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There’s no simpler way to summarize Tom Friedman’s new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded that the above statement. Combining many of his ideas from The World is Flat, this book is a progression from that bestselling volume, weaving in the energy crisis to his flat world theories. Anyone who has read the majority of Friedman’s column
s over the past five years wont e surprised by anything here: it’s better written and obviously more extensive than any piece for the New York Times, but the information is essentially the same.
Friedman presents a compelling case for the energy crisis, and is able to explain complicated issue in a way that is easily understandable for the layman. He breaks down the current problems into five categories: energy supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, energy poverty, and biodiversity loss. He argues that only by reducing these effects can we preserve the world as we know it for future generations. His analysis of the current climate is enough to give one an ulcer, but his claims on ways to overcome the crisis aren’t all that convincing.
Calling himself a ‘sober optimist,’ Friedman presents all sorts of fantastical contraptions that we might have in the future. A lengthy section details the energy demands of an average worker through his work day, only with the twist of being able to set his house to only run appliances when energy costs are at a certain level and the ability to sell energy from one’s car batteries into the energy net while one is at work. The idea of an energy internet is fascinating, but he glosses over the huge cost and infrastructure needed to have such a plan work on even a regional level, much less a national one.
He also calls for the new president to set a price bottom for crude oil at something like $100 a barrel. When oil is cheaper than $100, the US Treasury would reap the difference, when it is over $100 then it would just sell for the market value. This would allow energy companies to have a definite cost for carbon and thus allow them to successfully plan for the future with new technologies. But what he doesn’t hit on until the last ten pages of the book is how unlikely this is to happen—and not because of energy companies. Earlier this summer, when it was costing fifty dollars to fill up a small car with gasoline, there was an outcry. People were driving less, vacation revenue was drying up. Now that oil is selling in the forty dollar per barrel range, this pressure has been lessened, but can you imagine what would happen to President-Elect Obama and the Congressmen who voted for a price bottom? They could kiss reelection goodbye. The American public is notoriously near-sighted and on this issue they would be no different.
But where Friedman succeeds is in establishing firmly the principle that the market will have to dictate what kinds of clean energy will be produced and how quickly they will come about. Currently we have a market designed to keep dirty fuel cheap and new energy resources expensive. When it is cost effective, people and organizations will change. He recounts the US Army’s adoption of insulation for its tents in the Middle East, which allow the air conditioners to run less often and at lower power, which in turn means less diesel needs to delivered to camps, which in turn leads to fewer casualties from IEDs since fewer trucks are required to make deliveries. His use of examples and case studies is likely the strongest portion of his book, as I have found the case in all of his writing.
While the pleas for Americans to rise to the occasion and dominate the new energy technologies may be a bit of a surprise coming from Mr. Globalism, the message in Hot, Flat, and Crowded is one that we need to hear. Some of the details are shocking, especially the fact that pet food companies spend more on research and development than energy companies. But Friedman repeatedly hits home with a message to which audiences from tree-huggers to corporate board members will be receptive, and given his prominence in these sorts of discussions, it will prove to be a book that shifts the current conversation to a great degree.
One of the best things about reading a lot more criticism is the introduction one gets to new authors and even genres that weren’t even on his/her radar before. Such was the case for me when John Lahr reviewed the work of playwright David Rabe in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Though I had heard the name, I was unfamiliar with his career and work so I went to the library and picked up a couple of his prominent works.
Rabe is best known as a ‘Vietnam playwright,’ the sort of tag is reductive to the point of absurdity. In Strea
mers, the third play is his Vietnam trilogy, it is easy to see that the play isn’t so much about Vietnam as it is about state of America as a whole in 1965. Like a lot of drama, the characters and situation serve as a microcosm to society.
Three soldiers bunk together in a small room on a military base, waiting for orders to be deployed to Vietnam. Over the past few weeks, several men from their unit have received their orders, so they know it is just a matter of time. The three soldiers are Billy, an idealist who represents the typical white American; Roger, a young black man who has become comfortable with his place in a society that is patently unfair to him; and Richie, a young man who is struggling with his homosexuality. Into their midst comes Carlyle, a bitter, vicious, trouble-making black man.
The others recognize they must get rid of Carlyle to survive; in other words, the must purge him to save their harmonious society. Yet they fail, and in his murderous rampage, Carlyle kills Billy, the all American kid.
