Warren Brussee's "The Second Great Depression" & Herman Cain's Nutty Economics

Posted on October 15, 2011 by williamjcobb

So one of the truisms that is sometimes voiced about our current Great Recession is that “Nobody saw it coming.” Which is nonsense, a myth propagated by dimwit media types who would like to believe this fiction, or who actually don’t read much, so they’re not up on what’s being published, and what some people warned might very well happen. Case in point: Years ago (back in 2007, I believe) I read Warren Brussee’s The Second Great Depression: Starting 2007, Ending 2020 (2005), which is all about debt, personal and governmental (mainly personal, if I remember correctly), and how it would drag down the U.S. and global economy for many years. I wasn’t too impressed with the book, although I did think it offered a cogent vision and argument, rather wonky. It might seem a bit too simplistic at times, a bit too monolithic—the one idea of debt overshadowing all other economic movers and shakers—but there is also virtue in its simplicity.
But in 2011, with the global economies limping along, Brussee seems to be a regular Nostradamus. I hope he’s wrong about how long it takes to emerge from this stagnation. Unfortunately I recently saw an article that seemed to back up his gloomy timeline.
Enter Herman Cain and his motivational speaker economics. Tim Egan in the NY Times, as always, does a good riff on it here:

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Pete Dexter in the New York Times!

Posted on October 2, 2011 by williamjcobb

So it’s a good day when you stumble upon a book review of a Jim Harrison novel written by none other than one of our best living novelists, Pete Dexter, here:

My favorite paragraph, about fiction: “Put together, these things serve (to borrow a phrase from “The Great Leader”) to percolate Sunderson’s brain. That is, to entertain it, which is one of the two possible reasons to write, or for that matter read. To enlighten and to entertain: what else is there? And while good books — even so-so books — serve both functions, if you ever have to choose one over the other, keep in mind that a book that entertains without enlightening can still be a guilty pleasure, but a book that enlightens without entertaining is algebra.”
Dexter is a both an entertaining writer and one who burns a scar of recognition across your brain. His best novels are Deadwood (1986) and Paris Trout (1988), while The Paperboy (1995) is underrated. Last year’s Spooner is a sprawling knockout, like three novels in one.

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Reading Daniel Yergin's "The Quest" & a Witty Post About Truthiness

Posted on September 27, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I’m reading the much-talked-about new tome on energy and the future, Daniel Yergin’s The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, just published. So far I’m not particularly impressed, especially after Dwight Garner’s rave review in the NY Times, which offers this rather dim-witted/simplistic rebuttal to the “peak oil” theorists:
“He considers the notion of “peak oil” — the idea that the world’s supply is rapidly running out — and mostly dismisses it. Thanks to new technologies, estimates of the world’s total stock keep growing. But there are other reasons to move beyond oil, not all of them ecological.”
Yergin states: “Oil production today is five times greater than it was in 1957” (I’m reading it on Kindle, so don’t have a page number to cite.)
That’s all fine and dandy, and simplistic to the point of being misleading. Sure, production is greater, technologies have advanced, there is plenty of oil and we’re not “running out” soon, which the more analytic and level-headed warnings about peak oil theory acknowledge. But oil is finite, and all the greater technology is simply allowing the oil industry to obtain it from more and more difficult sources, such as the deep-water well that malfunctioned in the Gulf of Mexico. How much higher is the world’s population now than in 1957? (A webpage called About.com-Geography claims the world population was 2.8 billion in 1955, 6.8 billion now.) How much higher is our energy and oil use than in 1957? (Yergin’s book begins with a recounting of how astronomic our energy usage has become.)
Imagine a forest, a wood pile, and a bonfire. The bonfire is our usage, the forest the total oil on Earth, and the wood pile is what we find and produce. The wood pile may grow larger, but the forest has only so many trees in it. Eventually all of them will be cut down, logical thinking suggests. Jared Diamond does a great analysis of this dynamic in his excellent book Collapse, which contains a chapter about the natives of Easter Island, who apparently cut down all their trees to build the rollers for their massive statues, then perished from ecological collapse.
And for some reason, logic seems to get tossed out the window for many in this argument about peak oil, including by some of its proponents. But this is logical: Oil is a finite commodity. We are getting better and better at finding it, and burning it. The last “Super Giant” oil field was discovered decades ago, and we continue to rely on those (mainly in Saudi Arabia) for the bulk of the world’s oil production. It’s not actually “running out,” which is too simplistic. But it will get more and more expensive to obtain. That idea behooves us to change our ways to greater conservation, and efficiency—which is one thing Daniel Yergin does argue in The Quest. And if we find and burn all we have on Earth, we will have wrecked the atmosphere so severely we will be living in an essentially changed, and most likely chaotic, future.
On another subject altogether, although linked to the reality/spin-doctoring that seems to dominate media these days, there’s this witty rebuttal to a dissing of the “knowledge” of fiction:

Being a novelist, sure, I’m biased toward fiction, toward the role that stories play in culture and civilization. It’s a way we tell ourselves what’s important. It’s a way we communicate our visions of the past and future.

