View from the Loft

Kindle report

[Addendum: I forgot to include a caveat about free e-books, which I've now added below.]

So I've had my Kindle for a few weeks now. How do I like it? I love it!

Many objections to e-readers have been made by book-lovers, and to some extent, I can sympathize with them. As I said previously, I had all the same thoughts about the nefariousness of e-readers and the superiority of books.

But I find that I really love my Kindle.

It's very easy to read, with clear, crisp print and no glare. I have read it in direct sunlight with no difficulty whatever. Moreover, with the case I bought for it, containing the built-in light, I've finished a book before dawn while my spouse was still asleep beside me. Yes, one can buy book lights and do the same thing--I realize that. I'm just happy with Kindle for providing an option here, since the screen is not backlit. I didn't want a backlit screen, after all, so this is a happy solution. The case, too, offers some protection against everyday knocks, slings, and arrows. I find it aesthetically pleasing as well, Kindle and case both.

The battery lasts for up to a month if you (a) don't leave the WiFi connection on; (b) don't use the Kindle to play games; and/or (c) don't use the light a lot (it runs off the Kindle battery).  

The Kindle is well designed, with ease of navigation and the opportunity to organize your library in collections. You can highlight passages in books, bookmark pages, and write notes about whatever you're reading right on the device, with the ability to call up all these notations easily when you need to, say for a book discussion.

I also downloaded the PC version of Kindle, so that I can read on the computer if it so suits me. All of the books I've purchased or downloaded for free are available on my computer with no extra effort on my part--Amazon handles all that. You can get Kindle for your Blackberry or iPhone or iPad, too.

While I haven't done it, one can also get blogs, newspapers, and magazines via Kindle.

I like being able to get a book instantaneously. My fears of reckless spending have not materialized; in fact, I've spent more at Amazon recently on CDs than on books. I like that I can use the Kindle itself to shop the Kindle store at Amazon. Very handy if, say, you're traveling and don't have access to your computer.

I had a great time browsing the Kindle store's many free offerings of books copyrighted before 1923.  I downloaded a couple of dozen or more, including a cookery book (as they were called) dating back to 1600s England and a book on cooking and dining in ancient Rome. While I wouldn't buy a Kindle version of a cookbook I planned to use regularly, these old cookbooks are perfect for leisurely reads that give one a flavor of the period and of attitudes toward food therein. I happen to love old recipe books, and now I have a slew of them on my Kindle.

I also downloaded (free) three early Virginia Woolf novels that I've always meant to read but never have. Right now I'm part way through The Voyage Out, and loving it. Yes, I could possibly have found it at my local library and borrowed it, but this way I own it (at least until TEOTWAWKI!), along with Jacob's Room and Night and Day. 

The free offerings at the Kindle store are amazing in their variety: everything from 1800s travel diaries to diseases of the horse hoof, beekeeping, and surgical techniques. I have a hard time resisting some of the travel journals, especially those having to do with severely cold climates. Why? Heck if I know. I just had to have Shackleton's memoir of his ill-fated Antarctica venure, though, as well as something called Tenting in Siberia, written just after the Civil War.

I should warn you, though, that not all free e-books are created equal. At Project Gutenberg, about which I've written before, a serious attempt is made to produce an electronic book as free from error as possible. That's not true everywhere. Customer reviews on Amazon.com sometimes complain of error-riddled e-books. And in my own case, there are problems with The Voyage Out. For whatever reason, lines of poetry included in the print version are missing from the electronic version. If something like that makes you crazy, you'd do well to obtain a different version than what's offered in the selection of free Kindle books on the Amazon site.

Another thing: Kindle editions are often (not always) cheaper than print editions. Yep, I'm cheap!

Most of all I love having a little library that's so compact that I can take it anywhere with me and choose from a number of offerings to suit whatever mood I'm in. When Jim and I went to Grand Island, New York last week, it was great to have a choice without lugging a lot of books with me. Or I put my Kindle on my nightstand and there it is, ready for me when I wake up in the middle of the night, whether I want to read a mystery or P.G. Wodehouse or Origin of Species (which I also got for free).

