When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century – Fred Pearce, 2006

Alas, the Nature and Environment book group didn’t think much of this book. There’s a revised edition coming out soon (August 2018), but unless it’s completely rewritten and restructured, it’s going to have some of the same failings; its age was only part of the problem.

I learned a lot of interesting but somewhat disconnected things. No notes! No bibliography!

Like many books about water, there’s a lot of focus on waste. At the end of chapter 26 Pearce finally addresses what happens if everyone “saves” water: “…in many river basins, most of the ‘wasted’ water would actually have moved on through the water cycle, either returning to rivers, from where someone downstream would capture it, or percolating underground, from where the same farmer or his neighbor might later pump it back to the surface.” Nothing on fracking, unfortunately.

In this book I learned

  • “Salt cedar, also known as tamarisk, is a nasty and extremely tough shrub, able to withstand fire and drought, flood and searing desert heat. A single plant can drink more than 265 gallons of water a day.”
  • Treaties and laws can “allocate more water than actually exists”
  • Green revolution crops need more water (kind of makes sense!)
  • Mining fossil water described as “farming water” (see quote about Tirupur, below) – classic tragedy of the commons
  • dairy “white revolution” in Gujarat: “two districts alone are exporting from the state 1.2 million acre-feet of virtual water a year in the form of milk”
  • Libya’s “Great Manmade River”
  • arsenic and fluoride (naturally occurring) can make groundwater poisonous
  • dams are incredibly inefficient, turning fertile floodplains into dust bowls
  • Naga fireballs in the Mekong
  • Qanats and ab-anbars – amazing! I want to visit one!
  • The history of the Salton Sea encapsulates many of the mistakes people make in trying to control water
  • “[The Bon Om Touk] festival has taken place since the twelfth century, always at the full moon in late October or early November. It is a celebration of one extraordinary fact about the river on which it takes place. The Tonle Sap is one of the few rivers in the world that reverses its flow. It does it every year, right in front of the palace.” (Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
  • Sussex dew ponds: they use a ‘secret process’ to insulate the clay bottom. “The straw insulated the clay, keeping it colder than the soil beneath at night. The stones, which shed heat quickly at night, lowered the temperature further. Once a successful dew pond was created, it would, in effect, generate its own water from the air.”
  • “On a cool, still night, the air can be so saturated with moisture that even modest air movements, such as sound waves, can condense the moisture and produce raindrops. In the mountains of Yunan in southern China, villagers have a tradition of yelling loudly in the hope that it will stimulate rain. The louder they shout, it is said, the more it rains.”
  • Stenocara gracilipes: “In Namibia … a beetle in the desert [was discovered] that has evolved a bobbled upper surface to its body with a pattern that is supremely efficient at capturing moisture from passing fogs. The hexagonal pattern of tiny peaks and troughs appears to push tiny droplets together to form larger droplets, which then roll off the beetle’s back and into its mouth.”
  • Raj-Samadhiyala, a village in Gujarat where water conservation is a top priority: “…On the paths there were thousands of fruit trees, where most villages are treeless. Under their shade were piles of mangoes and watermelons. And out among the small fields growing wheat and vegetables and groundnuts, there were the ponds—lots of them. … Nobody is allowed to take water directly from the ponds, and farmers are banned from growing the thirstiest crops, like sugarcane.”

