The rank-and-file at BBC are restive - and one of them defected to Extinction Rebellion and produced this podcast, which is very good. It combines informative journalism about journalism in the present day with dystopian reporting from the future - and nobody does dystopia like the Brits. Listen to it here.
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this is not
an emergency, all this climate stuff. if it were, we’d know it: the streets would be flooded, the hills would be burning, there’d be climate refugee camps; and our governments would declare an emergency, right? sure, that stuff happens in other places – those sh*thole countries mr. trump talks about (o yeah and japan) (ok and australia) but it can’t happen here; can't be happening; or if it can, it won’t be for hundreds or decades of years, long after those making the decisions are dead – otherwise, why would the scientists always say “by the end of the century”? no- body will be around by the end of the century, except people who are infants today, and they don’t much care. they’re not blocking traffic! & it’s not like there’s no good news: it turns out, stormquakes don’t pose a danger to humans. hooray!, right? also: temps in lawrence, ks., u.s. hover around normal now: hi 71, avg 68 lo 36, avg 43; & even if you’re not so lucky, you can still feel happy for us. sure there’s some bad news: another bomb cyclone smashes n.e. u.s. – this after the nor’easter last week – ½ million w/o electricity in new england & beyond; & old england facing the kind of severe thunderstorms more often seen around here; but this is not an “emergency,” it’s more like an “issue”; this is not pervasive, these isolated incidents. & this is not a poem, this is a verse-chronicle about a poem – the poem being written every day, the poem of our climate On overpasses. On pieces of scrap-paper, crumpled into people’s hands. On posters, wheat-pasted. In the margins of books. Chanted on street corners. Carved into trees. On the sides of cars. Broadcast via pirate radio. Flyers curled up and stuck randomly in chain-link fences around construction sites. Taped in the stairwell of libraries. Crudely hewn in stone using a newly-invented alphabet. In videos still stored on the mobile phones that still work. Translated from signals in space. In fortune cookies. Written in magic marker on the reverse side of the official story. Spoken into rhizomes. On signs where some of the words or letters have fallen off. In the circle between the mind’s environs and the thing the mind did not know it contained. From the words not inked-over in catalogs or magazines in the doctor’s waiting room. Under the doormat of an empty house, instead of a key. Tattoos. Placards and banners. Letters to the editor. In or over photographs. In paper airplanes, sailed onto the floor of the Senate or stock exchange. In jokes spread by word-of-mouth. In buried scrolls. In between the books in the library (if there are books in the library). In the fossil record. Under your skin.
“ample moisture &
moderate temperatures have translated into later than normal fall colors,” sez ken lassman’s kaw valley almanac, “so this coming weekend’s maple leaf festival in baldwin will likely not see much in the way of brilliantly colored maple leaves.” his book, wild douglas county (2007) sez ashes & elms turn yellow by now; locusts hackberries walnuts almost bare: well, that was then this is now, & I’m seeing nothing but green out the window. meanwhile wildflowers blossom on the 70th parallel north, in melting permafrost. lovely, but unnatural. not the same as losing house or life or limb, but hard not to take them as portents, these little things, esp those of us who get sentimental about birds & bees & such. & remember the jet stream? the “conveyor belt” of the weather? well, now it looks more like a worm cut into pieces, each part wriggling independent of the rest. new england “braces" for second nor'easter in two weeks – "costly beach erosion," etc.; but in the dakotas, it's more serious: second oct. 11 snowfall in 145 yrs.: & est. one-third of corn & one-fifth of soybeans had yet to reach full maturity" (farmers are finding out all about climate chaos – they even make earmuffs for cows, now); texas just had its hottest september (hottest-ever september worldwide, in fact); & that 115 f temp in colo. this summer? hottest ever in that state. meanwhile india had its wettest september on record. & in e. honshu (japan), another day, another 36”of rain – “my frightened daughter can’t stop shaking” (evacuee); plenty to shake about for adults, too: levees around tokyo barely held: the civil engineer sez the