Plus 5 books about cold places.

It’s starting to get cold in my part of the world.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, co-directed by Werner Herzog and Dmitry Vasyukov in 2010, is free on Tubi, and to prepare myself for winter I watched it. I have no review to share; enough about the film has already been written. There’s a fantastic blog post on a gem of a website: Four Winds 10. The other content on the linked site seems to be more obscure or esoteric content about purification and meditative transcendence, not about films. (I love the worlds you can enter on the internet. Lo and behold, reveries of the connected world!) Instead, I have some musings about cold places to share.

In harsh places, there is a simplicity dictating life and human interaction, because value comes from survival and survival has value. In the Taiga, the hunter/trappers have the land, their dogs, their skills, their moral code, and their traditions and way of life. In the Taiga, the people are deeply and intrinsically tied to the land, and there is an interconnectedness upon which collective survival depends. For settlers in places like California, survival is seen as fleeting, transient, and transactional, and thus is devalued. Individuals are expected to survive, separate from any collective survival. But a hand can’t survive without the rest of the body. Settlers have managed to be creative in the scale and their destruction, in eviscerating parts of the body. In our state capitol just this year, homelessness has increased by 70%.

My life and the lives of non-native folk here on this land, are a product of this destructive settler colonial project. I hope and believe respect can be learned, but it obviously needs to be earned. To work for the land and its people is to work to sabotage the settler colonial project that has passed down generationally and is the structure upon which our society operates. As a settler, one can choose to flee from the struggle, but not as a nomad – as a gentrifier.

The following are a few selections that all involve some adventure in cold and harsh lands – struggles to learn it, survive it, and protect it.

Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov

Here’s my entry for the most petit bourgeoisie sentence ever: I came across the spine of this minty blue-green Penguin Classic one day, while perusing a used bookshop in Bushwick. The reverent and enthusiastic introduction by John Glad is what made me buy the book – the first page says something like: “You are about to have your life changed by entering this book…” And so ensue the most incredible, harsh, funny, disgusting, unsentimental, and just real daily lives of Gulag prisoners. I read somewhere that this book is in the East, what “the Gulag Archipelago” is to the West. Worth reading cover to cover!

Storytelling in Siberia: The Olonkho Epic in a Changing World by Robin P. Harris

The University of Illinois book publisher has this amazing free monthly e-book program. October’s free book was an ethnomusicological study of Olonkho, a type of Yakutian (Siberian indigenous) epic poem recited and sung by master poets. There’s a beautiful expression in the book – “to sit under the mouth” – to sit in rapt attention and absorb the tales that range from a few to several dozen thousand lines, from the master Olonkohosut.

An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

A young man from Togo escapes a snake cult, becomes fascinated with Greenland from some random book he found, and makes his way there via Paris and Copenhagen, with no money and no handle of any of the languages. But he learns, and he describes the people, homes, and environs of Greenland through his own lens. It’s a totally unique book of someone plopping from one culture into another, so you get to learn about both Togo and Greenland in the process.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

Most of this book is about two people sledding across a giant tundra, and probably the best book for gender expansion and inclusion. It’s the type of book you can read in a day (if you start early).

Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu

The chapter entitled “Siberia” that is a mindblowing one in a total mindfuck of a book. One man’s journey inspired by witnessing the death of his parents, took him from scientific exploration to weapon production. This book is not about survival in a place, but rather survival of one’s morals.