The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck, 1939

To my surprise, most of us in the Great Books group had never read this before. I particularly loved the amazing descriptions and the poetic interstitial chapters.

In this book I learned

  • anlage – “the foundation of a subsequent development”
  • Rochester lamp

Short quotes

  • “all the various purposes of a cap—carrying sack, towel, handkerchief.”
  • Half-car/half-truck “this was the new hearth, the living center of the family”
  • “You’re jus’ as free as you got jack to pay for it”
  • Poor boys staring at a candy case: “not with craving or with hope or even with desire, but just with a kind of wonder that such things could be”
  • “a furrow four miles long that ain’t stoppin’ or goin’ aroun’ Jesus Christ Hisself”
  • “I never seen nobody that’s busy as a prairie dog collectin’ stuff that wasn’t disappointed”
  • “A red is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we’re payin’ twenty-five!”
  • “the on’y thing you got to look at is that ever’ time they’s a little step fo’ward, she may slip back a little, but she never slips clear back”
  • “Ruthie looked fiercely about, but she went to a corner of the car and put her back in the corner. Her shame and fierceness were blended.”
  • “Every kid got a turtle some time or other. Nobody can’t keep a turtle though. They work at it and work at it, and at last one day they get out and away they go- off somewheres.”
  • Tenant says: “We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.”
  • “The nickel, which has caused all this mechanism to work, has caused Crosby to sing and an orchestra to play- this nickel drops from between the contact points into the box where the profits go. The nickel, unlike most money, has actually done a job of work, has been physically responsible for a reaction.”
  • “‘We pay sales tax an’ gas tax an’ tobacco tax,’ this little guy says. An’ he say, ‘Farmers get four cents a cotton poun’ from the gov’ment- ain’t that relief?’ An’ he says, ‘Railroads an’ shippin’ companies draw subsidies- ain’t that relief?'”

Jim Casy quotes:

“I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit- the human sperit- the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent- I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”

“I ain’t sayin’ I’m like Jesus,” the preacher went on. “But I got tired like Him, an’ I got mixed up like Him, an’ I went into the wilderness like Him, without no campin’ stuff. Nighttime I’d lay on my back an’ look up at the stars; morning I’d set an’ watch the sun come up; midday I’d look out from a hill at the rollin’ dry country; evenin’ I’d foller the sun down. Sometimes I’d pray like I always done. On’y I couldn’ figure what I was prayin’ to or for. There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy.”

“This here ol’ man jus’ lived a life an’ jus’ died out of it. I don’t know whether he was good or bad, but that don’t matter much. He was alive, an’ that’s what matters. An’ now he’s dead, an’ that don’t matter. Heard a fella tell a poem one time, an’ he says, ‘All that lives is holy.’ Got to thinkin’, an’ purty soon it means more than the words says. An’ I wouldn’ pray for a ol’ fella that’s dead. He’s awright. He got a job to do, but it’s all laid out for ‘im an’ there’s on’y one way to do it. But us, we got a job to do, an’ they’s a thousan’ ways, an’ we don’ know which one to take. An’ if I was to pray, it’d be for the folks that don’ know which way to turn. Grampa here, he got the easy straight. An’ now cover ‘im up and let ‘im get to his work.”

Tom Joad quoting Casy:

Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’ have no soul that was his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain’t no good, ’cause his little piece of a soul wasn’t no good ‘less it was with the rest, an’ was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn’t even think I was listenin’. But I know now a fella ain’t no good alone.”

“Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one — an’ then —”
“Then what, Tom?”
“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ — I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build — why, I’ll be there.

Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding. She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.

Selling horses:

You’re buying a little girl plaiting the forelocks, taking off her hair ribbon to make bows, standing back, head cocked, rubbing the soft noses with her cheek. You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk. But watch it, mister. There’s a premium goes with this pile of junk and the bay horses- so beautiful- a packet of bitterness to grow in your house and to flower, some day. We could have saved you, but you cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there’ll be none of us to save you.

“Ain’t you thinkin’ what’s it gonna be like when we get there? Ain’t you scared it won’t be nice like we thought?”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much- livin’ too many lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ’em, it’s too much. You got to live ahead ’cause you’re so young, but- it’s jus’ the road goin’ by for me.

Little pot-bellied men in light suits and panama hats; clean, pink men with puzzled, worried eyes, with restless eyes. Worried because formulas do not work out; hungry for security and yet sensing its disappearance from the earth. In their lapels the insignia of lodges and service clubs, places where they can go and, by a weight of numbers of little worried men, reassure themselves that business is noble and not the curious ritualized thievery they know it is; that business men are intelligent in spite of the records of their stupidity; that they are kind and charitable in spite of the principles of sound business; that their lives are rich instead of the thin tiresome routines they know; and that a time is coming when they will not be afraid any more.

They arose in the dark no more to hear the sleepy birds’ first chittering, and the morning wind around the house while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres. These things were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not also a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.

