About science fiction's uncanny oracle, and U.S. politics, and Katrina. With poetry.
Science fiction has a problem particular to its genre -- how to communicate all the information about the made-up SF world to the reader. It doesn't help the reader's suspension of disbelief to have the narrator tell them. ("In this future world, people routinely flew using jetpacks" ...) A good author would have these details emerge incidentally along the course of the book. But of course most SF authors are not good. So there grew up the tradition of implausible expository dialogue in which people told other people things they already knew, so that the reader would know them. This became known self-mockingly as As you know, Bob. "'As you know, Bob, people fly using jetpacks these days,' said Fred."
Bob is rather uncanny, as you can see. He knows everything. Yet people persist in telling him what he already knows. Of course he must do it back to them too. All of his life people have been telling him things he already knew; it's the only way he's ever related to people. So he tells people things, assuming that they already know them. Sometimes they don't really already know, but it doesn't matter; there's something in his manner that makes people not listen to him, or people don't listen because there's nothing they can do anyways. He'd be Cassandra if the kind of SF that he grew from had anything remotely female about it.
For the last eight years or so, or more, what some Bush servitor named the "reality-based community" has been Bob. People already knew everything bad that was happening. But, of course, knowledge was powerless. Speaking truth to power was about as productive as speaking truth to the wind.
One of things that people knew about was what would happen to New Orleans if a major hurricane hit. There were plans aplenty to rebuild the levees, regenerate the barrier wetlands... but there was no way that Republicans wanted to spend the money. So they waited until afterwards, and then said that there was no way they could have known, just as they are with the banking crisis that everyone who wasn't in the tank predicted.
But in a sense, everyone knows. Everyone knows that the system that we're in doesn't really serve us; we just don't want to hear it, because we don't think there's anything we can do. I wrote about that in the Savior Machine post as "forgetting", but can people forget what they never really knew? No one is teaching people that the system can be otherwise -- but somehow, I think that they must know that it can be.
Let this all serve as an introduction to a Katrina poem, the best of the many that I wrote about that time. It contains Bob the useless prophet, a figure who I hope will be limited as an archetype to these last eight closing years of the twentieth century. Because if future historians don't see this year as the real boundary between the 20th century and the 21st -- if the Bush years were the first years of the 21st century -- then God help us all.
As You Know, Katrina
It was in New Orleans
That he first appeared
He was white, in his 50's
With wild hair and a strange fixed grin
And burn in his eyes
Somehow he was always facing you
He never said much
Just stood there, ticking
No one knew him
We were sitting on the curb
When someone's radio played
Weather
And we didn't pay much
Weather alert
Attention, but he was standing there
His eyes got brighter, his mouth opened
"As you know," he said
"We live in a bowl"
A bowl? People shrugged, smiled
To each other, but he went on
Something about how we knew
About global warming and
Hurricane cycles and the
Corps of Engineers and the
Levee system
No one could laugh, quite
So we went home, or just away
Over the next days
When we couldn't find a car
And were standing, talking, looking
For some wood, there he was
The first wind
Blowing his hair every way
"As you know," he said
"We live in a racist society"
And one old man said all sour
"We know that," but he went on
No stopping him, about how
As we knew
The city, the police, the plans
Were made for certain
To get out
Certain to not
We couldn't get away
But the sound of hammering wood
Drowned him for a while
The next days
Some said they'd seen him
Standing in the water
When you ran for the Superdome
He'd be by the side
"As you know," he'd say
And all about Bush and some
Man we didn't know named Brown
And about corruption
His eyes glowed so you could hardly look
It seemd like his smile
Might freeze forever
People waded by as fast as they could
Making hand signs
And somehow we knew
What was waiting
When we were trying to get out
After the food was gone
People would see him coming
And drive him off if they could
It was all jammed together
As you know
About the weather and crony capitalism
And how
As we knew
We'd never see that reconstruction money
"Stop it, stop" people would yell
But it was the same eyes, grin, hair
Always the face
The words
When we got out
We'd meet sometimes at the shelters
"Did you see him?" someone'd say
And someone'd say they saw him
Dead, water flowing through that grin
Or shot at last
Or just gone away
But we knew
We knew he'd come back
...Read more
Friday, November 28, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Treaties can work
The recent news about climate change in the U.S. has been dominated by the EPA appeals panel's decision to block a coal plant's permit, which has stopped permitting of about 100 U.S. coal plants until the Obama administration can decide what to do about them.
But this press release (via Michael Tobis) struck me as being quite important too. Countries are agreeing to destroy stocks of CFCs, which cause global warming, under the Montreal Protocol, which was designed to address stratospheric ozone depletion. The end effect could be quite significant: 6 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalents with possibly more later.
As I wrote before, I'm not going to deal with global warming denialism with regard to science -- there will always be Flat Earthers. But there's a more subtle form of denialism that says that we can't do anything about global warming. This manifests itself, among other ways, in a conviction that countries can't agree to manage their infrastructure: their national interests will differ too much, or it will be too expensive, or, if they agree, they'll cheat. The Montreal Protocol is a standing rebuke to those people. In fact, the Montreal Protocol has worked as I expect global warming agreements to -- once people make a commitment to change an industry, it can change quite quickly, and people naturally use the new infrastructure without a lot of voluntary coaxing or permit trading. The CFC stocks planned to be destroyed are being destroyed because once people built alternatives, no one really needs them.
Update: and see this (via John Quiggin). I expect that market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions will prove to be just as reliable and well-behaved as every other market just now.
But this press release (via Michael Tobis) struck me as being quite important too. Countries are agreeing to destroy stocks of CFCs, which cause global warming, under the Montreal Protocol, which was designed to address stratospheric ozone depletion. The end effect could be quite significant: 6 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalents with possibly more later.
As I wrote before, I'm not going to deal with global warming denialism with regard to science -- there will always be Flat Earthers. But there's a more subtle form of denialism that says that we can't do anything about global warming. This manifests itself, among other ways, in a conviction that countries can't agree to manage their infrastructure: their national interests will differ too much, or it will be too expensive, or, if they agree, they'll cheat. The Montreal Protocol is a standing rebuke to those people. In fact, the Montreal Protocol has worked as I expect global warming agreements to -- once people make a commitment to change an industry, it can change quite quickly, and people naturally use the new infrastructure without a lot of voluntary coaxing or permit trading. The CFC stocks planned to be destroyed are being destroyed because once people built alternatives, no one really needs them.
Update: and see this (via John Quiggin). I expect that market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions will prove to be just as reliable and well-behaved as every other market just now.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
William Gibson retrospective; or, how Bush killed cyberpunk
A long, somewhat cranky piece on William Gibson, cyberpunk, and the failure of a certain kind of technological-change ideology under the pressure of political events.
William Gibson has now written eight novels, not counting The Difference Engine, and in some basic sense they are all the same novel. They are all populated by stock archetypal characters -- the Thug With A Heart Of Gold. The Finder of Art, someone with the medieval-mystical ability to find God in the ordinary, picking out sculpture or watches or cool itself. The Everyman With A Skill, the completely ordinary person, usually a computer hacker, who carries a fundamental innocence. The Wizard / Oracle. The Dupe, longing hopelessly for the world before everything broke down. The usually evil Corporate Boss. The same goes for the themes of the work, and the plots are mostly "let's get the party together -- we need a fighter, a mage, a thief, and a cleric -- and do the quest."
This is not necessarily a bad way to write. There is a peculiar energy in Gibson's best work, and Neuromancer is going to be remembered long after technically better works have been forgotten. I've wondered how to describe authors of this type, and I think that the best short phrase is "subgenre creators" -- writers who tapped into some essential aspect of their time, something that gave their work that vigor that led to many imitators, often many failed imitators. Think H.P. Lovecraft and those works now called Lovecraftian. Robert E. Howard and sword-and-sorcery. E.E. "Doc" Smith and space opera. And Gibson and cyberpunk. Before the inevitable objections, I'm aware that Gibson wasn't the first cyberpunk writer, didn't coin the word, that Bruce Sterling was the movement's chief ideologue, and so on, but without Neuromancer, I think that cyberpunk would have been a hopeful might-be-subgenre that never reached critical mass, like so many others.
Why write about the death of cyberpunk now? People have been saying it's dead since the 90s, after all, so why bother? Because it tells us something about cyberpunk and about our time, I think. In October 2008 Bruce Sterling responds to the is-cyberpunk-dead question: "It might well be, depending on how you define “cyberpunk” and “dead,” but that’s not gonna make any practical difference. Me, Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, Shirley, Cadigan, Di Filippo, I doubt any of us give that issue a minute’s thought now." That sounds about right. Gibson, in particular, seems to me to still be writing cyberpunk. It was always about "the street finds its own use for things", about social change starting at the margins under the pressure of technology, about the uncontrollability of culture by governmental forces. And Bush essentially took a lead pipe to that and beat its head in.
I'm talking, here, about Gibson's 2007 novel Spook Country. Gibson has previously written novels that are simply bad, within the context of his work -- Idoru, anyone? -- but Spook Country is that rare case of a tremendous failure that points out something interesting. I'm going to write spoilers about the book at this point, if anyone cares.
Spook Country's plot concerns a shipping container full of money, packed full of the bricks of money delivered to Baghdad by the Bush administration to spread around during the Iraq war, and then embezzled by corrupt insiders and diverted. It's being chased down by the good guys not to steal it, but to render it radioactive and unuseable, and therefore to strike a quixotic blow against -- who? Certain unnamed mid-level government people for whom this was the most that they could steal, unlike the real big-timers.
