Friday Book Club - Nobody's Fool

by Francine Prose

Years ago, when I felt that the world weighed too heavily on my shoulders and believed (as only the young do) that the world would not willingly let me go, I used to dream of disappearing to some remote upstate New York town and checking in, a permanent guest, at its crumbling bleak hotel. Such towns, which I imagined to be off the edge of the map, are very much at the center of Richard Russo's fictional geography. His ambitious new novel, "Nobody's Fool," is set in North Bath, N.Y., a fractionally less blighted version of the blue-collar dead end where his earlier novels, "Mohawk" and "The Risk Pool," take place.

North Bath is the sort of community we might drive through without pausing, except to fantasize roomier lives for ourselves in its "aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been worth some money if they were across the border in Vermont." But Mr. Russo encourages us to stop and look around; he shows us that what seems static is churning, underneath. And one soon realizes that no sensible person would go to North Bath to disappear, since life there, as Balzac wrote of the provinces, is lived entirely in public.

Perhaps that's the reason that small towns, like seagoing vessels, have always suited fiction: manageable little pressure cookers with a fixed cast of characters, whose lack of privacy and enforced proximity may cause the plot to boil over. What's turned up the heat in North Bath is the possibility that a theme park, to be called the Ultimate Escape, may be built there, and may breathe some economic life into the moribund former spa. Once a thriving resort, the town has declined steadily since 1868, "when the unthinkable began to happen and the various mineral springs, one by one, without warning or apparent reason, began, like luck, to dry up, and with them the town's wealth and future."

It's autumn 1984 and North Bath is "still waiting for its luck to change," but one senses its luck would need a fairly dramatic reversal to much affect the fortunes of Sully, Donald Sullivan, the novel's incorrigible and engaging hero: "Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully -- people still remarked -- was nobody's fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application -- that at 60, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable -- all of which he stubbornly confused with independence."

Sixty years have knocked Sully from one part of North Bath to another, from his violent father's house to the rooms he rents now from the elderly Miss Beryl Peoples, his former teacher. A painful knee injury has him working odd jobs, off the books.

Sully is a partly domesticated, slightly maddened bear, feinting and jabbing at the center of the book's many subplots and hard-luck characters. His estranged lover, Ruth, has a husband she despises and a daughter whose own husband is trying to kill her. Sully's son, Peter, has serious marital troubles, two difficult children, a crazily possessive mother, a sick stepfather -- and he's been denied tenure at the small college where he teaches. Miss Beryl has been getting lost on her excursions around town, and she is compelled to fend off the grabby, selfish meddling of her banker son, Clive Jr. -- one of the main boosters of the Ultimate Escape. Even Sully's best friend, Rub (he's too dim to find trouble to get into), is undone by his wife's late-blooming kleptomania.

The Death of the American Dream

By Walter Russell Mead

The news from the housing market this week is bad.  Really bad.  House prices today are lower in most of the country than they were in the dismal month of April 2009; we are now in the second dip of the double dip housing downturn.

This doesn’t just mean that President Obama’s re-election is in trouble.  It doesn’t just mean that stocks and the dollar may fall.  It doesn’t just mean that unemployment will stay high for a while and that whole economy may follow the housing market back into the tank for a second recession.

It means something bigger.  For eighty years we have defined the American dream as an owner occupied family home, preferably with a nice swathe of crabgrass-free lawn around it.  The home mortgage was the centerpiece of a society of consumers based on debt-financed living.  It was life on the installment plan.  The latest downturn in the housing market is one more grim signal that in its current form, the American Dream is going the way of the dodo.

A home of your own increasingly means a home of the bank’s.  Today some 86 million Americans live in homes that are ‘under water’ where the amount owed on the mortgage is greater than the value of the house.  Since the financial crisis began in 2008, over one million consumer mortgages have gone into foreclosure. Sales of bank-owned properties are now 34.5 percent of the housing market;  homes in foreclosure waiting for resale now account for a three years-supply on the sluggish housing market.

The damage is heavy.  For most Americans, their single biggest asset is the equity in their home.  At the peak of the boom, total net home equity in the US (the value of owner occupied homes minus the remaining mortgage debt) stood at 13 trillion.  Today it is down to $6.5 trillion. America’s home equity losses are greater than the GDP of Japan.