The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water – Charles Fishman, 2011

Nature and Enviro selection. Fishman reached out to Forbes and we had a very enjoyable Skype session with him at the end of the meeting. We asked about what’s changed since 2011 and he shared a few more great win-win stories. He plugged his new book, One Giant Leap, with a compelling tie-in to climate change.

There are a lot of numbers – audio book listeners complained – and it was a bit repetitive, but overall I really liked it and it made an interesting comparison to When the Rivers Run Dry, which we read in 2018.

In this book I learned

  • “Fit-for-purpose water” – just clean enough (e.g., use gray water on golf courses)
  • It’s a location problem – we don’t have less water, it’s in different places, and saving it here doesn’t necessarily help over there
  • Lots of success stories and win-win: “Americans in 2005 used less water per person than they did in 1955” (of how many other resources is that true?) “Business is actually ahead of politics, and ahead of popular awareness” – so much money to be saved
  • “Caustics” – the wonderful word for “the shapes of shifting light water makes on the bottom of a swimming pool”
  • Space water! Space is full of it! “There is enough water being formed [in the Orion Molecular Cloud] sufficient to fill all of the Earth’s oceans every twenty-four minutes.”
  • The fourth state of water! Incorporated in hydrous minerals like serpentine – of 200 lbs of serpentine, 22 is H2O
  • Ultra-pure water, used to clean semiconductors, is “not just regarded as an industrial solvent, but … considered akin to a poison. … UPW is ‘hungry’ – it will leach molecules right out of your body tissues.”
  • OMG the crazy situation of Atlanta’s water supply from Lake Lanier. At publication time (2011) it wasn’t resolved, so I flagged it to look up. Summer 2019: still not resolved!!! Revisiting this to finish and publish in January 2025: the case was dismissed in August 2021. Only 11 years…
  • Water service levels have gone backwards in India – most major cities had 24/7 water in 1947, but now “That level of service, and more important, the expectation of that level of service, has slipped away”
  • Lack of water means girls are more likely to stop going to school once menstruation begins!
  • Insane amount of pollution in the Yamuna river: “One eyedropper of Yamuna River water is enough to make six bathtubs of water unsafe to sit in. Says the CSE report, ‘The river is unfit for any human purpose.'”
  • I want to see a WET fountain, like the one at the Bellagio!

Things I’d already thought about that he expressed really well:

  • the ridiculousness of paying for bottled water. “Ten gallons of tap water, at home, costs on average 3 pennies. … We happily pay three thousand times that price at the convenience store … But when the water bill goes from $30 to $34 a month, customers react as if they’ll have to choose between their prescription drugs and their water service.” “Bottled water undermines our financial and civic commitment to a reliable public water system.” “It is easier for the typical American living in Beverly Hills or Miami or Manhattan to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fijian water than it is for most people in Fiji.” Many of us in the group didn’t realize it was more than just marketing, that the water actually comes from freakin’ Fiji. WTF!

Given that water is both the most familiar substance in our lives, and the most important substance in our lives, the really astonishing thing is that most of us don’t think of ourselves as having a relationship to water. It’s perfectly natural to talk about our relationship to our car or our relationship to food, our relationship to alcohol, or money, or God.

But water has achieved an invisibility in our lives that is only more remarkable given how central it is. Water used to be part of the rhythm and motivation of daily life, and there are plenty of places, including farms and whole swaths of the developing world, where it still is.

But in the United States and the developed world, we’ve spent the last hundred years in a kind of aquatic paradise: our water has been abundant, safe, and cheap.

Water is tirelessly resilient. Water participates in a mind-bending array of physical, chemical, biochemical, geological, and human-created processes every minute of the day—water is essential to creating soup and computer servers, it drives both hurricanes and erosion, it is the essential element in human beings maintaining our body temperature at 98.6 degrees—and yet water emerges from every one of those processes intact, undamaged, unchanged, ready to make a fresh cloud or a fresh drop of sweat, an iceberg or a jellyfish, as the occasion requires.

Water’s indestructibility, its reusability, will be vital as we confront an era where water scarcity becomes more common. Water itself isn’t becoming more scare, it’s simply disappearing from places where people have become accustomed to finding it—where they have built communities assuming a certain availability of water—and reappearing somewhere else.

We want a comforting mental and physical distance between the last time our water was dirty and the moment we use it to stir up a pitcher of ice tea. It’s easy for water professionals who live every day of their careers with the reality that while there is plenty of pure water, there is no fresh water—our water was Tyrannosaurus rex pee and dirty snow at some point, because there is no other water. For ordinary people, though, our consciousness of water doesn’t even include a willful forgetting about its source, as it does with the hamburger. We really don’t know where our water comes from, just that it needs to be “fresh” when we fill the ice cube tray.s

In any meaningful measure of reality, there was nothing in the purified water but water. In scientific terms, there were some molecules of other stuff.

