Author: clock

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan, made a phrase in history come alive. I knew that drought in the 1930s ravaged parts of the midwest, and I’ve read Grapes of Wrath like most American high-schoolers. But I did not comprehend that the “Dust” in “Dust Bowl” was so shockingly literal. I had no idea that the area of the country known in the 1800s as the Great American Desert was, during the 1930s, literally awash in dunes of dust.

The trials endured by those who stayed — because this book chronicles those who stayed, and suffered — went beyond crushing poverty and straight into illness and death, whether from dust pneumonia, getting caught outside in a dust storm and getting lost within shouting distance of shelter, or (at times) loss of hope.

Much of this devastation was brought on by a blind optimism (in the face of historical weather trends) and accelerated by the plowing of the prairies. Ecological devastation writ large, but instead of floods of water claiming New Orleans, the Dust Bowl saw the land — and the prosperity of the 1920s — simply blow away. Some of these storms carried enough dust to blacken the sky as far away as Washington DC, as Egan brings home during a Congressional hearing on possible relief measures for the area. Only when the East Coast literally saw the topsoil of Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Texas arriving on their doorstep was a true measure of the crisis accepted by those in power. Of course, the Dust Bowl had to compete with the entire country’s economic devastation, so there was reason to hesitate, and wonder whether farmers in an area that many thought shouldn’t be farmed deserved a helping hand.

The stories and pictures here demonstrate the crushing need, and also share the loneliness. So many left, and those who stayed either felt bound to endure, or simply gave up. In a country which (at least in its myths) is optimistic and all about growth, personal and patriotic, the tale of the Dust Bowl reminds that not every resource can withstand the onrush of human greed.

Today, of course, the parallels are clear, and An Inconvenient Truth rattles through top-level warnings around the world where human choices are making a difference…usually for the worse. But Al Gore’s breadth in sounding the alarm about environmental crisis is reinforced by the depth and personal stories of The Worst Hard Time.

The 1936 documentary mentioned in the book, The Plow That Broke The Plains, was funded, extraordinarily, by the United States Government. The Internet Archive has it online, about 25 minutes long, and I’m going to watch it now.

I went to the pool today, only to be shut out by a youth swim meet. So I jumped on the erg instead. Ten minute warmup, and then 5000m in 19:22. I didn’t try to kill myself, since I didn’t want to blow out my back or anything silly. Always tough to get on the erg, no matter what shape you’re in, but it’s painful to compare this time to my past. During the piece, I even thought about whether I would record the time, but that’s all that kept me honest and pushing the last 1000m, when I accelerated a little bit (3:46). The lungs are fine, but the muscles are not ready for rowing right now (no surprise). If I’m going to find a regatta with my friend Charlie this year, I have some work to do. I did some weights afterwards, just to make sure everything I did today would leave me sore.

Just a normal 25 minute run to work, and a cold bicycle ride back home.

(I’m backdating these posts to the day of the exercise when I’m behind.)

Ran home from work, in the chilly-for-San-Francisco evening, in about 26 minutes.

My wife’s book group discussed A General Theory of Love, by three Bay Area psychiatrists, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon. I read the book after getting a “you might like this… it’s about the brain” recommendation. After reading it, I have several reactions.

They have some core ideas of interest, though I was not always convinced.

While I might wish for a magazine article of New Yorker or Atlantic length instead of this full book, the second and third chapters are genuinely interesting. Through a survey across time of studies and theories about the brain, the authors explain the concept of the limbic brain, which is the unthinking emotional center that (for the authors) is the core of who we are emotionally. Unthinking is not negative, just descriptive. The neocortex, with its conscious thinking, cannot overrule the limbic brain, which developed earlier on the evolutionary timescale. The authors put the common split between the heart and the head all in the brain: the split is between the neocortex and the limbic brain.

These ideas and theories were not entirely new to me, but they were explained well, despite (in some cases) the language. The more evocative leap from there was to the idea of limbic connection, and how central it is to human development. Essentially, if you don’t connect emotionally during childhood, you’re scarred in almost physical ways, at least as far as your brain patterns and social development go. This isn’t news, really. But the emphasis on how mammals depend on these connections for any kind of satisfactory life goes further here than I’ve seen before. It’s not simple, and the authors don’t pretend to explain it fully, but they certainly believe their attention to this concept can carry it far beyond individual development.

Our society overlooks the drain on emotional balance that comes from severing attachments. From the dawn of the species until a few hundred years ago, most human beings lived out their lives in one community. The signature lesson of the twentieth century is that unforeseen complications are ever the faithful companions of technological progress. The convenient devices that enable extensive mobility are problematic because limbic regulation operates weakly at a distance. We have the means to establish a periparetic lifestyle, but we will never have the brains for it.

Statements like this are how we go from the brain to “a general theory of love.” The brain and our changing insights into how it works physically and emotionally captivated me. The attempts at extending these ideas to society as a whole snapped the spell.

This book needed a firmer editor.

Each chapter was dramatically individual in its style. It was jarring to jump from heavier science about brain chemistry, however well described, to anecdotal passages and excerpted poetry and broader extrapolations about society and human development. The authors clearly aimed for a sweeping tone, but it led them astray, in my reading.

The authors should have worked harder to find a consistent tone, or identified themselves for each chapter. I’ve seen that done in some other multi-author works, although it is rare. I did not race through this book, as I’d get bored with some of the flowery language. Which leads me to…

Someone should read some Hemingway.

Maybe old Ernest was too sparse in his language, but after you read a few sentences like this, I was ready to throw myself into the Sea with the Old Man.

As a collection of dense matter betrays its presence through electromagnetic emissions, a person’s emotional Attractors manifest themselves in a radiant aura of limbic tones. If a listener quiets his neocortical chatter and allows limbic sensing to range free, melodies begin to penetrate the static of anonymity.

And there’s plenty more where that comes from. I’ve been known to stretch for a few ten-cent words now and again, but oof!

The Painted Veil is an Edward Norton vehicle, and that’s OK. The movie inspired little interest in me in the book from which it’s adapted, but the film engaged us both. Some balance between the personal story of their relationship (from deeply frosty to fiery, and parts in between) and the development of Chinese nationalism in the mid-1920s. The relationship, though, takes center stage. To its credit, the film doesn’t take the easy way out at the end.

The Chinese countryside plays a supporting role: it’s a pretty place in this movie, despite the cholera epidemic (!) which drives the plot forward. I simultaneously wondered whether it was easy to find places in China that looked as if 80 years had not passed or it was hard to find a place that was not despoiled (environmentally) by the fervent rush for progress which marks most of the tales of China seen in the American reports of the last decade or so.

Metacritic score of 70…works for me.

Note: I still wonder whether Matthew Hurst is a big Edward Norton fan, or he has simply found interesting data points around Norton’s recent movies.

Short run to work, stretched a few minutes more than normal (27?) as I cut by Moscone Center on Howard to see how the Macworld setup was going. I want one.

Afternoon run out to the ocean and back, with erratic pacing…blame the boy on the bike during the family outing. I’m glad he got tired before I did. 😉 Sixty-six minutes or so. Already feeling sore.

Ran home from work, ~24:40. Back is stiffening up, so need to rest tomorrow.

And it’s great when they are celebrated. Man Is Rescued by Stranger on Subway Tracks made me give thanks this morning, and try to imagine if I could do the same. I hope I never need to find out. What a remarkable story, and a remarkable man.