Not about reading them, or even writing them. I dream, while still partly awake, about stacks of old books being carted off before I’ve had the chance to scour their titles or flip through their pages. I want to know what I’m losing, but there’s no time. I’m grieving.
We’d talked about it plenty, as a hypothetical. But when the time suddenly came to move my dad and step-mom out of Dad’s condo, where he’d lived for 40 years, into a much smaller, furnished, assisted-living rental, I had less than I week to get him ready.
And so now I sleep-fret over the mad rush to give away almost everything he owned. The book angst is especially haunting.
Dear readers of Last Word on Nothing: This will be my last post for some time, as I need to buckle down and focus on a book I am writing. The book is about the tricky ethics of our relationships with nonhuman animals in a world massively influenced by human activity.
I will miss writing here but it has to be done. Focusing on a long, complex project in 2019 is nearly impossible. Some of the tools I am using to focus include the Freedom app, a writing residency at a beautiful desert location here in Oregon, bribing myself with bath treats and baked goods, and saying no to things. I have a massive stack of books about animals from biologists, philosophers, and other experts to read. I have notebooks full of my own reporting on the intersections between animal welfare/rights and species conservation. I have a brain filled with book spaghetti. It is time to get down to work.
I still have a few articles that will come out during my “book leave,” I’ll still be working on local climate activism in Southern Oregon, and I am going to allow myself a teensy bit of Twitter, because I am a hopeless addict–but you may hear quite a bit less of Emma Marris for a few months.
I’ll admit that I am a bit nervous about going dark-ish in a world and an industry that rewards constant public presence. I will miss talking to people through my pieces and through social media. But–oh–the conversations we can have once the book is out! I really do hope that the book growing in me will change the way many of us think about “wild animals” and how we ought to treat them. My own thoughts on this are shifting in unexpected ways.
This week, the river that connects the place I live to the sea was recognized as a person. The youth climate movement is changing people’s minds about the extent of our obligations to fight for justice for nonhumans and humans not even born. We are living in wild, turbulent, painful, and transformative times. I hope that by retreating now I can create a thoughtful exploration of the ethics we need to find our way through these times, one that will be helpful–or at least thought-provoking–for many.
Finding a decent bedtime story to read to your kid is harder than you might think. Most childrens books are either pointless (Superman likes red! Superman likes blue!), overproduced (A book with buttons and recorded dinosaur sounds! Wait, who made these recordings?), boring (Pokey the Bear showed Susie she had the strength the whole time!), or derivative (Blue Omelets and Bacon).
There are plenty of kids books that don’t make me crave a lobotomy. Shel Silverstein, Adam Rex, Jan Brett. (Please list others in the comments. Seriously, I need this.) But there is one that stands alone. The one I grab before my kid can reach for some drivel by John Travolta or Madonna.
“The Lorax,” by Dr. Seuss, is a tale of runaway greed, environmental destruction and redemption. It opens with a kid who lives in a grassy suburb and wants to hear a story told by the town hermit, the Once-ler. His home, the land of grickle grass and crows, is just another place where kids live. But by the end, we see it as the post-apocalyptic remnant of a once-beautiful forest.
You see, years before, the Once-ler came to a beautiful forest of silky truffala trees. In a greedy rampage, he cut them all down, despite the warnings of a plucky forest gnome called the Lorax. And now all that’s left is grickle grass and crows.
I love this story because it’s prophetic and soulful. Also, because I’ve been there.
Update: this movie, Particle Fever, ended up winning a ton of awards, being shown at a ton of film festivals including Telluride, being reviewed in a ton of surprised and delighted publications including the New York Times, and generally ending up exactly the way you’d want it to. This post ran October 18, 2012, before the movie came out.
As part of LWON’s unintended series on scienceandart, or maybe its focus on unexpected behavior in physicists, please meet David Kaplan. He’s a Johns Hopkins theorist whose specialty is creating the theories beyond the theory that almost accounts for all the matter and energy in the universe. As such, he was involved in Large Hadron Collider (the LHC) experiment that last summer found the Higgs boson. But he hadn’t known they’d find it, no one knew they’d find it. Theory had been predicting for 30 years they’d find it, but no data refuted or confirmed the theory; the large American collider to do the experiment had been cancelled, the LHC was being repeatedly delayed and was so expensive that they’d be given one shot and if no Higgs, then no more big colliders. Physicists were getting older, their careers were shrivelling, they weren’t sleeping, maybe the very question was dumb.