But the difference between “nothing” and “virtually nothing” is the difference between security and anxiety. In a heated political campaign, it’s the difference between trust and suspicion.

One of the legacies of scaling an economy to abundant water is that when the abundance disappears, it turns out we not only don’t have the water, we don’t have a water system that can adapt to scarcity.

One of the interesting things about water is that it is one of those rare areas where the gold standard of service and the basic level of service are the same thing: Water should be provided twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in pipes that keep it clean and safe.

Water poverty doesn’t just mean your hands are dirty, or you can’t wash your clothes, or you are often thirsty. Water poverty may mean you never learn to read, it means you get sick more often than you should, it means you and your children are hungry. Water poverty traps you in a primitive day-to-day struggle. Water poverty is, quite literally, de-civilizing.

Water issues, in particular, are often made worse when everyone operates independently—all those pumps sucking water from mains in Delhi and Hyderabad and Bangalore make everyone’s water dirty. The collective solution is usually cheaper, more efficient, less wasteful, and better for the fate of the water itself. Money and technology are often not the best solutions to water issues—rainwater harvesting is simple, low-tech, and it’s a lot easier and less expensive than finding new sources of water.

When you think about the qualities of water that are so appealing—the energy, the playfulness, the adaptability, the variety of mood, the artistry, and also the sheer everyday usefulness—what’s striking is how much the personality of water mirrors our own personality as people.

The Liar’s Club: A Memoir – Mary Karr, 1995

Second Monday book group selection. I led the discussion and adapted some questions from the online reader’s guide. One of my big points was that this was the vanguard of the whole miserabilia memoir genre.

  • Sheriff goes up to neighbor women “setting in motion a series of robe-tightening and sweater-buttonings.”
  • “Like most people, he lied best by omission…”
  • Oil-storage tanks “like the abandoned eggs of some terrible prehistoric insect.”
  • “It turned out to be impossible for me to ‘run away’ in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement of all was taken as progress in my family.”
  • “The four of use tended to eat our family meals sitting cross-legged on the edges of that bed. We faced opposite walls, our back together, looking like some four-headed totem, our plates balanced on the spot of quilt between our legs.”
  • a penis: “it felt like a wet bone encased in something”
  • “Maybe drinking caused Mother to go crazy, or maybe the craziness was just sort of standing in line to happen and the drinking actually staved it off a while.”
  • ““Don’t make no difference, bigger,” Daddy says. “Bigger’s just one thing. They’s a whole lot of other things than bigger, Pokey. Don’t you forget it.”
  • Kids trying to navigate their own fate “when we wanted a straight-thinking adult but couldn’t find one”
  • “bench-pressing boxes up” into an attic

I kept cutting my eyes between my window, where the new glass skyscrapers going up just slid past, and the small rearview mirror, where Mother’s eyes were still eerily blank. Nothing showed in those eyes but the road’s white dashed lines, which seemed to be flying off the road and into the darkest part of her pupils, where they disappeared like knives.

It is a sad commentary on the women of my family that we can recite whole wardrobe assemblages from the most minor event in detail, but often forget almost everything else. In fact, the more important the occasion—funeral, wedding, divorce court—the more detailed the wardrobe memory and the dimmer the hope of dredging up anything that happened.)

The school had taken up something called self-paced learning, which meant kids worked independently through a progression of reading folders and math folders. Student monitors oversaw the classes. The teachers stayed in the lounge all day smoking and eating from big Tupperware containers they took turns bringing in—brownies and cupcakes and cookies by the boatload.

I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow “transcend” the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger.

July 2019 books read

  • The Welsh Girl – Peter Ho Davies, 2007
  • The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature – David George Haskell, 2012
  • Outer Order, Inner Calm: Declutter & Organize to Make Room for Happiness – Gretchen Rubin, 2019 – Not much content, but it was pretty good I guess? A little cotton-candy-ish: enjoyable going down but barely remembered afterwards.
  • The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy – Tim Pat Coogan, 2012 – quotes pulled, post tbd
  • Wanderers – Chuck Wending, 2019 – I’ve followed Wendig on Twitter for a while, to get his nutso morning encouragements (like Lin-Manuel Miranda but 5x), so I saw a lot of promotion of this as a doorstop masterpiece, like The Stand, etc. And yeah, it was good and kept me engrossed! I don’t think I’d re-read when there’s so much else out there, but enjoyable.
  • O, Pioneers! – Willa Cather, 1913.

O Pioneers! – Willa Cather, 1913

Great Books selection – we’ve loved every Cather we’ve tried!

