I was away from the computer for a few days, and didn’t post anything about the terrible tornado in Oklahoma, but here’s an initial article on it from The New York Times. And David Knowles writes for The New York Daily News that the “Oklahoma Tornado Packed More Energy Than Atomic Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima.”
As Matthew L. Wald reports in yesterday’s New York Times, “All 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology.” This flaw became apparent after the Fukushima meltdown, which the Times reported on here. This is a striking admission, coming as it does from the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
As The New York Times reports, North Korea shut down its last military hot lines to South Korea, and that “it put all its missile and artillery units on ‘the highest alert’ on Tuesday, ordering them to be ready to hit South Korea, as well as the United States and its military installations in Hawaii and Guam.” Perhaps even more disturbing, especially considering how provacative N. Korea has been in the last week, it was reported that “The South Korean Defense Ministry [. . .] vowed a ‘thousandfold, ten-thousandfold retaliation’ against a Cheonan-like provocation from the North” (referring to a sub that sank in 2010 that the South claims was attacked by the North). I find the extreme rhetoric flying around fairly chilling.
It is quite possible that N. Korea is responding to the announcement yesterday of a written agreement b/t the US and S. Korea detailing how the US would respond to aggression against the South (though the specific details were not released). The agreement b/t the two countries was reached last Friday, 22 March 2013.
Now that it’s been pointed out by Michael Moats at Fiction Advocate, I’m realizing the gaggle of David Foster Wallace-related stuff that happened in 2012. The great deal of material that has appeared this year that is in some way connected to DFW has inspired Moats to title his (incomplete . . .) encyclopedic recounting of all this stuff, the “Year of David Foster Wallace” (part 2 is here).
Matt Bucher, administrator of the wallace-l listserv, also weighed in with, “Consider the Year of David Foster Wallace.”
To be honest, however, I don’t necessarily see this trend slowing down too considerably in 2013, as, for example, DFW’s name was mentioned a number of times in Joel Lovell’s recent review-essay in The New York Times, “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year” (a book, titled The Tenth of December, that I very much look forward to reading). Bucher also points out that that we will probably be receiving at least 4 more books that revolve in the DFW orbit in 2013.
Though posted in November, I want to draw attention to Chris Osmond also briefly reflecting on DFW’s pedagogy in his blog post, “Hideous Teachers.” Beginning another semester of SC today where my students will be reading DFW (yet again) makes me realize how valuable his writing can be in the classroom.
As has often been the case recently, my mother is more up on things than I am, so I was quite happy to get a link from her this morning letting me know that a new Thomas Pynchon novel has been announced. It will be titled The Bleeding Edge.
Thanks to R. for drawing my attention to Andrew Martin’s article, “Hurricane Sandy and the Disaster Preparedness Economy,” in Saturday’s New York Times that details yet another example of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism” (though this is admittedly a bit different than, say, Iraq or Chile . . .) in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine. An excerpt:
It’s all part of what you might call the Mad Max Economy, a multibillion-dollar-a-year collection of industries that thrive when things get really, really bad. Weather radios, kerosene heaters, D batteries, candles, industrial fans for drying soggy homes — all are scarce and coveted in the gloomy aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and her ilk.
It didn’t start with the last few hurricanes, either. Modern Mad Max capitalism has been around a while, decades even, growing out of something like old-fashioned self-reliance, political beliefs and post-Apocalyptic visions. The cold war may have been the start, when schoolchildren dove under desks and ordinary citizens dug bomb shelters out back. But economic fears, as well as worries about climate change and an unreliable electronic grid have all fed it.
Don’t have much more to say than that, but I thought it necessary to in some way mark the historic occasion of not only the nation’s first black President, but one elected to a second term amidst catastrophic economic conditions and the unprecedented natural disaster of merely a week ago. Sometimes we do pay attention to our better angels, and don’t only respond to things through fear and shame. The image is from The New York Times.
In something that’s been making the rounds recently, James Glanz writes in the NY Times about how data centers waste vast amounts of energy in, “Power, Pollution and the Internet.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 