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Reading the novel which I feel must have grown from one of my favorite short stories, then rereading the story, made me realize that the novel may be considered the “long form” but the short story will always be the “great form.” Novels intentionally suck everything out of your head. A short story demands that […]
Reading the novel which I feel must have grown from one of my favorite short stories, then rereading the story, made me realize that the novel may be considered the “long form” but the short story will always be the “great form.” Novels intentionally suck everything out of your head. A short story demands that the reader breath with it, use imagination to inflate it to its deserved size.
What I talk about when we talk about contemporary short stories are my three favorites of the last fifteen years – “Another Manhattan,” Donald Antrim; “The Spot,” David Means; and “The Cold Outside,” John Burnside. I don’t know how many times I have recited this list. Honestly, I wish it would change. I get tired of listening to it myself.
When I read David Means’ novel, Hystopia, I realized immediately that I was reading some inflated version of “The Spot.” When I say inflated, I mean from a balloon to a dirigible.
Means’ is a consummate short story writer. He’s considered one of the best in contemporary letters. His work regularly appears in The New Yorker. He has published four highly regarded and honored collections. Short Story writers can hardly do better than that. I’ve read most of his output. I am a fan.
It’s not my intent to be a critic here or convince you to buy and read Hystopia. I found it worth every page and sentence because I admire how Means’ writes. He makes me feel, feel, feel, what’s going on, rather than think, think, think too hard about it. Honestly, about two-thirds through, I might have put it down if it wasn’t a novel by one of my three favorite short story writers. But because I am familiar with his short works, I was beyond curious how he would handle the long form.
I’m a little weary of Vietnam-era stories (this is one). I’m not a fan of dystopian fiction (obvious from the title). I can’t get movies like “Platoon” and “Apocalypse Now” and “Deerhunter” and all the others out of my head when I read them. I’m also not a fan of female characters who seem like they are being dragged by the hair by barbarian males (there’s at least one). But I was taken with Means’ sense of the pastoral in the setting (essentially the state of Michigan, in a state that can best be described as an extrapolation from the violence, war, and assassinations of the late 1960s and presaging the economic ravages of post-industrial America still to come). I was taken with the tight structure of the novel, an infield of major characters, and an outfield of minor characters vital to what’s going on.
I am always a sucker for stories which depict the trauma and absurdity, and the unintended consequences, of large institutional programs, in this case the government trying to collectively manage veterans post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) in its many varieties, and the consequences of the war in general on what would later come to be known as “the Homeland.”
In two words, the America of Hystopia has just gone batshit crazy. The characters are desperately trying to hold it together, maneuver through what’s left of their lives. And whether the character is on the outside fighting those on the inside, or fighting within their own tribe, or vice-versa or reversa, there ain’t much left of life for any of them. And that’s what Means’ does best in Hystopia, take the remnants of these lives, find their essence under these dire circumstances, and deliver what’s left of the human condition.
But what I really want to convey is a unique experience. I’ve read “The Spot” at least a half a dozen times, maybe a dozen, although it had been a few years since the last time. Hystopia clearly (well, clear to me) builds on the types of characters and, most importantly, the mood from “The Spot,” although who knows which came first, in print or in the author’s mind. Anyway, I reread “The Spot” a day after finishing the novel. Wow! At first, it was deflationary. The short story seemed small, like a balloon, compared to what I had just experienced. But then, I focused on the perfection of the sentences and how each one expands into the next and the next. And what I reaffirmed is that the short story is the dirigible, because, if done right, the reader is given the space, the air, to inflate it to whatever size he/she wishes. Novels are intended to suck up all the oxygen in your system. In many ways, the author does all the work for the reader. Short stories, great ones, are an opportunity for the reader to air-dance with the story, imagine something larger from the short form.
Here’s a fragment from “The Spot”: “You see, the water is unsuspecting until it hits that spot. It has no idea it’s gonna be collected, drawn under the streets, cleaned up, and piped into homes. Not a clue. But when it touches that suck, its future vanishes. No chance of becoming a wave after that, no kissing the shore and yearning back out into the lake. Instead it ends up pooled on somebody’s lawn, or slipping down a throat, or spooned into a bowl of baby cereal. That’s the mystery of chance. One minute you’re doing one thing, the next you’re another, and choice had nothing at all to do with it.”
Choice has nothing to do with it. How much bleaker can you get? But keep thinking about it. Maybe choice is less influential than we wish to believe.
What does one avid reader write about the latest novel from one of, if not the, leading American author of contemporary literary fiction?
I feel like I’ve grown up with this guy through his novels. The Names was an enabler of my addiction to literary fiction when I read it in the early 1980s. Underworld is […]
What does one avid reader write about the latest novel from one of, if not the, leading American author of contemporary literary fiction?
I feel like I’ve grown up with this guy through his novels. The Names was an enabler of my addiction to literary fiction when I read it in the early 1980s. Underworld is one of my all time favorite “big books.” I’ve read everything the guy’s published since Underworld, including his short stories in the The New Yorker, and gone back to read his earlier works from the 1970s, including Great Jones Street, End Zone, and White Noise.
Zero K is about a son coming to grips with his wealthy father’s impending cryogenic preservation in a personal pod at one of those remote sites where they’d have to kill you if they told you its location. About all we know about it is it is “land traveled by nomads for thousands of years.” His father wants to “own the end of the world.”
No one reads DeLillo for plot or character. You read DeLillo because he is a master at extrapolating the contemporary zeitgeist to its future state. He anticipates our future without sensationalizing it. He makes you look at it, not immerse you in it.
And you read DeLillo, or at least I do, because his writing is so exact, so precise, without ever resorting to lofty words for the sake of making the reader look them up. When he uses such a word in Zero K, he has his narrator step back and examine it, define it for you.
Zero K is a meditation on life extension, on the notion of not wanting to die, on having the means (money) to choose not to die. It probes the idea of money and science as the new religion. After all, you better have faith in the scientists who are going to restore you if you’re going to be preserved for a few decades or centuries.
Most of all, it challenges the impact of those the preserved leave behind. Isn’t that what death is all about? The dead are dead. The living have to make sense of it all. In this case, they aren’t dead, though, but a state in-between.
DeLillo uses this idea of being preserved, for later reincarnation on this planet, to explore elements of modern life, death, and everything in-between. Because being preserved for your rebirth in an enhanced physical state for whatever future society holds in store is the ultimate betwixt and between life and death, I suppose.
My observation on DeLillo is that his novels have a detachment quality which has grown over time, not linearly perhaps, but a trendline (Great Jones Street is an example of an early work with this detachment quality). This detachment hasn’t worked so well in all of his later novels. I thought Cosmopolis was kind of a dud but Point Omega was fantastic.
Detachment is extremely effective in Zero K. Maybe it works because we (the characters, us readers) are not attached to either life or death as this story unfolds. We’re observers with the narrator. It’s not the surround sound kind of effect most novels have.
The narrator is uber self conscious, almost annoyingly so at times. He ponders everything. I mean, everything. And DeLillo pauses time as part of the reading process for the narrator to ponder. Most of the time, the narrator seems detached from himself even.
The detachment of the narrator from his father, his girlfriend, his mother in law, and the death of his real mother, his girlfriend’s abandoned son, adopted from an old Soviet state, all this detachment also allows DeLillo to get away with passages which in other novels might be considered explanation getting the way of the story. We’re observing Jeffrey Lockhart, the son, ponder his father’s impending non-death.
There’s much pondering going on, but I can assure you it’s not a ponderous novel.
This is the kind of detachment which permeates this novel, from the last few pages when the narrator son is back in New York: “On public elevators, I direct a blind gaze precisely nowhere, knowing that I’m in a sealed box alone with others and that none of us is willing to offer a face open to inspection.” A nice metaphor for the preserved in pods half a planet away, but also cold hard truth for elevator riders everywhere.
