What do people need? Dex is a garden monk who should, by all accounts, enjoy a perfectly happy life. Health, a meaningful job, people who love them — what’s missing? Dex doesn’t know. After departing from the monastery to pursue a slightly different, if adjacent vocation — that of tea monk, offering herbal tea and a listening ear to those who are stressed or in need of trouble, Dex continues to wrestle with a feeling of emptiness and disatisfication. As invigorating as the new challenge is, it’s still not quite enough — and so, Dex sets out past the limits of human civilization, venturing into the wilderness to see if they might hear the crickets cry. Even knowing the dangers that are out there — bears, river wolves, disasters — Dex has an urge to move forward. The push into the wild results in Dex being greeted by an robot which calls itself Mosscap, and Mosscap is also looking for an answer. Centuries ago, robot intelligences chose to withdraw from human society, but they have remained curious about their creators — and Mosscap has volunteered to go to the humans and see how they’re getting on. Dex reluctantly agrees to guide Mosscap through human society, but only if Mosscap will take Dex deeper into the wilderness, to an abandoned hermitage that was the site of the last recorded cricket chirps. Psalm for the Wild-Bult is an interesting kind of science fiction, as it’s essentially an extended conversation about existentialism in a solarpunk context. The worldbuilding is compelling in its own right, as we’re offered a vision of a human society that has found a way to live in harmonious comfort with Nature, and has done for for at least centuries. That steady-state has led to frustration for some, like Dex, whose inexplicable distress at the start of the novel testifies to the truth that both Captain Kirk (“This Side of Paradise”) and Carl Sagan observed: we are homo viator, man on a journey — forever striving, exploring. Plotwise, this is not a grand story: it’s simply a monk and a robot traveling and talking. I happen to have a hearty appetite for this kind of introspective discussion (there’s a reason Alain de Botton is one of my very favorite authors, and why I’ve watched My Dinner with Andre), so between that and the solarpunk setting I was delighted with this.
Highlights:
“So, the paradox is that the ecosystem as a whole needs its participants to act with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior.” “Other than fear.” “Other than fear, which is a feeling you want to avoid or stop at all costs.”
“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”
“We’re machines, and machines are objects. Objects are its.” “I’d say you’re more than just an object,” Dex said. The robot looked a touch offended. “I would never call you just an animal, Sibling Dex.” It turned its gaze to the road, head held high. “We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value.”
You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it.”
Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, in which Americans, Brits, and Canadians landed on the beaches of Normandy and opened the Second Front and began reclaiming Europe from Nazism the cost of their lives. Death to tyrants. Here’s FDR, announcing the news to America:
“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
“Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
“They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
“They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest-until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.
“For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.
“Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.
“And for us at home — fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas — whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them — help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.
“Many people have urged that I call the Nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.
“Give us strength, too — strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.
“And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.
“And, O Lord, give us Faith. Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.
“With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.
“Thy will be done, Almighty God.
Amen.”
“This is New York, NBC newsroom again. Men and women of the United States, this is a momentous hour in world history: this is the invasion of Hitler’s Europe, the zero hour of the Second Front. The men of General Dwight Eisenhower are leaving their landing barges , fighting their way up the beaches, into the fortress of Nazi Europe. They are moving in from the sea to attack the enemy under a mammoth cloud of fighter planes, under a ceiling of screaming shells from Allied warships. The first new flashes do not say, but a large portion of this assault is believed to be in the hands of American men. They are making this attack side by side with the British Tommies who were bombed and blasted out of Europe at Dunkirk. Now, at this hour, they are bombing and blasting their way back again. This is the EUROPEAN FRONT, once again being established in fire and blood.”
Constance is a young woman who’s just arrived in Hazelbourne, there to take care of an older family friend who’s just had a bout with flu. She enters into a new social circle thanks to this connection, and despite the gap in their backgrounds, Constance quickly make friends. One friend in particular, Poppy, introduces her to another world entirely: that of the Hazelbourne Ladies’ Motorcycle Club. During the war, Poppy and her friends were dispatch riders for the government, roaring around on their motorcycles to deliver important messages. Now that the war is over, that work is ended — and other women who had taken up spots vacated by men who were being sent to the slaughter are also being cashiered out to make room for those boys who served, from public transportation to accounting firms. Rather than sit around and gripe, though, the dynamic Poppy and her friends have created both a social club and a business organization: offering motorcycle repair, training, and taxi service. Such is the premise of this unique period piece, set immediately after the First World War when Britons young and old were reeling from the chaos of the war and the change it set in motion: while not a patch on Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, it’s still a sweet story with memorable characters.
