tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9494210016449045372024-02-21T09:05:01.342-08:00EXPLORING CULTURES: A Global Blog (all languages)Comments welcome. Be polite.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2728125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-72167476274552934922020-06-23T05:05:00.000-07:002020-06-23T05:06:34.393-07:00小提琴制作者贝内迪克特-弗里德曼(Benedicte Friedmann)在传统的基础上进行调整。 在意大利的克雷莫纳 -- Meet violin maker Benedicte Friedmann who tunes in to tradition in Italy’s Cremona <b><span style="font-size: large;">小提琴制作者贝内迪克特-弗里德曼(Benedicte Friedmann)在传统的基础上进行调整。</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">在意大利的克雷莫纳</span></b><br />
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<a href="http://www.cremonacitta.it/intranet/immagini/140/orig/benedicte_friedmann_violini_cremona_violin_maker_liuteria_cremona-img140-06-1.jpg" style="border: 0px; color: black; display: block; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="Benedicte Friedmann"><img alt="Benedicte Friedmann" class="copertina" src="http://www.cremonacitta.it/intranet/immagini/_resized/1/scheda/140/w/q80/230x/benedicte_friedmann_violini_cremona_violin_maker_liuteria_cremona-img140-06-1.jpg" height="346" style="border: 0px; font: inherit; height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" title="Benedicte Friedmann" width="230" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><strong style="border: 0px; color: #cc3333; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Benedicte Friedmann</strong> </span></div>
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45岁的法国小提琴家贝内迪克特-弗里德曼一直生活在法国。<br />
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在 "小提琴制造的摇篮 "里呆了大约20年。"来到克雷莫纳是--。<br />
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也许这样说有点自命不凡--就像走在最伟大的脚步上。<br />
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斯特拉迪瓦里、瓜奈里、阿玛蒂,"她说,"她指的是这座城市最令人尊敬的。<br />
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几个世纪以来的工匠。<br />
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"在这里做一名琴师,意味着可以百分之百地投入到乐器的创作中去,做得越多,你就会变得越好。"弗里德曼说。<br />
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弗里德曼说,在法国,为了赚取小提琴制作者的生活费,很多人都会做维修、重新梳理琴弓或销售配件,这让他们几乎没有时间从事艺术创作。<br />
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然而,对于克雷莫纳的小提琴制造商来说,情况并不总是简单的,他们在20世纪60-80年代享受增长,然后情况变得更加艰难。<br />
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"我们的市场,这是一个精英市场,已经萎缩了。我们正面临着一个非常严重的问题"。<br />
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工匠联合会主席乔治-格里萨莱斯说。<br />
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越来越少的演出和音乐场所,以及经验丰富的小提琴家更喜欢18和19世纪的古董乐器,都伤害了这个小众行业。甚至在COVID-19席卷意大利北部之前,格里萨莱斯就表示,"由于来自中国和东欧的无情竞争,这个行业陷入了困境。"<br />
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根据国际贸易中心的数据,中国是世界上最主要的弓形乐器生产国,去年出口额为7780万美元,即150万件乐器,超过世界市场的一半。<br />
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意大利排在第五位,出口额占世界出口额的4.6%,仅次于英国和德国,但高于法国。意大利的主要客户是日本和美国。<br />
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意大利的小提琴制造商必须与市场上的假琴竞争,有些假琴是在其他地方制造的,并标榜为克雷蒙尼琴,但最重要的是竞争来自于价格较低的小提琴。格里萨莱斯说,大师级的乐器起价为25000欧元(27943美元),尽管其他质量上乘的乐器售价可以低1万欧元左右。<br />
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不过,只要花200欧元或更少的钱,就可以买到一把中国小提琴、琴弓和琴盒。<br />
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巴洛克小提琴家法布里奇奥-隆戈说:"它们是经济型乐器,是系列化生产的,目的是为了那些初学的人"。<br />
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法国小提琴制作家弗里德曼说,小提琴的制作过程<br />
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n中国的大多数情况下,她和她的手艺有很大的不同。<br />
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克雷莫纳的其他人都在从事。<br />
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"它们是手工制作的,但10个小提琴制造商每天都在同一个零件上工作。这是一个生产线的工作,最后你得到一个组装,"弗里曼说。"没有独特性,没有真实性。"<br />
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在克雷莫纳,格里萨莱斯说,制作一把小提琴至少需要300个小时,也就是两到三个月的时间。<br />
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琴师们面临的另一个挑战是如何在克雷莫纳的竞争中脱颖而出。<br />
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弗里德曼说:"打响知名度有点费劲",而寻找订单 "是一个永久的追求"。<br />
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一些小提琴制造商通过在黑市上工作和避免高额税收,能够提供更低的价格--伤害了琴师同行。<br />
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尽管有这些挑战,弗里德曼说,集中在克雷莫纳的小提琴制造商创造了一个健康的环境,模仿和追求卓越的愿望。<br />
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"当有人问我哪把琴是我做过的最漂亮的琴时。<br />
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对我来说,它总是下一个,"Friedmann 说。<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">ENGLISH</span><br />
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Violin maker Benedicte Friedmann tunes in to tradition </h1>
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in Italy’s Cremona</h1>
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<b>Benedicte Friedmann</b>, a 45-year-old violinkaker from France, has been living </div>
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in “the cradle of violin-making” for about 20 years. “Coming to Cremona was — </div>
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and maybe it’s a bit pretentious to say this — like walking in the footsteps of the greatest, </div>
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Stradivarius, Guarneri, Amati,” she said, referring to the city’s most revered </div>
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craftsmen of centuries past.</div>
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“Being a luthier here means being able to devote yourself 100 percent to creating instruments, and the more you do, the better you become,” <b>Friedmann said.</b></div>
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In France, to earn a living as a violinmaker, many people do repairs, re-hair bows or sell accessories, which leaves them little time for their art, <b>Friedmann</b> said.</div>
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However, the situation is not always simple for the violinmakers of Cremona, who enjoyed growth in the 1960s-1980s, before things got tougher.</div>
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“Our market, which is an elite market, has shrunk. We are facing a very serious problem,” </div>
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said Giorgio Grisales, president of the artisans’ consortium.</div>
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Fewer performances and musical venues and the preference of seasoned violinists for antique instruments from the 18th and 19th centuries have hurt the niche industry. Even before COVID-19 swept through northern Italy, Grisales said that “the sector was in trouble because of ruthless competition from China and Eastern Europe.”</div>
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China is the world’s leading producer of bowed instruments with US$77.8 million in exports last year, or 1.5 million instruments, more than half of the world market, according to the International Trade Centre.</div>
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Italy is in fifth position, with 4.6 percent of world exports, behind the UK and Germany, but ahead of France. Italy’s main customers are Japan and the US.</div>
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Italian violinmakers must contend with counterfeit instruments in the marketplace, some built elsewhere and advertised as Cremonese, but above all competition comes from lower priced violins. Master instruments start at 25,000 euros (US$27,943), although others of fine quality can sell for about 10,000 euros less, Grisales said.</div>
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However, for 200 euros or less, it is possible to buy a Chinese violin, bow and case.</div>
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“They are economic instruments, made in series, and intended for those who are beginning to study,” baroque violinist Fabrizio Longo said.</div>
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Friedmann, the French violinmaker, said that the process of making a violin </div>
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n China is for the most part vastly different from the craftsmanship she and </div>
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others in Cremona engage in.</div>
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“They are handmade, but 10 violinmakers work every day on the same parts. It’s a line job and at the end you get an assembly,” Friemann said. “There’s no uniqueness, no authenticity.”</div>
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In Cremona, Grisales said that it takes at least 300 hours to make a violin, or between two to three months.</div>
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Another challenge for the luthiers is to stand out among the Cremonese competition.</div>
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“Getting known is a bit laborious,” while the search for orders “is a permanent quest,” Friedmann said.</div>
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Some violinmakers have been able to offer lower prices — hurting fellow luthiers — by working on the black market and avoiding high taxes.</div>
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Despite these challenges, Friedmann said that the concentration of violinmakers in Cremona creates a healthy environment of emulation and the desire to excel.</div>
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“When I’m asked which is the most beautiful instrument I’ve made, </div>
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for me it’s always the next one,” Friedmann said.</div>
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With 160 studios in the city of 70,000 people, most of Cremona’s luthiers are foreigners, many of whom stayed on after studying at the International Violin Making School, which opened in 1938</h3>
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AFP, CREMONA, Italy</div>
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Working in the shadow of the great masters, the violinmakers of Italy’s Cremona are valiantly fighting a shrinking market and foreign competition as they seek perfection, one violin at a time.</div>
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The birthplace of Stradivarius, Cremona is a veritable laboratory for luthiers from all over the world, where violin workshops seem to be everywhere you look.</div>
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Stefano Conia’s studio — just one of the 160 in the northern Italian city of 70,000 inhabitants — has not changed for decades.</div>
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Stefano Conia, left, and his son, also named Stefano, inspect violins at their workshop in Cremona on June 9.</h1>
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Photo: AFP</div>
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It is situated at the back of a flower-filled courtyard, and this native Hungarian, one of the doyens of Cremonese violinmakers, heads there every day, despite retiring nearly 10 years ago.</div>
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“If I stopped making violins, life for me would be over. Every day I’m here in the workshop. It’s an antidote to old age,” said a smiling Conia, 74, whose father crafted violins and whose son is also pursuing the family tradition.</div>
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Conia’s workbench faces that of his son’s. Both are covered with files, clamps, compasses, brushes and small saws. Wooden planks are laid on the floor.</div>
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Violin body patterns hang in Stefano Conia’s workshop in Cremona on June 9.</h1>
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Photo: AFP</div>
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“Going into violin-making was a natural choice,” said Conia’s son, Stefano, known as “the youngster” who began handling tools at the age of seven or eight.</div>
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He spent his childhood in the workshop his father opened in 1972, two months before his birth.</div>
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“I would play with the wood and the musicians would come and buy their violins and play,” said the younger Conia. “It’s always been a special atmosphere, which I really liked.”</div>
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For the Conias, the violins lovingly made from flamed maple or spruce are more than just instruments — they become family.</div>
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“The instruments are a bit like children. They live thanks to the energy we give them, it is a part of us that will continue to live after our death,” Stefano Conia said.</div>
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Like the Conias, the majority of Cremona’s luthiers are foreigners. Many came to study at the Cremona International Violin Making School and stayed on.</div>
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“The school was started in 1938, the first teachers were foreigners and the students come from all over the world. There is a saying that ‘Nobody is a prophet in his own country’ and it’s true that we, Cremonese violinmakers, are really few and far between,” said Marco Nolli, 55, one of this exclusive club.</div>
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Of the one-third of Cremona’s violinmakers who are Italian, only about 10 percent come from Cremona, he said.</div>
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Benedicte Friedmann, a 45-year-old from France, has been living in “the cradle of violin-making” for about 20 years. “Coming to Cremona was — and maybe it’s a bit pretentious to say this — like walking in the footsteps of the greatest, Stradivarius, Guarneri, Amati,” she said, referring to the city’s most revered craftsmen of centuries past.</div>
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“Being a luthier here means being able to devote yourself 100 percent to creating instruments, and the more you do, the better you become,” Friedmann said.</div>
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In France, to earn a living as a violinmaker, many people do repairs, re-hair bows or sell accessories, which leaves them little time for their art, she said.</div>
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However, the situation is not always simple for the violinmakers of Cremona, who enjoyed growth in the 1960s-1980s, before things got tougher.</div>
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“Our market, which is an elite market, has shrunk. We are facing a very serious problem,” said Giorgio Grisales, president of the artisans’ consortium.</div>
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Fewer performances and musical venues and the preference of seasoned violinists for antique instruments from the 18th and 19th centuries have hurt the niche industry. Even before COVID-19 swept through northern Italy, Grisales said that “the sector was in trouble because of ruthless competition from China and Eastern Europe.”</div>
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China is the world’s leading producer of bowed instruments with US$77.8 million in exports last year, or 1.5 million instruments, more than half of the world market, according to the International Trade Centre.</div>
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Italy is in fifth position, with 4.6 percent of world exports, behind the UK and Germany, but ahead of France. Italy’s main customers are Japan and the US.</div>
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Italian violinmakers must contend with counterfeit instruments in the marketplace, some built elsewhere and advertised as Cremonese, but above all competition comes from lower priced violins. Master instruments start at 25,000 euros (US$27,943), although others of fine quality can sell for about 10,000 euros less, Grisales said.</div>
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However, for 200 euros or less, it is possible to buy a Chinese violin, bow and case.</div>
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“They are economic instruments, made in series, and intended for those who are beginning to study,” baroque violinist Fabrizio Longo said.</div>
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Friedmann, the French violinmaker, said that the process of making a violin in China is for the most part vastly different from the craftsmanship she and others in Cremona engage in.</div>
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“They are handmade, but 10 violinmakers work every day on the same parts. It’s a line job and at the end you get an assembly,” she said. “There’s no uniqueness, no authenticity.”</div>
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In Cremona, Grisales said that it takes at least 300 hours to make a violin, or between two to three months.</div>
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Another challenge for the luthiers is to stand out among the Cremonese competition.</div>
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“Getting known is a bit laborious,” while the search for orders “is a permanent quest,” Friedmann said.</div>
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Some violinmakers have been able to offer lower prices — hurting fellow luthiers — by working on the black market and avoiding high taxes.</div>
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Despite these challenges, Friedmann said that the concentration of violinmakers in Cremona creates a healthy environment of emulation and the desire to excel.</div>
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“When I’m asked which is the most beautiful instrument I’ve made, </div>
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for me it’s always the next one,” she said.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">FRENCH:</span></div>
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<span style="color: orange; font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">La luthière Benedicte Friedmann </span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="color: orange; font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">se met au diapason de la tradition </span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="color: orange; font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">dans la ville italienne de Crémone</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Bénédicte Friedmann, une violoniste française de 45 ans, a vécu </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">dans "le berceau de la lutherie" depuis une vingtaine d'années. "Venir à Crémone, c'était - </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">et c'est peut-être un peu prétentieux de le dire - comme de marcher sur les traces des plus grands, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Stradivarius, Guarneri, Amati", a-t-elle déclaré, en faisant référence aux plus vénérés de la ville </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">artisans des siècles passés.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"Etre luthier ici, c'est pouvoir se consacrer à 100 % à la création d'instruments, et plus on en fait, mieux on se porte", a déclaré Friedmann.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">En France, pour gagner leur vie en tant que luthier, beaucoup de gens font des réparations, recoiffent des archets ou vendent des accessoires, ce qui leur laisse peu de temps pour leur art, a déclaré M. Friedmann.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Cependant, la situation n'est pas toujours simple pour les luthiers de Crémone, qui ont connu une croissance dans les années 1960-1980, avant que les choses ne se durcissent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"Notre marché, qui est un marché d'élite, s'est rétréci. Nous sommes confrontés à un problème très sérieux". </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">a déclaré Giorgio Grisales, président du consortium d'artisans.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">La diminution du nombre de représentations et de lieux de musique et la préférence des violonistes chevronnés pour les instruments anciens des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles ont nui à cette industrie de niche. Avant même que COVID-19 ne s'étende au nord de l'Italie, M. Grisales a déclaré que "le secteur était en difficulté en raison de la concurrence impitoyable de la Chine et de l'Europe de l'Est".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">La Chine est le premier producteur mondial d'instruments à archet avec 77,8 millions de dollars d'exportations l'année dernière, soit 1,5 million d'instruments, plus de la moitié du marché mondial, selon le Centre du commerce international.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">L'Italie est en cinquième position, avec 4,6 % des exportations mondiales, derrière le Royaume-Uni et l'Allemagne, mais devant la France. Les principaux clients de l'Italie sont le Japon et les États-Unis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Les luthiers italiens doivent faire face à des instruments contrefaits sur le marché, certains fabriqués ailleurs et annoncés comme étant de Crémone, mais la concurrence vient surtout des violons à bas prix. Les instruments de maître commencent à 25 000 euros (27 943 dollars US), mais d'autres de bonne qualité peuvent se vendre environ 10 000 euros de moins, a déclaré M. Grisales.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Toutefois, pour 200 euros ou moins, il est possible d'acheter un violon, un archet et un étui chinois.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"Ce sont des instruments économiques, fabriqués en série, et destinés à ceux qui commencent à étudier", a déclaré le violoniste baroque Fabrizio Longo.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Friedmann, le luthier français, a déclaré que le processus de fabrication d'un violon </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">n Chine est pour l'essentiel très différente de l'artisanat qu'elle et </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">d'autres personnes à Crémone s'engagent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"Ils sont faits à la main, mais dix luthiers travaillent chaque jour sur les mêmes pièces. C'est un travail à la chaîne et à la fin, on obtient un assemblage", a déclaré M. Friemann. "Il n'y a pas d'unicité, pas d'authenticité."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">À Crémone, Grisales a déclaré qu'il faut au moins 300 heures pour fabriquer un violon, soit deux à trois mois.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Un autre défi pour les luthiers est de se démarquer dans le concours de Crémone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"Se faire connaître est un peu laborieux", alors que la recherche de commandes "est une quête permanente", a déclaré Friedmann.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Certains luthiers ont pu proposer des prix plus bas - ce qui a nui à leurs confrères - en travaillant au marché noir et en évitant des taxes élevées.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Malgré ces difficultés, M. Friedmann a déclaré que la concentration des luthiers à Crémone crée un environnement sain d'émulation et de désir d'exceller.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"Quand on me demande quel est le plus bel instrument que j'ai fabriqué, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , , "wenquanyi zen hei" , "pro" , "lihei pro" , , "microsoft jhenghei" , , "pmingliu" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Pour moi, c'est toujours la prochaine", a déclaré Friedmann.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-21860450358266321872020-06-19T01:14:00.001-07:002020-06-19T01:14:25.341-07:00Cli-Fi Blog Interview With a Cli-Fi Movie Fan in the Far West with 6 questions for Dan Bloom<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">
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Cli-Fi Blog Interview</div>
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<br /><span style="color: #222222;">1. </span><span style="color: red;"> what drew you in to promoting <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">"cli-fi"</a> as a new literary genre for<br />climate fiction novels?</span><span style="color: #222222;"> In 2011, i was beginning to get very worried about how the media in general was ignoring climate change issues. So i decided to to put the cli-fi term out there as an eye catching buzzword for headlines and book reviews. Somehow, it caught on.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;">2. </span><span style="color: red;">Why do you find it important to promote environmental issues with novels and movies? </span><span style="color: #222222;">Novels and movies with cli-fi themes can impact millions of fans across the world.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;">3. </span><span style="color: red;">How tricky is it to use metaphor to try and frame real world issues?</span><span style="color: #222222;"> Very tricky. Not easy. But it's very important for </span><br /><span style="color: #222222;">climate science to inform climate fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;">4. </span><span style="color: red;">What are your favorite pieces of Cli-Fi to date?</span></div>
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Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. Water Knife by paolo bacigalupi.</div>
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<span style="color: #222222;">5.</span><span style="color: red;"> Where do you see cli-fi going and what does the future of Cli-Fi look like to you?</span><span style="color: #222222;"> I think cli-fi will really take off in the 2020s and 2030s. Its future is promising. Publishers and movie people are getting behind it.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;">6. </span><span style="color: red;">What<br />do you hope to see?</span><span style="color: #222222;"> I see both despair and hope. The climate emergency we are in is not a pretty picture, to be sure. But my DNA is based on optimism and hope. So i plan to soldier on as a cli-fi promoter via my website <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">www.cli-fi.net </a>and my blog posts and tweets.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-48635666965769130752020-06-17T23:40:00.001-07:002020-07-22T21:33:13.046-07:00'Redemption' is a Holocaust novel with a history<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">'Redemption' is a Holocaust novel with a history</span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">RE: the ''Redemption'' story; here is a link.</span><br />
