Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/23/world-made-by-hand-b.html
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On that topic:
I have been chopping wood for the fire place as a good avoidance to the insanity that has ensued.
1] it’s a great workout 2] zero cost to me 3] it heats the house 4] every log is I imagine it’s a TGOP’er / tRump Co. asshole.
So I’m going back to the yard for some wood chopping.
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I’ve read this, and there is an awful lot of wishful projection going on in it on the part of Kunstler. He doesn’t like TVs, cities, computers and modern music, so he creates a future where people don’t have these things and are better for it. There is a place for stories where modern civilization collapses, but they have to be honest in showing that it wouldn’t be a nice place, not the cozy world he describes.
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Every time a hear about anything post-apocalyptic, I’m reminded of “Earth Abides”. Same idea, but it seemed to more uplifting than this one. I know it wasn’t the first of the genre, but it’s the one that stuck with me over the years.
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Just finished reading Sarah Pinsker’s “A Song for a New Day,” which came out less than a year ago and already managed to predict half the stuff that happened in the last month. The novel’s background has the twin disasters of a major terrorist attack and a deadly global plague convincing the government to ban all large gatherings, including concerts, festivals, sporting events, shopping malls, schools, etc. It’s quite something to be reading a science fiction book and find stuff that looks like it came straight out of the evening news.
The story itself focuses on attempts to bring back live music, which is also a great bonus for a story…
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Earth Abides is the best!
Why do I want to read a dystopian novel when I’m living in one?
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Kunstler glorifies manorialism (emphasis on “man”) in this book as the best way to achieve the active and productive communities he portrays with such longing. No thanks, not worth considering any more than it’s worth considering Ayn Rand’s fantasies.
He doesn’t like anything about the modern world, lumping tattoos and hip-hop in with fossil fuels and pollution as dire threats to future of humanity. He’s written some great and incisive stuff about environmentalism and conservation, but then undermines himself with his old white guy "get off my lawn’ routine that reminds me more of post-Obama Clint Eastwood.
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Mostly what’s happened in these novels is loss of fossil fuels (peak oil and whatnot) and the increase in the Earth’s carrying capacity for industrial/late-capitalism human life suddenly snapping back to a preindustrial level.
The books make some references to a flu pandemic at the time that things go pear-shaped as well, but this wasn’t the primary driver.
The books get less good from 1 to 2 to 3. I think he was working on a fourth but haven’t read it.
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Those reasons are not obvious to me.
If you think of the discussion of coronavirus as a media-borne pandemic in its own right (and I do), we’re all proudly competing to cough in as many strangers’ faces as possible. It’s dissonant.
No one, especially anyone with internet access, needs to jam yet more sovereign-citizen collapse porn into their brains. So, maybe put a pin in this for next year (which, remember, is still happening).
If you somehow really need plague-themed entertainment, why not try something thoughtful and descriptive like Love in the Time of Cholera or Wolf Hall?
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By novel 3 he’d gotten to gay people being cured by the end of modernity. In 4 (having invested this much time I just had to finish it I guess) he went after a thinly disguised Alan Chartok, the head of our local NPR franchise… I assume because of bad reviews. I’ve contacted him about 5 or 6 years ago to help a friend who was trying to save the Catskill Mountain scenic railroad, and he was nice enough then, but since then he’s become a full on Trumpkins.
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Read it when it came out so my memory might be skewed but I remember basket-weaving women and men with power. Ugh.
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Does his book make up for the fact that he’s regularly published on Zero Hedge as a full blown RW nutjob these days? Seriously, the guy has lost it.
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I have self-quarantined from Zero Hedge a while ago, so thanks for the info!
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Yeah, I took his blog out of my Feedly sources a long long while ago.
Incidentally I did a wintertime hike on the Shokan rail-trail a few months back – this is what a good length of former Catskill Mountain scenic railway territory has become lately, which I’m sure you know but the average BBSer might not – and it was quite nice. Very much usable for cycle transportation when it’s not covered in snow also. Sad for the railway, but this was probably not a bad trade.
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Ugh, how sad. I really enjoyed Geography of Nowhere, even if it is mostly just one long rant.
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There was a solution to have the railroad run with the bike lane - around Phoenicia they would have been close together. The bikers didn’t want to compromise. As a biker myself (I biked from NYC to Seattle one time) I though it’s not exactly in the spirit of rails to trails and is likely to make it harder to get things like that done in the future. But then I grew up biking in NYC so I have a high tolerance for my ride having some infrastructure next to it…
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He was good when he was writing that… though he actually probably would have agreed with Trump even then about making all federal buildings “classical”. The Long Emergency was also ok, just turns out that he was completely wrong about peak oil.
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Oh, that’s unfortunate. I’m not extremely local so I wasn’t following that closely. I suppose the trail can always be reclaimed if at some later juncture true passenger rail along that corridor gets reactivated. (That may be a peak-oil-actually-happens sort of retrenchment. Which doesn’t seem to be happening at anything like the timeframe that Kunstler thought it would in The Long Emergency.)
Having read both (and the sequel to WMBH, called “The Witch of Hebron”) I have to say that Station Eleven is a much more nuanced interpretation of a post pandemic world. Still with poignant social moments, but much less optimistic overall as to the value of what we will lose. It’s a world which is broken by that loss, but which has people who’s humanity is still beautiful. I will say, I read this during the trump election, and it was crushingly depressing then. I would not read it now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven
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