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The Memory of Running
by Ron McLarty

…is decent, and readable, but too calculating for my tastes.

(Put another way, the film rights to the book were optioned to Warner Bros. for 7 figures, and it shows.)

This is a book you’re supposed to like. The plot is strange, but not too strange. Some characters are likeable, but of course they have their human flaws. And then there are the undesirables, cropping up from time to time. Bad stuff happens. If it happens to other people, too bad. If it happens to the Narrator (Smithy Ide), it’s overcome with help from Good People.

Aw, shucks.

I don’t mean to disparage this book because, as I said, it’s not wholly incompetent.

Notice I said “not wholly”.

Here are the qualms I have:

Characterization is very stop-and-go — some characters central to the plot are poorly conceived caricatures, while others who make incidental appearances are brilliantly portrayed. It’s nonsensical. For some people, the good spots might overcome the bad. Not for me.

The narrator’s a simple man. This in itself is not a problem. That he’s simple is a fact he tells you time and again, and you can tell—from his diction, from his mannerisms, from his reactions to uncomfortable situations — that he’s telling the truth. So far, so good. My problem with this is that it’s too calculating, or feels too calculating, at any rate. This isn’t the good-natured homey (yet strangely complex) simplicity of a Wendell Berry character, but the cold, carefully weighed simplicity of a door-to-door salesman. It feels fake, and the book suffers as a result.

(I doubt this is a result of author Ron McLarty being sinister or anything like that; it’s likely a result of him not knowing any other way to create a simple character. It’s not the best way to get the job done.)

The dialogue is atrocious. It’s ridiculously, absurdly simplistic at times, while other times the conversation participants delve into lengthy, hearty exposition that you could excuse if not for the fact that it does little to make any kind of valid, meaningful point (aside from the basic triad of [1] there’s suffering in the world, [2] some people are bad, and [3] some people are good — and, let’s face it, nobody needs to be told this). Or maybe it does, and there’s something I’m missing.

All told, The Memory of Running is a book to avoid. Not “avoid like the plague” avoid, mind you. But stay alert.

Upcoming Book Reviews:

• The Family Tree by Carole Cadwalladr
• Home Land by Sam Lipsyte
• The Power Game by Joesph Nye, Jr.
• Walking the Big Wild by Karsten Heuer
• Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by Julian Rubinstein
• Il Dottore by Ron Felber

Why do you write? What is your main objective?

Derrick [Jensen]: My main objective is to bring down civilization. Actually that’s not quite true. My main objective is to live in a world with more wild salmon every year than the year before, more migratory songbirds, more natural forest communities, more fish in the ocean, less dioxin in every mother’s breast milk. And I’ll do what it takes to get there. And what it will take is for us to dismantle everything we see around us. It will take, at the very least, the destruction of civilization, which has been killing the planet for 6000 years.

I write because I am a recruiter for this revolution, in favor of life, and against civilization.

…

I don’t think most people care, and I don’t think most people will ever care. We can trot out whatever polls we want to try to prove most Americans actually do care about the Environment(TM), Justice(TM), Sustainability(TM)—that they care about anything beyond being left alone to numb themselves with alcohol, cheap consumables, and television. We can cite (or make up) some poll saying that all other things being equal, 64 percent of Americans don’t want penguins to be driven extinct (unless saving them will even slightly increase the price of gasoline); or we can cite (or make up) some other poll saying that 22 percent of American males would prefer to live on a habitable planet than to have sex with a supermodel (this number climbs to 45 percent if the men are not allowed to brag about it to their friends). But the truth is that it’s just not that important to most people, it in this case being the survival of tigers, salmon, traditional indigenous peoples, oceans, rivers, the earth; it also being justice, fairness, love, honesty, peace. If it were, “most people” would do something about it.

Sure, most people would rather that they themselves be treated with at least the pretense of justice, fairness, and so on, but so long as those in power aren’t aiming their Peacekeepers(TM) at me, why should I care if brown people living on a sea of oil a half a world away get blown to bits? Likewise, so long as the price of my prescription anti-depressants stays reasonably low and the number of TV channels on my satellite dish stays high, why should I care that some stupid fish can’t survive in a dammed river? It’s survival of the fittest, damn it all, and I’m one of the fit, so I get to survive.

