The Book Building

Is "On Bullshit" actually bullshit? - or an attempt at "Inception"?

vlicata — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 16:10:40 +0000

Is "On Bullshit" actually bullshit? - or an attempt at "Inception"?

A physicist friend of mine recently lent me a copy of Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", which purports to be the only ever philosophical analysis of "bullshit". This former essay turned teeny tiny hardback book reaches such profound conclusions as: 1) bullshit is sort of like humbug, only more excremental; 2) bullshit is worse than lying, because liars know the truth, while bullshitters just yak away without regard for the truth or non-truth of what they are saying; and 3) that since a person cannot ever really know him/her self, any sincere expression of one's feelings is bullshit.

This is quite a funny little teeny tiny book, but I've seen and heard more than one person express the opinion that it actually is a treatise on bullshit, when it quite clearly seems to be a complete piece of bullshit itself.

Clues are everywhere throughout - Frankfurt spends the first several pages noting that he didn't check the literature, that he didn't really look much of anything up (except he does say he looked up "bullshit" in the dictionary), but that he didn't even look up the words for "bull" or "shit" in any other language, even though he says they might provide important clues. Any scientist reading this would immediately exclaim: "this is bullshit". He thus seems to spend the first few pages clearly defining the whole essay as bullshit - a clean and clear example of his own definition of bullshit: postulating on a topic without concern for the truth. But, perhaps they do things differently in philosophy.

He then pulls a very nice "Wallace Shawn": he incrementally, with the voice of authority, argues that bullshit is worse than lying and that any attempt at sincerity is bullshit - both, of course, insidiously destructive memes. It really is a beautifully constructed essay, what's most interesting (and quite frankly disturbing) is that so many people apparently take it seriously. Wallace Shawn, in his play "Aunt Dan and Lemon," and in more detail in his postscript to the play, talks a lot about the power of this particular type of rhetoric, and he explores situations where one listens to what seems to be a coherent, well reasoned, and linear argument that leads one to embrace a conclusion that one actually finds incorrect (or even evil).

So, two of the key memes that Frankfurt's essay has apparently "incepted" into the minds of some of his readers are: 1) "bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies" and 2) "sincerity itself is bullshit" and frankly, this seems, quite hilariously, pure bullshit to me - so why do so many people apparently take it at face value? Now, that is an interesting question about our society's ability to deal with the difference between rhetoric and actual sincerity. If only it were so easy to get people to believe in actual scientific results, like evolution or global warming.

vlicata Sat, 01/22/2011 - 11:10

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Any item which uses the term "meme" has a 90%+ probability of being bullshit itself ...

Surely David Stove's work is, if there is any, the the first philosophical treatise on bullshit:
http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html
@Scott: Alpha Meme belongs to the 10%- of course.

I once picked up this book and, thankfully, in a minute realized that it was mostly bullshit in the guise of some sort of intellectual analysis.

On the other hand, 'Crimes against Logic' was a delight to read.

I agree, but I disagree. If you mean Frankfurt's definition of bullshit when you call his piece -no pun intended - bullshit, then you're mistaken. He seems to care about the truth, and being that he's a philosopher, that's a fair assumption. I doubt the rest of his works are so . . . meaningless.

But, he certainly did seem to get nowhere with the piece. So, assuming you aren't using his definition of bullshit, I agree with you. I am about to write a paper on "On Bullshit," and I thought I would take to the internet to see what other people thought of it. With that said, I definitely agree that his defense for "bullshit is worse than a lie" is, well, bullshit. The funniest thing about this piece of literature is that he says, "The phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean." It turns out that he ended up making arbitrary decisions and so on - exactly what he didn't want to do. And lastly, I sincerely doubt he's said "something helpful." (Both quotes come from page 117 of the PDF I have.)

Also, when he talks about sincerity being bullshit, I believe he is referring to postmodernism, which is definitely bullshit. He talks about anti-realist doctrines, which are held by postmodernists. All he's saying there is that they are bullshit.
They talk about relativism and such, right? That means, to them, the only truth is being authentic to oneself. "And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit." I think that's a good reading of what Frankfurt meant. :)

Seems like a pretty lame article. The essay you're writing about is no great shakes, but it would be good to try to get something out of it.

