Wordwork|play

Reading Satire

The ONION features a neat satire on reading entitled "Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book." It's quite funny on the surface, but points to a disturbing move away from books, especially among the younger generations. Many young people no longer have the requisite attention span to read books. They seem to need a continuous stream of stimuli, of sound bytes and visual flickers. In our always-on, plugged-in, virtually networked and technologically connected culture, there is no shortage thereof. There's lots of money to be made from a generation trained to be in constant 'need' of fresh stimuli and new, or newly packaged, products.

On the topic of books, here's another sad commentary. And here yet another. We laugh at all of them for the same reason that we laugh when poked in the ribs (I'll leave that analogy for you to think about for now).

Book Review: Something About the Blues: an unlikely collection of poetry, by Al Young

(Published Jan. 28, 2008 in BC Magazine)

The poetry in Something About the Blues is beautiful, captivating, painful, powerful, sometimes soothing, and often thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

There is something about the blues that grabs hold of you and moves you, physically and emotionally, that transports you to places past, present and imagined, something that taps into the deepest elemental parts of you to soothe and sometimes heal. It's easy to lose yourself in the blues. Its history runs deep and its influence on other forms has been enormous. The blues, Al Young writes in the introduction to Something About the Blues: an unlikely collection of poetry, is "[b]eaded and threaded throughout America's musical mosaic." But the blues, like poetry, is difficult to describe, define, confine. "[T]he blues," he writes, "will always be dramatically unpredictable, sometimes torturous and sometimes pleasurable," and "[e]ver resistant to classroom analysis," for the blues dwells largely "in a feral state; blues truth is wild and menacing."

Something About the Blues is blues poetry. Though I've often listened to and lost myself in the blues, and have immersed myself in various kinds of poetry, I must confess that I was largely ignorant of the blues in poetic form until I had the good fortune to read this collection. The first to popularize blues poetry was Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, and best "known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties" (learn more about Hughes at Poets.org). It is fitting, then, that Young opens his collection of blues poetry with Hughes' beautiful and haunting poem, "The Weary Blues." This poem, read by Hughes himself, also opens the accompanying CD. It serves as a wonderful introduction to the spirit of blues poetry and sets the mood perfectly.

Al Young, born in 1939 in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, was raised first in Mississippi and then in Detroit, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan from 1957-1960, co-editing Generation, the campus literary magazine. In 1961 he settled in Berkeley, where he held a number of odd jobs--folksinger, lab aide, disk jockey, medical photographer, clerk typist, employment counselor--before graduating with a degree in Spanish from U.C. Berkeley. He has taught creative writing and literature at various universities, has received numerous honours, including, inter alia, Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction. Young has written a number of poetry collections, several novels, three musicals, and numerous screenplays. He was appointed Poet Laureate of California in 2005 by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Everything in Something About the Blues is to some extent a meditation on the blues. This collection attempts to say something about the blues -- its origins, history, themes, essence and power. Whether through dedications, tributes, or other mention, many jazz and blues greats make it into this powerful collection -- Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Lester "Pres" Young, Marian McPartland, Ella Fitzgerald, Lead Belly, Vernon Alley, Harry Connick, Jr., Lena Horn, the James Cotton Band, Gene Ammons, Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges, Clifford Brown, Billie Holiday, John "Dizzy" Birks Gillespie, Malcolm X, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Jackie McLean, James P. Johnson, Langston Hughes, and James Brown. Some poems allude to and play with poetry from the Western "white" Canon, while others address, more specifically, issues of racism and systemic discrimination, of exoticization, othering and hybridity, as well as of terrorism and environmental racism. Some of these topics go well beyond the traditional themes of the blues. And then some poems are of a more playful nature, more earthy and sensual.

The poetry in this collection, like the blues, is raw and elemental. It rarely indulges in complex symbols, extended metaphors, or florid language. It is less constrained by meter and rhyme, but characterized by the liberal use of alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme, enjambment, repetition, and rhythm. It's language is, on the whole, clear, direct, hard-hitting.

There is one poem, just a little into the book, that captures so much of the often contradictory nature of the blues. "The Blues Don't Change" addresses the blues directly:

And I was born with you, wasn't I, Blues?
Wombed with you, wounded, reared and forwarded
from address to address, stamped, stomped
and returned to sender by nobody else but you,
Blue Rider, writing me off every chance you
got, you mean old grudgefulhearted, table
turning demon, you, you sexy soulsucking gem.

The blues is a contradictory character, both wombing and wounding you. You bear its stamp, yet also feel stomped on, moved from place to place, returned to sender, and written off by the blues. The blues stings where you can't scratch and moves you "from frying/pan to skillet" just as it moves you to wiggle your body, juggle your limbs, loosen that goose, up your voice, open your pores, and roll your hips and lips.

The blues is characterized as a grudgefulhearted (neat word), table turning demon who is also -- here begins another wonderful twist -- a sexy soulsucking gem, a "[b]lue diamond in the rough" who "can't be outfoxed don't care how they cut/and smuggle and shine you on." And, in a note to students and theorists, the blues is "too dumb and stubborn and necessary/to let them turn you into what you ain't/with color or theory or powder or paint." You can never, the poem suggests, fully capture or contain the blues. And it is its contradictory, shape-shifting nature that allows the blues to stay forever fresh and current.

The impossibility of capturing the blues completely is also addressed in "Detroit 1958." "Only parts of the pain of living/may be captured in a poem or/tale or song or in the image seen," goes the first stanza. In the blues, as in life, "[s]adness is the theme of existence;/joy its variations." The blues merely imitates the pain of life, but, in another apparent contradiction, it is, "as the man sings,/'The bitter note makes the song so sweet."

