Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Both sides then

I just stumbled onto the 1957–58 diary of Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, the lover identified as "H" in Reborn, Susan Sontag's diary of the same period. If you, like me, have read Sontag's diary and were swept up in its heady melodrama, you will probably not be able to resist peeking at Zwerling's version. Among other revelations: Sontag herself was unable to resist peeking at it ("Susan read yesterday’s diary entry and now it’s embarrassing to be in bed with her as I write . . ."). Perhaps most surprising is how much the two agree about the nature of their miserable affair. Here, for example, is Zwerling's diagnosis:

I’ve never before lived with someone I neither desired sexually nor felt strongly about. It’s so decadent! I feel terrible about it all, brooding depression— (5 February 1958)

And here's Sontag's echo-response:

H thinks she is decadent because she has entered into a relation which neither physically nor emotionally interests her. How decadent then am I, who know how she really feels, and still want her? (8 February 1958)

I imagine that if one were to read the two diaries against one another, many small details would fall into place. I happened to noticed one. In one of her unhappy rhapsodies, Sontag writes:

H, whom I love—is beautiful, beautiful. Can she? Will she want to be a little happy with me here? . . . the Negro has a date with [blank] for Tuesday (23 February 1958)

Zwerling's diary fills in the blank. It was Zwerling herself who had the date:

Today I had a date at the Flore with a Negro man who stood me up. Susan insisted on coming with me in the Metro; she’s going to the Deux Magots. I guess it serves me right that he didn’t show, but I had really been looking forward to getting fucked! (25 February 1958)

Upon which Sontag seems to comment in her entry of the following day:

Your insatiability, dear H, that's just the consoling way in which your talent for satiety appears to you. Never to get what one wants is never to want (for long) what one gets—unless, sometimes, when it is taken away. (26 February 1958)

Relics

Not far from my mother's house in Fort Worth, a creek has dug a wide gully down through about ten feet of chalky sediment. Walking by, last week, we happened to notice that some of the rocks had shapes, and over a few visits, gathered a number of these fossils. I'm not at all sure of my identifications, and would welcome corrections, but the ones above seem to be ammonites, ancient versions of the nautilus, squidlike creatures that lived in curvy shells. Those below are various snails, aka gastropods. Below left are a kind of echinoderm, sort of fat versions of sand dollars, perhaps the ones known locally as "Texas stars" or "Texas hearts." The twisty, filamentous ones below right are mysterious to me—worms? seaweed?

The personal and the political

Further to the questions I raised last month about the Templeton Foundation, Mark Oppenheimer has written a first-person account of his work there as an editor and gives his assessment of the foundation's engagement with the issue of institutional bias.

Discord

In the London Review of Books, Paul Mitchinson investigates the damage that Leoš Janáček did to his career by his lack of tact (subscription required).

He persisted for years in misspelling (in multiple ways) Arnold Schoenberg’s name, and filled his copy of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre with critical commentary. (‘Ass!’ he wrote in the margin next to a discussion of chord-construction on fourths.)

There seems to have been a little of this laying waste to normal human decorum even in Janáček's "most famous contribution to music: the 'speech melody.'"

In the summer of 1897, perhaps under Dvořák’s influence, Janáček began notating the tempo and pitch of the conversation he heard around him: the cries of children, the comments of neighbours, even the sounds of farm animals. In 1903, as his daughter lay dying of rheumatic heart disease, Janáček notated her strangled cries.

The real thing

After editing the late John Leonard for sixty-nine months, during which despite regular chemotherapy he never missed a deadline, Jennifer Szalai of Harper's magazine looks back to their first month working together (subscription required):

I had the young editor's tendency to err on the far side of caution. My queries to John weren't many, but their phrasing was that of someone who had never met a hair she wouldn't wplit yet was shy about wielding the knife. I recently opened up the Microsoft Word document on which we did most of our edits for that [first] column, last saved at 8:22 P.M. on February 11, 2003, and I saw a bold-faced query of mine after John's reference to "a techno-rave, ZyloFlex body armor, and some stun-gun sex." I had bolded "stun-gun sex" and added, "John: Just to clarify: Is 'stun-gun' meant metaphorically here?"

No, it most emphatically wasn't.

Boom

In Bookforum, Craig Seligman, author of the brilliant Sontag and Kael, wonders what to make of the sexual revelations in the first volume of Susan Sontag's journals, which he likens to an explosion and which, like me, he finds "riveting":

So, surprise—she was human. The inverse parabola that Reborn traces—the high of her sexual initiation, the low of her marriage, and her eventual reawakening (her real rebirth)—constitutes a gay-liberation paradigm so obvious it borders on the banal. Except that, as we all know, the story didn’t end so crisply. Sontag came no further out of the closet before the wider public until she was forced to by a pair of hostile biographers in 2000. There’s been endless speculation as to why she remained so tight-lipped. A lot of people have called her a coward.

