My Life with the Saints

Posted on September 15, 2017 by smellincoffee

My Life with the Saints
© 2007 James Martin, SJ
414 pages

The church I grew up in consistently referred to Rome as the whore of Babylon, so needless to say I didn’t learn anything about saints. I knew Biblical personalities, sure, but was completely oblivious to the hundreds of men and women throughout the Christian era who served as outstanding examples, witnesses, or reproaches to the rest of us. I encountered a few in history books, like St. Augustine,  but they were more statuesque than human. The sole exception was Joan of Arc, who began as a figure from history but became (as I read various biographies) someone I felt an odd sense of affection for.  James Martin grew up Catholic, but his saintly education seems to have been almost as paltry as mine, discovering most of them as he attended seminary and trained to be a Jesuit. In the beginning, Martin notes that Catholics approach saints as both intercessors and companions; the latter approach inspiring most of this book.

My Life with the Saints mixes biography — his, the saints, and others — with spiritual reflection. In each chapter, Martin recounts his encounter with each personality, sharing how they shaped and informed his own spirituality while connecting their lives to people he has worked with through the years.  St. Francis,  “the fool for Christ”, is revisited in the story of another ‘fool’, a priest who worked with gangs in Chicago and would try to disrupt fights by walking into the middle of the fracas, dressed in a blue-jean robe.  Martin mixes Biblical, medieval, and modern personalities, and includes a fair few people (notably Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day) who aren’t “official” saints.   Although I purchased this hoping to meet a lot of obscure personalities, the mix meant only a handful were  completely new to me. Even so, I found Martin’s meditations  refreshing, particularly the conclusion in which he remarked on the variety of the saints — old, young, rural, urban, intellectual, hardy, mystical, rational — and the hope that presents  to readers, that sainthood isn’t limited to a superhero type.

Related:
The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day
The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Mark Twain

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Infrastructure: A Field Guide

Posted on September 14, 2017 by smellincoffee

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
© 1999, 2014 Brian Hayes
544 pages

Here at last is a book for those of us who constantly gaze out the car window at the fixtures on utility poles, or drums mounted in the sky above the telephone building, and wonder: what are those and what do they do?  Chris Hayes offers in his introduction that there are many books for understanding the various kinds of trees and birds we see around us; his hope is to help readers understand the built environment which can be beautiful in own right. Hayes’  field guide is not a dry catalog of pipes and antennae, organized alphabetically. Instead, he offers a narrative laced with humor that explores the built world, system by system — beginning with mining raw resources and ending with waste disposal.  In between are covered farming, waterworks, power production, the power grid, telecommunications, roads, bridges, railroads,  aviation, and shipping.  Hayes’ writing combines history and description,  allowing the reader to understand not only how things work,  but how they got that way. Photographs abound, most of which were taken by the author himself and include unusual shots.

The fact that this book has gone through three editions indicates it has been a success with readers, and I’m not surprised.  We live in the midst of and are sustained by systems built with human hands, but which few understand. There’s enormous appeal in opening the hood on modernity  and gaining even a little knowledge as to how it all works, especially when systems link together. Although this is a guide to the ‘industrial landscape’,  Hayes’ writing brings a strong humanistic touch. The book is about the world humans have created for ourselves, for our needs;  reading the built landscape  is an act not just of technical analysis, but of human interest.   Admittedly,  there are topics in the book harder to appreciate; mining, for instance, usually happens far from where we live.  The majority of this book, however, is the stuff of everyday: traffic lights, radio towers,  food, and highways.  Although I’ve  done a good bit of reading on infrastructure, Hayes’ book was full of interesting facts and stories. For instance,  in the early 1980s a network of eight radio towers were set up to aide in global navigation: one of the stations was maintained by the US Coast Guard in the middle of Nevada. The system only lasted ten years before being supplanted  totally by GPS.

I referred to Kate Asher’s The Works as a dream of a book, and I can only repeat the statement here:  it’s a gorgeous and helpful piece of work.

Hey, look, it’s the Very Large Array!


