A Change in the Wind

Orwell on the rules of story-telling in non-fiction

A review of Zero Dark Thirty includes this gem of a quote, one writer in effect overhearing arguably the first great modern non-fiction writer, George Orwell, talking about what we today call literary non-fiction, and what fictionalization he allows in a non-fiction story. .

There were few more minute observers of fact than George Orwell. As Timothy Garton Ash has written, if Orwell had a God it was Kipling’s “God of Things as They are.” Yet, as Garton Ash says of Orwell: “One of his most powerful early essays describes witnessing a hanging in Burma. But he later told three separate people that this was ‘only a story.’ So did he ever witness a hanging? He annotates a copy of “Down and Out in Paris and London” for a girlfriend: this really happened, this happened almost like this, but “this incident is invented.”’

Orwell was a polemicist trapped in a realist's body. That's what made his fiction so striking -- its consciousness of its own politics.

At the same time, note the assumption embedded in that quote or Orwell's. An essay will focus on a story. Of course! That's his attitude, and that's the forgotten Orwell -- the great storyteller.

Here's an example, from the story about a hanging::

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened — a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog..

In the end, it's not Orwell's rules that make him special. It's his writing.  

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Avoiding over-reaction by any means necessary: NYTimes

Evidently the media adults in the room -- excluding The Weather Channel -- are going out of their way to underplay the big winter storm hitting the East Coast this weekend. The Times and the Post are not putting it on top of the front page and are avoiding calling it by TWC's name. Meteorological services too are emphasizing the caveats. Not to mention complaining about the The Weather Channel's exploitation. 

Said the Atlantic Wire:

AccuWeather and other services don't play along with the new name game, says [senior meteorologist Tom] Kines, because the practice "confuses people." Unlike a hurricane, which affects everything in its path, a winter storm's wrath doesn't have the same certain doom. "The National Weather Service does not name winter storms because a winter storm's impact can vary from one location to another, and storms can weaken and redevelop, making it difficult to define where one ends and another begins," National Weather Service spokesperson Susan Buchanan told The Wire.

But when does avoiding panic become an over-reaction itself? Maybe when a newspaper sets out to remind us of how it compares to a blizzard from the 19th century. Even if it is the Great Blizzard of 1888. 

If this is the worst winter storm in 125 years, isn't it pretty serious? 

[pic from NYC, before Nemo arrives, via Stormgram at NBC] 

A blizzard that looks a little like a hurricane: Nemo

And the wind cried...Nemo?

One model's vision of the blizzard-to-come.... very hurricane-like. twitter.com/EricHolthaus/s…

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) February 8, 2013

 

That's from The Weather Channel...but isn't it NOAA's job to name storms?

 

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Falling love with a lone wolf -- via a GPS tracker

Great op-ed yesterday in the New York Times about how GPS data is helping bring us closer to other species.

In recent years, there has been much pontificating about how modern communications technologies are changing the way that we relate to other people. Less discussed is the way these advances are reshaping our relationships with other species. By using satellite and cellular tags to track free-ranging animals, biologists are providing us with intimate access to the daily lives of other species, drawing us closer to the world’s wild things and making us more invested in their welfare.

Over the past several decades, the use of wildlife tags has proliferated as the devices have become smaller and more powerful. Today’s tags are capable of collecting months’ or years’ worth of data on an animal’s location at a given moment, and can be used to track everything from tiny tropical orchid bees to blubbery, deep-diving elephant seals. The devices provide crucial information about populations — helping scientists uncover the migratory pathways of Arctic terns or the ocean currents that loggerhead sea turtles like to surf — as well as individuals. Is this particular predator a pack leader or a lone wolf?

Lots of fascinating ironies here, but it's worth mentioning again how usefully the Times has refashioned the op-ed column. So often it becomes strident argumentation along predictable lines, but it can be a prime opportunity for the thoughtful exploration of topics not topical enough to be considered news. 

Though actually, the story of OR-7, the first wolf known to have visited California in many years, did make news in both California and Oregon. Here's one of OR-7's cohorts, OR-10, via California's (renamed) Department of Fish and Wildlife. 

Exactly as author Emily Anthes says, following an individual has helped us bond to the species. 