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The Most Divisive Moral Issue in America

Jack Kevorkian, the audacious doctor who spurred on the national right-to-die debate with a homemade suicide machine that helped end the lives of dozens of ailing people, died today at a Detroit-area hospital after a brief illness. He was 83.

Twelve years after Dr. Jack Kevorkian went to prison for murder when he helped a man with Lou Gehrig's disease die, American's are still sharply divided about the morality of doctor-assisted suicide. With 45 percent of people believing euthanasia is OK, and 48 percent against the practice, that issue stands atop a new Gallup poll of the nation's most divisive moral conundrums. Second and third were abortion and having a child out of wedlock, which is surprising when one ponders the adoration of "Brangelina."

What the vast majority of Americans can agree upon is that a married man and woman having an affair is morally wrong. And most also believe that it's bad to have more than one spouse and to clone humans.

Of course while the extremes on either end are always fun to see, what's most interesting about this survey isn't the poles. Most interesting is that for every practice Gallup asked about, at least a quarter of respondents found it morally objectionable. In a time in which America seems like it's filled with bigots who will never be willing to accept gays, it's important to remember that the number of people against gays and lesbians and the number of people against gambling aren't separated by too wide a gulf. As you can see below, nearly 25 percent of Americans even think something as benign as divorce is morally wrong.

The next time you're shocked, as I sometimes am, at how many people have moral problems with LGBT people, just remember that almost as many are opposed to a man and woman having intercourse out of wedlock, something millions of Americans do every day.

The point is that the moral police are going to be the moral police regardless of your race, gender, or sexual orientation. It's annoying, but it's now so archaic as to be laughable.

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A Short History of the Campsite

by Martin Hogue

Open camp in Adirondacks, ca. 1890. [Courtesy of the Adirondack Museum]

One does not impose, but rather expose the site.
— Robert Smithson [1]

There is a satisfying immediacy about the prospect of establishing an encampment for the night — clearing the site, erecting the tent, chopping wood, building a fire and cooking over the live flame — that in turn suggests a meaningful connection to landscape, place and the rugged life of backwoods adventurers. In essence camping is an act of faith and survival, a way to buttress a modest, isolated human settlement against the forces of nature. Situated "somewhere between challenging new circumstances and the safe reassurances of familiarity," the camp is a temporary substitute for the home — a place to dwell, to sleep, to interact socially, to prepare and eat food. [2] Stripped of any but the most vital conveniences, the camp is literally and figuratively open to the stimuli of its natural surroundings.

This summer millions of Americans will take to the road in search of this powerful experience of nature. And that parcel of land upon which most will elect to drive their car, set up their tent, park their trailer or RV is the campsite — which is thus not only an imagined ideal but also the fundamental unit of management of the modern campground. There are 113,000 federally managed campsites in the United States, 166,000 campsites dispersed across state parks, and untold numbers in private facilities. [3] Last year Kampgrounds of America — KOA, familiarly — alone reported a total usage of over five million campsite nights, as well as 1.5 million hits monthly on its website. [4]

Modern campsites embody a peculiar contradiction: They are defined and serviced by an increasingly sophisticated range of utilities and conveniences, and yet marketed to perpetuate the cherished American ideal of the backwoods camp. For artist Robert Smithson, whose sensitivities to site and site-making were informed by childhood family camping trips he helped organize, the campsite was where one could reenact the making of a place. [5] Campgrounds indeed commodify into multiple sites — literally tens of thousands of them — with each functioning as the locus of a singular experience, which is itself further commodified and mediated by popular imagery. The record sales reported by sporting utility stores like REI and EMS owe largely to the retailers' successful efforts to associate their equipment with the out-of-doors and the prospect of healthy living. For many urbanites, high-performance gear — hiking boots, mountaineering vests, etc. — have become staples of everyday casual chic.

Postcard, Silver Streak, "The Finest Travel Trailer Built." [Via Flickr]

Modern campgrounds are replete with delightful irony: each "lone" campsite functions as a stage upon which cultural fantasies can be performed in full view of an audience of fellow campers interested in much the same "wilderness" experience. Who in the camping community has not experienced a degree of gear envy at the sight, on a neighboring camp, of a brand new Primus Gravity II EasyFuel stove (with piezo ignition), a Sierra Designs tent, or a Marmot sleeping bag? KOA even leases some permanently parked Airstream trailers, which allow campers to spend the night in a cultural icon; this experiment also allows would-be campers to show up without any personal equipment, just as they would at a roadside motel. No wonder that the daily repetition of chores once associated with survival has now been so fully recast as a series of almost spiritual rituals intended to reconnect the camper with what has been largely lost; for by now most of the old necessities — hiking to and clearing the site, hunting for game, collecting water and firewood — have given way to such less arduous activities as parking the car, pitching cable-free pop tents, buying cold cuts at the campground store, hooking up electrical and sewerage conduits, setting up patio chairs, etc. Serviced by networks of infrastructure and populated with trailers and $100,000 RVs, campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives and desires (wilderness, individuality, access, speed, comfort, nostalgia, profit) have become strangely and powerfully hybridized.

