Nuclear and National Security State
Mark Strauss, “Failed Nuclear Weapons Recycling Program Could Put Us All in Danger.”
Lauren Gambino, “New York Review of Books Slams CIA with Twitter Attack.”
Climate Change
It’s sad that we even see articles like this one. Allison Kopicki, “Is Global Warming Real? Most Americans Say Yes.” Argh.
Lori Montgomery, “In Norfolk, Evidence of Climate Change Is in the Streets at High Tide.”
Nuclear
More adventures in nuclear incompetence: Lily Hay Newman, “Air Force Security Failed a Takeover Drill at a Nuclear Silo.”
Climate Change, Catastrophe, and the Anthropocene
We’re doomed. “A Galaxy Far, Far Away . . . Will Hit Ours.”
Lindsay Abrams, “Researchers: The Collapse of Greenland’s Ice Sheet Could Be a Bigger Disaster Than We Thought.”
Ari Phillips, “In Landmark Class Action, Farmers Insurance Sues Local Government for Ignoring Climate Change.” Is that what we need? For the insurance companies to get involved?
Yes. McKenzie Funk, “Insuring the Apocalypse.”
Paul Krugman, “Cutting Back on Carbon.”
On the flooding in the Balkans.
Everything is the worst: Ryan Koronowski, “House Votes to Deny Climate Science and Ties Pentagon’s Hands on Climate Change.”
Climate Change
The New York Times on the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Paul Krugman, “Points of No Return.”
Eyder Peralta, “New Report Finds Climate Change Already Having Broad Impact.”
Gerry Canavan on “Dystopia, Anti-Utopia, and the End of the World.”
Peter Frase, “Adjusting to the Apocalypse.”
A very interesting piece at Jacobin reflecting on an analogy between abolitionists and environmentalists: Matt Karp, “A Second Civil War.”
Roger Peet, “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis.”
Martin Lukacs, “New, Privatized African City Heralds Climate Apartheid.”
Julie Beck on John Oliver’s “Statistically Representative Climate Change Debate.”
Saskia Sassen, “Countdown to Oblivion: The Real Reason We Can’t Stop Global Warming.”
Mike Wall, “To Combat Climate Change, Humanity Must Act Now, NASA Chief Says.”
Brad Plumer, “Five Horrifying Maps of America’s Massive Drought.”
And “Picture This: U.S. Cities Under 12 Feet of Sea Level Rise.” An example:
The Back Bay in Boston under 12 Feet of Sea Level Rise
But don’t fret, “This Couple is Making Roads Out of Solar Panels, and They Actually Work.”
And Michelle Nijhuis, “How to Laugh at Climate Change.”
Below is an abstract for a paper I will be presenting at the 2014 American Literature Association Conference, taking place May 22-25. I will be presenting this paper on a panel organized by the William Carlos Williams society, titled, “William Carlos Williams: The Poet-Doctor as Environmentalist.” The panel will be taking place 11:10-12:30 on May 23.
Apocalypse on Repeat: William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All and the Nuclear Imagination
Long out of print after their initial publication in 1923, the prose sections of Spring and All offer remarkable critical avenues for discussing William Carlos Williams’s environmentalism. Serving as both a frame for some of his more well-known poetry and a theoretical engagement with the volume’s central concern—the imagination—the prose of Spring and All cannot help but strike a contemporary reader with its anticipation of the post-apocalyptic and eco-disaster narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To begin the aesthetic work of poetic composition, Spring and All enacts total destruction followed by material repetition in order to allow Williams to formulate an imagination distinct from a romantic apocalyptic, a formulation essential for the development of his ecopoetics. The imagination in Spring and All is a material force. It is vibrant, organic, and radioactive. It is scientific and geological, and it is concerned with atomic physics well before the atom was split. This paper will argue that Spring and All articulates what I have called elsewhere a nuclear imagination. Drawing upon current reconsiderations of modernism’s relationship to atomic technology and my own conversations with J. Hillis Miller about Williams’s poetry and romanticism, I will suggest that Williams, through embracing this destructive, recursive, ironic, nuclear imagination, abandons an eschatology that could in any way be positive, even as something to be gone “beyond.” In this way, reconsidering Spring and All opens up a space for the contemporary environmental imagination that is neither apocalyptic nor post-apocalyptic, but rather thoroughly material and ecological.