There is plenty of bitterness in Young's poetry, though it is not consumed by it. And sometimes that bitterness also comes out in poems alluding to and playing with poems from the Western canon. "The Lovesong of O.O.Gabugah" is a good example, an obvious allusion to T.S. Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a lengthy, meandering, metaphorically dense poem about an aging, indecisive, isolated urban man walking along foggy half-deserted streets on his way to what sounds like a high society party in order to woo a particular woman. But he doesn't dare. His indecisiveness and insecurity are the focus of the poem, and the reader--aren't we lucky--gets to accompany Prufrock and listen in on his inner dialogue.

Though parts of Elliot's poem suggest a somewhat tongue-in-cheek nature, Young's "The Lovesong of O.O. Gabugah" lies in sharp contrast. The tone, right from the start, reflects a rougher context, a very different reality. Instead of "Let us go then, you and I," we get "Time to split now, you & me." The narrator of Young's poem, presumably a black male, also takes his reader along on a walk through an urban landscape, "past alleyways & neon signs/& people waitin in movie lines." But he has no time for lengthy reflection, comparing himself to this or that dramatic figure, to Hamlet, or even Polonius the Fool, or wrapping his emotional insecurities in fancy, drawn-out metaphors. He is physically in danger. If he so much as stops too long near the people waiting in movie lines, he fears getting zapped. What we witness here is something much more grim -- "[t]he snowy line. . . whooshed up the chimney clean, burnt out a nose,/& sniffin all there was to know about July,/just blew its ownself out, forget the rose." Our guide here is not on his way to a high society party where well-dressed ladies discuss Michelangelo. He is headed to a place where he can forget his misery by blowing himself out with cocaine.

One piece in this collection, more short story than poem, addresses a form of oppression and source of misery one wouldn't necessarily expect in a blues collection. "Silent Parrot Blues" discusses environmental racism, a fairly new and academic concept that links racism, a common theme in the blues, to the environment, an uncommon one. It is prefaced by a quote from Myrla Baldanado, Statement Coordinator: People's Task Force for Base Clean Up, that explains what environmental racism is -- forcing people of colour "to bear the brunt of the nation's pollution problem." The story begins with Young encountering a listless, raggedy, broken parrot kept in a dark supply closet by a building superintendent. As he walks back to his apartment, arms full of laundry and disturbed, he meets his intellectually curious hallway neighbor, Briscoe, a veteran of the American War in Vietnam.

Through the conversation with the well-read and socially-aware though rough around the edges Briscoe, a good amount of ground is covered on the topic of environmental racism. Briscoe wants him to take his parrot story straight to the mayor and city council, because, as he puts it, "white people don't like that shit. They hate it -- mistreating birds and animals. . . They won't stand for it. . . . In fact, they're prepared to make your ass extinct in a minute before they'll let anybody fuck with a timber wolf." Young goes on to talk about Romanticism and its role in creating an industrial and post-Industrial society in which humans are seen as separate, apart from, and above nature. He then links that kind of thinking back to the "English romantics -- Shelley, Byron, Keats, Thomas Gray, Samuel Coleridge, and William Blake, among others -- [who] did their part to exoticize nature." He goes on to mention Thoreau, and not very flatteringly either, as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and the poetry of Poe and Whitman. Their kind of thinking has led to the dumping of all manner of dangerous waste, as Briscoe points out, "where black people and Mexicans and Indians live." While people of colour, more than anyone else, bear the brunt of the world's pollution problem, Young does point out that poor whites are also affected.

By including environmental racism in this collection, as well as, in "Your Basic Black Poet," cultural hybridity, Young updates the blues. If the subject matter, the inspiration that often gives rise to and feeds the blues is the highs, though more often the lows, of people oppressed, then these topics belong in the blues of an increasingly complex and globalised society.

In Something About the Blues," Al Young, as the title suggests, says something about the blues. In his "Statement on Poetics" at the end of the collection, Young says that "[a]fter 60 years of listening, I still feel as though I can't get started; as though I have so little to say about jazz and the roles all music continue to play in that curtainless sun-room in the mansion of my life, where thinking and telling take bloom." Though a force as elemental and dynamic as the blues can never be entirely captured and contained, Young does manage to say a great deal about the blues in this collection, and the spirit of the blues certainly moves within and through it. The inclusion of a CD with various live readings brings the poetry even closer, making it come to life. Unfortunately, the sound quality of the CD is not always consistent--the volume and clarity change from reading to reading, which is a bit disconcerting. It may be because they were recorded at different venues, without sufficient audio post-processing. And perhaps this is only a problem on the advance copy. Overall, the more time is spent with Something About the Blues, the more emerges that is beautiful, captivating, painful, powerful, sometimes soothing, and often thought-provoking. This collection of blues poetry comes highly recommended.

On Old Books, Fungus, and Inspiration

What's not to love about books? I have always loved books. I love the feel of books, the look of books, and yes, the smell of books. Particularly old books. The older the better--old books look, feel and smell better than modern ones.

Oh how I love hanging out in and walking through library stacks (read about the long history of libraries here), inhaling deeply the musty smell of old books. For that, and the intellectually stimulating atmosphere of course, I miss university life. I used to think I liked the smell of books for psychological reasons--I love the idea of books, therefore I like the smell of books. But an article I came across recently suggests something more physical.