I found it set out some important ideas and elaborated on them here

http://clubtroppo.com.au/2014/11/19/complexity-reducability-integrity-a…

#5: Memory, History, and Landscape (Ten Best of the Decade from Half of the World's Fair)

bcohen — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

#5: Memory, History, and Landscape (Ten Best of the Decade from Half of the World's Fair)

Halfway there. This one first ran earlier this year, back in February. I was actually preparing for an interview, sitting in a bed and breakfast when I posted it, as I recall, which in retrospect makes it yet more meaningful to me. It was snowing, picturesque, comforting. Now a memory.

I had the chance to see a talk by William Cronon last week here at U.Va. He's a professor at the University of Wisconsin and a recognized world leader in environmental history and environmental studies. His work, while helping define the field of environmental history as it became one in recent decades, also transcends it; there's this too, his skill at public speaking is top shelf. He is and has been for some time working on a book called, simply, The Portage. The talk last week was from that book. Taking one location in Wisconsin--Portage--only miles from which John Muir lived when his family moved from Scotland (when he was 12); Frederick Jackson Turner, famed nineteenth-century historian of the American frontier, grew up; and Aldo Leopold, wrote and worked, Cronon sets up an entire narrative about reading and writing narratives about the landscape.

Cronon's work involves, requires, and pushes on geology, ecology, and wildlife science, even as he does humanities (not scientific) work. His motivation in the book is to read landscapes. His main argument is to elevate the place of stories in doing so. History is not the past, he repeats several times in his talk, but the stories we tell about the past. But don't take that as naÃ¯ve anti-realism. Of course things in the past exist. It's just that history is the story we tell about those things that actually happened.

Reading a landscape is difficult business. Landscapes are multi-layered, contingent, unstable, unpredictable things. Cronon flashes the image above at the start of his talk and explains that he won't go too far from it for the next 75 minutes of text. The scene is the Fox River. Fort Winnebago used to be nearby. Just off camera to the right (across that bridge) is a turn-off for cars to park and check out the historical markers about the place. Jefferson Davis was once stationed there around the 1830s. This fact, and Davis's name among others on a carefully placed historical marker, evokes some kind of memory for most passers-by. Few may have heard of Ft. Winnebago, and fewer still of Portage, WI. But many people will think, Jefferson Davis? The President of the Confederacy? This notice puts the place (Portage) into a collective with other memories of the viewer.

From that start Cronon unfolds into a wide-reaching and interconnected discussion about memory, place, and time. Davis at Ft. Winnebago; Ft. Winnebago as a trading post and secure spot; the locale at a key geological point at the outer reaches of the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes Watershed. The Fox River, as it happens, is but a few miles from the Wisconsin River. The Fox runs north into Lake Michigan; the Wisconsin runs south into the Mississippi. That few-mile span between them is thus a geological rarity and the best and closest connection bringing the entire continent within reach - one can travel from the Atlantic through the St. Lawrence into the Great lakes, down the Fox River and over to the Wisconsin; down the Wisconsin into the Mississippi; and then to the Gulf of Mexico. The trade routes didn't get better than that. The portage of canoes across that short space of land gave name to the small town that later grew up there. The rivers' odd proximity to one another--flowing in different directions--is the result of glacial moves from thousands of years ago. To read that landscape requires a good deal of deliberate investigation, not just passive gazing. Reading landscapes is difficult work, but it explains how places are made.

Given all of that--the connections, the geology, the history, the landscape--I was struck most by the subtitle's emphasis on memory. Cronon intends for his study to be about time, memory, and place. Every place can withstand such full readings. He is fortunate that his place, Portage, was also signified by its famous residents in the history of environmentalism -- Muir, Turner, Leopold. Our memory of them brings the meaning of that place closer. We remember them because of the history of environmental thought and practice that followed. We tell their stories. For example, we still tell stories about John Muir, we still hold him in our memory, and we still find that relevant and meaningful. He is remembered. (Consider Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature, his new biography of John Muir. Good book, that, and only the most recent of many Muir biographies.) When I note above that Cronon's work transcends environmental history, I mean that in the sense here that the story of Portage is an environmental one--reading landscapes, understanding their history--but also a cultural, human one. Who are we, the readers or landmark viewers in that landscape? Who lived there before and why do we care now? His story addresses those questions.