We here follow Constance and Poppy throughout the summer of 1919, in a Britain still trying to adjust to the end of the great war. Its remnants are everywhere: a German U-boat lies stranded on the beach nearby, and Poppy’s own brother Harris lost his leg in combat and now struggles with grief for himself, and despair over an inability to find a way to pitch in: everyone seems to want him to just roll over and play the good invalid, to ‘rest’ and perhaps write morbid poetry or something, when he wants to take to the air again, or at the very least go back to work in an office. One strength of this novel is the relationships it is built on, particularly that between Poppy and Harris: though they constantly mock one another, Constance sees clearly that they love one another. Poppy’s is a bit of a gadfly: she doesn’t want her brother surrendering, she wants him to keep fighting to have a life beyond his status as Disabled Veteran, wants him to overcome the resistance pushed on him by everyone else. Poppy’s dynamism, her refusal to become some background ornament, demonstrates another theme of the novel, that of change. The economy is changing, and so is culture: social roles are changing. Poppy constantly pushes against the envelope, and following in her wake Constance finds courage of her own. To me, Poppy was the dominant character in the novel: it is she who buys the airplane, for instance, that a lot of the novel’s second half is built around, including the growing relationship between Constance and Harris. The core of the novel is the relationship between Constance and these two siblings, especially given the gap in social classes: this leads to an unexpected and interesting ending that becomes a little more predictable with the epilogue. I did have some quibbles about the novel: Simonson has one airman talking about mixing it up with Jerrie over the channel, which is….dodgy in the extreme. Germany did send over Gotha bombers and zeppelins, but the air war was largely staged over the trenches, in direct connection to trench warfare. I think Simonson may have been thinking of WW2 in that particular instance, but that’s forgivable given that this isn’t a work of military fiction, and that the Battle of Britain must have a dominating presence in the historic reckoning of British writers.
Hazelbourne was a fun novel to read, and I’m looking forward to Simonson’s remaining work, The Summer Before the War.
Over at Bewitching Books, Ravenous Reads, I saw a fun bookish game in which ten images are generated by AI, using prompts inspired by books. It was originally inspired by the same game at Bowl Owl’s Corner. I fool around with gen-AI every day, so I wanted to try my hand. Below are fifteen renderings inspired by prompts from works of literature. Most of these are classics. They’re a bit on the obvious side, I think, but one of them will be a little harder for most unless they share my passion for a certain author. May the odds be ever in your favor.
Scene One
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Scene 8:
There is some absolute weirdness in this one, but I THINK it’s still guessable.
Scene 9:
Scene 10:
Scene 11:
Hint: one detail in this picture is extremely important to getting it. No, I’m not telling you which detail.
Today’s TTT is about books that provoked a strong reaction. I’m going to try to focus on books from the first ten years of the blog. First, though, Ye Olde Tuesday Tease.
For [Antipater], the human being in action is best understood as an archer. We train and practice, We draw back the arrow and aim it to the best of our abilities. But we know full well that despite our training and our aim, many factors outside our control will influence where the arrow hits the target — or if it falls short entirely.(Lives of the Stoics, Ryan Holiday)
(1) The Good Guy, Dean Koontz. I don’t remember the plot of this novel as much, only that one of its viewpoint characters was a serial killer, and Koontz was effective at creeping me the heck out.
(2) Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn. Again, disturbing enough that I never revisited Flynn.
(3) Most of Phillip Kerr, but especially The Lady from Zagreb. Although Kerr’s German mystery novels were always masterful thrillers, I had to limit myself to one a year because they were frequently depressing, despite the main character’s Berlin humor.
(4) The Art of Living, a translation of Epictetus by Sharon Lebell. After quotations from Marcus Aurelius prompted me to read The Meditations, I wanted to read more of the Stoics and discovered this volume in my university library back in 2008. I vividly remember copying passage after passage from the book into a notebook. Unfortunately, I lost that college commonplace book in a move — how I would love to see the stuff I was thinking about back then! I later bought my own copy of this as well as The Meditations.
(6)The Four Agreements. One of the first books I ever one-starred on Shelfari (anyone remember that?) and Goodreads.
