Electoral politics, USA, September 2012

Certain commonplace ideas have been trotted out in every recent American Presidential election. The candidates, people are told, are moving to the center for the general election after tacking to the right or left during the primary. There is a nudge-and-wink, in-the-know quality to this. Everyone who follows politics is supposed to know that this move to the center is insincere, a cheap theatrical to fool the low-information rubes who make up the only undecided voters at this point.

People don't generally seem to have considered what it means that Obama is moving to the left for the general election. The Democratic convention was supposedly a festival of the assertive, confident liberalism that people have looked for in vain throughout Obama's actual term. I've seen plenty of well-known political bloggers argue that turnout may be more important than focussing all appeals on the small pool of undecided voters in states that matter, and with Obama's moves to "evolve" on gay marriage and to stop some deportations, I've guessed that he's decided that he needs someone to actually be enthusiastic about him. After all, you need people to get out the vote. But the corollary of the rhetorical moves to the left for the general election is that he has no intention of governing that way. Otherwise it wouldn't be a change that he's making now.

Meanwhile, what's happening with Romney? As I write this, a tape has recently surfaced of him telling donors that he's written off 47% of the country as moochers and looters who depend on handouts from the government and will never vote for him. Basically, all Republicans now talk as if they are cartoons drawn by hippies sometime in the 1970s. It used to be that only a few fringe leftists described America as an empire, until the neoconservatives took over and said that yes it was and we should be damned proud of it. People would have derided it as crazy if you said that the GOP political elite would generally turn out to be followers of Ayn Rand. And of course "everyone knew" that the contemporary GOP's core objection to a black President would not be as crudely racist as thinking that he couldn't run for election because he was literally un-American, literally an African.

The hippies, as usual in this decade, have been right. That really is who the GOP is. Under these circumstances, either Obama will win, or basically nothing he could do would make him win. I think that he'll most likely win. After which we'll be back to GOP policies in all but name, market-based do-nothing environmentalism, health care individual mandates, assassination and aggressive wars, a financial system run on the behalf of elites, basically everything that the part of the GOP that ever cared about policy would have liked, stripped of their desperate craziness and given a liberal-managerial sheen.

If the Democrats do win this election, it won't be a triumph of any kind of ideas over any other kind of ideas. On the contrary, as far as I can see the broad outlines of governance for the elite are going to be the same no matter who wins. This is mostly an election about demographics, and prefigures what I think will be the GOP's perpetual loss in national elections. There is no way that they can give up on racism: their funders don't actually care about it, but it's how they get enough votes. And there simply isn't a high enough percentage of white people in the population any more.

As a Republican strategist said, with rare apparent honesty, "'This is the last time anyone will try to do this' — 'this' being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election." (Quoting Jonathan Chait quoting the strategist). But of course it's not the last election in which they will try. They will try in every election in which the GOP exists; they have nothing else. They are trapped into one loss after another, unable to keep themselves from demanding identity papers from the same Hispanics who were supposed to be their next socially conservative base of support. Their funding is now inextricably hooked to crazy billionaires who will insist on making their craziness public.

So the right will lose, but the left will not win. The lesser evil is clear to a bare majority, and a bare majority will dutifully vote Democratic. That is the best that can be expected from our system, and any actual political progress is going to happen elsewhere. ...Read more

Matter

Some criticism of Iain Banks' SF book, Matter



Although this book was published in 2008, and I bought it in hardcover, I haven't read it till now. Why? Well, I've written a whole lot about Iain Banks' work, mostly of Usenet back in the late 90's. I watched his Culture series go from some of the books that I thought were really among the best ever to be written in Sf (Use of Weapons) to some that were really rather bad. After Look To Windward in 2000, I'd predicted that that might well be the last of Culture: Banks seemed exhausted, the contemporary political atmosphere (for these are political books) was quite discouraging for the European libertarian left, the book had an air of finality... and that's how it stood until Matter came out.

I was relieved to see that several Banks tics that had become gradually more annoying were gone from this book. No one gets righteously tortured to death in revenge for some rightist atrocity. (This was so common in previous books that I'd called it the ODV scene: Obligatory Deadly Vengeance). The aristocratic characters are not instantly type-castable as dissolute and useless. And most of all, there's finally a book where Banks does not seem to be making an attempt to write a new "dark side of the Culture", a sinister secret or flaw that will give them more drama.

What replaces this encouraging absence of writerly crutches? Well... it's a very competent novel. Serviceable. Um... very pleasant in an ordinary SF kind of way.

I feel bad for writing that. The novel really does have its good points. Its core is a fairy tale, really, which I always think is a good choice. The tale goes something like this. (Oh yes, spoilers.) Once upon a time there were three princes. Their father, a strong king, had raised the first to be a warrior, the second to be a diplomat, and the third to be a scholar. And here's the first variation from the classic tale: the first prince died, and his place was taken by his sister, a woman who went to a far land where women could be warriors far stronger than any their land could ever make. But then the king died treacherously and the land was threatened by dire foes, foes it would take combined military force and diplomacy and scholarship to defeat. In an additional fairy tale touch, the youngest of the princes became King, the others being missing, and since he was a studious youth, his enemies expected him to fail easily. But he confounded their schemes.

So far, so familiar, right? But, this being an anarcho-socialist novel, the princes and princess are not going to rule happily ever after. All three end up sacrificing their lives, more or less gracefully passing from the scene and preserving their land so it can progress to its next stage, a republic, which will be led by their former servant.

The three nobles are all somewhat played against type. Ferbin, the middle brother and the first viewpoint character, seems at first to be cut from standard Banks whole cloth. He's ineffectual and dissipated, someone who sleeps with a lot of women and runs back to the protection of his social status when he gets them and himself into trouble. But he's saved by his self-knowledge. At the beginning of the book, he's already telling us that he knows that he would be a bad king. At the end, when one of their group needs to be sacrificed to stop the lead bad guy, he throws himself in, knowing that tis a far, far better thing that he does etc. (Aided, admittedly, by brain chemicals that keep him from worrying too much. Quite a boon for cowards in general, those would be.) Anaplian, the princess, fits into the Culture with no problems at all. As an ex-royal, she's already used to not paying money for anything, already uniformly suspicious of people seeking to use her. There isn't any of, say, Zakalwe's (the agent in Use of Weapons) passive-aggressive almost middle-class "I can make it on my own" refusal to incorporate all of the Culture's benefits into herself. She's the ideal Special Circumstances agent.

Oramen, the youngest brother, is always a half-step behind. The plotter against the throne expects him to crumble immediately, and he doesn't, rather unconvincingly being able to do things like deliver convincing orations in front of real crowds without practice, because he remembers similar ones from plays. He survives one assassination plot after another through forethought, quick reactions, and a bit of authorial grease. But after telling himself to be decisive and to not be ashamed to take precautions that might look foolish, Oramen does exactly that -- although suspicious, he doesn't do anything about his suspicions at the critical moment, and he's mortally injured, though he survives long enough to warn his brother and sister.

This plot takes place within a galactic setting that sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. It doesn't work when Banks gives pages-long infodumps that are intended to tell us who is mentoring who is mentoring who within the complex, stacked hierarchy of civilizations at different levels of advancement. It does work when the effects on the lower-level civilizational leaders are presented -- they know that they are small players on a large stage, and their reaction is convincingly rather optimistic-predatory in that they feel they have somewhere to go and something to do, not the standard SF one of despair at being out-developed.

The main characters live on a sometimes-deadly piece of space junk. Oh, it's a huge, impressive artificial-hollow-planet artifact, and its perfectly understandable why all sorts of people would end up squatting on it once its builders left. But someone from a real top-level civilization, like the Culture or other Involveds, would never move onto something like that en masse. They'd just build their own artifact to whatever spec they wanted. So the civilization where the action takes place is, in a larger sense, rather like a tribe living on top of a huge junk pile, which has a certain engaging quality. Even their god, a huge and high-tech alien, is senile.