Climate Change and Disaster
Henry Fountain, “At Chernobyl, Hints of Nature’s Adaptation.”
New advances in solar technology.
Climate change already impacting US and “New Report Finds Climate Change Already Having a Broad Impact.”
Katie Valentine, “The Southeast Has Had More Billion-Dollar Disasters than the Rest of the Country Combined.”
Archives
A whole new kind of archive fever: the cassette tape that can hold 64 million songs. Where was this technology when I was making mixtapes in high school?
It’s been a busy end of the semester and I haven’t been able to post anything for a bit. So, now that I have a bit of time before the semester wraps up, here’s a bunch of stuff that has been happening the last few weeks. My apologies if I’m a bit late on some of these things.
Nuclear and Disaster
Laura Miller reviews Craig Nelson’s The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and the Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Age.
John Metcalfe, “What Famous Old Paintings Can Tell Us About Climate Change.”
Only .02% of published research rejects global warming.
Adam Weinstein, “Arrest Climate Change Deniers.”
The Concourse has a great map of the ways that Hollywood films have depicted the destruction of various locales in the US.
Science
The first evidence for cosmic inflation–i.e., the Big Bang–was discovered this week.
Megan Garber at The Atlantic, “What It’s Like to be Right About the Big Bang?”
The search for Flight MH370 is revealing one thing: the ocean is filled with garbage.
Kim Stanley Robinson alert: Paul Rosenfeld, “Would You Take a One-Way Ticket to Mars?”
And as part of his forthcoming 3 million page novel, Breeze Avenue (2015), Richard Grossman has buried a crystal ball deep inside of Princeton Mountain in Colorado. The ball, “made of synthetic sapphire, which is almost as indestructible as diamond,” has the Ten Commandments inscribed on it in Hebrew, and in “20 million years, as a result of natural forces carefully calculated by the geologists, the Torah Ball will emerge from its eroded resting place and bear the Ten Commandments down the mountain.” Hyperarchivalists of the deep future rejoice!
Richard Grossman, The Torah Ball (Synthetic Sapphire, Princeton Mountain, 20 Million Years of Erosion, 2011).
In “NASA-Funded Study: Industrial Civilization Headed for ‘Irreversible Collapse’?” Nafeez Ahmed reports for The Guardian on a recent study produced by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center that “highlight[s] the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.” The most striking thing about the report to me is its interdisciplinarity, mixing bleeding edge environmental science, historical perspective, economics, Marxist cultural analysis, etc.: “Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most ‘detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners,’ allowing them to ‘continue “business as usual” despite the impending catastrophe.’ The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how ‘historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases).'” We’re doomed.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a discussion of Elaine Scarry‘s new book, Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom (2014). Nathan Schneider has written an extensive review of Thermonuclear Monarchy, “A Literary Scholar’s Voice in the Wilderness: Elaine Scarry Fights American Complacency About Nuclear Arms.” Scarry is also the author of the monumentally important, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987).
“Melting Ice Makes the Arctic A Much Worse Heat-Magnet than Scientists Feared.”
January was actually one of the warmest months on record.
And more disastrous weather to come.
Davis and Michaels explaining why they’re striking at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Noam Chomsky: Zombies are the New Indians and Slave in White America’s Collective Nightmare.”
“David Foster Wallace, Mathematician.”
Samuel Cohen on Wallace, “Future Tense.”
My friend David Letzler reviews Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013).
On Dead Poets Society (1989) and the humanities.
“Feminism, Depravity, and Power in House of Cards.” I just finished watching the fairly incredible second season last night.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 