I can't speak for other e-readers, but the Kindle is terrific and available at a very reasonable cost, so if you've ever considered an e-reader, do look into it. You don't have to give up books. But you just might find that e-readers have their own compelling attributes.

Kindle

My status update on Facebook read, "I can't believe I'm thinking of buying a Kindle ..." Surprisingly (to me, anyway), it generated several comments. One suggested a different e-reader; a couple of people waxed enthusiastic and assured me that I'd love it; and a couple of people disliked the whole idea and remain loyal to actual books.

I know how those loyalists feel, because I was one of them. I never thought I'd buy an e-reader. The smell, the heft, the feel of a book, the turning of pages--these are things I've always loved. The physical aspects of books, not just the contents. And yet.

I like to think that I am capable of changing my mind and not staying with a position out of stubbornness alone. I'm not accusing the Kindle detractors of that at all, just saying that I myself am a stubborn person and could see myself falling into that trap. But last year we bought some new furniture, and two of the pieces were leather--this after a lifetime of declaring that I hated leather furniture and would never have any in my home. What can I say? The chair and loveseat are comfortable, simple, and go with the sofa. I like them. I changed my mind.

And so it is with the Kindle. When a friend of mine got one, I was surprised, because, like me, she's a book person. Even more of a book person than I am. I had a visceral reaction against the whole idea of e-books and e-readers and said, "I can't see myself ever owning a Kindle."

But recently I began thinking about the whole thing. In a discussion about e-readers, another friend made the point that he had a lot of books whose pages were turning yellow and brittle, with bindings that were coming apart. He was thinking about it (by now he probably has an e-reader of some sort).

Thanks to various ads on the Internet, and on Amazon.com itself, I discovered how modestly priced the Kindle is. Hmmm. I began paying a bit of attention to these newfangled devices.

Then yet another friend told me how much he loved ordering books that were delivered immediately to his newly purchased iPad.

I started saying things like, "My big worry would be how easy it is to order a book on impulse." In other words, I had already somehow gotten beyond out-and-out opposition to the idea of owning an e-reader. I was now considering the implications and wondering if this gadget was something I wanted after all.

My reasons for purchasing an e-reader are many. First and foremost, I have run out of room for storing books. My shelves have two and three rows of paperbacks and still not enough room. Boxes of books sit in the basement. Yes, I do need to take some of them to the used bookstore, an extra errand I really don't need or want.

Second, I can get free or very cheap books that have no copyright. We're talking Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Samuel Clemens and the like. In my little Kindle, weighing 8.7 ounces, I can have, say, War and Peace without the bulk.

If I'm on vacation, I don't have to lug several different books with me so that I can choose one according to my mood. They'll all be right there on my Kindle.

I considered buying an e-reader that was backlit for nighttime reading, but after reading the reviews, I knew I really wanted the Kindle, on which the screen is not backlit. Luckily, there's an accessory that solves the problem: a case with a built in reading light that runs off the Kindle's battery. If insomnia strikes on a camping trip, I can read without disturbing my spouse.

And yes, there's the whole instant gratification thing: the next book in a series can be in my hands in 60 seconds. That mystery novel that's been calling to me can arrive almost instantly. (Of course, that could start to cost me an unjustifiable amount of money, too!)

It's a near impossibility that I will never purchase another print book. Not all books are available for Kindle, but besides that, it seems to me that some books cry out for a print version. But I'm looking forward to my Kindle. I'll let you know how it works out for me.

What I've been reading

I've been on a reading binge for the past couple of weeks. Perhaps it was receiving books as Christmas gifts that got me going, because although in the past I was a voracious reader, for the past two or three years I haven't been up to my old tricks of having two or three books going at once, or spending whole afternoons just reading. I blame it on the Internet--reading the short pieces on blogs rather than focusing on lengthier items.