I don’t think there was anything cowardly about her, though. It was more complicated than that. Her sexuality wasn’t what she wanted the conversation to be about—and she always thought she could control the conversation.

DFW disproves fatalism

Fatalism is the idea that actions in the present aren't decisive but are determined by the state of affairs in the future. It was given a serious formulation in 1962 by a philosopher named Richard Taylor. For the New York Times Magazine, James Ryerson looks up the undergraduate philosophy thesis of the novelist David Foster Wallace and discovers that Wallace refutes it.

Wallace proposed that there was a flaw in Taylor’s argument, a hidden defect. In essence, Taylor was treating two types of propositions as if they were the same, when in fact they needed to be distinguished and treated differently. Consider the sentences “It was the case that I couldn’t fire my handgun” and “It cannot be the case that I did fire my handgun.” At first they may sound similar, but Wallace argued that they involve quite different notions of impossibility. “It was the case that I couldn’t fire my handgun” refers to a past situation in which discharge is deemed impossible because (let’s say) my gun was broken. “It cannot be the case that I did fire my handgun” refers to a present situation in which discharge is deemed impossible because (let’s say) my gun is still cool to the touch. The first notion involves an earlier, physical constraint on firing (namely, the broken gun); the other involves the current absence of a necessary consequence of firing (namely, a hot barrel). An extremely sensitive observer of language, Wallace noted that there is a subtle indicator of this important distinction already at work in our language: the fine differentiation in meaning between “I couldn’t have done such and so” and “I can’t have done such and so.”

Armed with this small but powerful insight, Wallace was able to pick apart the machinery of Taylor’s argument.

How torture misled America into war on Iraq

There's another review of The Dark Side, Jane Mayer's exposé of America's involvement in torture, in Open Letters (thanks for calling my attention to it, Sam). Greg Waldmann explains lucidly and in depth a number of Mayer's revelations, including a disquieting link between torture and the case for war presented to American voters:

The most disturbing example of torture’s inefficacy was the "enhanced" interrogation of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who actually was a terrorist. Bush hailed al-Libi as a model of what "enhanced interrogation" could accomplish. But all the useful information he’d given was given to the FBI, who ran their interrogations normally. The CIA took control, however, and packed him away to Egypt, where he was pressed particularly hard on the subject of Iraqi/al-Qaeda connections. Al-Libi told the Egyptians that three al-Qaeda figures (he used real names) had gone to Iraq to learn about nuclear weapons. It was a fabrication. The Egyptians wanted more, so he made up some more stuff about Iraqi training in bomb-making and biological and chemical weapons. This "intelligence" made it into an October 2002 speech by President Bush, and later into Colin Powell’s famous February 2003 address to the United Nations.

Attack of the kittenheads

"Pixies, Sheilas, Dirtbags, and Cougar Bait," an essay of mine on slang, appears in The Nation of 29 December 2008. Revealed: a glimpse into the interior world of a "literary" gay couple in Brooklyn, and the sordid truth about the low intellectual level of their home banter. Including: lots of words so dirty you may not know what they mean. Plus: the return of Gordon Bennett.

[Image above: Jodie Silsby's Portsmouth Vernacular, the dialect of Portsmouth, England, printed as a street map. Buy a copy here. Via Jacket Mechanical, who got it via Creative Review.]

The story so far

In October, the Christian Science Monitor announced that as of April it will no longer be printed on paper. The Newark Star-Ledger announced a 40 percent staff cut. Radar closed, for what seemed like the fourteenth time, and Culture and Travel closed for the first and probably only time. Time, Inc. announced it would be laying off six hundred staffers, and the Gannett news chain announced it would be laying off 10 percent of its workforce. Condé Nast shrank Men's Vogue into a Vogue supplement, pruned Portfolio down to ten issues a year, and asked its other magazines to cut budgets by 10 percent.

In November, the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said it was not going to purchase any new manuscripts in the foreseeable future. U.S. News and World Report announced that it, too, would go all-web, except for consumer guides.

In December, Fine Books & Collectibles said it was trading in its print magazine for an electronic newsletter, and the Rare Book Review ceased publication altogether. On so-called Black Wednesday, Simon & Schuster laid off thirty-five staffers, Penguin and Harper Collins froze salaries, and Random House underwent a massive consolidation, turning five divisions into three, a change expected to lead to many more layoffs. A few days later, the New York Times quietly announced it was putting up its new building as collateral for a loan of cash. Then Tribune Company, the owner of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune filed for bankruptcy. And today Macmillan, owner of FSG, Picador, and St. Martin's, joined Penguin and Harper in a salary freeze.