(The first part is from an interview; the second part [after the ellipsis] is quoted within the interview, and is part of a work-in-progress of Jensen’s.)

(Alternative Press Review: “Bring it all down: An interview with Derrick Jensen”; originally published in Green Anarchy [Summer 2004])

Alaska’s Virtual Library & Digital Archive is a wonderful resource that, if nothing else, is certainly bound to turn up all sorts of interesting images. Helpful, possibly, if you should happen to need historical images of Alaska.

The archive has lots and lots and lots of images, with a database that’s searchable by region, area, time period, date, subject, creator (not to mention publisher, contributor, audience, title, format, language, relation [is referenced by, is a part of, is a version of… etc.]). We’re talking mondo advanced search here.

(Oh: and you can zoom & pan online.)

More than 8000 items total.

• Money Map. Yes, so we’re all sick and tired of red-/blue-/purple- state maps, but the Money Map (courtesy of the Fundrace Project) is interesting for the fact that it bases its colors on actual money given to the parties. Also, it’s massively customizable: you can see divisions by state, zip code, or county; and you can look at donations to Democrats vs. Republicans, to GW & the RNC, to Kerry & the DNC, to Edwards, Dean, Clark, Kucinich, Lieberman, and Sharpton. Neat.
• Guns as White Tools. A recent study indicated that “[p]eople are more likely to misidentify tools as guns when they are first linked to African Americans.” What the study also showed, however, was that the same people understood their misidentification on some level; in one study, nearly all participants expressed low confidence in their own assessment in the cases in which they were wrong. Similarly, people given a second shot at the gun/tool choice corrected their mistakes, bringing misidentifications down from 15 to 2 percent.

  Misidentifications went both ways, however, with participants mis-labeling guns as tools when they were associated with white faces. (This error also went down with the second assessment, dropping from 11 to 3 percent.)

  (EurekAlert!/Ohio State University: “Whites more likely to misidentify tools as guns when linked to black faces” [October 18, 2004])

• The Periodic Table of Comic Books. Yes, it does exist. Each element has its own page listing the comics in which it appeared, with links to pages from those comics.
• Ooh, aah, etc. Some excellent, high-quality QuickTime panoramas thanks to Écliptique. (via MeFi)

Yes, it’s not so surprising that Yamaha has fold-your-own paper models of, e.g., the SR400 (a motorcycle); more surprising is that they also have “paper crafts” of rare animals of the world (the Steller’s sea eagle, for instance) and of Japan (like the Hondo stoat).

Another place to go for paper crafts is The Flying Pig, I kid you not. There are some things you can buy, but also some you can download free, like the agreeable sheep. You need to cough up an e-mail address…

But seriously: an agreeable sheep. Don’t you think it’s worth the hassle?

That’s what I thought.

(FYI, the “agreeable sheep” is a kind of nodding sheep on a pedestal, with a clever lever to solicit cheerful, agreeable nods.)

Of course we can’t really talk about fun with paper without at least brushing on the topic of paper airplanes. And if you’re going to make a paper airplane, you might as well settle for the best paper airplane in the world.

NASA Dryden Flight Research Center has a gallery of digitized video clips of some experimental and/or historically significant aircraft.

Possibly more unique than the SR-71 (that would be the Blackbird) or Mars Rover is the video of a Controlled Impact Demonstration (pictured right) wherein a Boeing 720 was intentionally crashed in order to record the results.

Is harrowing the right word?

(originally via BoingBoing, w/ some additional sniffing around to find the details)

A success story, but not the right kind of success story.

This one’s a story of successful lobbying by Syngenta, which apparently learned the lessons of bad publicity.

Faced with a potential ban on an herbicide it produces (what herbicide is used on 2/3 of corn in the U.S. and 90% of sugarcane), Syngenta spent $260,000 lobbying various governmental entities.

On October 31—the date suggested by the lobbying firm of Alston & Bird—the EPA agreed to re-register the herbicide.