(7) The Sea Wolf, Jack London. My favorite London novel, it follows a young academic who is lost at sea and rescued by a whaler. The whaler is captained by a beast of a man — strong, intelligent, dominating, and the academic must learn to function as a man in full (adding physical strength and courage to his mental gifts and moral core) to overcome his captor. Invigorating!
(8) Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry. I regard this as my favorite novel, and it’s one I didn’t just “read”: I have both as a physical book and an audiobook, and I frequently re-listen to chapters from the audio book whem I’m trying to relax. There are many unforgettable moments in this book for me — Jayber standing up to Troy, Jayber’s realization that “She said ‘we'”, etc.
(9) Angels and Demons, Dan Brown. I would have thrown this book across the room if it wasn’t a library title.
(10) Enemy of God, Bernard Cornwell. The middle volume of his Arthur trilogy, which set Arthur as a Celtic lord fighting against the Saxons. However, this isn’t straight historical fiction: because Arthur is such a legend, Cornwell departed from his usual style and gave this the slightest grazing of the ethereal — not making it fantasy, but taking the book to the very edge, to the liminal space between history and myth. Enemy of God was especially close to that edge, and set during Samhain it has a scene that borders on horror. Really effective.
I’ve been dogsitting away from my PC, hence the delay in posting this…
Sweet and Lowdown, 1999. Sean Penn plays a rival to Django Reinhardt. Unfortunately, I liked All the King’s Men so much that Sean Pean is now indistinguishable from Willy Stark/Huey Long.
El Mariachi. 1992. A guitarist is confused for a gang-banger. Many homicides ensue. There is an attractive woman.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, 2023. A man receives a letter from a former coworker and embarks on a walking trek across the whole of England, which is simultaneously a journey through his past as he comes to terms with regrets and meaning. Definitely tear-jerky and heart-warmy. Probably my favorite movie all year.
Diva, 1981. French film in which a postman with an obsessive interest in an American opera singer gets caught up in a crime drama after a potential witness drops a cassette tape in his mailbag shortly before she’s knocked off. Beautiful music.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Lady taxi driver drives around swearing and shooting Tiktok videos using a filter that make her look like Andrew Tate. Romanian. I fell asleep watching it. My friend likes this director and has made me watch several shorts by them. So many, in fact, that he felt apologetic and later introduced me to Spring Breakers as an apology.
Trees Lounge, 1996. Steve Buscemi plays a mechanic who was recently fired, who spends his time hanging out in a bar with a few characters who we get to know over the progress of the movie. After his uncle dies he starts driving the uncle’s ice cream truck to earn some money, but gets in trouble after his ex-girlfriend’s niece starts hanging out with him. It’s not a story that gets wrapped up nice and neat, but the viewer gets interested in the characters, and that’s what matters. Definitely enjoyed it. Michael Imperioloi, who played Christuhpuh in The Sopranoes (where Buscemi also played a character, thatanimal Blundetto!) appears. His accent is stronger in Sopranoes. My introduction to Chloe Sevigny, who I definitely want to see more of.
Married to the Mob, 1988. Alec Baldwin plays a mobster who dies fairly early and the rest of the movie is about AB’s boss trying to seduce AB’s widow. Love the late eighties hair and fashion.
All about my Mother, Pablo Almodóvar.I’ve seen him before (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breaktown) and absolutely loved his use of color. That appears here again, though not as prominent. I was especially interested in this film because the main character is a transplant coordinator, and 2.5 years ago I was nearly killed by an autoimmune disorder that led to my being put on dialysis, and then having a kidney transplant after a few months on dialysis. In the film, a woman’s son dies on his 18th birthday, and she — distraught — goes to find his father to tell him. I don’t want to go into the plot too much, but his father is a transvestite, as we discover. Anyway, the main character’s search for the father leads to her life intersecting with an an accomplished but aging actress and her junkie lover, as well as a young nun who works with the least of us and who is both pregnant and HIV-positive. Although there’s a lot of tragedy in this story, it’s beautiful in its way — and not just for the visuals or Penelope Cruz! Considering how HUGE a role A Streetcar Named Desire played in this, I need to watch it soon-ish. Oh, and great soundtrack Almodovar is apparently a fan of the noir-jazz sound.