Buck-E

My essay-review "Good at Being Gods," about Buckminster Fuller and the alternative energy movement of the 1970s, is published in the 18 December 2008 issue of the London Review of Books. It begins thus:

In the recent Pixar movie Wall-E there is a conflict between two different visions of technology. From one angle, technology appears to be humanity’s overlord: the movie imagines that in the future a megacorporation called Buy N Large will so exhaust and pollute the planet that it will have to whisk its customers away on a luxury outer-space cruise ship for their own protection. From another angle, technology appears to be the only thing capable of saving humanity’s soul. Wall-E, a scrappy, pint-sized robot left behind to tidy up Earth, scavenges for mementos of human culture, finds evidence of resurgent plant life and falls in love. The two visions are inconsistent but inextricable: Wall-E is himself a Buy N Large product.

A similar ambivalence colours the reputation of the 20th-century designer Buckminster Fuller. You might say that Fuller aspired to engineer a post-apocalypse outer-space cruise ship but in the end managed only to get himself adopted as technology’s mascot. . . .

The article is available online, but you have to subscribe or buy an electronic copy to read it. (I encourage you to, because ultimately that's how I find the money to buy my daily allotment of toast and peanut butter.)

The file folder containing my notes for this review is titled "Utopian post-oil," because when I started thinking about the issues, it seemed to me that a lot of the utopian alternative-energy notions of the 1970s were returning to haunt (or inspire) us today. The review focuses on K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller's Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, because much of the 1970s movement crystallized around Fuller, and the Whitney Museum show and Yale University Press exhibition catalog provided an opportunity. But I also take account of Andrew G. Kirk's Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (University Press of Kansas, 2007), an informative book on an aspect of technological and social history that hasn't been much chronicled; Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), an analysis and manifesto that seems to have been taken to heart by the Obama campaign, if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly; and Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini's Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture's Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis (Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2007), a sort of visual encyclopedia of the 1970s alternative-energy movement and as a book an object of great charm. The "Sorry, Out of Gas" website is also well worth a visit. I also tapped the following for more information:

• Geoffrey Carr, "The Power and the Glory: A Special Report on Energy," The Economist, 21 June 2008
• Daniel Horowitz, Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s: The "Crisis of Confidence" Speech of July 15, 1979: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford St. Martin's, 2005)
• Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (Harper & Row, 1974)
• Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller's Universe (Basic Books, 1989)
• Karen R. Merrill, The Oil Crisis of 1973–1974: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford St. Martin's, 2007)
• James Sterngold, "The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller," New York Times, 15 June 2008
• Nelson D. Schwartz, "Asleep at the Spigot: A Thirst for Oil Comes back to Haunt a Nation of Gas Guzzlers," New York Times, 6 July 2008
• John Tierney, "An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’," New York Times, 27 February 2007
• Witold Rybczynski, Paper Heroes: A Review of Appropriate Technology (Anchor Books, 1980)
• E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (Blond & Briggs, 1973)
• J. Baldwin and Stewart Brand, eds., Soft-Tech (Penguin, 1978)
• Newsweek staff, "How He Did It," Newsweek, 17 November 2008

As close students of my work, if there are any, will have noticed, this is part of an ongoing obsession about the history of energy. Or anyway, a trilogy, comprised of my recent New York Times Book Review piece on horses as a nineteenth-century energy supply, this one for the LRB on windmills and solar power, and another forthcoming in the New Yorker.

Happily for those who disagree with my skepticism about do-it-yourself environmentalism, the website Treehugger recently released a buying guide to "Hot Home Wind Turbines You Can Actually Buy." (Hot as in stylin'.) And for those in search of more Fulleriana, here are links to Stanford University's R. Buckminster Fuller Archive, which features an entertaining slide show; a sort of interactive information tree of Fuller's ideas called the Fuller Map; and for explications of the Fuller terminology that flummoxed me, the R. Buckminster Fuller FAQ.

All the gems of Samarkand

Why did Elif Batuman go to graduate school? Why did she go to Uzbekistan? Why did she go back to both places? Why did Pushkin go to Turkey? The answers are in Elif's terrifically funny memoir, part one of which is published in the latest n+1, and includes a lovely description of the sort of blackmail one may receive at the hands of academics, if one has made the tactical error of exposing the contingency of one's commitment:

"This doesn't look good," [the grants administrator] said. "You're backing out of your research proposal just because you aren't eligible for this particular job at Berkeley, this particular year?" She shook her head. "It doesn't look good. I like you, Elif, and I want you to succeed. That's why I'm telling you that, if you back out of your proposal now, the likelihood of this comittee ever awarding you a grant again will be very small."

Of all the circumstances that contributed to my ending up in Samarkand, this ultimatum was the most unexpected. Go to Uzbekistan now . . . or you will never get departmental funding ever again?