Four book reviews

My work these days has primarily involved helping others on their own projects: supporting books, essays, and all sorts of public-facing things related to the excellent research and creative work happening at WashU.

But I've managed to write a few book reviews in the meantime. A review of John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed, for The Common Reader; a review of Rebecca McCarthy's Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, and a review of Steve Ramirez's Casting Homeward, both for The FlyFish Journal. I also have a review of Michelle Currie Navakas's Coral Lives coming out soon in the journal Novel. 

I have probably written more than 50 book reviews now. I was thinking of collecting them all together in a book, as a sort of archive of my reading and reviewing life over the past 20 years. I think book reviews (and book review essays) are an under-appreciated genre. They are a chance to try out ideas, experiment with essay forms, and engage with other writers. It might be interesting to see what over two decades of book reviews look like, constellated. This often happens in single-author essay collections, inadvertently. But what about a book that takes this on deliberately, and begins with a discussion of this mode of writing? An idea I'll continue to incubate... 

Little Data

For Spring 2024, a new book: Little Data, which I wrote with my great friend and longtime collaborator Mark Yakich. 

 

Recent book news

A minnow-pattern fly tied by my friend Glen up in Michigan. I'm showing it to one of my Loyola students, Morgan. Photo by Kyle Encar.

My book Fly-Fishing continues to generate new connections and ideas. 

I was asked to contribute the words for a short film by Henry Quirion. 

I did a 'lecture' for One Day University called "What's so great about Fly-Fishing? An A to Z Guide." (I put the word lecture in scare quotes because I don't typically lecture. It isn't my preferred mode, and I fear I failed miserably; I haven't watched this and so I can't even vouch for it!)

On the other hand, I wrote a short piece about my fly-fishing class at Loyola last winter, for The Conversation. Teaching that course caused some sort of pedagogical tectonic shift in me, one I'm still working to articulate. 

For me this little book has been a living example of how short crossover books can connect with wide, often unexpected audiences.

Unrelated, but not really, two things on my book Adventure: Liam Otten wrote a really sweet piece on it for The Source, including an actual adventure in Forest Park. And Jeannette Cooperman wrote a generous review of the book for The Common Reader.  

My two recent books nod to each together, and follow from Searching for the Anthropocene from four years ago. 

Big Move, New Project

I've been busy this summer: We moved 650 miles up the Mississippi River, where I've taken a new job as Director of Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis. This program is part of an exciting strategic plan that the college of Arts & Sciences recently embarked on. I wrote a bit about what we're doing with the new program for Inside Higher Ed. I also wrote a new piece about how air travel is in a rut, for The Conversation—a key venue we're utilizing to enhance public scholarship at WashU. 

Adventure

 

New book coming August 2023! 

Three new pieces

I keep thinking about this ad that circulated for months online, last year: it's for a cozy clothes line, like pajamas and sweats, but sort of fancy. I discussed the ad briefly in my recent Real Review essay as an example of Poe's Law: without context, appearing as it does as a mere spot on the internet, it's impossible to know if it's sincere or ironic. But either way, one thing is clear: we agree that flying is by default uncomfortable. Cozy, really, on an airplane? That familiar slump in the seat? The fact that the airplane is waiting on the tarmac? (Notice the vertical stabilizer in the background, through the window? That plane is grounded!) Is there even such a thing as the "perfect airplane outfit," or is it a contradiction in terms? This seemingly simple little image is just overflowing with runaway connotations, and I can't leave it alone. My critique of air travel and its cultural representations won't quit. 

Three new pieces out:

At Times Higher Ed I contributed a reflection on the ways scholars can have public impact beyond social media.

I wrote a narrative commentary on my first flight since the pandemic started, which is up at Popula. 

And in the retro department again, I wrote about getting rid of my iPhone in exchange for a Light Phone II (which is great! I highly recommend it!), for Slate's Future Tense column. I am working on a longer piece on this topic, possibly the basis of my next book. 

Two new essays...in print magazines

I didn't set out to be so retro this year, but I have two new essays out this month in print magazines. (Just in print, not online!) 

I wrote about the current state of air travel for the 13th issue of a London-based architectural theory magazine called Real Review. The main editor there, Jack Self, commissioned me to write a piece that was basically an epilogue to my book Grounded, which I was happy to do. The issue is full of other great pieces and artwork.

And I wrote a piece on urban fly-fishing for The FlyFish Journal's latest issue. This piece touches on and runs parallel to some themes that I wrote about in the epilogue of my new book Fly-Fishing, which comes out in March. I've admired this magazine for years, and am thrilled to have a piece in its pages. I also really enjoyed reading an interview with the Atlanta-based artist Michi Meko in the issue. His style of fly-fishing, as well as artistic practice, resonated with me. 