Gibson clearly really wants to denounce Bush, as well he should, but he just can't seem to find the purchase to do so. Absurdly, a standard-order lecture about and criticism of the Bush regime pops out of the mouth of a junkie, directed towards a contract thug who couldn't care less. And the junkie thinks "why am I saying this?" As does the reader, and, I got the feeling, the author himself. The book might work as a sort of leftist romp -- "ha ha, you liberals, you think you can fix this system" -- but Gibson doesn't seem to really have absurdity in him. Instead what he has is a subgenre in which governments can not do what the Bush administration evidently did; take control of society, in every important sense, and turn it to its own ends, using brute force and even the momentum of failure itself. So the book is one long thrashing-around, like the apologetics of a Marxist coming up with reasons why the USSR was really state capitalism.
Gibson is forced to make every actor in his books a social marginal of some kind. For instance, he never had a handle on real, impersonal corporate power -- all of his bad guys were highly atypical, individual and eccentric super-rich people. Now he has people distressed by bricks of money being loaded into planes bound for Iraq and disbursed to who knows who -- but the bad guys are somehow not really the government. Oh, they may be in the government, but they're basically thieves; they aren't carrying out governmental policy, as the real people who sent those bricks of money were. And the people opposing them aren't trying to bring anything to light, or engage with democracy in any way -- it's just spy-vs-spy. Weirdly, there's bad apples at the bottom, and only silence at the top. Gibson is left with no way to say "Huh -- you know, maybe the government really is important after all." There's Spook Country, but no one can ever give orders to the spooks. The Cossacks do not work for the Czar.
It's not just Gibson, though. Try Bruce Sterling -- I think that Sterling is a better writer in almost every sense, and doesn't get the credit that he should, even though it seems likely that no individual work of his is going to be as influential as Neuromancer. Compare Schismatrix and Holy Fire, his in my opinion two best novels. While they're both about human attempts to transcend limits to freedom, Abelard Lindsay's increasingly slick betrayals of every ideology that would freeze his life and Mia Ziemann's fulfillment of youthful fantasy that turns into her remaking into a creative person are the actions of two actually different characters. So it's a shock in 2004 when Sterling writes The Zenith Angle, in which once again, people are maneuvering amidst the wreckage that Bush left, but the government really doesn't control anything -- Sterling puts in an offhand remark about how Bush is really a kindly dullard, mostly concerned about his daughters. So all the post-9/11 farcical war on terror just sort of happened. No one did it. It was in the zeitgeist. Sterling gets tremendous credit from me for the Viridian list, a good attempt to mobilize his SF prestige and his fans towards global warming issues, but I also remember the denial that crept in with Bush-v-Gore. You couldn't get the sense, reading the list, that this really would make a much greater difference than any kind of decentralized action by designers and technologists could.
The New Weird, the subgenre that has as great a claim as any towards picking up cyberpunk's baton, has China Mieville's Iron Council as its signature work. That's a novel in which the action is driven by social marginals, yes, but in the end, it makes a whole lot of difference which government stands and which falls. And that's what makes it a more or less living SF subgenre in our time.
...Read more
William Gibson has now written eight novels, not counting The Difference Engine, and in some basic sense they are all the same novel. They are all populated by stock archetypal characters -- the Thug With A Heart Of Gold. The Finder of Art, someone with the medieval-mystical ability to find God in the ordinary, picking out sculpture or watches or cool itself. The Everyman With A Skill, the completely ordinary person, usually a computer hacker, who carries a fundamental innocence. The Wizard / Oracle. The Dupe, longing hopelessly for the world before everything broke down. The usually evil Corporate Boss. The same goes for the themes of the work, and the plots are mostly "let's get the party together -- we need a fighter, a mage, a thief, and a cleric -- and do the quest."
This is not necessarily a bad way to write. There is a peculiar energy in Gibson's best work, and Neuromancer is going to be remembered long after technically better works have been forgotten. I've wondered how to describe authors of this type, and I think that the best short phrase is "subgenre creators" -- writers who tapped into some essential aspect of their time, something that gave their work that vigor that led to many imitators, often many failed imitators. Think H.P. Lovecraft and those works now called Lovecraftian. Robert E. Howard and sword-and-sorcery. E.E. "Doc" Smith and space opera. And Gibson and cyberpunk. Before the inevitable objections, I'm aware that Gibson wasn't the first cyberpunk writer, didn't coin the word, that Bruce Sterling was the movement's chief ideologue, and so on, but without Neuromancer, I think that cyberpunk would have been a hopeful might-be-subgenre that never reached critical mass, like so many others.
Why write about the death of cyberpunk now? People have been saying it's dead since the 90s, after all, so why bother? Because it tells us something about cyberpunk and about our time, I think. In October 2008 Bruce Sterling responds to the is-cyberpunk-dead question: "It might well be, depending on how you define “cyberpunk” and “dead,” but that’s not gonna make any practical difference. Me, Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, Shirley, Cadigan, Di Filippo, I doubt any of us give that issue a minute’s thought now." That sounds about right. Gibson, in particular, seems to me to still be writing cyberpunk. It was always about "the street finds its own use for things", about social change starting at the margins under the pressure of technology, about the uncontrollability of culture by governmental forces. And Bush essentially took a lead pipe to that and beat its head in.
I'm talking, here, about Gibson's 2007 novel Spook Country. Gibson has previously written novels that are simply bad, within the context of his work -- Idoru, anyone? -- but Spook Country is that rare case of a tremendous failure that points out something interesting. I'm going to write spoilers about the book at this point, if anyone cares.
Spook Country's plot concerns a shipping container full of money, packed full of the bricks of money delivered to Baghdad by the Bush administration to spread around during the Iraq war, and then embezzled by corrupt insiders and diverted. It's being chased down by the good guys not to steal it, but to render it radioactive and unuseable, and therefore to strike a quixotic blow against -- who? Certain unnamed mid-level government people for whom this was the most that they could steal, unlike the real big-timers.
Gibson clearly really wants to denounce Bush, as well he should, but he just can't seem to find the purchase to do so. Absurdly, a standard-order lecture about and criticism of the Bush regime pops out of the mouth of a junkie, directed towards a contract thug who couldn't care less. And the junkie thinks "why am I saying this?" As does the reader, and, I got the feeling, the author himself. The book might work as a sort of leftist romp -- "ha ha, you liberals, you think you can fix this system" -- but Gibson doesn't seem to really have absurdity in him. Instead what he has is a subgenre in which governments can not do what the Bush administration evidently did; take control of society, in every important sense, and turn it to its own ends, using brute force and even the momentum of failure itself. So the book is one long thrashing-around, like the apologetics of a Marxist coming up with reasons why the USSR was really state capitalism.
Gibson is forced to make every actor in his books a social marginal of some kind. For instance, he never had a handle on real, impersonal corporate power -- all of his bad guys were highly atypical, individual and eccentric super-rich people. Now he has people distressed by bricks of money being loaded into planes bound for Iraq and disbursed to who knows who -- but the bad guys are somehow not really the government. Oh, they may be in the government, but they're basically thieves; they aren't carrying out governmental policy, as the real people who sent those bricks of money were. And the people opposing them aren't trying to bring anything to light, or engage with democracy in any way -- it's just spy-vs-spy. Weirdly, there's bad apples at the bottom, and only silence at the top. Gibson is left with no way to say "Huh -- you know, maybe the government really is important after all." There's Spook Country, but no one can ever give orders to the spooks. The Cossacks do not work for the Czar.
It's not just Gibson, though. Try Bruce Sterling -- I think that Sterling is a better writer in almost every sense, and doesn't get the credit that he should, even though it seems likely that no individual work of his is going to be as influential as Neuromancer. Compare Schismatrix and Holy Fire, his in my opinion two best novels. While they're both about human attempts to transcend limits to freedom, Abelard Lindsay's increasingly slick betrayals of every ideology that would freeze his life and Mia Ziemann's fulfillment of youthful fantasy that turns into her remaking into a creative person are the actions of two actually different characters. So it's a shock in 2004 when Sterling writes The Zenith Angle, in which once again, people are maneuvering amidst the wreckage that Bush left, but the government really doesn't control anything -- Sterling puts in an offhand remark about how Bush is really a kindly dullard, mostly concerned about his daughters. So all the post-9/11 farcical war on terror just sort of happened. No one did it. It was in the zeitgeist. Sterling gets tremendous credit from me for the Viridian list, a good attempt to mobilize his SF prestige and his fans towards global warming issues, but I also remember the denial that crept in with Bush-v-Gore. You couldn't get the sense, reading the list, that this really would make a much greater difference than any kind of decentralized action by designers and technologists could.
The New Weird, the subgenre that has as great a claim as any towards picking up cyberpunk's baton, has China Mieville's Iron Council as its signature work. That's a novel in which the action is driven by social marginals, yes, but in the end, it makes a whole lot of difference which government stands and which falls. And that's what makes it a more or less living SF subgenre in our time.
...Read more
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Chemical security report released
The Center for American Progress has released Chemical Security 101: What You Don’t Have Can’t Leak, or Be Blown Up by Terrorists. Whatever the awkwardness of the title, the report is excellent, identifying the 100+ most hazardous chemical facilities in the U.S. and listing specific actions they could take to change their operations to eliminate the hazard, rather than treating the problem as one for gates and guards. I'm familiar with the report because I spent a significant amount of time crunching numbers for part of it.
