Sunday's Reading List
If you have the time, read the first two articles from the March 24th edition of The New York Review of Books: Very Bad News and Welcome to Doomsday. In Very Bad News, Clifford Geertz reviews two books : Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond and Catastrophe: Risk and Response by Richard A. Posner.
ìWhether societies waste away in ecological neglect or are destroyed by foreseeable disasters they have failed to prevent, for both writers vigilance and resolve are the price of survival. Awareness is all. However much they may differ in style and method (and they occupy the poles of the social sciencesódogged, fact-thick empiricism on the one side, model-and-calculate political arithmetic on the other), these are consciousness-raising books, tracts for the time. It is later than we think. Later even than we have thought to think. ì
From Welcome to Doomsday by Bill Moyers : ì There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power.î
Maybe even before we landed in Evansville, or was it while we werenÃt waiting for our luggage because we had only carry-ons, Brian brought up SalingerÃs short story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish (click and download a Word.doc). As an example of near-perfect dialogue. That day, I downloaded it, Diane read it out loud in the living room on Bellemeade and we all discussed it off and on until we got back on the plane. One question, that we couldnÃt answer, that is only tangentially related: Why did we read it in the first place? Why did every high school student read Catcher in the Rye? And other books that are now classics – A Separate Peace for instance. Were they assigned? I donÃt think so. Did we all simply read more then? Are there not comparable authors? Are the Harry Potter Books comparable? Matt reads, but claims most of his friends do not.
I’m quite sure that A Separate Peace was assigned, and I’m not sure I ever DID read Catcher in the Rye! (I also never read the Shakespeare that my kids have both been assigned.)
Comment by jennifer — March 6, 2005 @ 1:18 pm
I read almost all of Shakespeare (sonnets, too), but nothing of Knowles or Salinger. Lotta Shaw, too, though…….
Mikey’s posted some serious homework here — not for those whose reading muscles have atrophied. Near the end of the comparison:
>> They ask, in somewhat different ways, the same question: “Is the modern way of life globally sustainable?” And they give, on the basis of somewhat different material, the same answer: “Not as it stands.”
Looking around, one finds it hard to argue. There are enough calamities, actual and looming, natural and man-made, to give anyone pause, even if they still fall a bit short of Diamond’s isolate and castaway Easter Island or Posner’s world-devouring nano-machines. Kobe and Banda Aceh, Bhopal and Chernobyl, September 11 and Madrid, Rwanda and Darfur; AIDS, deforestation, overpopulation, urban sprawl, pollution, and the proliferation of industrial waste seem near out-of-hand; and it is, in fact, difficult to imagine a world in which the Chinese use of automobiles matches the American. Yet it is possible to wonder whether the situation will yield to alarm and entreaty, the cry havoc persuasion of large numbers of minds. Decline and fall melodramas and sci-fi scenarios may serve to italicize crisis, but it is not so clear what they do to engage it.
Comment by halfway read — March 6, 2005 @ 1:41 pm
Down here near the mind-numbing inside-the-beltway swamps, the center of non-marginal delusions, I’m sufficiently curious at exactly whom or what Bill Moyers in referring to in that quotation that I’m going to go read Welcome to Doomsday, even though I’ve been saturated in “doomsday” just by reading Scientific American or listening to the experts speak about the melting Artic at National Geographic Hall.
As for Chrichton’s new book…the first I heard of it was from George Will–a widely-revered journalist who refuses to believe in the imminence of global warming. (Talk about dispassionate. He may not be as insane as Senator Imhoffe [R, KS], who believes global warming is a hoax, but…) In one of his recent columns, failing to find any concrete evidence to reassure himself that global warming is not anything to worry about, George Will, quoted Chrichton’s book at length. It was a sorryful example of a journalist resorting to using a book of fiction to buttress his own worthless beliefs. Belief trumps evidence any day, at least in politicsville.
Doomsday is all around us in other respects, too. But I can only worry about a dozen things at a time.
Comment by rakkity — March 6, 2005 @ 3:01 pm
Katie and Patrick are prolific readers, but, like Matt’s friends, none of their friends read much. What did we do in their raising to make them so odd? Could it have been limiting TV to less than 5 hours a week? Or the example Beth & I set reading on the sofa every night? Reading stories to them at bedtime all the way through elementary school? Showing excitement at stories and books at every possible moment?