Short quotes

  • Tirupur: “These villagers in this toxic wilderness were buying their water, at the price of a rupee per pot, from the people who sucked dry the precious underground reserves of Mandaba. The same people who were keeping the dye factories in business, producing the effluent that poisoned their fields and wells for miles around, were making a further tidy profit out of the misery caused by their pollution. The tragedy of Tamil Nadu’s disappearing water supplies was complete.”
  • “The Colorado is both legally and hydrologically one of the most regulated rivers in the world. But it is becoming clear that the legal and the hydrological no longer mesh.”
  • “By trying to turn the complex hydrology of rivers into the simple mechanics of a water pipe, engineers have often created danger where they promised safety and intensified the floods they intended to prevent.”
  • “The Six-Day War was… the first modern water war. … Israel today uses far more water than falls on its territory, and it has been able to do so because of its occupation of the West Bank, which gives it control of the western aquifer, and the Golan Heights, which gives it control of the Jordan River.”
  •  Africa described as “a continent of haphazard boundaries largely created in the days of imperial rule and maintained because anything else would bring chaos”
  • About the notion of sending waters from the north-flowing Ob and Yenisei to water cotton and maybe revive the Aral Sea: “you cannot keep a bad megaproject down”
  • “Money thrown at problems often produces the wrong solution.”
  • “Attempts to tame [the Rhine] began in earnest in the nineteenth century, with ‘rectification’ works undertaken by the German engineer Johanna Tulla. …Tulla forced the river into a single, well-defined, permanent channel. ‘As a rule,’ he declared, ‘no stream or river needs more than one bed.’ Nature never intended that this should be so, but Tulla’s maxim has become the rule that almost every river engineer follows.”
  • “The good news is that we never destroy water. .. [S]omewhere, sometime, it will return, purged and fresh, in rain clouds over India or Africa or the rolling hills of Europe. … Water is the ultimate renewable resource.”

About dams

  • “Water, as they say in the American West, flows uphill to money.”
  • “If nothing else, dams have proved an exceptionally effective technology for turning the unruly flow of rivers into private or state property.”
  • “On rivers like the Colorado, the Volta in West Africa, and the Nile, the big dams can hold two or three times the actual annual flow. And yet they remain an essentially experimental technology. Their hydrological, ecological, and social effects have been huge. But for many years their status as symbols of modernism insulated them from serious appraisal. … Only since the late 1990s have serious steps been taken internationally to establish whether their benefits outweigh the environmental, social, and economic costs.”
  • There are few “untamed rivers” left, primarily in empty areas.
  • Hydroelectric dam in the Amazon: “The rotting vegetation in the flooded forest is producing huge amounts of methane… The reservoir was created in the 1980s to provide pollution-free electricity for the capital of the Amazon, but by Fearnside’s calculations, it produces methane with eight times the greenhouse effect of a coal-fired power station with a similar generating capacity.”
  • “Most dams are built with the promise that they will capture floodwaters from the rivers they barricade. But one of the secrets of dams is how often they make floods. This happens because of the contradictory hydrological requirements of the different uses to which dams are put.”

Water in China

  • “Controlling [the Yellow River] floods has always been the single most important activity of Chinese governments. Many historians argue that it is the single most important reason for the creation and survival over the millennia of the vast Chinese state with its draconian powers. The Chinese sum up the relationship in a word: zhi, which means both ‘to regulate water’ and ‘to rule.’”
  • “In ancient times, if the river shifted ground, the emperor was thought to have lost the mandate of heaven and could no longer rule.”
  • Karl Wittfogel is quoted as calling it a “hydraulic civilization.”
  • “The [Loess Plateau] is the source of 90 percent of the silt in the world’s siltiest river. Nowhere on earth loses as much to erosion. This is because the Loess Plateau is not a proper mountain range at all. There is no underlying geology. It is just a huge pile of loose sand, several hundred yards thick and covering an area five times the size of Louisiana.
    The sand blew here from a distant desert thousands of years ago and has been left out in the rain ever since.”
  • “The Chinese, brought up on the wisdom of managing the Yellow River, sensibly have an idiom, ‘when the river runs clear.’ It means ‘never.’”

Longer quote

It is too easy to see communities that depend on natural wild resources and the vagaries of untamed rivers as somehow left behind by progress. The truth, quite often, is the opposite. It is they who have unlocked the truth about how to make the maximum use of natural resources. It is the urban sophisticates with their engineering degrees who haven’t got a clue.  … When the rivers run dry, it does not need to be a disaster, provided societies can adapt to cope with it. And the traditional attributes of flexibility associated with communities living on wetlands serve remarkably well. One of the ironies is that we have grown disturbingly good at disrupting river flows while losing our capacity for coping with, let alone prospering from, the consequences.

Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi, 1945

Relatively rare for a Second Monday selection: non-fiction. I’d heard of this book but probably had it confused with The Last Temptation of Christ – it’s actually a memoir, or almost a collection of essays/short stories. And/or I conflated it with Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, which I read as a teenager. The most bizarre anecdote was about a group of men who emigrate to America and get together on Sundays to take a crap together outdoors under a tree, as kind of a bonding ritual and/or way to return to their southern Italian roots.

In this book I learned

  • “Lucus a non lucendo” — although Levi is describing bare woodlands, so that’s the exact opposite of what the Latin pun means (a grove where there is no light, which has come to mean a nonsensical explanation)
  • gnomes that can’t live without their red hood – “These gnomes are the spirits or ghosts of children who have died without being baptized; they are numerous in these parts because the peasants often put off the baptism of their offspring for years.” I tried to find more information about the hood but only came up with this not-authoritative-looking site.

Short quotes

  • Bread “spiced occasionally with a carefully crushed raw tomato, or a little garlic and oil, or a Spanish pepper”
  • “Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason nor history.”
  • “an obese, heavy, deaf old man, greedy and grasping like an enormous silk-worm”
  • “A unifying web, not only of family ties (a first cousin was often as close as a brother), but of the acquired and symbolic kinship called comparaggio, ran throughout the village.”
  • “Before the chickens had roosted on it he must have had the library of a cultivated and enlightened priest.”
  • Instead of “how are you?” people ask “What did you have to eat today?”
  • “The only women who could come to work in my house were those in some way exempt from the general rule, who had many children of unidentified fathers, who, although they had not embraced prostitution (no such trade existed in the village), displayed a tendency to be free and easy, and who were concerned with all that pertained to love, above all the means of obtaining it. In a word, witches.”
  • Italian war in Africa: “[The peasants] had no faith in a promised land which had first to be taken away from those to whom it belonged; instinct told them that this was wrong and could only bring ill luck.”
  • “At dusk three angels come down from the sky to every house. One stands at the door, another sits at the table, and the third watches over the bed. They look after the house and protect it. Neither wolves nor evil spirits can enter the whole night long. If I threw the sweepings outside the door they might land on the face of the angel, whom we can’t see; the angel might take offense and never come back.”

Longer quotes

This passive brotherliness, this sympathy in the original sense of the word, this fatalistic, comradely, age-old patience, is the deepest feeling the peasants have in common, a bond made by nature rather than by religion. They do not and can not have what is called political awareness, because they are literally pagani, “pagans,” or countrymen, as distinguished from city-dwellers. The deities of the State and the city can find no worshipers here on the land, where the wolf and the ancient black boar reign supreme, where there is no wall between the world of men and the world of animals and spirits, between the leaves of the trees above and the roots below. They can not have even an awareness of themselves as individuals, here where all things are held together by acting upon one another and each one is a power unto itself, working imperceptibly, where there is no barrier that can not be broken down by magic. They live submerged in a world that rolls on independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria, where there can be neither happiness, as literary devotees of the land conceive it, nor hope, because these two are adjuncts of personality and here there is only the grim passivity of a sorrowful Nature. But they have a lively human feeling for the common fate of mankind and its common acceptance. This is strictly a feeling rather than an act of will; they do not express it in words but they carry it with them at every moment and in every motion of their lives, through all the unbroken days that pass over these wastes.

There are many strange creatures at Gagliano who have a dual nature. A middle-aged peasant woman, married and having children, with nothing out of the ordinary about her appearance, was the daughter of a cow. So the village said, and she herself confirmed it. The older people clearly remembered her cow mother, who followed her everywhere when she was a child, mooing to her and licking her with a rough tongue. This did not alter the fact that she had also had a human mother, who had been dead for many years. No one saw any contradiction in this dual birth, and the woman herself, whom I knew personally, lived quietly and happily, like both her mothers, for all her animal heredity.