Characters, narrator, elevator riders, readers – all are on the outside looking into something and away from others.
This is how pod residents are prepared: “You are completely outside the narrative of what we refer to as history. There are no horizons here. We are pledged to an inwardness, a deep probing focus on who and where we are.”
Think about this the next time you watch someone with face in iphone smack into something or someone. DeLillo is extrapolating from here to Zero K. I think. After all, the narrator Jeffrey tells us in the middle of the book, “what else was there for [my father] to acquire” but “the billionaire’s myth of immortality.” The “pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.”
Detachment fully serves what I perceive to be DeLillo’s purpose here, so the reader senses this in between space along with the characters, especially the narrator who has the obligation but no desire to witness his father’s preservation and privilege.
What is it like not to be attached to life or death? Zero K nails that one.
I had been anticipating Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire for over a year, ever since I caught wind of its existence and the author’s celebrated six-figure contract with a big five New York City publishing house. It’s billed as a book about 1970s New York City, and the July 14, 1977 blackout is the […]
I had been anticipating Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire for over a year, ever since I caught wind of its existence and the author’s celebrated six-figure contract with a big five New York City publishing house. It’s billed as a book about 1970s New York City, and the July 14, 1977 blackout is the temporal focal point of the events in the novel.
At eighteen years old, I landed in Manhattan in September 1974 for college and ended up staying (except for one year) until 1987, after which I still commuted to Manhattan and lived in the metro area (two states away in Bucks County PA).
Mercifully, during the blackout, I was living in a trailer working as an engineering intern (well-paid, not like today’s interns) at a power plant in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. After I left that job, I returned to Manhattan with an office in World Trade Tower 1 (95th floor) from 1979-1981, though I spent much of that time reverse-commuting to a refinery in Elizabeth, NJ), and lucked into an apartment on the Upper East Side (400 sq. ft., street side!, third floor of a five floor walkup, with three locks on the door, and boasting a metal shower on top of an 18-in cement pedestal in the kitchen, one sink for dishes and toiletries, and a water closet). After the engineering job, I ended up working for almost two decades for McGraw-Hill, a major New York publisher (though not known for its literary fiction).
More recently, I co-launched an indie publishing company, and I fashion myself a writer of fiction, so I am well-versed in the vagaries of the lords of New York publishing, and the tens of thousands of writers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and beyond (can you see that famous New Yorker map cover or what?) seeking to jump the ditch between these two worlds. Incidentally, many of these writers and their agents are now querying our little publishing house in St. Louis (Blank Slate Press, now part of Amphorae Publishing Group).
So, I came to City on Fire with an all-consuming desire to read a “big book” about a seminal period in my life and a desire to understand how this relatively young author and his debut (debut, mind you!) novel manuscript were anointed by the all-consuming New York publishing community to be the 927-page cause celebre of lit fiction in the middle part of the second decade of the twenty first century.
When my wife (who now runs the publishing company) went to New York in May for Book Expo America, I politely told her not come back without one of the 700 free advance reader editions of City on Fire Knopf (the publisher) was going to hand out.
Others in the blogosphere (and the envy wing of struggling authors everywhere) had already asked the obvious questions, what’s a guy (Garth Risk Hallberg) from the American South born around 1980 have to say about 1970s New York? How did he get this amazing contract as an unknown (in part, apparently, because he was assigned a seat next to a big deal New York agent at the wedding of a mutual friend, according to an article in Publishers Weekly, May 4, 2015)? How could a major house risk so much on a 930-page debut from a complete unknown?
I would also add a few of my own. Why are all the back flap blurbs from people who sell books for a living, and the seven in the front written by the editors at Knopf and Vintage? Could they not find any better from the lit fiction “blurbosphere”?
A bipolar reaction
I read this book over four months. I travel a lot and it was just too weighty to take on trips (I do my serious reading in paper). For me, a “book I can’t put down” is one I do put down frequently just to catch my breath, savor the language, and prolong the joy. This wasn’t that kind of book.
Without giving too much away, here are the primary characters and plot elements:
- A rag tag group of punk kids and young adults are plotting and executing domestic terrorist-like events (against property mostly)
- A corporation, The Hamilton Sweeney Company, is doing corrupt development and “making money from money”; its corporate headquarters becomes a target for the rag tag bunch above (and the climax of the novel).
- Mercer Goodman, a young African American gay writer type guy from Georgia trying to “make it” in the city, takes up with William Hamilton Sweeney III, a rebellious Richie Rich artiste, in the early stages of the novel, but soon the two go their separate ways.
- Sam (Samantha), a Long Island girl whose dad is the pre-eminent manufacturer of fireworks serves as a conveyor belt among these worlds; she is shot on New Year’s Eve prior to the July 14 blackout.
- Charlie, a very confused Long Island kid and best friend to Sam, is much like Sam, but he’s not shot; instead, he (and earlier Sam) ends up attached to the nihilist punks seeking meaning through subversion, rock n roll, drugs, and explosives.
- A retired cop (Larry Pulaski) and a newspaper guy (Richard Groskoph) are running around trying to piece all of this stuff together; the newspaper guy gets taken out early.
- Regan Hamilton Sweeney (sister to William III) and her ne’er-do-well husband Keith Lamplighter experience family and marital problems suitable for any day or nighttime soap.
What I mean by bipolar is that I have two strong opposing reactions about City on Fire. Think barbell.
On the one end of the axis, this novel is precisely constructed, tightly woven, as sturdy as a brick shithouse (at least until the very end, which I address later). This is quite an accomplishment for 927 pages. In those four months of picking up and putting down this book, I rarely lost track of the characters, was always grounded in place and time, and could follow everything page to page, chapter to chapter. This is unusual for me. There are lots of big books out there I love, but I spend a lot of time confused and have to keep retracing my steps.
There are five principal loci of the action – the Hamilton Sweeney corporate building (and family residence), the lower east side hovel serving as the base of operations for the post-punk rock musician/junkie/nihilist/domestic terrorist kids/young adults, the apartment where William Hamilton Sweeney III (later known as Billy three sticks) and his gay lover Mercer Goodman live (For me, Mercer is at least in part a stand in for the author, he’s from Georgia, he’s writing a novel, he’s moved to New York, he teaches high school English, he’s poor, etc), the residence in Brooklyn where the Hamilton Sweeney daughter Regan lives with her husband Keith and their two kids, and a somewhat peripheral Long Island location where Sam and Charlie migrate from.
Hallberg does an exceptional job of keeping these sub-worlds together. In this department, he’s got mojo on the order of gravity and objects in a solar system. I would have loved to see his plot diagram, his white board, his apartment wall where all of this was hatched, stitched, taped, and glued.
It all holds together, that is, until the ending (foreshadow number two).
But here’s the problem at the other end of this axis. This world, as I “felt” it reading this novel, is an amalgamation of post 9/11 NYC and 1970s NYC. I suppose you can say that’s where the fiction comes in, but still, it didn’t authentically reflect and enlighten my experience or, for that matter, that depicted in the dozens of NYC novels and short stories I have read (I am a sucker for NYC stories) or movies I’ve seen.
I mean, I wasn’t looking for Taxi Driver, or Death Wish, The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3, Bright Lights, Big City (Jay McInerny, another author who cut teeth with a NYC debut novel), Lush Life, or Great Jones Street grimness, grit, and gore. But it’s 1977, for crying out loud. The Yankees are going to win the World Series, Miss Subways and Jacoby and Meyers posters line the subway cars, graffiti covers every surface, Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels are patrolling the underground, half the city openly smokes pot waiting in line at the movies and at the ball parks, Times Square is a cesspool of pornography, ghetto youth act out once the subway car empties and you’re the only rider left, the Port Authority could win the prize for skankiest city block sized enclosure in America, “Headless Body Found In Topless Bar” graces the New York Post front page, and a spread photograph of a bullet-riddled mafia boss in a restaurant in Little Italy is the only thing the daily papers will sacrifice the back-page front page of the Sports Section. Where’s WNEW and WPLJ, the pre-eminent rock radio stations of the era, in a novel with anarchist rock musicians terrorizing the city?