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Australian Horror on Netflix: "The Reef," "Arctic Blast," and "Primal"

Posted on September 18, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I was at first excited by the streaming-video options of Netflix months ago, but the charm actually rather quickly wore off and I agree with some of the popular grouching about it—basically that Netflix has a rather limited list of titles, even if there are zillions of them. I find myself searching around for something weird and offbeat, and lately all those titles have been Austrialian horror/scifi movies. They’re surprisingly better than our similar B-movie offerings, the kind you can often find on the SyFy channel or Chiller: the Australian ones tend to have better acting and plots. They seem to take their cheese more seriously, and it pays off.
The last film I watched in this category was Arctic Blast, which should really be called Ozone Blast. The best part: when hundreds/thousands of people get flash-frozen because a dangerous hole in the ozone layer lets in some cold air (“Close that ozone hole, why don’tcha?”), the hero (a climate scientist) shrugs and says, “We did it to ourselves. We’ve polluted the planet.” (Or something like that.) He’s unflappable to the nth degree. They should have had this tag line for the movie poster: Arctic Blast—”It’s an eco-thriller The Fog without dead pirates!”
Primal is even more fun, for what happens to the sexed-up cutie on a camping trip. You can always tell who’s going to get eaten/stabbed/hacked/infected first in a horror film—the horniest one. But as this girl morphs into a snarling zombie/monster, her boyfriend doesn’t want to hurt her. “But she’s my girlfriend!” he cries (or something like that: I mean, I wasn’t taking notes), after she’s just eaten another person on their camping trip. (Her version of “glorp.”)
And the seriously good one of this trio is The Reef, which is like Open Water only better. It should really be called The Swim, but why quibble. Some holiday yuppies go for a boat ride, it hits a reef and capsizes, then several of them swim for an island far, far away. Guess what? A shark follows, picking off the slowest ones. The end is quite good. Like Arctic Blast, it also features a seriously stoic hero. That must be an Australian thing.

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"127 Hours" as Big-Budget "I Shouldn't Be Alive," With a Nod to the Great "Touching the Void"

Posted on September 17, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I finally got around to watching the much-acclaimed/suspect film of Aaron Ralston’s self-amputation, 127 Hours, and actually thought it was pretty good, even if my hotel owner/chef in Green River, Utah held a grudge against Ralston for not paying back the county/state money spent on searching for him. (See previous post months ago: I met the guy at his Riverside Terrace restaurant, which made a killer breakfast.) It’s really a big-budget version of one of my favorite AnimalPlanet TV shows, I Shouldn’t Be Alive, which reenacts true tales of harrowing outdoor horror, some of them quite good. My favorite: the guy who survived for over three months at sea, adrift in a small life raft. The great part of those shows is they feature the actual survivors reliving their stories, and providing some interesting commentary. Ralston only shows up at the end of 127 Hours, in a brief flash, with his wife, and seems likable enough, for that brief moment.
But Ralston’s story, harrowing as it is, pales in comparison to both the book and film of Touching the Void. This first appeared as a nonfiction book in 1988, about Joe Simpson and Simon Yates’s disaster while mountain climbing in Peru, in which Simpson fell and broke several bones, and then Yates tried to lower him down the mountain, only to be forced to cut the rope and let him fall into a crevasse, giving him up for dead. Only he didn’t die. He crawled out of the crevasse, and several miles over glaciers and rocks back to camp, to arrive just in time before Yates and another fellow were about to hike back to civilization. The book was amazing. The film, made in 2003, was excruciating to watch, and is still the greatest I Shouldn’t Be Alive episode ever told.

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Climate Change Coverage in the NY Times

Posted on September 8, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I have decidedly mixed feelings about most of our media, no matter how much I read or watch it, as I imagine most of us do. (I make a point to read CNN just to see the latest blather of the neconservative/supposedly liberal media at work. Fox News? I can’t stoop that low.) But this morning I’m heartened to notice the continued coverage of climate change in the NY Times, evidenced by these two articles. The first is about the Republican denial of climate change, here:

That’s an easy target to hit, but I’m glad to see them summing up the various candidates blatant conservative pandering/stupidity so well. And this morning they offer a more difficult pill to swallow, directed toward the believers like myself—and everyone, actually, here:

These two opposing points of view illustrate the difficult choices we face. The Times is standing out as a pillar of intelligence in the dumbed-down world of mass media.