For book group we read Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a book that I highly recommend. Not only is it a riveting story of an amazing, courageous woman, but it makes an interesting argument about Islamic immigrant communities. The author, who is now an atheist, was raised as a Muslim, and her experiences growing up and as a young adult are often harrowing to read about. When she arrived in The Netherlands, her newfound liberty resulted in a freedom to learn, to work, to be, that, as a woman and a Muslim, she would never have found in her homeland. She argues--and, as a member of Parliament, argued--that Dutch policies have worked against the assimilation of Islamic immigrants, who tend to live in enclaves and maintain a way of life that in highly injurious to women and girls. Females in traditional Islamic societies are not full citizens nor, really, full human beings. They're at the mercy of their male relatives: they can be married without being present at all; they can be beaten by their husbands without recourse; they can be killed outright if they've been found guilty of offending male honor. Ayaan Hirsi Ali seems to have been born with a questioning mind, because she was never, even as a young child, content with the pat answers she was given concerning the place and duty of women.

Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America is a book written for people like me who are fed up with cheerleading, ostrich-like behavior, and the idea that if we just clap harder, all will be merry and bright. Of particular interest to me was Ehrenreich's investigation into the roots of the positive thinking movement, especially as a reaction to the grim Calvinistic tradition that ruled American spiritual life for too long. Her diagnosis of breast cancer brought her into initimate contact with the line of thinking that getting rid of "negativity" is necessary if one wants to survive cancer. This is just so much bullshit, as no study has ever proven that positive thinking affects cancer outcomes. I've had it up to here with Oprah Winfrey, The Secret, and all that magical thinking. I'm not saying that optimism is a bad thing--far from it--and I'm not saying that being dour and pessimistic is the only way to be realistic. What I do believe is that wishful thinking doesn't get anybody anywhere, and that taken to extremes, the gospel of positive thinking can make people like cancer victims feel it's their own fault--if they hadn't given in to negativity, they wouldn't have gotten cancer, or at least they'd be able to cure themselves. Equally troublesome, to me, is the emphasis on material gain that we see coming out of the positive-thinking folks: Creflo Dollar, The Secret, etc. And Deepak Chopra can go fuck himself, as far as I'm concerned.

I really liked The Help by Kathryn Stockett. What a great read. Set in the early 60s in Jackson, Mississippi, it's the story of an affluent white woman who enables black maids to tell their story--the story of their relationships with the women they work for. And it's the story of the domestic help themselves, how they view their employers, how they relate to their employers' children, and all the complexity of walking a fine line as employees who nonetheless are inimately involved with the day-to-day life of the families they work for. The author is herself from Jackson, and she writes with authority on the topic. Skeeter, the white female protagonist, finds herself and her life's work in bringing to light the stories of the maids, but the two black maids who share the stage--Minny and Aibelene--also come to a new understanding of themselves and their lives in the process of telling their stories. Okay, it's a feel-good book, but who doesn't need that from time to time?

I also read a couple of mystery novels along the way. I'd fallen way behind in the Sharon McCone series by Marcia Muller, so a while back I ordered several paperbacks by this author. All I can say is that if you haven't read the McCone mysteries, you're missing out. I'm not a plot person, so I look for fiction, even mysteries, in which character and setting are important. Muller's mysteries include complex characters and ongoing narratives about each of the people in Sharon McCone's life, which makes me happy.

Next up: Greg Mortensen's Stones into Schools, and also Barbara Kingsolver's latest, The Lacuna.

"The God Delusion"

Although I'd read several reviews of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, I wasn't prepared for such a witty, entertaining, lively read. What lodged in my mind, I suppose, were opinions that Dawkins was over the top and confrontational, leading me to wonder whether I'd find him offensively belligerent, even nasty.

Well, I suppose some people do find him nasty (most likely because they find frank disavowal of religious ideas nasty), and he certainly is willing to be confrontational. He doesn't soft-pedal any of his exuberantly atheistic beliefs, nor does he think that we should make an exception for religion in terms of challenging its claims to truth.

A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts--the non-religious included--is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offense and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other. (20)

He then quotes Douglas Adams on the topic:

If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue abut it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand when somebody says "I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday," you say, "I respect that."

*    *    *    *    *

We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any others, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be. (20-21)

It's this aspect of the book that I really appreciated, because we have debate stymied by this idea of "respect." Not only that, but it's gotten to the point now that religious fundamentalists in the United States are demanding that the rights of certain of our citizens--the LGBT community--continue to be abridged out of respect for some Christians' religious beliefs! That's taking "respect" a little too far, don't you think? And yet religious groups demand this "respect" all the time. If we talk about sexual behavior, or debates (which we shouldn't even be having!) about homosexual rights, some leader of a religious group--usually the wingnuttier the better--is trotted out and we are to listen to this person with the greatest respect because of his (and it's usually his, not her) religious leadership.