The book's title, Matter, is rather a puzzle. It's taken from an incident in which Ferbin meets an ex-Culture agent, and they have the now-age-old-within-SF discussion, or rather, college bull session, about whether the universe is a simulation, or whether it's really made out of matter -- whether it is the base reality. The ex-Culture agent opines that it must be the real world, made of matter, because such horrible things happen that any simulationeer creating the scenario would have to be an ultimate bastard, morally worse than their ability to create such simulations would imply. Or so I remember the scene. It really doesn't have any wider significance within the plot.

Here's where I queasily wonder whether I'll look like a complete jerk for having wondered whether I influenced the book somehow, because I used to write about this concept a lot and someone pretty convincingly seeming to be Iain Banks once indicated that he'd read some of my jottings. This is what I call, following James Branch Cabell, a problem of Demiurgy. The world of the novel is not the real world. It's not a world of matter, not really. The simulationeer, the creator, is one Iain Banks. If horrible things happen in that world, well, they happen because Iain Banks wrote them to happen.

And it's immediately apparent why those horrible things happen. They happen so the world will be dramatic. I vaguely remember an Iain Banks interview in which he was asked about why he didn't he write about an ordinary, non-violent Culture person going about an ordinary Culture life. He replied something to the effect that it would be like a soap opera. And there you have it! Problem of evil not so hard to understand after all, eh?

Of course, this is an artistic failure, and authors -- good authors, even great ones, as Banks has sometimes been -- have to know it at some level. If you want to write about an anarcho-socialist future world, and you really believe that anarcho-socialism is good, then you really should be able to depict an ordinary, happy life in that world as interesting. Otherwise, you implicitly agree that we need bad things to happen for life to be worth living. Which, no, Banks really does not, or so he's said. The author as Demiurge is always, inevitably, in some way a failure as a creator, and there is always some authorial guilt about that failure. I think that's as good an explanation as any for why the scene and title are there.

So, finally, back to the political part of the book. Banks didn't try to subvert his utopia for dramatic purposes this time. But is there really any reason for it to be there? The Culture, in this book, isn't really that distinguishable from the other Involved cultures. They are all advanced to the point where there are no conflicts over resources, energy, or living space; they can all afford to give their citizens as much, materially, as they really could want. So the Culture has a few quirks. They have this thing about missionary work, they're ideologically rather expansionist, and they're more touchy about full citizenship for machine intelligence and about lack of individual social restrictions than most Involveds. But you really don't get the feeling that living under one of the others would be that different, all told.

And that's rather a weakness of the book. When resources and energy and space don't matter, what matters is ideology. The real, best, ultimate Culture villains were the Idirans, the species that the Culture had its only really major military conflict with in the first Culture book. The Idirans, if I remember rightly, had a sort of religious belief that each people had a place and should stay there. And otherwise? They weren't monsters. They didn't engage in any of the Grand Guignol that far too many Banks villains engage in, committing genocide and torture and rape out of raw sadism and power-lust. They thought their system was right, and it really, really wasn't.

If there are to be other Culture books, I'm still hoping for one that has as villains standard, liberal, personally mostly well-intentioned and well-behaved politicians. To the Culture, those are really just as bad, aren't they? Look To Windward features the Chelgrians, who come complete with a caste system in which certain caste servants are routinely mutilated. Which is a cop-out. A remaining caste system like contemporary India's would be quite bad enough, for the Culture. There's something about the depiction of conflict without staged horrors that Banks captured, right at the beginning of the Culture's published works. (Use of Weapons and The Player of Games, his two best books in my opinion, aren't as directly concerned with that, being in my reading a meditation on the action hero and a bildungsroman respectively). I hope that he can capture that again.
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Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

A piece on Adam Roberts' book Yellow Blue Tibia.




"What do you think, Richard? Have the reviewers written useful things about this book?"

"Not that I've seen. Even Clute seemed to go through the ostensible plot, put in a few graceful adjectives--"

"Don't be so quick to say that you know about what you don't. "

"Not that again, John. OK, if we're going to talk about this, let's assume that anyone reading this knows what the book is about, doesn't care about being 'spoiled', doesn't need a plot summary..."

"All right."

"What struck me, right from the start -- you remember the scene where one of the Soviet SF writers is explaining to another that he's plagiarized all his work from Western European or American SF?"

"Yep."

"One of the titles of his plagiarized works was The Grasshopper Lies Heavy."

"OK, that's amusing. I'd guess that most SF readers would recognize that as the name of the book within a book in PKD's The Man in the High Castle. But so what?"

"So what? At first I thought, funny, so the writer within the book plagiarized PKD and used one of his titles. But he can't have, because the conversation happens when Stalin was alive and PKD didn't publish that until 1962. So the writer can't have copied PKD."

"So it's a little joke by Adam Roberts to the reader."

"No! This is a book in which one of the characters later refers to the page count by which he met one of the other characters. It's steeped in ... in ... casual metatextuality. What's the point of it?"

"I don't know, but I think you're going to tell me. Does it have to have a point?"

"Yes! It's a book about fiction, about fiction creating reality, and it's chock-full of references to famous postmodern books. Later on, there's a cop interview scene, and many reviewers wrote appreciatively about the humor in how the cop keeps turning his tape recorder on during the times when it should be off and vice versa. It's funny, sure. But he introduces himself with 'My name is Zembla'!"

"Hmm. Pale Fire was also published in 1962. But this conversation was taking place in 1986. You'd think the protagonist might have recognized the name of the cop as being something from a famous literary work."

"Maybe Soviet censorship kept it out of Russia. Maybe he didn't read anything since he gave up writing. But yeah, there's a bit too much of that; it risks making the characters look too provincial, as if they don't know about the wide world of literature, yet aren't shown as having countervailing knowledge of their own writing that's really worth knowing."

"Can you get back to the point?"

"All right. Look, I read the book while I had a fever of 101 degrees F."

"Perhaps not the best time --"

"Yeah, yeah. So I missed a lot, I'm sure. But I"m pretty sure that Gravity's Rainbow popped up in a reference to ghost rockets, there was probably something from Borges -- or there should have been -- and there were low-culture references too, in that high/low culture blend that's one of the other postmodern signatures. The male Scientologist character is a safety inspector for nuclear power plants. In other words, he has Homer Simpson's job."

"Overreading a bit, maybe."

"There's an argument a lot like the Monty Python 'How to have an argument' sketch. But all right. The two main drivers of the action are the protagonist and the other surviving one of the original group of SF writers, who has become a KGB agent. The KGB agent keeps coming back to the protagonist and insisting on having this pointless discussion with him about whether the protagonist believes in UFOs. And the protagonist -- despite being called, derisively, an ironist who doesn't believe in anything -- keeps coming back, obsessively, in little bits towards the beginning of chapters, to the idea of binary valuation. That there either are UFOs, or there aren't. And he's pretty clearly skeptical about UFOs."

"So if the KGB guy wants to actually convince him, why not show him convincing evidence?"

"I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want to -- or maybe he can't produce it. The KGB guy is a brutal killer and defender of the fading Communist regime who turns out to be right about everything, by the way. The UFOs turn out to really exist, within the book -- as far as we can trust unreliable narration. But they work by using multiple quantum realities, so binary thinking is inappropriate, so, I guess the KGB guy is right there too. And they seem to be malign, so he's justified in trying to warn and mobilize the world about them, you'd think, even if he thinks that would also work to prop up the regime."

"Justified in causing the deaths of thousands due to Chernobyl?"

