Revere (be it one person or more than one, hardly matters) is always worth reading, and is pretty sure to please either because (1) my own sentiments are more clearly expressed than I could manage myself, and/or (2) some new vista of the world’s complexities is opened and eloquently articulated, and/or (3) something is brought to my attention that I’d otherwise never have given house room. And just because “Public Health” is such a broad and vital canvas… Anyhow, today’s On being inspired by the preface of a philosophy book quotes at some length from Michael Dummett’s Preface to his Frege: The Philosophy of Language (1973/1981) –a book I’d never have picked up, let alone read the Preface to. Revere’s posting sucked me right in, and occasioned a cascade of thoughts, memories, mental asides, and personal resolutions for the future (among them: always read the Preface…). Can’t ask much more of a blog posting, can you?
Category Archives: reading
Extrapolatory and “plausible futures” fiction
Over at Jyri Zengestrom’s blog I happened upon this statement:
The most disruptive social objects articulate something masses of people urgently feel, but lack a way to express.
…and it fits nicely with a number of things I’ve been reading lately. Not everyone will share my enthusiasm for Warren Ellis’s Freak Angels (a serialized graphic novel, dark and violent), or for the near-future (and alternate-past) genres like Cyberpunk and Steampunk, but it’s obvious that authors in these realms are working with materials that are highly relevant to the present. And I’m reminded of the John Brunner masterpieces Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up that I used in courses 30-some years ago, to get students thinking about possible futures and different views of the present…
I’ve been following Jim Kunstler’s blog for a while now, and his World Made By Hand arrived a couple of days ago and has been inhaled. The novel is interesting on several levels, but especially as an exercise in imagining the contingencies of an all-too-plausible future –that is, as a sort of projective anthropology. A visit to the World Made By Hand website will reward in a number of ways. It’s the first time I’ve seen a trailer for a novel:
and there’s an interview with Jim Kunstler in which he talks about how he wrote the book. Two bits that jumped out at me:
the footing underneath reality is not quite what we’ve been used to…
…when you’re composing a novel like this, you set certain elements in motion and they end up dictating how things will play out –it’s an emergent, self-organizing process
As I read World Made By Hand I found myself marking bits of text that serve as technological and sociological mise en scène, and I feel compelled to lay at least some of them out here. Why? Hmmmm. I suppose it’s an exercise in “projective anthropology” but it’s also part of my own continuing rumination on what-all underpins the lives we lead in the ethnographic present –the unexamined assumptions and contingencies that support our material lives. Anthropology is, after all, one of the means to wrestle with the question: where does structure come from for people’s lives? So here’s a passel of short extracts, with pages noted, each of them a potential jumping-off place for thought and discussion:
since we didn’t have news reporters anymore and you barely knew what was going on five miles away (3)
The turbines and metal parts had long since been sold for scrap and every other useful thing was scavenged out. We couldn’t replace them anymore. (4)
Now, in the new times, there were far fewer people, and many of the houses outside town were being taken down for their materials. Farming was back. That was the only way we got food. (5)
You could still find rubber tires here and there, but you couldn’t get patch kits or the kinds of adhesives that would stand up to a repair job anymore (5)
The strip mall stores were vacant. Spiky mulleins and sumacs erupted through the broken pavement of the parking lot. The plate glass was gone and the aluminum sashes, and everything else worth scavenging was stripped out. (11)
People are on the move again (12)
Being so few in numbers, children no longer enjoyed solidarity in rebellion, and our society was too fragile to indulge much symbolic misbehavior (13)
The various shifting factions worked hard at managing the news even as the TV, newspapers, and Internet were failing in one way or another from irregular electric service (15)
the federal government was little more than a figment of the collective memory. Everything was local now. (15)
We had trouble getting wheat latelybecause trade had fallen off, and we couldn’t grow it locally because of a persistent wheat rust in the soil that returned no matter how you rested a field. Mostly we had to rely on corn and buckwheat, with some barley, rye, and oats (16)
“It’s not all bad now,” I said.
“Weve lost our world.”
