Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

The "other" ERE. Societal aspects of the ERE philosophy. Emergent change-making, scale-effects,...
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mountainFrugal
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by mountainFrugal »

jacob wrote:
Fri Sep 10, 2021 3:16 pm
Almost forgot:
For aspiring writers who do not wish to commit a scientific faux pas (like Day of Tomorrow or other giant snowstorm literature ), I recommend https://www.amazon.com/dp/1517799392/
Skimmed through (as I always do before committing) and now am on part 2 of the actual read. Thanks for the recommendation @jacob

AxelHeyst
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by AxelHeyst »

New Yorker article about the genre of climate change memoir.
the article wrote:These authors have seen enough catastrophe to know how bleak the outlook really is, and are wary of selling the reader false hope or tired platitudes. Their books are not injunctions to act but interrogations of the rift between what we know and what we do. After so many false starts of imploring readers, or guilting readers, or scaring readers, these authors are now attempting something else—to simply bear witness. The narratives of this new genre are sincere and self-reflective, but they’re not easy to animate: stories are propelled by clean lines of action, and these books seek to capture inaction’s sprawl. As the climate writer Paul Kingsnorth puts it in his memoir, “Savage Gods,” with a note of bitterness, “What happens when your stories don’t work anymore?”

7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Rough excerpt from my likely never to be finished or released novel entitled "Identifications":
He was going to win the argument by volume alone. Purely on the basis of decibels bellowed within the confines of the spacious SUV. She was surprised when he threw out “Something you don't seem to know. I'm twice as smart as you.” She wasn't a bit offended. It was simply not true and seemed to offer some form of tactical advantage. Could he really believe that? Maybe he confused getting things done with intelligence? Why was she so long in a relationship with a man she respected so little that his derogatory comments offered no sting? On the other hand, why was she thinking in terms of tactical advantage if she didn't on some level respect him enough to stay engaged? The debate over climate change was dead settled in her mind, so of little further interest, but her own motivations still puzzled her. Maybe she was just using him for money, or in the meanwhile, or any port in the growing storm? How did she hope this would end?

“What's the volume of the atmosphere? Is it ____? Is it ________? Can you answer that question? Do you even have a calculator? I didn't think so. But you are trying to tell me that amount of CO2 can have an influence over that kind of volume? You are trying to tell me that the lake is high this year because of that. You have no fucking clue what you are talking about.”

Susan recognized that his temperament was as variable as the recent regional weather conditions under the influence of the factors producing global climate change, so she wasn't surprised when scant minute after he gave full growl to his middle-aged paunch full of displeasure with what he viewed as a disloyal political stance on her part, he smiled brightly, rubbed her leg, and asked “Is the air too cold for you? Is your seat too warm? Does the perch place sound good for dinner?” as if her preferences were his primary concern in the moment.

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Miss Lonelyhearts
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by Miss Lonelyhearts »

More!

7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

As Artie slit open yet another plastic bag full of dog shit, she considered the bleak deniability of her sex life.

Don't get it wrong. Artie liked dogs. Lately, this seemed like a criminal admission. Not the liking, but the only liking. For her, dogs were maybe on par with macaroni and cheese in terms of utility. She couldn't understand the demand for a restaurant specializing in macaroni and cheese or the desire for a life emotionally centered around a dog. She also couldn't understand why humans whose feelings were such that they were definitely going to check the Member of My Family box at the vet's office or even write in their pet's name on the census form in defiant protest of homo-favoritism, would still dispose of their dog's shit in a plastic bag tossed into a garbage can. Granted, safe and thorough composting of human and dog shit was complicated process, but if you are going to throw down the equivalent of half her student loan payment for clean organic dog chow, maybe you could at least flush the expensive resultant turds down the toilet with your own shit, maybe?

Even if she couldn't smell it, the identification of dog shit was usually pretty instantaneous. Few other items of similar heft and composition were routinely disposed of in such a manner. Sometimes, on a day when the training run had been particularly boring, she would imagine the possibility of finding something else enclosed; remnants of raw kielbasa, a dead guinea pig, or the curled clots of a moderately late miscarriage. Almost always it was just undeniable dog shit.

Her sex life, on the other hand, had too little substance to create much of a stench.

The Tool had greater difficulty with dog shit. This was one of the reasons why Artie still had a job. The Tool could identify the make and model of a car from a single mangled bolt. It could access the entire genetic code of a plant from one wilted leaf. It could reconstruct your account number from the bill you tore into 24 pieces and smeared with strawberry jam. It could access the obituary of a difficult man from the empty morphine bottle his much harrassed nurse aide tossed into the trash 5 minutes before he took his last breath. Heck, it could even write his obituary based on the contents of the household's last 5 trash bags. But, Artie's boss (or very senior business partner/landlord, their relationship remained quite fuzzy in spite of stamp of notary-bot to smart contracts), Evan, was too lazy and distracted by dalliances with strippers and muscle relaxants to complete the long promised olfactory module, so dog shit continued to befuddle the Tool.

The state of Artie's sex life also seemed condemned to a neo-Victorian 9 letter word like that. Men didn't fuck her; they befuddled her. Her last partner, Darren, had invited her to a bundling; a re-enactment of Puritan courtship practice, recently revived in Japan, which involved being wrapped together face-to-face with your partner, fully dressed, in tightly rolled blankets. ///All she could think about was the quality of freshness of her breath and the count per centimeter of the pores on his not unhandsome nose and the sound of Zumba music humming from the floor below. The rest of her body felt either numb or distant or shamed. She believed that she was meant to experience this Therapeutic Bundling Experience with the sensitivity of the fabled Princess who bruised purple simply due to presence of pea slipped by her Prince under two-score of magic goose down-filled mattresses. Okay, truth told, maybe she did have some sense of what might have been an erection through the multiple layers of anachronistically plush micro-fiber, and her well-socialized response to this timorous evidence of arousal was to blink her eyes and tightly smile as if to herself, yet for other. However, her gut reaction and true desire, which was restrained tight in the bundle with Darren, was to throw her arms forward and out in the strong swimmer's stroke she had mastered at an age when she still enjoyed such fairy tales, and kick, kick, kick her way to a land far, far, far away from here and from him.