Dawkins has little patience, either, with the late Stephen Jay Gould's concept of NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria), the idea that science and religion occupy two different realms, and never the twain shall meet. Dawkins challenges that idea, saying,

Why shouldn't we comment on God, as scientists? And why isn't ... the Flying Spaghetti Monster equally immune from scientific skepticism? ... A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter? (55) [link added by me]

and

What are these ultimate questions in whose presence religion is an honored guest and science must respectfully slink away? (55)

He goes so far as to talk about "the Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists," those who tamp down criticisms of religion or play down their own atheism in order to enlist the aid of non-extremist religious people who will help in the fight against creationism.

Some book reviewers have said that Dawkins alienates potential readers, just as his critics say he alienates people who might be on the side of the evolutionists if only people like him (and other like-minded thinkers) didn't go too far.  And how does he go too far? He does not respect religious belief--that is, accept religion's claim to have a special dispensation when it comes to subjecting it to analysis and debate.

That's what's really got people's shorts in a knot. He won't abide by the rules that the religionists have made up.

In any case, it's a great read, and how can it not be satisfying to see the Intelligent Design folks and the creationists (two names for the same thing) skewered? Dawkins deftly shatters their claims to such things as "irreducible complexity" and also addresses the issue of why religion is so universal, using his expertise as an evolutionary biologist to do so.

I was struck by Dawkins's explanation of how life could come to be, a question much exploited by the creationists and ID-ers as one that "proves" the existence of God. For them, the origin of life is one thing that cannot be explained by science, for how could life come from non-biological chemistry? Dawkins says,

. . . we can make the point that, however improbable the origin of life might be, we know it happened on Earth because we are here. . . . there are two hypotheses to explain what happened--the design hypothesis and the scientific or "anthropic" hypothesis. The design approach postulates a God who wrought a deliberate miracle, struck the prebiotic soup with divine fire and launched DNA, or something equivalent, on its momentous career.

Again ... the anthropic alternative to the design hypothesis is statistical. Scientists invoke the magic of large numbers. It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggeringly improbably event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. A grant-giving body would laugh at any chemist who admitted that the chance of his proposed research succeeding was only one in a billion. And yet . . . even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets--of which Earth, of course is one. (138)

With a billion to one odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets. So with even longer odds, how could life not arise on just one planet? Wow. Just wow.

So I learned a little physics, a little biology along the way, and along with Dawkins I marveled at the intricacies and surprises of nature and the universe. One of the things I like best about him is his absolute delight in nature and in the science that reveals nature to us. He revels in the idea that science is our key to solving mysteries, and he outright rejects the valorizing of religious mystery, castigating the creationists as those who would urge us not to investigate, not to question, not to search. During the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case (plaintiffs took issue with the school board's decision to require the teaching of Intelligent Design), creationist Michael Behe claimed that the immune system is an "irreducible complexity" that cannot be explained by evolution and is therefore an "unfruitful" area for research. Dawkins quotes Eric Rothschild, the attorney who represented the plaintiffs, summing up:

Thankfully, there are scientists who do search for answers to the question of the origin of the immune system. It's our defense against debilitating and fatal diseases. The scientists who wrote those books and articles toil in obscurity, without book royalties or speaking engagements. Their efforts help us combat and cure serious medical conditions. By contrast, Professor Behe and the entire intelligent design movement are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don't bother. (133)

Other issues taken up by Dawkins didn't intrigue me as much, since they are by and large familiar ones given my long history as an agnostic/atheist: arguments for the existence of god, morality's independence from religion, the impossibility (well, not quite, as Francis Collins and others prove) of a rationalist taking the Bible literally, the confused authorship of the Bible's various parts, the puzzle of a "loving" god allowing evil and suffering in the world, the evil done in the name of religion, and so on. It's Dawkins's refusal to tread softly out of "respect" for religion--he's been labeled a "fundamentalist atheist" by some--that delights me. And I have to agree with him about the sheer majesty, sweep, and awe-inspiring intricacies of our earth and the universe. No belief in a god is necessary to experience joy and wonder in the face of the vastness of it all and the gift we are given in being alive.

