels of Richard Powers. They are so intellectual that I can hardly understand them, even with a Ph.D. But they are good, especially Overstory, which might well be the best novel ever written. Back in the day, I tried to read Gold Bug Variations and gave up.

Many of the characters are very intelligent and do not attempt to hide it. The author is not afraid to follow them into significant intellectual discussions. Even the janitor/groundskeeper is intellectual. In later essays, I will give examples of science and math, and of music, that are central to the plot, not just thrown into the novel. May I recommend this novel if you, like me, believe that there are a lot more intelligent people in the world than usually show up in fiction?