I loved Shakespeare in high school and college, and even afterwards. I’m looking forward to see the movie version of Merchant of Venice–the first play I was introduced to (50 years ago). “A pound of flesh, but not a drop of blood” still rings in my head. I hope the film does the play justice.
Comment by rakkity — March 6, 2005 @ 3:13 pm
I donÃt understand the deniers agenda. I donÃt understand what they are afraid of. Can they be divided into classes? Those who believe the earth is heating up, but donÃt believe the cause is the playful plague of bipedal locusts from those who donÃt even believe the temperature rise? Or do they all concede itÃs hotter out there? I suppose if you still have that childÃs view of earth as an impossible huge wobbly orb, you might…I donÃt know, I canÃt even go there. Too bad there isnÃt a personal penalty (rather than Global) for aligning yourself with the six pooh poohing industry paid scientists.
I didnÃt see a connection between the end of the world and Bananafish. Except in scale. I do see a not so coincidental paring of the two articles in The New York Review of Books.
I know I read Shakespeare in high school and college, but my most vivid memories are of the assigned fiction in high school. Lord of the Flies in my sophomore year, for instance, which in some ways is not so different from those Easter Islanders who lived in harmony all those years, but end up eating everything including themselves. Maybe the real question was, how did a book written in 1954 make it to a course curriculum in 1963? Are Matt and Hil reading and discussing books written in the middle nineties?
Comment by michael — March 6, 2005 @ 7:00 pm
I may have misread bananafish as badly as anybody in history, but the link I thought I perceived was of a man still fully able to look at the wonders of the world but ready to choose to end participating in it for the indelible toehold death had gained on his soul, the truths about human existence war had taught him. All that inexorable doomsday scholarliness could drive one who really believed in its inevitability to a similar place.
Comment by adam — March 6, 2005 @ 8:06 pm
My favorite quote from who was one of my favorite authors when I was 20 something: “Keep passing the open windows”. Seymore Glass couldn’t pass them anymore. Neither could Lily in the Hotel New Hampshire. Poor them. I had to read Catcher in high school, it’s the only Salinger I’ve read and now BananaFish. I enjoyed BananaFish.
Comment by john irving said... — March 7, 2005 @ 12:13 am
After reading Bill Moyers, if I hadn’t just seen the Canadian film “The Great Warming”, which offers hope and an alternative vision of a cooperative future, I think I’d just go jump off a bridge.
As to the classes among the deniers, I’d say, there are the “Jesus-is-coming” folks, the anti-science “Know Nothings”, and the opportunistic “Profiteers”. But there’s at least one other class of denier, such as Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute. His arguments sometimes seem valid on the surface, but he ignores global evidence and selects the pieces of data that he likes. Why? Denial is easy, acceptance of reality is hard.
Comment by rakkity — March 7, 2005 @ 3:39 pm
If I had rakkityÃs job, which involves observing the natural world (okay, the sun above, or mostly computer data or what is it exactly that you do do?), IÃd have already jumped off the bridge. With my work, I can moderate distasteful information – which is to say I can turn off NPR. Although, didnÃt I say if I had JenniferÃs dreams, IÃd be looking for some other line of work? I guess IÃm really a Zonker Harris clone – they should have named it something other than work.
It seems to me that john irving laid see more glass to rest with her comment. What else is there to say?
But I have to add my two cents. When Diane got to the Ortgies 7.65, I thought, egaads, what happened to the flashes of lightning to let us know that thunder is coming? Then I reread it – without her voice edging me into an alpha state – and thought, ohhhh, okay.
I might add that today Sybil would have a different nickname.
Worthy Salinger web site: http://www.geocities.com/deadcaulfields/DCHome.html
Comment by michael — March 7, 2005 @ 8:47 pm
From the aforementioned Salinger sight: “An aching soul, Seymour’s final act is one of sacrifice rather than selfishness.” Interesting concept, though I couldn’t disagree more…it’s the ultimate act of selfishness, no matter how poignant the individual. Anyway, that quote alone would make for an interesting dialogue.
Comment by john irving said... — March 7, 2005 @ 9:58 pm
Humans who use themselves as artillery aside, I see suicide as transcending those emotions. Althought Hunter ThompsonÃs seemed planned to inflict the greatest amount of damage.
Comment by michael — March 8, 2005 @ 6:39 am