city is “not in any way ready yet” for a typhoon hagibis; & the number of hungry people in the world rose from 785 million in 2015 to 822 million in 2018, largely due to climate disasters (you’re not hungry, mabye, but it’s hard to keep starving people away from food) flooding in the w. of Ireland, tornado in the east – signs & portents (of a bang or a whimper?); 100 wildfires in lebanon, on top of 3 million trees already incinerated, “equivalent to all trees planted in reforestation initiatives over the last 15 years” & meanwhile back in the u.s. of a., the presidential debate discussed the climate catastrophe for all of how many minutes. & our city govt here in lawrence, kansas, is thinking potholes . . . (Every other Tuesday, I invite a guest blogger to share a post. Today, I have invited Epictetus. "But," you may be saying, "he's a philosopher, not a poet." Well, true; but there's nothing like destruction of the biosphere, mass starvation, economic collapse, fascism &/or chaos, to make one think of why one is doing a thing. Are you writing (or teaching) for the sake of the cohesion of your community in the face of danger? Or for your own advantage? Are you writing and publishing to strengthen yourself and others when facing adversity? Or for praise and career advancement? To touch your readers and hearers? Or to amuse yourself until you die? He's thought about stuff like this, it turns out. He does tend to "go on," so this post has been edited. - Ed.) When then you say, "Come and hear me read to you": take care first of all that you are not doing this without a purpose; then, if you have discovered that you are doing this with reference to a purpose, consider if it is the right purpose. Do you wish to do good or to be praised? Immediately you hear him [sic] saying, "To me what is the value of praise from the many?" and he says well, for it is of no value to a musician, so far as he is a musician, nor to a geometrician. Do you then wish to be useful? in what? tell us that we may run to your audience-room.
Tell me the truth; but if you lie, I will tell you. Lately when your hearers came together rather coldly, and did not give you applause, you went away humbled. Lately again when you had been praised, you went about and said to all, "What did you think of me?" "Wonderful, master, I swear by all that is dear to me." "But how did I treat of that particular matter?" "Which?" "The passage in which I described Pan and the nymphs?" "Excellently." Then do you tell me that in desire and in aversion you are acting according to nature? Begone; try to persuade somebody else. Did you not praise a certain person contrary to your opinion? and did you not flatter a certain person who was the son of a senator? Would you wish your own children to be such persons? "I hope not." Why then did you praise and flatter him? "He is an ingenuous youth and listens well to discourses." How is this? "He admires me." You have stated your proof. Then what do you think? do not these very people secretly despise you? When, then, a man who is conscious that he has neither done any good nor ever thinks of it, finds a philosopher who says, "You have a great natural talent, and you have a candid and good disposition," what else do you think that he's saying except this, "This man has some need of me"? Or tell me, what act that indicates a great mind has he shown? Observe; he has been in your company a long time; he has listened to your discourses, he has heard you reading; has he become more modest? has he been turned to reflect on himself? has he perceived in what a bad state he is? has he cast away self-conceit? does he look for a person to teach him? "He does." A man who will teach him to live? No, fool, but how to talk; for it is for this that he admires you also. Listen and hear what he says: "This man writes with perfect art, much better than Dion." This is altogether another thing. Does he say, "This man is modest, faithful, free from perturbations?" You, then, who are in a wretched plight and gaping after applause and counting your auditors, do you intend to be useful to others? "To-day many more attended my discourse." "Yes, many; we suppose five hundred." "That is nothing; suppose that there were a thousand." "Dion never had so many hearers." "How could he?" "And they understand what is said beautifully." "What is fine, master, can move even a stone!" But why should I hear you? Do you wish to show me that you put words together cleverly? You put them together, man; and what good will it do you? "But only praise me." What do you mean by praising? "Say to me, "Admirable, wonderful." Well, I say so. But if praise