To tell the story of the campsite is not to tell the story of any one site or even any one campground, but rather to examine how this cultural ideal of rugged American character came to be appropriated and transformed into a generic and widely replicated template of spatial protocols. It is to talk not only about campers but also about the crucial role of motor vehicles in shaping this narrative, which begins rather innocuously with early 20th-century roadside bivouacs and culminates in today's tightly organized loops of dedicated plots. The following four concepts seem to me key to understanding the radical physical and cultural transformations of the campground in the past century.

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The Making of Diaspora

by Ariel Bleicher


Armed with Google technologies, four young coders are planting the seeds for the post-Facebook future.

This is part of IEEE Spectrum's special report on the battle for the future of the social Web.

The Diaspora guys, four college kids turned chief engineers of the most-talked-about social networking start-up this year, get a lot of friend requests. Sometimes fans just show up at their office, uninvited, and ask to work with them. Every now and then, someone recognizes them in public, which freaks them out. On the day they moved into their current office in San Francisco, a commuter stopped them on the subway and commanded, "Go get 'em, guys! Kill Facebook!"

Journalists and bloggers have called Diaspora "the Facebook killer," "the Facebook rival," "the anti-Facebook," "Facebook's challenger," and "another Facebook wannabe." They have speculated about whether Diaspora is better than Facebook, whether Facebook will try to buy Diaspora, and whether Diaspora could "knock Facebook off its perch."

The guys, however, don't see themselves as competition. After all, Diaspora is a rookie company; its software is buggy and crash prone, and although the company tries to solve the biggest problem with Facebook by giving users better control over their private data, its site looks and acts like a vacant, amateur imitation.

Besides, the guys insist, they're not aiming to replace Facebook with "yet another social network." Rather, they're taking a stab at reengineering the way online socializing works by building an entire network of networks from the ground up. They hope that in the process they will help promote standards that other social sites—such as Digg, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, and perhaps one day even Facebook—will use to bridge their services. They imagine that during the next decade, the Web will evolve from a sea of social networking islands into what many developers are calling the federated social Web—one that lets you choose your networking provider, just as you now choose your e-mail provider, and yet still connect with friends who use other services.

Such a Web may be a distant, idealistic vision, but it's not Diaspora's alone. Many programmers and social media thinkers, including some at other start-ups, at universities, and at big companies such as Google, Mozilla, and Germany's Vodafone, have been working to develop open standards for a federated social Web since around the time "The Facebook" was a profile directory for Harvard students. They believe that such a Web is not only possible but also preferable. "If I couldn't e-mail people who don't share the same domain as me, that would be pretty stupid," remarks Joseph Smarr, a social Web engineer at Google. "But that's exactly the way social networks work today, and that's broken and should be fixed."

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Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

[ed.  Fascinating history on the marketing and economics of the diamond industry.  Hint: they are not really as rare or valuable as you think.]

by Edward J. Epstein

The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as "The Syndicate." In Europe, it was called the "C.S.O." -- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company. And in black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with names like Diamond Development Corporation and Mining Services, Inc. At its height -- for most of this century -- it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa but also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland.

De Beers proved to be the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce. While other commodities, such as gold, silver, copper, rubber, and grains, fluctuated wildly in response to economic conditions, diamonds have continued, with few exceptions, to advance upward in price every year since the Depression. Indeed, the cartel seemed so superbly in control of prices -- and unassailable -- that, in the late 1970s, even speculators began buying diamonds as a guard against the vagaries of inflation and recession.

The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever -- "forever" in the sense that they should never be resold.

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Demolishing Detroit

by Howie Kahn

The massive twelve-wheeled demolition truck rumbles down the street and lures the neighbors out to gripe. It's not that the truck or the driver, Lorenzo Coney, are unwelcome. The people here just want to know what's taken them so long.