The entire time I was listening to Cronon I was simultaneously daydreaming about an amazing short story by Kevin Brockmeier called "The Brief History of the Dead." The short story was published about six years ago, and later worked up into a full novel, published in 2006. As I remember it, the not-quite-sci-fi story is about the dwindling population of a not-quite-heaven, post-life netherworld called "the city" where people remain only as long as someone back in the real living world remembers them.

the city was not Heaven, and it was not Hell, and it certainly was not the world. It stood to reason, then, that it had to be something else. More and more people came to adopt the theory that it was an extension of life itself--a sort of outer room--and that they would remain there only so long as they endured in living memory. When the last person who had actually known them died, they would pass over into whatever came next.

Given the fiction of it, I'll interpret the story to be about the connections we have to one another, the love we leave behind, the mark we make before we are gone--or, here, this is better, that the mark we make before we are gone is the set of connections we've made while living.

Memory was Cronon's theme as well--Muir remains alive in the sense that we remember him. He's still in "the city," with Jefferson Davis as it were. Eventually in his talk, and with that river image looming so large we knew it was coming, Cronon gave us the Heraclites line--You can never step in the same river twice. As he noted, the subsequent clichÃ©d use of the line should not take away from the depth of the observation. The river is the name we give to a moving body of water, a thread running across the ground that is defined by drops of water that will never go by the same spot again. One step in, and you are part of a dynamic system. One step out and back in, and you are part of a different one with the same name. It isn't about the river alone, though, it's also about our ecological systems. Though we don't walk around saying this, you can never really stand in the same environment twice. (As I noted in a prior post, this makes legislating policy about it difficult, since we presume the policy applies to the same thing, equally, always, and without variety.)

What's lingered over the last week for me is the connection between Cronon's reading of the landscape, Brockmeier's reading of humanity, and the common element of memory between them.

In a deeper way, Heraclite's point is an autobiographical one. Holding Brockmeier's fictional story with Cronon's non-fictional one helps show the human identity, the biography, at stake in these stories. I sat there thinking about my own past as Cronon talked about the past of Portage and Davis and Ft. Winnebago and the Fox River and post-glacial Wisconsin. Autobiographically, then, I remember my earlier years, and I know that was me. But I was different. That wasn't the "me" I am now. I have the same name, but I can never be the same person twice. I struggle with this all the time, and no, not always in the drippy way one might interpret my words here to indicate. I read the Brockmeier story six years ago, when I was someone else, only I had the same name so it's hard to say I was someone else. Except I was, in the Heraclitian one. I still have in my Inbox a note to reply to from an old classmate, a woman who sat with me on the front steps of our seminar room on September 11th; we write once a year to say hi and give life updates and talk about how blue the sky was that day. That wasn't me there either. I wasn't a parent yet; I lived in a different place; I didn't know about Cheney's full call to darkness. I drive up an interstate a few times a year back to my hometown, and I remember the dozens, maybe hundreds of times I've driven up that valley. And it's never been the same drive twice.

This could go on, so let me get back onto the main track: Hercalites is not making a point only about history--it's also about identity. Cronon is not making a point only about nature--it's also about culture, about human identity as part of nature. Landscapes are worth reading as much as biographies. We might come to respect their integrity more if we made this a habit.

I suppose my point is that Cronon's talk was memorable. But mostly because it was provocative, allowing me to put it into my own thoughts on place and time. That's good public speaking, an art, the same effect as a good film or novel. All the better that it's intent was to open up new perspectives on the environment.

bcohen Sun, 12/20/2009 - 04:00

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Thanks for the reminder of this piece. It's one of the finest reflections on environmental history I've seen in a very long time. It was a treat to read it again. Maybe worth working up for life after the World's Fair...

Of course, I realize this isn't the same piece I read earlier this year and I'm not the same reader. And you working the piece up in another format wouldn't be the same you and the piece wouldn't be the same piece. But I did remember it.

thanks, I realize this isn't the same piece I read earlier this year and I'm not the same reader

Does Science Equal Progress?

bcohen — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Does Science Equal Progress?

Instead of me answering that, I wondered instead how other people have argued about the question. To be more specific, since I am interested in the role of scientific practice for defining the land, I wondered how people argued about whether or not science was better for agriculture. I wrote a book about it. It's called Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside. I commented here a few months ago that the book was finally on its way. Although Amazon sales do not begin until October 20th (here is their link), the publisher has it officially listed for sale now at their site.