“Only the part that the machines lived in.” (18)commercial entertainment as we knew it was no more, and its handmaiden, advertising, had gone with it (21)
milk was more difficult to keep in high summer because we lacked refrigeration (22)
…after the bomb went off in Los Angeles. That act of jihad was extraordinarily successful. The authorities finally had to start inspecting every shipping container that entered every harbor in the nation. Freighters anchored for weeks off Seattle, Norfolk, Baltimore, the Jersey terminals, Boston, and every other port of entry. Many of them eventually turned around and went home with their cargoes undelivered. (23)
…it was obvious there would be no return to “normality.” The economy wouldn’t be coming back. Globalism was over. (24)
We didn’t have coffee anymore, or any caffeinated substitutes for it (24)
…in the absence of complex polymers and advanced cements…(25)
When every last useful thing in town had been stripped from the Kmart and the United Auto, the CVS drugstore, and other trading establishments of the bygone national chain-store economy, daily life became a perpetual flea market centered on the old town dump, which had been capped over in the 1990s (28)
By then the justice system had ground to a halt like so many things that had once seemed woven into the fabric of regular life (29)
There were no distant markets to send it to because shipping anything was slow at best and often unreliable, and traveling was something you just didn’t do anymore (30)
with the population so far down, and many empty houses in town itself, and the oil gone, and no ability to drive heroic distances, these buildings had no value except for salvage (31)
Agriculture had changed completely without oil. We’d gone from a few people using machines to grow monoculture crops and process them for everybody else, to a society in which at least half the people used tools skillfully with human and animal muscle to feed the other half (35)
With the electricity off, you didn’t hear recorded music anymore. You had to make it yourself (36)
There were still plenty of guns around, but manufactured ammunition was nearly impossible to get (49)
No one years ago would have anticipated how much production moved back into the home when the machine age ended (57)
There were no official safety nets in our little society, no more social services, no life insurance, nothing but the goodwill of neighbors. (70)
A lot of what had been forsaken, leftover terrain in the old days, was coming back into cultivation (74)
“…all these individuals in the town trying to live like it’s still old times, each on its own, each family alone against the world. You can’t have that in these new times or things will fall apart…” (90)
As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we’d thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved and nobody even debated it anymore (101)
In a world without electric powered saws, you had to take care with hand tools (112)
You never knew the weather in advance anymore. You might be said to have a good weather eye but nobody knew anything for sure and some were just better guessers than others (115)
You couldn’t be too careful about infected wounds when there were no
more antibiotic medicines (134)Less pollution of all kinds ran into the river, no more factory fertilizers and pest control poisons, no more detergents. So the fish had returned in numbers not seen in anyone’s memory (135)
“There’s grievances and vendettas all around at every level. Poor against what rich are left. Black against white. English-speaking against the Spanish. More than one bunch on the Jews. You name it, there’s a fight on. Groups in flight everywhere…” (149)
“This is just a time when nobody seems to know how to do anything, to get things done. A fellow makes a few things happen, and the world falls at his feet…” (162)
…a talented fellow whose fix-it shop was vital in a society that was forced to recycle virtually everything (199-200)
…going back to the old days, when television and all the other bygone diversions held people hostage in their homes after the sun went down, and you could hardly pry people out of their living rooms –as we used to call the place where the TVs lived (208)
“Even back in the old days, in the big hospitals, the docs lost patients,” I said. “What they gained in technological magic, they lost in bureaucracy and inattention and sloppiness.” (229)
“The car wrecked the southland. It wrecked Atlanta worse than Sherman ever did. It paved over my Virginia. they made themselves slaves to the car and everything connected with it, and it destroyed them in the end.” (305)
The immense overburden of skyscrapers in Manhattan had proven unuseable without electric service (317)
I’m sure that a lot of this material is handled in more expository fashion in Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, which I haven’t read. Suppose I should, and his earlier writings too.
On the Nacirema
James Lileks (author of some ESSENTIAL books) is always entertaining and sometimes downright percipient in fingering the squirmiest aspects of American culture. In a recent posting he unreels Peter Lorre’s Mr. Moto’s Last Warning (1939 –and available via Amazon) and includes some wonderful stills:
of which he notes
Augh! It’s like a blow-up love toy for a planet of mimes
You might also enjoy his Coffee and Chrome: restaurants from the days before the chains among other things on the Menu at his site, like Fargo 1950 and The Institute of Official Cheer.
What goes around
The come-on from The New Yorker is very tempting: subscribers now have access to the WHOLE Archive of the magazine in online form, and today’s annunciatory email quotes a bit from the November 2 1929 issue. So I log in and go to the Archive to see more, and here’s the first paragraph of Talk of the Town from that issue:
Fear, running through the jungle like flame, strong as ever. Doom still makes a crackling sound, like summer thunder. Thousands of minor clerks and small tradespeople, hearing faint noises of railroads they had never seen, mines they had never worked, steel they had never tempered, fled before the terror of the dark. Then came the voices. Two hundred and five for twenty-five thousand steel, said a Morgan, gritting his teeth. The fundamental business of the country is on a sound and prosperous basis, said President Hoover. No buildings were burned down, no industries have died, no mines, no railroads have vanished, crooned Arthur Brisbane. The great comforters. There, there, my children. Try and catch a little sleep. Mother is near.