No one sane in 1970s New York City goes into the parks after dark, and yet the incident around which much of the story spins involves two white Long Island teenagers meeting in Central Park on New Year’s Eve 1976.
Sure, some of these details are included here and there, but they didn’t feel woven into the fabric of scene setting. And some details are so obscure, I wondered if they were placed as deep inside triggers for true New Yorkers. On page 908, the cop Larry Pulaski drives across a bridge in New Jersey “that for once merits his name.” I know this bridge only because I drove across it for more than a year reverse commuting to that refinery. It’s the Pulaski skyway. Talk about obscure references (and that air of superiority privileged only to current and ex-New Yorkers). The “West Side Angels” make an appearance on pp 804-805. I don’t recall Mayor Abe Beame making an appearance, or any politician for that matter.
In reaching the end of City on Fire, I was reminded of the World Trade Center buildings. They are so precisely constructed. The symmetry of all those windows in the sky is like an optical illusion. They rise majestically from the lower Manhattan skyline. No question, they are purpose-built towers, solid, functional, practical, everything a Hamilton Sweeney Board of Directors would want from an office building.
They are also ugly. Or at least they are not beautiful. They are tall shoeboxes from an architectural perspective. They were the tallest buildings in the world at that time. Though they have been mythologized and eulogized since 9/11, when they were built did they serve, beyond the practical, any function besides bragging rights for New York City?
Given the hype, I expected this novel to be like the view of NYC from inside those towers with binoculars, telescope even, not the view of those towers from the outside.
And so with City on Fire, I missed that 1970s feel, that cruel-to-be-kind urban landscape? If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere … well, if you could make it during that decade, you probably really could make it anywhere and anytime.
This book, in short, felt more like an edifice than edifying.
And the edifice begins to sway dangerously by the end. The attempted killing of the girl around which the story spins essentially disappears (the girl and her father appear but the crime dissipates like a New York minute), as does the whole sub-plot about the fireworks. One secondary character (the Asian woman, Jenny Nguyen, who lives in the same building as the offed-early journalist) and one tertiary character (the duplicitous executive partner at Hamilton Sweeney) rendezvous at the L.A. airport for no reason whatsoever other than to say that this box has been checked, yes, we’ve reminded the reader about them and they need to do something.
Jenny, incidentally, is a darling in the sense of another oft-stated admonition to writers, “kill your darlings.” In other words, get rid of characters which are a drag on the story. But let’s be real: These rules don’t apply when you’ve been anointed.
There’s an epilogue that seems to have nothing to do with the price of real estate on the Upper East Side (there’s also a prologue, so all you budding authors, don’t listen to agents who say, never have a prologue or an epilogue). The two gay lovers Mercer and Billy three sticks meet up after about a billion pages for no apparent reason, other than, I suppose, two lovers so important early on had to face off at the end.
Then on page 881 comes a long paragraph about Mercer’s novel, described much like, can you guess?, City on Fire: “In his head the book kept growing and growing in length and complexity, almost as if it had taken on the burden of supplanting real life, rather than evoking it.” And get this line at the end of that paragraph: “And clearly, he [Mercer] was no Homer. Was not even an Erica Jong.” The reading public will probably wait the same length of time that spans the lives of these two before such disparate authors are ever uttered in the same breath.
And an errant claim that “Elton John begat Queen, and Queen begat Frampton” surely alters my notions of 1970s rock n roll. It continues later with “Frampton begat Kiss who begat Alice Cooper, who begat Bowie…” Now maybe these statements are only through the eyes of the mixed up Charlie Weisbarger, but they took me right out of the decade this novel was supposed to be about.
In the middle of the box-checking march through the finale, Mercer encounters a “quartet of skinheads” looting the school Mercer taught at. Memory what it is, I still don’t recall skinheads being a “thing” anywhere but Germany in the 1970s. Bizarrely enough, these skinheads (who could be “off-duty Marines or alopeciacs”) take time off from looting to engage Mercer in conversation. And alopeciacs? Really?
I don’t mind so much the ending buckling. It is terribly difficult for even the best authors to craft an ending that doesn’t feel pretentious, rushed, tidy, or insipid. I don’t mind that City on Fire lacks lyrical prose. It’s muscular prose. It’s dense prose. It’s dense enough to keep me grounded at all times. And it’s consistent, also a stunning achievement.
But by the end I felt like I was wearing cement shoes.
The grand finale doesn’t so much resolve the plot points or character conflicts as it drifts towards the something terrible that is about to happen to the Hamilton Sweeney building. Then all these characters from the previous 850 pages re-appear in order for the author to check the requisite boxes.
And it has other elements which lack purpose, for one, a thirty page interlude that appears at page 498 (a little more than halfway through), excerpts from Sam’s diary/rebellious youth graphic ‘zine. I mean, it was a nice break in the action, but it didn’t, as we say incessantly in writers groups, “advance the story.” A second 32-page interlude appears between pages 761 and 782 (no, the numbers don’t add up) that, for some in explicable reason, explains most of the plot. On page 254, there is a reference to fireworks being directed by computer. Well, I leave room for technology advances I may have ignored on the inner pages of The New York Times during those years.
I do mind the use of obscure words that serve the same purpose as a composer who writes unplayable music. Look at me! Ambuscading, inveigle (I think I had to memorized this on in high school), perverdid, declivity, occiput, ailanthus, cormorant, unguent, ontic, pellucid, ratiocination, lapidary are a few I marked just for grins. I also mind a chapter (34 in this edition) that, out of the blue, switches to second person lecture mode. These may be the inevitable requisites of lit fiction to satisfy the academically oriented, and who knows, maybe there is deep meaning that only study in a graduate literature course will ferret out.
Don’t get me wrong, I was glad I read it. I’m happy to put City on Fire in the context of all the other NYC books I referred to earlier (and many, many more which line my shelves). If City on Fire sells well and earns the big literature prizes, I suppose the publisher can claim bragging rights. We built this! But in the end, the questions, for me, remain: why this author, why this book? Does it all come down to carefully arranged seating cards at a wedding reception?
I suppose it’s only natural to compare this novel to a similar one, Infinite Jest, from the middle of the last decade of the last millenium. After three attempts, I still haven’t made it past page 250 in that block of reconstituted wood. But I’ve spent countless hours discussing Infinite Jest with people who have read it and love it (two different reading groups, writing groups, my daughter, other aspiring fiction writers) that I feel I understand the essence of the book. I think one difference between the two tomes is that David Foster Wallace was clearly intent on telling a story in a unique way, through a new structure and use of hyperactive prose.
And back another two decades, there was Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I almost got to the end of that one (but I was much younger then), but was so annoyed I decided not to give the author the benefit of my completing it. (I was big on personal and silent protest). I finished Hallberg’s City on Fire. And I was glad I did.
In sum, I admire the scale and ambition. I admire the construction. But I don’t read anything in City of Fire that advances the art of novel writing, of telling a big story in a big way. And I didn’t feel 1970s New York come alive in ways I had expected.
Tagged with: big novels • book review • City on Fire • fiction • Garth Risk Hallberg • Literary fiction • novels
Assia Djebar, a highly acclaimed Algerian author, died earlier this year. I just finished her novel So Vast the Prison (1995). It does not read like a novel (certainly not a conventional or even non-conventional one). Judging from the brief bio info I’ve read, it is as much, or more, memoir and autobiography laced with […]
Assia Djebar, a highly acclaimed Algerian author, died earlier this year. I just finished her novel So Vast the Prison (1995). It does not read like a novel (certainly not a conventional or even non-conventional one). Judging from the brief bio info I’ve read, it is as much, or more, memoir and autobiography laced with historical fiction. The language is beautiful. It is perfectly titled. The way the universal plight of women is addressed takes no prisoners. Like some paintings I love, it is amorphous and fluid, and even confusing at times. But I stayed with it and realized my own limited perspective was getting in the way.