<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2020/06/18/redeeming-a-holocaust-survivors-reputation/&source=gmail&ust=1592636642936000&usg=AFQjCNFSWY5EVOISI477AOjo1NOJ9zNvxA" href="https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2020/06/18/redeeming-a-holocaust-survivors-reputation/" rel="noreferrer" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;" target="_blank">https://www.sdjewishworld.com/<wbr></wbr>2020/06/18/redeeming-a-holocau<wbr></wbr>st-survivors-reputation/</a></div>
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<b>SAN FRANCISCO</b> -- Retired California theater producer and drama professor George Kovach is the stepson the late Cecelia ''Cilka'' Klein who was the subject of a recent Holocaust sex and romance novel by an Australian novelist named Heather Morris, who wrote an earlier sex and romance novel set during the Holocaust titled<a href="http://google.com/"> "The Tattooist of Auschwitz."</a> In Morris' sequel to her bestselling first novel, titled<a href="http://google.com/"> "Cilka's Journey," </a>she focused on Cecelia Klein, and Kovach found the portrayal of his Jewish stepmother highly objectionable and took Morris to court for trampling on the memory of Holocaust survivors in both novels. </div>
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So he decided to tell his own story about the real ''Cilka'' in a novel that he and his wife co-wrote, titled<b> "Redemption."</b> The novel has been completed and Kovach and his wife are currently searching for a publisher in New York.</div>
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In recent email he told me: "Although this book is about real people and events, it is not just another novel 'based on<br />
a true story.' The heroine and hero are two people I knew intimately, loved, and respected<br />
immensely. They are, in fact, my stepmother and my father. This is the story of their sufferings,<br />
their courage, and their love and devotion for each other. It is based on my conversations with<br />
them over a period of years and on my father’s written memoirs of his time in the Soviet gulag."</div>
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Kovach explained that there is a reason for "Redemption" that goes beyond simply wanting to tell their<br />
remarkable story, sharing: "My stepmother, Cecilia Klein-Kovacova, has already been represented in two<br />
global best-sellers [by a non-Jewish writer from Australia.] Both claimed to be 'based on a true story.' However, in these books, my<br />
stepmother does many things that were impossible, or simply absurd, for a prisoner to do in<br />
Auschwitz or the Gulag. The fabrication of this so-called 'true' character from rumor, selective<br />
recollections, and an author’s lurid fantasies is deeply offensive to my stepmother’s memory. I<br />
protested this false representation of my stepmother and my protest ignited a controversy on three<br />
continents. That story will be found in the 'afterword' at the end of the novel."</div>
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"My wife and I searched for a way to redeem my stepmother’s character and tarnished<br />
reputation, to show the woman we knew and loved," he added, noting: "Because we are writers, we decided the best<br />
way would be to have her tell her own story as we heard it."</div>
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''Redemption'' is the story of his stepmother’s journey from the hell of a Nazi concentration<br />
camp to a new hell in the Siberian gulag, he said. It is also the story of how his stepmother and his father<br />
met and fell in love, as he put it in his email to me "in the last place on earth you would think genuine love between two people<br />
could blossom and thrive, a place of physical torture, hopelessness, and gross brutality."</div>
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'And yet, Cecilia Klein and Ivan Kovach found each other and enduring love in this horrendous place," Kovach added. " Was<br />
it love at first sight? Perhaps. The eternal attraction between a man and a woman touches the soul<br />
in a way that transcends the degradation of humanity. I know this to be true because when I spent<br />
time with them, I saw the depth of their mutual devotion and care for each other. It inspired me<br />
and I hope it will inspire our readers.". </div>
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Kovach and his writer wife have co-written (under a single pen name) a novel about his father and stepmother Cecelia Klein, aka CILKA. The couple have co-written a couple of mysteries earlier in their lives under a pen name so they know how to write a novel.</div>
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Last Spring and Summer 0f 2019 were very frustrating and painful for George. People he had always admired and loved, who were now dead, were presented by Australian writer Heather Morris and her publishers in a very negative light.</div>
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"I was able to save my father's reputation by my threat of suing them, but not Cecilia's. Since this brouhaha started, I've talked to numerous individuals, including, alas, family members who now feel Cecilia was some kind of monster," Kovach told this blog.</div>
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''That's why my wife and I wanted to write a book about the Cecilia we knew and what we knew about her. The novel deals with Cecilia's liberation from Ravensbruck, her arrest in Slovakia by the Soviets, and her meeting and falling in love with my father in the Gulag.''</div>
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''This novel is based on conversations we had with Cecilia and my father, on his memoirs of the Gulag, and on Cecilia's documents in my possession. Since we were writers, it only seemed natural that we defend her by writing a book really based on the true facts.We don't have a publisher as yet, but we will self-publish if necessary.''</div>
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There is also an "afterword'' at the end of the book, deals with the whole controversy with Heather Morris and her publishers.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-61101520628516138452020-06-10T22:33:00.002-07:002020-06-11T06:00:24.661-07:00An interview with rising British literary critic Grace Robinson, born in 1996 with a big future ahead of her<div style="font-family: garamond; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-weight: bold;">INTRO: This blogger's eyes recently caught <a href="https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/19303">a very perceptive literary essay by British university student Grace Robinson in The Varsity student newspaper at Cambridge University</a>, a campus publication read widely by the student body there and, it seems, far beyond thanks to the worldwide reach of the internet. Born in 1996 in Blackpool, a seaside town in Lancashire on the northwest coast of Britain Grace graduated this June. For her undergraduate degree, she told us, she studied Modern and Medieval Languages and Literature, with an emphasis on French and Italian languages and postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone literature.</span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><span style="font-size: large;">This interview was conducted via email. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/Chronicling%20coronavirus:%20Who%20will%20we%20want%20to%20pen%20the%20pandemic?"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Grace's essay was titled</span></a> </span></span></div>
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<strong>And subtitled: <em>Grace Robinson</em></strong><em> explores the impact of coronavirus on the literary scene.</em> </div>
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LINK <a href="https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/19303">https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/19303</a></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">QUESTION: Do you think a new literary genre might arise for novels and plays and poetry collections about life during the 2020-2025 pandemic, before, during and after? I'd be interested in hearing your ideas on this. Tell me more.</span></div>
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<strong>GRACE ROBINSON:</strong> I'm not sure that the creative response to the pandemic will emerge as a genre of its own, but perhaps more as a theme which spans genres, languages and countries. I imagine that, like a creative response to any major cultural or world event, this will continue for years to come, as different perspectives and voices come to light. I am, primarily, interested in how the publishing industry will seek to tell <span style="font-style: italic;">all </span>the stories of the pandemic, not just those of writers with the space and time to set about chronicling their experiences now. This has become even more pertinent in recent weeks, as the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests have sparked new interest in inclusive publishing and reading habits, and the power of literature to educate and inform us. Of course, the renewed momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement is itself becoming part of the pandemic's narrative, and will surely make its way into stories that seek to capture the cultural zeitgeist of such historic times. For this reason, predictions of what the literary response to COVID-19 will look like are still so difficult to make: we are still living through it, and I believe that only with the distance required to process the events will writers be able to craft holistic accounts of the pandemic.</div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">These novels will appear in the UK of course, and in the USA and Canada and Australia, too. And the pandemic novels of the future will also be written across genres, from sci-fi and cli-fi to thrillers to memoirs and autofiction and young adult novels, too. Stage plays. Movie scripts. TV series from Netflix and Hulu and the BBC. And writers will be putting pen to paper on this subject in India and Sweden and Italy, too. In over a dozen languages, Japanese and Chinese and Spanish and French among them. What do you hope to see from these future novels? Might you be writing one yourself in future days? </span></div>
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<strong>GRACE ROBINSON:</strong> I certainly think everything you've mentioned here will manifest at some point over the coming years, and the creative response to the pandemic will be long-lived. I imagine intersections between the pandemic and what you call 'clifi' will be produce popular and thrilling content - there's plenty of scope for pandemic-era dystopian narratives, whether on page, stage or screen. Personally, I will be interested in the depiction of the pandemic in literary fiction, which will undoubtedly emerge in a few years time. I would like to read stories which unveil the hidden realities of lives lived during times which currently feel completely surreal. <a href="https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/19303">In my <strong>Varsity</strong> article I talked at length about Ali Smith, whose 'Summer' will publish in August and which I await with bated breath - I imagine she will be the first British writer to chronicle the virus and its ramifications in her work. </a>I do have a few ideas myself in terms of pandemic-era tales, so may very well put pen to paper in the coming years! </div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">How does the covid pandemic intersect with the climate crisis, if at all? Your thoughts?</span></div>
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The COVID-19 pandemic absolutely intersects with the climate crisis, as a dramatic fall in global emissions has been a by-product of the near-global shut-down induced by the pandemic. It's incredible that demands climate activists have been making for years were inadvertently met within days, and raises many questions about why nothing was done sooner, and how easy it can actually be to effectuate change when deemed necessary. It is, however, far too soon for climate activists to begin celebrating; as lockdowns across the world ease up, the grim reality of a return to "business as usual" seems ever more likely. Now, more than ever, we need to ensure that the positive climate action brought about by the pandemic does not go to waste. </div>
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<a href="https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/19303">Y</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/19303">ou recently published a very good article in the Varsity which was on the global Google News site</a> where I found it. What has the reaction been to that article so far?</span></div>
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The article has been relatively well-received, although was published around the same time that the Black Lives Matter movement began to gain momentum again, so much of the media focus shifted to cover that. This is a testament to how quickly things can change, and how difficult it seems to pin down now exactly what the literary response to the pandemic will look like - the political landscape now is vastly different to when we first got in touch nearly two weeks ago. </div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Alison Flood at the Guardian newspapear recently wrote a good article on how some British writers are dealing with the lockdown and the pandemic in their novel writing? What did you think of her article? Any particular anecdotes she mentioned that stand out?</span></div>
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I enjoyed Alison's article, which focused on the changes that authors are currently having to make to their writing to address the pandemic. The different approaches were interesting - some were completely revising their narratives to encompass the many cultural signals of the current situation, whereas some have decided to shift the setting of their books back a few years to avoid the issue completely. The article certainly raises interesting questions for narratives which don't deal directly with the pandemic, but necessarily brush up against it: how much action can there really be when characters can't touch one another? Writers having to shape and re-shape current work is obviously one of the early challenges the pandemic will pose to literature; writers who begin brand-new pieces during this time will naturally feel their work immediately influenced by the current state of affairs.</div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Just for fun, and as a possible buzzword for newspaper editors and publishers, I am calling these new novels about the pandemic as part of what I have dubbed Corona-Lit and created a hashtag on Twitter for it at <span style="color: blue;">#CoronaLit</span> -- what other genre names might appear later? Pandemic-Lit? Pan-Lit? Any suggestions that are serious or just in fun?</span></div>
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I see that <strong><span style="color: blue;">#CoronaLit</span></strong> is being used quite a bit on Twitter now, and that seems the most zeitgeisty name there could be - for now! </div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">What motivated you to want to write <a href="https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/19303">the Varsity piece</a> you wrote on pandemic novels and what did your editors say when you submitted it?</span></div>
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As I wrote in the piece, my thinking was very much influenced by Ali Smith. I read the third instalment of her seasonal quartet, <strong><em>Spring</em></strong>, in April, which got me thinking about the novel's capacity as rapid-response unit in times of political turbulence. I imagine that Smith will be the first British author to chronicle the pandemic in the fourth and final installation of her series,<strong><em> Summer</em></strong>, and I'll be incredibly interested to see who will follow suit, and how the response will pan out across genres, and across the world.</div>
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DAN BLOOM: Thank you, Grace, for taking the time to do this interview online with me. I like your thoughts here.</div>
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GRACE ROBINSON: Thank you, Dan, for reaching out to me.<br />
<br />
30/40</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-87338123265569873842020-06-09T23:45:00.001-07:002020-06-11T03:52:48.084-07:00Titus Kaphar (most likely a pen name the celebrated artist has created for himself) did not discover art until his mid-20s, when as a college student in Santa Clara, California he was trying to impress a young white woman named Julianne K. Philp, now his wife, with whom he has had two biracrial children, two boys, Savion,13 and Daven, 11. <h1 class="headline heading-content margin-8-top margin-16-bottom">
'I Cannot Sell You This Painting.' Black New Haven Artist Titus Kaphar on his George Floyd TIME Magazine Cover and what it means to him as the maker of the image:</h1>
<h1 class="headline heading-content margin-8-top margin-16-bottom">
'I Cannot Sell You This Painting.' Artist Titus Kaphar on his George Floyd TIME Cover</h1>
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TITUS ''TED TALK'' VIDEO: 13 minutes HERE: <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/titus_kaphar_can_art_amend_history/discussion?c=25758">https://www.ted.com/talks/titus_kaphar_can_art_amend_history/discussion?c=25758</a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Painting by Titus Kaphar for TIME</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">By </span><a class="bold author-name" href="https://time.com/author/titus-kaphar/"><span style="font-size: x-large;"> Titus T. Kaphar </span></a> </div>
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<li><span style="color: #dd4b39;">Titus Kaphar</span>, who was born 43 years ago when his mother was 15, and whose birth name was most likely not Titus Kaphar, which is most likely a creative pen name the artist has taken, since KAPHAR IS A GREEK WORD FOR ''ATONEMENT'' AND NOT A SURNAME PER SE AND TITUS WAS MOST LIKELY NOT THE NAME HIS MOM GAVE HIM OR ON HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE, did not discover art until his mid-20s, when as a college student in Santa Clara, California he was trying to impress a young white woman named <em><span style="color: #dd4b39;">Julianne K. Philp</span></em>, who says she is related to George Washington's family in the distant past, now his wife, with whom he has had two biracial children, two boys, Savion,13 and Daven, 11. </li>
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PHOTOS OF THE FAMILY HERE: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/julianne.kaphar">https://www.facebook.com/julianne.kaphar</a></div>
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<img alt="圖像裡可能有2 個人" class="scaledImageFitHeight img" data-src="https://scontent-tpe1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/s130x130/300750_10150410916783273_1882340450_n.jpg?_nc_cat=107&_nc_sid=e007fa&_nc_ohc=WZu-HXC4PK0AX_VrJKD&_nc_ht=scontent-tpe1-1.xx&_nc_tp=7&oh=fab65e0741c789f79bcf38ca3c48cc21&oe=5F07617B" height="98" src="https://scontent-tpe1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/s130x130/300750_10150410916783273_1882340450_n.jpg?_nc_cat=107&_nc_sid=e007fa&_nc_ohc=WZu-HXC4PK0AX_VrJKD&_nc_ht=scontent-tpe1-1.xx&_nc_tp=7&oh=fab65e0741c789f79bcf38ca3c48cc21&oe=5F07617B" style="left: -20px;" width="130" /></div>
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還有 436 張</div>
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<div class="timestamp published-date padding-12-left">
June 4, 2020 </div>
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Titus Kaphar is a Black American artist whose work <a href="https://kapharstudio.com/about/">examines the history of representation </a></div>
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<em>Artist Titus Kaphar painted the portrait that appears on the <a href="https://time.com/5847667/the-story-behind-times-george-floyd-cover">cover</a> of this week’s TIME about George Floyd. He has written the following piece as a text to accompany the work.</em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em></em><br />
<strong>I</strong><br />
<strong>can not</strong><br />
<strong>sell</strong><br />
<strong>you</strong><br />
<strong>this</strong><br />
<strong>painting.</strong><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">In her expression, I see the Black mothers who are unseen, and rendered helpless in this fury against their babies.</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
<span style="color: red;">As I listlessly wade through another cycle of violence against Black people,</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">I paint a Black mother…</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">eyes closed,</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">furrowed brow,</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">holding the contour of her loss.</span><br />
<br />
Is this what it means for us?<br />
Are black and loss<br />
analogous colors in America?<br />
If Malcolm could not fix it,<br />
if Martin could not fix it,<br />
if Michael,<br />
Sandra,<br />
Trayvon,<br />
Tamir,<br />
Breonna and<br />
Now George Floyd…<br />
can be murdered<br />
and nothing changes…<br />
wouldn’t it be foolish to remain hopeful?<br />
Must I accept that this is what it means to be Black<br />
in America?<br />
<br />
Do<br />
not<br />
ask<br />
me<br />
to be<br />
hopeful.<br />
<br />
I have given up trying to describe the feeling of knowing that I can not be safe in the country of my birth…<br />
How do I explain to my children that the very system set up to protect others could be a threat to our existence?<br />
How do I shield them from the psychological impact of knowing that for the rest of our lives we will likely be seen as a threat,<br />
and for that<br />
We may die?<br />
A MacArthur won’t protect you .<br />
A Yale degree won’t protect you .<br />
Your well-spoken plea will not change hundreds of years of institutionalized hate.<br />
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You will never be as eloquent as Baldwin,<br />
you will never be as kind as King…<br />
So, <br />
isn’t it only reasonable to believe that there will be no<br />
change<br />
soon?<br />
<br />
And so those without hope…<br />
Burn.<br />
<br />
This Black mother understands the fire.<br />
Black mothers<br />
understand despair.<br />
I can change NOTHING in this world,<br />
but in paint,<br />
I can realize her….<br />
This brings me solace…<br />
not hope,<br />
but solace.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">She walks me through the flames of rage.</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
<span style="color: red;">My Black mother rescues me yet again.</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
<span style="color: red;">I want to be sure that she is seen.</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
<span style="color: red;">I want to be certain that her story is told.</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
<span style="color: red;">And so,</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">this time</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">America must hear her voice.</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
<span style="color: red;">This time</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">America must believe her.</span><br />
<br />
<strong>One</strong><br />
<strong>Black</strong><br />
<strong>mother’s</strong><br />
<strong>loss</strong><br />
<strong>WILL</strong><br />
<strong>be</strong><br />
<strong>memorialized.</strong><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">This time</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">I will not let her go.</span><br />
<br />
<strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">I</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">can not</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">sell</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">you</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">this</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">painting</span></strong>.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">George Floyd Cover</span> <br />
<h1 class="headline heading-content margin-8-top margin-16-bottom">
The Story Behind TIME's George Floyd Cover</h1>
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Painting by Titus Kaphar for TIME</div>
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Ideas</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">By </span><a class="bold author-name" href="https://time.com/author/d-w-pine/"><span style="font-size: x-large;"> D.W. Pine</span> </a> </div>
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June 4, 2020 </div>
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<span style="color: red;">D.W. Pine is the Creative Director at TIME.</span></div>
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<span class="dropcap">F</span>or the June 15, 2020, cover on the<a href="https://time.com/5847967/george-floyd-protests-trump/"> protests surrounding the death of George Floyd</a>, we turned to prominent American artist Titus T. Kaphar.<br />