If and when I get through global warming databases on this blog, I'll write about chemical accident ones. The database used for this report, the Risk Management Plan database, has a particularly interesting history. The chemical industry and the Bush administration crippled what was supposed to be a publicly accessible database by restricting access to it to reading rooms where you could only get information on ten facilities at a time. Otherwise, they said, terrorists would use the data for targeting, even though all the actual incidents so far have been straightforward industrial accidents. And then they proceeded to block one law after another that would have required industry to actually do anything to protect people from these hazards. Computer people like to talk about Security Through Obscurity -- well, this was year after year of Security Theater For Obscurity.
If and when I get through global warming databases on this blog, I'll write about chemical accident ones. The database used for this report, the Risk Management Plan database, has a particularly interesting history. The chemical industry and the Bush administration crippled what was supposed to be a publicly accessible database by restricting access to it to reading rooms where you could only get information on ten facilities at a time. Otherwise, they said, terrorists would use the data for targeting, even though all the actual incidents so far have been straightforward industrial accidents. And then they proceeded to block one law after another that would have required industry to actually do anything to protect people from these hazards. Computer people like to talk about Security Through Obscurity -- well, this was year after year of Security Theater For Obscurity.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Savior Machine
The group of poets that I write with has decided to do an event as part of the 1000 Inaugural Poets project -- an idea of Brett Axel's, I think. So I'm going to be writing a poem about Obama's inauguration.
This brings up a problem. What am I to make of it? The ceremony itself is just a ceremony. Auden is supposed to have said that "anyone who wished to call him or herself a poet should be able to write serviceable verses, on demand, about the queen's hat" (although the only place I've found that quote is here, so it may be apocryphal.) Well and good. But that requires an approach of some kind, and harsh cynicism would be almost as much of a cliche as hopeful congratulation. I mean, I know how to write harsh cynicism. So does every other contemporary political poet. Should we all go that way just because we're used to it? (This seems to be a common problem. Check out the hilarious Historic Election May Signal Death of Flarf.)
I decided to go for a procedural-poetry approach. I'd go to my favorite free-games site, Kongregate, go to a chat room, throw the question up to the assembled 14-year-olds, and write on the theme of whatever they came up with. Sadly, all I got back was some version of "Well, how do you feel about Obama becoming President?"
How do I feel about it? I expect Obama, personally, to be something of a Clinton figure, and to probably squander our chances. But, at the same time, we finally do have a chance to seriously change the U.S., and I don't want to write a poem blaming Obama for something he has yet to do.
I think that if I can write something that works at all, it's going to have something to do with David Bowie's early song, Saviour Machine, from his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World. Musically, this song is nothing to write home about -- it has has a good deal more 60s noodling than it really should. But the lyrics have stuck in my imagination:
President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a saviour machine
They called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom
'Please dont believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war, or I may kill you all
Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all Ive seen
You cant stake your lives on a saviour machine
I need you flying, and Ill show you that dying
Is living beyond reason, sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind'
[repeat "Don't let me stay" verse]
Bowie did some great things with internal rhyme in this song, especially the way he hits adored / boredom. I've mined the song before for bits about, e.g., the forbidden dream of being able to find every interpretation of a text ("I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind"). But it works even better for this inauguration.
Note, first of all, that the poem at first appears to be one of the conservative ideas about Obama writ large -- the "socialist" who is going to try to (as they strain to remember little bits and pieces of Edmund Burke) rationalize everything and destroy society in the process. I'm not interested in that ludicrous fantasy. Still less in the Obama-as-Antichrist one, which this also could point to. More interestingly, the song is against technocracy, as a number of art works from the time may have been -- try the discussion around Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven at Acephalous -- but despite my own involvement in that, that's not the approach I'm looking for either.
What really works for me is that the song brings up a critique of drama itself. The Prayer, unlike so many shoddy SF computers, doesn't go bad because of innate evil, poor programming, or a twisted id-like desire for human experience that it can never have. It's just bored. Plagues and wars are more interesting to it than unending happiness and no one getting killed or going hungry. The Prayer goes on about the sacred dimension of time, and how dying is living beyond reason -- I could even imagine of sort of twisted I-want-to-inspire-you political sloganeering using I need you flying.
But the Prayer is, of course, wrong. What we need most of all right now is the courage to reject drama. To go ahead and make things better, even if that leaves some people with the nagging feeling that it means that our glory days are behind us. Remember that, up until very recently, the quote below passed for non-insane:
"But with public discussion dominated by accountants— 'there's the Republican Party tying itself into knots. Over what? Prescriptions for elderly people? Who gives a damn? I think it's disgusting that...presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people. Future historians will find this very hard to believe. It's not Athens. It's not Rome. It's not anything.'"
That was Irving Kristol, the father of William Kristol. The supposedly respectable conservative intellectual, not the hack. Saying that it was disgusting that we should be concerned with healing people, and instead should be sending our sons and daughters out to fight and die, for no better reason than to give future historians something to write about -- to make things interesting for them.
There's been a critical failure of imagination in this country. People have forgotten how to even dream about a society in which there is not a desperate crisis of some kind going on, in which people don't have to continually watch out or else. They've forgotten how to even hope for one. One of the things that I'd like to see people writing about is how to imagine a society in which people wouldn't naturally smash utopia two seconds after making it because it's boring to do science, make art, raise children, and work, without having to kill somebody or, at least, crush them in a business deal. (There's a guy who went by CR who I used to argue with a lot, but who understood this. More people should.)
No one's really looking for a Savior Machine, of course. But metaphorically, if a version of it that wasn't bored existed -- a government that actually tried to solve problems -- it wouldn't be made by Obama alone. If it exists, it's going to be all of us, pushing Obama's administration to make the changes that need to be made so that our kids don't struggle with global warming, don't need to scramble for health care, don't lose their lives in endless wars. That means that we need the courage to push for that. To reject the subconscious idea that we need all that drama, or else society will have no reason to go on.
I don't know if I'm going to write a successful poem about Obama's inauguration, but if I do, that's what it's going to be about.
...Read more
This brings up a problem. What am I to make of it? The ceremony itself is just a ceremony. Auden is supposed to have said that "anyone who wished to call him or herself a poet should be able to write serviceable verses, on demand, about the queen's hat" (although the only place I've found that quote is here, so it may be apocryphal.) Well and good. But that requires an approach of some kind, and harsh cynicism would be almost as much of a cliche as hopeful congratulation. I mean, I know how to write harsh cynicism. So does every other contemporary political poet. Should we all go that way just because we're used to it? (This seems to be a common problem. Check out the hilarious Historic Election May Signal Death of Flarf.)
I decided to go for a procedural-poetry approach. I'd go to my favorite free-games site, Kongregate, go to a chat room, throw the question up to the assembled 14-year-olds, and write on the theme of whatever they came up with. Sadly, all I got back was some version of "Well, how do you feel about Obama becoming President?"
How do I feel about it? I expect Obama, personally, to be something of a Clinton figure, and to probably squander our chances. But, at the same time, we finally do have a chance to seriously change the U.S., and I don't want to write a poem blaming Obama for something he has yet to do.
I think that if I can write something that works at all, it's going to have something to do with David Bowie's early song, Saviour Machine, from his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World. Musically, this song is nothing to write home about -- it has has a good deal more 60s noodling than it really should. But the lyrics have stuck in my imagination:
President Joe once had a dream
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a saviour machine
They called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom
'Please dont believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war, or I may kill you all
Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all Ive seen
You cant stake your lives on a saviour machine
I need you flying, and Ill show you that dying
Is living beyond reason, sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind'
[repeat "Don't let me stay" verse]
Bowie did some great things with internal rhyme in this song, especially the way he hits adored / boredom. I've mined the song before for bits about, e.g., the forbidden dream of being able to find every interpretation of a text ("I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind"). But it works even better for this inauguration.
Note, first of all, that the poem at first appears to be one of the conservative ideas about Obama writ large -- the "socialist" who is going to try to (as they strain to remember little bits and pieces of Edmund Burke) rationalize everything and destroy society in the process. I'm not interested in that ludicrous fantasy. Still less in the Obama-as-Antichrist one, which this also could point to. More interestingly, the song is against technocracy, as a number of art works from the time may have been -- try the discussion around Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven at Acephalous -- but despite my own involvement in that, that's not the approach I'm looking for either.
What really works for me is that the song brings up a critique of drama itself. The Prayer, unlike so many shoddy SF computers, doesn't go bad because of innate evil, poor programming, or a twisted id-like desire for human experience that it can never have. It's just bored. Plagues and wars are more interesting to it than unending happiness and no one getting killed or going hungry. The Prayer goes on about the sacred dimension of time, and how dying is living beyond reason -- I could even imagine of sort of twisted I-want-to-inspire-you political sloganeering using I need you flying.
But the Prayer is, of course, wrong. What we need most of all right now is the courage to reject drama. To go ahead and make things better, even if that leaves some people with the nagging feeling that it means that our glory days are behind us. Remember that, up until very recently, the quote below passed for non-insane:
"But with public discussion dominated by accountants— 'there's the Republican Party tying itself into knots. Over what? Prescriptions for elderly people? Who gives a damn? I think it's disgusting that...presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people. Future historians will find this very hard to believe. It's not Athens. It's not Rome. It's not anything.'"