The novel covers a hundred years, or at least several generations, across France and Algeria. At times I was completely confused. Was this fiction? Was it a memoir? Some of the passages seemed to come straight from a journal. Or was it simply an epic poem? The narration starts with a long sequence about a lover, really an infatuation, never to return to this seemingly critical individual. It hops from generation to generation. Suddenly, it is all about making a film about a woman’s life, or the life for women, in Algeria. There are brothers and mothers (including in laws) and cousins and and aunts and uncles and sisters and friends appearing on stage, usually briefly. Men, as you may guess, don’t fare well. Husbands are brutal. Leaders are oppressive and dictatorial and battle-wagers.
But I had to go back to the title to “get it.” So Vast the Prison. That is the theme. That is what ties all of this together…tightly, unambiguously, unabashedly. Excepting perhaps a lucky few, the women of the world live in various forms of prison. Their bodies and child-bearing, prison. Their men keep them in prison. These same men maintain the cultural norms which perpetuate these life sentences. Other women, clinging to the traditional ways, fortify these prisons. Across generations, continents, and time, so vast is the prison.
Once again, this theme I’ve written about before (http://jasonmakansi.com/the-global-american-footprint-in-fiction/) emerges. Novels which are “big” outside America (and often highly acclaimed) address sobering issues, issues of life and death, survival, war, oppression, the human condition; meanwhile, the big American novels seem frivolous by comparison, dealing with the minutiae of life in the suburbs, the vagaries of popular culture, privilege, entitlement, or, as I often see it referred to these days, “first world problems.” More to the point, novels like So Vast the Prison deal with the impact of the first world’s footprint on the rest of the people living on this planet, in this case the colonization of Algeria by the French and the ensuring war for independence, as well as internal conflicts. But that’s just a backdrop for the Godzilla footprints of men all over women all across the ages.
So Vast the Prison is beautiful, lyrical writing. It may not have fit my notion of what a novel should be, but through it, I “felt” what a great deal of feminist literature has been trying to tell me for decades.
Blind Faith in your leaders will get you killed. Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA tour, Brendan Byrne Arena/Meadowlands, 1985
Actually, the title of this post should be what I thought about when I was thinking about writing a blog post about my recent bike trip listening to Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, […]
Blind Faith in your leaders will get you killed. Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA tour, Brendan Byrne Arena/Meadowlands, 1985
Actually, the title of this post should be what I thought about when I was thinking about writing a blog post about my recent bike trip listening to Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, 1975-1985 (a compilation of live performances) on the headphones. But I figured if I shortened it, I could make a play on the title of that famous Raymond Carver short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Lying back in my recliner, which hasn’t gotten near enough use over nearly two decades, I remembered when I saw Springsteen live in 1985 and he uttered the statement which begins this post. Then I also remembered this is Veterans Day, probably not the best day for such a quote.
All of which makes sense in the strangest of ways because my day started, like most weekdays, with the 6-7 a.m. call in show on C-Span during which an Iraq veteran caller was irate because Springsteen was playing at some ceremony somewhere and the guy was pissed because Brooce! was an ardent Iraq War protester. As was I. Am I, since the damn war continues under different guises. That caused me to talk back to my television, asking, “Well, how many more U.S. military personnel would have been killed or maimed if Iraq War protesters had not risen up and helped elect a President who campaigned on ending it?”
What does all this have to do with my recent bike tour along the C&O canal towpath from Cumberland, MD to Georgetown, Washington DC, a 180-mile ride I pedaled with four comrades over a five day four night period last week in September? I’m not sure, but we sure experienced a tremendous amount of history on that ride. The construction of the canal, nominally between 1820-1860, was, in many ways, a forty year exercise in futility because the railroads had quickly become the shipping option of choice and efficiency. We saw some small towns bearing the scars of decades of a de-industrializing America, a subject Springsteen sung to more than once. We detoured one afternoon to visit Antietam, a bloody awful battlefield of the Civil War. And we ended our tour in the nation’s capital, where our elected officials and the bureaucracy surrounding them make the decisions to send men and women into battle, pursue global economic strategies which gut high paying domestic jobs and, with them, the American middle class, and appropriate tax dollars for things like, well, keeping up the C&O Canal trail through the National Park Service. In between and all around us were striking views of the Potomac River and its environs.
One night we even stayed in a Comfort Suites (leesburg, VA) where the staff treated us five bikers like royalty, after we had ridden a ferry across the river. They even helped us wash our bikes! Oh, and one of my pedaling mates, she was named Sandy, and of course, that Springsteen song was on the vinyl side I just listened to. Another night we stayed at a B&B which could have doubled as a fright house for Halloween, but the lone proprietor proved to be an eminently nice guy. Although his lodging resembled an army barracks, he called ahead to make sure the one restaurant within ten miles would stay open for us for dinner, drove us to a scenic overlook, then cooked up some bitchin’ pancakes (or was it french toast?) the next morning.
I had no big thoughts, revelations, mid-course corrections, or eureka moments pedaling all those miles. My head was down and I was concentrating on the trail, most of which had ruts, and exposed roots, mud puddles, fallen branches, and other debris. I read many more C&O towpath historical markers than I ever would have if I were traveling solo. In many ways, it was a flat (an elevation difference of 600-700 feet total and we were going downhill), unobstructed, tour through a rich, winding slice of America and its history.
I thought I would fill many journal pages with new ideas, descriptions, sentiments, and details, fragments of which later might become seeds for short stories or blog posts. Not so much. I do recall an aroma in the air for several miles several times of cider, perhaps the pungency of rotting apples, though we never saw any fruit trees. The highway and the railroad which paralleled the towpath constantly reminded me we were not exactly in the wilderness. Industrial ruins and even an old water wheel mill house were at times embedded in the woods.
Though I’ve been riding a bike as a adult since 1980 (I marked the year by writing a poem about my first really cool bike), and I completed two centurions back when I used to live and bike in Manhattan, this was my first “overnight.” I seriously love my saddle bags, which the three ladies I lived with got me for Christmas last year, along with the contraption to hook them onto on the back of the bike (thank you, ladies!). Amazing how much stuff they hold. I thought a lot about how I am trying to substitute as many car miles for bike miles as I can at home. Even though I live in the heart of a city and everything is nicely compressed, it still isn’t easy. It was also nice to pedal so many miles without someone in a car yelling something stupid at me like, “YOU ARE NOT A CAR!” even though he was the one who didn’t see me.
I thought more than several times that I was gaining weight. That happened on one of those centurions I finished. When we reached the tip of Long Island, we completely and totally pigged out. That was after the probably 4000 calorie brunch we had at the halfway point in an IHOP. But no. I was at my same weight when I got home from the C&O trip.
Come to think of it, I did have blind faith in our leaders, Mark and Sandy Doumas, who last year had biked across the entire country – San Diego, CA to Richmond, VA. For all the biking I’ve done, I’m not much of a bike mechanic. I can change a tire but it would take me about five times as long as a guy like Mark. My friend Tom in the DC area helped me negotiate getting my car to my bike and put me up one night ahead of the trip and one night at the end. My sister-in-law made all the hotel arrangements. I didn’t even question. This may have been the first trip since college I went into expressly to “get beyond myself.”
Though I do question the wisdom of, and stridently oppose, the wars and overseas conflicts our nation is entangled in, none of which in my mind have a damn thing to do with our freedom here, I am nevertheless thankful that I live in a country where Bruce Springsteen can sing protest songs, my tax dollars support National Parks and Forests, and a veteran can speak his mind on the day he and his still-serving and fallen comrades are honored, a country which welcomed my father, who left a country with little if any freedom almost 65 years ago.