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Kaphar’s 60″x60″ oil painting, titled <em>Analogous Colors,</em> features an African-American mother holding her Black child. To complete the work, Kaphar cut out the canvas to show a mother’s loss: Floyd called out to his deceased mother during the 8 minutes and 46 seconds he was pinned to the ground by a Minneapolis police officer after being arrested while on drugs and resisting arrest.<br />
“Mamma!” Floyd, 46, called out. “Mamma! I’m through.” Floyd’s mother, Larcenia Floyd, died in 2018.<br />
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FIND PHOTO ONLINE: A young George Floyd as infant with his mother Larcenia Floyd</div>
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“In her expression, I see the black mothers who are unseen, and rendered helpless in this fury against their babies,” writes Kaphar. “As I listlessly wade through another cycle of violence against black people, I paint a black mother … eyes closed, furrowed brow, holding the contour of her loss.”<br />
For the first time ever in the history of the United States which began importing black slaves from Africa in 1620, some 400 years ago, surrounding Kaphar’s painting, the red border of TIME includes the names of people: 35 black men and women whose deaths, in many cases by police, were the result of systemic racism and helped fuel the rise of the<a href="https://time.com/5771045/black-history-month-evolution/"> Black Lives Matter movement</a>. Their names are merely a fraction of the many more who have lost their lives because of the racist violence that has been part of this nation from its start.<br />
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The names are Trayvon Martin, Yvette Smith, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Tanisha Anderson, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Jerame Reid, Natasha McKenna, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, William Chapman, Sandra Bland, Darrius Stewart, Samuel DuBose, Janet Wilson, Calin Roquemore, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Joseph Mann, Terence Crutcher, Chad Robertson, Jordan Edwards, Aaron Bailey, Stephon Clark, Danny Ray Thomas, Antwon Rose, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, Michael Dean, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd.<br />
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<strong>In a piece accompanying the painting, Ti writes</strong>, <em>“This black mother understands the fire. Black mothers understand despair. I can change nothing in this world, but in paint, I can realize her. That brings me solace … not hope, but solace. She walks me through the flames of rage. My black mother rescues me yet again. I need to be sure that they can see her. I want to be certain that her story is told. And so this time, America needs to hear her voice.”</em><br />
<br />
<strong><em>Read <a href="https://time.com/5847487/i-cannot-sell-you-this-painting-artist-titus-kaphar-on-his-george-floyd-time-cover">“I cannot sell this painting”</a> by Titus Kaphar.</em></strong><br />
<strong><em></em></strong><br />
Kaphar, who received a BFA from a California art school where he met his wife and was the recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship Grant, also created a painting for TIME in 2014 marking the protests in Ferguson, <em>Yet Another Fight for Remembrance</em>, which captured black protestors, arms raised up and obscured with layers of white brushstrokes.<br />
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His commitment to social engagement has led him to move beyond traditional modes of artistic expression: Kaphar established <a href="https://www.nxthvn.com/" target="_blank">NXTHVN</a>, an arts incubator and residency program based in New Haven, Conn. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and The National Portrait Gallery in D.C., among others<br />
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Painting by Titus Kaphar for TIME</div>
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<em>“I have given up trying to describe the feeling of knowing that I can not be safe in the country of my birth,” says the 44-year-old artist, who was born in Kalamazoo, Mich., and now works in his New Haven studio. “How do I explain to my children that the very system set up to protect others could be a threat to our existence? How do I shield them from the psychological impact of knowing that for the rest of our lives we will likely be seen as a threat?”</em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em>=====================</em><br />
<em></em><br />
<h1 class="headline-primary" data-editable="overrideHeadline" itemprop="headline">
See Titus Kaphar’s Paintings About Black Motherhood</h1>
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<span class="primary-bylines" data-editable="bylines"><em><span style="font-family: "georgia";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">By</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span class="author-name" itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a class="article-author" href="https://www.vulture.com/author/trupti-rami/" rel="author"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: black;">Trupti Rami</span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></em></span> </div>
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<strong>Titus Kaphar in his studio with his painting <em>The Aftermath</em> (2020), New Haven, Connecticut, 2020. <span class="credit">Photo: Artwork © Titus Kaphar. Photo: John Lucas. Courtesy Gagosian.</span></strong> </div>
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Titus Kaphar loves art history, but he takes from the canon what he wants and turns it toward his own ends. The MacArthur-winner (and <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/titus_kaphar_can_art_amend_history?language=en"><span style="color: black;">Ted Talk</span></a>-er) is subverting these “classical” styles to use them to address the history of slavery and racism. Now represented by <a href="https://gagosian.com/artists/titus-kaphar/"><span style="color: black;">Gagosian</span></a>, Kaphar describes his latest paintings, <em>From a Tropical Space,</em> as a “surrealist, fictional Afro-futuristic narrative” about black mothers and the disappearance of their children.</div>
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Black women have not been represented as Madonnas, Venuses, or odalisques, Kaphar observes. “What we have is the depiction of black folks in general, and black women specifically, as enslaved and [in] servitude.” This series, which Kaphar hopes to translate into a film one day, is a conversation about the Madonna paintings and Michelangelo’s <em>Pietà</em>. “These are mothers mourning the loss of their children,” he says.</div>
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Although the New York exhibition of this work has been postponed, Kaphar is the focus of Gagosian’s latest <a href="https://gagosian.com/fairs/2020/05/03/titus-kaphar-artist-spotlight/"><span style="color: black;">“Artist Spotlight”</span></a> through May 12.</div>
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<strong>Let’s talk about <em>From a Tropical Space</em>. </strong><br />
When I started this project, it was unfamiliar to me. I’d started this painting with these two women sitting on this couch with this otherworldly white light kind of dancing off their foreheads and where the children were on their laps were cut out and removed. I was really happy with the formal aspects of the painting, but it felt like it didn’t fit with anything I was working on currently. So I stuck it to the side of the studio and then just periodically came back to it.</div>
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<strong>What made you come back to it?</strong><br />
Part of the reason for me not being happy with it was, it felt like it was telling the story of black domestics, black women who were caretakers for white people’s babies. And I just didn’t want to go there. I felt like I’ve had that conversation before. Then a couple of months later, I came back to the painting and asked myself the question <em>What in the composition insisted that the baby sitting on their laps didn’t belong to them?</em> And I had to admit that there was nothing.</div>
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<picture><source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/465/168/66eed9fa096cc1034320314a034cb3e184-titus-kaphar-braiding-possibility.2x.w710.jpg 2x" media="(min-resolution: 192dpi) and (min-width: 1180px), (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) and (min-width: 1180px)"></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/465/168/66eed9fa096cc1034320314a034cb3e184-titus-kaphar-braiding-possibility.w710.jpg" media="(min-width: 1180px) "></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/465/168/66eed9fa096cc1034320314a034cb3e184-titus-kaphar-braiding-possibility.2x.w710.jpg 2x" media="(min-resolution: 192dpi) and (min-width: 768px), (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) and (min-width: 768px)"></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/465/168/66eed9fa096cc1034320314a034cb3e184-titus-kaphar-braiding-possibility.w710.jpg" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/465/168/66eed9fa096cc1034320314a034cb3e184-titus-kaphar-braiding-possibility.2x.w710.jpg" media="(min-resolution: 192dpi), (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2)"></source> <img alt="" class="img-data" data-content-img="" data-src="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/465/168/66eed9fa096cc1034320314a034cb3e184-titus-kaphar-braiding-possibility.w710.jpg" src="" /></picture> </div>
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Titus Kaphar, <em>Braiding possibility</em>, 2020. Oil on canvas. 83 3/4 x 68 inches. 212.7 x 172.7 cm. <span class="credit">Photo: © Titus Kaphar. Photo: Christopher Gardener. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.</span> </div>
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<strong>It sounds like in deciding to pursue this series, you had to reassess your own biases. </strong><br />
I’m keenly aware of the way in which my own personal bias from studying Western art history will even influence the way that I even see the things that I make. Because of that, I almost decided just not to go on this particular journey. But when I realized that I needed to address this bias in myself, or rather my seeing, then it became something that was worth investigating. At a certain point, I was doing studio visits. I had folks walk into the studio, and as I suspected, their interpretations turned these mothers into domestic workers who were only momentarily caring for these children. The bias that I was experiencing in myself reiterated through other eyes, as well.</div>
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<strong>At first glance, the paintings look like a departure from your past work with its source material in art history.</strong><br />
In the same way that the idea that these mothers are actually mammys, caretakers, domestics, au pairs, that understanding of the work is there because of a history, a reality that occurred. We don’t see very many pictures of black women in art history, period. They are not our Madonnas. They’re not our Venuses. They are not our odalisques. What we have is the depiction of black folks in general, and black women specifically, as enslaved and [in] servitude. When I looked at the compositions themselves, I realized that this [series] is a conversation about the Madonna. This is a conversation about the Pietà. These are mothers mourning the loss of their children. So in that way, the relationship to art history is there. It’s just, the expression has changed.</div>
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<strong>The depictions of the children are actually excised from the canvas.</strong><br />
They’re cut out with the razor blade very surgically and removed. This whole body of work has unfolded for me as a sort of surrealist, fictional Afro-futuristic narrative. What became clear to me was that this was a story about black mothers and the disappearance of their children.</div>
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When I brought my mother into this studio, she saw one of the paintings and said, “You know, that reminds me of <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2018/03/flint-town-netflix-review.html"><span style="color: black;">Flint</span></a>.” My family’s from Michigan. I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “Well, you know, obviously, the sky’s not that color in Flint, but there’s a sense that the environment itself is toxic and will kill you.” And we live in communities like this all over the country. So the feeling, the mood, speaks to the trauma that these mothers are experiencing. That kind of anxiety, that kind of fear in these paintings, culminates into this moment of absence.</div>
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<picture><source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9e5/74f/31df2e28f5b8e8beba01d4763ea4efad65-titus-kaphar-the-distance-between-what-w.2x.w710.jpg 2x" media="(min-resolution: 192dpi) and (min-width: 1180px), (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) and (min-width: 1180px)"></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9e5/74f/31df2e28f5b8e8beba01d4763ea4efad65-titus-kaphar-the-distance-between-what-w.w710.jpg" media="(min-width: 1180px) "></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9e5/74f/31df2e28f5b8e8beba01d4763ea4efad65-titus-kaphar-the-distance-between-what-w.2x.w710.jpg 2x" media="(min-resolution: 192dpi) and (min-width: 768px), (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) and (min-width: 768px)"></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9e5/74f/31df2e28f5b8e8beba01d4763ea4efad65-titus-kaphar-the-distance-between-what-w.w710.jpg" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9e5/74f/31df2e28f5b8e8beba01d4763ea4efad65-titus-kaphar-the-distance-between-what-w.2x.w710.jpg" media="(min-resolution: 192dpi), (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2)"></source> <img alt="" class="img-data" data-content-img="" data-src="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9e5/74f/31df2e28f5b8e8beba01d4763ea4efad65-titus-kaphar-the-distance-between-what-w.w710.jpg" src="" /></picture> </div>
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Titus Kaphar, <em>The distance between what we have and what we want</em>, 2019. Oil on canvas. 108 x 84 1/4 inches. 274.3 x 214 cm. <span class="credit">Photo: © Titus Kaphar. Photo: Christopher Gardener. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.</span> </div>
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<strong>You’ve said your work is not about COVID-19. But in a way, this work continues the </strong><a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/coronavirus-inequality-america.html"><strong><span style="color: black;">conversation we’re having about the effects of the pandemic</span></strong></a><strong>, falling disproportionately on people of color. </strong><br />
So what we’re talking about is the trauma. And how it works is, these moments of despair highlight the gap between communities in this country better than any exposé, right? When we’re talking about COVID, there are some specifics that have to do with the virus and health care, but the real lasting conversation that we should be having, the conversation that is going to go beyond COVID, is about that disparity in the communities. And so in that way, this body of work reflects what has been there. It’s not for the sole purpose of teaching somebody a lesson. That’s not the way that I make my work. It’s for the purpose of me exploring my experience. The work is not about COVID, but there are a couple of pieces that the nature of what’s happening in the country right now can’t be removed from the understanding of the piece anymore.</div>
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<strong>Tell me about your life right now.</strong><br />
<span style="color: red;">In a lot of ways, it hasn’t changed anything. I’m a very private person. I’m not really on social media. I’m a studio hermit, so I continue to be a studio hermit. My family is fine. My brother got really sick in Detroit, where he lives. The hospitals there just didn’t have enough space for people. So he had a temperature of 105. More or less, they just gave him Tylenol and sent them home. There was just no place to put people. And that speaks to that disparity that we’re talking about in communities like this. In that way, I’m affected like everyone else is affected, when their loved ones’ health is at risk, but I’m incredibly blessed, honestly. I mean lucky. I do a job where I can do it on my own and I can continue working. The quiet of the day has been helpful.</span></div>
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<picture><source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/831/851/7d14c045bc27dc1711bf6157ea4bff1dbe-titus-kaphar-from-a-tropical-space.2x.w710.jpg 2x" media="(min-resolution: 192dpi) and (min-width: 1180px), (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) and (min-width: 1180px)"></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/831/851/7d14c045bc27dc1711bf6157ea4bff1dbe-titus-kaphar-from-a-tropical-space.w710.jpg" media="(min-width: 1180px) "></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/831/851/7d14c045bc27dc1711bf6157ea4bff1dbe-titus-kaphar-from-a-tropical-space.2x.w710.jpg 2x" media="(min-resolution: 192dpi) and (min-width: 768px), (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) and (min-width: 768px)"></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/831/851/7d14c045bc27dc1711bf6157ea4bff1dbe-titus-kaphar-from-a-tropical-space.w710.jpg" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source> <source data-srcset="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/831/851/7d14c045bc27dc1711bf6157ea4bff1dbe-titus-kaphar-from-a-tropical-space.2x.w710.jpg" media="(min-resolution: 192dpi), (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2)"></source> <img alt="" class="img-data" data-content-img="" data-src="https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/831/851/7d14c045bc27dc1711bf6157ea4bff1dbe-titus-kaphar-from-a-tropical-space.w710.jpg" src="" /></picture> </div>
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Titus Kaphar,<em> From a Tropical Space</em>, 2019. Oil on canvas. 92 x 72 inches. 233.7 x 182.9 cm. <span class="credit">Photo: © Titus Kaphar. Photo: Christopher Gardener. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.</span> </div>
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<strong>Congrats on joining Gagosian. How’d you end up deciding to join that gallery?</strong><br />
I appreciate the congratulations about Gagosian. This is sort of misunderstood, the dates of these things are misunderstood, so let me clarify. I left Jack Shainman some time ago. I’ve been away from their gallery for almost two years, and I was managing my studio on my own. I was sort of representing myself in that way. I was actually fine with it. I hadn’t been looking for another gallery but had been approached by several of the larger galleries. To be completely honest with you, when <span style="color: red;">Sam Orlofsky</span> asked me to do a studio visit, I really wasn’t taking it that seriously. I never pictured myself as being at Gagosian, and I was, as I said, okay with being on my own. But when he came in, we went to <a href="https://www.nxthvn.com/"><span style="color: black;">NXTHVN</span></a> first and we spent an hour and a half, almost two hours, over there. He really took time with each of the artists in the program. Then we came back and did a studio visit, and it was clear to me that he, as a representative of Gagosian, understood that the NXTHVN project is not a side thing for me. It’s not a hobby. This is fundamental to my practice.</div>
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<strong>NXTHVN is a part of your life’s work now.</strong><br />
That’s right. Not only did they understand that, but they valued that. They stepped up and committed to supporting NXTHVN significantly as a part of their support for me. Our conversations weren’t about money, which is what I think most people think when you move on to Gagosian or Hauser & Wirth or Pace or any of the big ones. Our conversation was about ideas and my values as an artist, and the essential aspect of my practice, which is NXTHVN.</div>
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;">What’s next for you?</span></strong><br />
<span style="color: blue;">It’s my dream to direct a film based on this body of work</span>. <span style="color: red;">I’ve been collaborating with a couple of friends of mine, and we’re releasing the short piece relatively soon. I’ve collaborated with my friend Nigerian-American writer Tochi Onyebuchi. He and I have been collaborating on a piece of writing. And then, another friend of mine, Samora Pinderhughes, who was a great jazz pianist, we’re collaborating on a music project. The gallery is actually releasing a kind of short episodic artistic film piece that will go along with this. We’ll go along with this “Spotlight” and exhibition. I’m really excited about exploring these other mediums, music and film, to continue telling the story. The idea is that these works will be brought back and the second chapter of the narrative will be shown in Los Angeles next year. Hopefully by that point, we will have some of this cinematic piece to show at that time.</span></div>
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<strong>The colors in your pieces are so kaleidoscopic and luminous. Will the film be like that? </strong><br />
That’s exactly how I want the ultimate film to be. The saturation in these paintings is less about a geographic place and more about an internal landscape. It reflects the emotional pitch of what’s going on for these characters, even though in these moments they are frozen. They are still. We’ve caught most of these women in the instance right before they realized the child has disappeared, but their anxiety is already rising.</div>
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<em>This interview has been edited and condensed.</em></div>
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<em>One work from the show, </em>Braiding possibility <em>(2020), will be available for sale beginning on Friday, May 8, at 6 a.m. ET, for 48 hours.</em></div>
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<h2 class="title">
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<li class="tags-list-item"><a aria-label="More articles tagged titus kaphar" class="tags-link" href="https://www.vulture.com/tags/titus-kaphar/"><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: xx-small;">titus kaphar</span></a> </li>
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<li class="tags-list-item"><strong><span style="color: red;">I wonder if you could start by talking about your own evolution as an artist. It’s my understanding that you came to art later in life, correct?</span> </strong><br />
I did. I was in my mid-twenties when I decided ultimately that this was what I wanted to do. <span style="color: red;">Prior to that I thought I wanted to be a rock star. [<em>laughter</em>]. Maybe I still do a little bit. I’m a bass player</span>.<br />
Let me step back a little bit. I didn’t do well at school. I failed most of the classes that I took. I got kicked out of kindergarten. I was suspended very often in high school. I wasn’t a good student to say the least. I went on to junior college only because I was trying to impress a whte woman named Julianne Philp who would later become my wife and bear our two sons. Long story short, I took an art history class in junior college and it opened up the world to me. It made me realize that I had a kind of visual intelligence I never knew existed, and that if I could understand the world through images—and sound also—I could figure things out. So I went from being a very poor student to being on the dean’s list, and that was mind blowing to me. That sent me on this journey to pursue art and it started off as this very art-historical approach. I was taking as many art history classes as I could find. </li>
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<li class="tags-list-item"><h1 class="css-hzs6w4 e1h9rw200" data-test-id="headline" id="link-25965570" itemprop="headline">
An Artist Rises, and Brings a Generation With Him </h1>
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In a struggling neighborhood with a vibrant history, Titus Kaphar found a home for himself. Now he’s creating a center there to nurture emerging artists. </div>
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<img alt="The artist Titus Kaphar in his New Haven studio with new paintings. Left, portrait of Reginald Dwayne Betts, his collaborator on the “Redaction” project now at MoMA PS1. The studio is three blocks from NXTHVN, an art space he founded with Jonathan Brand and Jason Price." class="css-11cwn6f" decoding="async" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/14/arts/14titus-kaphar1/merlin_152309358_24550741-5de0-4576-8d8b-9280c8e9ce76-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" itemprop="url" sizes="((min-width: 600px) and (max-width: 1004px)) 84vw, (min-width: 1005px) 80vw, 100vw" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/14/arts/14titus-kaphar1/merlin_152309358_24550741-5de0-4576-8d8b-9280c8e9ce76-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" srcset="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/14/arts/14titus-kaphar1/merlin_152309358_24550741-5de0-4576-8d8b-9280c8e9ce76-articleLarge.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp 600w,https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/14/arts/14titus-kaphar1/merlin_152309358_24550741-5de0-4576-8d8b-9280c8e9ce76-jumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp 1024w,https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/14/arts/14titus-kaphar1/merlin_152309358_24550741-5de0-4576-8d8b-9280c8e9ce76-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp 2048w" /></div>