That was Irving Kristol, the father of William Kristol. The supposedly respectable conservative intellectual, not the hack. Saying that it was disgusting that we should be concerned with healing people, and instead should be sending our sons and daughters out to fight and die, for no better reason than to give future historians something to write about -- to make things interesting for them.
There's been a critical failure of imagination in this country. People have forgotten how to even dream about a society in which there is not a desperate crisis of some kind going on, in which people don't have to continually watch out or else. They've forgotten how to even hope for one. One of the things that I'd like to see people writing about is how to imagine a society in which people wouldn't naturally smash utopia two seconds after making it because it's boring to do science, make art, raise children, and work, without having to kill somebody or, at least, crush them in a business deal. (There's a guy who went by CR who I used to argue with a lot, but who understood this. More people should.)
No one's really looking for a Savior Machine, of course. But metaphorically, if a version of it that wasn't bored existed -- a government that actually tried to solve problems -- it wouldn't be made by Obama alone. If it exists, it's going to be all of us, pushing Obama's administration to make the changes that need to be made so that our kids don't struggle with global warming, don't need to scramble for health care, don't lose their lives in endless wars. That means that we need the courage to push for that. To reject the subconscious idea that we need all that drama, or else society will have no reason to go on.
I don't know if I'm going to write a successful poem about Obama's inauguration, but if I do, that's what it's going to be about.
...Read more
Monday, November 17, 2008
eGRID
This is the second post in a series on global warming data, about the basics of U.S. EPA's eGRID database.
eGRID's home page claims that it is “the preeminent source of air emissions data for the electric power sector,” and as for as the U.S. is concerned, that is probably true. It contains air emissions data for nitrogen oxides (Nox) and sulfur dioxide (SO2), which are of concern because they contribute to ground-level smog and acid rain. It contains data on emissions of mercury, a persistent bioaccumulative toxic. And it contains data on emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). It also has information on how much power is generated, and how much fuel of each type is used, so that you can see how efficient each plant is.
eGRID is an odd database in that it's not a data collection; no one ever fills out a form to report their emissions to eGRID. Instead, it's a combination of data from various data collections, together with model estimates. Most of the data that go into eGRID were originally collected through a scatter of databases held by EPA and the Department of Energy. For EPA for the last decade or more, it's been very difficult to get any new, major data collections, so information has to be cobbled together from a number of sources, none of them designed to exactly address the problem.
One of the advantages of a yearly data collection is that it has to be released every year. The primary disadvantage of eGRID, in the past, was that it came out irregularly and by the time it came out it sometimes used old versions of the data sources that it drew from. For instance, it's been released about once a year since 1998, except that it wasn't between May 2003 and Dec 2006. The Dept. of Energy databases that it draws from currently seem to be available up through 2006, and eGRID only has data through 2005. Still, a version has just been released – as of October 2008 – and that makes it up-to-date enough for all but the most picky and expert uses.
One of the large advantages to using eGRID is that some data quality work has been done to match the various databases together. I had to do that once, for a report for an environmental group that we couldn't use eGRID data for, and it's something that you don't want to do unless you have no other choice. Even more important, it upgrades all plant ownership, parent company, merger data and so on to a single date: December 31 2007 in this case. Electric utilities try all sorts of tricks to confuse their paper trail or to take advantage of regulatory exemptions or make financial maneuvers; there has been a lot of buying and selling of power plants among various entities. Making sure that all of that is upgraded to a single date is a significant advance. What this means is that, for instance, a power plant that last reported in 2005 will be listed in eGRID as being owned by whichever company owned it on Dec 31 2007, not by whatever company owned it in 2005.
eGRID is used in all sorts of regulatory initiatives, for environmental disclosure, and in governmental and nonprofit electricity-information Web sites such as Power Profiler, Power Scorecard, or CARMA. If you have a casual interest in your local electric power, you're probably better off with one of those. But it's good for some people to look at eGRID, because more information is available through it directly, and because it sets the baseline that so many people work from.
There are a couple of reasons why eGRID may not be the best source for generally tracking electricity, as opposed to tracking sources of emissions due to electricity generation. For one thing, it doesn't include any purchases of power, e.g. from Canada. For another, the net generation amounts that it reports subtract generation used by the power plant itself, but don't take transmission and distribution losses into account, so the electricity that people actually use will have a lower efficiency with respect to emissions than is reported in eGRID.
So how do you use eGRID? It's really just a set of three Excel files, so all you do is download them and open them on your computer – you can use OpenOffice. The most basic file holds information for each generating plant, and for subunits within plants. A second file, the aggregation file, adds things up – it combines individual plants into totals by state, owner, operator, parent company, grid, and for the whole U.S. That has almost all of the same data fields as the plant file, so once you learn one of them, you learn the other. The third of the files is for state imports and exports, and you can probably ignore it.
(Note, though, that the aggregation file handles parent companies badly, in my opinion. The people who made eGRID considered a parent company to be a holding company, not whatever company ultimately controls the plant, including the plant itself if there is no other owner. Therefore, some plants in eGRID don't have parent companies. That means that the parent company file, unlike the other aggregations, doesn't add up to the total of the individual plants. I may try to get the people who make eGRID to change this, put in a parent company for every plant, and indicate whether a parent company is a holding company or not with some kind of data field.)
But the plant file is probably the most useful. EPA doesn't like to release information about individual plants, or companies, within its general summary documents which are all that most people see if they see anything. It likes to release numbers about states, regions, industries, and so on, but saying that specific company ABC is responsible for x percent of pollution? You'll very rarely see that from EPA. So you'll have to dig it out for yourself.
The plant file contains sheets on generators and boilers: components of plants. Most users will probably skip those, although it's worth noting that they include years when the equipment went in service, which can be important for some things. But you'll probably want the information on plants themselves. There's about 5000 of them. You can look at the eGRID technical docs to explain the data elements.
What are some of the more useful data elements? Well, for the purpose of global warming, I'll look at CO2, ignoring methane and N2O for now. That's “plant annual CO2 emissions (tons)”, or PLCO2AN. A quick descending sort of the sheet by that field, and the top plant is the Scherer plant in Georgia, whose parent company is Southern Co. With 26 million tons of CO2, that's one percent of the total CO2 emissions for the whole database right there. There's only 68 plants that emitted more than 10 million tons. Those 68 plants account for 36% of the total emissions from electricity generation. That's about 12% of the total U.S. CO2 emissions from all sources, including cars, industry, houses, and residential electricity used by those light bulbs that people are always telling you to change whenever you say that we need to do something about global warming.
But those plants generate electricity too, of course. How much? Well, there the whole thing is complicated by the fact that a single power plant might generate electricity from a wide range of fuels. So just totaling up all the electricity from those plants is going to be a bit off. But I can total up the net generation from combustion sources for them. It's 31% of total U.S. generation from combustion sources – we're getting 36% of the CO2 for 31% of the power from combustion. It's 22% of our power from all sources.
What I'd like to see for these top plants is how efficient they are in burning coal. Coal is worse, from a CO2 standpoint, than natural gas, and coal burning efficiency varies by the equipment and the grade of coal used. But I can't quite see how to do it. The database includes an efficiency number that divides emissions of CO2 by the net generation from all combustion sources, but that includes oil and gas as well as coal. There's a net generation only from coal number, but there doesn't appear to be a CO2 emissions only from coal number, so I don't see how to figure out an emissions rate that includes only coal in both the numerator and denominator. Perhaps I could get it by digging into the boiler and generator data – but this post is too long as it is.
So, finally, here's a table of the 6 largest plants for 2005 for CO2 emissions, those with more than 20 million tons. You could get these yourself through the eGRID tables, but I might as well list them here for Google indexing purposes:
...Read more
eGRID's home page claims that it is “the preeminent source of air emissions data for the electric power sector,” and as for as the U.S. is concerned, that is probably true. It contains air emissions data for nitrogen oxides (Nox) and sulfur dioxide (SO2), which are of concern because they contribute to ground-level smog and acid rain. It contains data on emissions of mercury, a persistent bioaccumulative toxic. And it contains data on emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). It also has information on how much power is generated, and how much fuel of each type is used, so that you can see how efficient each plant is.
eGRID is an odd database in that it's not a data collection; no one ever fills out a form to report their emissions to eGRID. Instead, it's a combination of data from various data collections, together with model estimates. Most of the data that go into eGRID were originally collected through a scatter of databases held by EPA and the Department of Energy. For EPA for the last decade or more, it's been very difficult to get any new, major data collections, so information has to be cobbled together from a number of sources, none of them designed to exactly address the problem.
One of the advantages of a yearly data collection is that it has to be released every year. The primary disadvantage of eGRID, in the past, was that it came out irregularly and by the time it came out it sometimes used old versions of the data sources that it drew from. For instance, it's been released about once a year since 1998, except that it wasn't between May 2003 and Dec 2006. The Dept. of Energy databases that it draws from currently seem to be available up through 2006, and eGRID only has data through 2005. Still, a version has just been released – as of October 2008 – and that makes it up-to-date enough for all but the most picky and expert uses.