Ellen Warren writes, in the Chicago Tribune, that there may well be more to getting high on great literature than the love of literature or learning itself. In "Book Fungus Can Get You High," Warren writes that "[e]xperts on the various fungi that feed on the pages and on the covers of books are increasingly convinced that you can get high - or at least a little wacky-by sniffing old books. Fungus on books, they say, is a likely source of hallucinogenic spores." Hmm. So that could explain some of the great works of literature--the authors, spending hours upon hours in dank libraries full of old books, especially in the days before high-tech humidity control, got high off fungus spores. Their inspiration may have come from what they were inspiring (breathing in).

I really need to surround myself with more old books. Take a good whiff of old book, then get back to the computer to write. That may be another downside of digital literature--no hallucinogenic fungus to inspire.

NOD: The Archimedes Codex

Newtonian science was sober-minded; Archimedes' science was not. Archimedes was famous for hoaxes, enigmas, and circuitous routes. These were not some external features of his writings; they characterized his scientific personality. Science is not--mathematics is not--dry and impersonal. It is where one's imagination is allowed to roam freely.

NOD: The Archimedes Codex

This selection is purely incidental to the subject of the book, but given my recent interest in the letter, this caught my attention. The letter is something you will see me going back to from time to time. I somehow feel we're really losing something in switching from letters to e-mails.

E-mails are short on ritual. There is no walk to the mailbox, no looking at the stamp, no slicing the envelope, no guessing the handwriting. They just pop up unbidden on your computer screen while you are engrossed in your daily business. Some of them, like little electronic terrorists, can blow your mind and change your life.

NOD: The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist

My review of Something About the Blues should be submitted sometime tonight and published within a couple of days.

I am already well into the next, utterly fascinating, book--The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist.

Here's a NOD from its preface (I keep reading, lately, about the crusaders, in The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War; The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In; Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics; and now here):

In April 1204, Christian soldiers on a mission to liberate Jerusalem stopped short of their goal and sacked Constantinople, the richest city in Europe. . . . . The looted city had many more books than people. It was the first time Constantinople had fallen in the 874 years since Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome founded it in AD 330. . . . [T]he city held the literary treasures of the ancient world as its inheritance. Among the treasures were treatises by the greatest mathematician of the ancient world and one of the greatest thinkers who had ever lived. He approximated the value of pi, he developed the theory of centers of gravity, and he made steps toward the development of the calculus 1,800 years before Newton and Leibniz. His name was Archimedes.

The Life of a Creative Offering: Independent and yet Dependent

I was doing some research on Ecotecture (word-blend of ecology and architecture) and came across the following quote from Picasso that can be equally well applied to literature--to poetry, short stories, and novels.

A picture is not thought out and settled before hand. While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives a life like a living creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from day to day. This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man who is looking at it.

Picasso from a 1935 interview with Christian Zervos. (found at Ecotecture Canada)

A work of fiction is the same way. No matter how much thought and effort a writer may have put into a story-- perhaps growing it out of, and around, an overarching concept or leitmotif, forming and refining characters, laying out plot elements, and then revising, refining, focusing, clarifying, culling, and polishing--to bring it to life, as soon as it is published and out of the author's hands, out of the author's control, it begins a life of its own. It is an independent, living creature. As long as it has a reader, it is alive. But it grows and changes.

People change from childhood into adulthood, and continue to change and grow and be modified by the impact of life experience. People change when they cross national, cultural, religious, linguistic and political borders, even if certain core elements remain relatively fixed. And so it is also with the work of fiction. Even if unchanged in a literal sense, an ancient Arabic, Greek, Indian, Persian, or Roman story, an Old English or Norse poem, or for that matter a Victorian, or even modernist novel, is a different creature now. It no longer means what it did in its own time and place. It has a life of its own, but is utterly dependent upon the reader. The author gives it birth, but it is the reader alone who keeps it alive, the reader alone who nurtures it, changes it, and sometimes revives it.

LibraryThing

I discovered LibraryThing yesterday. It lets you create an online catalogue of your personal library. And you can post and read reviews, click on the books to buy them from Amazon, as well as get in touch with people who have similar libraries. Pretty neat.

I've begun adding my books to LibraryThing. It'll take a while though, as I have a lot of books and no barcode scanner. I have to enter them all manually, though even that is made quite easy.

Check out my library (in progress) on the right hand side of my site, near the top.

NOD: Something About the Blues

From "See, See, Moon."

But when the blues overtakes you,
every little once in while,
bluegummed moon, all explanations fail
it seems, but no, the blues
by any other name would be
just as funky.
Why should it be so difficult
to pin the color of your sorrow?

NOD: Something About the Blues

Here's another taste from Something About the Blues. This particular selection is from a poem entitled "The Blues Don't Change." There is a sense, almost, of the Blues being not only a persistent undercurrent, an elemental force, but indeed a kind of trickster figure.

And I was born with you, wasn't I, Blues?
Wombed with you, wounded, reared and forwarded
from address to address, stamped, stomped
and returned to sender by nobody else but you,
Blue Rider, writing me off at every chance you
got, you mean old grudgefulhearted, table
turning demon, you, you sexy soulsucking gem.

It's difficult to quote only a part of this poem. The whole thing is so powerful, works so well, is so necessary, that plucking a sentence or fragment out of a stanza just seems wrong. But the one stanza above can meaningfully stand there on its own.

NOD: Something About the Blues, by Al Young

There won't be many NODs for Something About the Blues. Maybe a two or three. I do, after all, intend to have my review of this collection of blues poetry up sometime this week. Sooner than later.

Anyway, here's the first. It provides a broad introduction to the blues, and ties it to poetry as well.

Beaded and threaded throughout America's musical mosaic, the blues make you feel and hear. Sometimes you can count them off in measures and beats, but largely they dwell in a feral state; blues truth is wild and menacing.