Back in Black, 2024. Full disclosure: I’ve been an Amy Winehouse fan since Frank hit the US. so when this film was announced I was prepared to hate it. I was….very pleasantly surprised. Abela got the accent pretty well, at least to my American ears, and the costuming and on-stage presences were great. I’ve watched a LOT of Winehouse video over the years and recognized the recordings some shots were based on. Although Winehouse fans tend to take the universal line that Blake was The Worst Thing Ever, the film does a good job of making him attractive (especially in the intro pool hall scene, where his love of the Shangri-Las results in an endearing performance), and defending him to some extent from the idea that he and he alone pushed her into harder drugs and self-destruction. The ending was….beautifully tragic. From the moment the pararazzi asked her what she thought of her ex-hubs and his child by his new girlfriend, I knew exactly what was about to happen, and that last shot…the directors take a lovely direction with it. We are not forced to see what happens, but there’s another shot that links to previous shots and it’s apparent to the viewer what happens next. Going to read Amy Winehouse in Her Own Words before the month is out.
Bernie, 2011. Jack Black plays a real-life mortician and community pillar who, apparently, shot an old lady in the back 4 times because she was just making his life a living hell. Bernie was a real man, as was his victim, and as were all the townspeople — who appear in the movie!! — defending him. Matthew McConaughey does a solid job as a D.A.. My fifth Linklater film.
The Garden of Words, 2013. Anime movie in which two lonely people who keep encountering one another on rainy days in the park developing a friendship. Liked the music, loved the art. I haven’t watched much anime,but this had a visual richness not found in say, Pokemon or Bludgeoning Angel. The art was “warm” and felt like it had dimension, unlike the flat depictions of those other anime offerings.
Paper Moon, 1973. Set in the 1930s, filmed in the 1970s. A father and daughter team play a con man who is transporting a girl who proves to be a useful asset in his scheming. The girl was Tatum O’Neil, who played in Bad News Bears. Great music.
Bronson, 2008. Tom Hardy is Michael Peterson, aka Charlie Bronson, an absolutely violent but weirdly charismatic serial offender who has spent 30+ years in solitary. The film is framed as Charlie giving a one-man show about his life.
Spring Breakers, 2013. Four college women go to spring break, funded by a little robbery that three of them committed immediately prior. They all get drunk and wild and wind up in prison, and are then bailed out by a very skeezy white rapper who gives Selena Gomez the willies, so she’s put on a bus. (She’s one of the aforementioned coeds, in one of her first ‘adult’ films.) The three remaining girls (The Beautiful Blondes and The Girl With Pink Hair) hang around a bit, but then the rapper gets into a feud with another gangsta wannabe and Pink Hair is shot in the arm. The Beautiful Blondes stick around. Watched this with a friend with no idea of the plot or premise and found it…..interesting, hilarious, and horrifying at the same time.Think I may watch Beezus and Ramona to revisit Selena Gomez in an utterly wholesome role.
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, 1957. Fun comedy that stars Jane Mansfield as a Hollywood bombshell who makes an ad man a star after she agrees to endorse his product — but only if he helps her create some drama by pretending to be her new boyfriend, making her old mimbo boyfriend jealous and generating publicity. Tony Randall proved to be a solid comedic actor, and he’s not alone. I liked this better than my previous Mansfield title, The Girl Can’t Help It — though that one was enjoyable.
The Imitation Game, 2014. Tempted to watch it because Alan Turing is the father of computing, and I’m an IT geek; sold because Matthew Goode was involved and I’ve been a fan of his since Chasing Liberty and Imagine Me and You. (Also liked him in Downton, but he was just a supporting character much overshadowed by the family.) Icing on the cake: Allen Leech, who played Tom/Mr Branson in Downton Abbey, is a supporting character. Alan Turing beats the Engima machine but commits suicide after being persecuted for homosexuality.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975. Jack Nicholson is sent to a mental institution to be evaluated: his refusal to surrender to institutionalization creates fun chaos in the asylum, until The Powers that Be decide he’s pushed things too far. Tragic ending. Nice seeing Louise Fletcher here, who I know as Kai Winn from Deep Space Nine.
May proved to be a charming and busy month for reading, and continued the strange trend of my reading more novels than nonfiction, possibly because grad school and a major work project. I did make some progress on the Science Survey, though, and oddly enough one of the remaining sections is usually the low-hanging fruit of biology. I have the summer off of school, though, so my reading might start trending more toward the usual stuff.