"Well, let's not go down that path, either. But here's the problem of the book. The UFO believers are all more or less kooks. The Americans involved are Scientologists, and Scientologists have a special relationship to this subject. There we have a religion created by an SF writer whose most famous supposed quote is 'You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.'"

"Who knows whether he really said it?"

"Yes, who knows? It can be blurred -- everything can be blurred. Have you heard of right-wing postmodernism?"

"Oh, not this again."

"Come on, one more time. At the historical time and place in which I'm writing this -- U.S.A., 2009 -- we've just emerged from the Bush years, a time of unbridled right-wing postmodernism. One of the core elements of those years were that it didn't matter whether anything was true as long as people believed it to be true. Their belief created reality. And -- here is the particularly right-wing part -- since people in power controlled belief through mass media, people in power thought that they controlled reality."

"We saw how well that worked."

"Yes. You go along nicely until you slam into a wall."

"So what does that have to do with Yellow Blue Tibia?"

"It makes it -- difficult, I think -- to read the book for its strengths, for me, at this place, at this time. Perhaps this is an English/American difference? Look, this is a very good book in many ways. The excellent, wry dialogue, for instance, that I've clumsily copied the form but not the feel or the style of. The characterization. The initial conceit. But its ending -- love is what's important, uncertainty doesn't really have to be resolved -- just feels wrong for this time."

"But uncertainty of that sort is a tool of the aliens, who are depicted as malign."

"I guess so. But the people against them are so hopelessly doomed by history on the Soviet side, or representative of what I see as a bad part of American culture -- the disbelievers in whatever they don't want to believe, whether that's consensus history about Waco or UFOs or 9/11 or global warming or the Holocaust --"

"Hey! Godwin!"

"I guess it works if you talk to yourself long enough, too."

"Hmm. But aren't there hints the aliens are really supporting the KGB guy with their technology? He takes a fall of four stories, lands on his head, and lives, though with brain damage. Isn't that really only possible if they saved his life in the same way that they saved the protagonist's from being shot? That would mean that the aliens want there to be people against them who are unsympathetic, perhaps so that people won't believe them."

"Maybe so. I don't know. Or maybe it's some kind of reference to "major character protection" -- the way the main villain in a fiction can't ever just die. But let me get back to the thread, if anyone is still following it. Look, this is a good book. But it's the wrong book for me, right now. I suspect that what I need -- what SF needs, if I'm going to generalize my preferences -- is something like what the younger Iain Banks wrote (and hey, may write again). Something from China Mieville in a more confident mood about whether he can depict society after the revolution. Something that overreaches, because the author believes. Where they make all the appropriate writerly gestures towards there maybe being two sides to the story, or more, but in the end you know there really isn't."

"Isn't that a rather childish desire? Getting back to the grandiose, triumphialist SF that Roberts identifies with Stalin (and see The Iron Dream, etc.)?"

"It depends what it's in service of. A sort of leftist humanism? I don't see how that really goes along with genocide... of course, some might differ. But basically, I think that *literary* postmodernism took a big hit from the Bush years, at least in the U.S. Those references start to seem as dated as the Soviet culture in the book. SF, now, has to reawaken to post-post-modernism. Maybe that's what the book means."

"And you missed it because of your fever? You've gone on a really long time nevertheless."

"Oh well. What do you have to say about the book?"

"That it's an amusing book that people should read."

"That's it?"

"And it's also kind of funny that Jodi Dean, someone who parenthetically used to take a generally opposing view on literary-theoretical matters from those on The Valve, a site that Adam Roberts writes on, wrote a book about exactly this subject. Her book was called Aliens in America and it examined belief in UFOs from a postmodern viewpoint without (as far as I know) taking a position on whether the belief was really 'true' or not. Adam Roberts doesn't show any sign of knowledge of the existence of this book within Yellow Blue Tibia, so it's probably a coincidence."

"Huh."
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An Open Letter to the DNC's "Organizing for America"

Dear DNC:

Why should I participate in "Organizing for America?"

That isn't a rhetorical question. My spouse received an Organizing for America pitch in the mail today, and I've read it. It tells me that the organization's mission will be to advance President Obama's legislative agenda, and to continue building the grassroots organization started during the Obama campaign.

But Obama's legislative agenda appears to be on its way towards success or failure without me. Specifically, health care reform and global climate change have both had a small group of "centrist" Democratic Senators write that they are unwilling to let them be attached to vehicles that require only 50 votes, and instead wish to let them be filibustered. If so, that means that they are almost certain not to become law. Is "Organizing for America" going to be a vehicle towards enforcing party discipline on those Senators? If not, what good is it?

President Obama has often said that he wants bipartisan solutions. I am a partisan. I do not want bipartisan solutions, not when one side is still fully committed to the failed beliefs of the Bush years. Why should I participate?

Or, to put it another way, President Obama made all sorts of concessions to the right and to the center on the recent stimulus bill. These concessions weakened the bill to the point where it will probably be ineffective as stimulus, and did not succeed politically in getting any GOP votes in the House, and only three in the Senate. Would my work be wasted and go towards similarly ineffective concessions?

If so, bluntly, what's in it for the liberals and the left? The centrists and the right held up laws that would be good for the country in order to pursue their own petty interests. As a result, their concerns were not ignored. The liberals and the left went along, and were ignored. What is President Obama going to do for his base? Is he going to announce an investigation into Bush-era war crimes? Go ahead and nationalize AIG? Perhaps reverse his shameful opinion that detainees at Bagram have no right to challenge their detention? Stop allowing his deputies to try to preserve the existing, dysfunctional banking system? Support a stronger push against climate change, rather than a relatively ineffective and easily gamed market-ideology cap-and-trade scheme?

And why is the pitch so one-way in an organizational sense? The mail that I saw didn't try to pull people into any genuinely netroots-style peer-to-peer effort. There was a pro forma URL listed -- www.democrats.org -- and a request for an Email address. The program mentioned was one of house meetings and gathering stories -- the sort of thing easily controlled centrally by the DNC. The materials repeat the false, Republican-framed claim that "Change doesn't come from Washington"': if people are supposed to take that seriously, why is this being controlled from Washington?

I invite anyone to answer. There's not much at stake: only a hundred or so dollars from me, and whatever volunteer efforts I can muster. But that's proportionally more than I've seen I've seen the DNC or the Obama administration put into this effort. Why does this deserve my support?

Regards,

Rich Puchalsky
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Pink Triangle

Listening to a classical-strings cover of Weezer's song Pink Triangle -- used as a perfect life-stages-going-by tune -- I looked back at the lyrics to the original. It's a song in which the narrator sees a girl, falls in love, imagines marrying her, and oh noes sees she has a pink triangle on. The narrator apparently isn't able to recognize that his interest in her was as an anima figure. (The guy who wrote the song mentioned, in an interview, that this actually happened to him and he found out later that she was just wearing the triangle to show support. But of course, as he didn't say in the interview, he didn't really care about her as an actual person.)

So, that's the background for what follows. The poetry group that I read to thought it was funny, anyways. This is the second recent poem in which Silliman figures as symbol of "real poetry"; reading through his link lists must be a good carrier for his aesthetics.


Pink Triangle


When I'm filled with what I've heard
I start looking around for words
Time to pay poetic rent
Maybe I'll read The New Sentence
But when I start to feel that pull
I'm just pulling off myself
My inspiration's left unsaid
Though she lives inside my head

My muse is a lesbian
Arrangements didn't go like they should
She and I are married in my mind
But poems in my mind are no good

At least we can still be friends
Though she'll sit down and pretend
Wishing she had Patti Smith
But muses don't choose who they're with
When we're feeling bad and down
Then we'll laugh and joke around
Sometimes she'll smile and touch my hand
It's all that she can really stand

My muse is a lesbian
My poetry is always third-rate
Every poem that I like is queer
Why can I only write them straight?