Related:
The Works: Anatomy of a City, Kate Ascher
On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems That Make Our World Work, Scott Huler
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum
The Grid: A Journey to the Heart of Our Electrified World, Phillip Schewe
Divided Highways: Building the Interstates, Transforming American Life, Tom Lewis

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

The Black Ice

Posted on September 12, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Black Ice
© 1993 Michael Connelly
336 pages

A body discovered in a sleazy motel on Christmas Eve connects a handful of otherwise dead cases, and sets Detective Harry Bosch against his own department, culminating in the pursuit of a half-chance to Mexico.  The case was never supposed to be Bosch’s;  when a cop suspected being bent showed up missing his face, all the department wanted to do was sweep the victim quietly under the rug. But Harry Bosch was the detective on duty when the call came in, and damned if he’s going to be kicked to the side.  As is usual, the solitary brooder — Bosch opens this novel like seemingly every other, sitting by himself and listening to jazz —  can’t stop the feeling that there’s more to the story, can’t stop looking even when everyone else is telling him to drop it.  Several unsolved cases, suddenly parts of a puzzle that he can see the outlines of as he digs, point to a drug lord in Mexico who is pushing a new product in Los Angeles. That’s where Bosch ultimately goes, teaming up with a Mexican officer who is an outsider in his own apartment, and their joint investigation leads to fireworks in the Sonoran dark.  While I haven’t read a Bosch novel since 201l,  the character is just as compelling as he first was:  a child of the street turned cop thereof,  forever butting heads with the politicos who run things as he pursues justice on nothing more than his gut instincts, black coffee, and the help of rare friends — usually women.  Characterization is strong here, both as Connelly is developing Bosch (this is the 2nd Bosch novel) further, and giving him interesting enemies, allies, and hybrid creatures to wrangle with.  Interestingly, early on Bosch encounters Mickey Haller — of Lincoln Lawyer fame, but not made a lead character until that novel’s debut in 2005. 

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Irma a wash-out

Posted on September 12, 2017 by smellincoffee

From the St. Augustine Record –  Castillo de San Marcos

If I hadn’t known that a tropical storm was passing by last night, I would not have guessed it.  I knew all of the excitement would be on the east side of the storm, but after sunset we received absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. A little wind, scattered showers…our ordinary low-pressure systems are more exciting.  Bizarrely, we experienced more wind and driving rain when the hurricane was near the Florida-Georgia-Alabama borders than we did when it was approaching us. The greatest effect was a dive in temperatures, and the fact that the rain smelled like seawater; our electrical service never blinked.  The city closed a lot of its services (schools, libraries, etc) yesterday, so I spent it reading either Michael Connelly’s Black Ice, or Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape.

All’s well that end’s well, at least for the deep south. Florida and Cuba’s Irma experience was altogether different!

Posted in General | 10 Comments

Isaac’s Storm

Posted on September 10, 2017 by smellincoffee

Isaac’s Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
© 1999 Erik Larson
336 pages

First news from Galveston just received by train that could get no closer to the bay shore than 6 mi  where the prairie was strewn with debris and dead bodies. About 200 corpses counted from the train. Large steamship stranded 2 mi inland. Nothing could be seen of Galveston. Loss of life and property undoubtedly most appalling. Weather clear and bright here with gentle southeast wind.

On September 8th, 1900,  Galveston, Texas lost its bid to become the greatest city in Texas, the New York of the West. It became famous for another reason, however: the near-total destruction of the city and the deaths of at least six thousand of its people made the Galveston hurricane the deadliest to ever strike. It remains the United States’ greatest natural disaster, despite challengers like Katrina and the San Francisco Fire of 1906. Isaac’s Storm renders a history of the disaster, largely through the eyes of a Weather Bureau scientist who failed to predict it — to his own tragedy. A mix of history and science, Isaac’s Storm is narrative history that reminds readers of a more optimistic time — and of the dangers of that optimism.

I first learned of the Galveston hurricane through a novel, strangely enough, a criminal thriller/western set in the city’s seedy underbelly shortly before another hurricane struck the city.  The thought of a metropolis-in-the-making having its life snuffed out has stayed with me ever since, but the storm’s anniversary — coinciding with three hurricanes brewing in the Atlantic — brought the event to mind recently. Isaac’s Storm mixes all kinds of science and history together; Larson doesn’t just stick with Isaac Cline, but in the opening chapters darts hither and yon across the hemispheres to tell stories that contributing to our understanding of tropical storms and hurricanes. Although Isaac Cline was a dedicated and intelligent scientist, he believed (based on studying reports from places like Bengal) that Galveston Bay was inimical to hurricane strikes, that the topography of the Texas coast discourage and dampened them.  Unfortunately for the residents of Galveston, a warning about the hurricane from Cuba was dismissed by American authorities, who regarded the Cubans as excitive and superstitious.  Larson regards the Weather Bureau of 1900 as overly confident in its own abilities to predict the weather with exactitude, despite its able use of a telegraphic warning system that was leaping the oceans.

