I must admit I chuckled when I read, in the second half of Stephen Greenblatt’s elegantly-written book on the rediscovery of Lucretius, that the intellectual conflict between Lorenzo Valla and Poggio Bracciolini sounded so much like the Yale seminar room in the late 90s —

How can the conflict between these two sharply opposed interpretations be resolved?  Which is it: subversion or containment?  (224)

The attendant self-citation to the earliest form of “Invisible Bullets” in Glyph (1981) was a kind of cipher, gesturing subtly to a whole host of scholarship and intellectual pretzel-making back in the New Historicist day.

But The Swerve isn’t about re-plowing old fields, or even making magisterial pronouncements.  It’s a smart, wonderfully-written — his prose has always been Greenblatt’s calling card, at least for me — detail-rich portrait of the way a single poem can come to stand for an ancient strain of inquiry that resurfaced powerfully in 16c Europe.  Unlike the New Yorker excerpt, the printed version doesn’t harp on the “Dark Ages” that preceded the Renaissance, a term that my medievalist colleagues will rightly bristle at.  Instead it’s a detailed picture of the life of Poggio the book-man.

Lots of fun, really.  There might be a semi-allegory or commentary on modern academic politics, or perhaps international institutions such as the American Academy in Rome, where much of the book was written.  But mostly I just read it for fun.

 

William Ruddiman, professor emeritus from UVA, has one of the more controversial theses out there in terms of climate science.  He argues, based on long-term studies, that human-driven climate change is not a recent, post-industrial phenomenon, but rather began with the dawn of agriculture around 12,000 years ago.  Clearing forests to plant crops began soon after, with the results that around 5-6,000 years ago, when methane and other carbon levels should have been decreasing in the run-up to another ice age, levels rose instead.  In Ruddiman’s view, the past 5,000 years of relative climate stability “may actually reflect a coincidental near-balance between a natural cooling that should have begun and an offsetting warming effect caused by humans” (94).

The second-level controversial claim Ruddiman makes is that, since humans have been modifying the climate for millenia, it’s not possible under any regime to return to a “natural” path.  Taking a geological approach to time, he instead suggests that we are in the middle of a 400-year carbon intensive period, during which humanity will exhaust first oil (almost now), then natural gas, and then finally coal reserves.  At the end of that period, all the easily accessible carbon will be in gaseous form, and the end result of the experiment — can the world ocean absorb that much carbon, and what will the consequences of the resulting acidification be? — will slowly become apparent.  In the medium term, he’s more worried about topsoil and water shortages than fuel, though he does think that oil is nearly depleted now.

With curiosity, some abstraction, and a general desire to caution against alarmism on the green or brown sides, Ruddiman suggests that climate modification is what humans do.  Interesting stuff.

This is the World just before men.  Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly.  They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal.  Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth’s body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew Creation apart.  So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion.  God’s spoilers.  Us.  Counter-revolutionaries.  It is our mission to promote death.  (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow 720).

 

When the lights were out after Irene, I had the great pleasure of reading this hybrid memoir-cum-history by Gott’s Island summer resident Christina Gillis.  She and her husband John had just hosted Ian and me for a day-trip to Gott’s Island the week before, at the end of our Maine trip, so I had an eerie sense of recent physical memory of some of the places she describes — the dock, the granite “sidewalk” that surrounds the Atlantic side of the island where Ian and I caught juvenile mackerel, the open-ness of the old center of the village, and the constant presence of history, especially of the early 20th-century agricultural and fishing village that decided, apparently en masse, to vacate the island in the 1920s.

Christina’s book interweaves two painful human stories: the unexpected loss of her son Ben, who died in an air wreck in Kenya in 1991, and the death of Miss Peterson, a solitary Gott’s island resident whose house burned in the winter of 1926, when the island was depopulating.  She also explores the life and works of the poet Ruth Moore, who formerly owned the house in which she and John have spent the past 40 summers.

The books’ central conceit — Christina is very much an English professor, with a specialty in the 18c novel — is writing on stone, the question of how permanent the marks humans make on a rocky coastal island can become.  She spends quite a bit of time thinking and writing about the village cemetery — the cover image is a view of her house from the cemetery — and the book closes with a spare photo of Benjamin Gillis’s gravestone.

It’s not in any way a sentimental book, though as a parent I find the story simply terrifying.  I also can’t help recalling that I’m roughly Ben’s age, and  I also spent 1990-1 worrying my parents with far-off adventures, for me in Asia, Alaska, and Australia, rather than Africa.  The book is a tribute to things that survive, and the limits of how deeply human beings can mark geography.  She’s got a rich, measured tone when she writes about the island —

Never entirely fixed, our gauge of time and tide, the dock reflects the pace of life on the island.  At low tide, with the pool an empty expanse of mud and stones, when the float sits inertly on the pebbly, shell-strewn ooze, the island falls into a lull, as if left to itself, to contemplation, to chores, to life that does not extend far beyond itself.  It seems to wait for the incoming tide that will enable the dock to float and become once again the connecting point with the mainland.  (15)

Ian and I had a charmed day on the magic granite of Gott’s.  Feeling a bit like trespassers as we tromped up the beach with our fishing poles and tackle box, we arrived a low tide, and our boat, piloted by Christiana’s cousin, could not get to the dock.  Islands are hermetic spaces — “not utopias,” Christina’s husband John, author of Islands of the Mind, laughingly insisted as we walked through the remnants of some old houses on the island’s spine, but closed and inward-looking.

