Fire Weather - John Vaillant The most important book I read all year.
If all of Alberta’s pipelines were lined up end to end, they would span the gap between Fort McMurray and the moon, with enough leftover to wrap the equator.
According to a 2019 International Monetary Fund report, Canadian taxpayers contributed more than $40 billion (U.S.) in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry in 2015 alone (approximately $1,200 for every man, woman, and child).
Our fire-powered civilization is now in the early stages of replicating that “once-in-a-lifetime” extinction event. It is widely understood in the scientific community that a sixth major extinction is under way, and that it is wholly due to human activity.
The chances of anyone alive today experiencing a year as relatively cool as 1996 are effectively nil.
[T]he energy business, in conjunction with elected officials and the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, has mortgaged the atmosphere.
In 2019, three years after the fire, and still singularly focused on mining and selling bitumen, the Conservative government allocated $30 million of taxpayer money to a “War Room” whose purpose was to promote Alberta bitumen while investigating, smearing, and otherwise discrediting anyone who might question or criticize that objective.
In January 2020 [...] JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest financier to the fossil fuel industry, sounded yet another alarm to shareholders. In a report commissioned by the bank, the authors explained that a status quo approach to energy and investment “would likely push the earth to a place that we haven’t seen for many millions of years.” Climate change, they wrote, “reflects a global market failure in the sense that producers and consumers of CO2 emissions do not pay for the climate damage that results . . . Although precise predictions are not possible, it is clear that planet Earth is on an unsustainable trajectory. Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive.”
Canada [...] is the standout laggard among the G-7 countries. While every other member country has been reducing its CO2 emissions steadily since at least 2010, Canada’s emissions have been rising. In 2021, they were 25 percent over 1990 levels, due largely to the bitumen industry whose emissions have more than doubled since 2005
In June 2021, the riverside hamlet of Lytton, British Columbia, broke the heat record for Canada three days in a row, topping out at 49°C. On the fourth day, a wind-driven wildfire burned the town to the ground in half an hour. Two people died. “I’m sixty,” said Lytton’s mayor, Jan Polderman, “and I thought climate change was a problem for the next generation. Now I’m mayor of a town that no longer exists.
The record-breaking “heat dome” of June 2021 that killed nearly six hundred people in British Columbia alone (per coroner), and hundreds of millions of intertidal sea creatures, was, with the exception of the Halifax explosion, the largest mass casualty event on Canadian soil since confederation, and the deadliest weather event by far.
The Suicide Museum - Ariel Dorfman A history of the tissue of lies public and private that constitute survival; the truthtelling and infidelities that destroy and sustain us. Exquisite.
And whenever he was forced to emerge out into the open, to supposedly share his intimacy with ostentatious profligacy, he had turned that as well into a way of shrouding himself, taking cover under the glare of his own excessive light.
There Is No Blue - Martha Baillie: A memoir of love and art, as distilled and clarified by death. A cool blue burn.
One evening, in a bar, a crashing sound made her turn. Jackson Pollock, felled by alcohol, hit the floor. The sight of him more repelled than excited her. She kept what she’d witnessed alive in her mind as proof that she did not desire to squeeze her way into that huddle of male painters – Kline, Motherwell, de Kooning, and Pollock – whose artistic daring was inspiring her but from whose public displays of freedom she recoiled; in any case, for none of them did she exist, though she had true talent, she’d been told, and told herself, yes she did, no she didn’t, yes she did.
When, in my early twenties, I’d ask about her sex life with Yovan, she’d offer vague answers. Then, one day, she confessed to having decided, in the moment he first ‘seduced’ her, that theirs had to be a great love to justify her relinquishing her virginity. If theirs was true love, she was not a slut or loose woman. To the idea of their great love she’d remain loyal for over a decade. The ideas we cling to in order to elude shame hold great power over us.
The Hakawati - Rabih Alameddine I met this novelist's cousin on a bus. It sent me.
The group spoke Lebanese, even or maybe especially around people who didn’t understand the language. They would have been speaking English or French had they been in Lebanon, but in America, they spoke Arabic. We were all misfits.
Uncle Jihad used to say that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us.
We Don't Know Ourselves - Fintan O'Toole The best general history of modern Ireland I've ever read. Discounting John Doyle's A Great Feast of Light and Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing, cos they're about particulars.
The menstrual blood on the walls of Armagh jail was not compared to Newgrange or the Book of Kells. The women’s suffering was not Christlike.