Creative Nonfiction

I reviewed Chris Dombrowski's moving new book The River You Touch for The FlyFish Journal. This book got me thinking again about the curious genre of creative nonfiction. It is a really interesting if sometimes frustrating category of literature: a third option of sorts, somewhere between memoir or straight nonfiction, on the one side, and fiction or poetry, on the other. Not entirely made-up, but neither presented as totally true. You can't run the data on it. It's a galling designation, in a way, because it lets the author skirt and slip away from standards and measures for how a narrative should work, or how truth might be told or reality reflected. Yet it is these slippery aspects that make the genre (or non-genre, really) so fascinating and worthy of study—as well as experimentation. 

I remember talking about creative nonfiction a lot when I taught my David Foster Wallace seminars, what seems like a lifetime ago. And my own books have drifted into this realm, as I've blurred cultural criticism with storytelling and playing with form. (One of the reasons I enjoy editing Object Lessons so much is that I love thinking about each book's form, and helping authors rethink how to shape their manuscripts—sometimes it's subtle things, other times it's a dramatic shift or alternative structure.)

I am teaching a creative nonfiction workshop at Loyola this spring, and am eager to see what my students do with it. Are there new roles for this kind of writing, after post-truth and in the midst of a slogging pandemic with its whorl of science fact and speculative fictions? What will my students write, how will they write into this streaming data-driven world? Is this a mode of writing to embrace, or to be wary of? Is it a cop-out, or an escape route? I am here for it. 

Invasive fish & us

 

Rio Grande Cichlid, Bayou St. John, MidCity New Orleans

I enjoyed D.T. Max’s recent New Yorker article on lionfish and the spearfishing communities in Florida that target these creatures. Max’s story reminded me of another aquarium fish, a species that allegedly escaped after a hurricane and which now populates the brackish waters around New Orleans: the Rio Grande Cichlid. Rio Grande Cichlid are known to outcompete other fish for feeding and breeding territory, and they have fierce-looking little front teeth to prove it. Unlike lionfish, though, Rio Grande Cichlid can be caught on a hook; I catch them regularly in Bayou St. John in MidCity when I fly-fish there. Anglers are encouraged to “destroy” these fish upon catching them. But no matter how many anglers kill these fish, they adapt and proliferate. Max’s underlying statistics quietly reveal a predicament: Millions of lionfish, spreading and reproducing exponentially, often in waters practically unreachable by humans. Even with the best spearfishers and netting contraptions, we alone won’t be able to reverse this invasion. And stories of invasive fish often end up being parables for the Anthropocene: The more humans attempt to control nature, for better or worse, the more our own invasive nature is revealed.

Environmental Memoir Undone

An Alice Marwick concept that she made for my next book's cover; we didn't end up using this image, but I like it a lot.

I wrote about Doug Peacock's new book Was It Worth It? and the genre of the environmental memoir, for The Millions. This essay has strains of my next book Adventure in it, and also some hints of my forthcoming book Fly-Fishing.

Fly-fishing as practice

 

My buddy Brian with a beautiful bluegill caught at Bayou St. John

I wrote a brief review of Dylan Tomine's new book Headwaters, for The FlyFish Journal. 

I have been going fly-fishing in Bayou St. John near my home a few mornings a week throughout the school year, and have learned a lot about this little urban body of water (or I've just continued to be mystified by it, really). I wrote about this place as well as my childhood lakes in northern Michigan in my next book Fly-Fishing, which comes out with Duke University Press in their new Practices series next spring. 

No More Twitter

Han in carbonite, about the same dimensions as my iPhone SE

I got off Twitter last month, and wrote a bit about why for Inside Higher Ed. 

First, there was the lightening. 

But wait—back up. 

I had tapered off my Twitter usage over the last six months, since I dropped and shattered my iPhone last summer. When I replaced my phone with an older model that my partner had cast off when she upgraded a couple years ago, I didn’t download the Twitter app. I realized then how much I had just been thumb-scrolling through the idle minutes and hours of the days. (I also didn’t log in to my email on the recycled phone; another epiphany that followed was just how much work I had been doing on my phone, at odd hours. “Job spill,” indeed.)

I used my Twitter account less and less throughout the school year, mostly retweeting other people’s news and promoting a book of mine that came out in January, Pedagogy of the Depressed. 