I learned about buffalo-pea (Mrs. Bergson tries to make jam of them)

Short quotes

  • “Marie was incapable of being lukewarm about anything that pleased her. She simply did not know how to give a half-hearted response. When she was delighted, she was as likely as not to stand on her tip-toes and clap her hands. If people laughed at her, she laughed with them.”
  • “There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.”
  • Poor Swedish girls marrying men “they are afraid of” because they “think a cross man makes a good manager”
  • Alexandra says about Carl understanding her: “I expect that is the only way one person every really can help another.”
  • Smart young man “raising the new kind of clover. He says the right thing is usually just what everybody don’t do.”
  • “The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it’s exactly the sort you are not.” No-fault divorce would change everything!

Long quotes (so many!)

The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been, had fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow. But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy’s mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.

The winter twilight was fading. The sick man heard his wife strike a match in the kitchen, and the light of a lamp glimmered through the cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shining far away. He turned painfully in his bed and looked at his white hands, with all the work gone out of them. He was ready to give up, he felt. He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find him. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave the tangle to other hands; he thought of his Alexandra’s strong ones.

At one end of the pond was an earthen dam, planted with green willow bushes, and above it a door and a single window were set into the hillside. You would not have seen them at all but for the reflection of the sunlight upon the four panes of window-glass. And that was all you saw. Not a shed, not a corral, not a well, not even a path broken in the curly grass. But for the piece of rusty stovepipe sticking up through the sod, you could have walked over the roof of Ivar’s dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human habitation. Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank, without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done.

Ivar found contentment in the solitude he had sought out for himself. He disliked the litter of human dwellings: the broken food, the bits of broken china, the old wash-boilers and tea-kettles thrown into the sunflower patch. He preferred the cleanness and tidiness of the wild sod. He always said that the badgers had cleaner houses than people, and that when he took a housekeeper her name would be Mrs. Badger. He best expressed his preference for his wild homestead by saying that his Bible seemed truer to him there. If one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at the rough land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot sunlight; if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of the quail, the burr of the locust against that vast silence, one understood what Ivar meant.

You know that my spells come from God, and that I would not harm any living creature. You believe that every one should worship God in the way revealed to him. But that is not the way of this country. The way here is for all to do alike. I am despised because I do not wear shoes, because I do not cut my hair, and because I have visions. At home, in the old country, there were many like me, who had been touched by God, or who had seen things in the graveyard at night and were different afterward. We thought nothing of it, and let them alone. But here, if a man is different in his feet or in his head, they put him in the asylum.

Contrast between brothers and Alexandra:

The Bergson boys, certainly, would have been happier with their uncle Otto, in the bakery shop in Chicago. Like most of their neighbors, they were meant to follow in paths already marked out for them, not to break trails in a new country. A steady job, a few holidays, nothing to think about, and they would have been very happy. It was no fault of theirs that they had been dragged into the wilderness when they were little boys. A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.

Oscar:

But he was as indolent of mind as he was unsparing of his body. His love of routine amounted to a vice. He worked like an insect, always doing the same thing over in the same way, regardless of whether it was best or no. He felt that there was a sovereign virtue in mere bodily toil, and he rather liked to do things in the hardest way. If a field had once been in corn, he couldn’t bear to put it into wheat. He liked to begin his corn-planting at the same time every year, whether the season were backward or forward. He seemed to feel that by his own irreproachable regularity he would clear himself of blame and reprove the weather. When the wheat crop failed, he threshed the straw at a dead loss to demonstrate how little grain there was, and thus prove his case against Providence.

The table was set for company in the dining-room, where highly varnished wood and colored glass and useless pieces of china were conspicuous enough to satisfy the standards of the new prosperity. Alexandra had put herself into the hands of the Hanover furniture dealer, and he had conscientiously done his best to make her dining-room look like his display window. She said frankly that she knew nothing about such things, and she was willing to be governed by the general conviction that the more useless and utterly unusable objects were, the greater their virtue as ornament. That seemed reasonable enough. Since she liked plain things herself, it was all the more necessary to have jars and punchbowls and candlesticks in the company rooms for people who did appreciate them. Her guests liked to see about them these reassuring emblems of prosperity.

Carl:

“Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him.

Remembering Alexandra:

He could remember exactly how she looked when she came over the close-cropped grass, her skirts pinned up, her head bare, a bright tin pail in either hand, and the milky light of the early morning all about her. Even as a boy he used to feel,  when he saw her coming with her free step, her upright head and calm shoulders, that she looked as if she had walked straight out of the morning itself. Since then, when he had happened to see the sun come up in the country or on the water, he had often remembered the young Swedish girl and her milking pails.

Alexandra and Emil’s wild duck:

In this little bay a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening her feathers, disporting herself very happily in the flickering light and shade. They sat for a long time, watching the solitary bird take its pleasure. No living thing had ever seemed to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck. Emil must have felt about it as she did, for afterward, when they were at home, he used sometimes to say, “Sister, you know our duck down there—” Alexandra remembered that day as one of the happiest in her life. Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there, swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight, a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change.

As he rode past the graveyard he looked at the brown hole in the earth where Amedee was to lie, and felt no horror. That, too, was beautiful, that simple doorway into forgetfulness. The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death. It is the old and the poor and the maimed who shrink from that brown hole; its wooers are found among the young, the passionate, the gallant-hearted.

When Frank took up his gun and walked out of the house, he had not the faintest purpose of doing anything with it. He did not believe that he had any real grievance. But it gratified him to feel like a desperate man. He had got into the habit of seeing himself always in desperate straits. His unhappy temperament was like a cage; he could never get out of it; and he felt that other people, his wife in particular, must have put him there. It had never more than dimly occurred to Frank that he made his own unhappiness. Though he took up his gun with dark projects in his mind, he would have been paralyzed with fright had he known that there was the slightest probability of his ever carrying any of them out.

He knew that he was to blame. For three years he had been trying to break her spirit. She had a way of making the best of things that seemed to him a sentimental affectation. He wanted his wife to resent that he was wasting his best years among these stupid and unappreciative people; but she had seemed to find the people quite good enough. If he ever got rich he meant to buy her pretty clothes and take her to California in a Pullman car, and treat her like a lady; but in the mean time he wanted her to feel that life was as ugly and as unjust as he felt it. He had tried to make her life ugly. He had refused to share any of the little pleasures she was so plucky about making for herself. She could be gay about the least thing in the world; but she must be gay!

The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature – David George Haskell, 2012

Nature and Environment group selection. I recommended it because I’d seen reviews for The Song of Trees, his subsequent book which we will probably read in the next few years, but that title was a little too new and a little too close in topic to The Hidden Life of Trees (our 3/2018 selection, which I kinda hated).

It was a small group this month—just three of us—but we all loved this book. Occasionally it’s a little overwritten or purple, but it’s an amazing overall accomplishment. Haskell visits a specific patch of old-growth forest in Tennessee—a meter-diameter circle he calls the mandala—over the course of a year, in all weathers, and writes short essays on what he notices there. (The chapters are just a bit longer that Ross Gay’s delights, and remind me of them in some ways).

I learned about:

  • Lady Julian of Norwich’s hazelnut (not as cool as it sounded because it’s not an actual nut, but still interesting)
  • lichens cover 10% of the earth’s surface (!)
  • it takes time for plants to prepare for winter, which is why early frosts will damage branches that would survive much worse later
  • the hoatzin bird, which I had heard of because the babies have claws, but not that they eat leaves and have a fermentation sack to digest them, like ruminants (and also that makes them slow and lethargic, like sloths and koalas!)
  • and in the same chapter how impressive the rumen’s ability to grow microbes is—“A million million individual bacteria of at least two hundred species swim through every milliliter of rumen fluid”
  • honey locust and osage orange fruit evolved to be eaten by mastodons
  • Jakob Böhme
  • “human sweat is made from blood with all the large molecules removed, like soup passed through a sieve”
  • egg-laying birds build up a medullary bone from calcium in order to break it down when ready to lay
  • pot worms and horsehair or Gordian worms
  • what he calls “sunflecks” (beams on a normally-dark patch of forest floor) are problematic for dimness-adjusted plants—“to cope with the arrival of a sunfleck, plants unplug some of their light-harvesting molecules before they can gather too much energy”
  • cicada tymbals
  • “in most forests [caterpillars] consume more leaves than all other herbivores combined”
  • vulture guts kill cholera and anthrax, unlike mammals or insects!
  • on our descent from shrew-like creatures: “Our ancestors were shrill and vicious, leading a caffeinated existence in dark corridors”

There were a bunch of longer passages I found interesting or delightful. It’s a sign of how much I liked a book when the post ends up super-long with quotes:

Grooves on the surface of stems wick water from the mosses’ wet interiors to their dry tips, like tissue paper dipped in a spill. The miniature stems are felted with water-hugging curls, and their leaves are studded with bumps that create a large surface area for clinging water. The leaves clasp the stem at just the right angle to hold a crescent of water. These trapped drops are interconnected by water trapped in woolly hairs and surface wrinkles. Moss bodies are swampy river deltas miniaturized and turned vertical. Water creeps from slough to lagoon to rivulet, wrapping its home in moisture. And when the rains stop, the moss has captured five to ten times as much water on its body as it contains within its cells. Moss carries a botanical camel’s hump as it trudges through long stretches of aridity.

A bravura description of observing a snail through a hand lens culminates in this:

I peek over the lens and suddenly it is all gone. The change of scale is a wrench into a different world; the fungus is invisible, the snail is a valueless detail in a world dominated by bigger things. I return to the lens world and rediscover the vivid tentacles, the snail’s black-and-silver grace. The hand lens helps me harvest the world’s beauty, throwing my eyes wide open. Layers of delight are hidden by the limitations of everyday human vision.

This perfectly captures the sonic personality of the red-eyed vireo:

The vireo questions the forest, then answers over and over, lecturing into the midday heat when other birds have retired from the podium. As befits his professorial temperament, the vireo seldom descends from the heights of the canopy and is usually detected only through his bright, repetitious song.