Knew the day was coming that
I'd get middle-aged and fat
You need youth to be emo
Going on is how it goes
I'd rather be like Bowie
Sam Pickwick's the guy I see
Since I can't be inspired
I'll do parodies until I'm tired

My muse is a lesbian
And when we have to pass on
We'll kiss and have one final sing
Of Mr. Toad's Last Little Song
...Read more

Yawnpiphany

On reading a funny Adam Roberts review of Anathem, full of parody neologisms, I was struck (in the comment box) with the idea of the yawnpiphany. In some seriousness, that's the best name I've yet been able to think of for a certain New Wave SF writing technique.

It goes like this. Let's say that you want to rebel against the tired old forms of SF. In some sense, you want to be literary. But you're also rebelling against literariness itself; you don't want to merely imitate Modernist classics or join in the forming post-modernism. You want something that is a specifically SF form of iconoclasm.

That means that formal innovation is probably out. SF never had any sort of advanced formalism to reject. What SF had are "ideas" and adventure. So the best rebellion is a long-drawn-out attempt to bore the reader. Not by simply writing a bad book -- anyone could do that. But instead a purposeful, skillful repetition of the same thing over and over until the reader has a yawnpiphany that makes it impossible for them to see standard SF quite in the same way anymore.

Yes, Waiting for Godot has been done. But I think that there is a specifically SF form of this. I wrote about this a bit when considering Brian Aldiss' Hothouse, a novel of anti-ideas. A better example is his Report on Probability A, an anti-novel. But I don't feel up to considering that book at the length it deserves yet. So I'll just mention it -- there's a bit about it in the post on Hothouse -- along with two other candidate works that I immediately thought of: Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream and Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet.

The Iron Dream is a work that I can't seem to convince anyone else of the importance of. It's structured as a laugh, an "oh, that's clever", a long grind, and a yell. I keep thinking that people who think that it's good but not great somehow don't appreciate the long grind. The laugh is the splash page from the publisher at the beginning, which says how popular the author of The Iron Dream, Adolph Hitler, is with SF fans and how his costumes are special favorites at SF conventions. The "oh, that's clever" is the first chapter, in which the protagonist, in a dead-on savaging of every Golden Age SF trope, sets out to save the pure humans via necessary genocide against the wholly evil mind-controlling twisted mutants. The yell at the end is the afterword by a supposed critic of the book. But it's the long grind that gets undervalued. By the end of the first chapter, you've realized that the book is an SF adventure story that recapitulates the real Hitler's actual rise to power. It goes on and on as he and his followers rejoice homoerotically as they wipe out the evil mutants and the mutant-lovers, and there's a real temptation to just skip a few chapters, since, after all, you've gotten the idea.

But you can't. Reading the same thing over and over, you start to realize -- or at least I started to realize; I don't really know whether anyone else reacts similarly -- just how often you've read the same thing over and over, better concealed, in real SF. I've referred to this as "strapping your inner fanboy down Clockwork Orange style." You know intellectually what point Spinrad is making after the first chapter, but you don't feel it, in your gut, until a point somewhere near the end. This is the yawnpiphany.

Or there's the example of the Moorcock Pyat series. I've only actually managed to make it through the first one of these books, myself. I've never read a more determined attempt to make a wholly unsympathetic protagonist. (There's a good review here). Pyat is a cocaine-fueled self-hating ultra-right schemer whose only talent, as he goes through the 20th century, is to con people into having sex with him, and to fool others and himself into thinking that he is capable of SF engineering feats which, of course, fail. He lurches from one country to another, getting involved in every fascist movement going, and escaping each one badly used and having badly used others. This might seem like a shockarama, and at the beginning perhaps it is. But it's the same thing over and over. By the middle of the first book, I was flipping pages forward, thinking that OK, I've learned all there is to learn from this horrible unreliable narrator. Is there anything more?

Again, this is intended, I believe, as a source of the yawnpiphany for every historic-fantasy-adventure book, most particularly Moorcock's own. It's the kind of thing where I can describe the idea of the book, and you the reader can think that you get it, but you can't really get it until you've pushed past the point of boredom and said, "Wow! This is really quite like..." which is when your boredom becomes identified with the slight boredom that you felt when reading, say, the middle of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and its strangely cute crypto-authoritarianism. Which is not a bad book, but that's the point of the yawnpiphany; at its best, it can change your whole reading of a subgenre.

At any rate, that's it for the yawnpiphany. Most of my ideas on SF, like it, are dialogically half-formed out of comment boxes, a process of uncertain value. But anyone still reading this far should really check out this really amusing post by John Holbo about the philosophical thought experiment of Lewd and Prude, complete with some fanfic I wrote in the comment box. That's really what blogging should be about.
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Brian Aldiss' Hothouse

On an implicit recommendation within Adam Roberts' Palgrave History of SF, I recently finished reading Brian Aldiss' early work Hothouse. The consideration of this important book is my excuse for an extended ramble on science in SF, other works by Aldiss, grand narrative, and the unreliable omniscient narrator.




Hothouse was written in 1961 as five short stories, winning a Hugo in 1962 as short fiction, and later emerged through the SF "fix-up" process as a novel. It's apparently been recently re-issued. It manages to encapsulate everything that I feel, as a reader, about Aldiss' work in general. On the one hand, it's brilliant work by a skilled writer with literary ambitions, and deserves serious attention by literary critics. On the other, it's annoying.

Do you get the feeling that I'm going to spend more time on the second of these than the first? Since the only people who read this blog probably already know my writing style -- at any rate, first, why should everyone interested in literary SF read this book? Because, as Adam Roberts points out, it's a giant metaphor for SF. The novel is set in a future-world overgrown jungle planet, actually the Earth after the Sun has expanded. Its hapless humans have shrunken in size and in mental capability, though the last may be more a matter of lost culture and knowledge than anything else. As is proper for an SF jungle from this era, everything, including eerily aggressive plants, is a predator on everything else. (Wiki informs me that Aldiss' military service in jungles in Burma may have helped to inspire the novel, and also that he put together an anthology of Venus-jungle stories called Farewell, Fantastic Venus!.) But this is only background; the heart of what makes this a literary novel is "the morel". The morel is a parasitic fungus that acts like an auxiliary brain of sorts; when it attaches itself to a human, it can not only render them more intelligent and inform them of the contents of its own memories, it can dig through and interpret their ancestral memories as well. Again per Roberts (although any misrepresentations of his idea are mine), it acts as a cognate for the concern with "ideas" of SF itself.

The protagonist, Gren, isn't just informed and made more intelligent by the morel -- as well as being controlled by it in ultimately destructive ways -- he's also brought by it into modernity. He is changed from a person reacting within a tradition of inherited social structure to someone with a familiar, contemporary mindset that the world is shapable, controllable through thought and effort. Therefore, it's saying something about colonialism, too, which Aldiss had first-hand knowledge of from India and Indonesia. Gren's mate manages to detach the morel after it attempts to parasitize their child as well. But even after it's gone, Gren has been changed by it -- when someone from an advanced civilization wants him to do something, his choices aren't limited to refusal or agreement, he now knows how to argue.

The morel manages to later take over one of the "travellers": huge, mobile plants shaped like giant spiders that spin webs that extend from the Earth to the Moon. It informs Gren that the universe has cycles of growth and decay, evolution and devolution, and that life is about to pack up and leave the Earth. The morel offers to give Gren a ride on the traveller; other, former members of Gren's tribe are going to go along inside it, to find a new habitable planet around another star. But Gren refuses. He points out that the morel has said that the catastrophe won't occur for several human generations, so why should he care? He is "tired of carrying and being carried." He tells the morel to "fill a whole empty world with people and fungus" if it wants to. His son's grandson will live in the jungle, as he has. So he goes back to the (eventually) doomed Earth.