People need to save more for retirement. The planet could do with much less carbon in the atmosphere. Combine the two. Climate change problem solved.
If you want to debate whether global climate change is “real,” argue about how severe the impacts are and will be, or whether humans should even be contemplating behavioral and […]
People need to save more for retirement. The planet could do with much less carbon in the atmosphere. Combine the two. Climate change problem solved.
If you want to debate whether global climate change is “real,” argue about how severe the impacts are and will be, or whether humans should even be contemplating behavioral and economic changes to manage global climate change, kindly check out of this post now.
Rather, this post explains a conceptual and, if I do say so myself, elegant (on paper) means of reducing carbon discharged into the atmosphere as individuals participating in our economy.
First, recognize that when we talk seriously about reducing carbon, by default we are talking about massive social and behavioral change. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. Individually, and as a society, we emit carbon everywhere, our mouths, our automobile tailpipes, our furnaces, our sources of electricity (unless nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, or other non-carbon source), our offices, our schools. Everywhere!
I have been an electricity/energy industry professional for 35 years, and have been in the middle of environmental management and global warming debates for all of that time. There have long been two gaping holes in climate change “solutions.” They fail to appropriately account for individual responsibility and change and they fail to offer long-term incentives for changing behavior. Most of the time, I throw up my hands at the complexity of the problem and the solutions (at least from a systems, multi-dimensional perspective), and conclude, that there is only one way to articulate the solution: Use less! Consume less. Have less stuff. Reduce your life’s footprint, whether you measure it in carbon, dollars, community, locavores, etc.
Yes, there are periods when people collectively are not only acutely aware of environmental issues but engaged with them. Usually, they are short-lived episodes, always coinciding with periods of escalating energy prices. When prices return to “normal,” people go back to complaining but not doing.
Why do we go to work, earn money? Because the economy revolves around money. If we don’t have money, we starve. If we make more than we need for survival, we thrive. We can even have fun, have more leisure, etc. One of the basic tenets of a modern economy is that we save for when we are older and can’t work, or don’t want to. We contribute to government programs (through payroll contributions) that help us in retirement. All modern economies do this. We save on top of that if we don’t want to just “subsist” when we quit earning money.
This is the key to my elegant solution.
My solution has two parts: First, develop standards for monitoring carbon reduction, whether it is how you heat your home, commute to work, buy your groceries, grow you food, or school your children. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. If you take mass transit rather than drive alone to work, you reduce your carbon footprint. If you ride a bike, you reduce it even further. If you use less heat for your home than, say, the average American household (commensurate with your household size and square footage of your home) or the average home in your state or your area, you reduce the carbon footprint. If you are vegetarian, you have a smaller carbon footprint than if you are a hearty meat eater. If you home-school your children (maximize use of your home as a resource, for example) and use resources from the web, rather than travel a long way to a private school, you positively impact the carbon footprint.
You see where this is going. You need yardsticks. You need to authenticate the behavioral change with a number determined from an agreed-upon methodology. This won’t be easy. But it can be done.
Then, you can tally an individual’s carbon reduction regularly. You can tally a business, a school, a house of worship.
Now, imagine you make behavioral changes with carbon reductions for your entire working career. In a bank somewhere, quietly summing over the course of that career or life, are your “carbon reduction credits.” What if the government treated this just like an IRA or a 401K? Over the course of your retirement, the government rewarded you. The more carbon emissions you avoided, the larger your carbon IRA/401K-like savings account is. The means of reward could be discussed. It could be lower taxes (this is how IRA and 401K programs work today and the tax advantages are compelling). It could be social security like payments. For young people, it could be student debt forgiveness. It could be a choice that changes over the course of your life. But it has to be something substantial. something that makes you want to sacrifice for the long term in the same way you sacrifice the now for retirement, spending today for the kids’ college tomorrow, and so on.
Ever seen the national debt clock? How fast it spins? Think if a plurality of Americans contributed to their personal carbon avoidance or carbon credit clocks and thereby a national carbon clock.
Now, I have not figured out how the government will back these payments with real money. Then again, the federal government has unfunded liabilities coming out the wazoo, war expenditures which are off the “balance sheet,” oodles of treasury bills held by China and Japan (and god knows who else), and the dollar is strengthening! Which goes to show you, the amount of debt is immaterial, if your country is still, in a relative way, considered the safest bet out there. Controlling the high seas, the skies, the digital air waves, and the global monetary network probably doesn’t hurt either. But I digress.
I hesitate to suggest that at the end of each year, along with our tax returns, and other end-of-year financial record-keeping, we could also have carbon credit filing? God, I more than hesitate. To think of one more government form on the order of the tax code? Ugh! BUT, you know, if you want to solve a long-term, global problem, then everyone has to be in it to win it. It doesn’t have to be complicated (although I recognize the vagaries of bureaucracy mitigate against simplicity over time), and maybe on-line record-keeping or even automation through our personal digital devices could help.
Only carrots or sticks permanently alter behavior. You can force automobile manufacturers to make more efficient cars. You can force electric utilities to use less fossil fuel. You can spend a great deal of money to put in light rail and bus lines. You can hector people about living more simply. But the best way to achieve long-term behavioral changes is to incentivize individuals to change the way they consume stuff. Energy is consumed in and of itself and as part of every bit of “stuff” that’s made, acquired, and disposed of. That’s why carbon reduction is an exceedingly difficult problem. And that’s why you have to solve the problem at its source, rather than shifting the problem from one part of the economic system to another like the bathtub ring in The Cat in the Hat. In a consumer-based economy, consumers are the source.
Develop standards for monitoring and aggregating individual carbon reductions and reward that behavior with the equivalent of a retirement account. Instead of talking about carbon cap and trading schemes, which will only create more financial engineering shenanigans from the wizards of Wall Street, push it down to the consumers. Reward us for doing the right thing, not the bankers for manipulating trading markets. Make the incentive something besides an Energy Star designation from the EPA, or a LEEDS platinum for an energy-efficient commercial building, or a subsidy to a energy company for some people paid for by other people (like most rooftop solar incentive schemes).
People need more for retirement. The planet needs less carbon in the atmosphere. Combined the two. Problem solved. I am of course being tongue in cheek. It would be a massive undertaking to implement the solution I describe here. But similar things have been done on a grand scale before. Income tax has only been a permanent fixture in this country for 101 years. On climactic scales, that’s not that long. IRAs were established forty years ago.
This is FREE WARE, OPEN SOURCE. Take the idea, the money, the whatever, and run!
I’d never visited a Presidential Library before. Here’s a collection of observational odds and ends from visits to Bill Clinton’s and George W Bush’s.
Like their two-term administrations, I had the opportunity during a recent road trip to visit the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, Little Rock, AR, and the George W Bush Presidential Library […]
I’d never visited a Presidential Library before. Here’s a collection of observational odds and ends from visits to Bill Clinton’s and George W Bush’s.
Like their two-term administrations, I had the opportunity during a recent road trip to visit the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, Little Rock, AR, and the George W Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, TX back to back. I had never visited a presidential library before. While each of course strives to cast their former president in the best light, what I came away with was a distinction between the “man” and the “office” of President of the United States and a greater appreciation for the evolution of policies that are blamed on one president but are actually a continuation of policies started by previous ones.
For example, Ronald Reagan generally gets the credit for starting the big wave of modern deregulation in the US, but this was actually started by President Carter, who deregulated the trucking industry before Reagan got into office, and started the ball rolling on the deregulation of the electricity industry with legislation that broke open the monopoly franchise electric utilities had enjoyed for five decades.