All winter I had been contemplating getting off Twitter altogether, because I was becoming more and more aware of how even a few seconds on the website usually made me either A) annoyed, B) jealous, or C) outright angry. Bird sounds in the morning are often gentle and pleasant to wake up to; tweets, on the other hand are blaring and distracting. The website could be called SCREAM instead.

I was raised in a cult and escaped it, so I am highly allergic to fanatical leaders and charismatic power mongers. I never joined Facebook, because the founder gave me the willies. I tried Instagram for a year, but once Facebook acquired it, I deleted my account. So when I read about the wealthiest person in the world attempting to buy Twitter, I knew my days there were numbered. (Even if the sale falls through, just the thought of such an absurd gesture was enough.)

I requested my archive of tweets and all the subfolders of data that come with this package; not that I’ll ever weed through any of the files, realistically. 

There was some good news for a book series that I co-edit: one of our titles got a nice treatment in a New Yorker article online. I dutifully retweeted the piece. 

I liked someone’s clever tweet about…something. I can’t even remember. 

Then on a Thursday evening as I was cleaning up after dinner, I simply opened up my Twitter profile, clicked the red button for Deactivate, and learned that the company was sorry to see me go.

Then, the lightening happened. I could feel a physical, palpable lifting as if off my shoulders. Who knew I was carrying Twitter around with me all this time, even as I used it less and less? Maybe it should be called Burden: a gray cinderblock for the icon. 

A quiet descended—or maybe it rose up from the ground. Either way, it permeated. 

I sat down on the floor and cuddled with my cat for a few minutes. 

I plucked The Great Gatsby from the bookshelf (my partner’s tattered copy from high school!) and read the first few pages before bed. 

I was off Twitter, for good. 

Those 4600 “followers”—would they miss me? Probably not. No one would probably even notice: Social media isn’t able to capture the beauty of absence. Would I miss the people that I followed? If so, I’ll send them an email to say hello. So many of my contacts on Twitter were people I worked with in some capacity or another, anyway: fellow professors, current and former students, writers, editors, and readers. There would be other ways to cross paths. Quieter ways. 

That Saturday morning I leafed through Thoreau’s journals, and texted a few passages to my friend Mark, who gave me the book a couple years ago. We regularly trade timely or otherwise curious sentences from the pages. May 23, 1854: “In me is the sucker that I see.” 

Later in the day I read an article at the Atlantic on my phone that my friend Ian had just published, about slushies. It was great. Ian had texted the link to me and our mutual friend Tim, and we bantered about the article over a text thread. I hadn’t needed Twitter to find this piece, or “engage” with it—or my friends, for that matter.  

On Monday I would reply to emails on my computer, at my office. I wouldn’t toggle over to the Twitter website, because I was not there any longer. I wouldn’t become distracted, feel competitive, or get upset by the incessant visual cacophony. (Sure, I’ll still feel all these feelings—just not provoked relentlessly by that one website.) 

I don’t know what I’ll do with all this new time, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. Hell, I might even start blogging more regularly again. 

I might even just listen to the birds outside, for a while. It’s so quiet, after all. 

Editing & Publishing

The most recent Object Lessons poster

Part of my job these days involves directing the new Center for Editing & Publishing at Loyola. This center was the culmination of years of collaborations between several of my colleagues (especially Mark Yakich, who was the center's inaugural director last year), and our shared realization that between the New Orleans Review and Object Lessons we had built an incredible foundation for practical, hands-on experience for our students in the realms of editing and publishing. We also have Airplane Reading, which we're planning to resurrect next year. And then there's our award-winning student newspaper The Maroon, which isn't housed in the English department but which lots of our students write for or are otherwise involved with.

We noticed our students getting great internships and jobs—at literary agencies, major trade publishers, academic and university presses, independent presses, and literary journals—after graduating from Loyola. We connected the dots and understood that our students were naturally merging the lessons they'd learned across the different publishing initiatives we had in our department and around Loyola and New Orleans more broadly. So thanks to the intrepid leadership and organizational skills of my colleague Hillary Eklund, who was department chair at the time, we procured some space in our building, launched the Center, and created a five-course editing & publishing certificate available to students across disciplines. 

This was not something I ever planned to do as an English professor. I didn't have any formal training in editing, no background in the publishing profession. 

Looking back, though, I realize that I had several valuable experiences that informed my work as it exists now. For instance, one time at UC Davis when I was a grad student, Timothy Morton hired me to create the index for the Cambridge Companion to Shelley, which he was then in the process of editing. This was a deep-dive into a particular vein of British Romanticism, as well as a crash-course in manuscript handling and document preparation. I became fascinated with indexing as a reading practice. (Several years later when I met the indexer Susan Clements in New Orleans, I had a basis for truly valuing her work—and Susan ended up being a stedfast indexer, copyeditor, and general cheerleader and connector for Object Lessons until her untimely death in 2020. Susan was a great friend.)