One of the large advantages to using eGRID is that some data quality work has been done to match the various databases together. I had to do that once, for a report for an environmental group that we couldn't use eGRID data for, and it's something that you don't want to do unless you have no other choice. Even more important, it upgrades all plant ownership, parent company, merger data and so on to a single date: December 31 2007 in this case. Electric utilities try all sorts of tricks to confuse their paper trail or to take advantage of regulatory exemptions or make financial maneuvers; there has been a lot of buying and selling of power plants among various entities. Making sure that all of that is upgraded to a single date is a significant advance. What this means is that, for instance, a power plant that last reported in 2005 will be listed in eGRID as being owned by whichever company owned it on Dec 31 2007, not by whatever company owned it in 2005.
eGRID is used in all sorts of regulatory initiatives, for environmental disclosure, and in governmental and nonprofit electricity-information Web sites such as Power Profiler, Power Scorecard, or CARMA. If you have a casual interest in your local electric power, you're probably better off with one of those. But it's good for some people to look at eGRID, because more information is available through it directly, and because it sets the baseline that so many people work from.
There are a couple of reasons why eGRID may not be the best source for generally tracking electricity, as opposed to tracking sources of emissions due to electricity generation. For one thing, it doesn't include any purchases of power, e.g. from Canada. For another, the net generation amounts that it reports subtract generation used by the power plant itself, but don't take transmission and distribution losses into account, so the electricity that people actually use will have a lower efficiency with respect to emissions than is reported in eGRID.
So how do you use eGRID? It's really just a set of three Excel files, so all you do is download them and open them on your computer – you can use OpenOffice. The most basic file holds information for each generating plant, and for subunits within plants. A second file, the aggregation file, adds things up – it combines individual plants into totals by state, owner, operator, parent company, grid, and for the whole U.S. That has almost all of the same data fields as the plant file, so once you learn one of them, you learn the other. The third of the files is for state imports and exports, and you can probably ignore it.
(Note, though, that the aggregation file handles parent companies badly, in my opinion. The people who made eGRID considered a parent company to be a holding company, not whatever company ultimately controls the plant, including the plant itself if there is no other owner. Therefore, some plants in eGRID don't have parent companies. That means that the parent company file, unlike the other aggregations, doesn't add up to the total of the individual plants. I may try to get the people who make eGRID to change this, put in a parent company for every plant, and indicate whether a parent company is a holding company or not with some kind of data field.)
But the plant file is probably the most useful. EPA doesn't like to release information about individual plants, or companies, within its general summary documents which are all that most people see if they see anything. It likes to release numbers about states, regions, industries, and so on, but saying that specific company ABC is responsible for x percent of pollution? You'll very rarely see that from EPA. So you'll have to dig it out for yourself.
The plant file contains sheets on generators and boilers: components of plants. Most users will probably skip those, although it's worth noting that they include years when the equipment went in service, which can be important for some things. But you'll probably want the information on plants themselves. There's about 5000 of them. You can look at the eGRID technical docs to explain the data elements.
What are some of the more useful data elements? Well, for the purpose of global warming, I'll look at CO2, ignoring methane and N2O for now. That's “plant annual CO2 emissions (tons)”, or PLCO2AN. A quick descending sort of the sheet by that field, and the top plant is the Scherer plant in Georgia, whose parent company is Southern Co. With 26 million tons of CO2, that's one percent of the total CO2 emissions for the whole database right there. There's only 68 plants that emitted more than 10 million tons. Those 68 plants account for 36% of the total emissions from electricity generation. That's about 12% of the total U.S. CO2 emissions from all sources, including cars, industry, houses, and residential electricity used by those light bulbs that people are always telling you to change whenever you say that we need to do something about global warming.
But those plants generate electricity too, of course. How much? Well, there the whole thing is complicated by the fact that a single power plant might generate electricity from a wide range of fuels. So just totaling up all the electricity from those plants is going to be a bit off. But I can total up the net generation from combustion sources for them. It's 31% of total U.S. generation from combustion sources – we're getting 36% of the CO2 for 31% of the power from combustion. It's 22% of our power from all sources.
What I'd like to see for these top plants is how efficient they are in burning coal. Coal is worse, from a CO2 standpoint, than natural gas, and coal burning efficiency varies by the equipment and the grade of coal used. But I can't quite see how to do it. The database includes an efficiency number that divides emissions of CO2 by the net generation from all combustion sources, but that includes oil and gas as well as coal. There's a net generation only from coal number, but there doesn't appear to be a CO2 emissions only from coal number, so I don't see how to figure out an emissions rate that includes only coal in both the numerator and denominator. Perhaps I could get it by digging into the boiler and generator data – but this post is too long as it is.
So, finally, here's a table of the 6 largest plants for 2005 for CO2 emissions, those with more than 20 million tons. You could get these yourself through the eGRID tables, but I might as well list them here for Google indexing purposes:
Top U.S. CO2 Emitting Electric Power Plants, 2005
| State | Plant name | Plant operator | Parent company | 2005 CO2 tons |
| GA | Scherer | Georgia Power Co | Southern Co | 26,040,793.5 |
| AL | James H Miller Jr | Alabama Power Co | Southern Co | 22,509,466.8 |
| GA | Bowen | Georgia Power Co | Southern Co | 22,156,373.7 |
| IN | Gibson | Duke Indiana Inc | Duke Energy | 21,746,394.3 |
| TX | Martin Lake | TXU Generation Co LP | Energy Future Holdings (TXU) | 21,593,119.5 |
| TX | W A Parish | NRG Energy | 20,703,129.9 |
...Read more
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Adam Roberts' Splinter
Adam Roberts is an English professor, SF writer, and critic. (And poet, and humorist, though he would perhaps rather not have those be mentioned except in a parenthetical.) His SF is often written with a strong self-set formal constraint of some kind; in the case of Splinter, thirds of the book are written in past, present, and future tense. This post is one of a series in which I try to provide readings of his work, each of them, as an exercise, playing off of the formal structure of the book that it addresses in some way.
Splinter was written with a deceptively simple setting, taken from the unendingly stirred soup stock of SF: a catastrophe leaves a few survivors in a changed world. But Roberts complicated the book with any number of agendas and references and interpretations, many of which he supplied in his own critical afterword: it was a homage to Jules Verne's most uncanny novel, Hector Servedac, journeys and adventures around the solar system (an English translation of the title, clearly), in which a comet strikes the Earth and carries part of it off, and which ends with the people on the carried-off planetoid returning to an Earth on which nothing has changed. A smaller piece breaking off a larger suggested to Roberts a book about fathers and sons and the process by which children separate from families and finish becoming adults, sometimes long after they are chronologically adult. And the odd, required-to-be-happy ending suggested ideas about stasis within SF: the way that extreme changes can happen within these works, extraordinary voyages can be taken, yet everything ends up much as it always has been. Because "the default mode for novelistic discourse, the third-person past tense, always already implies the existence of survivors [...] to relate the adventures", Splinter was written in past tense, moving to present, moving to future tense. Did you follow all that?
One of the claims that boastful SF fans sometimes like to make is that SF is "the literature of ideas." Reading the above, you might think that this is the literature of too many ideas. But note what kind of ideas they are; SF ideas are usually supposed to be about speculative science, coupled to a more or less pedestrian writing style. These were speculative ideas about literature, coupled to a more or less pedestrian SF plot. The attraction of Roberts' work, in my opinion, is that so many things are going on within it that it can support strong critical readings. These, for me, are not Roberts' own readings. He spent a good part of his afterword deprecating himself as critic of his own work, saying that he doesn't really know what it's about, although he has his theories. But a strength of his work is not you're not locked into his authorial readings; there's a lot of material there to work with, more than enough to construct your own.
My own reading is that the book worked as a savage and sometimes funny extended satire or metaphor for the history of SF. It was about the anxiety of SF, as a written genre, and its uneasy relationship with literariness -- the concerns of some authors and fans about whether it's ever going to successfully split off and become a new form of literary writing in its own right.
Adam -- I'm going to shift to a familiar, first name reference to him for reasons that soon should become apparent -- certainly assisted in this interpretation by previously writing a Palgrave History of SF, which I was able to read despite its $100 price tag because he sent me a copy. So I write this after a history of correspondence with him, and can say that my idea of what his history of SF would look like corresponds fairly well to what he's actually written. If you can afford it, by the way, you certainly should try it out. Also, and there is no need to afford this because Adam has kindly provided it for free, he has edited and re-translated a new edition of the original Verne book that served as the inspiration for Splinter, which you can read at this link.
SF crystallized its literary status anxiety some time ago, in the 1970s, and it's never really gotten through that period. A more recent representative text of the genre is Lethem's The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction, written in 1998. Reading through this and similar critical pieces, you'll see two moments mentioned over and over. First, the 1973 Nebula award that should supposedly have gone to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow instead of the usual SF potboiler. Presumably this would have indicated that SF awards were now being judged with regard to literary value, strangely enough -- perhaps for the first time ever -- and would have sparked a mass discussion of Barthes among SF fans. The second was Star Wars, which from the point of view of literary SF readers embodied the triple threat of being dumb, visual, and popular. I don't want to get into the merits of this complex of ideas too much, although you can undoubtedly get the general drift of my opinions from the above.
At any rate, back to Adam's book. I'm not going to worry about spoilers; I don't think it's the kind of book where knowing what happens makes an appreciable difference in how much you enjoy it. The plot is simple; Hector Servedac Sr. has had psychic visions of a coming catastrophe, and has called a group of followers together to survive it on his ranch, his son Hector Jr. being the last and most skeptical of these. The catastrophe happens, and Hector Jr. spends most of the rest of the book wondering whether it is real. And that is basically it. I understand calling the book a Voyage Extraordinaire in homage to Verne, but outside flashbacks and Hector Jr.'s initial arrival, there is no traveling in this book. There's only a place where people are stuck. The book is in many ways a classic "cozy catastrophe"; the world ends and Hector Jr. thinks about this in large part as a matter of sexual possibilities. Fog-bound, his largest adventure is a collision with a sofa.