On this June morning, with the heat and humidity rising, residents emerge from their homes one by one: mostly women, mostly older, mostly taking care of their mothers and grandkids. They've been calling the city, they say, for years without response and feel as abandoned as the houses that surround them—the foreclosed, devitalized structures that require immediate wrecking. They have questions for Lorenzo. Comprehensive to-do lists for this man who has powerful machines and, so, they figure, actual power. They ask when the dead trees are coming down. They want to know when the drug dealing will stop. Does Lorenzo's boss have a job for their sons, by any chance? Or for their nephews? Or what about for themselves? They can still work, they say. They can lift things. Handle a shovel. Run a hose. They pointat any number of vacancies on their street: "You tearing down this one? What about this one? How about this one?"

When they find out Lorenzo's only there for one house, they seethe. "But those are drug houses," they demand, imploring the crew to tear them all down, imploring me to somehow tear them all down. "That one," they say, "somebody got raped in. You're not taking that one down? Are you serious? I called about that one. I called. And called. When are you doing that one? You should be here all day. All week. All year."

Lorenzo explains he's only a wrecker; he's not the mayor. He's simply following orders, knocking down houses as fast as he can.

"I can do twenty a day," says Lorenzo, standing outside a Craftsman-style bungalow at 18058 Joann. This house took the better part of 1926 to build. Crews of men dug a hole, poured a foundation, assembled floor bridging and ceiling joists and a truss for the roof. Shingles were laid down, one at a time. Wooden siding was hung. Mortar was spread and bricks were stacked. By the time the house was completed, it boasted a gable roof, central dormer windows, and generous eaves shading a balustraded veranda. Covering 1,300 square feet, it had a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom, a small kitchen, and a light-filled parlor facing the street. It was priced for a worker—less than $4,000 new—and meant, for a family, a future.

It will take Lorenzo and his two-man crew from Farrow Demolition Incorporated thirty-six minutes to destroy it. It will be their fourth wreck of the day. By 9:30 a.m., 1718 Field, 3911 Beaconsfield, and 13103 Canfield have all been reduced to rubble, having met the mechanized violence of the CAT 330D L excavator. From house to garbage in the time it takes to do a load of laundry. Soon one of Farrow's drivers will collect the remains and haul them to the landfill—eighty-year-old houses, each ground down into a hundred tons of trash and dumped from the back of a truck. In the end, the house is just one more useless thing.

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Apocalypse - What Disasters Reveal

By Junot Diaz

ONE

On January 12, 2010 an earthquake struck Haiti. The epicenter of the quake, which registered a moment magnitude of 7.0, was only fifteen miles from the capital, Port-au-Prince. By the time the initial shocks subsided, Port-au-Prince and surrounding urbanizations were in ruins. Schools, hospitals, clinics, prisons collapsed. The electrical and communication grids imploded. The Presidential Palace, the Cathedral, and the National Assembly building—historic symbols of the Haitian patrimony—were severely damaged or destroyed. The headquarters of the UN aid mission was reduced to rubble, killing peacekeepers, aid workers, and the mission chief, Hédi Annabi.

The figures vary, but an estimated 220,000 people were killed in the aftermath of the quake, with hundreds of thousands injured and at least a million—one-tenth of Haiti’s population—rendered homeless. According to the Red Cross, three million Haitians were affected. It was the single greatest catastrophe in Haiti’s modern history. It was for all intents and purposes an apocalypse.

TWO

Apocalypse comes to us from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning to uncover and unveil. Now, as James Berger reminds us in After the End, apocalypse has three meanings. First, it is the actual imagined end of the world, whether in Revelations or in Hollywood blockbusters. Second, it comprises the catastrophes, personal or historical, that are said to resemble that imagined final ending—the Chernobyl meltdown or the Holocaust or the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan that killed thousands and critically damaged a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Finally, it is a disruptive event that provokes revelation. The apocalyptic event, Berger explains, in order to be truly apocalyptic, must in its disruptive moment clarify and illuminate “the true nature of what has been brought to end.” It must be revelatory.

“The apocalypse, then,” per Berger, “is the End, or resembles the end, or explains the end.” Apocalypses of the first, second, and third kinds. The Haiti earthquake was certainly an apocalypse of the second kind, and to those who perished it may even have been an apocalypse of the first kind, but what interests me here is how the Haiti earthquake was also an apocalypse of the third kind, a revelation. This in brief is my intent: to peer into the ruins of Haiti in an attempt to describe what for me the earthquake revealed—about Haiti, our world, and even our future.