<figcaption class="css-17ai7jg e18f7pbr0" itemprop="caption description"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">The artist Titus Kaphar in his New Haven studio with new paintings. Left, portrait of Reginald Dwayne Betts, his collaborator on the “Redaction” project now at MoMA PS1. The studio is three blocks from NXTHVN, an art space he founded with Jonathan Brand and Jason Price.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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By<!-- --> <a class="css-brehiz e1jsehar0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/patricia-leigh-brown"><span class="css-1baulvz last-byline" itemprop="name">Patricia Leigh Brown</span></a></div>
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<li class="css-ccw2r3 epjyd6m1"><time class="css-129k401 e16638kd0" datetime="2019-04-12T04:23:52-04:00">April 12, 2019</time></li>
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NEW HAVEN — Like many town-and-gown cities, New Haven is a community of parallel narratives. There is the storied Elm City of Yale University, a place of carillon bell towers, leaded glass windows and lush quadrangles behind iron gates.</div>
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But the artist Titus Kaphar wants to shift the narrative to a part of the city little known to outsiders, a once-thriving <!-- -->historic <!-- -->African-American neighborhood called Dixwell where he and his family have lived for more than a decade.</div>
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Mr. Kaphar, 42, has a profound connection to the forgotten, from the slaves owned by the founding fathers to the ubiquity of African-Americans in the criminal justice system, including his own father. The recipient of a recent MacArthur “genius” award, the artist is challenging racism in a body of strong work that has entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery, and was recently featured at the <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://npg.si.edu/exhibition/unseen-our-past-new-light-ken-gonzales-day-and-titus-kaphar" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">National Portrait Gallery</span></a>. Mr. Kaphar is known for appropriating images from American and European art in order to subvert them, cutting them into his canvases to pull back the velvet curtain of history. He wields materials like tar, wire, gold leaf and nails to unearth the past’s inconvenient truths, and to shine a restorative light on those residing in the shadows.</div>
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In Dixwell, a neighborhood buffeted by need in the shadows of Yale, he is rewriting the script with NXTHVN (for “Next Haven”), a $12 million nonprofit arts incubator and fellowship program he founded to nurture rising talents. The enterprise is housed in two once-<!-- -->moribund<!-- --> factory buildings that are being reimagined by the architect Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture.</div>
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<figcaption class="css-5qsc2a ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">A rendering of NXTHVN (for Next Haven). Former factory buildings have been reimagined as a cultural center. The project is designed by Deborah Berke Partners, the firm founded by Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Deborah Berke Partners</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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<figcaption class="css-18crmh6 ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">The construction site of NXTHVN, where a second building is being renovated for an art space.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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He envisions the project as a beacon for graduates hellbent on getting out of Dodge for New York (Mr. Kaphar, a 2006 Yale School of Art graduate, “drank the Kool-Aid” himself). “New Haven has some of the most esteemed artists in the world,” he said. “Yet as a city, we’ve done very little to say, ‘Why don’t you stay here?’”</div>
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The first half, studios for seven artist-fellows, is up and running in a former ice cream factory filled with natural light. The second building, where lab equipment was manufactured, is under renovation and NXTHVN hard hats are everywhere. The complex will unfold in phases and include a cafe run by a local nonprofit, a combined co-working and gallery space, a theater and a three-story addition with skylights and loft-like apartments for visiting artists-in-residence.</div>
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Financing for the 40,000-square-foot project has come from the state ($3 million) and the city ($1 million for facade improvements), with several million dollars from private foundations and philanthropies. Collectors of the artist’s work have helped subsidize the fellowship program.</div>
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Long a cultural hub for black residents, with a jazz club where Miles Davis and other luminaries played, the neighborhood was devastated by urban renewal and the 2006 closing of the <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkQerY14PQ8" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">Winchester Repeating Arms Factory</span></a> up the street, which once employed 26,000 people. “I think sometimes folks feel like we, as poor people, don’t know the difference,” Mr. Kaphar said of bringing distinctive arts and architecture to the neighborhood. “So we’ll get the leftovers — the backpack someone already discarded, the building that the city couldn’t find any other use for.” </div>
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The idea of an internationally competitive fellowship was inspired by Mr. Kaphar’s residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a program founded in 1968 by <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="http://www.michaelrosenfeldart.com/artists/william-t-williams-b1942" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">William T. Williams</span></a>, an artist he reveres. The seven artist-fellows at NXTHVN were chosen from 166 applicants. They are being steeped in art business nitty-gritty, from negotiating with galleries to public speaking. </div>
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“The art world is full of secrets,” said <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/the-rising-star-vaughn-spann-has-arrived/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">Vaughn Spann</span></a>, who graduated in 2018 with a master’s degree in fine arts from Yale. “Titus is unlocking the vault.”</div>
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Talented young people from local high schools serve as paid apprentices, learning how to sand and apply gesso to panels, or edit images online.</div>
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<figcaption class="css-18crmh6 ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Seven art fellows from around the country are working at NXTHVN.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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<figcaption class="css-1l6g02d ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Felipe Baeza, left, here with Mr. Kaphar, right, received a studio fellowship at NXTHVN. “New Haven has some of the most esteemed artists in the world,” Mr. Kaphar said. “Yet as a city, we’ve done very little to say, ‘Why don’t you stay here?’”</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times</span></figcaption></figure><figure aria-label="media" class="css-198gl8q e1g7ppur0" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/14/arts/14titus-kaphar15/merlin_152365740_b6fdd6a2-f280-4e6d-ae70-46075149659a-articleLarge.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><div class="css-1xdhyk6 erfvjey0">
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<figcaption class="css-1l6g02d ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Left, Vaughn Spann, 26, a Newark-based artist and veteran of gallery shows, is a NXTHVN fellow who is mentoring an apprentice from a local high school. The painting is from Mr. Spann’s “Dalmatians” series.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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Historically, artists have learned their craft by apprenticing with masters, Mr. Kaphar noted. “Diego Velázquez never went to graduate school,” he added.</div>
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Velázquez also never gave a major TED Talk — as Mr. Kaphar has <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.ted.com/talks/titus_kaphar_can_art_amend_history?language=en%E2%80%93" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">notably done, demonstrating </span></a> how artists convey wealth and privilege by taking a copy of a Frans Hals portrait of a 16th-century aristocratic family and whitewashing the main figures to shift the gaze to a black servant in the background. The painting will be the subject of “One: Titus Kaphar,” an exhibition at the <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="http://brooklynmuseum.tumblr.com/post/180755637127/upcoming-shows-through-june-2019-were-pleased-to" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">Brooklyn Museum</span></a> starting June 21. </div>
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In his 2018 painting, “Seeing Through Time,” perched on two paint cans at NXTHVN (it is now on view at Mass MoCA, the Berkshires museum), </div>
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Mr. Kaphar layered European characters onto a canvas, then peeled them back, creating space for a black girl, dressed in velvet and pearls, to emerge alongside a powerful contemporary woman. The girl breaks through layers of paint, and with it, the patriarchal and monoracial currents in the Western canon. </div>
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“For 400 years, the little girl on the side was always there,” he said of the art-historical device. “But you were never supposed to contemplate her personhood — her wants, needs and desires.” </div>
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<figcaption class="css-1l44abu ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">At a TED conference, Mr. Kaphar demonstrated how artists convey wealth and privilege: He white-washed aristocratic figures in a copy of a portrait by Frans Hals to shift the viewers’ attention to a servant.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Ryan Lash/TED</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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Mr. Kaphar did not discover art until his mid-20s, when he was trying to impress a young woman named Julianne, now his wife. He registered for an art survey class <!-- -->at a junior college<!-- --> in California and was outraged when the professor announced that they would be skipping over the “black people in art” section.</div>
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As a graduate student he looked hard at paintings and sculpture in the Yale University Art Gallery. Fittingly, his own work now hangs there: “Shadows of Liberty” (2016) is a portrait of George Washington in which his torso and face are obscured by nailed canvas strips, each inscribed with the names of slaves Washington owned in a given year.</div>
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In “Yet Another Fight for Remembrance” (2015), commissioned by Time magazine after Ferguson, Mo., young black protesters, their hands raised in a don’t-shoot stance, are caught in aggressive strokes of white paint, suggesting attempts to silence their voices. The humanity of their gaze is visible above the fray. <!-- -->The work “stops you flat,” Murray Whyte wrote i<!-- -->n The Boston Globe. “This is rough stuff, yet it’s plied with seductive grace.” </div>
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<strong class="css-8qgvsz ebyp5n10">IN MANY WAYS, </strong>NXTHVN represents Mr. Kaphar’s own “seeing through time,” reaching back into his own personal history to give promising young people a gift he never had. His father was in and out of prison for most of Mr. Kaphar’s childhood. In Kalamazoo, Mich., where he was born, the family earned extra cash in the neighborhood by carting metal barrels of burned trash to the dump.</div>
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For years he bounced among various family members, at one point living in a basement. At age 15, he left his father’s house for good after witnessing a violent incident in which the older man hit his girlfriend, who struck a mirror. Young Titus picked glass out of the woman’s back — and didn’t speak to his father again for 20 years. </div>
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<figcaption class="css-1l6g02d ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Mr. Kaphar’s “Shadows of Liberty,” 2016, oil and rusted nails on canvas.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Titus Kaphar; Yale University Art Gallery</span></figcaption></figure><figure aria-label="media" class="css-198gl8q e1g7ppur0" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/14/arts/14titus-kaphar4/14titus-kaphar4-articleLarge.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"><div class="css-1xdhyk6 erfvjey0">
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<figcaption class="css-1l6g02d ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Mr. Kaphar’s “Yet Another Fight for Remembrance,” oil on canvas, 2014.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Titus Kaphar</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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“There is a way in which my life is a trope,” he observed the other day. “‘Poor black boy from bad neighborhood becomes famous artist.’ As with all tropes, it lacks specificity.”</div>
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In San Jose, Calif., where his mother — who now has a master’s degree in counseling — lived briefly, he <!-- -->connected with a stable, close-knit family, a widower<!-- --> and his three sons, who became an anchoring force. He wound up living with them during his high school years. Later, the man, whom Mr. Kaphar calls “my dad,” Mars Severe, told him “I saw something in you.” </div>
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“Senseless generosity got me here where I am,” Mr. Kaphar said.</div>
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The Jerome Project, perhaps his best-known work, was inspired by glimmers of reconciliation with his estranged father, Jerome, who was remorseful when Mr. Kaphar encountered him at a family gathering. He researched his father’s incarceration record online and was stunned to find “99 other men with the <!-- -->exact same name<!-- --> — all of them trapped in the criminal justice system and all of them black,” he said.</div>
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<figcaption class="css-1l44abu ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">“Jerome I,” 2014, oil, gold leaf and tar on wood panel, is part of the Jerome Project, inspired by a reconciliation with the artist's father. </span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Titus Kaphar</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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Working from mug shots, the artist painted a series of devotional portraits of 65 Jeromes in Byzantine-style gold leaf, partly submerging each in tar based on the amount of time each Jerome spent in prison. The paintings, shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2014, express the suffocation of life behind bars — and the resilience necessary to survive. When his father saw the paintings, he was able to connect some <!-- -->revelatory<!-- --> dots between his own employment challenges and his criminal past. The rapprochement between father and son continues to unfold.</div>
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“Redaction,” Mr. Kaphar’s <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5056?locale=en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">collaboration </span></a>with the poet, lawyer and writer Reginald Dwayne Betts at MoMA PS1 through May 5, casts a critical and artistic eye on the human fallout of the cash bail system, in which poor defendants who have yet to be tried or convicted remain in jail. </div>
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“We’re redacting to reveal,” said Mr. Betts, who was tried as an adult for carjacking at age 16 and imprisoned. (He has since gotten his J.D. degree at Yale Law School and is pursuing a Ph.D. there.) Mr. Kaphar’s piercing etched portraits, intentionally blurred to obscure identities, appear behind hand-redacted poetry drawn from legal complaints filed by the nonprofit <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.civilrightscorps.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">Civil Rights Corps</span></a>, with the dark redacted lines resembling prison bars. The parting image is a large Jerome Project painting of Mr. Betts <!-- --> featuring<!-- --> flecks of gold-leaf shimmering in the tar.</div>
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“Titus’s work elicits a strong response,” said Sarah Suzuki, the curator. “He works from a place that’s very personal. But he also asks other people to connect their own experiences to it.”</div>
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<figcaption class="css-18crmh6 ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Mr. Kaphar and Mr. Betts, “Untitled (from the “Redaction”),” 2019, from a show at MoMa PS 1. Mr. Kaphar’s etched portraits appear behind hand-redacted legal complaints filed by the Civil Rights Corps. The redacted lines resemble prison bars.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>via Titus Kaphar Studio</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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<figcaption class="css-1l44abu ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Mr. Kaphar in his New Haven studio. </span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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In New Haven, the artist’s unassuming backyard studio stands out for a maraschino cherry-red 1956 GMC pickup in the driveway. Moving here after two years in New York provided the breathing room to take risks like “<a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://kapharstudio.com/the-vesper-project/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">The Vesper Project,”</span></a> a five-year effort that involved constructing a house in various states of decay to reflect a fictional character’s mental meltdown.</div>
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Mr. Kaphar and <!-- -->his wife <!-- -->live about three blocks from NXTHVN with their sons, Savion, now 12, and Daven, 10; they selected the neighborhood “so the kids would be able to see reflections of themselves,” he said.</div>
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A blitzkrieg tour of some of the artist’s favorite haunts started with gelato by an artisanal confectioner, followed by a chaser of barbecued pork ribs. He is on a first-name basis with the guards at the Yale University Art Gallery, who “spend far more time with the paintings than the curators,” he said. The city (pop. 130,000) is intimate enough that kindred spirits bump into each other. Mr. Kaphar and <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.nxthvn.com/meet-the-team" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">Jason Price, </span></a>a private equity professional who became NXTHVN’s co-founder, met when their boys requested a play date. He first encountered Mr. Betts at a dinner party where they argued about a book by <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://ta-nehisicoates.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">Ta-Nehisi Coates.</span></a></div>
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The artist has established personal relationships with collectors who have since donated to the NXTHVN cause. “It’s very unusual for a collector to look beyond his or her own nose,” said Jock Reynolds, the recently retired longtime director of the Yale University Art Gallery, who has known Mr. Kaphar since he was a graduate student and is now on the art incubator’s board. </div>
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“He doesn’t openly solicit,” said Barbara Shuster, a New York philanthropist and collector. “Because of his personality and his earnestness,” she added, “you hear about what he’s creating and want to be a part of it.”</div>
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Mr. Kaphar and his team are well aware of the tripwire of gentrification. But they also know the negative effects of disinvestment in the Dixwell neighborhood, where <!-- -->the buildings <!-- -->sat vacant for years after being used as a depot for illegal counterfeit goods. They are currently owned by Mr. Kaphar and two friends, who originally intended a far more modest arrangement in which raw space would be leased to artists in the area. The group, which includes the sculptor Jonathan Brand, plans to transfer ownership to the nonprofit.</div>
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The plan to <!-- -->build<!-- --> NXTHVN in phases instead of a grand ribbon-cutting “is a gracious way to connect with the community,” Ms. Berke said. Her design opens the cafe, co-working and gallery space to the street, and apprentices will give tours of rotating exhibitions.</div>
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“New Haven has a rich African-American history, with a lot of economic depression,” said the poet <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="http://www.elizabethalexander.net/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">Elizabeth Alexander,</span></a> president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the former chair of African-American studies at Yale. “Reactivating that history and legacy with art is very significant.”</div>
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<figcaption class="css-18crmh6 ewdxa0s0"><span aria-hidden="true" class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Mr. Kaphar on the construction site of NXTHVN, which he founded with a team. “Because of his personality and his earnestness,” said Barbara Shuster, a patron, "you hear what he’s creating and want to be a part of it.”</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90" itemprop="copyrightHolder"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span>Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times</span></figcaption></figure></div>
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<strong class="css-8qgvsz ebyp5n10">THE PROJECT JOINS</strong> a <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/t-magazine/art/theaster-gates-mark-bradford-rick-lowe-profile.html" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">number of urban artist-driven initiatives around the country</span></a>, most notably <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/arts/design/17kimm.html" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">Rick Lowe’s pioneering Project Row Houses, </span></a>which has transformed 39 structures within a five-block area of Houston’s Third Ward. Mr. Lowe inspired the renowned artists <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/theaster-gates-ingenuity-awards-chicago-180957203/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">Theaster Gates, </span></a>whose Rebuild Foundation has bought and refurbished dozens of buildings on Chicago’s South Side, and <a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.artandpractice.org/about/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title=""><span style="color: #326891;">Mark Bradford, whose 20,000-square-foot Art + Practice campus in Leimert Park, Los Angeles</span></a>, houses an education and employment program for foster youth, including paid internships in its contemporary art <!-- -->programs<!-- -->. </div>
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For most people starting an undertaking of this nature would be more than a full-time job. With forthcoming exhibitions Mr. Kaphar is trying to balance unfettered time in his studio with the caffeinated boost he gets from the young apprentices and fellows, for whom he is mentor, cheerleader, and <!-- -->critic in chief<!-- -->.</div>
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He would like young people from the neighborhood to “experience a Deborah Berke piece of architecture” and start thinking about space and light and the potential of art to transport someone over the threshold of difficult circumstances, as it did for him. “What I’m suggesting is that there is space for excellence and quality in our community — and I think we deserve it,” he said.</div>
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Most mornings, you can find him at the local boxing club, Elephant in the Room, where his approach to the punching bag reflects his point of view. He tends to improvise his jabs. “It looks wrong but it works,” his coach, Solomon Maye, said. “Titus sees something, and then sees beyond what he sees.” </div>
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<li class="tags-list-item"><a aria-label="More articles tagged art" class="tags-link" href="https://www.vulture.com/tags/art/"><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: xx-small;">art</span></a> </li>
<li class="tags-list-item"><a aria-label="More articles tagged gagosian" class="tags-link" href="https://www.vulture.com/tags/gagosian/"><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: xx-small;">gagosian</span></a> </li>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-48572174105811925052020-06-07T01:14:00.002-07:002020-06-07T01:53:24.178-07:00Risto Isomaki in Finland has published a new cli-fi novel in Finnish only titled CHILDREN OF THE DELUGE<div>