The characters are similarly somewhat skimpy, because they are seen through the eyes of Hector Jr., who is an amazingly feckless, self-absorbed person, interested in women only insofar as they present opportunities for sex, interested in his father in order to bolster his own self-image, interested in other men mostly as rivals for women. So we get little pieces of these character's back-stories as Hector dutifully listens to them while imagining someone naked, but they never come through very clearly. But that's OK, because in this reading, they are mostly symbolic roles, not quite as flat as Dickens' flat characters, but not very round either.
The elder Hector is Verne, not Verne the author but Verne the body of work, the straightforward, how-do-things-work, not very emotionally accessible patriarch. The time of Verne and Wells wasn't really when SF started -- depending on who you ask, that was with Shelley's Frankenstein. Kepler's Somnium, or the ancient Greeks -- but it was when people began to become conscious of SF as a distinct genre, and it has asserted a gravitational influence on all works following. The American Golden Age SF era is Tom, the nerdy science guy who's thrilled that the end of the world has arrived as predicted and whose first action afterwards is to get a gun. (Against whom? Ravening hordes? Like they'd shoot other survivors? His gun is silly, but very American-SFnal, and he ironically gets shot later.) Hector Jr. is people who feel that SF should be literary, but still admit to deep down being thrilled by pulp, and who are wondering how to reconcile their high-art aspirations with that. Or rather, since I'm typing people as eras, he's the British New Wave, which can stand for all succeeding literary attempts. Hector Jr. is an academic studying the arts, but there are scenes in which he admits to himself that he forced himself to prefer high culture because it's high-status; his relationship with it is at best uneasy. (There's a lot of Europe-vs-America in Splinter. Hector Sr. has a flashback to his honeymoon in Europe; almost the first thing Hector Jr. says is "the very air in Europe, it tends to stain." But this piece is long enough already without examining that.)
They are women in this book, too, but seen through Hector Jr's eyes, they can only function as Muse figures. Primary among them is Vera, nicknamed Dimmi. She starts the book as Tom's girlfriend, but calmly informs Hector Jr. that as they are among the few survivors of humanity, she's going to have a child by him eventually. (This is one of the all-time favorites fantasies of adolescent SF, by the way, the catastrophe after which, in order to save genetic variation or something, all the surviving men have to sleep with all of the surviving women. It's required, you see -- by science! It was so prevalent that Joanna Russ had to write an entire book, We Who Are About To. . ., to shoot it down.) But she refuses all his hints that she might sleep with him now, and by the middle of the book, Hector Jr. has found out that she's also sleeping with his father -- that his father is, in cult-leader style, sleeping with just about everyone. This sends Hector Jr. into paraoxysms of jealousy, of course. When is all that vitality going to get passed down to him? It's a perfect metaphor for the literary SF writer, looking back at classic SF and seeing its crudity of style, but also seeing its pulp vigor. In a tragicomic scene, Hector Jr. gets further with potential muse #2, an HIV-positive woman named Janet. But when she leaves to get a condom to protect him during oral sex, he thinks that she's not coming back, and when she returns he's already done himself. The contrasts between Dimmi's promise that she'll have his child and between Janet's in-three-different-ways-infertile sex couldn't be more profound, but Hector Jr. can't succeed even at that.
There is an element of hostile parody to Hector Jr., of course, but he's not quite completely bad. He's a delayed adolescent, someone who has made it to the point in middle age that people usually look at as the last time to decide to have children, and he casually dropped his serious relationship -- the woman who his father thought he'd bring with him to the ranch -- because he thought he could do better. His fantasies don't even involve relationships; he's still stuck on sex. He keeps thinking that he damaged his relationship with his father by giving away a large sum of money that his father gave him, though his father never mentions it. Giving away money without being a saint means giving up possibility, giving up what you can build on.
On the other hand, giving up the money that would have set him up for life is clearly what Hector Jr. did so he could try to be his own person. The problem of the book is that he never quite succeeds. He hangs around the ranch, being skeptical about his father's theories but never ceasing to take the mysterious pills that he thinks may contain some kind of hallucinogen, making abortive attempts to leave that never quite come off. The rest of the people at the ranch have thoroughly drunk the cool-aid -- by the end, they are an almost frankly religious cult based around visions of the future conferred by the alien being that has crashed into the Earth, a good metaphor for SF's attachment to "ideas" -- and Hector Jr. hasn't, but they're still his society. He's not with them, but he's of them. No matter what the literary ambitions of an SF writer, as long as they call themselves an SF writer, they still have to deal with Star Wars.
What will happen in the last part of Splinter? Hector Sr will start to die, and begin channeling Tom, who will have been shot. But most importantly, the events in the book will become an instantly recognizable (to me, anyways) melange of, say, Bruce Sterling and Greg Bear, those kind of writers. The nanoclasm, in which all matter is taken over by mysterious organic processes that can make anything out of anything. Invasive processes that download consciousness. Posthumans forming a new relationship to mortality. The postmodern sprouting of buildings next to each other, growing out of the ground without plan. Hector's future tense will be our SF present, more or less.
And finally, Hector's dad will try to set him up with a woman, growing her out of the ground for him to make up for all the real women who he couldn't make things work with. She will be "The Muse herself" -- a direct quote. And this future being will be fake. She will babble, her tongue will be partly made of something like felt, and when he'll kiss her, she'll taste weird, like smuts -- a fungal plant disease. Sure, the nano-plant-tech will perhaps be working busily on upgrading her to version 2.0, but the idea of him finally becoming an adult and having children with this simulacrum just doesn't work. The people who he spent time with? He will have forgotten their names; the plot will have been lost.
Having read Adam's Palgrave history of SF, I can see where this conclusion comes from -- he thinks that SF has passed from a primarily written to a primarily visual medium. That has to be depressing for a writer, or for a reader.
So, in a sense, the book enacts the Vernean Voyage Extraordinaire of SF. There has been a lot of motion, a lot of thrills -- heroic individuals! strange intelligences! science-catastrophe! the book hits many of the standard tropes -- but it's ended up pretty much where it started.
All in all, a good, thought-provoking book. ...Read more
Splinter was written with a deceptively simple setting, taken from the unendingly stirred soup stock of SF: a catastrophe leaves a few survivors in a changed world. But Roberts complicated the book with any number of agendas and references and interpretations, many of which he supplied in his own critical afterword: it was a homage to Jules Verne's most uncanny novel, Hector Servedac, journeys and adventures around the solar system (an English translation of the title, clearly), in which a comet strikes the Earth and carries part of it off, and which ends with the people on the carried-off planetoid returning to an Earth on which nothing has changed. A smaller piece breaking off a larger suggested to Roberts a book about fathers and sons and the process by which children separate from families and finish becoming adults, sometimes long after they are chronologically adult. And the odd, required-to-be-happy ending suggested ideas about stasis within SF: the way that extreme changes can happen within these works, extraordinary voyages can be taken, yet everything ends up much as it always has been. Because "the default mode for novelistic discourse, the third-person past tense, always already implies the existence of survivors [...] to relate the adventures", Splinter was written in past tense, moving to present, moving to future tense. Did you follow all that?
One of the claims that boastful SF fans sometimes like to make is that SF is "the literature of ideas." Reading the above, you might think that this is the literature of too many ideas. But note what kind of ideas they are; SF ideas are usually supposed to be about speculative science, coupled to a more or less pedestrian writing style. These were speculative ideas about literature, coupled to a more or less pedestrian SF plot. The attraction of Roberts' work, in my opinion, is that so many things are going on within it that it can support strong critical readings. These, for me, are not Roberts' own readings. He spent a good part of his afterword deprecating himself as critic of his own work, saying that he doesn't really know what it's about, although he has his theories. But a strength of his work is not you're not locked into his authorial readings; there's a lot of material there to work with, more than enough to construct your own.
My own reading is that the book worked as a savage and sometimes funny extended satire or metaphor for the history of SF. It was about the anxiety of SF, as a written genre, and its uneasy relationship with literariness -- the concerns of some authors and fans about whether it's ever going to successfully split off and become a new form of literary writing in its own right.
Adam -- I'm going to shift to a familiar, first name reference to him for reasons that soon should become apparent -- certainly assisted in this interpretation by previously writing a Palgrave History of SF, which I was able to read despite its $100 price tag because he sent me a copy. So I write this after a history of correspondence with him, and can say that my idea of what his history of SF would look like corresponds fairly well to what he's actually written. If you can afford it, by the way, you certainly should try it out. Also, and there is no need to afford this because Adam has kindly provided it for free, he has edited and re-translated a new edition of the original Verne book that served as the inspiration for Splinter, which you can read at this link.
SF crystallized its literary status anxiety some time ago, in the 1970s, and it's never really gotten through that period. A more recent representative text of the genre is Lethem's The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction, written in 1998. Reading through this and similar critical pieces, you'll see two moments mentioned over and over. First, the 1973 Nebula award that should supposedly have gone to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow instead of the usual SF potboiler. Presumably this would have indicated that SF awards were now being judged with regard to literary value, strangely enough -- perhaps for the first time ever -- and would have sparked a mass discussion of Barthes among SF fans. The second was Star Wars, which from the point of view of literary SF readers embodied the triple threat of being dumb, visual, and popular. I don't want to get into the merits of this complex of ideas too much, although you can undoubtedly get the general drift of my opinions from the above.