Low levels of the herbicide

“chemically castrate and feminize” male frogs, fish and other wildlife. Students first noticed deformed frogs in 1995 in a farm pond near Henderson, Minn.

And then there’s the fact that men working near the chemical have a higher risk of prostate cancer, and the tentative link between the herbicide and cancer (in, what else, laboratory animals).

Yay.

(via Gristmill, with excerpts/info from AP: “Company spent $260,000 lobbying for herbicide,” by Frederic Frommer [October 27, 2004])

(via BoingBoing)

Snippets from the Annenberg Survey, the results of which you may or may not have heard re: Daily Show viewers:

Young people who watched The Daily Show scored 48% correct on the campaign knowledge test while young people who did not watch any late-night comedy scored 39% correct. Meanwhile, young people who watched four of more days of network news scored 40% correct, equally frequent cable news viewers 48% correct and newspaper readers 46% correct.

…

A content analysis of late-night comedy content conducted on Leno, Letterman, and Stewart monologues and headlines from July 15 through Sept. 16 indicates that 33% of jokes made by Stewart during the show’s “headlines” mentioned at least one policy issue, compared to 24% of Leno’s monologue jokes and 21% of Letterman’s.

(Business Journal: “No Joke: Daily Show Viewers Follow Presidential Race” [September 21, 2004]; view the entire press release, along with various tables, @ the Annenberg Public Policy Center official release [PDF])

Google saves a man’s life; The Weather Channel could have prevented a woman from falling off a second-floor balcony (although possibly not, too).

The second “could have” is a little gimmicky, since it refers to the fact that the woman fell while step outside to check the weather. Whoever wrote the article’s headline presumably thought that, had the woman been watching the Weather Channel, she never would have stepped out onto the faulty balcony. And hence not fallen. Go figure. (I was initially conned by the headline, thinking that a woman was in fact saved by the Weather Channel.)

The first is less gimmicky, more genuine, and not a little startling: a journalist was captured in Iraq and released in part thanks to Google. His captors thought he was a CIA operative. He said he was an Australian journalist. They Googled his name and found out he was telling the truth. Let him go, they did. Which all makes an interesting story, though presumably there was more to it than that. I’m no expert in spycraft, and the CIA may have its problems, but I’m guessing [see above, “no expert”] that the Agency could with relative ease make an informant seem like a reporter, particularly if all that was required was adjusting a few web pages.

In the American Prospect, Harold Koh writes:

In no small part because of its promiscuous failure to ratify a convention with which it actually complies in most respects, the United States rarely gets enough credit for the large-scale moral and financial support that it actually gives to children’s rights around the world. [emphasis added]

I only point this out to be petty and small, as I have no real stake in how words are misused. But promiscuous? There’s really no sense of the word that makes sense in this particular context.

Barring a “creative” use of the word–which is not totally out of the question—I think the author means something along the lines of prominent, or conspicuous (which, when combined, yield something surprisingly close to promiscuous, [promi…]+[…spicuous]= promispicuous).

My point, aside from being small, is also to bring to light the fact that such misuse undermines the presumed validity of the article. I.e., as long as there are no incredibly conspicuous errors, you’re more likely to defer to the author’s opinions, or at least adapt you own viewpoints slightly. Phrases like “national prerogative” and “international adjudications” tend to make you think the author knows what he’s talking about.

And, let’s be honest. I doubt that a simple mistake means the author doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But one simple mistake is all it takes to force the reader to re-evaluate everything the author’s written, at least in that particular article/essay/etc.

When you’re trying to be persuasive, you can’t afford a simple misuse.

(apologies to American Prospect: “On America’s Double Standard,” by Harold Koh [October 1, 2004])

In most mammals, including humans, sex is decided by the X and Y chromosomes: two Xs create a female, while XY creates a male. In birds, the system is similar: ZW makes for a female, while ZZ makes for a male.

But in platypuses, XXXXXXXXXX creates a female, while XYXYXYXYXY creates a male. In other words, rather than a single chromosome pair, platypuses have a set of ten-chromosomes that determine their sex.