I'll leave you with this thought from Carl Sagan, quoted by Dawkins (12):

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?" Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

The ethics of eating

Over the weekend I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, a book I highly recommend, both to those who, like me, are deeply interested in the social and cultural context of food production and consumption, and to those who up until now haven't spent much time thinking about the implications of the choices we, as a society and as individuals, make every time we go to the supermarket--or abjure it.

Pollan sets out to discover just where our food comes from, and to that end, he journeys to the cornfields of Iowa, a feedlot in Kansas, a farm in Virginia, a Whole Foods supermarket, "big organic" farms in the Northwest, and a California forest (where he hunts wild pig, of all things!), exploring how we, as consumers, engage with food and with nature. For, as Pollan says, "even the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly."

But use petroleum we do, in our processing of food and in our raising of cattle. That will be the topic, I hope, of a future post (although my track record on promised future posts is dismal, at best). In fact, there are a number of questionable practices in the way most of our food is grown, and a number of questions we should be asking ourselves as we wolf down that Big Mac or buy that 79-cents-per-dozen carton of eggs. The questions Pollan raises can't always be answered unambiguously, and that's one of the things that make this book such a compelling read.

To take just one example, Pollan decides to read Peter Singer, the animal rights advocate who wrote the seminal Animal Liberation, just before his first foray into hunting. In both reading the book and in the experience of the hunt, he is anything but one-dimensional. He goes vegetarian for a few weeks, feeling that he can't properly judge the arguments he's reading if he's still behaving carnivorously. And then he goes out and shoots a pig.

While I admit that I couldn't read all of the hunting bits, I did appreciate Pollan's willingness to go to great lengths to "look." He says (and I agree completely) that most of us don't want to look at where our food comes from, how it is raised, the costs that standard agricultural methods exact from the environment and human health, the ways animals are treated in a system that views them as nothing more than production units, and so on. Instead, we cultivate a willful blindness, for to acknowledge such things would make us conscious. And this is exactly what Pollan wants to do: to eat consciously, refusing to look away. Thus he finds himself slaughtering chickens in Virginia (something he knew was coming, dreaded, but felt he had to do) and killing a pig in California (feeling first euphoria, and then shame).

He doesn't ask any of that of his readers, but the entire book is a call to consciousness and a challenge that we omnivores refuse to be ignorant about our food and, instead, come to understand that when we eat, we are connecting in a most basic way with nature. That Big Mac was once a cow. The cow fed on plants (however transformed) that, in turn, got their energy from the sun (but also, in modern agriculture, from fossil fuels as well). Just as much, we need to understand that our food is usually altered in substantial ways by the human practices and processes that most items in the American diet undergo, and which place a distance between us and our food.

Understanding that, seeing the factory-farming practices that so damage animals, soil, water, and air, should make some of Pollan's readers think about their food choices--and their buying habits. That's a possibility that will put off some potential readers, perhaps, and that's too bad. Not only will they miss a terrific book by an engaging, and engaged, writer; they will also be turning down an invitation to understand and appreciate a little better our human relationship to the natural world and the plants and animals with which we share it.

[cross-posted at Veggies Unlimited]

1491

Okay, I don't usually write about the books I'm reading. I don't like to write reviews: usually I think that I may read in too idiosyncratic a way to appeal to others, or that if I like a book/author I overlook terribly obvious flaws, or that I just can't summarize in a way that does justice to the material. And probably a hundred other reasons.

But I am now reading 1491 by Charles C. Mann, and it is unbelievably fascinating. For anyone who loved Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, this will be an equally intriguing read.

The book sets out to apprise us lay readers of all the  surprising finds about the pre-Columbus New World. Many of the finds remain controversial, as Mann points out, but all are extremely provocative and evocative.