Artie wondered sometimes if she might be a bit on the autism spectrum. The online test results were negative, but She didn't seem to have the same ability to summon up her feelings and call them out by true name as other women. Also, don't forget the fact that she only liked dogs. So, she struggled for a few minutes decompressing in her car after the bundling, trying to process the experience, before she decided that the feeling that you have when you feel like you despise a perfectly nice person down to the depth of his facial pores could only be despair.

//// It often seemed like the other humans she encountered were as confused about sex as a dog trying to roll its own shit into a plastic bag. As confused as a highly precisioned machine running code, possessing nothing like a nose, on this giant turd known as 21st century planet Earth.

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Hristo Botev
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by Hristo Botev »

I've never read Asimov, and so was not familiar with his Foundations series, but it's probably notable that Apple TV felt there is currently a viewership for a full budget production of the series. From a review from a conservative commentator, Rod Dreher, about the show:
Watching the show, and taking note of the parallels, it struck me that “the inertia of the Empire’s fall is too great to stop” is exactly the way I would put it regarding our own Empire. I believe that we are headed for a very nasty crash, and that it’s probably too late to stop it. If we hope to stop it, we are going to have to live in ways that few people are willing to live. Therefore, we are going to fall. It might not take place in my lifetime, but it is going to happen.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com ... ct-option/

Not sure if the Foundations books deal specifically with CC, either directly or indirectly (I've placed a request for the first book with the library); but there's a whole lot of truth in this statement from Dreher: "If we hope to stop [the very nasty crash], we are going to have to live in ways that few people are willing to live. Therefore, we are going to fall." Dreher is no doubt talking about crash/decline in the cultural context, not the CC one (though his Crunchy Cons book helped to set me on my own current trajectory of rejecting consumerist culture); but see Kingsnorth in terms of linking as intertwined the spiritual/religious/cultural decline with the CC decline--as in, it's the spiritual/religious/cultural decline that has resulted in CC (and, notably, it was Dreher, through @Jacob, that I learned about Kingsnorth).

All that is to say, for the purpose of this particular topic: are we as a popular culture now telling ourselves stories where the disaster is more of a long decline, as opposed to the more immediate asteroid, or nuclear war, or alien invasion? And are the heroes of our new stories now those who make strategic retreats, as opposed to those who fly off in a space ship or whatever to confront the asteroid/alien/nuclear war head-on, kamikaze style? And if that's the case, what does that mean?

7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Hristo Botev:

It seems to me that “in between” the cultural collapse feared by commentators such as Dreher and the climate change or species/resource collapse feared more by those on the Green Left, there is the growing reality of the Demographic Shift towards lower reproductive rate and urbanism. For the first time ever, more than 50% of humans live in urban areas and the rate of this change is increasing. Fertility rates in the U.S. dropped sharply and somewhat unexpectedly from 1.9 to 1.6 in just the last few years (even prior to Covid.) This trend is even breaking away from positive correlation with affluence and negative correlation with religion, because it is being seen in realms such as Iran and India. So, maybe it’s not be the chicken or the egg, but something else? Right now the trucks aren’t running at full efficient capacity, but not because gas is expensive or in short supply, but because there aren’t enough human truck drivers.

One thing I wonder about is the continuing purpose of strong sexual dichotomy when humans live such long lives, and spend a much smaller fraction of those years in family formation/maintenance mode? Also, if I had a penny for every late middle-aged raised religious guy who wants a open-minded, tries-to-be-kind-hearted-human green-yellow female like me to arrange a three-some with him and another guy...

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by mountainFrugal »

^^^ Since I am reviving this thread... Reminder from @jacob above ^^^
jacob wrote:
Sat Sep 04, 2021 4:07 pm
NOTE: If this thread devolves into politics, it's gonna die (again).
Similar to Ministry of the Future mentioned up-thread, but in Stephenson style. Near term future of multi-faction rational actors taking geoengineering into their own hands.
https://www.amazon.com/Termination-Shoc ... 0063028050

7Wannabe5
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Re: Emergence of the Literature of Climate Change

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@mountainFrugal:

Added to my list!

I haven't been keeping this thread updated, but my personal reading journey is solidly verifying my theory that any half-way serious writer must now address the issue. For instance, from one of Anne Tyler's recent novels:
She had read somewhere that human infants were born with the belief that they were entitled to two parents- that this explained why children reacted so catastrophically to divorce. Since coming to Baltimore, Willa had begun to wonder if they also felt entitled to grandparents. And certainly the reverse was true, because it seemed unthinkable that she didn't have any grandchildren.
Even if they would have to deal with the death of the planet.
I kind of feel this way myself. I had a wonderful time over the holidays with my extended family, but with every year it becomes more noticeable that there is no 4th generation. My 3 sisters and I are all well past reproductive age, and the 5 children that two of us had are now ranged in age between 33 and 22. No new babies in 22 years! I sometimes even feel vaguely envious of worn-down tattoo-bearing women around my age whom I observe pushing babies around in carts at the Dollar Tree.

The "funny" thing is that it's not even the case that it is concern about the "death of the planet" that is driving lower birth rate, although the competitive pressures may be somehow correlated.

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