In the midst of all this, seven years ago, Kaplan was explaining the what-if-no-Higgs story to a friend with a PhD in poetry criticism. The friend was impressed: at no other time in the history of science was there a single point at which a whole field could potentially come to a screeching halt. It sounded like a white-knuckle movie. Kaplan thought so too, so he made one.
As it happens, Kaplan had begun his educational career in film school making silly little movies, had decided he wasn’t cut out for a filmmaker and, as one would, became a physicist instead. He thought a movie about the LHC search for the Higgs would be a good match for his interests and bought a nice camera. Next he asked Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize-winning theorist, “What if nothing happens at the LHC?” and Glashow said, “Absolutely something will happen. This field is too much fun for this to be the end” — a great quote from a great man, but Kaplan in recording it screwed up the sound. He told his sister that he not only wasn’t doing physics, he couldn’t even do film. She introduced him to a producer/director who made a short, completely charming movie clip which begins with a physicist saying, “Thiss are two, thiss are two protons,” and for which Kaplan paid using his fellowship money. Then he tried to use the clip to raise more money, and couldn’t.
So he went back to the LHC for the summer, life went on, and he had to get tenure at Hopkins which he eventually did. Then out of the blue a director called, then two producers, and they agreed to raise money. Kaplan’s team found a list of all the “quants” on Wall Street, “quants” being young physicists who’d gone into finance, (and you wondered who thought up financial derivatives, didn’t you). Eventually enough people and enough foundations gave them money, and they hired a genius editor who not only actually wrote the book on editing but was also fascinated with physics.
Meanwhile, Kaplan and his collaborators had settled on seven people whom the movie would follow: three theorists (including Kaplan), three experimentalists (including Monica Dunford, whose picture is at the top of the post), and an instrumentalist (Mike Lamont, the urgently important and never recognized machine guy). And the crew had been filming. The crew knew lighting and angles, Kaplan knew what needed to go into the story.
For instance: in 2008 right after the experiment began, one of its fancy magnets blew out and the experiment stopped in its tracks for over a year. Kaplan knew they needed to film the moment the experiment turned back on, when tense physicists bunched up in a room looking at a square in which, oh joy!, a spot of light suddenly appeared: relief, relaxation, big smiles. Another instance: a delighted physicist walks around the room with her laptop, cradling it like a baby, holding it open and showing the screen to everyone: “Look at this beautiful plot. Have you seen this beautiful plot? Is there anyone I haven’t shown this beautiful plot to yet?”
Kaplan also knew the physics had to be soft-pedalled. “Physicists are in the truth business,” he says, “and they need to explain everything that’s going on.” But the movie’s audience wouldn’t need to understand the physics words or the labels on the axes of the laptop’s plot; they’d know to be happy when the spot of light appears, they’d want the physicists to succeed. Kaplan needed the audience to be inside, to be in the movie world in which the characters have a mission and the audience feels the urgency and fear and glory – understanding not so much the result of the mission, Kaplan says, but its reason, that is, where the mission begins. “There’s a purity to this,” he says. “This is what humans do.”
The movie is all but done. Its title is Particle Fever, it’ll probably be completely done (“picture lock”) in early 2013, it’s two hours long, it has cost $1.4 million, and now they need to find a distributor. Kaplan, though obsessed, hasn’t been excited by the filmmaking process. “It’s not like physics at all,” he says. Physics is clear and clean, you’re right or wrong, physicists tell you when they agree. Getting a film right is not only murkily magical and nobody quite tells you the truth, but sometimes people in the industry are fragile: “Physicists,” says Kaplan, “are not fragile.”
