Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution Book

This is a book about the education system with little bits of writing advice thrown in. Jensen follows the tradition of pedagogical cranks and visionaries like Ivan Illich and Jacques Ranciere in the idea that schools exist primarily to teach submission. For Jensen, of course, this is just part of the beast of Industrial Civilization destroying the liveable earth. But suddenly, in between salmon die-off statistics, you've got a helpful tip about writing dialogue. Even if Jensen isn't the best writer, his advice is clear and useful (including "The Most Important Writing Exercise," which is shaking out your hands and stretching them into double raised middle fingers to the world).

But you know when you're reading, say, Malcolm Gladwell, and you start to feel a tension in your spine, a bitterness at the back of your throat, a mild headache? I call the feeling "the Smarm Heebie-Jeebies." It happens when someone is absolutely certain they're right about the world and writes a book to prove it. Jensen's ideas are more interesting than Gladwell's, but I get the feeling nonetheless, because the SH-Js aren't ideological, they're aesthetic. All of this point-proving and self-certainty shapes writing, and I don't like that shape.

***NOTE: Derrick Jensen is publicly transphobic (for the "radical feminist" reasons). This book doesn't deal with those issues as far as I could see, but all the same I don't recommend buying any book by Jensen, or otherwise financially supporting him. I know that a lot of writers have messed up personal lives, and I'm fine with disconnecting their art from that -- but the problem for me is that Jensen's transphobia isn't personal: he's made it very public, and it hurts people I care about.