is that which philosophers mean by the name of good, what have I to praise in you? . . . For in truth this small art is an elegant thing, to select words, and to put them together, and to come forward and gracefully to read them or to speak, and while he is reading to say, "There are not many who can do these things, I swear by all that you value!" For they wish the things which lead to happiness, but they look for them in the wrong place. In order that this may be done, a thousand seats must be placed and men must be invited to listen, and you must ascend the pulpit in a fine robe or cloak and describe the death of Achilles. Cease, I entreat you by the gods, to spoil good words and good acts as much as you can. Nothing can have more power in exhortation than when the speaker shows to the hearers that he has need of them. But tell me who when he hears you reading or discoursing is anxious about himself, or turns to reflect on himself? or when he has gone out says, "He hit me well: I must no longer do these things." ------------------------------------------------- Epictetus was born a slave in Phrygia. He was taken to Rome, where he was freed; after studying with Musonius Rufus, he became the leader of the Stoic school in that city until his banishment. He now lives and teaches in Nicopolis, Greece. He hasn't published anything, and doesn't seem to give a shit what anybody thinks of him. His career is going nowhere. almost six months
of this verse chronicle, & nothing is getting funnier! . . . esp. for indigenous folks, even on indigenous people’s day: their home- land rainforest of amazonia burned or burning; rezzes getting drier; arctic melting, caribou dying; pastoralists w/o pastures (& bahamas, where invasion began, decimated, this time by invaders’ effluents & nul effects). what does it mean to feel grateful because you’ve some- thing someone else doesn’t, or you don’t have something somebody else does have but doesn’t want? the wet: well, if you’re not in japan, consider yourself lucky: typhoon hagibis (which means “speed” in tagalog, not the scottish national dish) crashes into japan: sluicing down mountains, filling the valleys w/mud. 56 dead, 186 injured (compare to 1958 storm left 1200 dead – value of better infrastructure in climatically chaotic times); 38k evac’d; 3700 homes flooded; 138k w/o water (potable, anyway); 425k homes w/o power; 112 mph winds w/gusts of 156; record rains, 37” in 24 hrs. in hakone; 37 rivers flooded; “cars & trucks flipped like toys”; + the usual landslides, etc. – you’re probably hearing about hagibis on the real news if you’re reading this in mid-oct., 2019; but it’s funny how when hurricanes hit underdeveloped lands, you don’t hear much about them . . . it’s flooding in kenya, too: “we are at risk of contracting waterborne diseases like cholera since floods have washed away toilets” (contractors didn’t consider drainage when building roads); “most of the people sleep in the cold after their houses were destroyed by flash floods” & their cattle died of pneumonia in the heavy rains; & floods in baja calif. sur, too (“material damage”); & massive downpours in uruguay “provocaron inundaciones” in various parts of the country & meanwhile 30 in. of snow in manitoba + 62 mph winds, in early oct. (btw, i use u.s. customary units not metric to try to get through the u.s. customary culture-noggin) . . . the dry: 13 million people suffer “critical levels of hunger” in the horn of africa (worst droughts since 1981 – remember “we are the world”? i guess we’re finding out that’s true – tho some are more world than others); & australia? omg – don’t get me started on australia: queensland’s fire season earliest on record; federal & n.w.s. govts investing $1 bn in water infrastructure (hear that, washington?): the town of tenterfield in that state has 74 days water left – then it’s recycled sewage on tap; & what wld an x-treme weather chronicle be w/o its daily dose of firestorm: 100 k evac’d in l.a. where they didn’t shut off the power; 100s of homes burnt (homes meaning “houses” – nowadays home is where the arse is – wherever you lay yr hat, if you survive); & here in petit larryville feels like oct. but leaves still green; local paper’s front-page story re: couple w/a “cozy bungalow”; on the back page: indigenous in ecuador negotiate with govt. (watch out, indigenous folks! i want to say but i don't have to tell them that) over fuel subsidies: see, the rich everywhere want a monopoly on the right to pollute, the right to cheap fuel, the right to be right Obviously, no course could contain all of these possibilities – this is just a menu of possibilities.