When I was working on my first book, my mentor Caren Kaplan introduced me to Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press, who Caren described to me as "a great book doctor." After my first meeting with Ken I understood exactly what she meant: Ken had a way of holding the idea of a book in his head, and explaining it, and describing how it might work in different forms, if tilted this way, or flipped in that way...he seemed to grasp books as tactile objects as much as intellectual projects, almost like interactive sculptures for brains. Anyway, I remember being taken with Ken's way of talking about books, then.  And later when I met Haaris Naqvi who would become my longtime editor and our Bloomsbury editor of Object Lessons, I appreciated Haaris's own style of 'book doctoring'. I think I gathered by osmosis some of this way of working with books, and as I started editing books on my own—Object Lessons books, as well as projects by colleagues and friends far flung—I began to see this as an increasingly gratifying part of my job. And I've tried, lately, to pass along to my students some of this energy and excitement for book editing—and the wide yet small, dynamic yet steeped in traditions, world of publishing in general. (At least the bits and parts of it that I've gotten to know over the past 15 years or so!)

Then as I worked with Ian Bogost on our book series, he invited me into the fast-moving realm of online publishing, writing for The Atlantic occasionally but also giving me the tools and tips that I could translate to so many other venues—like Slate where I've been writing about a range of topics, most recently higher ed and mental health. And again, I take a lot of joy in passing this knowledge on to my students, who have gone on to publish their own essays and even found entire online magazines themselves. 

This is just a slice of the editing and publishing activities that are happening in my professional life and in the lives of my colleagues and students at Loyola. But I wanted to take a few paragraphs to reflect on this work, as it wasn't what I was hired or planned to do here—and yet it's become something very real, and fulfilling.  

Blue tarps, and other fall recaps

It's been an exhausting semester, by turns a slog and a whirlwind (literally, at times). On a recent visit to my kids' doctor's office to get their second shot, I looked out the seventh-story window toward downtown and saw a patchwork of blue tarps covering roofs: storm damage leftover from Hurricane Ida. Somehow this image encapsulated the spirit of the times, here. 

But there have been a few highlights. 

Lately I've found myself writing about space exploration, future space travel dreams, and space tourism. I don't always know why I'm driven to write about these topics, although in a way they are not a huge departure from my earlier research and writing on airports and air travel. It's about how our temporary species migrates around the planet—and how we might wish to migrate further. 

While teaching my Ecological Thought seminar, I've been thinking about the odd place where nature writing and space travel intersect—a curious coincidence that was made vivid in Douglas Chadwick's book Four Fifths a Grizzly, and which I wrote about at Los Angeles Review of Books. 

Three of my Ecological Thought students and I presented on Jenny O'Dell's book How to Do Nothing, at a conference at Rice University called In the Path of Disaster(s). 

In that same class we read and discussed Julietta Singh's new book The Breaks, which I also reviewed for Los Angeles Review of Books, thinking about how it relates to recent trends in (and the importance of) public scholarship. This is a central aim of Object Lessons, so I am always eager to see what other pithy books are doing across this scattered field. 

In my workshop on writing the short essay, my students and I wrote a piece about how the classroom has felt during the pandemic. It was a cathartic piece to write, and we were gratified to see so many different readers respond positively to it. While writing it we weren't sure if we were just complaining or maybe whining too much, but it turned out that the utterly draining sensation of the moment has been widely shared. 

Space Travel is a Look

Having fled the blackout that left our city dark in the wake of Hurricane Ida, we found ourselves in a Courtside Marriott near the Memphis airport. The pandemic had made this hotel a shell of itself: a shuttered restaurant, whining AC units, ice machines broken, and minimal amenities. 

As I sat in our room after the long drive, sipping a lukewarm beer from the motley cooler stuffed with items we had salvaged from our fridge back home, I found myself staring at the decor behind the vaguely modern headboards of the beds. It was an intentionally pixelated rendering of pine branches, unfurling across the entire wall. It was made to look, well, like a look. Every two minutes or so, the muffled roar of widebody FedEx cargo jets on liftoff nearby whispered commerce. It was an unsettling feeling: the sheen of design applied to the gritty, worn out landscape of global logistics and disposable culture. Unsettling, if also utterly mundane.