Similarly, George Bush gets the credit or blame for hunting down terrorists around the world after declaring the “War on Terror” post 9/11, yet, as I learned at the Clinton Library, Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996. I’m no lawyer or legal scholar but Section III of this law appears to lay the groundwork for the Bush administration’s global war on terrorists.
Clinton also signed an executive order (#13099) prohibiting transactions with terrorists who threaten the Middle East Peace Process. Ironically, this order only lists Islamic groups, including specific individuals like Osama bin Laden, but there’s no mention of, for example, Jewish terrorist groups, like the Settler movement, who were responsible for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, in 1995. These people are typically called right-wing activists, not terrorists, though it is hard to identify people who disrupted the ME peace process more than those guys. This is an interesting point, in that the Clinton Library focuses on Rabin’s leadership in the Oslo Accords of 1993, when Rabin and Arafat shook hands and made peace, such as it was for a short while.
Of course, every president has to be seen making an attempt at Middle East peace and Bush was no exception. But he kind of got distracted by the invasion of Iraq and the War in Afghanistan.
Other broad events highlighted at the Clinton Library include the Bosnian War and the fight for Kosovo (“not an American lost”), the budget crisis, and welfare reform. Monica Lewinsky is actually mentioned! The Little Rock Nine of 1957, a seminal event in the Civil Rights Movement, was a defining moment in Clinton’s formative years. Clinton apparently spent the least amount of time of any president in the Oval Office. His morning Jogs are a constant feature in the White House daily schedules on display. The first Ramadan celebration at the White House was held during Clinton’s years in office. He invited 3000 Americans to the White House during his tenure.
It’s pretty clear that Bill Clinton has sought a role on the world stage ever since his administration ended, and indeed he has been successful at this. Hillary’s White House ambitions will continue this in spades. Somehow, I got this feeling as well from his Library, that his legacy was to be an American president “for life.”
A small word of warning: You are not allowed to bring a water bottle into the Clinton Library. This kind of pissed me off. Although the Library is just off of the main area of downtown Little Rock, it takes up lots of green space along the river. It’s a manufactured green space in an urban environment.
The Bush Library, in contrast, has reserved parking spaces for hybrid gas-electric vehicles! Probably wouldn’t have guessed that one, right? While the Clinton building is modern and gleaming and open (lots of glass and natural light), the Bush Library is traditional, ornate, and neo-classical, and associated with Southern Methodist University. Bush emphasizes faith, family, and values, as one might expect from a Republican. Bush also emphasizes “place” in the exhibits of his upbringing, while Clinton emphasizes events. Both were from small towns. You would expect a huge emphasis on 9/11 and fighting the War on Terror, and of course there is. The other big exhibits are on No Child Left Behind legislation and AIDs relief in Africa.
Oh, and I found this to be a fascinating difference: The Clinton theatre where you watch the orientation video is movie-house style while Bush’s is church style, with pews!
One of the panels under “protecting the environment” describes the Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch. They must have quickly run out of other ideas.
Here’s a statistic from the Bush Library that kind of blew me away: In 1950, there were 16 workers for every one social security recipient. In 2005, the ratio was 3:1. In 2040, it is forecasted to be 2:1. Both presidents struggled with the budget but Bush ended up with a blank check for funding wars.
Finally, I find this to be the most insightful observation. Okay, I didn’t comb the entire place, but after spending about two hours in the Bush Library, except for an old group photo that included Dick Cheney, I saw no other mention or photo of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Powell, Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, Feith, Perl, Abrams, Libby, Hadley, Rice, and the other major figures in his administration (and the architects of the Iraq War). I don’t state this as gospel, but more to learn if anyone else can refute or corroborate this. There are one or two Internet entries that mention Cheney’s absence at the Bush Library and this article in Politico (http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/george-w-bush-library-more-911-less-cheney-and-rove-90609_Page3.html) offers some substantiation on the others. Although it is widely known that Bush had become estranged from many of these officials during the course of the presidency, the lack of visibility is striking, and a contrast to the Clinton Library.
I am a baseball fan so I have to mention this tidbit from the Bush Library. The president threw out the first pitch of the World Series in 2000 (Yankees vs Mets), and while he walked on the field, Derek Jeter yelled at him, “Don’t bounce it, they’ll boo you!” Bush commented afterwards: “That baseball felt like a shot put.”
Honestly, though, I came away with great sympathy for both individuals as men and leaders struggling to live up to the expectations of the office, including the use of America’s firepower and military technology on the world stage, cooperation with Congress, our nation’s enormous resource appetite and percentage of the global economy, as well as the expectations of the rest of the world. Both were presidents during a period of the “lone superpower,” which certainly made all of this even more difficult (or, maybe not?). Who knows what the future holds for these two men, but I thought it was pretty clear Bush wishes to leave the office behind and live out his legacy as a humbler member of the human race, while the more apt phrase for Clinton would be, “you can take Clintons out of the White House but you can’t take the White House out of the Clintons.”
Putting these learnings in context with Obama’s second term, I can possibly see why someone would want to be President of the USA, but why would you want to ever want be a second-term president?
I burned out early trying to create an on-line life. In the process, I learned a few things.
Life, in some ways, is all about the search for a panacea, the next great thing that’s going to solve all your problems, get you discovered, shower you with bliss, find you love in all the right […]
I burned out early trying to create an on-line life. In the process, I learned a few things.
Life, in some ways, is all about the search for a panacea, the next great thing that’s going to solve all your problems, get you discovered, shower you with bliss, find you love in all the right places, and bend over, pick up the soap, and hand it to you in the shower. Life on-line, I have concluded, is pretty damn ordinary. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to read your musings on your on-line life, so if you skip mine, I applaud you for having something more worthwhile to do for the next ten to fifteen minutes.
Maybe the reason on-line life seems so ordinary (please hear this word as Mena Suvari uses it in American Beauty) to me is I started carving out an on-line life a long time ago, eons in the Internet time zone. Remember the AOL chat rooms back in the mid-1990s? I do. I gotta tell you, those conversations were racier than anything I’ve done on-line since (well, almost). You could jump into a “room” of “thirty somethings” and elbow your way to a conversation with someone of the opposite sex (well, who really knew), then meet them in a private room. We should all shudder at the idea of all those digital social experiments being recorded for posterity on a server somewhere. It was just like being in a singles bar on First Avenue, Manhattan upper East Side in the early 1980s. I even arranged a tryst with a woman (I hoped) in an Amtrak city 100 miles away. I never followed through. For three months, I was addicted like it was blow. Then, almost as quickly, chat just became ordinary.
Before most people knew what a digital magazine was, I launched an on-line news service as part of my editorial responsibilities at a trade publication owned at the time by a Fortune 500 publishing company. Want to guess what year? 1997. In fact, my publisher and I were so convinced digital would overtake print in a few years, we decided to put as much content as possible on-line and reduce the print publication from monthly to six times a year. Boy were we wrong! By the time we both had left the publication, the new owners restored it to monthly, even as they created several new on-line products. That venture was extraordinarily early. We almost destroyed the magazine.
I left a fine career in publishing at the end of of the last century/millenium for a dot.com startup. I was not only going to replicate industry information on-line, I was going to supplement it with hundreds of on-line design and operating “apps” that power plant engineers could use in their daily work. We were creating the “cloud” before anyone was dancing for digital rain. I left the business before y2k ended, but not before experiencing all the fun of C-suite morons running around creating “revenue” out of the barest wisps of murky relationships with people who might actually pay us for something…some day. These same C-suite gurus convinced lots of new employees to take a large chunk of their compensation in stock options. Not me. I was curious, not naive.