To call Haughey a hypocrite would be like calling Rembrandt a portraitist or Mozart a piano player. His mastery of hypocrisy was mesmerizing, exquisite, magisterial. And it operated not just with money but with the only other thing that had the same ambiguous fascination in modernizing Ireland: sex.
The Office of Historical Corrections - Danielle Evans Keen, judicious, devastating. America as disastrously bad date under scrutiny. I am still turning these stories over in my mind, uncovering the unexpected.
As a teenager, she prized her ability to see clearly the way things would end. She thought that if she saw things plainly enough, she could skip deception and disappointment, could love men not for their illusions but for their flaws and be loved for hers in return. She did not understand how to pretend.
The Ministry of Pain - Dubravka Ugrešić Bleakly funny and perceptive autofiction, a Yugoslavian woman flees the brutality of civil war, straight into the jaws of Dutch capitalist indifference. An unflinching account of a narrator caught between an empire of Barbie-sellers and a republic of unreconciled warcrimes.
I thought of the live Barbies—young women from Moldavia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus—the traffickers, traders in human flesh, bought up for export [...] who had come to this Disneyland to entertain the grown-up male children here, to give them alien flesh in which to insert their male members. How leuk [cute] it all was. And what is leuk is beyond good and evil: it is amoral not immoral; it is simply take it or leave it.
Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh - Mo Yan Extraordinary. Wish I could read this in the original. Each tale a coruscating universe hidden inside a dumpling.
An illegitimate child, of course, is one born to an unmarried woman. Most of these children are bright and attractive, because men and women who are adept at sneaking around to produce a love child are nobody's fools.
Doppelganger - Naomi Klein Clarity. Necessary.
This speaks to the quicksand underpinning our age: the confusion between saying/clicking/posting and doing. The tension between the virtual nature of lives led in the blue glow of screens and the reality of the embodied labour (digging, harvesting, soldering, sewing, scrubbing, boxing, hauling, delivering) and material inputs (oil, gas, coal, copper, lithium, cobalt, sand, trees) that makes it all possible.
That is the real source of my speechlessness in this unreal period: a feeling of near violent rupture between the world of words and the world beyond them. In recent years, left social movements have won huge victories in transforming the way we talk about all kinds of issues—billionaires and oligarchic rule, climate breakdown, white supremacy, prison abolition, gender identity, Palestinian rights, sexual violence—and I have to believe that those changes represent real victories, that they matter. And yet, on almost every front, tangible ground is being lost. Changing the discourse did not prevent the world’s ten richest men from doubling their collective fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion in the first two years of the pandemic; it did not stop police forces from increasing their budgets while teachers have to pay for basic supplies out of pocket; it did not prevent fossil fuel companies from collecting more billions in subsidies and new permits; it did not prevent the Israeli police forces from attacking the funeral of the revered Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh after a bullet that was almost certainly fired by an Israeli soldier took her life.
“We did change the discourse…,” a friend remarked to me the other day, and then the thought trailed off.
The Church of Baseball - Ron Shelton Exactly as it sounds.
“Despite my love of metaphysics and my rejection of most Judeo-Christian ethics, I am, within the framework of a baseball season, monogamous.”
My Heart - Semezdin Mehmedinović This book surprised me. What greater compliment is there? I am still re-reading it in my head.
But when I say, “She’s my wife,” that is a simplification, she’s more than that. For instance, in 1993, during the siege of Sarajevo, a murderer pointed the barrel of a Kalashnikov at my chest. And she stepped between the gun and me
For years I’ve been transforming your body into words. That’s my infidelity
The doctor (a neurologist), said several times that it was a serious question whether our medical insurance could cover the costs of the memory test (this was, allegedly, an expensive examination to determine the extent of forgetfulness). She repeated that it was “a serious question” three times, and then Sanja lost patience and said that it couldn’t possibly be a serious question. “Why does Something exist, and not Nothing? That’s a serious question!” she said.
Blueschild Baby - George Cain I went to the library on De Kalb looking for a book by Jim Carroll. They didn’t have it. Alphabetically next door was this book by Cain, which I opened for the title, and then, upon discovering that it was also about a heroin-addicted former highschool basketball star in Manhattan, figured it was meant to be. It was. This novel came out in 1970 and remains superbly apposite.