Old narratives about the conquest of the Incas are challenged. New evidence is presented that it was not armor, horses, and guns that defeated the Inca, but epidemics (and certain social forces). There is evidence that the population of the Americas was far, far higher than previously thought. Technologies dismissed as being not as sophisticated as European technology are shown to be otherwise. Pocohontas and Squanto weren't their real names. And that's just in the first 100 pages!

The auther does not claim that all of the newly unearthed and debated evidence is agreed upon. But to me, that makes the book all the more compelling. The reader is forced to confront his or her own prejudices about native peoples--prejuduces surely validated and promoted by public schooling--and to examine previously held beliefs about pre-Columbian (and that's a damned Eurocentric label itself) societies in the light of recent decades of excavation, analysis, and interpretation of those who inhabited North, Central, and South America before Europeans invaded.

This is a must for anyone curious about the lay of the land in the Americas prior to the advent of European colonization. I have been delighted and surprised so far, and I bet most of those who read this blog would be as well. (If any readers have read or started this book, I would love your comments!)

Antarctic adventure (armchair edition)

Lately--and for me, oddly--I've read a couple of books (and have also seen the film Shackleton) about Antarctic expeditions. Why? That's a question I've been trying to answer.

Previously I thought of expeditions to both the North and South Poles as relatively equal in terms of weather, difficulty of survival, the ice to be traversed, and so on. Of course I was aware that Antarctica is a continent and that there is no corresponding body of land at the North Pole, but since in my mind everything at either one is ice and snow, I hadn't realized how uninformed I was. It was just one of the infinity of things not on my radar screen, and my few impressions were vague and foggy, to say the least.

But Antarctica is unique.

According to the CIA's World Factbook, Antarctica is "the coldest, windiest, highest (on average), and driest continent." Natural hazards:

katabatic (gravity-driven) winds blow coastward from the high interior; frequent blizzards form near the foot of the plateau; cyclonic storms form over the ocean and move clockwise along the coast; volcanism on Deception Island and isolated areas of West Antarctica; other seismic activity rare and weak; large icebergs may calve from ice shelf

Those katabatic winds are something else. In Mawson's Will, the story of Australian Douglas Mawson, who braved the Antarctic in 1911, I first read about winds of 90 mph that blew steadily for as long as an hour at a time and at speeds much higher in short bursts, fierce, icy winds the men endured inside a wooden building constructed by the explorers themselves with materials brought on the ship that deposited them on "land."

I put "land" in quotation marks because the continent is 98% thick continental ice sheet and 2% barren rock.

Yet, again according to the World Factbook, in the 2002-2003 antarctic summer, over 13,000 tourists visited Antarctica, with the average tour (by commercial ship) lasting two weeks. Jim knows someone who did this because he is an avid birder.

Others go, no doubt, to see scenes like this. (For more amazing photos, visit Cool Antarctica.) Or because it is what it is, the strangest and most inhospitable continent on earth.

Not until 1820 was it confirmed that there was, in fact, land that far south, and not until 1840 was it confirmed that Antarctica is a continent and not a group of islands. The Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration lasted from 1900-1922, and the heroes include such famous names as Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen.

At that time, with the equipment available then, it would have been unimaginable that some day thousands of tourists would take their vacations in the Antarctic. An expedition party was dropped off by a ship that promised to return in a year's time, and those on the expedition had to be there waiting for it--or wait another year. There was a very small window during which the frozen seas could be navigated by the wooden, coal-fired ships that traveled there. All supplies had to be planned, gathered, organized, and transported with the thought that there was no backup. Neither was there radio contact, or, when there was, it was limited to telegraphic messages sent out on an extremely limited basis. Dogs, and in some cases ponies, had to be transported, fed, and cared for. Clothing was not the high-tech survival gear that it is now, and sleeping bags were made of reindeer hide. By today's standards, the equipment available to withstand the world's worst, most vicious weather was primitive.