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On a Novel Titled "The Bird Saviors"

Posted on September 6, 2011 by williamjcobb

So a few months ago I blogged about finishing my new novel ms., The Bird Saviors, & how the completion occurred by describing a rather simple detail—a man drinking a glass of water—that has greater implications and reverberations than one might usually think. Since then the novel went through the channels of agent, then editor, and is now bought (signed, sealed, delivered) and scheduled for publication in the spring. I’ve been writing on it for four years, which seems a lifetime.
It was actually a “Lost” novel, in that I wrote a first draft, kept neglecting to back up the document on my laptop, whose harddrive subsequently crashed, destroying the entire novel. A 300-page ms gone—no print-out, no nothing. I rewrote it from memory.

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Review of Justin Torres's novel(la) "We the Animals"

Posted on September 4, 2011 by williamjcobb

So my review of Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals, appears today in the Dallas Morning News, here:
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20110902-book-review-we-the-animals-by-justin-torres.ece
It’s a good, short book. I point out that it’s closer to a novella than a full-figured novel, but that’s not a damning criticism, in my view: Short & punchy is greatly favored over long-winded & tedious. (I could name names here, but I won’t. But in the last year I reviewed two novels over 800 pages each, and both were twice as long as needed.)
I saw the review of this book today in the NY Times, and I noticed their reviewer avoided giving away the ending, same as I. It’s no big mystery, and I’d already guessed it before the moment it’s revealed. It’s a cultural thing, really, why we’re holding back. And we’re being fair to the writer/reader, not wanting to telegraph the book before people interested have a chance to judge for themselves.

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The Know Nothing Party Defies Gravity, Wins Elections?

Posted on September 1, 2011 by williamjcobb

So it’s driving me (slightly) crazy to read the idiocy coming out of Rick Perry’s mouth, echoed by a chorus of other Republican presidential contenders. Paul Krugman in the NY Times sums up their anti-science idiocy well here:

What strikes me most? These Republicans are only anti-science when it conflicts with their half-baked “business is God” dogma: Give them an iPad, a nuclear reactor, that Facebook account by which they’ll promote their campaigns, and they’re more than happy to use it, even to kick off “technology” funds to fill the pockets of their friends with profits of government subsidies and contracts, as Perry is noted for doing. But evolution and climate change are crackpot theories, according to them. Why? Because it would conflict with their conservative Christian voters (who I’d say are smarter than that, hopefully), and their business cronies.
What scares me, and what should scare the country, is that somehow the electorate doesn’t see their contradictions. We could well have a Republican president next term. I don’t see Obama as perfect. I agree with others that he should fight harder for environmental concerns, which right now is usually doomed because each choice we face, such as the Keystone XL pipeline, gets labeled as “anti-business” or “anti-jobs” if you oppose it. (Which we should.) So, yes, he needs more of a backbone. But he’s trying to do the right thing.
In Tim Flannery’s excellent new book of nonfiction, Here On Earth, he discusses the idea of Future Discount. Basically it’s how people will often discount or dismiss things we can foresee in the future, like climate change, for a variety of reasons. Often those encompass a Willing Suspension of Disbelief, to use Coleridge’s dictum about storytelling. We want to believe climate change won’t greatly harm the world, so in spite of all the evidence scientists are offering that it will, we ignore them. We shouldn’t. And here’s why: My daughter, Lili, will be 44 years old at mid-century, when many scientists claim our climate change problem will be irreversible. And all the other sons and daughters of the world.

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On Tom Perrotta's New Novel, With a Warning About the Last

Posted on August 27, 2011 by williamjcobb

So in today’s New York Times Book Review Stephen King reviews Tom Perrotta’s new novel, The Leftovers, and has this to say:
“Perrotta began his exploration of the stress points between religion and secular American life in his previous novel, “The Abstinence Teacher.” “The Leftovers” feels like a logical, if extreme, extension of those concerns. Not every character and motivation rings perfectly true (Laurie’s conversion to the Guilty Remnant is especially troubling, since she is one of the fortunate Mapletonians not to have lost a family member), but the slow, sad drift of this suburban world into various forms of cultic extremism as a response to upheaval feels spot on.”
Perrotta wrote the novel Little Children (2004) that was made into the good film starring Kate Winslet, which I thought was terrific—the film; I bought the book and then decided not to bother reading it. Why? Believing Perrotta’s fiction must be good based on that film (a mistake), I assigned The Abstinence Teacher (2007), which was his new book at the time, to a writing class, before having read it. (I like to be up-to-date in my readings, and sometimes this backfires.) It proceeded to be something of a disaster. The students hated it. It was so bad I had to apologize for assigning it—the first and only time that’s happened, I think. It was a strange experience.

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