Dear Dan,</div>
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A letter today from Finnish novelist Mr. <a href="https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11350350">Risto Isomaki</a>, author of new <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">cli-fi novel</a> titled <span style="color: blue;">CHILDREN OF THE DELUGE</span>, (published now in Finnish only, but not yet translated or published in English)<br />
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<a href="https://kauppa.intokustannus.fi/kirja/vedenpaisumuksen-lapset/">https://kauppa.intokustannus.fi/kirja/vedenpaisumuksen-lapset/</a><br />
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<img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EZp30_-WoAEtgSa.jpg:small" /><span style="color: blue;">'' Vedenpaisumuksen Lapset''</span> (Children of the Deluge)<span style="color: red;"> [''lapset'' is Finnish for ''children'']</span></div>
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<strong>Here is Risto speaking on YouTube in Finnish for one hour video.</strong></div>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_TLOuxfZVI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_TLOuxfZVI</a></div>
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<strong>EDITOR's NOTE: [Risto Isomäki</strong> (born June 8, 1961 in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turku" title="Turku">Turku</a>) is a Finnish author of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction" title="Science fiction">science fiction</a> books. His 2005 novel <i>The Sands of Sarasvati</i> (<i>Sarasvatin hiekkaa</i>) was nominated for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandia_Prize" title="Finlandia Prize">Finlandia Prize</a> in 2005 and won the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A4htivaeltaja_Award" title="Tähtivaeltaja Award">Tähtivaeltaja Award</a> in 2006.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-1"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risto_Isom%C3%A4ki#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup> Two of his novels, <i>The Sands of Sarasvati</i> (Into, 2013) and <i>Lithium-6</i> (AmazonCrossing, 2015) have been published in English, along with a graphic novel adaptation of <i>The Sands of Sarasvati</i> (Tammi, 2008). His latest novel in 2020 is <a href="https://kauppa.intokustannus.fi/kirja/vedenpaisumuksen-lapset/">CHILDREN OF THE DELUGE</a> is a cli-fi novel.]</div>
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<img alt="Kirjailija Risto Isomäki " class="yle__article__figure__image" height="112" src="https://images.cdn.yle.fi/image/upload//w_1199,h_675,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto:eco/13-3-11350375.jpg" width="200" /></div>
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<strong>Dear Dan, Thank you for your message - and for your interest in my new novel!</strong></div>
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I would say that ''Children of the Deluge'' is pure ''climate fiction.'' The scientific speculations in it are mostly directly related to climate science and glaciology. The main point is to ask, whether multiplied production of icebergs from Greenland and the Antarctic could cause a new Dansgaard-Oeschger event (a mini ice age) by increasing the reflectivity (albedo) of the North Atlantic, North Pacific and the Southern Ocean. If this happens, global warming could actually temporarily lead to major cooling of especially North-Western Europe, before the heating impact of the greenhouse gases again begins to dominate the situation when the floating ice masses melt.</div>
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The novel has some other aspects, though. Above all, it presents a slightly modified/improved version of the old aquatic ape or marine ape theory, according to which the thirty or so anatomic features humans have and otherwise only exist in marine mammals can be explained by ancestor species that used to live in the water. I'm saying that this is unlikely but that all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle click together nicely if we assume that there were no aquatic ancestor species but that our own species is and has always been semi-aquatic. This idea is strongly supported by anatomic and paleontological evidence. In other words I am saying that it would be a disastrous mistake to think that mermaids do not exist, you probably saw thousands of them when you last went out in a city.</div>
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At the moment, I don't know when the book will be published in English. My literary agency (<strong>Bonnier Rights</strong>) is looking for an English publisher now. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Sincerely, </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">- Risto</span></div>
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<h1 class="lib_title" content="Vedenpaisumuksen lapset " itemprop="name" style="margin-bottom: 0px;">
''Vedenpaisumuksen lapset''</h1>
<span class="lib_book_author"><a href="https://www.risingshadow.fi/library/author/188-risto-isomaki">Risto Isomäki</a></span> <br /><span class="lib_text_small">Julkaistaan: <span class="lib_notice">syyskuu 1, 2020</span> (Published in Finland by <span itemprop="publisher" itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"><span style="color: red;">Into</span></span>)</span> <br />
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Tyyppi: <a class="toggle" href="https://www.blogger.com/null">spekulatiivinen fiktio</a><div id="type-info" style="display: none;">
Spekulatiivinen fiktio (spefi) on kuvitteellisia maailmoja ja tapahtumia kuvaavaa kirjallisuutta. Spefi sisältää elementtejä scifistä, fantasiasta tai kauhusta. Risingshadow'n kirjatietokannassa ylläpidetään kaikkien suomeksi ilmestyneiden spefi-kirjojen tietoja.</div>
<br />Tyylit: <a href="https://www.risingshadow.fi/library/genre/science_fiction"><span itemprop="genre">scifi</span></a>, <a href="https://www.risingshadow.fi/library/genre/history"><span itemprop="genre">historia</span></a>, <a href="https://www.risingshadow.fi/library/genre/thriller"><span itemprop="genre">jännitys</span></a> <br />Avainsanat: <a href="https://www.risingshadow.fi/library/genre/environmental_disasters">ekokatastrofit</a>, <a href="https://www.risingshadow.fi/library/genre/finnish_literature">kotimainen</a> <br /><a class="lib_action" href="https://www.risingshadow.fi/forum/lukusali/294-risto-isomaki" itemprop="discussionUrl" title="Risto Isomäki">Osallistu keskusteluun (viestejä 4 kpl)</a> </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-42244716315498929872020-06-07T00:55:00.002-07:002020-06-07T00:55:28.703-07:00Professor Julia Leyda – "What is cli-fi and why do we need it?"<img alt="Z om apokalypse og film: går det bra til slutt?" height="auto" itemprop="image" src="https://filmklubb.no/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/z-apokalypse-630x340.jpg" width="auto" /><u><span style="color: #0066cc;"> </span></u><br />
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June 5, 2020</h1>
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<span lang="en">INTRO: Inspired by Paul Schrader's popular American cli-fi movie <a href="http://cnn.com/">''First Reformed''</a>, it was apocalyptic that the time had come for the first Z last fall, but we had always found that number to come out in the middle of a pandemic.
But that's how it became, scary now that we've got a smack of worldwide pandemics, we can well argue that apocalypse is doing its best on film.
That is why we offer texts on <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">cli-fi (climate fiction),</a> zombies, neoliberalism, artificial intelligence and how the disaster tends to look like in Norwegian film, and keeps us away from virus films in this way.
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<strong>Julian Leyda</strong> - <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">What is cli-fi, and why do we need it?</a>
In recent decades, a new film genre called cli-fi has entered the scene since 2011: the ''climate fiction'' films, also called ''cli-fi'' by its American coiner Dan Bloom at <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">The Cli-Fi Report</a>. A genre of film capture increases in line with our understanding that we have entered the Anthrocenic age. Man's in nature has taken over and left an impression on the globe that nonkeke can be erased. Professor Julia Leyda PhD gives an introduction to this new - and exciting - genre.</span></div>
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<span lang="en"><strong>Julian Leyda</strong> - Away with the grave grave! About humor and irony in <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">cli-fi</a>
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<span lang="en"> Can you imagine the terrible and depressing times that the climate crisis and the million dollar threat in the film? Can you imagine the humor that can be a very effective means of combating the climate crisis that is so prevalent, for example, being able to live with the climate crisis on a small scale.</span></div>
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<br /><strong>Julia Leyda - <em>Hva er cli-fi, og hvorfor trenger vi det?</em></strong></div>
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<strong><br /><em> De siste tiårene har a ny filmgenre entret scenen: Klimafiksjonsfilmene, også kalt cli-fi. A genre of filmtilfanget øker in takt med vår innsikt in dat we har gått inn in het anthroposene tidsalderen. Menneskets in nature has tatt overhånd and etterlatt an inntrykk on kloden som ikkekeke can viskes ut. Julia Leyda gir a introducion to this new - and exciting - genre.</em></strong></div>
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<strong>LINK: <a href="https://filmklubb.no/2020/06/z-om-apokalypse-og-film-gar-det-bra-til-slutt">https://filmklubb.no/2020/06/z-om-apokalypse-og-film-gar-det-bra-til-slutt</a></strong></div>
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<a href="https://znett.com/2020/06/z-nr-2-2020-apokalypse/">Mer info om nummeret ligger her</a> <span style="color: red;">MORE DETAILS HERE IN NORWEGIAN: <a href="https://filmklubb.no/2020/06/z-om-apokalypse-og-film-gar-det-bra-til-slutt/">https://filmklubb.no/2020/06/z-om-apokalypse-og-film-gar-det-bra-til-slutt/</a></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-32997600089327885432020-06-06T10:26:00.001-07:002020-06-07T01:46:42.733-07:00''Baked Alaska: 2049…'' -- a short story in 2020 by Praveen Gupta in India<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Indian writer Mr. Praveen Gupta tells me today: ''Hello Dan, I made some edits to this. Here is the current version for your reading pleasure:''<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;"><strong>''Baked Alaska: 2049…''</strong></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><em><span style="font-size: large;">A short story by Praveen Gupta</span></em></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><em><span style="font-size: large;"><strong>(copyright 2020) </strong></span><span style="color: red; font-size: xx-small;">PRAVEN GUPTA</span></em></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">Ash thanked his background in quantum biology for the exciting exploration in demystifying the growing frequency and severity of global pandemics. He had heard and read in his history book about the Coronavirus and the resulting grief. It had mysteriously appeared in the winter of 2019, tapered in the summer of 2020, and totally disappeared the following summer. <u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">Ever since, there were several similar recurrences. It was the outbreak in Alaska and across the Bering Strait - Shishmaref and beyond just where the first climate change refugees originated from - that gave him an opportunity to pin down possible connection the Wuhan cause had with other outbreaks. Something was amiss, this was not just another case of pure physical transmission of the virus strain. <u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">The excessive melting of glaciers on the Qinghai -Tibetan Plateau was leading to receding permafrost. That is where the Yangtze, which meandered by Wuhan, originated! Climate Change was then a fledgling science, given the low priority not many endeavored to understand the dependencies. <u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">Ash’s grandfather was an economic migrant to Hong Kong. Thanks to the growing wind speed of the storms, which was predicted to touch 400 Kmph well before the end of the century, that the family moved to British Columbia. The winters there were no longer stiff. Christmas in much of the neighbouring Alaska was rarely white anymore. The remnants of the highly polluting tar sands left behind ugly scars across BC and Alberta. Deep wounds that seemed beyond healing.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">Ash would recall amazing bedtime stories from grandpa. The most vivid being the recurring appearance of the shark spirit ‘Saa Yue’, in his dreams. These generally coincided the typhoon season in the South China Sea. The ‘Saa Yue’ would share with him the benign equation she enjoyed with all the wise men who had traversed the oceans over time. She could teleport their relationship back and forth in time.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“How do I invoke the ‘Saa Yue’ spirit and seek answers?” Grandpa was long gone. ‘<i>Tunneling, dreams and quantum theory’</i> was the stuff of dreams! This presentation by Allen came just in time.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">Himself a climate refugee - from Maldives. Allen’s home - the Maafushi island - went under water much before he learnt to walk. His family made it to a lucky draw for resettlement in Canada. <u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">The young Maldivian as he grew - opted studying cognitive psychology and quantum computing at the UBC. Here he was trying to run past the findings of his doctorate with the peers. <u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“Tell me exactly where and when you lived in HK and let us attempt a simulation of the waves that transacted between the ‘Saa Yue’ spirit and grandpa”. “Do you at all recall what transpired between you two?” asked Allen. <u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“Grandpa could they talk our language. I recall asking”.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“Not really son”, he would say. “But they had some form of messaging even when they were far apart in time or space”.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“That is when I had my first inkling of entanglement between physics and biology’’.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“So, what was the ‘Saa Yue’ trying to communicate? I distinctly remember asking, I remember asking him”.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“The immediate grudge was the way humans behave with the sharks and how the craving for shark fin soup was decimating the specie. But overall, our obnoxious and catastrophic ways with nature”.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“She has even decoded my genes and predicts how you - my grandchild - would play a big role in rescuing the planet. There is also another set of genes in the process of manifesting in a youngster who you will partner by accident.”<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“That is got to be you, my friend”, said Ash!<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">There was no looking back since then. What bound the two climate warriors was the intensity of respective rage against the callous global leadership at large - hence their will to fix it themselves.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">The outbreak of first pandemic in Alaska coincided with Ash’s doctoral thesis which not only saw entanglement of physics and biology but underlying climate change as the common denominator. <u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">With quantum computing Ash reaffirmed his theory of COVID-19 and its linkage to the Great Alaskan Flu. The menace of plastic, rising temperature and all the mess caused by ongoing dumping into the oceans did not come in the way of communicating with the ‘Saa Yue’. To their surprise they realized that a unique QKD link already existed between the resilient Belugas of Pacific Northwest, Sunderbans Irrawaddy Dolphins and the ‘Saa Yue’. This time by sheer teleporting - the COVID was transplanted into the last of retracting Alaskan permafrost.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">Wuhan was a case of ‘partial’ teleporting as he realized. The deadly virus once replicated was dropped into the upper reaches of Yangtze - traversed to Wuhan in a free flow. The rest is history. Humans tend to have most blind spots when they are a cause of something. That Climate Change could be a cause of the deadly pandemic - was far beyond their imagination!<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">The connect with ‘Saa Yue’ was instant. “Delighted - you two are a dream team already”. “Yes, we used quantum cognition to simulate an irrational behavior only humans have it coded in their genome. We know how to crossover back to our original state - we are in a state of suspended mutation. No sooner we bring down the ‘shark fin soup craving’ human count to our target number, we shall revert to our normal. You two need to rewrite the quantum genetic algorithm to ensure a permanent crossover by humans and ensure the elimination of their irrational destructive tendencies. Good luck!”<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“Before you go, said Allen, we need to understand how would our algo be delivered to identified recipients?”<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">“You would have heard of viral vectors for gene therapy? We have a far advanced version than humans can ever imagine - will deploy it for all those humans desperately deserving this intervention. All for the sake of our Planet”.<u></u><u></u></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">Many months of toil whilst the Great Alaskan Flu raged - finally, the algo was ready to share. The response was delivered to Ash and Allen in their dreams: “Well-done boys!” Entangled, tunneled, and finally end to the chronic dissonance. They seemed to be building a whole new experiential vocabulary for a Brave New World of hope and joy. With the ‘alienation effect’ addressed, it was time for humans to resume the ‘rhythms of nature’.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;"><span style="color: lime;"><strong>NOTE TO READERS OF THIS BLOG:</strong></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;">Mr Gupta's many learned articles are published <a href="http://www.thediversityblog.com/">here</a>:</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 18pt;"><strong>And here at his blog: </strong><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 16pt;"><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.thediversityblog.com&source=gmail&ust=1591601145676000&usg=AFQjCNH-44B13XjNvKCZ43KtoqdvCGq3MQ" href="http://www.thediversityblog.com/" target="_blank"><strong>www.thediversityblog.com</strong></a><u></u><u></u></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt;">His twitter handle is <span style="color: cyan;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">@pgupta79</span> </span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-32589147038872676722020-06-03T00:20:00.003-07:002020-07-21T22:07:50.887-07:00''ECOTOPIA'' WAS AN EARLY CLI-FI NOVEL THAT WAS WAY AHEAD OF ITS TIME<span style="color: red;"><strong></strong></span><br />
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<span style="color: red;"><strong>THIS FLOATING POST HAS BEEN SLIGHTLY EDITED </strong></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><strong>FOR CLARITY AND AMPLIFICATION</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">''ECOTOPIA'' WAS AN EARLY UTOPIAN ''CLI-FI' NOVEL <span style="font-size: x-large;">THAT WAS WAY AHEAD </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">OF ITS TIME IN THE 1970s. FAST FORWARD TO 2020:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">AS EDITED BY OUR STAFFWRITER</span><br />
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<span class="s1">Berkeley CALIFORNIA in the early 1970s was a hotbed of hope. For Ernest Callenbach, a White science book editor, the hip and trendy city’s utopianism stood in stark contrast to reality. The scientists he published at the <strong>University of California Press</strong> were predicting environmental collapse from pollution and wildlife extinctions. Meanwhile, his marriage was unraveling. And yet Callenbach didn’t give in to despair; instead, he decided to remake the world.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Callenbach wrote an odd, awkward little <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">cli-fi novel</a> called <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/ecotopia/9780553348477" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i><span style="color: #7c7c7c;">Ecotopia</span></i></a>, about a near-future separatist nation comprising Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. <i>Ecotopia</i> was run by a female president, and its technology was entirely renewable, with an internet-like network linking everyone and carbon-neutral public transit. The region’s prisons had been shut down by Black activists and its economy converted into a stable-state system inspired by recycling. Involuntary homelessness was impossible, because giant 3-D printers extruded biodegradable buildings at no cost. Plus, everyone, Black and White, straight and gay, was having great, consensual sex.</span></div>
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Nobody wanted to publish the book. New York publishers thought it was too political and not very well written. According to a California literary critic, Callenbach had painstakingly fact-checked the science in the book, sending out each chapter to researchers for feedback. Unfortunately, he didn’t take the same care with his characters, who feel a little like wooden chess pieces moving through a narrative version of today's 2020 Green New Deal.</div>
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<span class="s1">And yet <i>Ecotopia</i> struck a chord with counterculture people hungry for a new vision of the future that didn’t involve scifi robot servants and scifi flying cars. Callenbach raised some money from friends and self-published 2,500 copies. The rest is a piece of nearly forgotten<a href="http://cli-fi.net/"> ''climate fiction''</a> history. He secured an endorsement for the book from Ralph Nader, who later ran for USA president on the Green Party ticket. <i>Ecotopia</i> sold almost 500,000 copies in the late 1970s, and the book’s political ideals strongly influenced activists, futurists, and environmentalists. And the counterculture of hippies and visionaries.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Callenbach’s blend of environmental justice politics and science visionaryism was characteristic of a utopian strand of <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">cli-fi with roots in America.</a> Ursula Le Guin and Stan Robinson are key figures in this tradition. As writers, they’re ruthlessly hopeful, imagining how humanity could right historical wrongs and build better societies in the long term. None of them try to conjure anything close to a perfect world—indeed, they often conjure horrific disasters—but their novels take us off the well-worn pathways that lead to dystopia and apocalypse.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Taking the path less traveled can be rough. Utopian writing has a bad reputation, mostly because it’s not particularly interesting to read about things that are going well. That’s why Le Guin and Robinson often focus on multigenerational narratives in which conflicts break out and get resolved over time. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">The extended time horizon also becomes a useful device in Robinson’s cli-fi epics <i>2312</i> and <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/new-york-2140/9780316262316" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><i><span style="color: #7c7c7c;">New York 2140</span></i></a>, which turn the slowness of the carbon cycle into action-packed adventures about coping with climate change. </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-40496385417198420102020-06-01T23:07:00.003-07:002020-06-19T00:17:48.179-07:00Cli-Fi as an instrument of global alarm<br />
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Cli-Fi as an instrument of global alarm</h1>
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by staff writer in Taiwan</div>
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In a recent address to the Global Landscape Orientation Forum’s digital climate change conference, cli-fi historian and promoter Dan Bloom called for cli-fi genre to be recognized as an instrument of global alarm.</div>
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What form might this recognition take? We don’t know yet, but Bloom offers a small clue in his address. </div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 1.125rem; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">Quoting Australian novelist Alexis Wright, Bloom offered this: "Storytellers and writers will need to dream big and will need endless courage, skill and dedication, she says. They will become more powerful by becoming tellers of "the universal local" who can focus not only on their own stories but on the realities of millions of people in a rapidly changing world."</span></div>