But such is the lure of adventure and the quest for scientific knowledge. Reading these stories of exploration, hardship, suffering, survival, and sometimes death, it's hard not to be moved by the bravery of these men, their determination in the face of incredible odds against them, and the sheer will to survive. Did they hope to make it into the history books? To become famous? Perhaps some of them did; it would be surprising if the leaders of expeditions such as these had small egos. But reading the diaries of these men, what comes through again and again is the desire to know: to know, as much as one ever can, the limits of human endurance and the extent of human capacities, but to know also the scientific and the practical--the geography, the geology, the animal life, the weather features, the behavior of the ice and sea. To an extent, knowledge of these things increased chances of survival. Passing on this crucial knowledge to those who came later was also the expressed primary reason for keeping detailed diaries, but detailed logs, drawings, charts, and photographs helped to document the scientific discoveries they made. And in the process, we in the present are left with a fascinating history of that time, that place, and those experiences.

Thank goodness. For as the anonymous writer at Cool Antarctica says,

Contrast this for instance with space exploration and the moon landings that haven't resulted in a single quality piece of writing. Apart from seeing the video footage, we the public really know nothing of it, we don't understand the hardships, comradeship, rivalries or even the mundane day to day routines.

But these diaries and stories do detail everyday life and its concomitant danger, boredom, illness, joys, disappointments, obstacles, surprises, and spontaneous celebrations. For all their heroism, we see the men of the expeditions in their mundane human-ness, too. And that adds to immediacy and gives texture to these stories.

I can't say that I can imagine myself there, struggling against harsh circumstances and enduring multiple miseries. But I can imagine other humans there, and I can feel a keen interest in their outcome.

If I sometimes feel myself at a cynical remove from these men's allegiance to ideas like nobility, faith, trust in the leadership, trust in one's fellow travelers, duty, patriotism, and the like, or from their idealism, at others I feel a great sadness that our ideas and aspirations have contracted to such a small size and that such idealism is scorned by whole societies devoted almost solely to getting and spending. Perhaps it's this great divide that brings new generations of readers to this kind of literature.

I think, too, that despite the noble ideals so many of the explorers allude to, paradoxically it's the stripped-down quality of life under such averse conditions that is appealing. The need to stay warm and fed and dry, the need to make do, to deal with illness and injury, to fight for survival: these fundamental necessities co-exist with lofty abstractions and ground them. That makes for compelling narrative in a modern world in which we know little either of striving for basic survival nor of seemingly lost concepts like the greater good, honor among leaders, and living a life dedicated to something bigger than ourselves and our comforts.

Sharon Olds to Laura: "No thanks"

Sharon Olds, one of my favorite poets, declined Laura Bush's invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival held on September 24, nor did she attend a dinner at the Library of Congress, nor the breakfast at the White House.

She explains why in an open letter to Laura Bush published in The Nation, which ends:

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness--as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

If only we could convince a few Democrats to speak even half as bluntly, perhaps we could begin to set this nation back on the road to peace and justice.

 

 

Riverbend's book to be released soon!

Riverbend fans, April 15 is the date advertised for the release of her book, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq.

For those who can't wait, the current issue of Ms. magazine includes an excerpt.

I've already pre-ordered my copy!

Homegrown Democrat

I've just started reading Garrison Keillor's Homegrown Democrat, and I'm loving it. The man can write. It's hard to choose from the vibrant prose that shimmers on almost every page, but I kinda liked this:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-base economists, see-through fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads, the shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, taxi dancers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers, pill pushers, chronic nappers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, Crips and Bloods of the boardroom, panjandrums of Ponzi marketing and the grand pooh-bahs of Percodan, censors, spin dentists, Swiss bankers, hit men, body snatchers, mouth breathers and tongue thrusters, testosterone junkies, oversexed hedgehogs, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, line jumpers, randy preachers, marsupial moms and chirpy news anchors, UFO scholars, johns, shroomheads, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks wizened aliens, aluminum-siding salesmen, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, braying, smirking, scratching on the national blackboard, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-a-Sketch president with a voice like a dial tone, who for almost four years has looked as if he were just about to say something smart, not much introspection going on here, no inquiring minds eager to learn about the world, not much chance of anyone picking up a book that isn't on the official reading list and hearing a still small voice, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions in general, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk, supported by millions of good folks who do not share the anarchist dream but sleep well with this West Texas sphinx for a nightlight. Republicans: the No. 1 reason why the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb, and dangerous.

Wooo!