Meanwhile, they’re doing screenings, then tinkering, then doing more screenings and more tinkering, getting the tone right, evoking the truth of the experience. The movie has no script: “Oh no. No, no, no,” Kaplan says. ”The real world has to be treated as sacred.” With no script, the story is all in the editing. Part of the editor’s genius, he thinks, is mixing the music. In one scene, a brilliant theorist is writing on the board, Greek letters and numbers and relations; he’s writing fast, chalk stabbing at the board hard, equation after equation, bam, bam, bam. Then music comes in quietly underneath, a sharp little drumbeat, bam bam bam, and you get this idea that it’s the theorist thinking, neurons firing, one thought after another, bam bam bam. Then the scene cuts to the theorist’s feet, now propped up on his desk, his foot tapping bam bam, those equations going step after step all the way to his feet, he’s thinking with his whole body.
Kaplan treats the film as though it were a physics project and thinks about it all the time. “The film has taken an order one fraction of my time for five years,” he says. But he needs to get back to physics: “I worry about decoupling from my field and I won’t be able to get back. So I’ll take six months to rehab and learn what people have been doing.” He’s liked film editing, he says, “but I love calculating.”
At 4 am, driving west from Ashland, Wisconsin, I flicked on BBC news and heard a report out of the North Fork of the Gunnison, a place I lived for a couple decades in western Colorado. It was about oil and gas development and the unprecedented rollback of environmental protections. Voices I know from home expressed concern over increased energy extraction, not just what it means to have more hydrocarbons burning into the atmosphere, but what it would mean for this community of working ranches, orchards, and vineyards to be subject to many new cherry stem roads, pipelines, wells, holding ponds, spills, groundwater fracturing, and chemicals pumped into the ground proven by the Trump-era EPA to be hazardous to local water supplies.
No lack of irony or hypocrisy had me listening to this news while sucking up gas in a rental to Duluth, then flying on to Minneapolis and then Phoenix where I picked up my car and drove till almost midnight back to the North Fork of the Gunnison to see my kids. It was the same day when students around the world went on strike to press for climate action. The next day I asked my boys about the strikes. Seventh grade and 11th, they go to school in the North Fork, and my younger had to search his memory when I mentioned Greta Thunberg. He hadn’t heard about the protests while I was gone, no mention of them in school, nary a teacher referencing what was going on outside the walls, hundreds of thousands of youth taking to the streets all around the world demanding that climate change be addressed seriously for at least the sake of their generation. My older boy knew this was happening, but not much about it.
In 2006, a puppy came to live on a small farm in Colorado. His name was Oskar, and he was the runt of the litter. Oskar was a playful little guy, but on one fateful autumn day, he would learn that he was living in the dark shadow of a blood-thirsty assailant.
In the days leading up to that portentous afternoon, Oskar’s human companion became an unwitting accomplice to the ruthless creature prowling in her midst. So oblivious was she to the sheer aggression lurking inside the feathery beast that roamed her farm that her only worry was that the eventual perpetrator might instead become a victim.
Dogs are notorious for their appetite for fresh poultry, and she didn’t want her puppy to grow up to become a chicken killer. She googled “how to teach a dog not to attack chickens” and called her veterinarian friends. Everyone told her the same thing — the only surefire way to prevent a dog from attacking a chicken is to make sure that it never gets the chance.
The same might be said of the chicken. She kept several dozen of them at her farm, and one, in particular, stood out. They called him the Little Red Bastard. Red was a bantam rooster the size of a child’s slipper and angry as a bull on castration day. He was known to make grown men whimper as he tore his razor-sharp spurs into the back of their legs, and he’d become the neighborhood’s most notorious bully. Continue reading →
“It’s like a good plague,” read the tweet from one of my NPR station’s editors. Epic floods across the Midwest this summer, which more than one local official referred to as “biblical,” brought a wave of frogs and toads to Missouri.
It is hard to overstate how much water inundated my adopted state, and the rest of middle America, in 2019. The New York Times did a good job of showing the so-called slow-motion disaster on a geographic scale, here. I live here, and it is difficult to fathom.
But the frogs helped bring it home. And they gave me a new perspective on this new world we have ushered in, unspooling even now at our feet.
I dream about books.