There were portents during the day that something was in the offing. Although the barometer rose at times and the skies didn’t have the “signature color” that preceded hurricanes (brickdust red, apparently), the rising swells that kept crashing into the beach were unusual. By the time night fell, those swells were ever-larger and wiping out the infrastructure build near the beach — docks, gazebos, even a trolley trestle. Throughout the late afternoon and early evening,  rising water flooded the city, but the full fury didn’t smash into Galveston until after dark.  Perhaps that contributed to the appalling death toll, making it harder for people to navigate through the sudden ruins of their city and avoid danger. A lot of deaths were caused by people being struck by debris, though building collapses were another factor — as were drownings. Isaac and his children managed to escape, but his pregnant wife never emerged from the ruins of their house, nor did the dozens of other people who had taken shelter there.

Although the book is ultimately about a harrowing disaster, as narrative history Isaac’s Storm is easy on the mind, and I appreciated the look into the beginnings of weather services in the United States…even if they weren’t even aware of the Gulf Stream yet.

The shaded blocks were destroyed as storm surges swept in from north and south.  Even the few unshaded blocks in the center were heavily damaged, according to Larson.

Posted in history, Reviews, science | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Eye of the Storm

Posted on September 10, 2017 by smellincoffee

Eye of the Storm: Inside City Hall During Katrina
© 2007 Sally Forman
260 pages

Although Hurricane Katrina was not the biggest disaster to ever hit an American city, it was New Orleans’ greatest crisis — posing a near-existential threat to the city, and forcing unprecedented measures from its leadership.  Sally Forman was the Communications Director for Mayor Ray Nagin at the time of the storm, with duties that involving trying to steer him away from shooting his mouth off. During the storm, she became an unofficial aide de camp, working to keep members of city hall in touch with one another, and with the county, state, and federal officials who were moving to help New Orleans at varying glacial paces. Eye of the Storm is her memoir, one that portrays NOLA’s City Hall doing the best it could under intense pressure with diminishing resources. Forman does not shy away from self-criticism, though her target is always herself and never the office of City Hall.  Civic leaders were proud to have evacuated 80% of the city given that such a general evacuation had never been ordered before, and in their prompt decision to declare martial law after reports began arriving about lootings, police shootings, and violence in the Superdome. Some failures of hurricane response owed to lack of foresight: no portable generator for the City Hall office,  buses not removed to ground high enough, and bus drivers not included in the evacuation exemption. Some owed to the murky jurisdictional disputes between city, state, and federal officials: Nagin expressed his frustrated at not knowing, really, who had ultimate authority since he’d declared martial law, but now FEMA and the National Guard were operating on their own.  Forman ends the memoir with a list of lessons learned.

This is not a full Katrina history by any means, but one of interest to those curious about how municipal governments can react during a crisis.  Unfortunately, Mayor Nagin seems to have acted better during the crisis weeks than during recovery, since he was indicted and made bankrupt by corruption charges.

Related:
Hurricane Katrina Through the Eyes of Storm Chasers, Jim Reed and Mike Theiss
Rescue Warriors, David Helvarg
Disaster 1906, Edward F. Dolan

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The Circle

Posted on September 9, 2017 by smellincoffee
The Circle
2013 Dave Eggers
507 pages

Sharing is Caring.
Privacy is Theft.
Secrets are Lies.

Imagine an internet transformed by a company  so innovative and ambitious that it had swallowed Facebook, Google, etc. whole.  It began with TruYou, a common login that allowed people to use one login for virtually everything online, from their hobbyist forums to their bank accounts.  It ends….well, that’s up to you and me. The Circle combines 1984 and The Social Network to present a dystopia-in-the-making,  one most users of internet service will recognize in their own habits. Funny and alarming,  it’s easily the most riveting novel I’ve read this year.


