I’m at a bit of a loss what to make of Jonathan Lethem’s latest. It’s definitely very clever. Maybe it does also capture growing up in Brooklyn during the earliest days of regeneration and eventual escape. Or not. I certainly enjoyed it one little chapter at a time. Overall, though, it just did not add up to anything notable, for me.
Perhaps you had to be there.
Perhaps the problem is that I have not internalised the geography, with its undeen boundaries visible only to those who, like the sheep that used to graze our orchard, have once or twice touched the electric netting when the charger is on. I’m not saying it needed a map, which in any case would have been horrible on a Kindle. It did need a bit more familiarity than I have.
Perhaps the problem is that I never had to take part in what Lethem calls the dance, the everyday crime that permeates the book. Every white kid apparently recognises an invitation to the dance; understands how to avoid it, but doesn’t; knows the steps; and is prepared at all times with inconsequential mugging money in a pocket and the rest in a sock or shoe. Presumably the Black kids know there’s more to be had and are content to milk the mugging money rather than attempt the bigger heist.
Well, I say never, but there was that one time — in NYC as it happens — and at around the time Brooklyn started to gentrify. It was my first visit, middle of the afternoon, and on a cross street somewhere in Greenwich Village. A lone Black kid asked to see my watch. But I didn’t know the dance, so I just said four fifteen or something and kept walking. Nothing more happened. Anticlimactic. A bit like Brooklyn Crime Novel.
]]>Episode summary: Episodio 42: Capitalismo carnivoro con Francesca Grazioli (Stagione 3)
Very disappointed that after mustering all the usual anti-industrial-meat arguments both the guest and the hosts had nothing useful to say about cultivated meat except, more or less, bring it on. No thoughtfulness that I could detect.
]]>Just finished this, a moment ago, on a blisteringly hot day, the kind of day that forces you into a darkened room, windows shut, blinds down, ceiling fan on. Any breeze from outside would only heat things up, and any attempt to sleep is fraught with a hot, icky pillow. It seemed appropriate, though doubtless I would have said the same had I finished it during an icy blizzard or drizzling greyness. Anything but temperate normalcy.
Weatherland is an incredible tour-de-force that takes a roughly chronological approach to how the arts, notably figurative art and literature, but music and others too, depict weather. The breadth of Alexandra Harris' erudition, the nimbleness with which she stitches together seemingly disparate ideas, her thoughtfulness in reminding us of ideas from much earlier in the book, all combine to make this a revelatory read.
Even though I have only a passing familiarity with many of the artists and writers she discusses, there was no sense of missing out on anything. I did mark one writer for further exploration, but overall the text carried me along, gently expanding on references that Harris (and others?) are probably very well acquainted with in order to bring the less knowledgeable reader along. So many ideas, from the lack of anything resembling a sky or weather in the earliest landscape depictions to the thought that science fiction may be the only appropriate response to the climate emergency.
The book had been a gift, uncracked on my shelves for quite a while because its premise seemed so flimsy. How wrong can you be?
]]>Episode summary: Native Americans once owned these lands, and they still treat the Columbia Basin as their sacred home. We’ve all benefited from that taken land, but now corporations are the West’s new settlers. Meanwhile, Cody faces a federal judge and his tight-knit rural community. His sons start taking over what remains of the family’s vast operation and beat-up reputation.
This was an interesting, if overloaded, series about how ranching and commodity farming work in “The West”. It tackled some important and hidden aspects of farming, like the role of big processors and the importance of old water rights. Did it need to be done within a frame of one of the biggest cattle swindles in the history of America (and how hard would it have been to get rid of the qualifier)? Probably, because nobody would want to listen to a 6-part series without a true crime. Which raises the question of whether listeners looking for true crime were willing to put up with the history of farming and ranching. Anyway, I enjoyed it and that’s good enough for me.