At any rate, back to Adam's book. I'm not going to worry about spoilers; I don't think it's the kind of book where knowing what happens makes an appreciable difference in how much you enjoy it. The plot is simple; Hector Servedac Sr. has had psychic visions of a coming catastrophe, and has called a group of followers together to survive it on his ranch, his son Hector Jr. being the last and most skeptical of these. The catastrophe happens, and Hector Jr. spends most of the rest of the book wondering whether it is real. And that is basically it. I understand calling the book a Voyage Extraordinaire in homage to Verne, but outside flashbacks and Hector Jr.'s initial arrival, there is no traveling in this book. There's only a place where people are stuck. The book is in many ways a classic "cozy catastrophe"; the world ends and Hector Jr. thinks about this in large part as a matter of sexual possibilities. Fog-bound, his largest adventure is a collision with a sofa.
The characters are similarly somewhat skimpy, because they are seen through the eyes of Hector Jr., who is an amazingly feckless, self-absorbed person, interested in women only insofar as they present opportunities for sex, interested in his father in order to bolster his own self-image, interested in other men mostly as rivals for women. So we get little pieces of these character's back-stories as Hector dutifully listens to them while imagining someone naked, but they never come through very clearly. But that's OK, because in this reading, they are mostly symbolic roles, not quite as flat as Dickens' flat characters, but not very round either.
The elder Hector is Verne, not Verne the author but Verne the body of work, the straightforward, how-do-things-work, not very emotionally accessible patriarch. The time of Verne and Wells wasn't really when SF started -- depending on who you ask, that was with Shelley's Frankenstein. Kepler's Somnium, or the ancient Greeks -- but it was when people began to become conscious of SF as a distinct genre, and it has asserted a gravitational influence on all works following. The American Golden Age SF era is Tom, the nerdy science guy who's thrilled that the end of the world has arrived as predicted and whose first action afterwards is to get a gun. (Against whom? Ravening hordes? Like they'd shoot other survivors? His gun is silly, but very American-SFnal, and he ironically gets shot later.) Hector Jr. is people who feel that SF should be literary, but still admit to deep down being thrilled by pulp, and who are wondering how to reconcile their high-art aspirations with that. Or rather, since I'm typing people as eras, he's the British New Wave, which can stand for all succeeding literary attempts. Hector Jr. is an academic studying the arts, but there are scenes in which he admits to himself that he forced himself to prefer high culture because it's high-status; his relationship with it is at best uneasy. (There's a lot of Europe-vs-America in Splinter. Hector Sr. has a flashback to his honeymoon in Europe; almost the first thing Hector Jr. says is "the very air in Europe, it tends to stain." But this piece is long enough already without examining that.)
They are women in this book, too, but seen through Hector Jr's eyes, they can only function as Muse figures. Primary among them is Vera, nicknamed Dimmi. She starts the book as Tom's girlfriend, but calmly informs Hector Jr. that as they are among the few survivors of humanity, she's going to have a child by him eventually. (This is one of the all-time favorites fantasies of adolescent SF, by the way, the catastrophe after which, in order to save genetic variation or something, all the surviving men have to sleep with all of the surviving women. It's required, you see -- by science! It was so prevalent that Joanna Russ had to write an entire book, We Who Are About To. . ., to shoot it down.) But she refuses all his hints that she might sleep with him now, and by the middle of the book, Hector Jr. has found out that she's also sleeping with his father -- that his father is, in cult-leader style, sleeping with just about everyone. This sends Hector Jr. into paraoxysms of jealousy, of course. When is all that vitality going to get passed down to him? It's a perfect metaphor for the literary SF writer, looking back at classic SF and seeing its crudity of style, but also seeing its pulp vigor. In a tragicomic scene, Hector Jr. gets further with potential muse #2, an HIV-positive woman named Janet. But when she leaves to get a condom to protect him during oral sex, he thinks that she's not coming back, and when she returns he's already done himself. The contrasts between Dimmi's promise that she'll have his child and between Janet's in-three-different-ways-infertile sex couldn't be more profound, but Hector Jr. can't succeed even at that.
There is an element of hostile parody to Hector Jr., of course, but he's not quite completely bad. He's a delayed adolescent, someone who has made it to the point in middle age that people usually look at as the last time to decide to have children, and he casually dropped his serious relationship -- the woman who his father thought he'd bring with him to the ranch -- because he thought he could do better. His fantasies don't even involve relationships; he's still stuck on sex. He keeps thinking that he damaged his relationship with his father by giving away a large sum of money that his father gave him, though his father never mentions it. Giving away money without being a saint means giving up possibility, giving up what you can build on.
On the other hand, giving up the money that would have set him up for life is clearly what Hector Jr. did so he could try to be his own person. The problem of the book is that he never quite succeeds. He hangs around the ranch, being skeptical about his father's theories but never ceasing to take the mysterious pills that he thinks may contain some kind of hallucinogen, making abortive attempts to leave that never quite come off. The rest of the people at the ranch have thoroughly drunk the cool-aid -- by the end, they are an almost frankly religious cult based around visions of the future conferred by the alien being that has crashed into the Earth, a good metaphor for SF's attachment to "ideas" -- and Hector Jr. hasn't, but they're still his society. He's not with them, but he's of them. No matter what the literary ambitions of an SF writer, as long as they call themselves an SF writer, they still have to deal with Star Wars.
What will happen in the last part of Splinter? Hector Sr will start to die, and begin channeling Tom, who will have been shot. But most importantly, the events in the book will become an instantly recognizable (to me, anyways) melange of, say, Bruce Sterling and Greg Bear, those kind of writers. The nanoclasm, in which all matter is taken over by mysterious organic processes that can make anything out of anything. Invasive processes that download consciousness. Posthumans forming a new relationship to mortality. The postmodern sprouting of buildings next to each other, growing out of the ground without plan. Hector's future tense will be our SF present, more or less.
And finally, Hector's dad will try to set him up with a woman, growing her out of the ground for him to make up for all the real women who he couldn't make things work with. She will be "The Muse herself" -- a direct quote. And this future being will be fake. She will babble, her tongue will be partly made of something like felt, and when he'll kiss her, she'll taste weird, like smuts -- a fungal plant disease. Sure, the nano-plant-tech will perhaps be working busily on upgrading her to version 2.0, but the idea of him finally becoming an adult and having children with this simulacrum just doesn't work. The people who he spent time with? He will have forgotten their names; the plot will have been lost.
Having read Adam's Palgrave history of SF, I can see where this conclusion comes from -- he thinks that SF has passed from a primarily written to a primarily visual medium. That has to be depressing for a writer, or for a reader.
So, in a sense, the book enacts the Vernean Voyage Extraordinaire of SF. There has been a lot of motion, a lot of thrills -- heroic individuals! strange intelligences! science-catastrophe! the book hits many of the standard tropes -- but it's ended up pretty much where it started.
All in all, a good, thought-provoking book. ...Read more
Larval Poets Manifesto
Poetry where I live has achieved a state of universal marginality.
It is written anonymous into notebooks cached in the woods. It appears on bulletin boards. It is self-published in hundreds of chapbooks, few of which will ever exist in a hundred copies. Events and groups gather around it. And very little of this activity seems to have anything to do with the profession of poetry, which as I understand it involves getting published and getting a job as a teacher of poetry. Which is a worthy thing to do, but clearly can't be done by everyone.
In conditions of universal overproduction, why should anyone write? Why should anyone read?
I'm unwilling to think of poetry as a pyramid. There is already more good poetry written than anyone could read in a lifetime. We don't have to do violence to our sense of aesthetics and say that there is no good or bad poetry, but the final reason for poetry can't involve it being good or bad. In the dreamed community, everyone is a poet, and everyone reads their neighhbors. Because they are there.
The following is a draft, a latest attempt. Please feel free to criticize, comment, suggest, scorn, or what have you.
Larval Poets Manifesto
They keep turning up as larvae
Immature forms of insects
Fuzzy caterpillars, weevils in cotton bolls, maggots perhaps
Those are poets, poems
Feeding wherever they can
Hoping for a metamorphosis
Not knowing what they're going to be
We eat paper and silence
Leave hollowed-out paths
Jagged edges of leaves re-scalloped
By munching. The faint crunch, crunch
Can be heard at night if you listen
Heard all over Northampton
What is good for a larva? All around
The classics sit, poets have been
Eating words for centuries
Will one of us write classics?
Silly to put the question
As if one glowing maggot,
Imbued with holy light
Could creep into the ear of the muse
And hear there the distant rush
Of the passing blood
It doesn't matter
We write for each other
We fix each other's houses
If a slight whisper penetrates the cotton
Or a twig trembles from a neighboring leaf
Thousands won't hear, but perhaps dozens
Will lift their heads, mandibles in the air
And recognize
Our village Florence was named by a water cure doctor
New England to become Italy
The boiling water that makes silk
Out of a mess of larvae and mulberry leaves
But we can't be boiled down
Not like the langpo people said
Maybe I saw it on Silliman's blog
You can't like all kinds of poetry
You can't be loyal to everything
You need a theory
Maggot
Grow a hard shell, ants defend the nest
A larva can't be hard
We all try to get better
Going in all directions blindly
Trying to moult to our next instar
We amble along our twig a little further
There isn't one direction we can go
Poems don't need your loyalty
Styles don't, movements
Only poets need loyalty
And that is what it means to be a larval poet
To hear the distant crunch of a neighbor
And wonder what they will be
And listen
Gnawing, hungry
And someday find a discarded shell
Your, theirs, it doesn't matter
And think, there was a poet ...Read more
It is written anonymous into notebooks cached in the woods. It appears on bulletin boards. It is self-published in hundreds of chapbooks, few of which will ever exist in a hundred copies. Events and groups gather around it. And very little of this activity seems to have anything to do with the profession of poetry, which as I understand it involves getting published and getting a job as a teacher of poetry. Which is a worthy thing to do, but clearly can't be done by everyone.