SF that rejects the primacy of thought, ideas, adventure, even survival -- that makes this a literary experiment. As such, it's a highly interesting one. And that "tired of carrying and being carried" is highly evocative. It works on a physical level, since Gren carries both the morel and later the sodal, a sort of person-sized intelligent aquatic creature that is proud of its knowledge, and Gren also uses the morel to be himself physically carried by various other creatures. It's also metaphorical, in the sense that people in modernity not only carry around the omnipresent mediation of their worldview, but are carried by it; the kind of people who read SF novels are probably thoroughly familiar with the concept of living off one's intelligence even if they don't personally do it. But it's also about SF, and how it likes to describe itself as "the literature of ideas," so that books are carried along by the quality of their ideas, and carry a sort of simulated science forward to their readers. Aldiss is registering some of the discomfort with traditional SF tropes that would animate the New Wave, which is usually said to begin three years after this, in 1964.

But onwards to criticism that I haven't basically cribbed from Roberts, which, sadly, is the negative part. I'm not trying to trash the book, but I don't see any value in shiny-sunny criticism that accentuates the positive and ignores the rest. I learned more from figuring out what I thought was wrong with this book than I did from appreciating what was right about it.

Why, exactly, do I find this work annoying? It starts with that jungle. The book was written before the era of popularized evolutionary biology a la Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene in 1976, and it shows it. Therefore, species and their evolutionary changes are always being anthropomorphized in purposeful-sounding ways; for instance, species "copy" other species' evolutionary adaptations. By itself, that's minor, and could be fixed by mentally substituting concepts of convergent evolution and so on. Where it can't be fixed is that Aldiss wants to tie the changes going on to a grand narrative of cycles of growth and decay. Evolution simply doesn't work like that.

But why should that matter? The idea of webs stretching from (tide-locked) Earth to Moon doesn't work in terms of physics, and I'm not bothered by that, even though I have a degree in astrophysics. I think that's because it's merely an incidental detail -- I don't really look for SF to have scientific accuracy. But I distrust grand narratives. Aldiss has Teilhard de Chardin'd up the place.

Why is that more serious than any amount of misplaced physics? Because it conflicts with his rejection of the SF-idea. One essence of contemporary science, as I understand it from my minimal experience of it -- I've done about as little science as you can do and still be said to have done some science -- is acceptance of randomness. Which, in its biological aspect, more often takes the form of historical contingency. The SF books that I've read that really made me sit up and say "Wow, this seems like actual science" were those from the chill, invigorating Arctic breeze of Stanislaw Lem: Solaris and, say, The Chain of Chance, or The Investigation. The SF-idea of science is almost always elsewhere tied to a narrative that neatly explains. Aldiss giving in to this, even as he calls it into question, seems like a highly troubling flaw. Nor is this something that seems to me to be dismissible as an artifact of its time. Olaf Stapledon, who wrote mystical, evolutionary SF, wrote earlier, and his work always had the saving grace in this respect, for me, of acknowledging accident -- the human race in his Last and First Men (if I remember rightly) fails to make some evolutionary jump, and who knows why? It's not part of some cosmic cycle or plan, it's just an accidental failure, so, goodbye.

Nor is this a feature of Aldiss' work that is limited to Hothouse. It appears, for instance, in one of his other major biological works, the 1980s Heliconia trilogy, one of the batch of series that depend on worlds that have unusually long seasons to drive the plot as well as provide a background of larger-than-human-scale cycles (e.g. Paul Park's Starbridge Chronicles, George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series). But the biology in Heliconia seems to keep creeping into mysticism; at one point, the residents of the Earth think good thoughts to change the Heliconians' world-wide relationship to their communicable ancestral spirits, which seem to have some material existence. Who can say that such things are impossible? It's not the impossibility that I object to, but rather the way in which things keep getting swept up.

Worse, it's a problem that in another way affects the most splendid failure in SF, Aldiss' Report on Probability A. That's a book that certainly deserves its own post, but in short, it's an "anti-novel" consisting mostly of repetitive, obsessional, purposefully banal descriptions of what static, solitary characters are doing and surrounded by. Three men are observing a house with a woman living in it, and themselves being observed by extra-planar observers, who wish to know why they are doing it. Sadly, this last question is not un-answerable. By the end of the book -- does this count as a spoiler? it could just be my misinterpretation, I suppose -- a too-plausible theory and too much dwelling within the head of one of the three has made it far too likely that the three simply are attracted to the woman, another man's wife, who may or may not have been slightly leading them on, and that they are hanging about obsessionally as much because they can't figure it out as in unrequited attraction. How much better the book would have been if the reader had had no real idea, by the end! Why did it have to be explained? That just makes it into a novel again.

There's one other thing that troubled me about both Hothouse and Heliconia, the unreliable omniscient narrator. In Hothouse, it's probably because it's a fix-up of multiple short stories, but still-- in the beginning of the novel, the narrator confidently tells us that there are only something like five specific non-plant species surviving on the Earth, all of the other niches having been taken by mobile plants. This isn't the narrator passing on the knowledge of Gren or his tribe; it's the narrator just telling us. And it's not vague: the narrator lists each of them. Then each succeeding part of the book adds more animal species that aren't among those five. If Aldiss was going to dump all this worldbuilding detail on us, couldn't he at least make it consistent through the book? But instead it seems to change according to what theme he's on at the moment. When he wants to impress with the idea of a plantosphere, there are only five non-plant species. When later he wants to do a picaresque, well, there have to be more creatures for the protagonists to run into. And later, when he wants to get into Stapledonian replacements of one form of humanity by another over time, there's a whole lot of different species of humanoids. I can accept an unreliable narrator, but when that narrator appears to be the author that's a different matter. In Heliconia, too, details of his biology seem to keep changing slightly from one omniscient description to the next.

But wishing that Aldiss had had a more picky editor is a comparatively minor problem. More generally, this kind of thing is always going to be a problem for SF; an author as omniscient narrator who tells you what a character is thinking can almost always be assumed to be right -- after all, the author wrote the character. But SF, which tells you about a world in addition, is susceptible to contradiction by our changing knowledge of what worlds are like. You can believe that Venus is a jungle, then a probe goes on a nearby fly-by, and it's farewell, fantastic Venus. This does not seem to me to be a feature of SF rather than a bug. The fantastic-venus stories are now, in my opinion, probably generally unreadable. If they had started out as fantasies, they wouldn't be. It's a problem that has not been generally apparent because SF self-identified as SF has only been around for a century or so. But Aldiss' failure to achieve internal self-consistency makes it emerge far sooner than it otherwise would. In this, of course, he also provokes thought about the genre that would not otherwise have emerged.

Aldiss is a giant of the New Wave -- as one of the founders, he got to be one of Moorcock's Granbrettanian gods, as Bjrin Adass -- and this book is well worth reading. But its problems seem to me to mix uncomfortably with its strengths, and can't be ignored.
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An agenda for the Toxic Release Inventory

Today Obama signed a new Executive Order revitalizing FOIA, and spoke about transparency being one of the touchstones of his Presidency. As a sort of minor reciprocal gesture of faith, I've decided to put up an agenda of changes that I think should be made to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), one of U.S. EPA's most successful data programs. At any time during the last eight years, I wouldn't have talked about these ideas in any public forum until each piece was ready to be proposed formally, knowing that talking about the agenda beforehand would only give industry a heads-up to prepare to scuttle it. But perhaps being willing to talk about it beforehand will help everything go more smoothly. Needless to say, I'm also eager to hear about other people's ideas.

I have no formal authority to propose these kinds of changes at all, and am not writing this under any organizational affiliation. They are simply my personal ideas. However, I've worked extensively on the Toxic Release Inventory outside EPA since 1990, and I consider myself to be an expert on it. There are a number of organizations which I plan to work with to propose these things formally, in the event that no one else does.

I'll try to provide a little bit of background, in the unlikely event that anyone reads this who doesn't know all about TRI already. If you want to find out basic information about the Toxic Release Inventory, you can go to EPA's Web page on it, but in short it's a database, legislatively mandated to be publicly accessible in electronic form, that requires most kinds of large, fixed polluters to report their releases and transfers of toxic chemicals, as well as the toxic chemicals in waste that they generate. Unlike EPA's hazardous waste databases, it also requires that these reports be of the amount of chemical, not the amount of chemical plus inert filler, and that the reports be in common units. Facilities have to report releases of chemicals to air, land, water, and underground. These characteristics make the database EPA's most useful one for general toxic pollution issues. TRI was the model for many similar databases in other countries; these databases are generally called PRTRs, Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers.

The Toxic Release Inventory has had notable expansions during its now decades-long span -- waste data was added by the Pollution Prevention Act in 1991, Federal facilities added in 1994, hundreds of chemicals added in 1995, new industries outside manufacturing had to report starting in 1998, and data on persistent bioaccumulative chemicals was expanded in 2000. And for the last eight years, that's where it has stood -- other than a disgraceful reduction in TRI data in 2006, when the "Form A" option for facilities to avoid reporting was expanded, despite widespread opposition from the public, lawmakers, and scientists. Suffice it to say that although EPA's civil service employees generally understand the value of TRI, the administration running the agency at that time was actively hostile.

So these ideas have been around, in some cases, for many years, but there was no point in proposing them until the administration changed. Now that it has, here they are:

1. Add chemicals that cause global anthropogenic climate change (global warming)

This would be primarily CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide -- the Montreal Protocol chemicals, which also contribute to global warming, are already in TRI. I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that this would be possible under current legal authority because chemicals can be added to TRI if they cause a sufficient adverse effect on the environment, which GHGs are now known to do. The statute does refer to the adverse effect as being due to toxicity, so this interpretation is not certain. But if new authority is needed, it's going to be gotten anyways -- the Obama administration plans to do something about global warming, and you can hardly do anything about it without tracking emissions.

I can understand that people who want to track GHGs may want a new database designed for that particular purpose. (Currently EPA and DOE have a patchwork of databases, none of which were really designed for that, and which are going to have to be replaced.) TRI has certain limitations as a database tracking GHGs; what, for example, would be done about transportation sources, like fleets of trucks? But it seems to me that these chemicals should be added to TRI in any case, even if another database is created to specifically track them, as a cross-check. The information would also then benefit from TRI's well-developed distribution paths and user base. And TRI would come closer to matching other countries' PRTRs, several of which added GHGs quite a few years ago.

2. Change range reporting and speciation reporting of highly toxic chemicals

Since the beginning of TRI, people have faced the problem that TRI most easily allows comparison of raw pounds of chemicals -- but some chemicals are much more toxic than others, and some releases affect more people than others. These problems are attacked by a (in my opinion) excellent program within EPA called RSEI. But whenever there is a data release using data from RSEI -- most recently, the USA Today report -- the same thing happens, a facility reports a release range of 11-499 pounds of a highly toxic chemical like chromium compounds or diisocyanates, and this rightly is converted by EPA into the midpoint of the range, 250 pounds. (I blogged about a case of this here). 250 pounds is generally a very large release, for these chemicals, and it makes facilities pop up as major polluters and wastes everyone's time as people have to track down what is really going on. Most often, it turns out that the facility either thinks that its releases are towards the bottom of the range, or they don't release the more dangerous form of a chemical with two or more forms -- hexavalent vs trivalent chromium, for instance.

EPA could help both the reporting facilities and the public by changing the reporting rules. First, for those highly toxic chemicals that have more than one common form, EPA could require that each form be reported separately. This is already done for Dioxin. Second, EPA could prevent release and transfer range reporting from being used for these chemicals, or at least warn people who report through the TRI-ME reporting software what they are about to do.

3. Fix the Form A.

I won't write about attempts to roll back Form A reporting to what it used to be; that's already being done by various people. But whether the expanded Form A is rolled back or not, EPA should change the way in which it treats already-reported Form A data. A Form A should be treated as a range report, in the same way as TRI release and transfer ranges are treated. If someone sends in a current Form A for a non-PBT chemical, they are reporting that they release not more than 2000 pounds of the chemical, and generate in waste not more than 5000 pounds. This is not zero pounds. In fact, it's a range: 0-2000 pounds for releases, and EPA should use its well-established procedure for handling release ranges and take the midpoint, converting this to a quantity within the database of 1000 pounds. This would preserve the TRI reporter's ability to not have to take the time to fill out the additional information required for a Form R, but it would also give the public a more accurate estimation, based on best available information, of what is going on. If a TRI reporter didn't want the public to assume that the best guess was 1000 pounds, they always have the option of choosing to fill out a Form R and reporting any number of pounds, including zero.

This procedure is currently used for TRI data provided by RTK NET (described here), so I know that it's both possible and easy to do. The release media (air, land, or water) can't be determined, but a general Form A pseudo-release-medium can be assigned. No change in how facilities report would be required in order to do this; it could be done simply as an internal change in how EPA handles the data.

4. Fix Pollution Prevention Act reporting.

Pollution Prevention Act data were added to TRI in 1991, and they've never been able to be done exactly right. The waste data are currently reported as amounts recycled on and off site, burned for energy recovery on and off site, treated (destroyed) on and off site, and released or disposed of on and off site in various ways. But all of these numbers were supposed to add up to a single number, the quantity of the chemical in waste generated by the facility. That's because reporting these numbers was supposed to encourage source reduction, the practice of changing processes to reduce the amount of waste generated. But the regulation was sabotaged by ideologues at the Office of Management and Budget, and EPA was prevented from defining what a waste was, or something similar. So it could only require that facilities report the components that add up to the overall waste number, without really referring to it in a coherent way.

I don't know whether any actual change in reporting is required for this to happen -- perhaps just better guidance from EPA? Re-opening the issue with a new OMB? Perhaps having facilities total up their Section 8 waste quantities and report the total would help them realize what it's supposed to be for.

5. Re-open cooperation with other countries' PRTRs

I'm not sure where this stands, organizationally, and it's not the kind of thing I'd know about directly. (Although I have worked for the Commission for Environmental Cooperation on putting together a Web site to display combined U.S., Canadian, and Mexican PRTR data.) But it seems to me that EPA could have more of a sense of where chemicals within TRI stand within an international comparison. Just about the entire First World has some sort of PRTR -- does EPA track transfers from one country to another using multiple PRTRs? Could they, perhaps, report on how U.S. emissions of particular chemicals compare to those of other countries? I'd guess that more is being done on this score than I know about, but anything that EPA can do to make this kind of data more truly global would be highly valuable.

(I should probably note that I once tried to put together a proposal to make a free, publicly accessible database-backed Web site that would allow people to search all the PRTRs at once. I couldn't find a funder for it -- most charitable foundations and NGOs that I deal with focus on the U.S. That was a few years back, and I don't know whether anyone is doing that now, but it would still be a good idea.)

That's probably enough for now. I invite anyone who wants to comment on this to feel free to.
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Poetry: For Obama's Inauguration

Here's the poem I'm going to be reading for the 100 inaugural poets project that I mentioned here. I tried a number of approaches, and finally decided that the earliest influences are best. So pour out a 40 for Theodore Geisel and join me:

For Obama's Inauguration

Hail to the President of hope and change!
On this great day we rearrange
The chairs on our high deck of state
All good things come to us who had to wait
Our age, born with the Southern strategy,
Perfected by Reagan's dolt jubilee,
Produced in Bush Two the one who is worst
So hail lesser evil! Hail Barack the First!
So long have the worst been the people's choice
That now, first in decades, is our time to rejoice
The TV flicker of hange and chope
Must signal something better than Clinton's scope

Oh dear, I can't read in the sun's glare
What I thought I could see isn't quite there
I should have pasted my papers, they're blowing away,
I can't even say what I wanted to say...

Hey mister, you dropped something –

Now that you stopped, got any spare change?
I'll just drink it down, but that isn't strange
I've lived my whole life in this country
But what has America been to me?
A nation in cowardice since 9/11,
Hell on Earth so they can dream about Heaven,
More people in jail than ever before,
Eager to torture, cheering for war
You can't blame just Bush as the one selected
The second time, he was even elected
And Obama thinks he can pull them together?
Good luck, guy, in stormy weather
Hey Obama, after all they've been through
Less than half of white people voted for you!
This country's like someone with a cough
Staggering on with one leg cut off

Yeah sure, Obama is a dream
A black President's good for our self-esteem
Been waiting long, but you know what I've heard?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it fall like old dry grapes off a vine?
Or soar like a suit blown off a clothesline?

You first know a President by who he brings in
And Rick Warren's the minister next to him
Hey Rick! How's it feel to push down Jesus' head?
Force your words into his mouth, say it's what he said?
Rick Warren's the Anti-Christ of our days
And being a Christian's about hating gays
Obama says those divided times are done
I look around and see them going on
Obama's going to compromise and waste our chance
When we need to wake up, we'll get the same old trance...

I've been listening, homeless guy, it's not quite like that --

Sure we'll try to get some spare change shaken out
But there's hope too coming after the drought
I'm a machinist, and I work on the machine
A machine made of people is the type I mean
Not the old style, for politicians to get elected
But the new kind, to combine the rejected
Our problems can be fixed, we know how to do it
We have to break the system and push through it
The GOP showed us how, they did indeed
Because 51 percent is all you need

Obama? Yeah I know about his biz
A man in Chicago told me how he is
The more you work for him, the more you believe,
The less of his regard you will receive
That's fine. I can give that my respect
Because who does he need for his projects?
He'll try to make nice, and not make a fuss
But in the end, he has to come back to us
We're the ones who put him there, and he hates to lose
And when push comes to shove, we're the ones who will choose
It's not his strength, but his weakness that gives hope
When he finds that Rick Warren won't help him cope
He'll have to turn to the new spread-out machine
That sent him small money, sent the ballots in
He wants to “look forwards,” let the war crimes go
But things can never change if we never say no
The system doesn't work, Constitution's disrupted
With a President King and a Court that's corrupted
We need a new deal, throw the old one away
And if Obama wants our help he has to pay
By giving us more than just chope and hange
He makes deals, so our system's gonna change
And if after all that we try to preserve it
We deserve to get screwed, because suckers deserve it

Come on, now, let's put the machine together
That'll be our prayer, in every weather
To make something tireless, that'll never stop,
As each of us fall it will never drop
Until we get justice, until prisoners are released,
Until we all have food, until we have peace,
Until we can even hope for these things
Without believing that greatness is what conflict brings,
Until we don't need a leader any more
And it's automatic that we don't get ignored

Yes, let's cheer for him as he begins
Yes, Obama, we're the ones who made you win
Yes, we don't really need you
Yes, we can make you come through ...Read more

It's hard to stop a global capitalism

A short meditation on a corporate history page.

I haven't blogged in almost a month because I've been absorbed in projects that, while worthy, would be highly boring to write about. One of them was revamping the interfaces to data for RTK NET, which new interfaces should be released in a month or so. The other has been going through a list of 3,000 or so polluting facilities to see who owns them, for PERI's Toxic 100 project.

That last one had its moments. I must have looked at almost a thousand corporate Web sites to see whether a particular name was a subsidiary, an independent company, a holding company for something else, etc. That's always useful, because the companies that are shady and don't want to admit who owns them can be noted down as probable bad actors. One of the forthright companies provided a punch-drunk laugh -- I wouldn't have thought it was funny if I hadn't just gone through hundreds of them -- at any rate, here comes heating and air conditioning company Trane. Their corporate history page could be taken as a template for every company's page: the history going back "about a century", the lone founder, the struggle to build up a coherent, folksy story around whatever surviving corporate fragment this is. And then there's the triumphant tale of Trane's separation from its surrounding conglomerate:

On Nov. 28, 2007 we successfully completed a plan announced the previous February to separate the three American Standard businesses, leaving each free to concentrate exclusively on the markets it knows best. . Over the course of the year WABCO was spun off as an independent corporation and Bath and Kitchen was sold to Bain Capital Partners. On Nov. 28th American Standard Companies changed its name to Trane, with its stock trading under the new symbol "TT". Our new name reflects our business focus and our leadership in providing integrated heating, ventilation and air conditioning services and solutions.

New chapters in our history of growth through innovation are being written every working day. Our momentum continues to build because -- as our people have said for years -- "it's hard to stop a Trane."

Inspiring slogan, huh? But then there was a single sentence, added right after that -- I can no longer quote it because the page has been modified since, and a copy doesn't seem to have been saved. "On June 5, 2008, global diversified industrial company Ingersoll Rand acquired Trane." Luckily no one was there to see me laugh, or wonder why I thought it was funny. Nothing stops the train of global capital. Trane lasted for about half a year being free to concentrate exclusively on the market it knew best, and then someone else swallowed them up.

Of course they couldn't leave the page that way. The end of the text has now has been refocused into their acquisition "furthering its transformation into a multi-brand commercial products manufacturer serving customers in diverse global markets, and away from the capital-intense, heavy-machinery profile of its past." Wow, that heavy-machinery train that they were trying to talk up -- where did it go? All that is solid melts into air. The text has gone from a heroic-unstoppable mode to a familial-comfort one:

"With Trane now part of the family, Ingersoll Rand is better able to provide products, services and solutions to enhance the quality and comfort in homes and buildings, and enable companies and their customers to create progress."

New chapters in Trane's history of growth through innovation are being written every working day. Now as part of Ingersoll Rand, our momentum continues to build because - as our people have said for years - "it's hard to stop a Trane."

Their momentum continues to build -- embedded within something larger, something not under their control? The toy train goes around and around the play set...

The history of writing about capital is full of stories about trains, from Marx down to, say, Iron Council. This tiny little tragicomedy was just too perfect.

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Saint-Gobain, Northampton, MA

The fallout from the USA Today report mentioned in the last post is still settling, with politicians and Federal and state regulators promising various responses. I've heard that there's the usual rush of facilities, after a TRI report like this is released, to correct their reporting errors and/or explain their reports. But I'm getting involved with this locally too; a school that I've often biked past, and that some of my friends' kids go to, is listed as the third most potentially polluted from these industrial sources in Massachusetts.

Update: after new information was supplied by the facility, this is probably nothing to worry about: see below.

Looking at the site, 99% of the estimated risk is from a single polluter here, a Saint-Gobain facility. Looking up their TRI data here, as well as their RSEI data, it's clear that the estimated risk is due to their report of an air release of chromium compounds.