Like poetry, the blues will always be dramatically unpredictable, sometimes torturous and sometimes pleasurable.

Book Review: Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, by William Bonner and Lila Rajiva

(Published Dec. 31, 2007 in BC Magazine)

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets is a serious and hilarious guide to surviving the public spectacle in finance and politics.

Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva team up, in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, to peel the layers of glittering wool from our eyes so that we may see the world of politics and financial markets for what they are. They show us the poor players upon the stage, to paraphrase Macbeth for a moment, as they strut and fret their hour upon the stage, telling tales full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And what a show it is! Cocks, with their long bright tail feathers, strutting down the runway. Big-horned deer duking it out on stage. That's what it all comes down to, the authors observe. In the end,

it's all sex and lies. Everything: Romance. Cars. Jobs. The debt bubble. The real estate bubble. The trade deficit bubble. The American Empire. They are useful only as evidence of conspicuous consumption; they wink to the opposite sex that the animal is fit for procreation and game for a little hanky-panky. If he can carry around all that extra baggage and still survive, he must be tough.

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets is a tragi-comedy, full of sharp observations, delivered with equally sharp wit. This book's dark and disturbing revelations could leave one depressed and disillusioned, were it not so damn funny.

But Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets isn't merely about sitting back in our seats to laugh at the poor saps on stage. They aren't blaming the actors either. Well, not entirely. Most of them are otherwise intelligent, responsible, rational individuals who have simply been caught up in the public spectacle and the irrationality of mass mentality. So along with the sharp observations and disturbing revelations are some pointers for the thinking individual--individual is key--to use the knowledge gleaned from the show to avoid getting caught up in the public spectacle and maybe even make some money to secure his or her future.

Bill Bonner is the founder and president of Agora Inc., a consumer newsletter and book publishing company and is the creator of The Daily Reckoning, a contrarian financial newsletter delivered via e-mail. Bonner has also written, with Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of An Epic Financial Crisis and Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century.

Lila Rajiva is a contributing writer and editor at Agora, and her work can also be found at Lew Rockwell, Counterpunch, Money Week, Dissident Voice, Himal South Asian, and Rational Review, among others. She is the author of The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media, and blogs at the Mind-Body Politic.

The first chapter, "Do-Gooders Gone Bad," is perhaps the lightest, but its opening paragraph hints at the central problem with which the book is concerned, whether in politics or in finance, and its dark humour sets the tone for the rest of the book.

It is a shame that the world improvers don't set off some signal before they go bad, like a fire alarm that is running out of juice. Maybe some adjustment could be made. Instead, the most successful of them--such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler--actually gain market share as they get worse. Their delusions are self-reinforcing, like the delusions of a stock market bubble; the higher the prices go, the more people come to believe they make sense.

Bonner and Rajiva don't put much stock in do-gooders and world improvers, nor in the over-bloated and fickle financial markets.

But how can you talk about figures like Mussolini and Hitler, some people may rightly ask, and crack jokes? The answer, I suspect, is that humour is a useful distancing tool. They are not making light of the suffering caused by these figures, but they think about things most people prefer not to. In the context of the inevitable and very devastating U.S. housing bust on the horizon they remark that they make it their business "to think about precisely what most people can't bear thinking about." And to think about these things to understand why they happen again and again and again, and why the masses inevitably get caught up in the momentum no matter how nasty things get, one must "get close enough to see how things work--like a prairie dog peering into a hay bailer--but not so close that you get caught up in it yourself."

The authors cover a lot of ground in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets. They discuss modern world-improvers-cum-dictators like Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Empires intent on improving the world--Greek, Arab, Assyrian, Frankish, British and now American. Terrorism in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries created in large part by European Crusaders who decided to "bring the blessings of Christian governance to the desert tribes" to terrorism today inspired by America's attempt at bringing 'freedom and democracy' to the Muslim world. They cover mass hysteria and paranoia from the witch hunts in the late Middle Ages to the McMartin Satanic child abuse trials across America in the 1980s. They discuss the players in the financial world, from incompetent and grossly overpaid CEOs, to multinational corporations sucking the land dry in far-off countries, to advocates of globalization and the flat earth, to the IMF, World Bank, and the Federal Reserve, as well as the debt, real estate, and trade deficit bubbles. And then, of course, there is the role of propaganda and the media, from Germany to Britain to China and once again to America.

"So many humbugs, dear reader, and so little time," the authors remark at one point. And as for all the efforts of world improvement, they have this to say: "[t]he negative consequences at the end of an effort at world improvement are roughly equal and opposite to the positive aspirations at the beginning." The problem is that otherwise reasonable, intelligent individuals, be they "[i]mperialists, anti-imperialists, capitalists, communists--as soon as they get a grand scheme into their heads, a pet project for world improvement, they all seem to end up in the same place--bungling, botching, and butchering." If you "put them at the head of a country or an army, then they are off on some fool mission--bringing civilization to the barbarians, making the world safe for democracy, or ushering in the proletarian revolution."

To get at an answer for why this happens, the authors turn to the work of the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar has studied the human animal, as also other primates like monkeys, chimpanzees, and baboons, and has come to the conclusion that there is a "maximum number of people and things with which the human brain can cope effectively." Though humans are very social animals, being in possession of a well-developed neocortex to deal with complex reasoning, we really have the capacity to effectively deal with only about 150 people. Dunbar has studied 21 different hunter-gatherer cultures and found the average number of people in their villages to be 148.4. And groups in modern societies seem to have picked up on this as well, from communal groups like the Hutterites to cohesive fighting units in militaries from the classical Roman army to the modern army company.