In conditions of universal overproduction, why should anyone write? Why should anyone read?
I'm unwilling to think of poetry as a pyramid. There is already more good poetry written than anyone could read in a lifetime. We don't have to do violence to our sense of aesthetics and say that there is no good or bad poetry, but the final reason for poetry can't involve it being good or bad. In the dreamed community, everyone is a poet, and everyone reads their neighhbors. Because they are there.
The following is a draft, a latest attempt. Please feel free to criticize, comment, suggest, scorn, or what have you.
Larval Poets Manifesto
They keep turning up as larvae
Immature forms of insects
Fuzzy caterpillars, weevils in cotton bolls, maggots perhaps
Those are poets, poems
Feeding wherever they can
Hoping for a metamorphosis
Not knowing what they're going to be
We eat paper and silence
Leave hollowed-out paths
Jagged edges of leaves re-scalloped
By munching. The faint crunch, crunch
Can be heard at night if you listen
Heard all over Northampton
What is good for a larva? All around
The classics sit, poets have been
Eating words for centuries
Will one of us write classics?
Silly to put the question
As if one glowing maggot,
Imbued with holy light
Could creep into the ear of the muse
And hear there the distant rush
Of the passing blood
It doesn't matter
We write for each other
We fix each other's houses
If a slight whisper penetrates the cotton
Or a twig trembles from a neighboring leaf
Thousands won't hear, but perhaps dozens
Will lift their heads, mandibles in the air
And recognize
Our village Florence was named by a water cure doctor
New England to become Italy
The boiling water that makes silk
Out of a mess of larvae and mulberry leaves
But we can't be boiled down
Not like the langpo people said
Maybe I saw it on Silliman's blog
You can't like all kinds of poetry
You can't be loyal to everything
You need a theory
Maggot
Grow a hard shell, ants defend the nest
A larva can't be hard
We all try to get better
Going in all directions blindly
Trying to moult to our next instar
We amble along our twig a little further
There isn't one direction we can go
Poems don't need your loyalty
Styles don't, movements
Only poets need loyalty
And that is what it means to be a larval poet
To hear the distant crunch of a neighbor
And wonder what they will be
And listen
Gnawing, hungry
And someday find a discarded shell
Your, theirs, it doesn't matter
And think, there was a poet ...Read more
Global warming -- U.S. sources
This post explains what global warming source data is and why you might be interested in it in a U.S. context.
Global warming -- or anthropogenic global climate change, to be more exact -- is one of the most critical contemporary environmental problems. It's also one that the Obama administration has promised to do something about. It's safe to assume that in a couple months, various proposals are going to begin to fly. What data do we have that would bear on these proposals? Over those months, I'm going to go over some of the material here. It's a good excuse to refamiliarize myself with it, since the last time I worked with it was in 2003.
That map is from eGRID, one of the best U.S. databases available when it's up-to-date. You may not be able to read the legend, but the black color is coal, the worst fuel from a greenhouse gas perspective. There's a few major things to notice. First, large hydro, the blue color, already dominates the areas where it's available. Nuclear, in red, has a substantial presence, but no more is going to be built any time soon. California and New England are already starting to diversify. The Mountain West and midwest isn't, but the emissions are comparatively small there in any case. The most immediate problem areas are Texas and the Illinois/Indiana/Ohio/Pennsylvania corridor.
Global warming -- or anthropogenic global climate change, to be more exact -- is one of the most critical contemporary environmental problems. It's also one that the Obama administration has promised to do something about. It's safe to assume that in a couple months, various proposals are going to begin to fly. What data do we have that would bear on these proposals? Over those months, I'm going to go over some of the material here. It's a good excuse to refamiliarize myself with it, since the last time I worked with it was in 2003.
I'm not going to address the science at all, or engage in any way with global warming denialists. The evidence that this is a real and important problem is unequivocal at this point, and anyone wanting more information on it should check out the IPCC, or if they prefer a group blog, RealClimate, or if they prefer more chatty, individual blogs: Deltoid, Stoat, Rabett Run, Only In It For the Gold, or More Grumbine Science.
The questions I'm going to look at bear more on politics and infrastructure. Where are the largest sources of the problem? Who owns them? How can people get information that helps them figure out their local power structure, if it comes down to local or state politics rather than national politics?
Global warming is caused by releases of greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon dioxide, CO2. The overall U.S. estimates of human sources of these gasses are in the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory. Looking at its Executive Summary, the total sources for 2006, the latest year available, were about 7000 Tg Co2 equivalents. (Don't worry about the units for now; just think of it as 7000 something.) Where did that come from? 2,300 was from electricity generation. 1,850 was from fossil fuels burned for transportation. 860 was from fossil fuels burned for industrial use, 330 residential, and all other types of sources were smaller. That means that roughly a third of the problem is from electric power plants, a quarter is from cars and other vehicles, and about a tenth from large industrial uses. Those three together make up more than 70% of the problem.
And those three types of sources are susceptible to infrastructural / political intervention. Affected industries' preferred defenses involve either saying that the market should decide, or diffusing responsiblity to consumers -- as if individual volunteerism like replacing light bulbs or turning down the thermostat a few degrees or driving a few less miles could really have enough of a cumulative effect to matter. (These actions can help, yes, but in the end you need to change infrastructure. I may get into that in a future post.) But no one builds a large power plant without governmental involvement; it's not really a market decision. The miles per gallon of car fleets is already regulated. And individual, large sources respond to pressure from organized communities.
Electricity generation is clearly the largest single piece. What is the picture for current sources? Here's the best map I could find, for 2005:
That map is from eGRID, one of the best U.S. databases available when it's up-to-date. You may not be able to read the legend, but the black color is coal, the worst fuel from a greenhouse gas perspective. There's a few major things to notice. First, large hydro, the blue color, already dominates the areas where it's available. Nuclear, in red, has a substantial presence, but no more is going to be built any time soon. California and New England are already starting to diversify. The Mountain West and midwest isn't, but the emissions are comparatively small there in any case. The most immediate problem areas are Texas and the Illinois/Indiana/Ohio/Pennsylvania corridor.
The political situation in Texas may not be the greatest, but Texas has abundant potential solar and wind energy resources, and my guess is that it's going to take advantage of them. The corridor is where I think local or state action might be most important.
What kind of information might assist in that action? Well, with a database like eGRID, people can identify which actual plants, owned by which companies, are producing the majority of the problem. And then there's a number of different outcomes people can push for -- shutting down coal plants and building renewable energy plants are only the most obvious ones. One type of early intervention can be made through efficiency improvements at existing power plants.
Imagine a set of ten coal-burning power plants, all alike. If you want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% and keep the same electricity generation, one way to do it is to shut one of them down and build a renewable power plant with the same output. But another way is to increase the efficiency at which the plants convert coal into electricity by about 10% so that you can shut one of them down and not build anything. We're going to want to eventually shut the coal plants down and replace them, of course. But putting in new equipment, such as more efficient turbines, can be cheaper and quicker for the initial stages.
A database like eGRID has information on every individual electric generating plant in the U.S. -- power generated, greenhouse gas emissions, and even some information on how up-to-date the equipment is. Using it, people can change the problem from a big, fuzzy one involving "large power companies" into one in which they know where their power is being generated, where the greenhouse gas sources are, and which source contributes what. That suggests points of potential pressure.
Perhaps that pressure won't be necessary -- perhaps a national cap-and-trade program will be implemented, and the problem will magically be solved by pseudo-market means. (I have my doubts about that, too.) Perhaps the data won't really be useful to local or state groups, or will be insufficient. Perhaps they will be useful to national policy people, although they have their own researchers for summarizing this kind of thing. But the particular tool of public access to data is the area that I know something about, so I'm going to assume that it's going to be useful to someone.
The next post in this series will be about eGRID.
...Read more
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
hell o world
My political life started with the early eighties in the U.S., so it has been wholly within the Age of Nixon, the Era of Reagan. Therefore it involved resistance, from somewhere behind the scenes. With Obama's upcoming administration, I choose to believe that positive action will become possible. Part of that involves writing about my small piece of what's going on.
I plan to have a good deal of this blog be about my work, which involves public access to data, especially pollution and financial databases, and the use of these data within activism. There are perhaps three people I can think of who would be interested in geekery about these databases and their uses. Since I'm going to be blogging anyways, I might as well write about everything else as well -- primarily poetry and SF criticism -- which similarly should be of interest to almost no one. However, taking my cue from the creative efforts of certain financial businesses now sadly going bankrupt, I understand that combining together large numbers of individually uninteresting things into one whole can permit tranches of the whole to become quite interesting. And you, reader, will get only the best. It's guaranteed.
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