We may be able to ignore a nameless, faceless mass of threatened creatures, but fill in their personalities and back stories, and it becomes harder to look the other way as their habitats disappear or they are hunted to extinction. A famous animal can become an ambassador for its species, inspiring efforts to conserve the entire population. Indeed, after [Yellowstone] wolf 832F [was shot to] death, the National Wolfwatcher Coalition started a fund-raising campaign in her honor, donating the proceeds to wolf research and education programs.

Make it specific, as they say in writing, and in drama. The general? Eh. 

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The Superbowl: National Day of Capitalism

Hype is the point, writes Hampton Stevens:  

The Super Bowl is our National Day of Capitalism—a feast and party that's mercifully without the least bit of spiritual underpinning. It's a celebration of commercialism and consumerism, and consumption for consumptions' sake. Today we slurp and cho down as much food and drink as humanly possible. We pay more attention to the TV commercials than the game. We gamble, which is almost capitalism in the purest form—an attempt to make money off nothing but one's capital, brains, and someone else's work. 

Oh, okay.

Add: Joel Achenbach puts it in perspective:

The Super Bowl is our day of national vulgarity. Everything about the event is over-the-top, most of all the halftime show. I kept thinking that Beyonce didn’t need to try so hard. She had me at hello. At several points it turned into a workout video.

America's largest crop is a lawn. Could it be a garden?

Mark Bittman, the amazing cook and bold columnist for the New York Times, tries to restrain his temper as he reports on how some suburban governments are citing homeowners for transforming their lawns into gardens.

He grumbles: 

...several times a year we hear of a situation like the one in Orlando[1], where the mayor claims to be striving to make his city green while his city harasses homeowners like Jason and Jennifer Helvenston for planting vegetables in their front yard, threatening to fine them $500 a day — for gardening. The battle has been raging for months, and the city’s latest proposal is to allow no more than 25 percent of a homeowner’s front yard to be planted in fruits and vegetables.

As if gardens were somehow an official eyesore, or inappropriate.

Of course not all governments are so homogeneity-obsessed. Here in the Southwest, in places like Las Vegas and Tucson and Ventura, cities are encouraging residents to transform their lawns to xeriscape or ocean-friendly gardens. But as Bittman points out, and a scientific team from the University of Montana (featured by NASA's Earth Observatory) has documented, the lawn is this nation's largest crop.

Using widely available data, Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International[3] estimates that converting 10 percent of our nation’s lawns to vegetable gardens “could meet about a third of our fresh vegetable needs at current consumption rates.”

Ten percent is optimistic; even 1 percent would be a terrific start, because there is a lot of lawn in this country. In fact it’s our biggest crop, three times as big as corn, according to research done using a variety of data, much of it from satellites. That’s around a trillion square feet — 50,000 square miles — and, since an average gardener can produce something like a half-pound of food per square foot (you garden 100 square feet, you produce 50 pounds of food), without getting too geeky you can imagine that Doiron’s estimates are rational.

Lawns are not exactly the enemy, but they’re certainly not helping matters any.

An especially striking picture from the University of Montana team, led by Christina Milesi, found a clever way to map lawn extent. See here:

Isn't it striking how wide-spread the extent of lawns really is, regardless of politics? The Bay Area in Northern California is really not so diffferent from SoCal, or even Texas, by that measure. 

Who needs sleep? Insomnia cookies available now!

From Pacific Standard comes the news that insomnia cookies -- aka, a wonder drug called Modafinil, is available that will make sleep all but unnecessary. An hour or two a night will be plenty, it is said. No problems. 

The past week has seen a flurry ofattention around the latest purported wonder drug, Modafinil, which claims to make sleeping basically optional, with no ill effects. Just pop one, and two hours of sleep is plenty—with no headaches, “sleep debt,” hangover feeling, withdrawal, post-dopamine crash (as with that other common sleep-avoidance drug, speed) and little addiction risk.

On the other hand, a simple googling for side effects brings the fact that it's first compared to amphetamine, and this cheerful list. 

SIDE EFFECTS: The most common side effects of modafinil are headache,upper respiratory tract infection, nausea, nervousness, anxiety, and insomnia. Modafinil also may cause serious skin reactions, multiple organ hypersensitivity reactions, high blood pressure, fainting, psychosis, thoughts of suicide, and abnormal heart beats.

Reference: FDA Prescribing Information

Color me skeptical, more along the lines of Chloie Aridjis, from the on-line journal of Granta, who has had insomnia in her earliest memories, and wonders  in Berlin if she ever will really sleep well. 