This is one of the most interesting parts of the book, and crucial to the central argument. "Human beings, according to the sociobiologists, cannot understand much more than the things about which they are concerned for their daily existence." Yet in our modern society individuals are put in positions in which they are asked to plan for millions of people and deal with dollar figures in the billions and even trillions. Dealing with all manner of things outside of their immediate circle, people are liable to accept inadequate or wrong explanations. "The human brain," the authors argue, "is just not big enough for the big world. In order to think, people are forced to start simplifying and eliminating a lot of detail. They have to abstract ... theorize ... generalize." And that's how mob mentality begins. And the problem with the mob, with crowds, is that "[t]hey can only feel and act. They can't think, because they have no set of facts solid enough on which to build." And at that point, the authors warn, "[s]logans replace reason. And the private world of right and wrong has been replaced by the public spectacle, which knows no moral authority beyond its own desires."

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets returns again and again to the public spectacle. The thinking individual, whether engaged in politics or finances, must avoid being caught up in it. The last two chapters of the book attempt to help the thinking individual steer clear of the public spectacle. Reading closely, there are some very helpful tips. The most important lesson, of course, is that independent thought will get you much further than following the masses, believing everything you read in the newspapers, or even looking for specific investment advice to follow in this book.

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets is a great read for the independent thinker with a well-developed, and perhaps somewhat morbid, sense of humour. Readers looking for easy answers without being willing to work hard and think independently will likely get little or nothing out of it. And readers without the sense of humour to sit back and laugh at the public spectacle as it unfolds, and as it is reported in the media, will likely be offended and put the book down. The sharp wit and dark humour, as much as some of us may enjoy it, is perhaps the greatest potential drawback of this book. For readers who are willing to think independently, but don't share the sense of humour, a more serious approach might be necessary. For the rest of us, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets is a serious and hilarious guide to surviving the public spectacle in finance and politics.

See also:

NOD: Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

There are so many good nuggets in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets that it's hard to choose just a few. I will post one more here, and then, within a few days, my review should be published and posted here.

. . . Iraq is full of potential terrorists with grudges. Had the Anglo-Americans bothered to look before they leaped, they would have seen a country that is a mix of tribes, clans, families, and religious groups--all of whom take it as an inherited obligation to avenge any wrong done to any of their own group by any member of any other group going back five generations. We cannot kill terrorists as fast as the State Department can create them, say some. . . . . Still, every great empire--from the Assyrians to the Mongols to the British--has taken Baghdad. America has to do it, too. It is the imperial script and America is right on cue.

NOD: Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

On the American Empire.

... by the twenty-first century, the United States had already reached an advanced stage of empire--and an aging empire needs a little more than banal reality. It needs delusion to keep it going. It desperately needs an enemy to justify defense budgets and military meddling. What else can you expect? Americans need to believe that they are confronted by a vast army of terrorists ready to "destroy our civilization."

NOD: Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Is America sliding towards fascism? A look at some disturbing things happening with the media.

Here is an MIT security studies maven, writing in a column in the Outlook section of the Washington Post, that the new U.S. strategy of paying Iraqi journalists to place stories favorable to the U.S. in the media is perfectly kosher. A reporter, says Michael Schrage, should be helping the military along, not just chattering about it.

... 'Securing positive coverage for our troops in Iraq can be as important to their safety as 'up-armoring' vehicles and providing state-of-the-art body armor. The failure to wage war is a failure to command.'

Ah--the media war. Until now we thought the war meant those cluster bombs going off in Baghdad. But we realize we were mistaken. It must be the blood that got us confused! The real war, we now see, is on the front pages. Take cover!

NOD: Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

There was a time when respectable marriages were based on more serious concerns--money, property, position, and so forth. . . . But in the Western world, arranged marriages have given way to deranged ones. People are expected to fall in love with each other--that is, they are expected to take leave of their senses, and while in this addled state, they are not only allowed, but encouraged, to sign a contract that is meant to last a lifetime.

Time, Money & Medieval Literature: A New Translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation

As mentioned in the lead-in to a recent post, "Texts in Translation: Kalima and Translation into Arabic," I have more than a passing interest in, and fascination with, medieval literature, as also with translation. But because I am overburdened with student debt, still, I have neither the time nor money to pursue this interest in earnest. Certainly not by way of another university degree--my three have nearly buried me in debt. But on to the matter of this post.

I came across a review of a new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the "Sunday Book Review" of the New York Times a few days ago--"A Stranger in Camelot." Though I prefer to read such texts in the original, in this case Middle English, I do understand the need for modern English translations that render the text intelligible to readers who struggle overmuch with older forms of English. Many, perhaps most, high school and university students today struggle even with Shakespearean English, so one cannot really expect them to tackle even earlier stuff.

I haven't read this translation yet, though I hope to do so in the near future. Apparently Armitage presents the Middle English original in a parallel text, much like Seamus Heaney did in Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, a copy of which I have and treasure in my personal library. When a new translation reproduces, as nearly as possible, the spirit and cadence of the original text, it is a joy to read and gives the modern reader a feel for the original. Especially important, as pointed out by Edward Hirsch, is an adequate reproduction of alliteration, the poetic device of choice in early English writing. I, personally, much prefer alliteration and assonance to rhyme as a poetic constraint.

The linguistically adventurous can read the new translation, then work their way through the original. Fun, fun, fun!

Prolific Professors

I have often wondered about very prolific writers, especially professors who also write books. Thinking about them, I always felt a mixture of admiration, jealousy, and shame. I admired their dedication, energy, and output, and bemoaned my lack.