The play is rooted in the supposed sublimated sexual drive that men use as an excuse for fighting and waging war. Each character is compelled to establish a sexual identity in order to stake their claim as a legitimate art of the all-male environment. But as each character is given the ability to defend himself and justify who they are, one gets a bit weary of the tired mechanics. However, when one considers that the play originated well over thirty years ago, it is a bit easier to forgive the characters for becoming so unsettled by one man flaunting his homosexuality.
The end result is a play that is not so much anti-war as it is an examination of the psychological and sexual motivations that lead men to wage war. Though reading a play never gives one the full effect of seeing it performed, it isn’t hard to imagine how powerful a production of Streamers could be with such a small set consisting of the spare, wooden barracks.
In fact, I may need to revise my penchant for criticizing drama based solely on reading the script. Though as a student we have necessarily studied plays this way, one does lose the visceral impact of witnessing a performance. Earlier this year I was blown away by seeing a staged version of Pinter’s Homecoming, so the next time a local theater stages a play of Rabe’s I’ll eagerly try to attend.
I wasn’t crazy about Brian Bendis’s Powers when I read the first collection a few months ago. However, the universe he created worked for me in a way that many of the ‘what would it be like if people in the real world had powers’ scenarios just haven’t. So I was happy thing afternoon when I found a copy of the second collection, Roleplay, at the used bookstore.
The series is classified as crime fiction/superhero in genre, and in this collection I think it is very apt. College students have been dressing up as heroes from the world and playing some sort of real life roleplaying game. Bu
t when four of them turn up dead, homicide detectives Walker and Deena are put on the case. Their interaction both in personal conversation and professional ones is strikingly well done, really picking up the noir feel of a police show like Law & Order. Michael Oeming’s art is stylized and works perfectly with this sort of storytelling. His sketches almost give one a feel of the old Batman animated series, with square jaws and more attention called to the lithe movement of the heroes than to their huge muscles or giant breasts.
But what wowed me more than anything were the layout choices chosen by Bendis and Oeming. Frequently, a two-page spread contains three rows, each being read across both pages before moving onto the second. For the most part this is successful, but not all pages initially thought to be drawn in such a manner are, and occasionally words or clues on how to read a page are lost in the gutter between pages. It would be interesting to look at the individual issues to see where the ads are placed and try and figure out how that constrained their storytelling ability.
After the deaths occur in issue one, Walker interviews a victim’s girlfriend while Deena interviews all the students in a dorm across the street from the murder. Deena’s interviews are rendered only with images, each box being a different person facing her, and these boxes extend around the page down the left side of the first page, across the bottom of the two pages, and then up the right side. All these panels are colored prominently in the dark blue used to connote nighttime.
Meanwhile, the center panels that depict Walker’s interview of the girlfriend are cast in a greenish-yellow light, meant to evoke the feeling of an interrogation room. These panels contain both image and dialogue, but the success of these pages is the way that it depicts the police work going on simultaneously without having a bunch of cross talk between the two scenes. Expertly done.
The lettering is a bit interesting as well, especially when several times an argument is depicted in a word balloon as taking place behind the closed door that is the only image in the panel. This argument basically is constructed through many balloons adjoining each other. Each new balloon indicates a new speaker, and even though more than one person is talking and the balloons aren’t visually different from each other, it is still possible to follow the argument itself. Though it is hard to describe without a visual, these balloons progress across a page more than once in what might best be described as a very steep sine curve. One must not only follow the balloons to make sense of the argument, but also learn to read from the bottom of the balloon to the top when on the upward portion of the curve.
All this talk of comic architecture is likely of interest only to me, so I will conclude by saying that after a mediocre start with the first collection, it’s not hard to see why the series has gotten such rave reviews after reading Roleplay.
It doesn’t take long to figure out that Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination owes a lot to Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. After being rapped aboard a spacecraft after everyone dies, forced to stay inside a locker the size of a coffin for six months, Gulliver Foyle becomes a monster bent on revenge when another ship approaches only to leave him behind. Vengeance drives him for the rest of the novel, with no price to high to pay in order to get back at those responsible for abandoning him.
