@“MoH”#p158287
This has me very interesting in the book. I haven‘t been sure if that’s the kind of book I want to read, especially after reading Naomi Klein's climate change book and also the Uninhabitable Earth (another data rich informed book, though the author seems more hopeful than I am).
But this may be the book to finally ease me into Volmann.
@“edward”#p158294 this is much better than the naomi klein book (assuming you mean this changes everything). i haven't read the david wallace-wells book, tho it does seem up my alley. the vollmann book is anything but hopeful (in fact the one reason for something close to hope is solar power, which vollmann deliberately shortchanges), but it has a literary flavor that seems to be missing in that space. give it a try!
@“MoH”#p158301
I actually do like the Naomi Klein book, though it shows its age, despite not being that old. But 10 years during this specific crisis feels like a lifetime!
I personally feel rather fatalistic with regard to all this, though I choose to be optimistic. Strangely, Paul Kingsnorth (before his conversion to Christianity) gave me a useful framework for thinking about the climate crisis. To boil it down, he believes (not without reason) that we have missed our chance to alleviate the worst of the crisis and it‘s possible we’re facing a civilization ending catastrophe. And so we need to do what we can, but rather than fall into despair, we must meet the challenge bravely, even if hopelessly.
Which may not be comforting to many people!
The Wallace-Wells book is quite good, though it's really just taking the available data and published information from climate scientists and then describe in specific detail what this means for the earth/climate and what that likely means for the human animal (and other animals). He's much more hopeful in the Bill Gates kind of approach, which is to say that he just hopes/believes someone will invent something to get us out of this.
@“edward”#p158304 i‘m not familiar with paul kingsnorth, but that line of thinking resonates with me (in fact it feels very christian in a sense, too). where i tend to differ is we (meaning humanity) would almost be lucky if the catastrophe was civilization ending. instead i fear we’re headed for an even more imbalanced and painful version of what we have now. it‘s this reason i’m very bearish on the bill gates/invent something approach. inventional civilization and its consequences are what brought us to this point.
at the same time, there is always potential good news for the ignorant like myself. the earth is a complex system despite our best attempts at modeling it. things are very bad and they will get worse, but perhaps the unexpected resiliency of nature will surprise us.
@“MoH”#p158306
That last bit is the thing that does give me hope. The earth doesn‘t really care that we’re here and it‘ll be fine whether we’re here or not.
@“edward”#p158308 in the abstract, absolutely. in the concrete, well….
what is Book Tock??
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/17/business/immersive-fantasy-events-tik-tok-millennials/index.html
Started reading a new translation of Chevengur by Andrei Platanov. It’s by the husband and wife Chandler team who did the good The Foundation Pit edition. That’s the only Platanov novel I’ve read in full and it’s of course excellent. I tried to read the ‘78 version of Chevengur a while back but it was so clumsy that I gave up eventually. This book along with Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship were the two books at the intersection of most want to read vs has an inexplicably terrible English translation so I’m glad at least this one’s decent. Comparing the two side by side I notice the new translation has sentences and even whole paragraphs that the earlier one does not, and the omissions seem to be about gross stuff (description of “small caliber white worms” flopping around in green puke, mentions of people methodically shitting on every grave in a cemetery, etc) so wonder what happened there. Maybe the earlier translator was working from a censored text?
I like it so far but it’s more ramshackle than _The Foundation Pit_ which has a more controlled and sustained mood to it. I think _Chevengur_ is the better regarded of the two in Russia though so what do I know. It’s sort of a hyperreal picaresque about rural poverty and revolutionary violence during the Russian Civil War. Platanov was one of those guys Stalin alternately liked and was pissed off at. Never wound up having him killed though. Not an endorsement of the practice but it’s always been wild to me that a head of state was so tuned into developments in avant garde literature that it reached the level of government intervention
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@“yeso”#p158652 Not an endorsement of the practice but it’s always been wild to me that a head of state was so tuned into developments in avant garde literature that it reached the level of government intervention
i knew the west was cooked when we stopped killing poets
who was the last artist to to get themselves in real trouble out here? Mike Diana maybe? Though that particular Florida jurisdiction wasnt exactly Stalin level prominent
piss christ guy
unless I’m missing something, it doesn’t look like Serrano got in any actual trouble for “Piss Christ”. According to Wikipedia, Sister Wendy defended him and the pope gave him a thumbs up (Francis, not JPII who would have been the contemporaneous Pope)
@“yeso”#p158687 no, i think you’re right. i just like keeping the piss christ dream alive. i didn’t know about mike diana…stuff looks “shocking” but not anything different than johnny ryan or something.
i don’t know when the last time an american got in serious trouble for art (for all our faults as a country, we’re pretty good at free speech >!(controlled dissent!<). i hate to be too coincidental here but vollmann was suspected of being the unibomber because one of his novels had some controversial themes. he wrote an essay [about it here](https://harpers.org/archive/2013/09/life-as-a-terrorist/). i think that’s probably the closest american artists get to being wiped.
edit: damn that mike diana story is crazy
@“MoH”#p158689
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edit: damn that mike diana story is crazy
This was one of those times where I went, "I know I shouldn't google this." But then I do google it. And then afterward I go, "I wish I hadn't googled that."