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"We will need the bravest of writers who will work the craft of writing to the bone," according to Wright. As she acknowledges, Bloom adds, it’s a mammoth task. Perhaps writers have never been so challenged. But the tone of Wright’s remarks were is optimistic and inspiring. Part white and part Aboriginal, Wright believes that writers can create new epics and new sagas, contribute to new ways of understanding what lies ahead, and that their literature can be a powerful instrument of persuasion.</div>
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With cli-fi, Bloom is calling for a new way of imagining the future in both novels and movies. For the planet’s sake, I hope literary critics and writers hear him.</div>
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</section>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-35955250869923853032020-05-28T18:22:00.000-07:002020-05-30T21:42:25.651-07:00American expat actor in Taiwan makes splash in Japanese-Taiwanese co-production of popular 3-part TV drama "Taiwan Express" now available with 3 episodes with English subtitles thanks to a group of global subbers in Tokyo: reruns NHK and PTS esp 1,2 and 3 June 14, 21, 28<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<img alt="Gary Gitchel" class="img-responsive" src="https://i.mydramalist.com/WBozRc.jpg" /> </div>
<span style="color: red;">Photo of Gary Gitchel </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: red;">Interview conducted by blogger Dan Bloom in Taiwan</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">RERUNS of show in Taiwan and Japan on June 14, 21 and 28, all 3 eps</span><br />
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<span style="color: red;">10 minute video of ''Taiwan Express''</span> TRAILER: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0astxpavIg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0astxpavIg</a><br />
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Exclusive interview with <a href="https://mydramalist.com/people/43249-gary-edward-gitchel">Gary Gitchel</a> in Taipei on this page: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqwefVFLNfw">in his own words,</a> the inside story on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIJjgpmZ-ro">how he got the gig</a>, how the drama was filmed and where, and why it's become a hit in Japan where actress Haru commands a huge fanbase there. NOTE: all 3 episodes are now available with English subtitles online at a free website. For details and links contact this blogger or leave query in comments below. <span style="color: red;">FREE ENGLISH SUBTITLES HERE:</span><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www2.dramacool.movie/ru-taiwan-express-episode-2.html&source=gmail&ust=1590983911192000&usg=AFQjCNFSMbnOVwDsvZy0jvVRKbQPR54RCw" href="https://www2.dramacool.movie/ru-taiwan-express-episode-2.html" target="_blank">https://www2.dramacool.movie/<wbr></wbr>ru-taiwan-express-episode-2.<wbr></wbr>html</a><br />
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MORE VIDEO OF SHOW HERE: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGE5Zt4Vi40">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGE5Zt4Vi40</a><br />
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<img alt="日劇】路~台灣特快人物介紹+劇情簡介@ 日劇推薦-非零分享:: 痞客邦::" class="n3VNCb" data-noaft="1" jsaction="load:XAeZkd;" jsname="HiaYvf" src="https://pic.pimg.tw/sabella/1588732248-2532814931.jpg" style="height: 470px; margin: 0px; width: 376px;" /><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial";"><strong>QUESTION:</strong> How did you get cast as Jack Bart and when was the audition? </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial";"></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial";"><span style="color: red;">2-minute video trailer of the TV show:</span> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpfAc7L9I3w">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpfAc7L9I3w</a></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><strong>GARY:</strong> I had just completed shooting the PTS TV series “Lady Butterfly” in September 2019. The casting director on that show, Benjamine Ho, called me one Friday afternoon in early October and asked me if I was free, something about a Japanese director. I threw on my business suit and took an Uber over to the production office in Xinyi District, knowing nothing about the show. Benjamine met me at the building entrance and hustled me up to a conference room. Details were basically exchanged in the elevator. I was escorted into a large room and there were about 10 or more Japanese producers from NHK. They had a translator explain the story to me and the scope of the project, explaining that we would shoot several months equally in Taiwan and Japan. The meeting went well, lasting about 45 minutes. I finally told the director “I’m your guy” and he came around the table and gave me a big hug. The whole thing was an actor’s dream. Although I am not 100% certain, I think that I was the only guy for the part of Jack that they ever saw. I never read the script or auditioned during that meeting, we just chatted. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial";">MORE VIDEO OF SHOW HERE: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbxhMaEgSZk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbxhMaEgSZk</a></span></div>
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<span class="im"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">QUESTION: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0astxpavIg">Who is Jack Bart in the TV show, his job in Taiwan for HSR? In the movie how old is Jack, and is he American or European? .</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GARY: There's an interesting evolution on Jack’s name. In the novel from 2012 that was written by a Japanese novelist and became the story for the TV series, in the 1st draft script, his name was ''Jacques Barth''. By the time an English translation script was delivered to me, he became "Jack Barth." In the credits and publicity materials it is Jack Bart -- I believe the Japanese side had some trouble pronouncing the “th”, it came out as a hard “t” in the filming when my name is used, and so it became “Bart”.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Taiwan High Speed Rail (HSR) was one the first public-private partnerships in the world and also the largest civil engineering project in the world at that time. The partnership bid out and hired many different engineering firms from around the world to work on various elements of the project. Jack Bart in the TV series, the part I play, is the general manager of that consortium. He was “the-buck-stops-here” guy. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the script it was never defined what Jack’s age was. Note that the timeline of the story is over 8 years. Jack is American in the series. The real-life character that Jack is based on was a Frenchman. I am 66, but have always looked younger. I still play 40 year olds all the time. They did dye my hair for the production, taking out all the grey….</span></div>
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<span class="im"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">QUESTION: How many weeks or months did filming last? </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GARY: Principal photography began in late November in Taipei. We shot in Taiwan at various locations until the first week of January 2020. Then production moved back to Japan. We shot all the interiors of the HSR boardroom at NHK Studios in Tokyo. Photography wrapped on February 28, 2020.</span></div>
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<span class="im"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">QUESTION: You spoke what sounded like Japanese in Episode 2. Did you read words from script in roman letters to do that scene? </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GARY: Actually, I did not speak any Japanese in the show. You may be referring to the scene in Episode 2 where I go ballistic on Anzai in the boardroom and jump up into his face. That was English, but I was so pissed off that I guess it might have sounded Japanese...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">QUESTION: Has there been any news of the TV show and you in USA newspapers or websites yet, like </span><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://thewrap.com/&source=gmail&ust=1590808057398000&usg=AFQjCNGFkEfr9pIgDt7VWptWvJoqFXpSSw" href="http://thewrap.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #1155cc;">thewrap.com</span></span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in Hollywood or the Los Angeles Times? Or in Japan in English language newspapers like The Japan Times or in Taiwan like The Taipei Times?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GARY: There has been no awareness of the show in the U.S. that I know of -- and I have been watching the trades. However, in Japan it seems to be developing into a phenom. Haru the star is extremely popular in Japan, I think kind of like a Julia Roberts type of image. You should check out the NHK feedback forums on the show. Lots and lots of fanboys and girls. Ah, Japan!...</span></div>
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<span class="im"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">QUESTION: Was the show mostly a NHK production or 50/50 with PTS TV in Taipei, Taiwan's public service network?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GARY: I don’t know the specific split on financing between NHK and PTS. However, the director was Japanese, the photography crew were all Japanese except for the “C” camera who were all Taiwanese. All the line producers were Japanese. Support services were all Taiwanese while shooting in Taiwan, but only the C camera crew traveled to Japan. </span></div>
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<span class="im"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">QUESTION: The experience of working on that high-profile TV series (high-profiled in Japan and Taiwan) must have been a personal high for you as an expat actor in Asia, no?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GARY: Definitely a very rewarding gig on many levels. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1) The part provided me a chance to do a deep dive into the HSR development history, along with additional research on the Shinkansen. There are actually a handful of Western guys still living in Taiwan who worked on the HSR, and they were an invaluable source of info. I love history and I love trains, having had the chance to ride the Shinkansen and the TGF during my life. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2) The Japanese production values and team were top-notch professionals. Everything was unbelievably efficient every day. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">3) The cast was excellent and a pleasure to work with. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">4) The challenge, oh, the challenges!! </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Language was a real thing on this set. The director spoke no English or Mandarin. So we all had translators/handlers. In my case she was trilingual. A typical day in Tokyo at NHK was: the director watched all the shooting in a control room on another floor. After each take, he would radio directions to the Assistant Director on the set. The AD would relay those directions to my translator. She would translate to me. If I needed clarification or had questions, the same chain would proceed in reverse. And then back again. Also, the Japanese actors that I worked with did not speak English. All their English lines were phonetically taught to them and they had a special guy on set to do only that. So improvisation was not really a thing on this set. The script had to be perfectly delivered or they would not know. When the Japanese guys mutter under their breath at me in a few scenes, I have no idea what they were saying. Interesting!</span></div>
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<span class="im"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">QUESTION: Before you retired in San Francisco and flew to Asia in 2014, what was your day job there before retiring?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GARY: I have been an actor my whole life in the U.S. My college degree was theater and I made my way to L.A. shortly after graduation. Basically in the 1970’s I was in LA, the 1980’s in New York and then San Francisco since 1990 until I left the States in 2014. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, the life of a journeyman actor is sometimes not sufficient income to make a good life; so I have been a fine dining maitre’d, general manager, wine consultant -- and in San Francisco I did some commercial real estate brokerage on and off. All the while doing TV commercials, voice work, Silicon Valley corporate films, bit parts in L.A. movies shooting in San Francisco, etc.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So there you have it! You might want to ask about my ''Taiwan Immigration Gold Card.'' I am the first professional actor in Taiwan to ever receive the Gold Card -- and that has provided many advantages leading to me developing the work I am doing here.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">QUESTION: Thank you Gary for taking the time to answer these questions. Congratuatlions of doing a great job in the movie. RERUNS of Part 1,2 and 3 in the series airs in Japan and in Taiwan on TV again on Saturdays, June 14, 21 and 28th at 8 pm in Tokyo and at 9 pm in Taipei.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GARY: Thank you for your interest in this!</span><br />
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<span class="im"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><i><b>Gary Gitchel</b></i></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span class="im"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"> SAG/AFTRA since 1978</span></span></div>
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<span class="im"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms"; font-size: x-large;">BONUS EXTRA: <br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=5YMD8EcbDWM&app=desktop">THE TV DRAMA THEME SONG, ENDING CREDITS in Japanese</a> and with English translation:</span></span></div>
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VIDEO OF ENDING SONG IN JAPANESE:<br />
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><span style="font-size: x-large;">"Connected Heart"</span> </span></span></div>
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><em>Lyrics: by Kumiko Tabuchi</em>
[translation by ''Mrs. Google'']</span></span></div>
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<strong>Born separately
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><strong>Deeper than a bond
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><strong>Hot thoughts
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Golden wind
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><strong>Blowing on the green earth
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><strong>Thoughts connected
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><strong>Connected dreams
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Oh, torn in the times
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><strong>Washed away
sadness
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><strong>Even if you lose everything
do not forget
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><strong>You and I</strong></span></span></div>
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<span class="im"><span lang="en"><strong>A heart that will be connected forever</strong></span></span></div>
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<span class="im"><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">『つながる心』</span> <span style="color: red;">作詞:田渕久美子</span></strong></span></div>
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<span class="im"><strong>別々に生まれても<br />共に生きるのだと<br />絆より深くなる<br />熱い思い<br /><br />金色の風<br /> 緑の大地に吹く<br /> つながる思い<br /> つながる夢<br /><br />ああ、時代に引き裂かれ<br />押し流され<br />悲しみ<br /> すべてをなくしても<br />忘れないで<br /><br /> あなたとわたしは<br />離さない 互いの手を<br />永久に つながる心を</strong></span><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-37547408315889710962020-05-28T02:06:00.000-07:002020-05-28T02:07:44.429-07:00Cli-fi movement temporarily sidelined by pandemic news, but sure to rebound when time is right See press release<br />
Http://Cli-fi-books.blogspot.comUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-9518274937640342562020-05-23T22:39:00.000-07:002020-05-30T21:35:57.945-07:00Exploring Taiwan's Political Culture and Body Language for the Taking of ''Oaths of Office''<span style="color: red;">WHAT IS THE PROPER ARM SALUTE FOR TAKING AN OATH OF OFFICE IN COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD AND IN PARTICULAR IN TAIWAN?</span> A friend in Germany posed this question. With special emphais on Taiwan's way of taking an oath of office for elected politicians nationwide. <strong>HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED THIS? SEE BELOW</strong><br />
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First, two recent photos from the front page of Apple Daily newspaper on May 21, the day after the second inauguration of President Tsai on May 20 to illustrate what Jesper told me.<br />
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<strong>LETTER TO EDITOR IN TAIPEI TIMES 5/31</strong><br />
<a href="https://taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2020/05/31/2003737335">https://taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2020/05/31/2003737335</a><br />
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<strong>DEAR EDITOR:</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>RE: Oath of office gesture</strong> <br />
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Elected and unelected politicians and national leaders in Taiwan have sworn the oath of office with the right arm raised at a 45° angle for more than 70 years, first introduced by Chiang Kai-Shek (蔣介石) in 1949, according to photos of him online. <br />
This Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) oath of office gesture was then used by presidents Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) and Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), according to photos available online. <br />
The gesture has become so normalized in the course of 70 years that even Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidents Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) used the same body language during their inaugurations without being aware that they were using a KMT political gesture, brought to Taiwan by Chiang. <br />
However, Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), in photos available online, used the oath gesture of the right hand raised in the same way as politicians in Japan, Europe and the US take the oath of office. <br />
Is it not time for the DPP to follow their own path and stop using the KMT oath of office gesture? The KMT can still use its own Chiang-inspired gesture, as it is part of KMT culture. However, the DPP needs to wake up and stop using the KMT oath gesture. <br />
signed ''Anonymous''<br />
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MORE PHOTO LINKS:<br />
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<a href="https://english.president.gov.tw/Page/251">https://english.president.gov.tw/Page/251</a><br />
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If the current style of body language for taking an oath of office in Taiwan was created by Chiang Kai-shek in China and brought the 45 degree raised arm style to Taiwan in 1949 and then the style was used by the KMT for 50 years until the DPP win election in 2000 to 2008 and again in 2016 to 2024, should President Tsai now that she is aware of the KMT history of the oath gesture stop using it herself and ask all DPP politicians to stop using and start using the traditional oath gesture used in Europe and the USA and by Sun Yat-sen himself long ago? Will she be persuaded to change her ways, Jesper asked.<br />
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<span style="color: red;"><strong>In Taiwan political culture, when politicians who take an ''oath of office'' as Tsai did on May 20, they raise right arm at 45 degree angle in what ''looks'' like to some foreign observers as a ''Nazi style" salute.</strong></span> <br />
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But that *cannot be the case as Taiwan has never had *anything to do with Nazi Germany of Hitler's time. Jesper sent me a photo of Tsai pictured in Apple daily front page. <span style="color: red;"><strong>''I've noticed this body language for oaths for many years as an friend and European observer of Taiwan,"</strong></span> Jesper told me. I was shocked! Could it be true? I looked again at the photos he sent me.<br />
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<strong>''Maybe this kind of oath of office body language was learned during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan for 50 years since Japan was ally of Nazi Hitler but I doubt it, "</strong> Jesper wrote.<br />
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<strong>''Or from KMT culture, following the way Chiang Kai-shek and his son and Lee Teng-hui executed their oaths under KMT rule. Have you ever noticed this? It is bad ''optics'' in international media. What do you think? I can send u photo if you don't believe me,"</strong> Jesper added.<br />
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<span style="color: red;">Another friend, this one an older Taiwanese man in Taipei told Jesper re this brouhaha</span>: "I have not noticed that ....but now that you mentioned it .....yes it seems what you said is true. This particular act could have ben started by the Chinese Nationalists KMT with those at the DPP following the precedents. So I am not sure about Taiwanese copying from the Japanese -- do Japanese take an oath of office with right hand at 45 degrees?"</div>
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<span style="color: red;"><strong>"Suffice it to say if the 45 degrees angle signifies the Nazi fashion then we shouldn't follow the evil regime's practice. Symbolism does matter,"</strong></span> Jesper said.</div>
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Jesper said he ''copied'' this issue and photos to a few acquaintances in Europe and Taiwan to see if anyone might know something.</div>
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<strong>''Taiwan was never a nation so it must have copied from the KMT or the Japanese, rather than its own making and intended to mimic the Nazi style,"</strong> the elderly Taiwanese man told Jesper. "We'll see what the responses are. <span style="color: red;">No matter what, I agree a person's rigjht arm should be raised perpendicularly at 90 degrees to avoid any misunderstanding in the international arena."</span></div>
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<strong>Jesper replied:</strong> "Yes I agree. Main thing is if enough people raise the issue, and without blaming anyone in particular because we don't know what happened in history to create this particular ROC oath of office body language style, maybe things can change. Yes raising the right hand in a perpendicular way is key here." <br />
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Jesper is the first person to bring up this sensitive issue and he said that nobody in Taiwan really cares. </div>
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<span style="color: red;">"It would be interesting if a newspaper or blog in the Chinese language in Taiwan or overseas raised this issue just to explore it,"</span> Jesper said. <span style="color: red;">"I wonder how the KMT and the DPP would react? If the Liberty Times or Apple Daily published an article in Chinese in Taipei it would get people thinking. But who would be brave enough to write it?"</span></div>
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COMMENTS ARE WELCOME, JESPER SAID, PRO OR CON. <br />
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HE SAID HE HAS NO AXE TO GRIND AND NO DOG IN THE FIGHT. BUT AS A FOREIGNER FROM GERMANY, HE IS CURIOUS WHAT OPINION IN TAIWAN AMONG TAIWANESE WOULD BE?<br />
RESEARCHERS EXPLAIN WITH PHOTOS:<br />
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<a href="https://www.360kuai.com/mob/transcoding?url=9de5655626a0b9411&cota=3&kuai_so=1&sign=360_7bc3b157&fbclid=IwAR0BEvpKYX8SUrKlgabosE2JLS7NS_NMI85nP5Vu84_2IHBA7NqFR72BTVs">https://www.360kuai.com/mob/transcoding?url=9de5655626a0b9411&cota=3&kuai_so=1&sign=360_7bc3b157&fbclid=IwAR0BEvpKYX8SUrKlgabosE2JLS7NS_NMI85nP5Vu84_2IHBA7NqFR72BTVs</a><br />
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<a href="https://freewechat.com/a/MzIxNTM2Nzg3MA==/2247495708/1?fbclid=IwAR3YpEDzA9Epv9sperRav3w-GZsSjP21Db4ifz6VJ3RgNp0wAGYMe3OQuzQ">https://freewechat.com/a/MzIxNTM2Nzg3MA==/2247495708/1?fbclid=IwAR3YpEDzA9Epv9sperRav3w-GZsSjP21Db4ifz6VJ3RgNp0wAGYMe3OQuzQ</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.epochtimes.com/b5/17/12/1/n9915698.htm/amp?fbclid=IwAR062pCOErQGrTdWhnVurmw_LRKtZ7VZZWnNTMqmp_ZiHyowFqBmjB0DEWk">https://www.epochtimes.com/b5/17/12/1/n9915698.htm/amp?fbclid=IwAR062pCOErQGrTdWhnVurmw_LRKtZ7VZZWnNTMqmp_ZiHyowFqBmjB0DEWk</a><br />
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<img alt="忐忑25年:蔣介石之後蔣經國是如何接班的? 歷史 第4張" src="http://5b0988e595225.cdn.sohucs.com/images/20181116/fd58a681d50942c6b90b66bac7204c33.jpeg" height="248" title="忐忑25年:蔣介石之後蔣經國是如何接班的? 歷史 第4張-尋夢新聞" width="320" /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-83897040730483355232020-03-10T23:21:00.002-07:002020-03-10T23:21:52.132-07:00🚨#journorequest🚨 <div class="gmail-TweetTextSize gmail-js-tweet-text gmail-tweet-text" lang="en">