Rather than paraphrase, I'll offer an excerpt from the preface here:

Notes from the Ground is about how and why dirt became an object of scientific interest. It is, to that end, a story about defining the modern landscape with scientific means. The book examines the historical and cultural basis from which agriculture and science first came together in America, a story that begins in the later eighteenth century and becomes fully manifest by the mid-nineteenth. By looking to farmers, planters, politicians, publishers, natural philosophers, chemists, and other advocates and critics, this book examines the moral and material bases from which our agricultural (i.e., food-making) practices became directed through scientific principles. The study takes soil identity, soil fertility, and the cultural reasons to seek more systematic knowledge of both as the basis of its narrative. These issues of soil identity and fertility interest me not only in the perhaps Nixonian way of wondering what rural citizens knew and when they knew it, but also at the level of questions about credibility and authority: when advocates claimed to know something new about the soil, why did anyone else believe them? Taking the knowledge and credibility questions together, in its larger ambition Notes from the Ground is a study of how science became a culturally credible means for humans to interact with the environment.

And the answer to that question, "Is science progress?"?

Yes, you'll have to read the book. But in brief, I can say that Americans began to equate the two once they built scientific practices that benefited their deeper goals of cultural progress. Put another way, science did not equal agricultural progress until scientific practices fit a dual improvement ethic that sought moral and material improvement together.

bcohen Fri, 09/25/2009 - 02:00

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NatureLand: What They Used to Call the Environment

Mass Destruction: the environmental effects of mining

bcohen — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 06:30:00 +0000

Mass Destruction: the environmental effects of mining

Tim LeCain, a professor at Montana State (in Bozeman) and a talented scholar in environmental history and the history of technology ("envirotech"), has just published Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet. Although I've not read it yet, I'm familiar with LeCain's work in general (having read prior work that is now part of the book). He's a solid scholar and a notable writer; this is important work.

I copy here from the Rutgers Press description of the book:

The place: The steep mountains outside Salt Lake City. The time: The first decade of the twentieth century. The man: Daniel Jackling, a young metallurgical engineer. The goal: A bold new technology that could provide billions of pounds of cheap copper for a rapidly electrifying America. The result: Bingham's enormous "Glory Hole," the first large-scale open-pit copper mine, an enormous chasm in the earth and one of the largest humanmade artifacts on the planet. Mass Destruction is the compelling story of Jackling and the development of open-pit hard rock mining, its role in the wiring of an electrified America, as well its devastating environmental consequences.

Mass destruction mining soon spread around the nation and the globe, providing raw materials essential to the mass production and mass consumption that increasingly defined the emerging "American way of life." At the dawn of the last century, Jackling's open pit replaced immense but constricted underground mines that probed nearly a mile beneath the earth, to become the ultimate symbol of the modern faith that science and technology could overcome all natural limits. A new culture of mass destruction emerged that promised nearly infinite supplies not only of copper, but also of coal, timber, fish, and other natural resources.

But, what were the consequences? Timothy J. LeCain deftly analyzes how open-pit mining continues to affect the environment in its ongoing devastation of nature and commodification of the physical world. The nation's largest toxic Superfund site would be one effect, as well as other types of environmental dead zones around the globe. Yet today, as the world's population races toward American levels of resource consumption, truly viable alternatives to the technology of mass destruction have not yet emerged.

It looks like Michael Barton, of The Dispersal of Darwin blog, has read the work and posted a review at Amazon. He notes that LeCain's writing is accessible and engaging, and Ed Russell, my colleague here at U.Va., blurbs the back by calling the book an "eloquent and searing portrait of the environmental cost of the coins in our pockets and wires in our walls."

Check it out.

If I ever get time, this should be in the author-blogger series here.

bcohen Thu, 07/23/2009 - 02:30

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NatureLand: What They Used to Call the Environment

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How Dirt Became Scientific: Book Cover Edition

bcohen — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:00:00 +0000

How Dirt Became Scientific: Book Cover Edition

Alas, I have a book cover to share for Notes from the Ground! I'm pleased with it. I was even brought to use an exclamation point just there.

It happens, I know it, it happens, people judge these things by their covers. I don't say so to be cutesy or play the cliche. I'm just acknowledging it happens. I've done it. Not infrequently, in fact. The one for this book is a plate from the 1697 John Dryden translation of Virgil's The Georgics, one of his epics and the one that threads through the book underneath the cover. I'm excited to see it. Make posters, put it on your walls, behold, revel, color in the lines if you must.

bcohen Tue, 07/14/2009 - 02:00

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NatureLand: What They Used to Call the Environment

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Upsets Abound in The Morning News Tournament of Books

bcohen — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:00:00 +0000

Upsets Abound in The Morning News Tournament of Books

The Morning News's Fifth Annual Tournament of Books, real March madness, is a true highlight of the near-Spring calendar. I'm told there is some other tournament this month, also capitalizing on the month "March" in its title. We'll have to look into that.