The Month’s Favorite: The Unlikely Voyage of Harold Fry. May will be remembered for discovering Rachel Joyce in general.
Classics Club: I picked up Resurrection several times and even glanced at The Shahnameh.
The Science Survey The Big Backyard, Ron Miller The Milky Way: An Autobiography, Moiya McTier OMFG Bees! Matt Kracht. Unreviewed because it was a short title: casual, vulgar, but informative. The author reviews different families of bees, informs the reader about their ecological importance, and argues for rewilding yard to better support bee populations. There’s also an amusing section in which he presents several pieces of art that could be improved by bees.
Readin’ Dixie:
Nothing this month, but I’m ahead for the year so not concerned.
Small Beginnings: Start a series. The Eighth Continent, Bruno & Castle. May use this one for Better Together, actually. Beep Boop: A book with a robot or AI: Shelli, David Brode. Good Things Come in Small Packages. The Downloaded, Robert Sawyer. 183 pages. All Tied Up: a tie-in novel. Plan 9 from Outer Space. You are Here: A book with a location in the title. Lunar Missile Crisis. Bits and Pieces: a collection or anthology. Solar Flare. Under the Radar: a book you head of in 2024. Growing Seeds from Stones.
I can technically stick Burning Dreams under several of these, but I’ve already uploaded the graphic so it can just wait a month to show up.
What’s coming up in June: I’m going to make a push at the science survey with an eye towards ending it in July, and really need to attend to the Classics Club.
Decades ago, then-Commander Spock risked a court martial to bring his former captain, Christopher Pike, to Talos IV, in hopes that it would allow Pike to escape his body, so ruined by delta radiation. Now Spock is returning, called to Talos for reasons unknown beyond his loyalty to Pike. In Burning Dreams, Margaret Bonanno offers readers a chance to get to know the man who inspired so much loyalty and devotion from Spock and others. We meet him as a young lad on a frontier planet, grooming horses on a volcano-based homestead, and follow him through adversity and tragedy — growing through his pain to become Starfleet’s finest. Although I was predisposed to like this because Anson Mount’s performance of Pike has thoroughly impressed me, Bonanno’s ending added a wonderful final flourish that does real justice to the character of Pike as a whole. Although this was written a decade before Strange New Worlds was created around Anson Mount’s masterful interpretation of Pike, SNW fans as well as classic Trek fans will find it a great read, as it establishes certain aspects of his background later used by other authors, and creates a version of Pike quite consistent with SNW’s character.
Most of the story is framed in Pike & Vina’s growing relationship upon his original return to Talos IV: now, he is a guest rather than a captive, and the two humans — both suffering from ruined bodies, both freed from them by the Talosians’ telepathic abilities — can now begin to get to know one another, no longer distracted by Pike’s need to find a way to escape the Talosians’ cage. They both begin sharing their pasts, though in this narrative we’re mostly hearing from Pike. We learn that his mother was an architect and his stepfather a geoengineer, making a home for themselves near the base of a volcano. Theirs was a frontier world, a colony world, peopled by a mix of Federation normies as well as neo-Luddites. One character, a horse groomer, proves to be a vital character in Pike’s life after disaster befalls– and it is he who puts Pike on the path to Starfleet. From here, we witness Pike’s growth as a young officer, standing fast on principle and growing in the estimation and affection of his peers. One of the longer section involves Pike being surprised and captured by some reptilian aliens, which cements Spock’s affection for him. Although my estimation of this book is partially inflated because of how much I’ve grown to like Pike, this was a solid story and the ending was superb.
Recently I encountered the word ‘solarpunk’, and learned that it was a subgenre of science fiction that attacks the pessimism of cyberpunk by creating futures that are its opposite. In solarpunk settings, humanity has learned to grow with nature — using technology to harmonize with it instead of conquering it. I like the aesthetics of it, though its economic literacy is…questionable. Anyway, I wanted to try some fiction in that category.
First up was a Kindle Unlimited piece called Growing Seeds from Stones. This is a short beginning of a story set in a future where there’s been an ecological/environmental/economic collapse. Our main character, Moss, is a member of a new community built from the remnants of the old world: the city is closed to outsiders, and only those who can fulfill are a useful function or have skills to contribute are allowed in. Jobs are assigned based on the community’s needs, not anyone’s desires, and there’s stagnation and latent dissatisfaction as a result. Sandy and her best friend Moss are two such frustrated young people. When Sandy makes the radical choice to secretly leave the community in the middle of the night, Moss is inspired to get involved in the community’s politics — and that’s where it leads off. The setting is interesting, but the ending was jarring, as if the second half of the book is simply not there.