Kinda makes you wish YOU had a subscription, doesn’t it? I’ve had The Complete New Yorker in the DVD form for a couple of years, but this Web form is much more useable (search function much improved, and navigation too). So now I have one more excuse to sit here in front of the monitor…
Guy Davenport
I can’t recall at whose behest I ordered The Geography of the Imagination, but I did and it came and I’ve been nibbling at it for a week or so now. Quite a few memorable bits of erudition and copious novel linkages of things I only sort-of know about, but tonight I was brought up short by one sentence:
One suspects that Thoreau would have married a woodchuck or a raccoon, if the biology of the union could have been arranged… (pg 71)
Finishing Little Brother
The text of Bruce Schneier’s Afterword to Doctorow’s Little Brother is well worth reading. Try this bit:
So when you’re wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the security systems around you. Look at the cameras in the stores you shop at. (Do they prevent crime, or just move it next door?) See how a restaurant operates. (If you pay after you eat, why don’t more people just leave without paying?) Pay attention at airport security. (How could you get a weapon onto an airplane?) Watch what the teller does at a bank. (Bank security is designed to prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from stealing.) Stare at an anthill. (Insects are all about security.) Read the Constitution, and notice all the ways it provides people with security against government. Look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems on television and in the movies. Figure out how they work, what threats they protect against and what threats they don’t, how they fail, and how they can be exploited.
Spend enough time doing this, and you’ll find yourself thinking differently about the world. You’ll start noticing that many of the security systems out there don’t actually do what they claim to, and that much of our national security is a waste of money. You’ll understand privacy as essential to security, not in opposition. You’ll stop worrying about things other people worry about, and start worrying about things other people don’t even think about.
And Andrew “bunnie” Huang’s Afterwordcontribution is, if anything, even more remarkable. Like this:
Have the terrorists already won? Have we given in to fear, such that artists, hobbyists, hackers, iconoclasts, or perhaps an unassuming group of kids playing Harajuku Fun Madness, could be so trivially implicated as terrorists?
There is a term for this dysfunction–it is called an autoimmune disease, where an organism’s defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to recognize itself and attacks its own cells. Ultimately, the organism self-destructs. Right now, America is on the verge of going into anaphylactic shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this. Technology is no cure for this paranoia; in fact, it may enhance the paranoia: it turns us into prisoners of our own device. Coercing millions of people to strip off their outer garments and walk barefoot through metal detectors every day is no solution either. It only serves to remind the population every day that they have a reason to be afraid, while in practice providing only a flimsy barrier to a determined adversary.
Read ’em both here. They’re short and to the point.
Little Brother and edupunk
I’ve been reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother with great pleasure and not a few heretical thoughts in the realm of DISRUPTION (continuing thoughts included in Making room for disruptive and emergent technologies, an article I wrote more than FIVE years ago for NITLE News, and still stand by [bits of linkrot here and there, alas]). The book provides a quick bootstrap in re: an array of present-day technologies (RFIDs, encryption, quite a few others) that some of us may be a bit hazy about details and implications of, and offers a clearer explanation of the paradox of false positives than you’re likely to find outside of a statistics text. Here’s a 3-minute snippet from an interview on Viking Youth Power Hour in mid-May 2008 –the whole 53 minutes is pretty interesting.
You can download LittleBrother for FREE, or BUY it. Lotsa people have done one or both of those things, for good reason. Note some of the comments on Little Brother:
I think I just read one of the most important books that I’ve ever read. It was good, too, but that is far outweighed by what I suspect will be the importance of the book to history. Uh, yeah, that sounds a bit dramatic, but bear with me for a little while… (Worlds & Time)
I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can. Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It’s a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless. (Neil Gaiman)
Doctorow shows students what we all know. Educational institutions present themselves as distributors of knowledge and information when it would be more accurate to understand them as guardians of knowledge and information. There’s a perpetual arms race between those who attempt to lock down networks in institutions and those who devise means to unlock them. Schools forbid cell phones, teachers keep computers turned off, professors tell students NOT to bring laptops to class: they don’t do these things b/c they hope students will be able to access and communicate knowledge. (Alex Reid)
About halfway into it, I wanted to stop reading it — not because I didn’t like it, but because I wanted to jam it into the hands of the next 14-year-old I saw and say, “you need to read this more than I do.” (John Scalzi)
…and Chris Pirillo (lockergnome) has a YouTube video commentary, including (from 5:00) a reading of Chapter 1.