To the peasants everything has a double meaning. The cow-woman, the werewolf, the lion-baron, and the goat-devil are only notorious and striking examples. People, trees, animals, even objects and words have a double life. Only reason, religion, and history have clear-cut meanings. But our feeling for life itself, for art, language, and love is complex, infinitely so. And in the peasants’ world there is no room for reason, religion, and history. There is no room for religion, because to them everything participates in divinity, everything is actually, not merely symbolically, divine: Christ and the goat; the heavens above, and the beasts of the field below; everything is bound up in natural magic. Even the ceremonies of the church become pagan rites, celebrating the existence of inanimate things, which the peasants endow with a soul, and the innumerable earthy divinities of the village.

… but the black-faced Madonna remained impassive, pitiless and deaf to all appeals, like indifferent Nature. Homage was paid to her in abundance, but it was rather the homage due to power than that offered to charity. The Black Madonna was like the earth; it was in her power to raise up and to destroy, but she was no respecter of persons, and appointed the seasons according to an inscrutable plan of her own. To the peasants the Black Madonna was beyond good and evil. She dried up the crops and let them wither away, but at the same time she dispensed food and protection and demanded worship. In every household, tacked up on the wall above the bed, the image of the Black Madonna of Viggiano looked on with expressionless eyes at all the acts of daily life.

Under the bed slept the animals, and so the room was divided into three layers: animals on the floor, people in the bed, and infants in the air. When I bent over a bed to listen to a patient’s heart or to give an injection to a woman whose teeth were chattering with fever or who was burning up with malaria, my head touched the hanging cradles, while frightened pigs and chickens darted between my legs.
But what never failed to strike me most of all and by now I had been in almost every house were the eyes of the two inseparable guardian angels that looked at me from the wall over the bed. On one side was the black, scowling face, with its large, inhuman eyes, of the Madonna of Viggiano; on the other a colored print of the sparkling eyes, behind gleaming glasses, and the hearty grin of President Roosevelt.

Yes, New York, rather than Rome or Naples, would be the real capital of the peasants of Lucania, If these men without a country could have a capital at all. And it is their capital, in the only way it can be for them, that is as a myth. As a place to work, it is indifferent to them; they live there as they would live anywhere else, like animals harnessed to a wagon, heedless of the street where they must pull it.

The other word that recurs most often among them is “crai” from the Latin cras, tomorrow. Everything that they are waiting for, that is due to come, that should be remedied or attended to is “crai.” But “crai” means never.

In this timeless land the dialect was richer in words with which to measure time than any other language; beyond the motionless and everlasting crai every day in the future had a name of its own. Crai meant tomorrow and forever; the day after tomorrow was prescrai and the day after that pescrille; then came pescruflo, marufto, maruflone; the seventh day was maruflicchio. But these precise terms had an undertone of irony. They were used less often to indicate this or that day than they were said all together in a string, one after the other; their very sound was grotesque and they were like a reflection of the futility of trying to make anything clear out of the cloudiness of crai.

I had indeed become a master of magic and its applications to medicine.

I respected the [abracadabra pyramid] amulets, paying tribute to their ancient origin and mysterious simplicity, and preferring to be their ally rather than their enemy. The peasants were grateful for my respect, and perhaps the abracadabra really did them some good. Anyhow, magic as it was practiced in Gagliano was harmless enough and the peasants considered it in no way in conflict with official medicine. The custom of prescribing some medicine for every illness, even when it is not necessary, is equivalent to magic, anyhow, especially when the prescription is written, as it once was, in Latin or in indecipherable handwriting. Most prescriptions would be just as effective if they were not taken to the druggist, but were simply hung on a string around the patient’s neck like an abracadabra.

I preferred to prescribe newer drugs, more powerful and possessed of greater magic, such as atabrine and plasmochin. These were doubly effective, both because of their chemical composition and the sway they exerted over the imagination.

Germinal – Émile Zola, 1885

I think I read this as a teen, but I didn’t remember any specifics – just that it was grim/grimy/bleak, and that’s still accurate! I read it in French, but the quotes are from the translation by Roger Pearson.

