Nature in a can: Tenn Williams and Thom Pynchon

In Night of the Iguana, a play first performed in 1961, but evolved out of a short story over a period of about fifteen years, Tennessee Williams expressed anger at our species for ruining our planet.  

In the movie of 1962, starring Richard Burton as a disgraced priest, his character, at the end of his rope, spits out his frustration at "Man's Inhumanity to God."

The pain that we caused Him. We poisoned his atmosphere, slaughtered his creatures of the wild, polluted his rivers. We've even taken His noblest creation, man himself, and brainwashed him into becoming our product, not God's. Packed, stacked, and canned.

Fascinating that Williams chose that metaphor to describe our destructive actions. Occurs that this is one industrial practice that has become a word in our language. "Canned" refers not just to fish, but to music, too, and thought — the fact has become a verb. Become a past tense. 

Thought of this when just yesterday I came across a passage in Thomas Pynchon's pretty hilarious recent novel, Inherent Vice, on pretty much the same theme, in a completely different style:

Let me set it up. Our anti-hero is a mediocre long-haired private eye named Doc living in Southern California in the l970's. He isn't afraid and might have Sam Spade potential if he would just stop smoking so much weed. He like Spade of course is after a complicated woman who might have a thing for him but is trouble. But she's hard to find, and meanwhile he's hanging out with an attorney friend who happens to like a particular soap opera. An ad for a brand of canned tuna comes on the televison. Our anti-hero's buddy, Sauncho, who's a little obessive but not stupid, kind of flips out. Doc happens to be in the bathroom pissing. He hears Sauncho screaming and comes out. 

"Everything cool?" [Doc says]

"Ahh…" [Sauncho] collapses on the couch. "Charlie the fucking Tuna, man." 

"What?"

"It's all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, so desperate to show he's got good tase, except he's also dyslexic so he gets "good taste" mixed up with "taste good," but it's worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like obsessive death wish! Yes! He wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumper capitalism, they won't be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it…"

"Saunch, wow, that's…"

"It's been on my mind. And another thing. Why is there Chicken of the Sea, but no Tuna of the Farm?" 

Might help to see the character from the commercial:

Charlie_tuna1

Pynchon's novel, by far his funniest in my experience of his work, will be on a few movie screens this year, in a film directed by P.T. Anderson, featuring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, and Benicio del Toro, who might deliver the rant above. Could be fun. 

Inherent-Vice-Del Toro

Why are Americans so extreme?

Heather Havrilesky wants to know what it is about extreme fitness that fascinates Americans:

A blond woman in a hot pink spandex tank hoists a sledgehammer over her shoulders, then slams it down with a dull thud onto the big tire in front of her. Beside her, another woman swings her sledgehammer even higher, grimacing and groaning with the effort. Their faces are bright red and dripping with sweat. It’s 9:45 a.m. and 85 degrees, and the sun is glinting off the asphalt of the strip-mall parking lot where the women are laboring."Swing it higher, above your shoulder!” a woman bellows at them, even as they gasp each time they raise their hammers, each time they let them fall.

Scary thing is, Havrilesky isn't making this up:

Pinksledgehammer

As one woman pauses to wipe the sweat from her eyes, she spots me studying her. I’ve been trying not to stare, but it’s a strange spectacle, this John Henry workout of theirs, hammering away in front of a women’s fitness center, just a few doors down from a smoke shop and a hair salon. It looks exhausting, and more than a little dangerous. (What if a sledgehammer slips and flies from one woman’s hands, braining her companion?) It also looks fruitless. Why not join a roofing crew for a few hours instead? Surely, there’s a tunnel somewhere that needs digging, or at least some hot tar that needs pouring.

Love it when a writer can get sarcastic in the sober, sedate NYTimes. But she has an idea — Puritanism, of course. OF COURSE!

The whole notion of pushing your physical limits — popularized by early Nike ads, Navy SEAL mythos and Lance Armstrong’s cult of personality — has attained a religiosity that’s as passionate as it is pervasive. The “extreme” version of anything is now widely assumed to be an improvement on the original rather than a perverse amplification of it. And as with most of sports culture, there is no gray area. You win or you lose. You leave it all on the floor or you shamefully skulk off the floor with extra gas in your tank.

But our new religion has more than a little in common with the religions that brought our ancestors to America in the first place. Like the idealists and extremists who founded this country, the modern zealots of exercise turn their backs on the indulgences of our culture, seeking solace in self-abnegation and suffering. “This is the route to a better life,” they tell us, gesturing at their sledgehammers and their kettlebells, their military drills and their dramatic re-enactments of hard labor. And in these uncertain times, it doesn’t sound so bad to be prepared for some coming disaster — or even for an actual job doing hard labor, if our empire ever falls.