This TMN tourney has thus far seen four colossal upsets. In one bracket alone, the Booker Prize winner and PEN/Faulkner Award winner's were both taken down by lower-seeded upstarts. Shocking. Startling. Immense. Bloggable.

Note that Judge Jonah Lehrer, he of The Frontal Cortex, was the arbiter of one of these upsets, picking Mark Sarva's Harry, Revised over Aravind Adiga's White Tiger. Note too that of the 16 entries in the tournament, I haven't quite finished them all so I can't say whether the results are fair. And by "quite finished" I mean that I haven't started them all. And by "all" I mean I haven't ready any of them. Yet.

Today's match up is Round 1, Match 5 in the DAVID FOSTER WALLACE Regional. It was the first to avoid an upset -- Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country in an easy victory over E. Lockhart's (apparently surprisingly solid) The Disreputable History of Frankie-Landau Banks.

Here is the original call to arms, the tourney announcement: this link.

Here are the brackets: go print them.

Here are this year's judges: a motley crew, including last year's winner Junot Diaz.

Here is where you can go to check in on other bloggers' comments and what not: all very interesting.

But here is where all the real action is: commentary from the booth (from today's).

bcohen Fri, 03/13/2009 - 07:00

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The Book Building

My collection of New Yorker rejection letters. It's like you can actually watch evolution take place.

worldsfair — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:45:45 +0000

My collection of New Yorker rejection letters. It's like you can actually watch evolution take place.

(Given it being a big week for Darwin and all, I thought it would be kind of cool to repost this post from 07)

Not counting Shouts and Murmurs email queries, I've sent pieces to the New Yorker proper on three occasions, the last of which just a few months ago. What I've noticed is that there is a clear trend is how these rejection letters have been developing over the years.

Here's the first one I got, which I think is pretty impressive and earned a rating of "A" in a previous post. I mean, it's got it all. Handwritten, reference to a powerful editor at the top of his game, written and signed even by someone in the same plateau. Plus, just the right amount of pretention in the letter to make it charming.

So that was in Spring of 2003. The Nigeria piece, by the way, did eventually get published at Maisonneuve.

Next, in and around the early part of 2005, I sent in two pieces and got this back. It's much more direct and impersonal, although still with some nice sentiment thrown in. (These pieces by the way also came to public light - the wine piece appearing, also, in Maisonneuve, and the "Am I Everywhere" appearing in The Believer.

More recently, Ben and I co-wrote a piece (there's actually an interesting story to this - which we can maybe divulge once it finds a home), and submitted it to the hallowed halls of the New Yorker. This time, it was easily the fastest turnaround time, but take a look at the actual letter:

Anyway, the trend is pretty clear, and if I was a betting man, the next time a rejection fom the New Yorker is received, I'm guessing it might look a little this:

worldsfair Wed, 02/11/2009 - 04:45

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That looks more like a case of a workplace where more and more emploees are gone and labor and time must be focused on doing the same amount of work with less resources.

My guess would be rather than a two word rejection letter, you'd get a returned unopened envelope stapmed with the words "No such person at this address"

Hahaha! Come on...fourth time's the charm, right?

I think the fourth one would not be hand written. It would be a form letter of one word: No.

In my experiences with rejection letters from the SnoozeYorker was born the conspiracy theory that they've employed a Rumsfeldian sign-off generating automaton. Like an efficient water heater, it will surely save them money in the long run.

actually, you have great letters there:
the first is positiviely cordial, almost like between colleagues- mentioning someone passed to them (that alone indicates that ONE of the decision makers had hopes for the piece); apologizing for the delay (NYer just rejected my poem after 9 months and no apology, not that I need one); the use of "yours" when usually it's sincerely; the "we are grateful for your attention", which I take as meaning they respect your talent and are happy you thot of them first....
I don't know if you want to be in TNY but i think if the piece is right for them and up to your usual standards, you'll get in.
Sincerely, Yours, Gratefully, Rob :)

Urban and Industrial Environments

bcohen — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:00:00 +0000

Urban and Industrial Environments

MIT Press publishes a series called Urban and Industrial Environments. Several of the "author-meets-blogger" books were from that series. The main editor is Robert Gottlieb of Occidental College out in California. I was just made aware of a blog for his Urban & Environmental Policy Institute there, where one can find notices of new books, discussions of current issues in environmental justice, and, you guessed it, matters of urban and environmental policy more broadly speaking.