This shares context-of-the-moment with the flurriment and scufflement of edupunk. If the term means nothing to you, explore the Wikipedia entry on the term [expect it to change rapidly], comments at Assorted Stuff and by Janet Clarey, and D’Arcy Norman’s fine summary which includes this aux armes:
It’s about individuals being able to craft their own tools, to plan their own agendas, and to determine their own destinies. It’s about individuals being able to participate, to collaborate, to contribute, without boundaries or barriers. And it’s not new.
See also the gallimaufry included under edupunk as a del.icio.us tag.
And while you’re at it, factor in Cory’s recent BoingBoing post on demonization of photography in public spaces.
Chabon reads from the Yiddish Policemen’s Union
followed by Q&A session from the same reading.
I picked up the book in the Pittsburgh airport and have been enjoying its improbabilities. Not surprising that it’s a Nebula Award winner, and up for Hugo and Sidewise awards too. An example of its descriptive and analytical astuteness:
A pine box slick with rain pitches and tosses on the surf of weeping men. Satmars hold umbrellas over the heads of Verbovers. Gerers and Shtrakenzers and Viznitzers link arms with the boldness of schoolgirls on a lark. Rivalries, grudges, sectarian disputes, mutual excommunications, they’ve been laid aside for a day so that everyone can mourn with due passion a yid who was forgotten by them until last Friday night. Not even a yid –the shell of a yid, thinned to transparency around the hard void of a twenty-year junk habit. Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have pinpointed the site of their collective unworthiness and gathered in the rain to lay it in the ground. (pg. 197)
I’m interested to see that Christianne Alarmist-Librarian identified the very same passage as the quintessence of the book…
Glorious sentence
It’s the most delicious pleasure to linger over bits of prose like this, where every word and clause is artfully placed to inform the reader:
Since those moments on the terrace, Harold had daily become more of the solicitous and indirectly beseeching lover; and Esther, from the very fact that she was weighed on by thoughts that were painfully bewildering to her –by thoughts which, in their newness to her young mind, seemed to shake her belief that life could be anything else than a compromise with things repugnant to the moral taste– had become more passive to his attentions at the very time that she had begun to feel more profoundly that in accepting Harold Transome she left the high mountain air, the passionate serenity of perfect love for ever behind her, and must adjust her wishes to a life of middling delights, overhung with the langourous haziness of motiveless ease, where poetry was only literature, and the fine ideas had to be taken down from the shelves of the library when her husband’s back was turned.
(George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical pg 426)
Franzen’s latest
I’ve been a student of things Chinese for many years, via heaps of basically-Orientalist books and articles following decades of modernization efforts and historical context. That used to be a leisurely pursuit, with plenty to read and meditate upon, and things seemed not to be happening all that rapidly until the last five years or so. But now the global importance of the juggernaut of China’s development is a whole new ball game, with daily updates across the spectrum of concerns, and pretty much every product that one buys these days is (or anyhow has components that are) Made in China. America’s addiction to consumables is the basic fuel of that juggernaut, and few pieces that I’ve read are more eloquent expositors of that point than Jonathan Franzen’s “The Way of the Puffin” in the New Yorker of 21 April. The full text of the piece isn’t available online, but there’s a detailed abstract and a very worthwhile audio interview (13 minutes, downloadable).
Franzen’s writing is a pleasure for its illustrative digressions. Here’s the second paragraph, a pretty unique mise en scène for an article about China, and even more so for an article about bird watching in China:
My difficulty with golf is that, although I play it once or twice a year to be sociable, I dislike almost everything about it. The point of the game seems to be the methodical euthanizing of workday-sized chunks of time by well-off white men. Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl. I dislike the self-congratulations of its etiquette, the self-important hush of its television analysts… (pg. 90)
Franzen drops other charming bits of description:
Xu’s teeth were beautiful. He had the fashionably angular eyeglasses and ingratiating eagerness of an untenured literature professor… (pg. 92)
(of Shanghai) …on the ground, the brutally new skyscrapers and the pedestrian-hostile streets and the artificial dusk of the smoke-filled winter sky: it was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, “Does somebody want to get into some unprecedentedly deep shit?” and this place has raised its hand and said, “Yeah!” (pg. 92)
…southeast Asia: a region well on its way to being clear-cut and strip-mined into one vast muddy pit, since China itself is hopelessly short on natural resources to supply the factories that supply us. The Chinese people may bear the brunt of Chinese pollution, but the trauma to biodiversity is being reëxported around the world. (pg. 105)