Fiction - TC Boyle, A Friend of the Earth - Bruce Sterling, Heavy Weather - Nathaniel Hill, Odds Against Tomorrow - Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (and Talents) - Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam trilogy – prob. Year of the Flood, if I had to choose one - Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus - Omar El Akkad, American War - John Lanchester, The Wall - Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City - Megan Hunter, The End We Start From - Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God Poetry - Big Energy Poets (Cli-Po anthology) - Kyce Bello, Refugia - Craig Perez’s recent and forthcoming work - Arcadia Project Anthology (Postmodern Pastoral) - Black Nature (anthology), Camille Dungy ed. - Allison Cobb, After We All Died & her forthcoming book re: plastic - Stephen Collis, Once in Blockadia - Madhur Anand, New Index for Predicting Catastrophes Nonfiction -The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh - The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells, esp. part 3 - “Uncivilization” (the Dark Mountain manifesto) - The End of Ice, Dahr jamail - selections from the Carbon Ideologies trilogy of Wm. T. Vollman - maybe part of This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein - maybe something by Rebecca Solnit to balance out all the negativity - A Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (essay collection) - Facing Gaia (Latour) - Ends of the World, Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - Chakrobarty on history and climate change - Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2012) - Peter Brannen, Ends of the World: volcanic apocalypses, lethal oceans, and our quest to understand Earth’s past mass extinctions - Roy Scranton, We’re Doomed, Now What? (excerpt of first essay) Books, literary essays, plays, poems, dance, music, stories, articles, etc, I haven’t included? Please add them in the comments! imagine:
you’ve paid yr power bill, but the power company cuts you off – & you don’t know how long it will last. bottled water, candles, bagged ice & coolers – if you have them: thus, the sitch in n. calif.: p.g.&e. disempowers 1.5 m customers b/c heavy winds expected = high fire danger (they’re already happening anyway). the co. went bankrupt for starting the big fires last year and the year before: they say “customers might have to do without power for days after the winds subside because ‘every inch’ of the system must be inspected by helicopters & 1000s of workers and declared safe before the grid is reactivated.” states of emergency & curfews declared in the darkened towns, 1000s & 1000s of further ramifications. this seems like a new thing, not a gradual thing like tightening of water restrictions, but more of a big fat ‘whump!’ . . . mean- while, victims of the santa rosa fire (remember the santa rosa fire? the fires are harder to keep straight than the mass shootings), insurance policies are being cancelled: the law sez you have 24 mo. – but the county had to rebuild the bridges, roads, lines first, then the people rebuilding their homes had to contend w/ debris removal geotechnical surveys geotechnical engineering finding architects finding contractors getting permits – before building starts – then guess what? time’s up! which goes to show climate disasters can turn out a lot more complicated than you ever imagined . . . but . . . what do you imagine? anyway elsewhere, on the other side of the world, 30 homes burn up, people suffer burns in n.s.w. – a “cyclonic firestorm” during which “birds dropped dead out of the sky at the height of the blaze” – fires in queensland, too – & summer just started down there meanwhile meanwhile bad bad bad october storms wrack n. rockies & plains: 100 car crashes in 3 hrs in denver; interstates and highways shut down; 100 flights cancelled; > 30k homes without power (unplanned & unintentional, in this case) meanwhile, “a new report” sez “if the world procrastinates on a carbon price one more year, the damages would climb an additional $1 trillion, & waiting 10 yrs would put the price tag at $100 trillion. in other words, the time to act was yesterday (or, like the 1980s).” coming soon to a region near you: climate mayhem! you’ve read the stories, now live the reality! & what’s the reality? “the degree of nightmarishness depends on the amount of greenhouse gases we send into the atmosphere & how quickly and ferociously the planet responds w/ feedback loops that accelerate warming. the euphemism for this is ‘uncertainty.’” imagine that! A lot of fiction and nonfiction writers have agents who “represent” them – primarily to publishing houses, but also to the public. Or they have publicists who do this. But for many writers (and almost all poets), it boils down to the creators themselves publicizing themselves. They have to arrange book tours, interviews, readings, comp copies, reviews, and a “social media presence.” To the extent that they want publicity, that is.