She's probably right. Here's another example that freaked me out — a laconic extreme hiker, who did (not walked) the John Muir Trail this summer when he had a few days to spare — and who now intends to through-hike the Pacific Crest Trail….in winter. 

Justin Licheter writes:

The plan is to try to thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail this win­ter. By thru-hike, I mean use what­ever human pow­ered means of travel is best for the con­di­tions. This will range between, hik­ing, snow­shoe­ing, and back­coun­try ski­ing, and stay­ing along thePCT cor­ri­dor. We are call­ing it the PCT cor­ri­dor because due to con­di­tions and snow cover it will be vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to stay on the trail at all times. Often the trail tread will be buried under 15 feet of snow.

Well, my research indicates that the winter is likely to be dry for the next couple of months. Perhaps Lichter and his companion will have finished before the big snows hit the Sierras. 

NASA vs. NOAA: battle of the winter forecast charts

The headline exaggerates, of course, but doesn't in fact mislead. Here's a graph of a NASA climate model, depicting a forecast of precipitation in the U.S. for the next winter. Colors tell the story. 

NASA_ensemble_prate_us_season2

In truth, it's a little hard to decode the anomalies chart, but this turns out to be just one of eight climate models forecasts. The trouble is that seven of those eight, as Eric Holthaus mentioned this morning on Twitter, depict little or no rain for the winter three months in California. 

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Troubling. Am trying to reserach, verify, discuss for a story. But also striking is this contrast with the NOAA forecast. 

   Precipforecast

 

It's a bit different isn't it? At least for SoCal. Much better chance of rain. 

 

El Niño 2014 October forecast: Glass little over half full

NOAA released its October outlook for our winter, based on ocean temperatures, and continues to find a 60-65% chance of the appearance of the boychick.

Here's my fave set of graphs today, from another site, and here's my fave single graph:

SSTsOctober2014

These are tempeartures taken across a section of the equatorial Pacific, the vast belt across the widest girth of the planet, that the experts consider central for the formation of El Niño.

As you can see, this year is in the red — meaning warmer than usual ocean conditions, which harbingers a warm winter with possibility of wetness for California — but only by a tiny bit. 

It's especially small compared to big El Niño years such as 2010 and of course the epochal 1997-1998, a year of catastrophic weather that literally changed the world. Note too that the forecast was well in the red for 2012, a predicted El Niño, which did not develop and left us in drought. 

On the other hand, if you look at the depth of blue/cooling over recent years in this indicative region, you see a steadily diminishing. This was the point The New York Times made a month or so ago in a story with a conclusion that struck me as anomalously insightful. 

“Even if we don’t see an El Niño, it doesn’t mean California is going to be dry,” [the climatologist] said.

In fact, Mr. Halpert and Mr. Pierce said, one bright spot in the long-range outlook is that with the odds favoring at least a weak El Niño, the opposite weather phenomenon, known as La Niña, is less likely. La Niña occurs when Pacific water is colder than normal, and the result for California could be very dry weather.

“At least when you have a weak El Niño it’s not a La Niña,” Mr. Pierce said. “So that’s some limited good news.”

Impressive to me when a highly changeable news story remains relevant well after the pub date.

The American pine-nut vs. climate change: NPR

A week or so ago had the privilege of living in the western fringe of the pine-nut forest of the Southwest and became fascinated with these super-hardy and super-productive trees, upon which so much life in this region depends. (Not so much human life these days, true, but once upon a time.) 

So today I couldn't help but perk up when I heard Dan Charles of All Things Considered report on pine nuts today, and reveal that a great deal of commercial pine nuts probably are smuggled out of Siberia, of all places, to China, because the pine nut trees in Russia are enormous and hugely productive. 

Once a year, the pine trees drop these cones onto the forest floor, and entire Siberian villages move into the forest for a month or so to gather them. "It doesn't take any special equipment," Sharashkin says. "You go into the forest, you pick up the cones from the ground, put them into burlap bags, and then transport them to wherever they are being crushed to extract the nuts."

Charles also talks to a couple of American experts, who fear that climate change and insect attacks are taking a bite out of pinyon pine forests today. He quotes Penny Frazier as stating that in twenty years we've lost "half that ecosystem" here in the U.S. (It's a little unclear if she's talking about the Missouri region in which she lives, or all of the American Southwest.)

But the good news is that she and at least one other pine-nut admirers have started a mail-order business to sell good ol' American pine nuts gathered from the wild. 

It's a worthy idea. Will check out and report back. Might want to go looking myself: a local blogger who spent a lot of time scavening as a kid reports on what it's like to try as a family in Frazier Park. 