Bester also uses concepts that are familiar to anyone whose read Neal Stephenson or William Gibson: huge corporations bent on world domination, cybernetic enhancements to the body, and a generally bleak version of the future. Yet the idea of jaunting, teleporting through sheer will, adds a bit of a science fiction aspect to the story that is lacking in the more realist tradition of cyberpunk authors. Bester also describes the sort of drugs we see often in such books, one of which puts humans in the state of a savage animal (in this case, a python).
A large company called Presteign and run by a man with the same name abandoned Foyle because his ship carried the top secret substance, PyrE, which could cause huge nuclear explosions activated only by the will of a human being. The plot basically revolves around Foyle trying to find out who is responsible for his situation and make them suffer, while Presteign and others try to find Foyle so they can lay their hands on the PyrE.
Bester has these advanced technologies, but is careful to tie them to the minds of the humans. Jaunting lets one teleport a thousand miles with the mind; PyrE, the omnidestructive matter, is activated through a wish. And personifying the savage in Gully Foyle, he seems to be saying that there is no force bigger than the instinct and emotion found within the mind of a human. The original title of the novel was Tiger, Tiger, a reference to Blake’s poem that supports this interpretation. (Gully is also scarred from facial tattoos that appear as red whenever he becomes angry, making the comparison to Blake's tiger unavoidable.)
Foyle is very well described, being, violent, immoral, and uncontrollable just as the unconscious of all men. This savagery is the catalyst for the novel’s action, and pretty well rendered. Bester should be commended for creating a character so captivating yet so unlikable. However, other characters like Presteign seem to be a bit superficial and one-note. It would have been nice to see them fleshed out a bit more, and a little more time spent after the climax by showing how those actions would affect the world (depending on optimism or cynicism, the ending could be taken in two wholly separate directions).
Yet so far as the old guard of SF goes, this is probably the best novel I’ve read. If someone is looking to explore the Asimov era, skip Foundation and take a look at The Stars My Destination.
A few years ago my friend Corey Reilly introduced me to a new series of short novels written by prominent authors that attempt to explore classic myths in new ways: the Canongate Myth Series. Jamie Byng, the owner of the British publishing firm, envisioned what has been called ‘one of the most ambitious acts of mass storytelling in recent years.’ His plan is for the series to reach one hundred entries, but seeing as how only nine have been released in over three years, I’ll have kids in college before I read the last of them.
Though my opinions of the stories have been mixed, I generally have enjoyed what I’ve read. David Grossman’s reimagining of the myth of Samson was especially engaging, as was Russian author Victor Pelevin’s take on the Minotaur of Crete in The Helmet of Horror. But as one might expect, I am more partial to novels based upon a myth with which I have some familiarity; Alexander McCall Smith’s Dream Angus failed to really resonate with me because I’d never heard of the basis for the story.
Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy is a reimagining of the tale of Iphis, which is originally told in one of the later books in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. It makes me feel less well read to have such a gaping unfamiliarity with a prominent work like this, but I don’t know all that much about Ovid at all. But this didn’t keep me from enjoying the book at all; I found that like the best entries in this series, it managed to be quite stirring.
The story is narrated by two sisters, Anthea and Imogen (called Midge). Anthea falls in love with Robin, who is protesting against Pure, the water company that both sisters work at. Overcome upon seeing Robin, Anthea says to herself, ‘He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he really looked like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life.’
This leads Midge to worry about her sister, not to mention fret about her own comfort with the lesbian relationship. Her stream of consciousness is transmitted parenthetically, an interesting device that separates it from her narration, and much more original and demonstrative than italics. I do wonder though how the story would have been different had Robin been referred to as a transgendered female rather than a masculine-looking lesbian. It seems that would have fit in with the myth of Iphis more easily.
Unfortunately, Smith has few if any of her characters embrace any sort of grey in the spectrum of morality. Midge hangs out with two male coworkers who are homophobic louts. The sisters’ boss at Pure tries to bed Midge so that she an take a high paying job with the company, telling her:
Small body of irate ethnics in one of our Indian sub-interests factioning against our planned filter-dam two-thirds completed and soon to power four Pure labs in the area. They say: our dam blocks their access to fresh water and ruins their crops. We say: they’re ethnic troublemakers who are trying to involve us in a despicable religious war. Use the word terrorism if necessary. Got it?
Meanwhile, Robin and Anthea spray paint tired feminist slogans about the oppressive hegemony of men all over the town.