Philosophers and theologians love paradoxes, regarding them as honorable signposts to important truths. Scientists take a dimmer view, having learned from experience that “paradox” is a polite way of saying that we are missing something obvious. The resolution of the paradox will likely show one of our “self-evident” assumptions to be embarrassingly false. Perhaps this is not so far removed from a philosophical paradox. The difference lies in the depth of the false assumption: relatively shallow and easily uprooted in science, deep and hard to dislodge in philosophy.

The tree’s answer to the wind’s force echoes the Taoism of the lichens: don’t fight back, don’t resist; bend and roll, let your adversary exhaust herself against your yielding. The analogy is reversed, for the Taoists drew their inspiration from nature, so “the Tao is Tree-ist” is more accurate.

Dehydration is the ticks’ main foe during their quests. Ticks sit in exposed locations for days, even weeks, waiting for their hosts. The wind whisks away moisture, and the sun bakes their small leathery bodies. Wandering off in search of a drink would interrupt the quest and, in many habitats, there is no water to be found. So, ticks have evolved the ability to drink water from air. They secrete a special saliva into a groove near the mouth and, like the silica gel that we use to dry our electronic gadgets, their saliva draws water out of the air.

Boy, those are some tough little organisms! Plus, they have to get rid of all the excess water they get in their gigantic blood meals, so they spit it back into their host, which explains why they can transmit so many diseases… yuck but wow.

When mushroom spores germinate, they produce baby filaments that grow through the dead leaves, seeking mates. Filaments exist not as male or female but as different “mating types.” These mating types all look the same to us, but fungi use chemical signals to sense the differences and will reproduce only with a mating type that differs from their own. Some fungus species have just two mating types, but others have thousands.
When two filaments meet, they begin an elaborate pas de deux, coordinating their dance with alternating chemical whispers. The opening sequence involves one filament’s sending out a chemical that is unique to its own mating type. If its partner is of the same type, the dance ends and the filaments ignore each other.

Terrestrial vertebrates whose lives require speed have reworked the fishes’ ancient architecture at least three separate times. The ancestors of mammals and two lines of dinosaurs each came up with modifications to the sprawling inefficiency of the fish-on-land. Legs moved in and under, putting the animal’s weight directly over its feet. This made it easier to balance and, therefore, to run without toppling over. The spine’s side-sway was replaced with an up-and-down flex. Mammals are masters of this flex and can reach forward with both forelegs while pushing off with the combined power of both hind legs, then curve the spine down and stuff their forelegs back while swinging the hind legs forward to plant them ready for the next push-off. No salamander can match the bounding gait of a mouse, let alone the enormous leaps of a running cheetah. This newfangled spine has, ironically, returned to the ocean to compete with the old fishy spine. Whales move their tails up and down, rather than side to side, revealing their terrestrial ancestry.

The mandala’s community emerges from the give-and-take of thousands of species; a golf course’s ecological community is a monoculture of alien grass that emerged from the mind of just one species. The mandala’s visual field is dominated by sex and death: dead leaves, pollen, birdsong. The golf course has been sanitized by the puritan life-police. The golf green is fed and trimmed to keep it in perpetual childhood: no dead stems, no flowers or seed heads. Sex and death are erased.

Feeding birds learn to associate ragged holes in leaves with the presence of caterpillars. Because leaves remain damaged long after caterpillars have moved on, birds continually update their feeding patterns based on their recent experience of feeding in particular tree species. Caterpillars that excise obvious holes in leaves, then linger next to these holes, will quickly attract the attention of these smart birds. Therefore, only well-defended caterpillars can afford to be messy eaters. Caterpillars that are more vulnerable to birds, such as those with few hairs, fastidiously pare leaves down from the edges, leaving no telltale holes, maintaining the silhouette of an entire leaf.

The wear of vegetation, grit, and wind will grind the feathers down, and by midsummer feathers will be ragged-edged and slim. Hooded warblers turn this aging process to their advantage, however. The birds abrade themselves into their breeding costume. Their crowns and throats are muted yellow now, but as the outer edges of these feathers wear away, the black of the breeding plumage is revealed below. This is a thrifty strategy; most other bird species acquire their breeding colors by growing new feathers, each one of which is made from costly protein.

Our living on land further distances us from the rest of the animal kingdom, augmenting the handicap of gigantism. Nine-tenths of the animal kingdom’s main branches are found in water—in the sea, in freshwater streams and lakes, in watery crevices within the soil, or in the moist interiors of other animals. The desiccated exceptions include the terrestrial arthropods (mostly insects) and the minority of vertebrates that have hauled themselves onto land (most vertebrate species are fish, so terrestrial life is unusual even for a vertebrate). Evolution has plucked us out of our wet burrows, leaving our kin behind. Our world is therefore populated by extremists, giving us a distorted view of life’s true diversity.