]]>Episode summary: SoS 64 The problematic history of lactase persistence research with Dr. Alice Yao — Sausage of Science — Overcast
Followed up the comment by Miranda Brown on ETP to this podcast (which I had to Huffduff, because) and very glad I did. I was (old white guy warning) completely unaware both of the difficulties with the label “lactose intolerant” and, even more so, with the crazed use being made of lactase persistence by the alt-right. I need to follow up, probably for ETP.
]]>Cheese Changes Everything was the first substantive episode in a new podcast from a company called Agricultural Economic Insights. It was my kind of story, looking at the ramifications of one decision — Eisenhower’s National Interstate and Defense Highways Act — on a whole lot of other things, most notably the US dairy industry. Better roads mean bigger dairy plants, sucking in milk from a wider area, which gives an edge to larger, more “efficient” dairy herds. They also mean fast food joints close to the highway, which means greater demand for more standardised cheese-like products, which means bigger dairy plants, which …
Fascinating stuff, but although the episode did mention the tragedy hidden in the miracle of practically continuous 3.5% annual growth in the cheese industry since 1956, the thousands of small farms that went under because they were “uncompetitive,” it said nothing about any of the externalities that accompanied relentless growth. Although the human costs are huge, my primary concern here is the cows. In 1935, the average cow produced 434 US gallons of milk a year. In 2017, the figure was 2675 US gallons a year.1 Is that really an improvement? The modern cow lasts less than three full lactations, less than a quarter of a cow’s natural lifespan. I’m not asking dairy farms to become old-cows’ homes, but with the cost of replacing a milking cow second only to the cost of feed, I wonder why it pays farmers to cull cows so soon.2 One reason may be that replacements have superior genetics and are even more productive.3
Knotty problems, for sure, and there are no simple answers in an industry where cheaper is the only metric with any value.
Then there was Laurie Taylor’s effusive interview with Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Glaeser co-wrote Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation, which “reckon[s] with how cities are changing in the face of existential threats the pandemic has only accelerated”. Cities as breeding grounds of innovation and disease alike is familiar turf, and we romped quickly through the impact of successive plagues, culminating culturally in the Black Death and its godchild the Renaissance. Will covid do the same? Maybe; your guess is as good as anyone’s.
The things that covid really did bring to the fore — the innovations that kept people fed, the fragility of (food) supply chains, even the drop in food insecurity as a result of government aid — were not mentioned. Converted factories growing microgreens notwithstanding, cities are utterly dependent on their hinterland to feed themselves. When that hinterland comprises the entire globe, feeding competing cities starts to look precarious indeed. Glaeser argued that inequities in health care and education are magnified in cities and threaten their continuation. Maybe so, but I would really like to have heard more about how successful cities are going to forestall hunger.
]]>If I were a character in this terrific novel, I would remember exactly who had recommended it to me, under what circumstances, and everything else about them. Alas, I am not, nor do I really wish I were, but as a story it has that kind of appeal, of making me think, what would I have done. The plot covers a dozen or so years, from Bulgaria in the early 1930s to America in 1946, and it concerns a group of NKVD recruits whose allegiance to one another is stronger than their allegiance to the NKVD. Or is it?
I found it utterly gripping, in that strange way in which although I have no direct experience or knowledge of any of it, the whole thing rings very true indeed. Alan Furst clearly knows his stuff. I had never thought of the origin of “fifth column” before, but there, in Madrid in 1936, the idea comes vividly to life, and if Furst’s account doesn't quite square with Wikipedia’s, I nevertheless far prefer the former.
Other things gave me pause. A crucial recruitment to the nascent OSS takes place in a diner on a Sunday, “surrounded by West End Avenue garment manufacturers taking their families out for brunch after temple”. On a Sunday? I’m sure Furst is correct, and yet ...
There’s a strange little anecdote, about the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy and O.A. Yanata, “the Ukranian botanist who had set up the first chair of Botany at the Academy of Sciences”.