The Circle as a novel begins with the arrival of Mae, a frustrated twenty-something to the customer service desk of the company. As the novel progresses, her willingness to adopt to the Circle culture and work hard to perpetuate it,  take her to the heights of power, to the company’s own inner circle. Readers witness her transformation as she grows to ignore the concerns of her ex-boyfriend and her parents that something isn’t right about the world the Circle wants to build.  At the center of the Circle are the Three Wise Men — a reclusive young genius,  a charismatic public face, and an avaricious  financier.  Between the three of them, they want to bring about a techno-utopia by allowing for — and even mandating — total transparency.  The Circle isn’t just a social network/search engine/marketplace on steroids, it’s also an Apple-esque technology company that produces new tools — tools like small, discrete cameras that allow for live-streaming from multiple locations. The network and its tools grow throughout the novel to allow for technocratic control of society:  child abductions are thwarted by chip implants,  politicians begin wearing bodycams to prove they aren’t sitting in smoking rooms hatching conspiracies, and neighborhood watch programs alert residents every time a non-registered person enters their block. Mae’s own ascent into the elite happens when  she leads a campaign to turn the Circle political, to make its platform a voting mechanism. When one person drives off a bridge to get away from the Circle, their response is to wistfully say that would have never happened if we could make everyone give up automobiles that aren’t self-driving.
The Circle is both warning and dark comedy, mocking compulsive users of social networks while building a threat that is more ominous than hilarious. In an early scene, Mae is called into her supervisor’s office to resolve a serious dispute between her and another coworker — one she has never met, but who invited her to a party for kindred hobbyists, and one who was deeply hurt when she never responded, not even to say “Sorry, no can do”.  The world of the Circle demands constant interaction, constant attention, constant sharing.  It’s not enough to go to after-work parties: there have to be pictures, shares, tags, likes, and tweets about the party. Mae first approaches her position like a nine to five job; she does her work, she goes home or goes kayaking, she returns. This is not the Circle way. The Circle’s social demands  are such that some people simply live on campus, and even when they leave, the idea that they’ve left the Circle is almost blasphemous. Mae went kayaking….by herself? She didn’t tell everyone she was going so they could send her Smiles, and worst of all…she didn’t record anything. No one can benefit from her experience except from Mae!  What selfishness.

Although I have my doubts about how effectively this novel could happen (the NSA has problems with storage and cooling, and it’s not coping with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous camera feeds),  Eggers’ novel makes obvious two dangers of the growing social network apparatus. First, there are people whose histrionic obsession with social media make them not far removed from Circlers. Two, the role that some companies have as web infrastructure — principally Google,  with its search engine, browser, cloud storage, email, control of YouTube and blogger —  poses a threat to free communication. Google is not a neutral actor; it has an agenda and does not brook dissent, either external or internal.  Facebook is no less threating to privacy; the reclusive genius used in The Circle is a transparent clone of Zuckerberg, complete with hoody.   The greatest problem shown by The Circle is what happens when these two factors combine — the needy child-mob on social networks, and the infrastructural control they rely on and enabled.

For what it’s worth: I maintain a WordPress copy of this website in case Google ever gets really nefarious.

Related:
4 Alternatives to Google

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The Republic of Imagination

Posted on September 7, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
Other edition subtitle: A Case for Fiction
© 2014 Azar Nafisi
352 pages

When Azar Nafisi taught literature in Iran, she dreamed of America. Not the United States, the government of which had been making itself decidedly unpopular in Iran, but “America” — an idea, a dream, where people were free to pursue their own lives, to grow and flourish without a shah or a thought-police militia’s interference.  She discovered and explored this America via its literature,  an experience which is partially shared in her Reading Lolita in Tehran.  When she came to the United States to teach literature, another Iranian immigrant disgustedly told her that these people were not what she was looking for. Americans weren’t passionate about literature the way Iranians were — not even their own.   Although Nafisi rejected his resignation,  the fate of the humanities – literature, particularly —  weighs on her in writing this, and the experiences that she and others have had wrestling with American literature are offered here as proof of what serious engagement with literature can provide.

Nafisi’s subtitle, America in Three Books, takes reader through Huckleberry Finn,   Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, and Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  Nafisi describes all of these as subversive, and links them as Individualist experiences —  the individual against conformity, consumerism, and their own lonely anguish.  My own experience with American literature has been so paltry that I haven’t read two of the three books mentioned,  but Nafisi’s strikes me as a fair take on Huckleberry Finn — both because he resists being ‘sivilized’ and shut up in doors, and because his instinctive human sympathy for a friend of his outweighs the dictum of the day that his friend is a slave who should be punished for escaping.   Nafisi’s intent is to connect themes in literature with our lives, so amid the literary discussion are events from Nafisi’s life, and conversations (or arguments) she has had with Americans and Iranians. Those who have read Lolita in Tehran will remember the style from that book. Nafisi’s deep love of literature puts her slightly at odds with the political currents she is otherwise sympathetic to: she abhors the knee-jerk reaction the academy has to classics, of automatically dismissing them because they are old and by the wrong people.  Literary criticism has missed the point altogether; instead of embracing works like a friend or lover to relate with, the books are beaten to death and the corpses picked at..  (To borrow from Douglas Adams:  “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.”)  Similarly, she is not a friend of the ‘common core’, and its sterile treatment of education as nothing more than mounds of Gradgrind facts to memorize.