(NewScientist: “Platypus sex is XXXXX-rated,” by Rachel Nowak [October 24, 2004])

TiddlyWiki is non-linear. I like it. The name is abhorrent. The uses are endless, yet nonexistent. What’re you gonna do?

(via MeFi)

Double-Tongued Word Wrester records words as they enter and leave the English language. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language.

Danny Gregory creates a gallery of portraits based on headshots of death row inmates. The Morning News hosts.

Writes Gregory:

I was surprised by what I discovered in their stories. Instead of evil genius, I found stupidity, dreadful planning, and a childishness surrender to id and immediate gratification. While some of the condemned are brooding and long-term bad, most just lashed out in some asinine way that led straight to the gallows.

Should anyone be killed by the state? I think not. Can this level of poor judgment be reformed? I doubt it. What should be done with these folks? I dunno, so I drew them. Here’s the beginning of roll call for the current graduating class and a synopsis of their extracurriculars.

(The Morning News: “Death Row Diaries,” by Danny Gregory [October 19, 2004])

Allow me to deobfuscate:

What you’re seeing is based on exit polls. It shows the correlation between income and vote choice. Bush and Kerry, in this case. (Who, bowing to recent “tradition,” are red and blue, respectively.)

The percentages essentially translate into the fraction of people in their income group voting for whatever party. So where Bush receives a 63% for the $200,000-and-over people, it means that 63% of those people voted for him. (I’m pointing this out because I’m not sure how readily apparent this convention is.)

The connection isn’t linear, but it’s fairly, surprisingly, straightforward. People with higher incomes voted overwhelmingly for G. Bush, and people with lower incomes voted overwhelmingly for J. Kerry.

Also interesting—though not pictured on this graph—is that the only income levels where Ralph Nader pulled any percentage points were $100-150,000 and the $200,000-and-over group.

Just thought I’d share.

(Also, please note that the Y axis does not go from 0 to 100%. While this does in fact accentuate the trends [or what-have-you], it was done mostly to save space.)

James Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere (previously quoted elsewhere on this blog) has a blog of sorts.

“Of sorts,” because it has none of the easy navigation or granularity typically associated with blogs (much less the links, blogroll, etc.); if you want to adhere to the author’s intent, it’s probably best to do away with analogy and just say that it’s called The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle.

If The Geography of Nowhere’s any indication of typical, the aforementioned TCNC is typically gloomy, cynical, and darkly funny.

The following is a snippet:

I was in Dallas two weeks ago, a wilderness of eight-lane freeways and sodium vapor lamps. I had to remind myself that this is how most Americans live. The so-called “city” was a product of the late 20th century cheap oil fiesta. If you live there, driving is mandatory, and lots of it, over heroic distances. It took me half an hour (and forty bucks) to get across just the north side of the sprawling town to the airport at five-thirty in the morning when the traffic was still light. This is exactly the kind of place that is going to be in deep trouble over the next four years. There are scores of places like it all over America. The people who live in them will be full of consternation and gall when their chosen living arrangement begins to fail them. They will blame whoever is sitting in the oval office.

“Why didn’t you tell us something awful was going to happen?”

“Why didn’t you ask?”

The main pretension of the Presidential campaigns is the idea that the next President will have any ability to control the events that will most determine how we live in this country. The federal government is likely to become more impotent and therefore increasingly irrelevent.

“Why didn’t you do something?”

“We didn’t want to upset you.”

What was the “truth” about the American condition in 2004? The truth was that we had made some bad choices about how we live and that events would soon compel us to change drastically whether we liked it or not. Nobody wanted to hear that, and no political leader dared say it.

(Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler; …and about the “navigation” thing… if you want to read previous entries, you ought to go straight to the archives )

Imagination³ is neat. Also not particularly useful. It’s a place to do collaborative drawing online (though if you’re anti-social, you can do it yourself). Which, I dunno—it might someday evolve into something truly useful. For the moment all it has going for it is novelty. Take it or leave it.

(via Everyday Matters)

More lit on The Commons^* than you could ever conceivably want to read. Ever.

(The Digital Library of the Commons)

Note:
^* same Commons as in, e.g., the near-infamous Tragedy of the Commons.