It is with this help that I have explored the forest mandala. I hope this book will encourage others to start their own explorations. I was fortunate to be able to watch a small patch of old-growth forest. This is a rare privilege; old growth covers less than one-half of a percent of the land in the eastern United States. But old forests are not the only windows into the ecology of the world. Indeed, one outcome of my watch at the mandala has been to realize that we create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding “pristine” places that will bring wonder to us. Gardens, urban trees, the sky, fields, young forests, a flock of suburban sparrows: these are all mandalas. Watching them closely is as fruitful as watching an ancient woodland.

We wished there had been photos in the book, but here they are!

The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch, 1970

Irish Writers selection, but alas I missed the discussion. Once again didn’t have post-it flags with me for most of it, and it’s a long book—too long by half and soap-opera-ish, but I loved the beginning. What struck me the most was Charles Arrowby’s love of food and focus on his little meals and treats, which I 90% identify with (not 100% because I get synergistic pleasure from reading while eating):

I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.

It was early evident to me that my uncle was more loved and fortunate than my father. How does a child perceive such things, or rather how is it that they are so perceptible, so obvious, to a child, who perhaps, like a dog, reads signs which have become invisible amid the conventions of the grown-up world, and are thus overlooked in the adult campaign of deceit?

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

I also took up acting … because I wanted to have fun myself and to procure some for my father. I doubt if he possessed the concept, or ever managed to acquire it later under my eager guidance. In having fun myself I have throughout my life been fairly consistently successful.

This interesting Paris Review essay comments that Arrowby’s food is not as good as it sounds to him, indicative of his self-deception about his character, but also that Iris Murdoch herself loved and ate similar dishes.

The Welsh Girl – Peter Ho Davies, 2007

Second Monday book group selection. I didn’t care for it particularly—pedestrian writing, tired WWII setting, ill-fitting parts, female protagonist who’s entirely wrapped up in the men around her—but others very much did.

Things I looked up: bartender “sets the shaker out for those who want to salt their drinks to melt the foam” (adding salt increases the head on a flat beer, according to what I’m seeing, but there are lots of other interesting reasons for this old tradition); the Ladies of Llangollen (although again, the context seems slightly off, describing them as having popularized hiking, when they just liked walking near their home); the expressions, as quoted in the book, “nargois” and “uckavie,” which are both kinda wrong; raddle, sheep paint to see which ewes have been bred, from the same root (red ochre/rouge) as “raddled.”

The most interesting theme of the book to me is connection to place and thoughts about nationalism, and now I see that almost all the quotes I pulled relate to it. A Welsh word, cynefin, comes up again and again. It’s defined as “the flock’s sense of place, of territory,” but it turns out it’s also now a framework for decision making, covering five “domains” of problems (disorder, obvious, complicated, complex and chaotic)—I’m interested in following that up. First, short quote: “she sees his nationalism for what it is, selfishness, and more than that, a kind of licensed misanthropy.”

It comes to her now that cynefin is the essential nationalism, not her father’s windy brand, but this secret bond between mothers and daughters, described by a word the English have no equivalent for.

And suddenly it felt not only possible but right to not be German or British, to escape all those debts and duties, the shackles of nationalism. That’s what he had glimpsed at the pub, what had sent him into that fit of laughter [he thought he was being treated rudely because he was Jewish, but it was because the Welsh bartender read him as English]. The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimization, it seemed at once such pure freedom to be without a country.

And one more quote I found interesting, but which to me also reveals a trace of sexism or gender essentialism that bothered me throughout:

Their dishonor, men’s dishonor, can always be redeemed, defeat followed by victory, capture by escape, escape by capture. Up hill and down dale. But women are dishonored once and for all. Their only hope is to hide it. To keep it to themselves.

No longer about the book but about my process: this post took about an hour to write, about 3/4 the pleasurable research and transcription and 1/4 the more laborious and active ordering and writing context. The quotes give me the most benefit as the primary reader of my own blog, but the shaping of the post (even though I don’t do it as thoroughly as I could, partially because it’s not really for an audience) is better for me as a writer. I’m dwelling on this because I have such a huge backlog and I’m trying to figure out if catching up is a realistic goal. I think I’ll focus on doing this month’s books quasi real-time first…

June 2019 books read

  • Warlight – Michael Ondjaate, 2018. Quotes pulled, review tbd.
  • Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming – Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, 2019.
  • All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir – Erin Lee Carr, 2019. I loved David Carr (enjoyed Night of the Gun, re-found him through Ta-Nehisi Coates), and I actually stayed up way too late to finish this, which I hardly ever do any more, but ultimately I didn’t think it was great despite being compelling. This came across my radar because “Always Love” by Nada Surf (my brother’s band) is the soundtrack for the book trailer, so I was super-excited about it—and I guess Carr was a fan too, because they feature in “Things I Learned from David Carr: A List”: “Always love (See band: Nada Surf).” I’m sorry I didn’t like the book more—it had a lot of potential but needed more structure and more depth. I am interested in Carr’s documentary work now!
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain, 1884. Re-read (3rd time maybe?) Quotes pulled, review tbd.
  • Sabriel – Garth Nix, 1995. I can’t remember if I read the whole thing when I first picked it up about two decades ago—Mogget, a white cat with a red collar who turns out to be a bound magic being, stuck in my memory, but after the first hundred pages the rest was unfamiliar. A great fantasy which has deservedly become a classic, and now I’m in the midst of the second volume of the trilogy.

