Bruno Latour has a new article, or “manifesto,” out in NLH, which is something of a mash-up and extension of two of my favorites, We Have Never Been Modern and Politics of Nature.  It’s called “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto'” & for now at least NLH is letting the pdf go for free.

The liveliest bits include his twin rejection of modern “progress” and postmodern iconoclasm in favor of what he calls “compositionism” or the construction of new things through combinations: “We need to have a much more material, much more mundane, much more immanent, much more realistic, much more embodied definition of the material world if we wish to compose a common world” (484).  Some of those terms seem familiar — material, immanent, embodied — but others less so — mundane, realistic, common.

Now that the (modern) age of Nature is over, sez Bruno, “it is time to compose” (487).

Update: Chased down one of Latour’s notes to find a lively op-ed by Erle Ellis, an ecologist at UMBC, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet.”  Ellis insists that climate change has been going on, caused by humans for nearly 7000 years, & it’s time to get used to a “used planet.”  Ready for a “postnatural environmentalism”?  I think I am…

I find these oddly beautiful. 

Mohawk Mountain, Sun Jan 15, 2011

The Boxing Day Storm of 2010, courtesy of Nasa’s satellite …

5500 yards this morning at the Soundview YMCA pool.  Some leg cramping about halfway.  2011! 

A nice warm night for a bonfire last night.  Preceded by seafood paella.

With MLA pushed back into January, and the green vistas of spring-term leave looming, I’ve had a little time to read books that have been lying around for a while.  Starting with a Christmas gift from my Marin in-laws of a few winters ago, Richard Rodriguez’s memoir and meditation Brown (2002).

It’s an engaging story about California, Stanford, and racial & cultural mixing — “Brown bleeds through the straight line, unstaunchable,” he writes on the first page.  But what intrigues me about the book is its experimental, allusive, free-wheeling style.  He’s a memoirist, not a researcher, though there are lots of facts to be gleaned, but he’s happy to skip logical steps and make elliptical moves.  He circles around his chosen topics, so that racial mixing rubs up against the idea of California, Mexico merges with the American West, San Francisco with the Pacific.

The dilemma of California remains as Edmund Wilson described it.  We have built right up to the edge of the sea.  It is also that the soil and the air promote contesting legends.  The earth in California is finite, animate, unreliable — the earth quakes, burns, slides into the sea.  But the air is temperate — light and vast — a stepping-off place, and we have only recently discovered how.

It reminds me that the best thing about writing is that you can invent for yourself the best ways to do it.

Nothing is quite as much fun as running on the beach in the dark in the middle of a massive blizzard.  With Alinor, Olivia, Maury, & Shanti.

And here are some of our footprints (me & the dog) —

Made it out of bed last night at 1:45 am to see a moon that looked suspiciously like the Apple logo with a bite taken out of the upper left hand side.  Product placement?  Or first solstice eclipse since 1638?

Earlier in the night, after our carol-singing party had disbanded around 9 pm, we saw an even better lunar vision: the full moon blazing, surrounded by a perfectly circular ring of clouds.  The larger circle was about 5 times as big as the moon itself.  No clouds inside the circle, but a wispy gray circle that seemed to hold the high clouds in the rest of the sky at bay.

Strange and beautiful things.

Here’s a pretty amazing riff by Russell Brand about Trinculo’s backstory.  More about Taymor’s Tempest soon.