Now, if you’ve read this blog more than a couple of times, chances are you at least credit the possibility that industrialized, capitalist society is headed for a fall of some sort within a generation or so, due to the unfolding – and accelerating – climate catastrophe that is encompassing the globe. And you are probably interested in literature, writing, or art in one form or another, possibly as a maker. So, in light of that possibility (some of us would say probability), does it make sense to publicize yourself? Do you curate your image? And if so, why? This is an honest question in intent, but a rhetorical question in effect: we all want attention, however small or brief. There is a fine line between publicity and publication. Someone once wrote that he’d never met a poet who thought they got enough recognition; that comment certainly squares with my experience (of both self and colleagues). And of course, if you do this sort of thing for a living, you have to keep doing it to live. And to support a family, if you have one. Twenty years from now, you or your family may be walking north on a dusty highway, carrying everything you have (including whatever water you have), accompanied by thousands of other people; but meanwhile, the rent comes due at the first of the month. Book sales, ad sales, class fees, tenure: one way or another, all of these plums require notoriety, for the writer. And yet. It is all starting to seem a bit unreal to this writer (who is, it should be said, tenured, on the far side of 50, and without dependents). To curate, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, meant to design and arrange exhibits and displays; nowadays, everything is “curated,” including the self. And that takes work – in the scientific meaning of the word. All the plane flights, car rides, electricity expended, all that CO2 foisted onto the atmosphere, all the consequent heat built up in the atmosphere and the oceans, to cultivate an image and have one’s name bruited about as – what? – an “ecopoet”? And the image is just that – a concatenation of carbon-fueled pixels that will wink out when the internet does. Yet we spend so much time and energy (personal and fossil-fueled) trying to get one more review, one more reading, a mention in an article, a few more books sold. But if things keep going in the direction they’re going, then the publishing/publicity apparatus, the university, and social media – all will be much smaller-scale and attenuated in the near- to middle-term, compared to now. In the long-term, and maybe middle-term, there is less to strive towards. Given this state of affairs, there arises the possibility of turning the energy of publicizing and curating back into writing, reading, and discussing. If one’s life becomes less publicity-focused, more locally-focused, perhaps cultivating an image will become less important and maybe cultivating drought-resistant, edible foods, more important. We will see what the inherent value of art is when it ceases to have an exchange value (esp. at one remove) – not to mention when a lot of us have to spend a lot more time doing things for ourselves that we now take for granted that other people will do. In the process, we might (might) see a literature that is more honest, truly “edgy” (as opposed to modish), less curated and posed. And who knows but what that in itself might not help us survive a little longer or a little better. “this week has weather
from all four seasons” the weather channel sez. that snowstorm is spreading across the rockies & n. plains; severe thunder in s. plains & midwest; storms brewing off the atlantic seaboard; santa ana winds in s. calif. well, we’ll see about that. but power will be shut off to 800k people tomorrow in n. calif.: “fire weather watch”: they don’t want no more paradises, see? & in the south, flash drought turns to flash flood, which is more familiar, like making water rescues once you’ve practiced them. & turns out hurricane dorian scraped the lids off six oil storage tanks: 1.5 mil gals spilt so far; & death toll at 61 w/608 still missing; but they rescued a dog from rubble! he was underneath the air conditioner . . . meanwhile the u.s. experienced 10 “billion-dollar weather & climate disasters” so far this year; & sen. eliz. warren has shaved 3 points off biden’s lead among “climate-focused voters” – i.e., the ones whose heads no longer reside in a very dark part of their anatomy (congratulations, senator); while across europe, extinction rebellion continues pissing off commuters; & this just in: “believing in climate change has no effect on whether coastal homeowners prepare for climate change” – just as those folks in paradise vowed to rebuild: climate change being an invisible creature – something that requires belief, like god. or air. me, i believe in air. |
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |