Summer 2023 CCC Reading List

So you like to read, do ya?

When I was young and overly full of myself, I begrudgingly studied The Canon, all the while thinking that most of that old stuff was irrelevant and obsolete. I lived in the New World and we were rapidly eclipsing all of history and remaking everything anyway. A direct result of both a) my coming up through the boffo American Bicentennial and b) my impatience to envision the future and get busy doing my part to bring it into fruition. Out with the old! Rah rah!

So after decades of chasing “it,” learning the hard way, and learning how advancement of human knowledge actually takes place, I have gradually arrived at a deep respect for this extant knowledge. All of it, all the way back. The philosophies, the religions, the sciences, political history. I just didn’t have a perspective from which to see the relevance before. There was so much to learn in the humanities, an impenetrable, subjective mass. I could chew through tech like nothing, so I just said “F*$k it I’m starting fresh where we are now and pushing from there.” Objectivity was all.

Boy was I wrong. Obsession with modernity and “always looking forward” dooms us not to only repeat the errors of the past from lessons not learned; in fact, it is clear now that such hubris and willful ignorance practically guarantees spectacular failure. Recognizing one’s own ignorance is the keyhole in the door to wisdom. There’s a lot more to that analogy, but I digress. Another time.

The information technology revolution has democratized knowledge. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near this far without the Internet and all of the contributors who poured their lives into advancing the public’s ability to access knowledge. Peak gratitude for Jon Postel, the ISOC, and Jimmy Wales.

(Image courtesy Telegeography, Global Internet Map 2021.)

But the web is ephemeral. We presume its permanence, as if “the cloud” was a bank with deposit insurance. The way the bits get around, how this information sharing environment perpetually scales, the insatiable power and real estate demands, the fact that it works at all, is an incredible feat of ongoing engineering. The required level of effort and investment continually increases; thus, it is not ultimately sustainable.

We’re gonna need the books.

Here’s the more-or-less quarterly update on, let’s say, global sustainability awareness from the Climate Crisis Club on that bird site:

Fiction

• The Man Who Planted Trees, Jean Giono, 1953
• Something New Under The Sun, Alexandra Kleeman, 2021

Nonfiction

• The Forest Passage, Ernst Jünger, 1951
• The Silent World, Jacques-Yves Cousteau & Frédéric Dumas, 1953
• Silent Spring, Rachel Carlson, 1962
• The Living Sea, Jacques-Yves Cousteau & James Dugan, 1963
• The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea, Jacques Cousteau & Phillipe Cousteau, 1970
• Diving for Sunken Treasure, Jacques Cousteau & Philippe Diolé, 1971
• The whale: mighty monarch of the sea, Jacques Cousteau, 1972
• Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence, Jacques Cousteau, 1973
• The Ocean World, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, 1973
• Whale Nation, Heathcote Williams, 1998 (whale recordings, poetry, classical music)
• The Secret Life of Trees, Colin Tudge, 2005
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noan Harari, 2011
• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013
• Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noan Harari, 2015
• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noan Harari, 2018
• Fen, Bog & Swamp, Annie Proulx, 2022

If I were an audiobook listener I might have a chance at getting through this list. Quite the backlog.

Happy reading!

Spring 2023 CCC Reading List

Historic preservation is but one small element of sustainability. As the latest forward-thinking goes, the greenest building is the one already built. Of course, older structures are “lossy” in terms of heat unless modernized. Some day, there will be an accounting. Some day…

More importantly than saving old buildings, we’ve got a whole lot of ecosystem that needs some serious TLC. So much has been written, it is tough to sort it all out.

At the request of some online correspondents, here are some books we’ve been reading.

Fiction

The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Gosh, 2021 (Follow up to the Great Derangement)

The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020

The Terror, Dan Simmons, 2007

The Orenda, Joseph Boyden, 2013 (Third in a trilogy)

Two Degrees, Alan Gratz, 2022 (Young Adult)

Non-Fiction

Black Elk Speaks, John Neihardt, Black Elk, 1932

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown, 1970

The New Climate War, Michael Mann, 2021

Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, Daniel K. Richter, 2001

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers, 1972/2022

The Earthist Challenge to Economism: A Theological Critique of the World Bank, John Cobb and Mary Cobb, 1998

Regenesis; Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, George Monbiot, 2022

Catch up on the dialog here (if you are into that sort of thing) https://twitter.com/Olivergill4B/status/1660995904675930112

The passing of the pasture

The Georgian style 1835 farmhouse at 208 Myrtle Street finally fell last fall. Having closely inspected the interior construction, I can say that this house appears to have been built up in two halves, perhaps over and over again, starting as early as the 1600s.

Some rooms and features in the old house were distinctly 17th or early 18th century. Like many of the old farmhouses in western Duxbury, they survived intact by habit, settling slowly in place over the centuries. So many families, so many stories in these walls.

This house showed interior finish elements dating back to the 1700s

A better view showing the rear ell

The Rufus Sampson house at 308 Summer Street, another farmhouse, just across from my place, came down just yesterday after another long, vacant wait. This was most recently known by many in town as the Lacosse Greenhouse. Back in the day, some say, there were “extended hours” at the green house for visiting friends.