In a recent Atlantic article Marina Koren hinted at something similar when she described the sleek if rather generic design details of the SpaceX Dragon capsule. Elon Musk's products are known for their streamlined aesthetics (even if that sometimes ends up making them more boring). As space travel becomes a highly rarefied commercial enterprise, its optics are shifting. It’s still a spectacle, but is turning into a different kind of aesthetic attractor. It's like how AirBnB advertises their more desirable, elite short-term rentals: not just as temporary places to crash, but as architectural novelties to bask in. Space, too, is getting repackaged as more than science, technology, engineering, and math—it has to be experienced as art, too.

Koren listed the Inspiration4 crew of passengers beginning with “Sian Proctor, a geoscience professor and artist.” Why is Proctor’s status as an artist important here? Is it to promote her progressive, positive messaging space prints? Perhaps. But I think there’s something more going on here: space travel itself is becoming a look, a professional affect. A fashion statement—that artsy look.

Except it's really not fashion forward. It's a throwback look, a callout to earlier times. Like the Dream Chaser (the Matchbox toy of which is above), a chubby echo of the Space Shuttle—if we're chasing a dream, it's one we had several decades ago. A fever dream, one we can't shake. I wrote about this dynamic for Popula.

Ecological Thoughts

 

Hurricane Ida reconfigured the willow tree in our backyard, titling it about 15 degrees to the left of where it used to stand. As a result—something to do with the new angle of exposure?—my children Julien and Camille suddenly discovered that they can climb it, and now they'll spend a couple hours a day just sitting up in its branches. 

I've been enjoying teaching my Ecological Thought seminar this semester, weaving together poems such as Ada Limón's "Overpass" and selections from Layli Long Soldier's Whereas, as well as Jamaica Kincaid on her garden, into the discussions of the main books we've been reading. 

This past summer I wrote a new book on fly fishing, for a just-about-to-launch series called Practices, edited by Margret Grebowicz. It's a short book on a lifelong obsession, and it was so much fun to write—even though the prospect of it intimidated me, at first. The fishing book genre is full, and varied. And it turns out to be incredibly challenging to write about something that has been an ineffable pursuit, a practice more than a pastime, for much of one's life.

A piece related to my fly fishing book was published at Terrain, after Hurricane Ida hit. My fly fishing book also follows up on a few pieces I've written in the past, including my chapter in the book Veer Ecology, and an essay I wrote for Sierra on fly tying. The book also tunnels into a strain of my earlier book Searching for the Anthropocene: the creeping feelings of solastalgia. 

Hurricane Ida

 

Hurricane Ida right before we lost power

I wrote three pieces at Medium about my experience of Hurricane Ida: before, during, and after. 

Spacefaring, Quarantine, Air Travel

Aspirational rendering of Mars base, (c) SpaceX

I've been thinking a lot about the narratives and fantasies that fuel space travel, and how these stories often draw from or align with things happening already on Earth—especially regarding our recent quarantine experience as well as everyday commercial air travel. So I wrote a new piece for Slate called "The Spacefaring Paradox" in which I try to think through some of these things. 

I touched on a few related topics toward the end of my book Searching for the Anthropocene, and I continue to ponder this nexus as SpaceX and other companies make real advances toward extraterrestrial journeys.

Recent writings

 Julien riding his bike up in Michigan

 

I wrote about teaching my kids to ride bicycles during quarantine, for Transformations. 

I wrote a review of Christine Harold's new book Things Worth Keeping: The Value of Attachment in a Disposable World for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

I wrote about the benefits of focusing a class on a single text for a whole semester, for Inside Higher Ed. 

I wrote a brief op-ed about the importance of tenure, for the Loyola Maroon. 

I wrote about The Mandalorian with my student Andres Castro, for Avidly. 

I did an interview for the site Advice to Writers. 

And my contemporary nonfiction students and I collaborated on two pieces this semester, one for 433 and another for Essay Daily. 

Colonizing Mars

 

This is not Mars. This is bread.

I wrote about how we're already colonizing Mars, for Slate's Future Tense series. 

Here are two paragraphs that I didn't end up including in the final version: 

If science is the quest to understand nature, one kind of “faraway” nature that is especially susceptible to exploration—and reverence or protection, but also annihilation—is wilderness. Mars is nothing if not a glowing red wilderness prize: thus the “extreme environments” highlighted by NASA. In a recent Atlantic article, Shannon Stirone pointed out that Mars isn’t some adventurous hike in the desert, or a long sought paradise; rather, it’s a hellhole. Still, the stretched panorama shots and fuzzy landscapes beamed back from the rover reveal a recycled fantasy of wilderness: Mars as a rugged open place just beckoning to be explored, conquered, and (at least potentially) inhabited.