<img alt="🚨" aria-label="Emoji: Police cars revolving light" class="gmail-Emoji gmail-Emoji--forText" height="28" src="https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f6a8.png" style="margin-right: 0px;" title="Police cars revolving light" unselectable="" width="28" /><a class="gmail-twitter-hashtag gmail-pretty-link gmail-js-nav" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/journorequest?src=hash"><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><s>#</s><b><strong>journorequest</strong></b></span></a><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><img alt="🚨" aria-label="Emoji: Police cars revolving light" class="gmail-Emoji gmail-Emoji--forText" height="33" src="https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f6a8.png" style="margin-right: 0px;" title="Police cars revolving light" unselectable="" width="33" /></span> I'm writing an article on 10 up-and-coming<a href="http://cli-fi.net/"> cli-fi</a> novelists (<span style="color: red;">published or </span><span style="color: lime;">unpublished</span>) to watch in 2020. I have 5 people on the list. I need 5 more to complete it. Do you know someone that you'd recommend? You? RSVP or email me at danbloom AT Gmail DOT com <a class="twitter-hashtag pretty-link js-nav" data-query-source="hashtag_click" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/journorequest?src=hash"><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><s>#</s><b>journorequest</b></span></a> <a class="twitter-hashtag pretty-link js-nav" data-query-source="hashtag_click" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/clifi?src=hash"><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><s>#</s><b>clifi</b></span></a> <a class="twitter-timeline-link" data-expanded-url="http://cli-fi.net" dir="ltr" href="https://t.co/tntilwQ4Pl" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" title="http://cli-fi.net"><span class="tco-ellipsis"></span><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><span class="invisible">http://</span><span class="js-display-url">cli-fi.net</span><span class="invisible"></span><span class="tco-ellipsis"><span class="invisible"> </span></span></span></a> <img alt="🌎" aria-label="Emoji: Earth globe americas" class="Emoji Emoji--forText" draggable="false" src="https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f30e.png" title="Earth globe americas" /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-59765320609465588242020-03-09T21:37:00.001-07:002020-03-09T21:37:09.179-07:00Meet Dylan C: host of the Knight Reader podcast<br />
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<span class="qu" role="gridcell" tabindex="-1"><span class="gD" data-hovercard-id="knightreadercast@yahoo.com" email="knightreadercast@yahoo.com" name="Dylan C"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Thread-000005b4-Id-00000014;">Dylan C</span></span> </span></h3>
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<span></span><span alt="Mar 10, 2020, 10:33 AM" class="g3" id=":j1" role="gridcell" tabindex="-1" title="Mar 10, 2020, 10:33 AM">10:33 AM (2 hours ago)</span><div aria-checked="false" aria-label="Not starred" class="zd bi4" jslog="20511; u014N:cOuCgd,Kr2w4b;" role="checkbox" style="outline: 0px;" tabindex="0" title="Not starred">
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<span class="hb"><span style="background-color: #737373;">to <span class="g2" data-hovercard-id="danbloom@gmail.com" dir="ltr" email="danbloom@gmail.com" name="me">me</span></span><span style="background-color: #737373;"> </span></span></div>
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Of course, I would love to answer any and all questions. You can also learn a lot about me on my linked in page, which i can send you the link of at the end of this email. </div>
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I am a parent, educator, and aspiring author, and dabble in many art forms, including sound design, podcast production, voice acting, multi instrumentalist, teacher and emotional development/music educator, and much more. The biggest thing i have going on at the moment is my podcast, which i host and produce by myself, called Knight Reader. It is a huge and central part of me and all that i do. It includes selfless promotion of incredible artists of all sorts, original music and voices, chats with authors, influencers, and readers from around the world. I also bring classic novels to life, such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick, with fully realized characters and themes for them all. I also provide in depth analysis that anyone can understand, and flesh the story out in a way that anyone can understand and ride along with! I really bring these books to life, and it is an endeavor i will never quit. I have many ambitions, some including non profits that i have attempted to start up, one being called "Books for Villages". In speaking with a small village in Belize, i learned that there are many young people there who love to read but do not have access to books or educational/art tools and supplies. This really spoke to me, and so i started the gofundme non profit for the cause last year. It has not picked up steam as of yet, though. As far as my writing journey, i have been reading and writing since a very young age, and have attempted writing stories for as long as i can remember. I entered and was included in the winners bracket of my first poetry contest when i was in fifth grade. I have been inspired greatly by authors and writers such as but not limited to, Richard Bach, Herman Melville, JK Rowling, Edgar Allen Poe, Dylan Thomas, John Steinbeck, and more. Musically, i dabble in many genres and instruments, from classical, flamenco, to blues and country. I have volunteered for over a year in pre school level class rooms, teaching children about emotions and music. It has been very rewarding for me, personally. My day job consists of a job of acting/educating middle school children in San Fransisco, on the historical Hyde St. Pier. I work for the maritime museum of SF, where many ancient vessels are harbored. Every day a class of children visits for an overnight trip aboard an ancient vessel, where i act as a sailor from 1906, whilst educating them, teaching them life skills and so much more. It has been an absolutely incredible adventure for me! </div>
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I have two children, both of which i had at a very young age, and though they both have their different special needs, my son is on the lower scale of the autism spectrum. </div>
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Being a young parent and working through these difficulties, learning, growing, and coping, have been the most difficult and special years of my life. I have been greatly inspired to write children's books, and parenting books, as well as very ambitious works of literary fiction that i would like to publish at some point. They vary greatly in subject and style, one of my works being based on my experiences growing up, and focusing on loss of faith and will to live. All of my future publications are still in the works, along with a great project with artists from all around the world. I am putting together collections of incredible art that flies under the radar, underappreciated artists that inspire me greatly, so much so, that i write poetry in theme of their art. I will be publishing this collection, which will be crowdfunded, some time late this year. I have yet to announce the title and crowd funding page. However, i plan to do so very soon, and i would be a great help to me if you could help spread that word, because in my heart my biggest goal is to inspire many. To change lives. To speak to souls young and old, to educate, and broaden horizons. To be a voice for the youth of today, and helping people get passed their apprehensions of creating their art, whatever it is. This is what my podcast and all that i do revolves around. I private publishing company will be publishing it, and i have not stuck with one yet. As i said, i will let you know the name and intended release very soon! My target audience varies greatly, but includes youth, young adults, young parents, parents of children with special needs and people with special needs. </div>
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For the collection of poetry and art, my target audience is the world. The book on Autism will be a parenting/children hybrid, meant to be read by both a child and a parent, to help better understand the family dynamic. The parenting ones will be picture books targeted at adults, and some of my picture books will be just for children. Thank you so much for letting me share myself with you, and i can answer any more questions you would like to know. I really appreciate you reaching out to me. Thank you so much, </div>
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Dylan C, Knight Reader. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-84202492202698563582020-03-08T20:17:00.000-07:002020-03-08T20:17:28.059-07:00Is feel-bad TV exploiting popular fears about environmental and social disaster? By Cli-Fi Maven Lauren Carroll Harris in OZ on The Screen Show<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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''Is feel-bad TV exploiting popular fears about environmental and social disaster?'' asks a veteran TV critic in OZ</h1>
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By Lauren Carroll Harris on The Screen Show</div>
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<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">Lauren Carroll Harris on the island of Australia </span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-18u37iz r-1q142lx r-1qd0xha r-1b6yd1w r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; flex-direction: row; flex-shrink: 0; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;"></span></div>
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<div class="css-901oao css-bfa6kz r-1re7ezh r-18u37iz r-1qd0xha r-a023e6 r-16dba41 r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" dir="ltr" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #657786; display: inline; flex-direction: row; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;">
<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">@DrLaurenCH</span></div>
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<div class="css-901oao r-hkyrab r-1qd0xha r-a023e6 r-16dba41 r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" data-testid="UserDescription" dir="auto" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14171a; display: inline; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">TV critic </span><span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1n1174f r-1loqt21 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" data-focusable="true" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23TheScreenShow&src=hashtag_click" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">#TheScreenShow</a></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">, Thursdays, </span><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">
<span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1n1174f r-1loqt21 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" data-focusable="true" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/RadioNational" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@RadioNational</a></span></div>
<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">. I curate Prototype & write for </span><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">
<span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1n1174f r-1loqt21 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" data-focusable="true" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/kyd_magazine" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@kyd_magazine</a></span></div>
<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">, </span><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">
<span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1n1174f r-1loqt21 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" data-focusable="true" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/satpaper" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@satpaper</a></span></div>
<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">, </span><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">
<span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1n1174f r-1loqt21 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" data-focusable="true" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/Cineaste_mag" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@Cineaste_mag</a></span></div>
<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">, </span><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;">
<span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1n1174f r-1loqt21 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" data-focusable="true" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/TheBafflermag" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@TheBafflermag</a></span></div>
<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;"> web.</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/the-screen-show/dystopian/12016114">https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/the-screen-show/dystopian/12016114</a></div>
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<span style="color: #3b3b3c;">She tweets: </span><span style="color: blue;">''<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Handmaid's Tale just began production on its fourth season having exhausted the plot of Atwood's original behind three series ago. The showrunner intends on ten seasons of this mother/hero's journey....good grief.''</span></span></div>
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LAUREN tweets to Aussie pal Mireille Juchau, <a href="http://northwardho.blogspot.com/">cli-fi novelist and author of THE WORLD WITHOUT US </a>after Mireille praised Lauren: ''<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">This was terrific Lauren, thank you. I too have wondered why the climate crisis isn't appearing in TV drama (though The Commons addresses it). It's surely the backdrop to all our contemporary stories - no longer a dystopian future but a very real present...''</span></div>
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<div dir="auto" id="m_-5051298840004488690gmail-tweet-reply-context" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #657786; display: inline; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/MireilleJuchau&source=gmail&ust=1583809045106000&usg=AFQjCNFaYaLUxKtHOvHjfM2j8wC1V7fOqQ" href="https://twitter.com/MireilleJuchau" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">@MireilleJuchau</span></a></div>
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<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/ArtsonRN&source=gmail&ust=1583809045106000&usg=AFQjCNFDTYJpE-_EzUH_1_IwQDwy_EVkAA" href="https://twitter.com/ArtsonRN" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">@ArtsonRN</span></a></div>
<span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;"><span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">和</span></span> <div style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-flex; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/RMIT&source=gmail&ust=1583809045106000&usg=AFQjCNFjuVF-CmAsFvj0gbyXZTo90LGo4g" href="https://twitter.com/RMIT" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">@RMIT</span></a></div>
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<div dir="auto" id="m_-5051298840004488690gmail-tweet-text" lang="en" style="background-color: #f5f8fa; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">thank you! tbh </span><span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;"><span style="color: red;">The World Without Us</span></span><span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;"> would make for a more nuanced onscreen </span><span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;"><a href="http://cli-fi.net/">cli-fi</a></span><span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;"><a href="http://cli-fi.net/"> (a term I just adore!)</a> story than </span><span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;"><span style="color: blue;">The Commons</span></span><span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;"> but I wouldn't want it subjected to the industrial storytelling practices of the prestige TV hellscape ;-)</span></div>
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Mireille Juchau then tells Lauren in a Tweet:</div>
<div dir="auto" id="m_9143814378570992205gmail-tweet-text" lang="en" style="background-color: #f5f8fa; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14171a; display: inline; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: xx-large; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
<span style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">Ah! [My novel] is in the works [for a TV show], so fingers crossed.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3b3b3c; font-family: ABCSans, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-69750304266854172932020-03-08T19:49:00.000-07:002020-03-09T21:55:52.593-07:00The French Army is recruiting SF writers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://www.nouvelobs.com/bibliobs/20200308.OBS25760/quand-l-armee-recrute-des-auteurs-de-science-fiction-pour-anticiper-sur-les-prochaines-guerres.html">https://www.nouvelobs.com/bibliobs/20200308.OBS25760/quand-l-armee-recrute-des-auteurs-de-science-fiction-pour-anticiper-sur-les-prochaines-guerres.html</a><br />
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Jean-Marc Ligny -- French <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">cli-fi</a> novelist NEWS: <br />
<span style="color: red;">ENGLISH TRANSLATION HERE: scroll down to see full French text, too:</span><br />
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<em>"French sci-fi noveliist Jean-Marc Ligny has thus become the French representative of an emerging sub-genre that intends to give substance to ecological upheavals: <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">climate fiction</a>. »</em><br />
<br /><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">The Obs magazine in France </span></strong><br />
<strong>reported by Remi Royon in Paris</strong><br />
<br /><em>Born in 1956 in Paris, Jean-Marc Ligny published his first novel, Temps blanc, in 1979. He won the Prix de l'Imaginaire in 1997 for Inner city (J'ai lu), the Rosny-Aîné prize in 1999 for Jihad (L'Atalante) and in 2007 for Aqua TM (L'Atalante), and the Prix européens des Utopiales in 2013 for Exodes (L'Atalante). He lives and works in Brittany.</em><br />
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<em><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">TEXT BEGINS:</span></strong></em><br />
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It's true, there are models, forecasts, multi-year plans, curves, plans, objectives, reports and timetables. But if we project ourselves into 2050 or 2100, on one of these round but worrying dates, our gaze becomes blurred, the curves unravel, everything becomes fuzzy, soft and malleable. And so, at the end of June 2019, the employees of Eau de Paris, which supplies drinking water to three million people, saw a strange guy with long hair and rolled cigarettes arrive. Jean-Marc Ligny, that's his name, came to take part in a mini-seminar called "Foresight, science fiction and the future of water". It was hot, Paris was in the middle of a heat wave and the writer - author of about fifty SF and fantasy novels - used scary words with the precision of a librarian: "overpopulated Paris", "plundering of fire hydrants", "heat waves". With their heads in "Mad Max" and the reports of the IPCC, the participants quickly added to the catastrophe fiction. "Each time someone spoke, it was to evoke a new drama. What if the water was polluted by bacilli? What if we had to introduce rationing? "recalls Benjamin Gestin, the operator's managing director. At the end of the day, a dozen people wanted to continue the exercise, to clear the future, by signing up for a writing workshop led by Jean-Marc Ligny.<br />
The choice of the man was not entirely random. In the world of SF, Ligny, 63, is identified as an author who "transforms the dryness of numbers into stories," says Roland Lehoucq, who presides over the Les Utopiales festival in Nantes. After trying to become a rock guitarist and then writing youth novels and big space operas, Ligny experienced an "anxiety-provoking" descent while reading the reports of the Giec. "In the 1950s, SF was marked by the prospect of a nuclear holocaust. But it was still a potential risk, a hazard, a weapon in human hands... Here, global warming is launched, massive, inevitable. The writing is changed: difficult to imagine ultra-technical futures on distant planets, when the viability of the Earth is no longer assured," he says at home, near Redon, in a shanty a little dark, packed on itself, heated with wood. Absorbing essays and scientific articles, Ligny has concocted a climate series in four acts. In Aqua TM (2006), he describes a planet with a degraded rainfall, prey to millennialist sects and voracious consortiums. Exodus (2012) is even more twilightly twilightly, although a Davos under a bell allows the elite to live in peace. Seeds (2015) marks the aftermath of the disaster, the human apogee being only a memory. Alliances, which appears these days, is a little more cheerful since there are still "oases and local microclimates" that "have allowed life to take shelter and even to develop"... Ligny has thus become the French representative of an emerging sub-genre, which intends to give substance to ecological upheavals: <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">climate fiction.</a><br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">The French Army is recruiting SF writers</span></strong><br />
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Let's zoom out. While Ligny was learning about the albedo effect (the Earth's reflective power) or the fragility of the Dutch polders, something strange happened: economists, engineers and prospectors of all kinds lost their vista. Their indicators appeared too cramped and their recipes were outdated. Suddenly they were no longer trusted to talk about a turbulent future of forest fires, migration and rising waters, not to mention the terrifying tipping points (melting permafrost, stopping the Gulf Stream, etc.) that could create a radically different planet.<br />
Faced with uncertainty, more and more institutions have turned to the imagination. Even the army has launched a public contract to recruit a "Red Team", a cell of writers responsible for "designing and rendering scenarios of adversity and threats for the period 2030 to 2060". The first "deliverables" should be ready by the end of the year: "Of course, we have teams that are wary of future threats. <br />
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What will the melting of the ice and the opening up of waterways in the Arctic change to the major geostrategic balances? How will droughts in the Sahel shape conflicts, etc.? We are also adapting our equipment to global warming or to the scarcity of certain resources," says the army. But, in this case, the aim is to challenge this work with a different perspective. If a new Jules Verne could imagine threats that we hadn't thought of, we would be happy. "For authors like Ligny, who has proposed his candidacy, a new activity is opening up. A quick survey confirms the trend. Catherine Dufour, author of some fifteen novels: "It all started with the French Environment and Energy Management Agency: in 2014, they decided that I knew something about construction, about the materials of the future. Since then, I have been receiving requests every day for conferences, presentations, etc. I'm very happy with the results. "Claude Ecken, a writer based in Béziers: "For an association that brings together European landscapers, town planners and farmers, I have written about climate change in Provence. It's true, we are increasingly solicited, which in my opinion reflects the general embarrassment: institutions sometimes contact us as if we were going to come up with a miracle solution... "The CNRS, the Museum of Natural History, the National Agency for the Management of Radioactive Waste, and many others, have recently called on the SF.<br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;">Should French President Macron read SF?</span></strong><br />
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Two years ago, a course entitled "Science fiction, a tool for thinking about the world and the future" was introduced at Sciences-Po. One of the teachers is Roland Lehoucq, who sees it as a way of acclimatizing elected officials to scientific issues they have little mastery of. "In addition to the problems of the world, SF, in addition to highlighting its moulds, shifts the cognitive frameworks, in the vein of 18th century philosophical tales, such as Voltaire's "Micromégas"," he points out, <span style="color: red;">echoing Emmanuel Macron, who recently indicated that he does not read SF.</span> In Hors des décombres du monde (Champ Vallon, 2018), Yannick Rumpala even goes so far as to write that "faced with a rhetorical confinement of reality in the absence of an alternative to the system that has become dominant", SF is a way of "reminding us that there is a plurality of possible futures".<br />
Thus, one can imagine what would happen if we genetically modify elephants to make them produce energy (The Automaton Girl), what would be a green despotism (The Wess'har Wars), the reconversion of our infrastructures after the end of oil (Pacific Edge), a world based on low tech technologies (The Rising Wave), etc. SF makes us dream, explores ideas by stripping them of technical jargon, but can it open up avenues that would have eluded futurologists? The boss of Eau de Paris, a former literature teacher, is convinced of this. Reading the short stories written by his colleagues, Benjamin Gestin was surprised by the role given to religious sects or water mafias: "When we talk about drought, an engineer will think 'dimensioning'. How much water should we find? How many trucks to transport it? A SF author, for his part, will immediately pose the problem from the point of view of power and control: who decides how the resource is distributed? "This experience pushes him to work on the "governance" of water, for example with a "participatory budget".<br />