I am still too angry to write about it properly. Read "A Million Little Writers" on how many writers, especially, though not exclusively, professors, manage to be such prolific writers. I too could be prolific if I had a host of minions to do the work for me--I come up with an idea and they do the research and writing to which I can affix my name.

NOD: Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

On news... lots about the news in this book.

... if you think about it, the word newspaper is itself a conceit. It pretends that the news industry is a clean pane of glass through which we look out at the spectacle of public events. But it is not a pane of glass at all; it is a microscope in which particular events are magnified and distorted. News that neither encourages journalistic prejudices nor inflates the journal's profits is invisible. The press lords must think their typical readers are louts. And, if not before, soon after they begin reading the newspapers, they will be.

NOD: Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

What is it about the Near or Middle East that keeps drawing world-improvers and do-gooders, two expressions used a lot in this book, to invade and conquer and reform?

Nor is it the first time that people have tried to do good in the Near East. At the end of the eleventh century, Europeans decided to bring the blessings of Christian governance to the desert tribes. The Crusades of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries were doomed from the beginning. The Crusaders had the will and the weapons to kick Arab butts; what they lacked was a real reason for doing so, for Christianity was already firmly rooted in the Holy Lands, as it had been for more than 1,000 years, even though Jerusalem had fallen to the caliph Umar Ibn al-Khattab in February of 638.

Book Review: ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide, 3rd Edition, by Sue Roaf, Manuel Fuentes, and Stephanie Thomas

(Published Dec. 11, 2007 in BC Magazine)

A beautifully designed, well-written, thorough guide to the ecohouse. Much recommended as both an inspiration and a technical guide.

ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide is a big book to read straight through. Whether you read it from front to back or dip into specific chapters depends on who you are and why you are reading it. In any case,Ecohouse is loaded with interesting and important — shocking, disturbing, inspiring, and enlightening — information, as well as very useful and practical technical guidance for building with both the health of our planet and the health of people — individuals, families, and communities — in mind.

This edition, for those who have not read the first and second, includes the introductions to all three. They are themselves well worth reading. In the introduction to this edition, Sue Roaf writes that the "theoretical concerns over climate change and fossil fuel depletion" covered in the introduction to the first edition were, by 2003, "firming up with the emerging reality of more extreme climate events and growing publicity over the issue of 'Peak Oil'." That is when the second edition was published. So why a third edition now?

Roaf provides several reasons for this new edition, and sees a fourth edition on the horizon. For one, "[e]ven in America the cozy talk amongst the educated architects of 'Sustainable Buildings' has turned to discussions of how we design for 'Passive Survival' in our own homes, when the power fails and the storms menace." Behind this not-so-veiled reference to America's lagging response, the point is that people are, in the face of irrefutable evidence of climate change, beginning to heed the calls for action. Secondly, there are now politicians around the world who are beginning to take notice because of the "growing economic impacts of climate change." And finally, more to the point in terms of the content of this edition, it has become clear that the technology to survive already exists. "What we desperately need now," Roaf writes, "is the 'Eco-society' that will enable the necessary changes to happen in time to ensure that everyone, especially the vulnerable, can 'future-proof' themselves against what lies ahead." This edition serves as a technical guide and inspiration to that end.

Sue Roaf, PhD was brought up in Malaysia and Australia, and studied at Manchester University, the Architectural Association, and Oxford Brookes University. Roaf has spent ten years in Iran and Iraq, working as a landscape architect, studying building technologies, and teaching at the University of Baghdad. She has been a professional Training Adviser for the Oxford School of Architecture and is now Visiting Professor and Architectural Consultant at both the University of Arizona and the Open University in the UK. Significantly, she designed and built her own ecohouse in North Oxford in 1995, a fact to which I will return. In addition to writing Ecohouse, she has also writtenClosing the Loop: Benchmarks for Sustainable Buildings and Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change: A 21st Century Survival Guide.

Five of the fourteen chapters in Ecohouse are a bit more on the conceptual side — "The form of the house": "The building as an analogy"; "The environmental impact of building materials"; "Pushing the building envelope"; "Building-in soul"; and "Health and happiness in the home." Yet even these contain various concrete examples, complete with illustrations and captioned photographs. Though all readers would be well advised to read the entire book, even if not all at once or in sequential order, these are arguably the chapters with greatest appeal to the lay reader or eco-enthusiast, as well as to the architect or builder just learning about eco-architecture. But the other chapters — "Ventilation"; "Passive solar design"; "Photovoltaics"; "Solar hot water systems"; "Using water wisely"; "Small-scale wind systems"; "Hydro power"; "Ground source heat pumps"; and "Lime and low-energy masonry" — contain a healthy amount of technical information and guidance, including formulae, charts, graphs, floor plans, diagrams and illustrations, and photographs. Less technical readers may find some of these a bit tiring on the brain.

Chapter one discusses the form of the house and useful analogies. It begins with a reference to a single analogy coined by the French architect, Le Corbusier, that has largely influenced twentieth-century architecture. He envisaged the building as 'a machine for living in.' This analogy, it is argued, is fundamentally flawed because "a machine is an inanimate object that can be turned on and off and operates only at the whim of its controller" and is a fixed, static object "amenable to scientific assessment," whereas "the driving force that acts upon the building to create comfort and shelter is the climate and its weather, neither of which can be controlled, predicted or turned on and off." This argument is a bit weak. Buildings are static, inanimate objects, even though they are acted upon by climate and weather, and I'm sure atmospheric scientists and climatologists would argue that climate and weather, at least to a point, can be predicted, though not yet significantly controlled. Buildings, the author continues, "are part of a complex interaction between people, the buildings themselves, the climate and the environment."