More than ten years ago, I joined an early (and in many ways pretty darn productive) writing workshop site called Zoetrope. You reviewed a certain number of short stories or novel chapters by others and then those others would review your stories. Some of the feedback was pretty helpful. Most participants, as in life, just did the minimum to get by. Short works got reviewed more often. Sexy titles got all the attention. Cliques developed in places called “offices.” Some authors were far more adept at figuring out how to use the site for self-promotion. There were some pretty good stories and authors on Zoetrope in the early years. But there was no real policing so you took your chances with titles that sounded good, writers you got to know, etc. In the end, it took too much time and energy to get to something beyond the ordinary.
Maybe you’ll forgive me saying that, as regards on-line life – been there, done that.
Nevertheless, you can’t stick your head in a newspaper forever. Speaking of, I decided at the beginning of 2014 that 2013 would be the last year I’d drag mountains of newsprint to the recycling bin half a block down the alley each week. So I opted for the on-line editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Well, no, I didn’t go cold turkey. Couldn’t you tell by my AOL chat room experience that I’m a chicken shit at heart? So, I kept the Sunday print edition. BUT, six days a week I now read the two papers of record on my iphone. What this has done to my reading and filing habits is interesting. I used to meticulously clip articles from both papers – stuff ranging from client-related items to recipes – and file them. Now I to email to myself important stories.
Surprise! In the time it takes me to get from “reading the papers” to settling in at the computer for work, most of those stories lose their import. That’s usually less than forty five minutes. Saving them on-line is more convenient than clipping and filing, but, you know, it’s just harder to be bothered. Oh, and in the span of three months, I decided I don’t even need the Journal. I quit paying for the on-line subscription. The first few times I emailed myself a WSJ article after that, I’d click on it and a version that gives the first few lines, then fades to white, would pop up.
I also learned a few other things about on-line editions. The publication has you over a barrel. Unless you print everything out (obviating the on-line cache), your archives are not accessible if you don’t pay your subscription. She (in the case of the The Gray Lady, not a gender-bending pronoun) who controls your data controls your life. They also run stories on-line for days and in different departments. I found myself reading the same book reviews not only several times but under different departments – Arts, Books, Culture – and on different days. It reminded me that I don’t remember any of what I read anyway. Going digital helped me acutely understand what I need and what I don’t.
Lingering over the paper each morning is so short now I can’t even get in two cups of coffee. On the other hand, anything I might want to look up later will be available on-line. The same publications I pay for subscriptions will pay or otherwise ensure they are listed at the top of Google searches.
I’ve been writing fiction for almost fifteen years. Today, every author is urged to create their on-line “platform.” Okay, I thought, I’ve completed a novel, I have almost ten short stories published. It’s time. With an extraordinary platform, I could transition from being an energy industry consultant (you tend to mosey away from me at parties after I say that) to a successful author (you tend to lean in at parties when I say that). So, I joined a bunch of on-line writer communities. Well, for the most part, everyone just asks a lot dumb ass questions and you’re supposed to be respectful in answering them. Or someone’s having a meltdown because a cat resembling a New York agent just passed by their window. Or, they want to know what you do to overcome writers block. Even funnier, everyone is trying to promote themselves without looking too much like they’re promoting themselves. Even the sites that caution,”NO PROMOTION!”, are promoting someone, just not you.
One thing you would think writers should know better than anyone: Words are an attempt to communicate, but they don’t always. Words always have a dark side. To someone. Often to lots of people. This is something I learned after twenty years working for a publishing company. Once I wrote an editorial, a eulogy of sorts for some industry colleagues who perished in a commercial plane crash. This, I thought at the time, will be the least controversial thing I’ve ever published. Yet one reader responded vehemently about what I had wrote. He had misinterpreted my closing sentence. One person writing a letter to the editor almost always means many other readers think the same thing.
On-line writing is NOT the same as off-line conversation.
I’ve bought a few books from completely unknown authors peddling their work on-line. So far, the reading experience has been worse than buying from the quarter book pile at the bookstore or a street vendor. Then, there are those authors who could be latter day Steinbecks, but you’re so sick of their “LOOK AT ME!” posts that you wouldn’t buy lemonade from them if they were eight years old and it’s a hundred degrees outside.
How long can yakking with people you don’t know, can’t see, and can’t hear hold your interest? Are Facebook posts really your machete for fighting in a political or cultural argument? Can you get serious responses from the like-minded that you couldn’t get from a book that’s probably sitting on your shelves? Are you asking a question just to avoid a Google search for a dozen good answers (and a thousand not so good)? Am I liking my brother’s post so I don’t feel guilty about not wanting to call him? Do I just need an excuse not to use my time more wisely?
Is any of this improving anyone’s writing, or whatever you do for work and avocation?
Oh, and maybe another reason it all seems so ordinary is that I’ve also worked from home since 1982. Not regularly. That didn’t happen until the late 1980s. What I discovered the one or two days a week I commuted to Manhattan back then was the extraordinary amount of time people wasted in an office environment. My boss, frankly, was the worst offender.
Millions of people working from home make on-line social media a fertile playground. Free agent nation gathers at the on-line water cooler, the digital ambient air for a cigarette with the smoke team, or the virtual lunch room for a meal or a soda. I guess the more people who use something, the more it reverts to the mean.
Have I mentioned all the e-zines, on-line locations, and links across my myriad interests that I have bookmarked? I can count on one hand those I ever returned to. If someone I know and respect suggests an on-line something, I’ll probably check it out. But, contrary to what I thought, I don’t spend quality time perusing my bookmarks for something to do, learn or read. The few blogs that I followed (my daughters’ blogs the exception) were pretty interesting for a while, but they tend to cave in on themselves. I get the core message. I don’t get it when they go off-topic and get personal or political (unless it’s a political blog). I get mad when I realize they’re just building a sales platform, too (usually for a book or their academic work). It’s hard to write something interesting regularly. It’s even harder to write something fresh. Most blog comments are populated by people who have something to gain from being associated with the blogger. Let’s face it, most blogs and comments are excuses to rant, join the choir, take pot shots at someone else’s choir, orshow how smart or clever you are.
Maybe that’s why about 95% of what gets passed around Facebook are slogans, cute contests (“IF YOU WERE A LEAF, WHAT KIND OF TREE WOULD YOU HAVE COME FROM?”), and quick retorts (guilty as charged here!). Getting credit for being alive, attentive, or concerned is a click or a few keystrokes away.
Twitter? I can’t even go there. Not yet. How do you say vertigo in 144 characters?
None of this is to denigrate on-line life totally. Some people are very clever on-line, probably a whole hell of a lot more entertaining than they would be in real life. I’ve gotten re-acquainted with some guys from high school I lost touch with...in high school. We’re different men now. A dear friend of mine just made a plea on Facebook for someone to donate a kidney. Some people use Facebook as their daily offering of poetry, or wise saying, and I would be lying if I didn’t find some of it truly inspirational. There’s one writer person who is either going to land in the psyche ward soon, or write a really great novel, and, given what I perceive as his natural writing talent, I can’t wait to read it, if he publishes it before his hands are strapped behind his back. His agent and publisher will be taking virtual Clorox to all of his on-line posts. Imagine Faulkner drunk and taking a break every few minutes to post. One particularly ravishing blond poet’s glam photo appears so often I click on it hoping it goes to her on-line dressing room. I’ve taken an interest in issues I probably would still be ignoring off-line.
Come to think about it, the world is a better place with some people always on-line.
I’ve been getting some pretty good short stories through an iphone app, perfect for reading something besides People at the dentist office. It’s funny. I appreciate that I don’t come off as some intellectual snob with National Geographic in my lap. At the same time, I can’t help but remember those women on the subway who used to read those steamy romances between innocuous covers or behind a larger magazine.
When I first got married, my spouse wanted to find a church to attend. The only times I had been in a church between ten years old and her desire to attend was (1) a Unitarian church infrequently (hardly counts anyway) as a teenager, (2) because a Baptist woman I was head over heels for at age 22 wasn’t going to give me the time of day if I didn’t, and (3) weddings. After my wife found a suitable church, I used to joke seriously that I attended often enough so that no parishioner would think we were having marital problems.