 *

Imagine if instead of collecting space rocks and leaving defunct rovers and wreckage on Mars, and bombarding internet users with photoshopped pictures, imagine if a different kind of mission took place. Picture one more human journey to the Red Planet, the most ambitious yet, with a rover the size of a shipping container—or better, a garbage truck. We might nickname this rover Frankie, after another literary figure who was tasked with cleaning up a mess made in the name of science. The objective: Land on Mars, retrieve every piece of Earth trash—every heatshield, each shredded parachute, all the outmoded rovers—and launch the rover again, detonating it and its amalgam of contents in deep space. We leave tracks, but no junk. And we stop going to Mars, at least for now. For a long now, while we focus instead on Earth. While we really learn how to live on a planet together as a species, alongside myriad other creatures. Earth: this planet that has been our sublime home—and may still be for some time, if we care, if we care for it enough.

 

Pedagogy of the Depressed

When I thought of the title for my next book, I figured that it must have been done already. It was too obvious: a contemporary pun on Paulo Freire’s revolutionary treatise Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but for now—when so many are so depressed, for a variety of reasons. So I Googled it, and was surprised to find that no one else had used this title for a book. (There were some articles that bore the name, but they were mostly buried in obscure academic journals.) 

I had been writing essays about various challenges in the 21st century English classroom, and I figured I could bundle a bunch of these pieces together under this title and make it a timely and maybe even useful book. My endlessly supportive editor Haaris Naqvi at Bloomsbury liked the idea, so I dove in. It worked, for a while: I assembled a draft with interlaced themes of classroom, culture, and community.

I was writing about the insinuation of new technologies in the classroom, from personal smartphones to institutionally adopted learning management systems. I was writing about trigger warnings, increasingly pervasive and layered mental health issues on campus, and how intellectual inquiry was turning into mere data collection. I was writing about my home town of New Orleans, and how my particular institution was adjusting to new modes of learning delivery while staying on mission. This was all under the looming shadow of the Trump presidency and on the eroding landscape of higher education across the United States. 

But this was before the COVID-19 pandemic, when everything changed so rapidly and all these facets took on new wrinkles and contortions. So I scrapped the manuscript I had been working on, and I decided to write this book from scratch, in real time as I taught through the pandemic year of 2020 and as I attempted to find my bearings in this new world. In truth, a lot of things that were nascent before the pandemic just found their way out in the open, as our new normal set in. I've revised some of the earlier pieces, which has been an exercise in humility and recalibration.

I'm finishing this book now, with new leadership in the offing and as the current pandemic looks —maybe, with any luck—to be winding down, even as there are many difficult months ahead. I'm writing about the unexpected highs of teaching and the new lowest lows. I'm writing as I teach, and as I myself adjust to my job feeling profoundly different, to conditions that I was never trained for—but which weirdly feel like extensions of things I've been reading and thinking about for a long time. 

Hygiene Class (& other speculations)

Hygiene Class starts with Hygiene Air...

I had a good chat with travel writer Andrew Nelson about the future of flight, for a listicle he did for the Wall Street Journal. I have a bit in the piece, but here's the longer back & forth...

Andrew: 

I'm wondering if you have a take on how we will feel about air travel, what it might mean to us to fly and how or what we might take with us on a flight that will be new, changed and maybe what might be the same? Will there be a "safe" class of  travel with extra hygienic flourishes as opposed to just business or economy? I encourage you to be speculative. 

Me: 

Four ideas to start with.

1) Fragility. To me one of the most profound things that has happened over the past six months is that travelers have been confronted with the baseline fragility of flight: something as tiny as a virus can set off a ripple effect that can ground flights around the world. The coronavirus has ruptured public confidence in the assumed ease and accessibility of air travel. In the 15 years or so since 9/11, there was a sort of unshakable confidence in the constant growth and lowered costs of commercial flight. Now, other factors in addition to public heath crises—increasingly erratic weather patterns linked to anthropogenic climate change; economic turmoil; geopolitical events—are more acutely positioned to quickly disrupt air travel on a mass scale (should it return at all). 

2) Stress & fear. As airlines attempt to refill planes, the stresses of flying will reach a fever pitch—counterproductively dissuading people from flying. The safety protocols in the wake of COVID-19 will make the post-9/11 security checkpoint seem quaint. Likewise, public health awareness and cleanliness (or the lack thereof) on airplanes will rapidly erode the relatively laissez-faire experience of personal space that travelers had become used to. (For so long it was about my armrest, my setback tray table, my leg room, my miles & points, etc.) Whereas air travel was seen since the Golden Age of flight as luxurious and something of a goal for ordinary people (if not part of their workaday lives), it may well become something that people avoid, and are even afraid of—because of perceived risk factors in addition to the increased stressors of flying. 