In this book I learned

  • A recession in the US led to coal mine layoffs in France
  • When coal is the economic incentive, you get conflicts over timbering – of course, but that had never occurred to me
  • A songbird competition where some sing so hard they die – sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s still bad
  • Could this be the origin of the movie trope where someone throws a match or grenade over their shoulder as they walk away? Souvarine has destroyed the mine Le Voreux, which is collapsing and filling with water. “He threw away his last cigarette and, without a backward glance, walked off into the darkness which had now fallen. In the distance his shadowy figure faded from view and melted into the blackness of the night. He was headed somewhere, anywhere, off into the unknown. In his usual calm way he was bound upon extermination, bound for wherever there was dynamite to blow cities and people to smithereens. And in all probability, when the bourgeoisie’s final hour arrives and every cobble is exploding in the road beneath its feet, there he will be.”

Short quotes

  • Battle, the white horse who lives in the mine, who dimly remembers his past above ground: “There had been something else, too, something burning away up in the air, some huge lamp or other, but his animal memory could not quite recall its exact nature. And he would stand there unsteadily on his old legs, vainly trying to remember the sun.”
  • Souvarine and the rabbit Poland: “As she snuggled down in his lap with her ears flattened along her back, she would close her eyes; and he would stroke her automatically, tirelessly running his hand through the grey silk of her fur and evidently soothed by this warm, living softness.”
  • La Maheude: “The worst of it, you know, is when you start telling yourself that things can never change… When you’re young, you think happiness is just around the corner, you hope for things; but then the poverty grinds on and on, and you find you can never escape it… “
  • “[Etienne] treated himself to a fine pair of boots, and at once he was a leader; the village began to rally to him.”
  • “…[R]ecently he had been coming round to collectivism, which called for the means of production to be returned into the ownership of the collective. But this was all still somewhat vague, and he couldn’t quite see how to acheive this new goal, prevented as he was by scruples of humanity and common sense from enjoying the fanatic’s ability to advance ideas with uncompromising conviction.”
  • Madame Hennebeau when the house is being attacked by the striking workers: “On top of everything these beastly workers have chosen the very day that I am entertaining guests. Really! And then they expect to be treated better!”
  • “Etienne saw only too well how one man’s misfortune became another man’s gain, and once more it discouraged him deeply  to think of the invincible power wielded by the sheer weight of capital, so strong in adversity that it grew fat on the defeat of others, gobbling up the small fry who fell by the wayside.”
  • La Maheude’s reaction to the priest assuring the workers “Within a week they would cleanse the world of the evildoers, they would dispatch the unworthy masters, and the true kingdom of God would be at hand, where each man would be rewarded according to his just desserts and the laws of the workplace would ensure the happiness of all.” – “‘That’s all very fine, Father,’ she said. ‘But you’re only saying that because you’ve fallen out with the bourgeois… All our other priests used to dine with the manager, and then they’d threaten us with hell-fire the moment we asked for bread.’”

Longer quotes

The Grégoires now believed steadfastly in their mine. The value would rise again; why, God Himself was not more reliable! At the same time, mixed with this religious faith in the mine, they felt a profound sense of gratitude towards a stock which had now fed and supported an entire family for over a century. It was like a private god whom they worshipped in their egotism, a fairy godmother who rocked them to sleep in their large bed of idleness and fattened them at their groaning table. And so it would continue, from father to son: why tempt fate by doubting it? And deep within their constancy lay a superstitious terror, the fear that the million francs would suddenly have melted away if they had realized their assets and placed the proceeds in a drawer. To their mind it was safer left in the ground, from whence a race of miners, generation after generation of starving people, would extract it for them, a little each day, sufficient unto their needs.

Etienne after the workers turn on him:

These madmen were lying when they accused him of having promised them a life of leisure and plenty to eat. Yet behind his attempts at self-justification, behind all the arguments with which he tried to combat his remorse, lay the unspoken fear that he had not been equal to his task and the niggling doubt of the semi-educated man who realizes that he doesn’t know the half of it. But he had run out of courage, and he no longer felt the same bond with the comrades, indeed he was afraid of them, of the huge, blind, irresistible mass that is the people, passing like a force of nature and sweeping away everything in its path, beyond the compass of rule or theory. He had begun to view them with distaste and had gradually grown apart from them, as his more refined tastes made him feel ill at ease in their company, and as his whole nature slowly began to aspire towards membership of a higher class.

