Why we want children

credit: John

How we are happy

Eaarth

Bill McKibben's new book Eaarth

"If you are, like McKibben, a grudging optimist who believes that human society can willfully transform into a better version of itself, you might be persuaded by his arguments, some of them new, others a little old hat. Arguments that a smaller, diversified agriculture could add stability to our compromised industrial food-production system. That “growth” as an economic model is inherently flawed and will no longer be viable. That an “uptick of neighboring” will spread the sharing and implementation of practical, Eaarth-friendly how-to-ism. That the Internet could alleviate the rural boredom so many of us dread when we contemplate chucking it all and going back to the land, as he argues we must."

The class side of the whole thing:

"But many of these proposed solutions inadvertently resemble the list of things Christian Lander lampooned in his 2008 best seller “Stuff White People Like”: “farmer’s markets,” “awareness,” “making you feel bad about not going outside,” “vegan/vegetarianism.” It’s not that these things aren’t important. But in the absence of some overarching authority, a kind of ecologically minded Lenin, they will remain hipster lifestyle choices rather than global game changers. Which I suppose in the end is part of McKibben’s point. Eaarth itself will be that ecological Lenin, a harsh environmental dictator that will force us to bend to new rules. The question is whether we will be smart enough to bend ourselves first."

Do we really need an oil spill to get a (crappy) energy bill on the floor of the senate?

So we fall in love with ghosts

"Sometimes Claire and I would come down the hill with the car lights turned off in complete blackness. Or we would climb from our bedroom window onto the skirt of the roof and lie flat on our backs on the large table-rock, still warm from the day, and talk and sing into the night. We counted out the seconds between meteor showers slipping horizontal across the heavens. When thunder shook the house and horse stalls, I’d see Claire in her bed, during the brief moments of lightning, sitting upright like a nervous hound, hardly breathing, crossing herself. There were days when she disappeared on her horse and I disappeared into a book. But we were still sharing everything then. The Nicasio bar, the Druid Hall, the Sebastiani movie theatre in Sonoma, whose screen was like the surface of the Petaluma reservoir, altering with every shift of light, the hundred or more redwings that always sat on the telephone wires and chirruped out loud before a storm. There was a purple flower in February called shooting star. There were the sticks of willow that Coop cut down and strapped onto my broken wrist before he drove me to the hospital. I was fourteen then. He was eighteen. Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross."

- "Divisadero," Michael Ondaatje

SB 1070

An inspiring article by Joel Olson on the situation in Arizona

Dos grandes

credit: Jaimeeeeeee

Opus 40 or David Foster Wallace with a penchant for historical research

"He believed because an artist must believe as easily and deeply as a child cries. What's creation but self-enacted belief? - Now for a cautionary note from E. Mravinsky: Shostakovich's music is self-ironic, which to me implies insincerity. This masquerade imparts the spurious impression that Shostakovich is being emotional. In reality, his music conceals extremely deep lyric feelings which are carefully protected from the outside world. In other words, is Shostakovich emotional or not? Feelings conceal - feelings. Could it be that this languishing longing I hear in Opus 40 actually masks something else? But didn't he promise Elena that she was the one for him? And how can love be self-ironic? All right, I do remember the rocking-horse sequence, but isn't that self mockery simply self-abnegation, the old lover's trick? Elena believes in me, I know she does! How ticklishly wonderful! Even Glikman can see it, although perhaps I shouldn't have told Glikman, because...What can love be if not faith? We look into each other's faces and believe: Here's the one for me!"

- William Vollmann, "Europe Central" (92)

-his latest: "Kissing the Mask," a 528 page meditation on Noh Theater
- "The David Blaine of Literature?" A somewhat shortsighted but widely read and generally interesting critique at Lit Kicks
- non-fiction piece on Afghanistan
- If you want to know what he thinks about prostitutes (among other things)

ps. hi everyone! back in the us - back posting on this thing.

The world is built on this

"It is rational to believe propositions that structure our lives, even if they are not rational things to believe."

- G. A. Cohen, via Nozick