That’s kind of how I feel about my on-line activity. You don’t have to get with the program but you should understand the program. I post often enough so people know I am still alive. I post when I think I have something useful to say. I post when I can complain but also get credit for being entertaining (hopefully). I answer even dumb ass questions so that someone else might benefit from my experience. I post when I blog (extend that platform!) but I don’t blog too often because it’s really difficult to write a sensible blog piece. Also, true confession (now that you’re close to the end): I write blog posts as much to capture some commentary for myself as I do for someone else to read.
Above all, I post after having learned a few things: (1) I am creating a permanent, indelible digital signature discoverable by anyone with the will and the money; (2) my words can and will be misinterpreted, especially when lifted out of context; and (3) restraint is the better part of valor in digital life.
I participate in social media often enough so people know I have an on-line life. And I know at least something about theirs. I burned out early creating an on-line life before there were on-line lifeforms. I found no panaceas. I acutely understand it takes time and energy to extract or offer something out of the ordinary. Just like real life.
War is hell as the saying goes. War also spawns thousands of private hells, human and ecological, which are not usually counted among the dead and wounded.
I like the word externality. It refers to a cost of a product or a service that isn’t reflected in its price, usually an environmental or human impact […]
War is hell as the saying goes. War also spawns thousands of private hells, human and ecological, which are not usually counted among the dead and wounded.
I like the word externality. It refers to a cost of a product or a service that isn’t reflected in its price, usually an environmental or human impact of some sort. The legacy of slavery is probably the most onerous externality I can think of. American society still pays for the impact of slave labor, which never figured in the price of, say, cotton.
A few weeks ago, I went hiking with a group who shall remain unnamed because they like it that way. We hiked around the reclaimed and rehabilitated site of the former Weldon Spring Ordnance Works, a TNT (trinitrotoluene) and DNT (dinitrotoluene) producing facility from 1941 to 1944, later converted into a uranium processing facility, making (now made infamous by the Bush administration lies justifying the Iraq War) yellow cake, or uranium ore concentrate, in the 1950s. Later it became a “disposal” and processing site for all manner of bad shit from the army. Today, there is an interpretive center run by DOE, a domed burial facility under which much of the bad shit is “safely contained,” hiking and biking trails, and a conservation area. You’ll find lots of information about this site on-line, official and unofficial. Suffice it to say, it is a place with lots of bad karma, a testament, really, to the externalities of war, the scars on the victims and the victors. Residents of whole towns were forced to move, the first attempts at cleanup and decontamination killed people and probably sent toxic fumes throughout the region, the groundwater became contaminated, cancer rates are thought to be elevated in the area. It just goes on and on.
But when you go off the official trails, like we did, you find relics not part of any official tour, timeline, or “interpretive center.” For example, our destination, thanks to our guide/leader who did the research ahead of time, was a huge in-ground concrete storage pit and pump house. And we found them! Overgrown, yes, but still visible, and you could still enter them. There is still a ladder you could climb to the bottom of the pit, a drainage grating visible at the bottom, and a large pipe feed at the top. Graffiti at the bottom attested to the fact that others were stupider than we were and climbed down there. At the pump house, you could see six concrete pads where the pumps sat, some of the pipe headers, and an electrical cabinet which, astonishingly, still had old relays intact. There was no trail, we were “bushwhacking,” mild as it was, in retrospect, although the first part off the sanctioned trail was probably a former roadway or access way.
While I was elated to “tour” this industrial wasteland, I could not believe the government would leave an open pit of such size. It’s a place screaming for a disaster and more lawsuits. While we passed a few “danger” signs, we were able to get through broken sections of fencing. Nothing said “do not enter” or “enter at own risk.” Just amazing.
The fun continues when you try to figure out what all this stuff was used for. The process engineer in me had to come out. Plus, I’ve loved old industrial contraptions since I was in elementary school traipsing through the woods near Chattanooga, TN, hoping to stumble upon old grain alcohol stills, and later when I worked a summer job loading tires into and out of old abandoned factories serving as temporary storage facilities. After a visit to the “interpretive center” (I hope you love the Orwellian sound of that as much as I do), and some questions asked of the curator/guide there, then considering the topology we trekked through, I speculate that we were looking at a raw water storage pit and associated pump house, which delivered water to an elevated storage tank on site (described as the most visible landmark of the facility). Water from this tank was then gravity distributed to where it was needed in the process. The fact that it was left there and not “remediated” also must be a clue (hopefully) that only benign material was stored/pumped there. One set of pumps probably drew the water from the Missouri River (only a mile or two away) and directed it to the storage pit, and another set drew from the bottom to deliver water to the tank.
Apparently, there are other open-pit lagoons and storage pits in the same general vicinity, but according to the information, one probably was smart to stay the hell away from those.
I downloaded a few of official documents about the site, historical stuff, EPA reports, DOE reports, etc, to see if I could confirm what I speculated about the facilities we viewed. I wish I had found something that added up or estimated the total cost of human and environmental damage incurred at this site, not just the cost of remediation and reclamation.
War is hell as the saying goes. War also spawns thousands of private hells, human and ecological, which are not usually counted among the dead and wounded. Future archeologists will have a field day with this place, and thousands, I am sure, like it around America.
Last Saturday I heard Joanna Mendoza (violist for the Arianna Quartet) and Alla Voskoboynikova perform Shostakovich’s Sonata for Viola and Piano in C Major, [the link is to another world-renowned violist’s performance, available on YouTube) described in the liner notes as the celebrated […]
Last Saturday I heard Joanna Mendoza (violist for the Arianna Quartet) and Alla Voskoboynikova perform Shostakovich’s Sonata for Viola and Piano in C Major, [the link is to another world-renowned violist’s performance, available on YouTube) described in the liner notes as the celebrated composer’s last work written while dying from lung cancer.
Apart from the gorgeous performance, somehow a viola seems the perfect instrument for a personal elegy, as it does not possess the natural perkiness of the violin or the foundational authority of the cello. The viola is naturally melancholic (to me anyway) although great violists (like great string players generally) make the instrument bend to their emotional will. What fascinates me about the piece is that the composer embedded “quotes” from all fifteen of his symphonies, but even more, the third movement is one long riff on Beethoven’s moonlight piano sonata, which the composer credits for his decision to become a composer in the first place.
Most people are familiar with fragments from the Moonlight even if they don’t associate with Beethoven or are not classical music buffs. It is interesting to hear how a composer takes his own themes and melodies and those from another great from past eras and integrates them into something new. Subconsciously, our influences are always at work, I suppose, but in the case of this Sonata it is overt. Plus, he wasn’t phased by using one of the most celebrated piano pieces of all time to carry him towards his exit. For the listener, we are allowed a rare “cover” (of sorts), something that is routine in popular music, but (at least to my knowledge) rare in classical music.
The free performance took place in a church and it reminded me of being in Paris many years ago and discovering that on any given day (especially Sundays), you can hear wonderful chamber music in any number of the city’s magnificent churches. For free! Similarly, the St. Louis area’s top classical musicians often play free of charge (or for next to nothing) at churches, schools, and community venues. While the country’s great orchestras are suffering financially, chamber music seems to be blossoming. Or maybe I’m just paying more attention.
The Shostakovich Op 147 is not what you’d call uplifting. It has its ethereal passages, undoubtedly the composer coming to terms with passing to the great unknown. If the last movement doesn’t move you to wet eyeballs, then you are probably just acting tough. But the Sonata also feels like a summary of a life in music, the composer’s suffering (like many artists, he suffered for his art in his native Russia during the Stalinist period) transcended by the joy of what he was leaving behind.
Tagged with: Arianna String Quartet • Joanna Mendoza • Moonlight sonata • Opus 147 • Shostakovich • Sonata for Viola and Piano
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