Pinenutcone

Sounds kind of fun actually. At least with boys eager to climb trees. 

Puzzles and mystery: How they differ

Sometimes the computational powers that be conspire to foil a post. That yet-to-be-posted item might have been trail inspirational: this one I found thought-inspiring. 

From a medical blogger flying under a banner headline: Embrace the Mystery

This distinction between puzzles and mysteries is described in a powerful new book by Ian Leslie: Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It.  As Leslie tells it, puzzles and mysteries have radically different characteristics. Puzzles are orderly and have definite answers; once we’ve solved a puzzle, we’ve reached the end of our inquiry and our curiosity. Mysteries, on the other hand, offer many possibilities for exploration and experience. They offer something richer and far more relevant to the messy reality of actually living in the world. Mysteries can’t be answered definitively; they keep us poised in ambiguity and force us to create our way forward. Mysteries offer us multiple paths to success.

Whole mini-essay makes one think about our scientific approach to medical research. Worth a look. 

Students vs. obesity in Santa Paula CA

Let me belatedly post the main story I have been at work on for the last six months or so, as part of a Reporting on Health fellowship, about obesity — and those battling it — in Santa Paula. 

Turns out, appropriately, it's students and young adults who have taken up the fight. Not to mention of course doctors, educators, health care agencies, and countless others I didn't have a chance to quote. 

I confess to liking my lede, for rhetorical reasons:

Americans today are an exceptional people: We are the heaviest in the world. Now the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that as we supersize ourselves we are skyrocketing our risk of developing diabetes.

Especially at risk are children in Ventura County.

Missionhealthycover

For more, please see Mission Healthy.

People — including the funders, who want it numerically — ask for some measure of impact. Wonder if I've heard much of a reaction. Well, a number of friends have told me that they thought it was good, they liked it, even that it actually had something of a happy ending, but that's all I've heard.

Well, that's enough. "Respect of my peers," as they say in sports. 

Note: a smart and faithful reader writes in to remind me that my math skills have gone to hell in the last forty years. So I'm going to keep my "metric" simple: compliments must outweigh reasonable complaints about errors re: any given story by 10-to-1 for it to be any good. This means — practically speaking — a story can't be good unless it is essentially error-less. 

That's a high standard, and that's why editors and time are required for good journalism. 

(Er, not that anybody asked…) 

Eliza Gilkyson: I’m so worried about everything

Eliza Gilkyson is a folk singer, an unexpectedly good guitar player, and a wit. For years she's been writing about nuclear war, environmental and economic collapse, and has had the nerve to issue whole records on these themes (notably the excellent song "The Party's Over"). 

But she also writes songs about herself, of course, and on her latest tour she's been in an unexpectedly sunny mood, kidding herself with the tagline:

I'm so worried about everything

Here she is singing the song ("Eliza Jane") earlier this year at a house concert. It's great to see an artist you love find a way to accept herself, doubts and fears and all. It's often said environmentalists have no sense of humor, but in my experience — reading Muir and Abbey and Thoreau — it's just not true. Not at all. 

Add Eliza Jane Gilkyson to the list.

What if we honored solitude as we honor group thinking?

Apologize for not catching up to all that is going on with climate environmental news. Yes, even bloggers — perhaps especially bloggers — can suffer from environmental overwhelm. 

In response, perhaps, have been reading into solitude lately, notably an appropriately thoughtful book called The Republic of Noise, an award-winning book from 2012, that looks at solitude and how it is being eroded by society today. The writer, Diana Senechal, is a teacher, and takes issue with her profession's incessant focus on group activities and thought. 

To put it plainly: as long as schools emphasize working in groups, getting along with group members, completing tasks together, and networking online, students will not learn to put forth ideas as ideas; they will not learn to stand apart from the group, either in public or in private. Relationships and products will take priority over clear and independent thought. 

But she also has a sense of humor, and include what I thought was a pretty funny description of what might happen if education did honor solitude the way it honors group activities. To wit:

…there is the danger that solitude might become a fad: that schools might embrace some sort of solutide movement and mention solitude at every turn. This could be worse than a neglect…schools would start having "solitude time," but it would be prescribed solitude: students would have to write in journals and perhaps even "share their solitudes" with the class afterward. There would be a forced sanctity to it: "Shh! The children are in solitude!" There would be solitude charts on the wall. Professional development sessions on "strategies" for "managing solitude" would be conducted. Administrators would go on "solitude appreciation retreats" where they would discuss solitude in small groups and give each other a "Woot!" at the end. 

Well, okay, yes, that wouldn't be good, would it? Perhaps those of us who really like solitude should appreciate how society doesn't, and accept our semi-outcast status in good grace. 

Republicofnoise

The Republic of Noise