I suspect the argument is a bit weak because the author is actually after something both more complex and less tangible here, and has a hard time putting a finger on it without devoting too much time to it. The machine analogy fits into, and derives from, a worldview that sees humans as separate from and above nature. Building design within this conceptual — one could say philosophical or ideological — framework is disconnected from nature and can often seem calculated, sterile, inorganic and lifeless. Three basic and very sensible principles on which all buildings should be based are proposed, and I hope architects, builders, and city planners are taking note.

1) design for climate
2) design for the physical and social environment
3) design for time, be it day or night, a season or the lifetime of a building and design a building that will adapt over time

A number of other analogies are then offered that have the potential to create a shift in how the house is regarded. The analogies suggested are: our third skin; a heat exchanger; a tea cozy; a greenhouse; a swallow; an igloo; a bucket; a brick in a storage radiator; a Roman bath house; a periscope; a tree in the breeze; a cool-core building; an air lock in a space ship; and a Hobbit hole. In discussing these analogies, readers also learn about such interesting structures, and their form-based properties, as the ice-house, yurt, and igloo. The latter two, because of their unique characteristics, can help people survive some of the harshest winters in the habitable world. Most importantly, however, these analogies help the reader see more clearly how the form and function of a building fits into various environments.

A number of chapters are devoted to technologies that generate or save energy, such as photovoltaics (solar panels), solar hot water systems, small-scale wind systems, hydro power, and ground source heat pumps (GSHP). These chapters should prove very useful to owners of existing homes in making them more eco-friendly, as also to designers and ecohouse builders. The other part of the energy equation is also covered well. There is a good discussion of the energy that has gone into the various materials we use in constructing our dwellings, as also of the emissions for which they are responsible. The terms embodied energy and embodied emissions are used. The term embodied energy stands for all energy used to create an object, from "extraction of raw materials, transportation to processing plants, energy used in factories, transportation to site, and energy used on site to install the product," while the term embodied emissions stands for all emissions, mainly of CO2, but also of toxins, released during its creation.

When one considers how many distinct products go into a house, the mere thought of trying to determine not only the embodied energy and emissions of each product, but indeed of the entire house, may well result in an overheated brain and complete loss of motivation. It seems overwhelming. The ideal would be to have a comprehensive and straightforward list of products and their embodied energy and emissions. Figures of these things are not yet widely available, but it is argued, quite sensibly, that what we really need is to understand the factors affecting embodied energy and emissions so that we can ask the right questions when selecting materials. Ecohouse devotes a fair chunk of space to this topic, including a section on the embodied energy of different building materials from plastics, to metals, to timber. There is also a case study and a good recommended reading list on material selection and life-cycle analysis.

In "Building-in soul," material selection is revisited in a different context. Building one's own house, though expensive, is not nearly so expensive, "perhaps not one-fifth, so expensive as having something built for you." And it is further pointed out that "most importantly, you invest your soul in what you build, which is why self-built homes are so soul-rich to live in." What buildings are made of, it is emphasized, contributes greatly to their character.

Wood, earth, brick, concrete, steel, glass or plastic buildings are totally different from each other to see, to live in, to build and in the forms their construction logically and characterfully demands. . . . So, very important in terms of their pollution and environmental costs, are their manufacturing biographies and how they end their life — do they return to nature or become refuse?

Though this chapter goes well beyond the selection of materials, discussing such things as the character and identity of a building, especially one self-built, as well as its connections to a wider community, economy and ecology, it also does a good job — better than the earlier argument against the building-as-a-machine analogy — of getting to the root of the difference between the common mass-produced house and the ecohouse. Materials, we are told, "connect us to the world from whence they came: living and life-cycle bound by nature, or lifeless, dead industrial processes." And the following quote both provides a general rule for material selection and a summary of how to create a vibrant, connected, almost living house:

We use thousands of materials in modern building, but a general rule is that the nearer something is to life, the more compatible it is: the healthier to live with, the more recyclable back to earth, thence to living matter again. It also needs more care for longevity — but this care, like the care given to its making, is imprinted into its substance and emanates from it, to nourish those who live next to it. Mass-produced products can never do this; the imprint of care is, by definition, absent.

There is a bit too much talk of soul for me here, giving it somewhat of a New Age tone, but that is mainly a matter of word choice. I would have just stuck to the language of psychological and emotional connections, as that is what it really comes down to.

Significantly, Sue Roaf has designed and built her own ecohouse. This is significant in terms of credibility. It demonstrates that she has not only a good theoretical understanding of ecobuilding, but also direct, hands-on experience. She provides it as one of the case studies at the end and refers to it from time to time throughout the book. Part of the motivation for designing it, she says, "was to put paid to the notion that pursuing a high quality of life necessarily entailed irreparable damage to the environment," the challenge being "to prove that those in richer countries could maintain an acceptably high standard of living without polluting the planet at the cost of those in poorer countries."

The authors of Ecohouse predict that we will probably all have to live in zero fossil fuel energy homes by the middle of this century, and hope that "[t]he seeds of the ideas sown in this book by then will have grown into the New Vernacular of housing for the twenty-first century and beyond." While the hope is admirable, how this will be achieved is not much discussed. Who can afford to build an ecohouse? Certainly not the bulk of homeowners even in so-called first-world nations in North America and Europe. Of those who could afford to, the vast majority have neither the desire nor the necessary knowledge. The vast majority of even well-to-do homeowners prefer to buy large, hastily-constructed, energy-profligate houses in suburbia or exurbia. These are most often cut-and-paste houses equipped with energy-greedy cooling and heating technologies, houses from which they drive — not walk — to work and the big box store. How we can combat these things is not adequately addressed in this book, nor how to make ecobuilding affordable to the common people.

