Sunday, December 12, 2021

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. 


Monday, October 11, 2021

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.


Saturday, September 25, 2021

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

Sunday, September 5, 2021

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

Friday, May 28, 2021

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.

Saturday, May 8, 2021

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

Saturday, April 3, 2021

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 hellholeStill, 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.