3) Inequalities. Wealth gaps within the airport and on the airplane will potentially be exacerbated. As you suggest, we could see grimier parts of the airport/airplane—where economy class travelers exist—and then cleaner parts where First Class and Business Class travelers exist. In a way this division had been happening gradually for a long time, but with fears and risks of infection and contagion, such divisions could be pronounced. (And if this sounds like something out of a Black Mirror episode, it should!) 

4) Cuts. Airlines are going to cut way back. I just heard this morning that 1800 experienced Delta pilots recently took a buy-out package. (And I’m quite sure that 1800 new Delta pilots are not being hired and trained, at the moment.) Major airlines will shrink and there will quite probably be mergers and absorptions. Aircraft manufacturing will also contract. Airlines and aircraft and jet engine manufacturers had for years projected multiple decades of steady growth; the current jolt will likely have a decades-long negative impact on these industries. Everyday travelers, such as they still exist, will feel these contractions in multiple small and big ways, from the eliminations of flights to certain airports, to fewer newer planes, to a decrease in amenities on board. 

Andrew:  

Let's tease this out even more.

• "Hygienic Class"—will people pay extra for a new class of seat and seating area with extra high filtration ventilation restricted to their part of the plane? Or will we see extra-hygienic flights—planes with fewer people but costing more, removing the middle row permanently or putting everyone in their own filtered pod, like a sleeper car on an old train?

• Will there be nostalgia expressed for the "golden days" of flying? Perhaps hit movies or sentimental songs about this era when anyone could get up, go and fly without fear? Could we see a spate of longing, cultural manifestations in song, Netflix streamers, movies? If so, what brand might be the Pan Am of our recently lost age? Virgin? Jet Blue?—certainly not United or American ... hah. Play casting director. Who might star in a 2026 Rom Com about air travel circa 2016?

• Because hub and spoke exposes us to more hassle will we opt for more direct flights?

• Will refurbished planes (because so many orders are cancelled) be the wave of the future—what could that design look like?

Me: 

• Would-be passengers will definitely pay extra for the illusion of hygiene and safety—and airlines and airports are already supplying these illusions (as well as the real thing, of course). But the question is what will happen as people become less trusting and more suspicious of things like high filtration, extra cleaning measures, etc. I think the reality is that people’s safe ‘pods’ are going to be what’s at home. As long as pandemics are on people’s minds, anything seen as a germ-sponge is going to be suspect—no matter how much the image is cleansed, no matter the new technologies touted. Regardless of the level of filtration and the cleanings between flights, it’s really hard to glorify the crammed long metal tube with wings, these days. 

• There will probably be some nostalgia for the Golden Age of flight. But there may also be a sense of “How were we that stupid to think we could do that, on such a scale?!?” And it’s from such a latter sense that we might learn something, and work toward better modes of mass transit and global migration. I think actually the brand we might long for the most is Southwest: that airline was simultaneously the nadir of commercial flight (for sneering elite fliers) and its apotheosis, as the world’s largest low-cost carrier. But Southwest's convivial ethos and cattle-car boarding procedures seem destined to the dustbin of history. Southwest will no doubt survive the current downturn (it has, in many ways, the smartest business model, with its sole 737s and low-fare logic), but I don’t think it will ever be the same. The imaginary movie you’re suggesting makes me think of that 2004 film The View from the Top, staring Gwyneth Paltrow—the first post-9/11 film to jovially revisit commercial flight, and really fascinating for the ways it did so. What will the comparable film be for us, in a few years, reflecting on the last several years of flight? Actually, what if we imagined this to be a Pixar airport-themed film, for the Covid-generation kids who never got to know commercial flight, or only remember it vaguely, and for their parents who remember it with a hint of nostalgia such as you mentioned above? That would be an interesting movie idea to play out, six years from now… 

• Yes, smaller airports are going to be under pressure with fewer flights, and people will likely start driving to destinations from major airports, again. The real scrum is going to involve what smaller airports survive, and how. Just look at the new New Orleans airport to see this crisis playing out in real time: after several months of boom, a massive drop in flights with no big boom back on the horizon anytime soon. Nola.com reported just a couple days ago on the airport having to slash jobs at the new airport. Southwest is cutting flights from MSY. This situation will play out at other small to mid-size airports that were banking on growth—only to be looking down the barrel of the pandemic, now. 