“Dig it Cain. The man is mad. Look into his eyes, see how afraid he is. He's afraid. Afraid of everything, afraid of getting mugged, afraid, for his property, afraid of n----s, afraid of Russia, afraid of China and most of all afraid of dying. Ain't that a bitch, afraid of what's got to happen. Fear is what's driving him mad. The other day I was reading about some guy who burned. He had so many locks on his doors and windows he couldn't get out the house. Tell me that ain't some crazy shit. I can't live like that, let fear lock me behind a door. Make me stay in the house, own so much shit I'm afraid to leave cause someone will take it. What the fuck happens out there Cain, what's with them people, what do they do to you?”
Young white beggars fill the streets, pawing and panhandling. Dirty and drugged. Everywhere gross acts and running obscenities. Bold, they exhibit their infirmities for sympathy and inspection, dead souls and lost minds. The cancer has found a fatter host, it began somewhere deep in my bowels and now consumes America. Tourists roam the place. Laughing and giving freely for what they think funny, not knowing it is their own death they're watching.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida - Shehan Karunatilaka
I lost all my favourite lovingly compiled quotes from this book. That's how good it is: the ship of your life might sink under the weight of its quotability.
Ghost Wars - Steve Coll At least partly inscrutable – it translates madrassa, the Arabic word for school, as terrorist training camp – this book is nonetheless filled with mountains of primary research & consequential information, and is an essential read for anyone who wants to fathom what is going through the heads of the Americans who call their country's shots in the Middle East.
Speaking in an interview in July 1992, seven months before the first Islamist terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, a U.S. official closely involved in the CIA supply program was asked by the author to estimate the amount of plastic explosives that had been transferred by Pakistani intelligence to the mujahedin with CIA and Saudi support. The official spontaneously chose these words: “We could have probably blown up half of New York with the explosives that the Paks supplied.”
Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta - James Hannaham The odyssey of a woman who spends nineteen years in prison for a crime she did not commit, only to return home to a Brooklyn made unrecognisable by gentrification. Carlotta is hilarious, sharpwitted, lovably maladroit, and a hawk-eyed critic of everyone and everything she encounters. Nostalgia, comedy, brutality, pathos, cultural criticism, and the greatest hits of 90s club life in a cocktail shaker.
“journey,” like ev’body call it now: My reentry journey, my lockdown journey, my SHU journey, my cold-cereal journey, my TVP journey, my fucking fatty-girl cake journey. So much people’s on a goddamn journey, it’s like ain’t nobody never home!
Don’t nobody down here care who you wanna fuck or whether you think God be a blue motherfucker with twenty arms or a lady with a archery set who show up in your bed like a ghost or a fuckin octopus doin a Rubik’s Cube, an the thrills is cheap, but that just mean that ev’body could afford em, an ain’t nobody excluded outta no fun by not havin no money, not even my boyfriend who down there whackin his joystick under the boardwalk or nobody (is that what that song bout?—Under the boardwalk, down by the sea?), an the weather good an it’s only my ass that got nine thousand stips to worry bout, can’t even talk to nobody cause they might turn out to be a convict an maybe I should move farther down this bench cause I could see people with open cans a beer an shit, or maybe it’s not just me, maybe it’s half these motherfuckers out here is folks that been inside, I dunno, and I’on’t wanna know, I just wanna be me, I just wanna be a human fuckin person like ev’body else, without nobody tellin me not to do who I am, holdin me gainst my will, don’t wanna be no statistic or no tragedy or no symbol of nothin goin wrong in society. Cause I’m what’s right, honey, I’m what’s goin right.
& Some Favourite..
Film
Have You Seen This Woman? by Matija Gluscevic, Dušan Zorić
Albums
Mizu - Distant Intervals
Chief Adjuah - Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning
Kate Fenner - Middle Voice
Joan As Police Woman - The Solution Is Restless
Yazz Ahmed - La Saboteuse
Christian Lee Hutson - Quitters
The Free Music - Free Music pt 1 (Habibi Funk 021)
Wayne Shorter – “Speak No Evil”
Incidentals
Best blast from the past: Wall of Death (cover) - R.E.M.
Best live show in Arabic: Nour Harkati
Best live show in opera: Joseph Keckler
Best live show in the rain: Lauryn Hill
Best archival band footage: Neil Young Harvest Time w/ Lugo
Best cover: The Wknd's Blinding Lights by Abigail Lapell
Best glorious poetry reading: Ama Codjoe, Nicole Sealey, and Terrance Hayes at NYPL
characteristic playlist
Greenpoint Wintersong https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2bHbxP1Y6WBLVQmkVyDxhy