When I first heard this title, it resonated with me, making me think of both the Greek cosmopolis — an ideal republic admitting all with reason as citizens — and another republic, one that absorbing a tradition makes us a member of, allowing us to learn and fight with a lecture from Cicero, or an argument from Aquinas or de Montaigne. Nafisi’s conviction that literature unites people across political boundaries led me on, however, as her republic of the imagination is a little more ethereal. It’s a place where people escape to — a place where people can find connection even if they live in a dehumanizing state. But it’s not merely a place of escape; in her epilogue, Nafisi admonishes those who demand trigger warnings on books and cry out for safe places. The world is not a safe space.  Even if you live in a perfectly bland place, a Pleasantview right out of 1950s television, you may fall in love or lose a parent or find yourself facing some other emotional storm. Literature, Nafisi argues, prepares us for these storms: it fixes our feet, steels our spine, clears our mind.   We must embrace its challenges, not shrivel away from them.

While I suspect anyone reading a book subtitled America in Three Books would already regard fiction as important,  for me this was a welcome exposure to a couple of books I’ve only heard a little about,  an encouraging reminder about the universality of good literature.

Related:
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, Fatehmeh Keshavarz

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A Devil’s Chaplain

Posted on September 6, 2017 by smellincoffee

A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
© 2003 Richard Dawkins
263 pages

Charles Darwin mused that a devil’s chaplain might write quite a book on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low, and horridly cruel works of nature.  A Devil’s Chaplain is not quite that book, however, though it does include a mention of fantastically inefficient bio-planning on nature’s part, as well as a paragraph or two on parasitic wasps.   Dawkins uses the title to collect various articles, prefaces, and reviews he has written, all pooling in either biology or skepticism. Those familiar with Dawkins will find no surprises: he writes on the role of wonder in science,  champions skepticism and evidence-based thinking, addresses religion with teeth bared in the wake of 9/11, and expands on his notion of cultural ideas being transmitted like genes, as “memes” — an originally serious word that is now applied to pictures with words on them, from captioned cats desirous of cheeseburgers to political commentary.  There’s also a considerable section dedicated to the then recently-late Stephen Jay Gould,  with whom Dawkins had professional disputes. (Dawkins defends their relationship as more professional than adversarial.)   Because the collection is so varied, it’s rather hard to rate;  here’s a chapter on genes and wasps, there’s an appraisal of a novel set in Botswana.  Most of the book is on biology and critical thinking, and there he had me;  when he moves to morals and culture, however, I found him wanting.

I raised my first eye when Dawkins praised Peter Singer, who sees no reason to value a room of babies over a room of puppies,  and asserts that religion only sustains itself by having its adherents instill the beliefs in their children.  Of course, religions like any other cultural element are maintained through that kind of transmission — language, for instance. They also sustain themselves, however, by providing something people need or want: meaning at the individual level, and tribal cohesion and (in some cases) some degree of public morality at the social level.   Dawkins’ understanding of religion as expressed here is simplistic, but part of his argument is fair: material facts should be believed on the basis of evidence, not desire or authority. Dawkins writes at the beginning that one bit of an advice a devil’s chaplain can provide, looking at the spectre of nature red in tooth and claw, is that while we are composed of selfish genes, we are not limited by them. Our intelligence gives us the ability to overcome the amoral logic of the jungle (or the savannah, no less savage). On the whole, however, amoral logic seems to have the edge; if a man can’t favor a room of babies over a room of animals,  there’s something vital missing.

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Back from a country retreat

Posted on September 5, 2017 by smellincoffee
For the past few weeks I’ve been house and dog sitting deep in the country, enjoying a screened-in back porch with a view of a pecan orchard. I thought I’d be getting a lot of reading done, but it turns out that novels are hard to take on when a playful and energetic terrier is demanding attention.   But I’m back to regularly scheduled programming,  with some interesting books in the post. I’m starting this week with Azar Nafisi’s Republic of the Imagination: America in Three Books,  and continuing with My Life with the Saints, one man writing about personalities through the ages who have inspired him in his vocation as a Jesuit priest working with the poor.  I was hoping to learn about obscure medieval personalities, but most of the figures are well-known and many are 20th-century figures like Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and John Paul II. 
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