Whenever I seek assurance that my insomnia is not something that arrived with adulthood or even with adolescence, but rather much earlier in life, I return to a poem my father once dedicated to me: ‘El insomnio empieza en la cuna’ (‘Insomnia Begins in the Cradle’). My sleepless nights began long before I knew the ailment had a name. My parents would look into my darkened room and see me standing in my crib, gripping the bars and peering over the rim, waiting for something or someone to come and save me from the desolation. Decades later, I experience that same old resistance to laying the day down to rest.

Insomnia: Who in their right mind would want more of that? 

"That's not a safe altitude": Moonrise Kingdom

Do you ever change your mind about a work, or act, or a person? 

 

Last year I saw "Moonrise Kingdom" and hated it. Unbearably cute, I thought. But then I started to remember it with affection, how preposterously droll it was. (See above.)

Then I saw about a thousand reviewers love it, and even nominate it for Best Picture. And then I came across this jaw-dropping interactive version of the script, shoot, and movie. 

And now I have to admit, I liked "Moonrise Kingdom." 

Bamazon: A jungle reality show that doesn't strike it rich

What's wrong with this picture? 

This is a screen capture from a new reality show on The History Channel called Bamazon. It's about eight construction workers from Alabama who decide to go to the Amazon in search of a fortune in gold. They mine gold in the Amazon the way we used to do it in California -- with high pressure hoses to wash minute amounts of it out of the hills, and mercury to make it useable. Lots and lots of mercury.  

But that was in the 19th century. This is happening in the Amazon. Now. 

A New York Times op-ed by an honored scientist and a research associate brought this to my attention. Warning! The news is scary. 

Artisanal miners succeed where large, centralized operations fail by evading regulations and targeting gold that has eroded over eons into river sediments, known as placer deposits, that are broadly distributed over vast landscapes.

But to get even an ounce of that gold, miners have to upend tons of river sediment. They pump a continuous slurry of sediment and river water over mats that trap minute fractions of gold-enriched dust, discharging their tailings back into the river.

Periodically, the accumulated gold dust is separated, and the gold isolated by amalgamating it with mercury. Invariably, the mercury is burned off into the atmosphere or, like the tailings, poured into waterways. Over 1,000 tons of mercury is dumped or burned off annually, and several large rivers have been so exhaustively mined that they simply disappear into vast mud pits that make parts of the Amazon look like the Somme.

Here in California, we are still dealing with the legacy of destruction and mercury deposits from our gold rush. It's painful to hear that once again our culture is chewing up a beautiful part of the world for the sake of jewelry, but to hear that we now view this destruction as entertainment?

Horrifying.  

Sex and dating: Women no different than men?

An op-ed in last Sunday's New York Times challenged the idea that physiology and evolutionary psychology can explain the differences between men and women.

Author Dan Slater took on three of the most prominent "differences" between the sexual behavior of men and women, beginning with promiscuity: 

Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0)

For those of us who like myth-busting, it gets even better. With research, Slater goes on to challenge the idea that women are choosier than men about who they will date, and even the idea that women are less interested in men in casual sex.  

Terri D. Conley, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, set out to re-examine what she calls “one of the largest documented sexuality gender differences,” that men have a greater interest in casual sex than women.

Ms. Conley found the methodology of [an often-cited] 1989 paper [researched on college campuses] to be less than ideal. “No one really comes up to you in the middle of the quad and asks, ‘Will you have sex with me?’ ” she told me recently. “So there needs to be a context for it. If you ask people what they would do in a specific situation, that’s a far more accurate way of getting responses.” In her study, when men and women considered offers of casual sex from famous people, or offers from close friends whom they were told were good in bed, the gender differences in acceptance of casual-sex proposals evaporated nearly to zero.

Slater wants to show that our attitudes about sex today may be spilling over into our assumptions about sex and gender, just as they did for Charles Darwin, who posited that for evolutionary reasons men wanted to go out and make money, and women wanted to stay home and raise children. 

In other words, the evolutionary psychology of its founder in l9th-century Britain miraculously reflected the Victorian era of his time. We must expect the same. And from right (orthodox religion) to the left (certain notorious feminists) there's a surprising consensus that women are less sexual than men.

But as Slater points out, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that in fact women are pretty much the same as men in this arena. Despite physiology.

A radical thought for all concerned to contemplate.   

[Image from a Cranberries video labeled Evolutionary Psychology. Sexuality is complicated and dreamy-- right? That much we should be able to agree on...]