Etienne argues with Souvarine:

Say the old society no longer existed and that every last trace of it had been swept away. Wasn’t there a risk that the new order which grew up in its place would slowly be corrupted by the same injustices, that there would again be the weak and the strong, that some people would be more skilful or intelligent than others and live off the fat of the land, while the stupid or the lazy once more became their slaves? At this prospect of everlasting poverty Souvarine exclaimed fiercely that if justice could not be achieved with man, it would have to be acheived without him. For as long as there were rotten societies, there would have to be wholesale slaughters, until the last human being had been exterminated.

How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration – David Richo, 1991

This was mentioned in a comment at the great Ask a Manager, and the title grabbed me.

  • “There are ghosts asleep inside every one of us: arcane issues never addressed, ancient griefs never laid to rest, suspicions, self-doubts, banished longings, secret meanings. Something in this book may call one of these ghosts by name. It will then arise from its slumber and begin speaking. … You are hearing the vote of a part of yourself long ago disenfranchised. When this happens, put the book aside and listen in rapture to the irrepressible ‘Yea.'”
  • Quoting from Anais Nin’s diary: “every day the real caress replaces the ghostly lover”
  • “…neediness itself tells us nothing about how much we need from others; it tells us how much we need to grieve the irrevocably barren past and evoke our own inner sources of nurturance.”
  • “The fear of revealing the True Self is disguised in these words: ‘If people really knew me, they would not like me.’ We can change that sentence to read: ‘I am free enough to want everything I say and do to reveal me as I am. I love being seen as I am.'”
  • affirmation: “I grant myself a margin of error in my work and relationships. I release myself from the pain of having to be right or competent all the time.”
  • “Allow every feeling and thought to pass through you as good hikers through the woods: taking nothing away, leaving nothing behind. Make no attempt to think them away, to interpret, or to interrupt them no matter how irrational or inconvenient they may seem.”
  • “Recurrent dreams are not so much to be interpreted as to be exhausted. They are played repeatedly like dramas, until integration and closure happen naturally.”
  • There was an interesting active imagination technique that I would like to go back to someday…

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer – Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2010

I was looking forward to reading this for the Nature and Environment group—I’d heard good things about it and I love this kind of book—but although it was good in many ways, it was a bit of a dense slog and also hard going emotionally (early cancer treatments, OMG). The hubris and ego of early surgeons resulted in a lot of excessive suffering, needlessly for those patients, but some of it resulted in actual advances. It’s morally painful and ambiguous.

[Advocates of radical surgery] genuinely believed that they could relieve the dreaded symptoms of cancer. But they lacked formal proof, and as they went further up the isolated promontories of their own beliefs, proof became irrelevant and trials impossible to run. The more fervently surgeons believed in the inherent good of their operations, the more untenable it became to put these to a formal scientific trial. Radical surgery thus drew the blinds of circular logic around itself for nearly a century.

It was fascinating and disheartening also to see how the mistaken mental frames around cancer (one disease, on which a coordinated “war” can be waged) delayed understanding and treatment. That’s one of the simplistic ideas that have been a problem for medicine: the body is so so so much more complicated that the imagery of pumps/fluid mechanics/contamination allows for. And it makes sense that patients are quick to demand treatments that haven’t been fully tested, resenting what can seem like (and maybe it) foot-dragging, but then the opportunity to really test is lost.

It’s well written but sometimes a little purple. Mukherjee for example describes a person as “brackish”—I kind of like it but it’s on the edge of too showy. There’s a plates section which feels a bit arbitrary. Also, the framing autobiographical bit (his treatment of one particular patient) is very small in comparison with the dense mass of the rest.

  • The modern-sounding clinical descriptions of Imhotep (2625 BC), under the description of breast cancer: treatment “There is none”
  • Autopsy literally means “to see for oneself;” Vesalius vainly looking for Galen’s “black bile”
  • Music and surgery: “The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.”
  • “Dogs, humans, and lions are the only animals known to develop prostate cancer”
  • “Hefty Brunsviga calculators, the precursors of modern computers, clacked and chimed … ringing like clocks each time a long division was performed.”
  • “The iconic Marlboro man, with his hypermasculine getup of lassos and tattoos, was an elaborate decoy set up to prove that there was nothing effeminate or sissy about smoking filter-tipped cigarettes.”
  • “Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.”

He’s widely read and has a great ear for quotes; a surprising number of the passages I flagged are from other writers:

  • Howard Skipper: “A model is a lie that helps you see the truth.”
  • Mukherjee names Bernard Fisher as the source for the fantastic “In God we trust. All others [must] have data;” the great Quote Investigator says it can’t be attributed to him, but I’m thrilled to have been introduced to it.
  • Paul Brodeur: “Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off”
  • Richard Avedon: “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
  • David Rieff in his memoir of his mother Susan Sontag’s illness: “Like so many doctors, he spoke to us as if we were children but without the care that a sensible adult takes in choosing what words to use with a child.”
  • Alfred Knudson saying he inferred the existence of anti-oncogenes “as one might infer the wind from the movement of the trees.”

The Laskers were professional socialites, in the same way that one can be a professional scientist or a professional athlete; they were extraordinary networkers, lobbyists, minglers, conversers, persuaders, letter writers, cocktail party–throwers, negotiators, name-droppers, deal makers. Fund-raising—and, more important, friend-raising—was instilled in their blood, and the depth and breadth of their social connections allowed them to reach deeply into the minds—and pockets—of private donors and of the government.

We are chemical apes: having discovered the capacity to extract, purify, and react molecules to produce new and wondrous molecules, we have begun to spin a new chemical universe around ourselves. Our bodies, our cells, our genes are thus being immersed and reimmersed in a changing flux of molecules—pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, estrogens, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses, such as radiation and magnetism.

Play It As It Lays – Joan Didion, 1970

Read for the Great Books group. The opening is famous: “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask,” but I don’t really understand it. I flagged a bunch of passages, but in looking back at them it wasn’t so much for the language or thought as for referring to in our discussion. I felt sorry for poor Maria and her gambling parents, separated from her daughter Kate, having had an awful abortion, and aging in Hollywood.

Carter: “Maria has difficulty talking to people with whom she is not sleeping.”

Maria fantasizes about a house by the sea where she would live with Kate doing her lessons at a pine table, and later “they would eat the mussels and drink a bottle of cold white wine and after a while it would be time to lie down again, on the clean white sheets.” But then (this is a 2-page chapter, Didion is nothing if not concise) “[they] understood as she did that the still center of the daylight world was never a house by the sea but the corner of Sunset and La Brea. In that empty sunlight Kate could do no lessons, and the mussels on any shore Maria knew were toxic.”

Chapter 52 in its entirety:

Maria made a list of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.

I wondered what a “cheese glass” could be – a book group member suggested a glass container that cottage cheese came in.

“five-to-one were the best odds Benny would lay on the sun rising”

Great ending too:

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.

How To Be Both – Ali Smith, 2014

The Second Monday book group reads a lot of contemporary fiction that I wouldn’t be drawn to on my own, and since I no longer work at a public library, it exposes me to authors I wouldn’t necessarily hear about. A number of the group members had read Ali Smith before. I wish there had been color plates because so much rides on seeing the work of Francesco del Cossa. The novel was published in two versions; I was glad to get the version that started with George as the narrator, because those of us who had Francesco at the beginning found it harder going, and I would have too.

I feel like it makes a lesser work to rely on something external so heavily, and a related annoyance were too-clever-by-half references, like Francesco mentioning George’s “Monica Victims” poster (Monica Vitti); it somehow feels cheap. Which is a shame because it’s otherwise wonderful.