Today the machine has been rumbling through the foundation blocks for hours. The fella plans to put in four houses on about 5 acres, the maximum allowed on town-mandated, tortured-lollipop lots. Elements of the farmhouse, such as large beams and the foundation blocks, will be recycled in the new construction.

I got a good look at the 1700’s Isaac Simmons house just recently. It seems to reflect a common theme… picking the best spot for a root cellar and hearth, and sticking with it as living standards (and building standards) evolved. It’s hard to say exactly what stood on the site in 1696. It may have been a barn rather than a house at that time. The house constructed at 761 Temple Street contains a main structural beam that is a recycled barn beam. The beam is installed inverted across the cellar, supporting the main part of the first floor. A series of pocket cuts, presumably for the previous rafters, is exposed on the lower side of the beam. The implications for putting a construction date on this structure remain to be ferreted out.

The old houses still stand resolutely, serving their occupants consistently, if quirkily. It takes a certain person to live in an antique house, a person with patience and tolerance. Values we can cherish for sure.

Threads of History, Wires of Demise

Storytelling in the New Millennium

We relate our stories through word of mouth.  We capture our stories in writing. When we have a particularly compelling story, we might go to the trouble of laboring over a book, developing a storyboard into a screenplay or a pilot, or even putting it to music in the form of an opera or a musical play.  In contrast, today we have so many “live feeds” that video cameras are now capturing extemporaneously unfolding stories which may inadvertently (and often intentionally) gain wide distribution through social media.  The gap between composed narrative and happenstance is a fertile ground for exploitation.

Regardless of origin, the story embodies a dynamic between individual attitudes and knowledge, personal decisions, social interactions, and in many cases, a larger body such as the state, an army, a gang, a school district, the medical establishment, or what have you.  The essential elements and composition are all still the same: some recognizable context grounded cultural assumptions of the reader/listener/watcher, a progress of events, some “surprise” or other emotional experience, and a conclusion (or lack thereof.) A story is a story is a story.

Technical Digression

Postulate: In this information age, all stories can be reduced to a mathematical expression of a sequence of human (and even animal) interactions.  The premise is that behaviors and interactions can be modeled using standardized words… a lexicon of behavioral vectors.

Has anyone actually done this?  I am sure that the major internet companies have.  What do you think a social network is, anyway?  Think about what happens when you click on that “share”, “plus 1” or “like” button.  You are feeding an algorithm that is modeling your behavior, along with everyone else’s.

(Setting aside the technical domain for the moment.)

Back to the Story

In this way, all human stories (whether fictional or factual) weave a fabric of human experience from the threads of history.  The stories we make up today through popular books, music, plays, and movies seem to me to be mostly re-hashing and recasting tales from the past.  There really doesn’t seem to be much innovation or foment in storytelling.

This phenomenon strikes me essentially as an attempt to repackage the canonical tales for consumption by our new society, which receives experiences much differently than any before us.  Recently I’ve seen the heavy commentary regarding the “millennial generation” as essentially being self-absorbed, to use a milder form of the many criticisms that have been leveled against this very technically fortunate, very socially unfortunate cohort. But this is an artifact of the environment of our rearing… heavily machine-driven, fragmented, and tenuous as it is.

Because information technology has simultaneously democratized information (witness wikis, blogging) and thoroughly balkanized knowledge (walled gardens, big data, artificial intelligence) we are living in a time where humankind is losing control of our narrative. In principle, this has always been the case… the victors write the history. The state controls the message. The schools propagate the banal rhetoric and the approved truths.  But now, we have trans-national, essentially anonymous, completely unsupervised entities controlling massive amounts of information.  This is unprecedented, unplanned, and… pretty unnoticed at this point.  The impact is unpredictable.  But I will give it a shot below.

Also, people forget. We rely on entertainment, commemoration, and social rituals as a form of collective memory, as a counter-weight to this institutionalization of our history.

We need stories to remind us of our mistakes, and what we have learned.

But – do people realize that there is now this other major force involved in the narrative?

Big Blind Eye

Who among us sees that we now have multiple massive, corporate-controlled and machine-driven shadow intelligences growing in our midst?  Do we realize that they are processing our every online move?   Do we remember that these machines are being continuously tuned and tweaked to find new ways to extract money from our livelihoods?

Everybody is a little paranoid, and perhaps me a bit more than most.  But still, it gives one pause.

Theory: Mechanization of society through computerized interactions institutionalizes social deficits. Machines only serve to enrich the owners of the machines, enabling the exploitation of everyone else.  This occurs on the personal level, and thus by extension on a larger scale, at the social sphere.

Prediction: If left unattended, commercial activity will demoralize society to the least common denominator of behavior and interaction. The higher forms of art will wither and die. Eventually some future generation will recognize that human value can only be created, recognized, and sustained in direct personal relations with another, or through production and exchange of handcrafted goods, without the involvement of machines.

Provocation

Do you see this?

Am I crazy?

If you agree… what will you do to counteract this trend, and preserve human history?

Very well put together

Very well put together

For those of a software bent, interested in optimal team performance.