• This is a really interesting question. Especially to think about with regard to the many many grounded Boeing 737 MAX planes—brand new, but still with a very questionable future! What could be done with them, if they never fly? Refurbished planes will almost certainly be used more and more. In fact, while I don’t have data to back this up yet, I’ll bet that the airplane scrap yards (like in Arizona) where commercial airliners are stored are going to see an uptick in business as airlines try to scrounge to keep fleets alive while spending minimally. (This may not sound very comforting to aspiring fliers!) Aircraft interiors can be spruced up so that planes appear ‘new’ from the inside—but the airliners themselves might be fairly old. In some ways the 88 Boeing 717s—converted from Air Tran (after being absorbed by Southwest) to Delta in 2013—show how this might work, especially as mergers happen in the coming years. 

Perpetual flight, and then...

Believe it or not, this is what 80% FEWER flights in the air over the U.S. looks like (30 April 2020)

I've been writing about the status of air travel leading right up to the COVID-19 pandemic, and then reflecting on the fallout since. 

On this subject last spring, I was quoted in a Vox piece, and took part in a Slate Future Tense conversation. 

A collection of my writings on this topic will be published as a short book in Minnesota's Forerunners series: it's called Grounded: Perpetual Flight . . . and then the Pandemic.  

Further Reflections on the Flying V

(c) Justus Benad

For Slate's Future Tense column I wrote about a concept airplane called the "Flying V." This is the idea of a new airliner that will be more fuel efficient; it is optimistically predicted to be in commercial service in two or three decades.

One "teaser" video showed the plane already pulled up to a jet bridge, and a worker ambling around the landing gear. This image makes the whole thing so remarkably mundane as if to suggest that it could happen tomorrow, if not already today.

KLM

I remain skeptical. I think think the airplane is about speculating on a future that will look—more or less—just like the present. The different shape of the airplane is a token gesture toward as-if radical change. The engineering is admirable, and the design is svelte and appealing.

I made a mistake in my piece, assuming there would be window seats along the inner walls of each arm of the V fuselage (at least in the back sections). Yet sketches and diagrams of the airliner show the inside seats to be placed next to a sheer wall (inside which maybe electronics, fuel, cargo?), rather than having their own inner-facing windows. The thought of sitting against a wall for three or six nine hours strikes me as no less uncanny, though, than the specter of looking out across the sky at a twin window-seat-mate. (If this plan develops, perhaps there could be dimmable ceiling windows, for those passengers located in the far darkness of the fuselage?)

But this mistake got me thinking.

Look at those seats in the above diagram: They are diagonally angled in relation to the center of the plane. This means that when the plane takes off, you wouldn't feel the ordinary push backward against your seat; instead, you'd feel a strange aslant pull toward the axis. I'm sure we would adjust, and over time this sideways-and-back feeling would become synonymous with flight—but still, the adjustment seems somehow significant. As one twitter follower pointed out, this also means that economic classes would be oriented around who was closer and farther from the roll axis of the plane, making poorer passengers experience more nauseating bodily tilting as the plane turns.

What about emergency exits? Are we really to believe that entire rows of six passengers are going to file through exit doors on only one side of the plane (one side for each 'wing')? This seems unlikely to pass safety approvals.

Also, consider boarding. In the above mockup, all passengers are conceivably enplaning through that single jet bridge. But then look again at the seat chart in the diagram. It seems to me that boarding this type of plane from a single jet bridge would be awkward at best, and a logistical nightmare at worst. Yet if two jet bridges per Flying V are needed, that is a signifiant infrastructural shift to ask of airports: It effectively means two discrete, coordinated boarding areas for each flight, guiding passengers down two different jet bridges to board the two 'wings' of the plane.

I realize I'm getting in the weeds here. And I'm using this metaphor intentionally: Weeds. This plane is, in so many ways, about realities on the ground, now—realities that we don't really want to face. A warming planet. Flooding coasts. Intensifying storms.

The following still image is from engineer Justus Benad's website, where the diagram above also came from:

(c) Justus Benad

In a video montage, a couple people (presumably one of them Benad) walk up a hill in order to demonstrate a model of the Flying V. They launch the plane, and it soars beautifully. What interests me about this presentation is the pastoral scene. The rolling field, the forested background. So much of this speculative airplane is about connecting with, or recovering, a better Earth. And my strong sense is that large-scale air travel is not the way to achieve something like equilibrium between our species and the rest of the planet, even air travel that promises 20% greater fuel efficiency. The Anthropocene requires a jolt to our current modes of movement and habitation—not just a tweak, no matter how aesthetically captivating it may appear.