Brief quotes

  • George’s mother’s phone: “All her mother’s playlists were on her phone. .. She never even looked at the playlists. It was her mother’s music. It was bound to have been rubbish. Now she has no idea and will never know what song her mother listened to every day to do the dance thing, or on the train, or walking along the street.”
  • “Imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you’d made, as if the thing you’d made became you.”
  • “there’s a very pure pleasure in a curve like the curve of a buttock: the only other thing as good to draw is the curve of a horse and like a horse a curved line is a warm thing, good-natured, will serve you well if not mistreated”
  • Mother’s saying “when you’ve nothing at least you have all of it”
  • Francesco is confused by everyone holding up their “votive tablets” (phones): “Is it possible then that all the people of this place are painters going about their world with the painting tools of their time? Perhaps I have been placed in a specific painters’ purgatorium.”
  • Going to a brothel: “So I learned plenty of dark things too, learned plenty of things that were the opposite of pleasure, at the pleasure house.”
  • “Barto and I were soon friends again : no time at all : many things get forgiven in the course of a life : nothing is finished or unchangeable except death and even death will bend a little if what you tell of it is told right”
  • “We go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering or wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.”

Longer quotes

Interesting insight – mourning with porn:

And you’ll drive yourself mad if you keep watching stuff like that, her father said. You’ll do damage to yourself.
Damage has already happened, George said.
George, her father said.
This really happened, George said. To this girl. And anyone can just watch it just, like, happening, any time he or she likes. And it happens for the first time, over and over again, every time someone who hasn’t seen it before clicks on it and watches it. So I want to watch it for a completely different reason. Because my completely different watching of it goes some way to acknowledging all of that to this girl.

When love is starting with H, they flirt by text of song titles in Latin (“Quingenta milia passuum ambulem”):

It is … like H is trying to find a language that will make personal sense to  George’s ears. No one has ever done this before for George. She has spent her whole life speaking other people’s languages. It is new to her. The newness of it has a sort of power that can make the old things—as old as those old songs, even as ancient as Latin itself—a kind of new…
… she sensed, like something blurred and moving glimpsed through a partition whose glass is clouded, both that love was coming for her and the nothing she could do about it. [sic]

As a child Francesco sees a seed fall into a puddle and wonders where the ring went:

It went, I said. It’s gone.

Ah, she said. Is that why you’re crying? But it hasn’t gone at all. And that’s why it’s better than gold. It hasn’t gone, it’s just that we can’t see it any more. In fact, it’s still going, still growing. It’ll never stop going, or growing wider and wider, the ring you saw. You were lucky to see it at all. Cause when it got to the edge of the puddle it left the puddle and entered the air instead, it went invisible. A marvel. Didn’t you feel it go through you? No? But it did, you’re inside it now. I am too. We both are. And the yard. And the brickpiles. And the sandpiles. And the firing shed. And the houses. And the horses, and your father, your uncle, and your brothers, and the workmen, and the street. And the other houses. And the walls, and the gardens and houses, the churches, the palace tower, the top of the cathedral, the river, the fields behind us, the fields way over there, see? See how far your eye can go. See the tower and the houses in the distance? It’s passing through them and nothing and nobody will feel a thing but there it is doing it nonetheless. And imagine it circling the fields and the farms we can’t see from here. And the towns beyond those fields and farms all the way to the sea. And across the sea. The ring you saw in the water’ll never stop travelling till the edge of the world and then when it reaches the edge it’ll go beyond that too. Nothing can stop it.

The great Alberti says that when we paint the dead, the dead man should be dead in every part of him all the way to the toe and finger nails, which are both living and dead at once : he says that when we paint the alive the alive must be alive to the very smallest part, each hair on the head or the arm of an alive person being itself alive : painting, Alberti says, is a kind of opposite to death : and though he knows that when we are bared back to nothing but our bones ourselves only God can remake us into humans, put faces back on our skulls on the final day and so on &c, which means there is no blasphemy in what I’m about to say –

cause Alberti said it and it is true –

all the same it’s many a person who can go to a painting and see someone in it as if that person is as alive as daylight though in reality that person has not lived or breathed for hundreds of years.

Alberti it is who teaches, too, how to build a body from nothing but bones : so that the process of drawing and painting outwits death and you draw, as he says, any animal by isolating each bone of the animal, and on to this adding muscle, and then clothing it all with its flesh : and this giving of muscle and flesh to bones is what in its essence the act of painting anything is.