Smith isn’t bashful about continuingly reflecting her themes of gender and equality everywhere she can, nor does she hesitate to use motifs of the original myth again and again. But rather than being bothersome, it gives the novel as a whole a real sense of completeness, especially with the resolution. Girl Meets Boy manages to be light-hearted and serious at the same time, pulled off by Smith’s charming prose.
There are few plays with which I am more familiar than Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo. I’ve studied it as an undergraduate and a graduate student, writing a seminar paper on the differences between the penultimate scene in Brecht’s two versions as well as Charles Laughton’s. I even participated in a dramatic reading when I was in high school. But on rereading it earlier this year, something nagged me that I wasn’t able to quite put my finger on, and life being what it is, other things came up and it was forgotten.
But in the past few days I have been thinking about the role of religion in our society, comparing my own anecdotal experiences and attitudes with those of my grandparents. I’m not really sure if there is a larger point to be made without significant research but this afternoon I started thinking about Brecht again.
On one level, the simplest I suppose, Galileo is about the rise of scientific reason against religious faith. As a young adult in the 21st century, I have pretty much come to the conclusion that scientific reason should probably trump faith when it can be sufficiently proven. For example, I don’t really think Christian and Jewish faith is injured too much by admitting the world is more than 6000 years old. Just like it didn’t hurt to much to admit, as Galileo proves, that the Earth revolves around the sun.
Yet when I get up every morning and walk out my front door, the world appears flat to me, and it appears to be in the same place it was yesterday. By my senses, the sun moves overhead, the ground isn’t rotating. Of course, I believe what science has explained, yet I do not possess the abilities to go out and prove it myself. I don’t have the slightest idea how to prove a rock is a few million years old. I don’t even understand the sunspot experiment that Galileo performs in the play.
I have faith that these things are true. The same faith that those in the 16th century placed in God, I place in science. Brecht even acknowledges this, with the Papal Inquisitor saying ‘Can society stand on doubt and not on faith?’ I suppose by the Inquisitor’s rationale, it can, for we as a society have left behind so many preconceived notions about the world as time has passed. Yet this new situation is possible for society only because it has faith in the science that it can’t hope to understand on its own.
I’m not sure that any of this is news, but somehow this truth is one that I am surprised to be so surprised by. Perhaps articulating things we all know is a way at really pointing them out, casting a light on what we often overlook. Thinking we are men ruled by science is not all that far from thinking we are men ruled by God.
Despite my glacial progress on my thesis over this semester, my proposal is complete and being reviewed as we speak by my committee in order to be finalized soon. In its writing, a moderate literature review was necessary which gives me a solid start on the full version, which is my seminar paper for my current class. I need to read through a couple of books and a few articles, then hammer the rest of it out over the weekend. Feeling pretty good about that.
One negative to this sort of work in academia is the length of tie one must dedicate to a central topic, especially since I tend to be interested in a lot of different things for a short period of time. I just started a book on hermetic philosopher Giordani Bruno, something that likely will have no bearing on any future scholarship. There are times when the difference between literary/cultural criticism and scholarly criticism seem so pronounced that I am beginning to realize the art of doing some things I don't really want to do is necessary to have the time and funds to the things I really enjoy. This is the closest thing to a perfect fit that I have found, though if someone wanted to be my benefactor, I certainly wouldn't turn them down.
In the midst of the thesis work, I managed to finish fifteen books over the past month, and this is what they were:
Though I found The Fall of Hyperion one of the best SF books I have ever read, I didn't feel that I had all that much to say about it when I was finished. And perhaps that is the sign that a book has truly succeeded: it was so well executed that one can't really find much to comment on when it is finished. I might have liked the first book, Hyperion, a bit more because of the Cantebury Tales device, but this novel managed to be thrilling and I couldn't quit turning the pages. I am looking forward to reading the next two books in the series.
I'll probably have something written on Girl Meets Boy in the next day or so, but I would recommend you take a look at the Canongate Myth Series, of which this is a part. I have enjoyed most of the books, and some like David Grossman's Lion's Honey a great deal.
As always, comments are welcome and appreciated. I wouldn't mind a recommendation or two either.
s over the past five years wont e surprised by anything here: it’s better written and obviously more extensive than any piece for the New York Times, but the information is essentially the same.