Next up was Solar Flare, a collection of solarpunk-inspired short stories from various authors. There’s a bit of a range, timewise: some are set a few decades away, others centuries. Unlike Metatropolis, they don’t share a same imagined future, though concepts are the same in both. There’s a good variety in the stories, all exploring different adaptations humans are making to worth with nature rather than ride roughshod over it, and these range from engineering to culture. In one story, for instance, we visit a team of women (“Umbrella Men”) who are tasked with repairing and re-orienting kilometer-sized veils in the upper atmosphere. These ‘umbrellas’ refract from sunlight, but also convey it into power that’s beamed down to Earth. The strangest one for me was “Lumen”, about a solar-based community in 1898 being persecuted by oil and gas interests: this seemed implausibly anachronistic, in part because I only associate solar power with conversion cells, and the means by which this town was employing solar power were not explained. Easily the most interesting story for me was “The Palmdale Community Newsletter”, in which a journalist tracks down an independent journalist who keeps writing articles about life in The Other America, a place that this indie journalist can see if he walks down a certain street: in this Other America, the United States took a very different turn after World War 2, pursuing sustainable energy and urban development instead of covering the good earth with oil-soaked parking lots and suburbs dominated by bee-hostile grass monocultures. The stories set closer to us tend to look at the consequences of our actions (like “Drips of Hope”, in which government agents try to persuade some towns people to relocate because there is no more water) , as well as “The Race on Dry Mississippi”, in which solar-powered vehicles race down the empty channel of the Mighty Missisippi. I was glad there was stories like “Drips of Hope” which examined environmental issues other than climate change. The biggest disappoint was “The Astronaut”, which had a fun premise (an astronaut put in stasis finds herself crash-landing on Earth in the late 24th century), but it ended very pompous lecture-y, as the Greenlanders (all Hispanic, interestingly) arrest the astronaut for possessing rocket fuel and go on and on and on about her ignorance and sin. All told, though, I liked the variety of the stories, and the central message about hope, human resilience, and ‘biophilic design’, which is something I want to read more about. It sounds a bit like permaculture on on a different scale.
This week’s triple-T is books we were over the moon to buy, but….haven’t gotten around to reading. But first, teases!
Volcanoes, then, can be sites of encounter and performance, where history is made. Sometimes their eruptions are so dramatic they make history themselves – the Indonesian volcano, Krakatau, which exploded violently in 1883 claiming 36,000 lives, comes to mind.And volcanoes are accomplished scribes – they write their history, in the folios of pumice and ash from which they are built. Pare back the layers of the archive and you might find ancient soils, agricultural land, towns, footprints, bodies and all traces of once-vibrant life whose chance exhumation connects us across millennia with fleeting seconds of peril. (Mountains of Fire, Clive Oppenheimer)
I propose that we view the late 1980s as the beginning of the transition from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood,” a transition that was not complete until the mid-2010s, when most adolescents had their own smartphone. I use “phone-based” broadly to include all of the internet-connected personal electronics that came to fill young people’s time, including laptop computers, tablets, internet-connected video game consoles, and, most important, smartphones with millions of apps. (The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt)
So…I can’t do much for this topic, since I haven’t been buying many books lately. Let’s take a gander at my Amazon order history and see…
The Anxious Generation certainly counts, as it was a preorder that arrived in the middle of Read of England and was so shelved.
There’s The Atlas of Beauty, a photo collection of women’s stories from around the world
Oh, and America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone! Bought that one last year.
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, William Manchester. Read this back in high school 20+ years ago (…criminy…) and wanted to revisit it.
Earthings, by Sayuka Marata.
Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything
Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Peggy Orenstein. This one should be interesting, considering that I found it while looking for works like Orenstein’sCinderella Ate My Daughter.
A Brief History of Nakedness. I’d bought this one to read with Naked at Lunch, but got distracted.
Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages, Dan Jones
Star Trek: Burning Dreams. A Captain Pike novel (pre-Strange New Worlds, sorry) by Margaret Bonanno.
Reading Freely 