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming – Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, 2010

Nature and Environment selection. We had a good discussion about it—generally we thought that it was somewhat of a slog to read because the details were inherently dry, but that it explained a lot about the sources of the media and public opinion problems we have with scientific information.

I didn’t realize how early the dangers of tobacco were recognized: “German scientists had shown in the 1930s that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer, and the Nazi government had run major antismoking campaigns; Adolf Hitler forbade smoking in his presence. However, the German scientific work was tainted by its Nazi associations, and to some extent ignored, if not actually suppressed, after the war.” Or that the discovery of ozone depletion by CFCs was accidental—the original concern was that super-sonic flights would disrupt the troposphere.

Here’s an early ID of the “just asking questions” strategy: “you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions, even if you actually knew the answers and they didn’t help your case.” The authors highlight the problem with the Fairness Doctrine (1949) and journalistic balance: “Balance was interpreted, it seems, as giving equal weight to both sides, rather than giving accurate weight to both sides.” And the consistent pattern of “scientific claims” (or retractions/corrections) “being published in scientific journals, where only scientists would read them, but unscientific claims were being published in the mass media.”

I didn’t know how unbalanced the money was! “The American Cancer Society and American Lung Association in 1981 devoted just under $300,000 to research; that same year, the tobacco industry gave $6.3 million.”

The biggest shocker for me was how much distortion was driven by just a couple of men (Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer), and the personal reasons (grudges, slighted feelings, rabid anti-communism, and of course greed and ego) that primed them to lead the charge against public heath and safety. Zinger on Singer: “For a man who worried enormously about scientific uncertainties, he was remarkably untroubled by economic ones.” And “his skepticism also gained him a huge amount of attention—far more than most scientists ever get for their research, quietly published in academic journals. So if scientists should be discredited for getting money for their research, or for enjoying the limelight, the same argument would logically apply to Singer.”

I didn’t know that “since nuclear weapon cores decay over time and lose their explosive capacity, any agreement to stop building new ones was, in effect, an agreement to disarm.” Or that the tobacco industry investigated avoiding the second-hand smoke issue by making the smoke “simply less visible“!

Useful term I’ve learned before but forgotten: hormesis (low dose good, high dose bad), but in a weird context: critics claiming that maybe small amounts of second-hand smoke or radiation were good.

Well-researched non-fiction books typically collect interesting quotes from other sources that are often the highlights for me—even from books I’ve read myself. For example, I’m pretty sure I’ve read C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves—if not, I want to—but don’t remember this great analysis of conspiracy-theory argument: “the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.” Similarly, a funny anecdote about Lord Harris, the architect of Thatcherism who venerated Adam Smith: “he declined a coat of arms on the grounds that the invisible hand could not be blazoned.” And Isaiah Berlin saying “liberty for wolves means death to lambs.” (Given that he’s the hedgehog/fox person, I wonder how many other mammal analogies he made?)

Describing the global warming that’s already committed: “‘sentenced’ might be a better word.” Arguments against trying to fix climate change: “It was equivalent to arguing that medical researchers shouldn’t try to cure cancer, because that would be too expensive, and in any case people in the future might decide that dying from cancer is not so bad.”

I’m looking forward to reading Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet; the same philosophical contrast is described here as that between Cornucopians and neo-Malthusians.

Free market fundamentalism:

 The idea that free markets produce optimum allocation of resources depends on participants having perfect information. But one of several ironies of our story is that our protagonists did everything in their power to ensure that the American people did not have good (much less perfect) information on crucial issues. Our protagonists, while ostensibly defending free markets, distorted the marketplace of ideas in the service of political goals and commercial interests. The American belief in fairness and the importance of hearing “both sides” was used and abused by people who didn’t want to admit the truth about the impacts of industrial capitalism.

One leading scientist said about the 1983 report, Changing Climate, “We knew it was garbage, so we just ignored it.” Unfortunately, garbage doesn’t just go away. Someone has to deal with it, and that someone is all of us: journalists who report scientific findings, specialist professional bodies who represent the scientific fields, and all of us as citizens.

It especially does not make sense to dismiss the consensus of experts if the dissenter is superannuated, disgruntled, a habitual contrarian, or in the pay of a group with an obvious ideological agenda or vested political or economic interest. Or in some cases, all of the above.

Or an opinionated amateur!