In addition to the well-stocked and premier Urban and Industrial Environments list, Gottlieb also edits a new series called Food, Health, and the Environment.

Take a look and maybe keep it in your bookmarks folder. It's good stuff. You'll hear more about those books here in the coming months.

bcohen Tue, 08/12/2008 - 03:00

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Science. Technology. Nature. Lawn.

bcohen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:30:00 +0000

Science. Technology. Nature. Lawn.

An advertisement from Frank Scott's company (as reprinted in Ted Steinberg's American Green). Talk about religion and nature--Scott thought it was un-christian not to keep a manicured lawn.

Our lawn finally came in this year after three years in this house. We hadn't put much of an effort into it, I'll admit, though the original builder sought to. Our dirt is awful, just god awful. Ask my dad. He, the ardent gardener, is astonished by how poor the soil is. But this year the crabgrass grew in. And it looks good, real good. Plus it's helped prevent erosion from the occasional torrential downpours and for the most part it manages itself. So, yeah.

One of the more fascinating things about lawns, to my mind, is that people keep writing about them. Just look at me. Here I am. Elizabeth Kolbert recently did too in The New Yorker, although it isn't exactly clear what the occasion for the essay review was. (Incidentally, I hear someone may have taken notice of the cover on that issue.) Perhaps she'd been rattling the topic around in her head for a while and finally reached critical mass. She makes note of "a new tradition in landscape writing," and cites a series of books (I'll list them at the end here) and, even though I just shaded my sentence a few back to make it seem like I was being critical, this is a fine mini-essay on the topic of nature, culture, and the values of our modern world. By virtue of the place of the lawn mower we also get a touch of the history of technology in there; by virtue of reference to botany and horticulture (be it direct or indirect) we get a touch of the history of science too.

I just read the late Philip Pauly's Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America. (I had to, it was on my summer reading list. A fine book, I was glad I did.) His central thesis is that American horticulturalists "sought to exclude or exterminate undesirable plants and plant pests. These activities fundamentally altered not only the vegetation, but also the economic activities, social relations, and common experiences of Americans. They shaped the identity of the United States." It's a bold claim, and he knows it. So he follows his set up to say that horticulture is far "more than an ornamental subject," more than gardening or aesthetic (though those are part of it) and more deserving of a fuller historical work-up. Horticulture is, more properly, a prominent example of human activity in the non-human natural world, an activity that in the nineteenth century was akin to today's biotechnology. He makes a fair case. Kolbert wasn't able to work Pauly into her essay review. In a future revised edition she might well do so, thus broadening her review of reviews of lawns in history with further curiosity about science and technology and then sticking the landing with environmental history.

Here, then, is her bibliography:

Michael Pollan's (1991) Second Nature (1991)
Sara Stein's (1993) Noah's Garden (1993)
F. Herbert Bormann, Diana Balmori, and Gordon T. Geballe's (1993) Redesigning the American Lawn
Sally and Andy Wasowski's (2004) Requiem for a Lawnmower
Ted Steinberg's (2006) American Green
Heather C. Flores's (2006) Food Not Lawns
Paul Robbins's (2007) Lawn People
Fritz Haeg's (2008) Edible Estates
Plus the Pauly book above (2008)
And for good measure, this cultural and environmental history, Jennifer Price's (1999) Flight Maps, one chapter of which addresses the cultural history of environmental sensibilities about lawns and the plastic Pink Flamingo.

Now to cap this off, because where else would this poem fit?, is Robert Frost's "Mowing":

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound--
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

bcohen Tue, 07/29/2008 - 08:30

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NatureLand: What They Used to Call the Environment

The Art/Science (Non?)Divide Building

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We spent last weekend ripping up our (grass) front lawn to put in plants that don't need to be mowed. The article in the New Yorker definitely spurred us on, but our inability to waste water on grass and our guilt at lawn mower emissions had a lot more to do with it.

Love is a Mixed Tape

worldsfair — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 06:18:22 +0000

Love is a Mixed Tape

It's been a while since I've enjoyed a book this much. That's all.

worldsfair Mon, 07/21/2008 - 02:18

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The Book Building