He had proposed to the academy that certain chemicals could be used for the destruction of weeds. This was an entirely new concept, since the only known method to date was continual use of the hoe. A lengthy political investigation of Yanata was instituted, at the end of which he was accused of attempting to destroy all the harvests of the Soviet Union by the use of chemicals and was subsequently tried and shot.
Wikipedia does not know Yanata, though it knows his wife, and that led me to the man himself. The story, which first struck me as tongue in cheek and possibly metaphorical, was confirmed, except in the details of Yanata’s demise.
In general, I was far too busy reading and far too engrossed to make notes. The intricate plotting, the utterly believable fieldcraft, the way the streams fork and rejoin, the entire flow, all swept me along. The challenge now is to decide which of Furst’s books, in which many of these characters surface and resurface, to read next. Chronologically? By others’ ratings? A tough problem, to be sure.
And if you were the one who recommended Night Soldiers to me, please claim your bounty.
]]>Episode summary: If moral philosophy is a train to crazy town, at what stop should we disembark?
I don’t think I heard an answer to this provocative question, but I did hear some things that I could not grasp. All this talk of “what if we’re living in a simulation” smacks to me of late nights in the dorm with bad weed and good cocoa, and yet here are bona fide intellectuals giving the question their all, without even a snicker. That makes me think I must be missing the point. Maybe I am, but the truth is, I honestly don’t care. As for the rest of MacAskill’s ideas, I’m all in favour of effective altruism, but a lot less sure about population ethics, especially after reading The New Moral Mathematics, a review by Kieran Setiya.
]]>Episode summary: Sunday, June 26, 2022; May I suggest listening to yesterday's podcast. It's full of timely stories, and reason to hope that now we will do what we've been putting off since the end of the Civil War. In the podcast I reference Bruce Sterling's talk in Copenhagen in 2009 and Elie Mystal's book about the Constitution which I strongly urge you to get and read or (preferred) listen to.
I'm not in the habit of listening to Dave Winer’s podcast, and I can't remember who recommended this episode, but it was well worth it. And while I am no expert on the US Constitution, I have heard every episode of the podcast formely known as What Trump can teach us about Con Law and also Scene on Radio. Which is to say, I think maybe I would enjoy Elie Mystal's Allow me to Retort. Much as I would like to take Dave’s advice and listen, I fear that I am not about to dip my toes into a “free” trial of Audible just to do so. Apparently an actual CD was once available, and is currently out of stock. I don’t suppose anyone would lend me a copy?
]]>Robert MacFarlane’s previous book, The Old Ways, I read in partial preparation for a long walk on one of the old ways, which has yet to materialise. Underland, on the other hand, informs me of journeys I will never make. Extreme cold, cramped passageways, far-off places — all of which become, in his hands, so much more than the thing alone. Visiting the city beneath the city of Paris, for example, which I knew only therough the Netflix show Lupin, was like being shown around by an expert guide, as indeed MacFarlane’s guide showed him around. A tour of some force. It wasn’t until the end of that chapter that I paused to note that not once were bodily needs other than food mentioned. MacFarlane is as good an editor as he is a creator, leaving out much that does not help tell his stories, although I still long to know the truth of the matter.
There is so much in this book that will stay with me. The entire Greenland section, the climate emergency brought home so directly. The original limestone karst above Trieste, which hides so much human hatred and reprisal that few people care to know about. Mendip, so close to where I was once so happy and of which, below ground, I was so ignorant. The underground vaults that Finland and the US are preparing to receive radioactive waste, with a veiled suggestion that we might perhaps have been able to avoid the worst of the greenhouse effect that permeates so many of the other stories. Tramping above ground through Epping Forest, the better to understand how, beneath the surface, the individual trees are all interconnected through fungal thoroughfares. And finally, the walk in the woods with his young son, which gives MacFarlane the chance to gather all his threads together, in case we had failed to do so for ourselves, and show us how the underlands are connected to one another and to the world above.
Wondrous.
]]>