I've seen many, many facilities get themselves bad publicity by reporting in the way that this facility did, when they report something like chromium compounds or diisocyanates, something with a high toxicity or carcinogenicity. They reported an air release using a release range: 11-499 pounds. EPA routinely transforms this into the midpoint of the range: 250 pounds. That's a lot of chromium. In addition, EPA doesn't have respondents distinguish between hexavalent chromium, a known human carcinogen (and the chemical that Erin Brockovich campaigned against), and trivalent chromium, which isn't anywhere near as bad.

The facility should clarify this so that everyone can get a better idea of how much concern there should be. I called their TRI public contact on the phone, left a message, and got no response -- that's no surprise; I've been working with TRI data since 1991 and have never, ever gotten a response from a public contact. So I sent the following Email to their technical contact:

Dear Mr. (redacted):

I am Emailing you because you are listed as the TRI (Toxic Release Inventory) technical contact for the Saint-Gobain Ceramic Materials facility in Northampton. I am an independent researcher living in Northampton who has worked with TRI data for some time, as well as the RSEI data used to make the USA Today report that references your facility at:

http://content.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/smokestack/polluter/465

As you can see from this USA Today report, the Saint-Gobain facility causes the Montessori School of Northampton to rank in the top two percentile of schools nationwide in terms of schools whose air is potentially polluted by industrial facilities, as well as potentially affecting other Northampton schools. Looking at your TRI report at:

http://data.rtknet.org/tri/tri.php?facility_id=01060SNTGB175IN&reporting_year=2005&datype=T&reptype=f&detail=4

and at the RSEI data, it is clear that the potential pollution in question is listed in your report as a release range of 11-499 pounds of chromium and chromium compounds to the air in 2005. EPA routinely treats release ranges of this sort as being equivalent to the midpoint of the range: 250 pounds.

I have some questions about your TRI report and the facility's operations:

1. Do you have a better idea of how much chromium and / or chromium in compounds is actually released than 11-499 pounds? Getting a more accurate number could affect the RSEI risk screening calculation quite dramatically.

2. Do you have an idea, through testing or other means, of how much of the chromium is hexavalent chromium -- a known human carcinogen -- vs how much is trivalent [note: I originally wrote this as "chromium trioxide", oops.]? That would also lead to a better understanding of the potential risk involved.

3. Are there any plans possible or underway to reduce use of, or emissions of, chromium? Your 2006 TRI report, the latest publicly available, shows the same chromium release as in 2005.

Thank you for your attention to this request for information. I plan on sharing your reply with other people who may be concerned about the chromium emissions from the Saint-Gobain Ceramic Materials facility. If you wish to contact me, I can be reached through Email, or by phone at xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Best regards,

Rich Puchalsky

cc: (redacted), Montessori School of Northampton

I'll see what I response I get. Given that Saint-Gobain is a multinational, I'd guess that my missive may well get passed up quite a chain. But I plan on continuing to pursue this.

My guess is that the range reporting may well have inflated their reported number to be greater than what they actually released. But there's no way to know without asking them.

Update (12/12/2008): The facility says that the level of hexavalent chromium in the chromium they use is very low, so I'd think that this means there's no reason for undue concern. Their reply was:

We produce various ceramic powders used by our customers in coating applications.  One of our products is trivalent chromium oxide used in wear resistance applications.  This chromium product contains well over 99% trivalent chromium oxide.  We have tested for hexavalent chromium oxide and the concentration tends to be around 50ppm in our product.  As stated in the USA Today website that you reference “Chromium 3 (trivalent) is an essential nutrient and helps the body process proteins, sugars, and fats.”

We believe that the emission values that you reference are a conservative estimate and the actual values are likely much less. The trivalenet chromium is present as a small particle like dust. We process our internal process air through “dust collectors” that are designed to remove 99.99% of the dust in the air. This treated air is then vented back into the building. We also utilize a plant wide central vacuum system for cleaning floors and equipment to minimize dust generation during cleaning. Therefore any trivalent chromium emissions are simply any minimal dust that may escape through open doors.  As you can imagine the actual number would be difficult to measure, but we feel that the actual number is closer to 11 lbs than to 499 lbs per year.

My reply was:

Thank you for your reply. The RSEI model used to estimate the risk from your facility's chromium emissions assumes that air emissions of chromium are particulates, as is the case for your facility, but it also assumes, based on industry averages, that the percentage of hexavalent chromium in the chromium released would be 34%. An actual hexavalent chromium percentage of 1% (to round up) would then reduce the estimated risk to 1/34 of the original calculation. That would lower the concern about emissions from your facility to the point where the Montessori school, and other schools in Northampton, would no longer score high on a nationwide or statewide comparison of the kind used in the USA Today report.

I should mention, however, that as far as I know, TRI estimates of releases are supposed to be made for the amount leaving the facility, not the amount "released" internally and then recollected before it reaches the outside. It's good to know that you have processes in place to reduce emissions, but the 11-499 pound estimate is presumably your estimate for the amount released to the air after your emission-control equipment has worked, not before.

I encourage you to develop a better estimate of how much chromium is actually released, sufficient for you to report to TRI with your best estimate in pounds rather than as a range. Until that is done, the public can only assume that 250 pounds is the best guess, which leads to more concern about your facility than is warranted if the true number is actually much lower. Hexavalent chromium is by far the primary concern for air emissions, but there are some environmental processes that can change trivalent to hexavalent chromium under some conditions, so it's still of interest to people to know how much is being released.

And that is that. Really what is needed is some way to change TRI reporting to discourage this kind of report from happening -- reporting chromium speciation would be good (people already report dioxin speciation to TRI, so it can be done), and there might be a category of highly toxic chemicals that range reporting is not used for, or at least warned about. I'm going to take this up with EPA once the new administration is in place.
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Toxic air and America's schools

There's an excellent report by USA Today that uses EPA reported pollution data and air modeling to estimate air quality at schools nationwide. It has a good database-backed Web site, too, that lets you look up your school, the schools with the worst air quality from those sources in your state, and so on.

I was involved very tangentially in this project -- I helped to work on data for PERI that USA Today used. I'm impressed by what USA Today did with it; it's better than the usual environmental toxics story. What PERI did was a bit complicated to explain, but I'll make the attempt -- there's a database, TRI, in which large industrial sources report their toxic pollution. A project within EPA, RSEI, takes the reported pounds of air pollution from each facility and runs an air model to see where the chemicals are going, geographically. They can then use Census data to see how many people live in each area affected by the pollution. They add all of this up into an overall risk screening score for each facility. PERI realized that these data could be obtained for each location on the ground, instead of being all added up to a single score for each facility. That lets you find the contribution of each polluter to a particular place where people live. (Or, in this case, where a school is.)

I only wish that I had the resources that USA Today does; their database-backed Web site is significantly more polished and user-friendly than I can generally make mine in the time that I have available to work on them. Learning how to embed databases into Google Maps is something I'm going to have to pick up. But there is one map graphic they created that I particularly wanted to call attention to: this -- or as a screenshot rather than an interactive map, so that I can show it here, the map below.



Compare this with the map of electric power generation by fuel source that I copied from eGRID for this earlier post. Or, for that matter, compare it with Joel Garreau's division of North America into "nine nations":



Industrial pollution near schools seems to be heavily concentrated in the areas of the country that Garreau refers to as Dixie and the Foundry. That's surprising, in some ways. Other places such as California certainly have industrial pollution too, but perhaps it's more spread out, or further away from city centers. Of course, this particular pollution map doesn't include non-point sources such as cars -- Los Angeles' smog problem gives it much worse overall air quality throughout its region than the vast majority of point-source-polluted sites. And this map doesn't include all sorts of other sources. But it's an example of how pollution is largely affected by regional patterns of development. If you were mapping environmental damage from mining waste, you'd get a different region of the U.S. highlighted -- national solutions to these problems often come down to regional politics.

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Bob knows already

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
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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.

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