That day, something happened that’s never happened to me before in all my years of fishing: I caught a fish with my first cast at our first spot, on the granite sidewalk, not far from the “box on the rocks” where Paul de Man apparently used to spend his summers writing.  Ian also caught one with his first cast in our last spot of the day, at the dock that Christina describes as the heart of the island.

How possible is it to write on the stone of Gott’s island?  The human history of those stones is relatively short, not even a blink inside their geological span.  For the past 80 years or so the human side has only been a summertime story, since no on overwinters these days.  “I hear the crickets on the island,” writes Christina, but “I will not see the frost” (167).

 

Got this one as a gift from my awesome  bro-in-law Maury Sterling, who heard the author on an NPR story & thought he sounded like the Michael Pollan of water.  Sounds good to me, though perhaps a tall order.  Fishman’s got great material and a lively, slightly breathless, prose style, but not quite Pollan’s speculative range.  I do like the watery focus.

I especially like the second chapter, “The Secret Life of Water,” which reminds us that our planet’s water originally “came from an interstellar cloud somewhere in the Milky Way” (29), that liquid water is concentrated on the planet’s surface, except that roughly 5 times as much water as flows above ground is stored inside rocks within the planet , which perhaps explains the relative stability of the depth of the oceans (39), and that all the water on the planet has been circulating for a very long time — each glass of water we drink or drop of rain that hits our skin fell or flowed during the age of the dinosaurs, and much earlier also.  Water is also, as he reminds us, the essential chemical for life as we know it.

There’s some very nice reporting here from Australia, working through a brutal 10-year drought that’s drained the Murray River, and India, with perhaps the most dysfunctional domestic water policy of any large, growing-rich, nation.  Mike Young, who teaches at the U of Adelaide, has an elegant scheme for proper water use allocation: first, “maintenance water” (enough to keep the rivers flowing), next “critical human needs” (washing and drinking), then “high security water” (which is somewhat expensive), and last “low security water” (which is fairly cheap, but on dry years might not be plentiful).  He estimates that the first 2 categories will take 20% off the top in most years, then a price system will allocate the high v low security needs of agriculture, industry, etc (281-87).  It rationalizes the currently haphazard system: “Allocating the opportunities to use water gives us the quality of life we have” (287).

Thinking about fresh water, which is the bulk of water use policy questions, also leads Fishman to a striking aphorism

There is no global water crisis, because all water problems are local.

Simply b/c it’s so hard to move water, and so much water is lost in transit, this watershed-centric mantra suggests that we might need to push back against our globalist views.  I’m reminded of the sage of Middlebury’s vision of local energy and food economies.

I wonder if we might want to revise that aphorism a bit —

All fresh water is local; all salt water is global.

That doesn’t quite work for the fresh water moved by clouds and rainstorms, in which water molecules spend an average of 9 days in gaseous form, but it’s an interesting way to think about local/global issues.  Or maybe what Fishman means is that all water shortages are local — the only way to repair them is to clean & reuse the water that’s already near at hand.  The planet-wide circulation of salt water, which drove global commerce and settlement in the Age of Sail, doesn’t really speak to irrigation or “thirst,” except perhaps via big desalinization plants like the one Fishman describes in Perth.

Fishman also takes pains not to sound too gloomy — here he reminds me a bit of the “least depressing book on fishing” that came out last year — and he cites Las Vegas’s strict recycling system, recently constructed in the face of massive population growth and very little water, as a model.  Despite resistance to “toilet to tap” cleaning systems, he seems pretty convinced they are the wave of the future, as in a two-tier systems providing drinking water and also “purple-spigot” water for outdoor use.  Farmers especially needs to improve water policies, whether in the Murray Basin or the Imperial Valley of CA: “Agriculture needs a blue revolution to follow its green revolution” (303).

 

Says Nina to her father Almayer at the turning point of Conrad’s first novel, which I listened to the audio of while driving from SF to LAX last week.  She’s about to abandon him to a lonely existence on a bend of a Bornean river — probably northeastern Borneo, Kal-Tim, on the Mahakam River, it appears — so that she can flee with her Balinese prince.  Almayer’s great hope was to make one last financial strike, perhaps find Rajah Laut’s gold mine, and then present Nina to Europe.  She’d rather go to Bali.

In many ways the plot reads like a rehearsal for the second half of Lord Jim, with the addition of Almayer himself and a happy ending for the multi-ethnic couple.  (Jim, I suppose, is his own Almayer as well as Prince Dain.)  A young novelist in 1895, Conrad balances his dark visions of human insufficiency with the storylines of romance.

Conrad wrote a trilogy about Rajah Laut and Indonesia — Laut, a fictional white rajah along the lines of James Brooke of Sarawak, was Almayer’s patron, and he figures in the other novels as well — The Outcast of the Islands (1896) and The Rescue (1920).