Anyway does "cancellation" equate to "serious trouble"? I would say no, not really. But that seems to be the closest American artists can get to serious trouble these days. I'm having trouble thinking of any more extreme examples.
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@“MoH”#p158689 the last time an american got in serious trouble for art
Tipper Gore sure tried her best, but maybe I'm showing my age and that is no longer reasonably considered as "recent"
(note, not suggesting Tipper was the artist -- rather the (misguided (as always)) police!)
I remember quite liking The Uninhabitable Earth - it was a very nice balance of data-driven arguments and vivid imagery of actual victims of climate change. The passages about a couple forced to tread water in their swimming pool to escape a forest fire or of the families hit by mudslides in Santa Barbara stay with me years later. Maybe wishful thinking on my part but I liked that he retained some optimism even though things look dour. At the time - 2019 - it seemed like the only climate change discourse I‘d see online was full doomerism “the earth will not make it to 2022” that seemingly had very little to back it up. I also think the very tenuous optimism is more in line with how I feel post-pandemic and seeing how, at least in those first few months, the world was able to mobilize in response to a global crisis in a way that I didn’t really think was possible
I haven't read Naomi Klein's book _This Changes Everything_, but I actually did just read _Doppelganger_, which is the first book of hers I've read. I really enjoyed it - it's a bit disparate but it feels really right for this particular moment in time. There are some ideas in there that I'm going to be thinking about for a while - especially the sections where she argues that we radically changed the discourse (for the better) right at the precise moment in time when words ceased to mean anything.
I liked _Doppelganger_ a lot and so looked into Klein a bit more. I read her interview in the New Yorker which was good. However, I hit play on a podcast where she was a guest to talk about the movie _Don't Look Up_, which she mentions in the book, but in a very neutral manner. I thought _Don't Look Up_ was one of the biggest disasters of the past five years or so... Then here she is on the podcast taking these enormous swings about how critics hate comedy and its a huge hit for netflix and how people aren't going to like its message because it's a "challenging film" (???)... honestly she sounded like a right winger talking about The Babylon Bee or one of those awful Daily Wire films... I shut the podcast off after 10 minutes. So, not totally sure what to think of Klein at the end of the day, but I did really like _Doppelganger_
One interpretation of Chevengur is that it’s about a guy who’s autistic for trains, but his autism is cured by a sudden understanding of class-consciousness
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@“yeso”#p159316 One interpretation of Chevengur is that it’s about a guy who’s autistic for trains, but his autism is cured by a sudden understanding of class-consciousness
Didn't know this was possible. I gotta get less class-conscious
Uuuuuuuuuuuuh………. uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh……………. actually it's fine for working class people to become police. I mean everyone has to make a living somehow
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@“MoH”#p158287 i’ll next be reading all the lovers in the night by mieko kawakami, author of forum favorite heaven
this was really good, by the way. it hit the same marks _heaven_ did, but in ways more subtle and unexpected. a very easy recommendation for anyone.
i'm now about halfway through volume 2 of vollmann's carbon ideologies, this volume called _no good alternative._ it's better than the first, and is so good in fact it's making me rethink the first. for as verbose as vollmann is, he lets some things the book does go unstated and/or delayed. when those things finally do come into focus, they give a certain aesthetic pleasure unique to literature. specifically in this case, it's the realization that vollmann structured the book a bit like an inverted pyramid. interviewing families of coal miners in west virginia who can't drink from their tap and suffer from strange cancers and industrial accidents has a tremendous weight after spending ~ 400 pages reading about BTUs and pounds of carbon etc etc. it's really good.
it's also super bleak. take this quote from an activist in west virginia vollmann worked with who had spent years trying to protect a small parcel of forest from mountain top removal mining:
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It seems a small and insignificant victory in the face of global habitat los and mass extinction. It feels frustrating to know that people can take a stand and win, as we did, yet so many people continue to passively accept the myth of their own powerlessness. It makes me angry that we had to spend years of our lives working to protect a tiny spot of land from the greed and insanity that threatens it, and that we could spend our entire lives doing the work of protecting the land yet still mourn daily for the many places we continue to lose to this sick culture to which nothing is sacred except exploitation. It feels good, really good, to stand up to powers that seem so invincible and systems so broken and corrupt … and beat them. It's inspiring to find and work with those few people who do care, and are willing to take action.
so it's hard to walk away from this book and not feel that we are very cooked.
speaking of releasing carbon, i have a long trip to japan coming up, so i'm looking for one meaty book that's also split up into piecemeal parts that i can take with me. _palm of the hand_ stories by kawabata fits this bill, but i already read that. ironically, so does _the atlas_ by vollmann so i might bring that but wanted to see if anyone else had any bright ideas. maybe _the anatomy of melancholy_...