Also not addressed, though they would have fit so nicely into the discussion of embodied energy and embodied emissions, are environmental racism and green-washing. It may be argued that this is a design guide, not a book of theory, but even a paragraph or two on these topics would have rounded the book out a bit more and at least acknowledged some of the darker aspects of eco- this and that. At whose expense are the products with the most embodied energy and emissions produced? Who suffers the most from the pollution both of producing these products and, increasingly, of recycling them? The feature documentary, Manufactured Landscapes, by Jennifer Baichwal does a decent job of illustrating this, though it has nothing otherwise to do with ecobuilding. It is often those in poorer so-called third-world or developing countries. Ecobuilders should pay as much attention to these aspects of material origins and selection.

Ecohouse is, despite these minor wants, a beautifully designed, well-written and thorough guide to the ecohouse. It is much recommended as both inspiration and a technical guide to architects and students of architecture, as well as designers, builders, city planners, and eco-enthusiasts.

See also:

NOD: Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics

Interesting, and funny, connection between world improvers and markets... mob mentality.

It is a shame that the world improvers don't set off some signal before they go bad, like a fire alarm that is running out of juice. Maybe some adjustment could be made. Instead, the most successful of them--such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler--actually gain market share as they get worse. Their delusions are self-reinforcing, like the delusions of a stock market bubble; the higher prices go, the more people come to believe they make sense

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Slow Reading, the Book, and New Media

I came across an interesting article, again at Inside Higher Ed, entitled "Blind, Deaf and Dumb." I read the beginning with great interest. I also feel that too much of our lives is sped up too much, and that this also applies to higher education, something I've touched on before (see Research: taking the time to read thoroughly). Students often have little time to truly engage with their reading materials, to read deliberately, thoroughly, and widely. They often feel compelled, when doing research for a research paper, for example, to use tables of contents and indices to find only what they feel is immediately relevant to their argument. This obviously leaves them open to taking things out of context. It also makes for an impoverished reading and learning experience.

I think I understand what Musgrove was getting at when discussing certain students' inability to relate to the text--to see, hear and speak about the text meaningfully. But that is, I think, little different from the blank stare and incoherent stammer exhibited by some (generally older) people when confronted with a computer, cellphone, or iPod. It has to do with familiarity and literacy. His choice of words were, however, rather unfortunate.

Though I also have a certain attachment to the physical book, I think we must be open to new media. The book was, just a few hundred years ago, a new medium. What we need to do is to continue tinkering with the medium to make it as useful as we can (the use of electronic paper helps), and make enough use of it to forget the medium and engage the text. Who gives any thought to the physical book when truly engrossed in the text?

NOD: ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide

One of the things so many people are concerned about when they think about living more environmentally-friendly lifestyles is that they will have to live more austere, almost ascetic lives. The following NOD addresses that notion.

One of the motivations for designing the Oxford Ecohouse was to put paid to the notion that pursuing a high quality of life necessarily entailed irreparable damage to the environment. The challenge was to prove that those in richer countries could maintain an acceptably high standard of living without polluting the planet at the cost to those in poorer countries. To help better understand the relationship between individual behaviours and the built environment it is necessary to look beyond the form and construction of a building to the consumption patterns of its inhabitants irrespective of culture, geography, or economy. Environmental accounting methodologies, such as ecological footprinting, can provide a very useful insight into those factors which are most important in minimising environmental impacts.

Covering Academic Books in Newspaper Books Sections?

I came across an interesting post yesterday on Inside Higher Ed about a new approach to book coverage in a newspaper. Apparently The Austin American-Statesman is trying a new niche to get people into reading--covering books from academic presses.

I was really surprised that a mainstream paper would try this when books sections are disappearing or shrinking in newspapers across North America. And their niche is academic books, not the newest genre fiction, which I could see as a more popular sort of thing--genre fiction is mostly what I see people on buses and subways and offices reading. I hope this catches on though, at least in university towns across North America.

NOD: ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide

A prediction:

By the middle of this century we will probably all have to live in zero fossil fuel energy homes. The seeds of the ideas sown in this book by then will have grown into the New Vernacular of housing for the twenty-first century and beyond.

NOD: ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide

A little on hemp, a very useful product in construction, as almost anywhere else. Concerns not so much its use in construction, which the book does address briefly, but rather its qualities and ill reputation.

Hemp fibre is the strongest natural fibre known to man and is reputedly stronger, weight for weight, than steel. Hemp grows very fast, from nothing to 4m high in four months and is virtually disease resistant. It can be used in rotation with other crops and helps improve the soil. Hemp got a bad name in the 1930s after publicity campaigns by the petrochemical industry linking it to its narcotic derivative, cannabis, got it banned (in order to promote oil-based materials). Nowadays industrial hemp has virtually no narcotic content, but still needs to be grown under license.

NOD: ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide

This NOD is about harnessing the wind and its relations to solar energy.

The wind has been harnessed since antiquity to power windmills, pump water, generate electricity and cool buildings and people. The wind gains its power ultimately from the sun and wind power is essentially solar energy in another form, as it is the sun which warms air and creates the variations in pressure that drive the wind.

Texts in Translation: Kalima and Translation into Arabic

I find translation fascinating. I once considered, but, for reasons I will not delve into here, did not pursue a gradu