After all, if these types of apocalyptic catastrophes have any value it is that in the process of causing things to fall apart they also give us a chance to see the aspects of our world that we as a society seek to run from, that we hide behind veils of denials.

Apocalyptic catastrophes don’t just raze cities and drown coastlines; these events, in David Brooks’s words, “wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities.” And, equally important, they allow us insight into the conditions that led to the catastrophe, whether we are talking about Haiti or Japan. (I do believe the tsunami-earthquake that ravaged Sendai this past March will eventually reveal much about our irresponsible reliance on nuclear power and the sinister collusion between local and international actors that led to the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe.)

If, as Roethke writes, “in a dark time, the eye begins to see,” apocalypse is a darkness that gives us light.

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Whhaaappaa...!

Surfer speak

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The Two Lives of Tom Watson

[ed.  I was as curious as anyone to learn about the "Secret" so I looked it up.  It's at the end of this article, in Tom's own words.]

 by Joe Posnanski

Tom Watson is one of the greatest golfers who ever lived. That’s a given. He won eight major championships — only five legendary golfers (Nicklaus, Woods, Hagen, Hogan, Player) have won more. He won 39 PGA events, which ties him with a couple of guys named Sarazen and Mickelson for 10th. He beat Nicklaus head-to-head three times — at Augusta, at Turnberry, at Pebble Beach — in three of the most famous duels in the history of golf. On Sunday, at age 61, he won the Senior PGA Championship in Louisville. That was his sixth major title on the Senior Tour (or “Champions Tour” as they beg people to call it) — only Nicklaus and Hale Irwin have won more. I’m not saying anything here that you don’t know. Tom Watson is certainly and unquestionably one of the greatest golfers who ever lived.

And yet … I think Watson’s career is singular because unlike any of the other great golfers, Watson’s life is really divided in two. There was the young and wild Watson who hit the ball all over the place and won with one of the great short games in golf history. And there is the older Watson, whose ball-striking is so magnificent that men half his age salivate, but who has been held back by 5-foot putts that stubbornly go their own way.

If the game of the old and young Watson had ever met, they would not recognize each other.

If the old Watson and the young Watson had ever shared a season, they might have won the Grand Slam.

They did not. Watson won the last of his six PGA Tour Player of the Year awards in 1984. He found what he calls “The Secret” in 1994. In the nine years between, he suffered. The young Watson was stormy and miraculous — even HE used the phrase “Watson Par” to describe his hit-into-the-trees, hack-it-somewhere-near-the-green, somehow-get-it-to-10-feet, drain-the-putt style. He would say it with a hint of mischief in his voice — “There you go, another Watson par” — but he did it too often for anyone to think of it as luck. In those days, Watson was the boldest putter in the world. And this was because he was fearless. He knew that if he hit it 4- or 6-feet by, he would make the comeback. He KNEW it.

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Me and the Devil

Doc

by  Katherine A. Powers

Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Earp's many brothers are known to most of us as they have been shaped successively by sensationalist journalism, dime novels, movies, and TV series. Though biographies of varying degrees of seriousness have also been written of most of these men, their lives might best be suited to fiction; only it can adequately convey the animating tincture of myth that has made them momentous.

This, at least, is the thought that comes to me upon finishing Mary Doria Russell's "Doc." This extraordinary novel, whose central figure is John Henry "Doc" Holliday, is both a work of reclamation of the man from his legend as a coldblooded killer and an inspired evocation of a mythic quintessence. That fundamental aspect of Doc's life is announced from the start: "The Fates pursued him from the day he first drew breath, howling for his delayed demise."

Though set chiefly in 1878 in Dodge City, the story begins with John Henry Holliday's early life as a man beset by misfortune. The son of a Georgia planter, he was born with a cleft palate, later repaired by innovative surgery. His mother, a woman "educated in excess of a lady's requirements," devoted herself to the arduous task of teaching him to speak clearly. She also taught him to play the piano and supplemented his formal education, sharing with him her love of the classics. She died of tuberculosis when he was 15, leaving him in life-long mourning. She quite possibly left Holliday with her disease as well -- the tuberculosis that eventually killed him two decades later.

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