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Scientists are also interested in the contribution of SF. While preparing <strong>Seeds</strong>, Jean-Marc Ligny wrote to paleoclimatologist Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a member of the IPCC. She invited him to her lab in Gif-sur-Yvette. "It was fascinating. We talked about marine fauna, California, the degassing of permafrost... The scientists went wild. They're never encouraged like this to imagine the future world without epistemological precautions. "More recently, a dozen or so researcher-author pairs have come together for an anthology entitled "Our futures" (to be published in June). The result?" We lack the stories to make these futures, desired or suffered, our own. "Of course, this collaboration is not without friction. "Scientists tell stories in dotted lines or probabilities, but a story is not going to take you to a garden where there is an X% chance that a particular flower has disappeared," explains writer Catherine Dufour, who exchanges prickly e-mails with an INRA researcher in an attempt to understand which plants will survive in overheated cities. As for Ligny, he is working on CO2 capture and storage. His partner, a geologist, is promoting this technology, which is "completely controllable", and which would make it possible to capture carbon dioxide at the outlet of industrial chimneys and bury it in the ground. Ligny is less convinced: "I imagined a distant future where carbon would come up from deep geological layers. Everybody has forgotten that it is stored there. The leak causes deaths, and the valley appears mysteriously cursed. »<br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;">Solutions to the world's problems</span></strong><br />
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Listening to him, one thinks that his pessimism is a professional deformation. "It's easier to do a good "post apo" and make everything go to hell than to write utopias," he admits. Fearing that catastrophism will demobilize the troops, ecologists are taking part in Bright Mirror writing evenings to build "a bright future" ... Following the movement, Ligny bought an essay on "the hundred most effective solutions to fight global warming". In front of his computer, he shows the sketch of a forthcoming novel "turned towards solutions". He has imagined six tribes, six ways of looking at the world: technophiles who invent user-friendly tools, survivalists who bunker with freeze-dried boustifaille, primitivo-anarchists who return to the state of hunter-gatherers, etc. He has also imagined six tribes, six ways of looking at the world.<br />
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This attention to detail is all the more important as FS can migrate into the real world. In 2011, on behalf of a subcontractor of the Post Office, Ligny imagines a digitalized France where the postman becomes the only social link (monetized). The company has since launched the "Watch over my parents" service, based on "regular postman's visits and remote assistance".<br />
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Is there a cause and effect relationship? I don't know," says Ligny, "but I've been wondering. <br />
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"In the climate department, self-fulfilling prophecies are even scarier. The SF has always imagined other planets with liveable atmospheres. Today, geoengineering is about artificially controlling the climate. It is studying, with varying degrees of seriousness, the modification of the Earth's orbit, the spraying of nanoparticles to reflect the Sun's rays, the genetic engineering of humans to make them smaller and emit less CO2 (yes, yes). <span style="color: red;">The flight of fancy may not be on the side we think it is.</span><br />
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<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">END</span><br />
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L'Obs n°2887 05/03/2020<br />
Rémi Royon<br />
Published on March 6, 2020 <br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">FRENCH TEXT:</span></h1>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">C’est vrai, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">il </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">y </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">a </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">des modélisations, des prévisions, des p<span style="font-weight: 400;">lanifications </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">pluriannuelles,</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> des courbes, des </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">plans, des </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">objectifs, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">des</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> rapports et </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">des </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">calendriers. Mais si </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">l</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">'</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">on se</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> projette en 2050 ou en 2100, à l'une de ces dates rondes, mais inquiétantes, le regard se brouille, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">les </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">courbes s'effilochent, tout devient flou, mou et malléable. Et c'est ainsi que, fin </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">juin 2019, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">les salariés d'Eau de </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Paris, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">qui approvisionne en eau potable trois millions de personnes, ont vu </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">débar</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">quer </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">un </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">drôle de type, aux cheveux </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">longs </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">et aux cigarettes roulées. Jean-Marc Ligny, c'est son nom, venait p</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">articiper à </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">un mini</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">-</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">séminaire baptisé « La prospective, la science-fiction et </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">les </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">lendemains de l'eau». Il faisait chaud, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Paris </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">était en pleine canicule et l'écrivain </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">- </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">auteur d'une cinquantaine de romans de SF et de </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">fantasy</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">a égrené des mots qui font peur avec une précision de </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">bibliothécaire : </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">« Paris surpeuplée », « pillage des bouches d’incendies », « chaleurs caniculaires ». </span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">La tête dans </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">« </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mad Max </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">» </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">et les rapports du Giec, les participants en ont vite rajouté </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">dans la </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">fiction catas</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">trophe. « Chaque fois que quelqu’un prenait la parole, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">c’était pour évoquer un nouveau drame. Et si les eaux étaient polluées par des bacilles? Et si l'on devait instaurer un rationnement? » se souvient Benjamin Gestin, le directeur général de l'opérateur. A l'issue de la journée, une douzaine de personnes ont voulu poursuivrel'exercice, débroussailler le futur, en s'inscrivant à un atelier d'écriture animé par Jean-Marc Ligny.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Le choix du bonhomme ne tenait pas tout à fait au hasard. Dans l'univers de la SF, Ligny, 63 ans, est identifié comme un auteur qui « transforme la sécheresse des nombres en histoires», dixit Roland Lehoucq, qui préside à Nantes le festival Les Utopiales. Après avoir tenté de devenir guitariste rock puis écrit des romans jeunesse et de bon gros space operas, Ligny a connu une descente « anxiogène » en lisant les rapports du Giec. « Dans les années 1950, la SF était marquée par la perspective d'un holocauste nucléaire. Mais cela restait un risque potentiel, un aléa, une arme entre les mains d'humain… Là, le réchauffement est lancé, massif, inévitable. L'écriture en est modifiée : difficile d'imaginer des futurs ultra-technicisés, sur des planètes lointaines, quand la viabilité de la Terre n'est plus assurée », raconte-t-il chez lui, près de Redon, dans une bicoque un peu sombre, tassée sur elle-même, chauffée au bois. Absorbant essais et articles scientifiques, Ligny a concocté une série climatique en quatre actes. Dans </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aqua TM</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (2006), il décrit une planète à la pluviométrie déglinguée, en proie à des sectes millénaristes et des consortiums voraces. </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Exodes</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (2012) est plus crépusculaire encore, même si un Davos sous cloche permet à l'élite de vivre au calme. </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Semences</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (2015) marque l'après-catastrophe, l'apogée humain n'étant plus qu'un souvenir. </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Alliances,</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;"> qui paraît ces jours-ci, est un poil plus joyeux puisqu'il reste des « oasis et des microclimats locaux » qui « ont permis à la vie de s'abriter, voire de se développer »... Ligny est ainsi devenu le représentant français d'un sous-genre émergent, qui entend donner corps aux bouleversements écologiques : la climate fiction.</span></div>
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<strong>Armée française recrute écrivains</strong></div>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Dézoomons. Pendant que Ligny se renseignait sur </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">l'effet </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">albédo (le pouvoir réfléchissant de la Terre) ou la fragilité des polders néerlandais, quelque chose d'étrange s'est produit : les économistes, ingénieurs et prospectivistes de toutes sortes ont perdu leur vista. Leurs indicateurs sont apparus trop cravatés, leurs recettes </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">éculées. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Soudain</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">on ne leur faisait plus confiance pour parler d'un </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">avenir </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">agité de feux de forêt, de migrations et de montée des eaux</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">sans compter </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">les </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">terrifiants points de bascule (fonte du permafrost, arrêt </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">du </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gulf Stream, etc.) qui pourraient créer une planète radicalement différente</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Confrontées à l'incertitude, de plus en plus d'institutions se sont tournées vers l'imaginaire. Même l'armée a lancé </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">un </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">mar</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ché </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">public pour recruter une « Red Team </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">», </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">une cellule d'écrivains, chargée de « </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">concevoir et restituer des scénarios </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">d 'adversité </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">et de menaces à l'horizon 2030 à 2060 </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">». </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Des premiers « </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">livrables » </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">doivent être prêts pour la </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">fin </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">de l'année : </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">« </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nous avons bien sûr des équipes qui réfiéchissent aux menaces futures. Qu'est- ce que la fonte </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">des </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">glaces et l'ouverture de voies navigables en Arctique va changer aux grands équilibres </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">géostratégiques </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">? </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Comment les </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">sécheresses au </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sahel vont-elles modeler </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">les </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">conflits</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">etc. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">? </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nous adaptons aussi nos matériels au réchauffement ou à la </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">rareté </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">de certaines ressources</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">résume-t-on du </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">côté de </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">l'armée. M</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ais</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">en l'espèce</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">l'objectif est de challenger ces travaux </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">avec </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">un autre regard. Si un nouveau Jules V</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">e</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">rne pouvait imaginer des </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">menaces </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">auxquelles nous n</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">'</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">avons pas pensé, nous serions contents. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">» </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pour les auteurs comme Ligny, qui a proposé sa candidature, une nouvelle activité s'ouvre. Un rapide coup de sonde confirme la </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">tendance. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Catherine Dufour</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">auteure </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">d'une quinzaine de romans :</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">« </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ça a commencé avec l’Agence de l'Environnement </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">et de la </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Maîtrise </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">de l'Energie </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">: en 2014, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ils </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ont décidé </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">que </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">je m</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">'</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">y </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">connaissais </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">en </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">construction, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">en </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">matériaux du </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">futur. Depuis, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">je </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">reçois </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">tous les jours </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">des sollicitations pour </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">des </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">colloques, des interventions, etc. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">» </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Claude Ecken, écrivain </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">basé </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">à Béziers : </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">« </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pour </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">une association qui réunit </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">des </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">paysagistes, urbanistes et agricul</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">teurs </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">européens, j'ai mis en </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">récit </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">l</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">'</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">évolution climatique de </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">la </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pro</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">vence. C'est vrai, nous sommes de plus en plus sollicités, ce qui traduit à mon sens l'embarras général : les institutions nous contactent parfois comme si nous allions dégainer une solution miracle... » Le CNRS, le Muséum d'Histoire naturelle, l’Agence nationale pour la Gestion des Déchets radioactifs, et plein d'autres, ont récemment fait appel à la SF.</span></div>
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<strong>Macron devrait-il lire de la SF</strong></div>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Il y a deux ans, un </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">cours </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">intitulé « La </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">science-fiction, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">outil pour penser le monde et envisager </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">l'avenir </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">» </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">a été introduit à Sciences-Po. L'un des </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">enseignants </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">est Roland Lehoucq, qui y voit une façon d'acclimater </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">les </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">élus à des enjeux scientifiques qu'ils maîtrisent peu. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">« </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">La SF, outre </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">les </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">problèmes </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">du </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">monde</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">met en</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> relief </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ses moisissures, déplace </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">les </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">cadres cognitifs, dans la veine des</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">contes philosophiques </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">du XVIIIe </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">siècle, comme le "Micromégas" de Voltaire », s</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ouligne-t-il comme en écho </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">à </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Emmanuel Macron, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">qui a </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">récemment </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">fait </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">savoir q</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">u'il ne lisait pas de SF. Dans <em>Hors des décombres du monde</em> (Champ Vallon, 2018), Yannick Rumpala va même jusqu'à écrire que « face à un enfermement rhétorique du réel dans une absence d'alternative au système devenu dominant », la SF est une manière de « rappeler qu'il y a une pluralité de futurs envisageables ».</span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Ainsi, on peut imaginer ce qui se passerait si nous modifions génétiquement des éléphants pour leur faire produire de l'énergie (<em>La Fille automate</em>), ce que serait un despotisme vert (<em>Les Guerres Wess'har</em>), la reconversion de nos infrastructures après la fin du pétrole (<em>Pacific Edge</em>), un monde fondé sur des technologies low tech (<em>La Vague montante</em>), etc. La SF fait rêver, explore des idées en les dépouillant du jargon technique, mais peut-elle dégager des pistes qui auraient échappé aux futurologues ? Le patron d'Eau de Paris, ancien prof de lettres, en est persuadé. En lisant les nouvelles écrites par ses collègues, Benjamin Gestin a été surpris du rôle donné à des sectes religieuses ou à des mafias de l'eau : « Lorsqu'on évoque la sécheresse, un ingénieur va penser "dimensionnement". Quel volume d'eau doit-on trouver ? Combien de camions pour l'acheminement ? Un auteur de SF, lui, va tout de suite poser le problème sous l'angle du pouvoir, du contrôle : qui décide comment la ressource est distribuée ? » Cette expérience le pousse à travailler sur la « gouvernance » de l'eau, par exemple avec « un budget participatif ».</span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">L'apport de la SF intéresse aussi les scientifiques. Alors qu'il préparait </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Semences</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Jean-Marc Ligny a écrit à la paléoclimatologue Valérie Masson-Delmotte, membre du Giec. Celle-ci l'a invité dans son labo de Gif-sur-Yvette. « C'était fascinant. On a parlé de la faune marine, de la Californie, du dégazage du permafrost… Les scientifiques se sont lâchés. Jamais ils ne sont encouragés, comme cela, à imaginer le monde futur en laissant tomber les précautions épistémologiques. » Plus récemment, une dizaine de binômes chercheurs-auteurs se sont réunis pour une anthologie baptisée « Nos futurs » (publication prévue en juin). Le constat ? « Nous manquons de récits pour nous approprier ces futurs, souhaités ou subis. » Bien sûr, cette collaboration ne va pas sans frictions. « Les scientifiques racontent en pointillé ou en probabilités , mais un récit ne va pas vous emmener dans un jardin où il y a X% de chances que telle fleur ait disparu », explique l'écrivaine Catherine Dufour, qui échange des e-mails piquants avec un chercheur de l'Inra pour tenter de comprendre quelles plantes subsisteront dans des villes surchauffées. Quant à Ligny, il travaille sur le captage et stockage du CO2. Sa binôme, géologue, promeut cette technologie, « tout à fait maîtrisable », qui permettrait de piéger le dioxyde de carbone à la sortie des cheminées industrielles, et de l'enfouir dans le sol. Ligny est moins convaincu : « J'ai imaginé un futur lointain où le carbone remonte depuis les couches géologiques profondes. Tout le monde a oublié qu'il était stocké là. La fuite provoque des morts, et la vallée apparaît mystérieusement maudite. »</span></div>
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<strong>Des solutions aux problèmes de la planète</strong></div>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">À l'écouter, on se dit que son pessimisme relève de la déformation professionnelle. « Il est plus facile de faire un bon "post apo" et de tout déglinguer que d'écrire des utopies », reconnaît-il. Craignant que le catastrophisme démobilise les troupes, des écolos participent d'ailleurs à des soirées d'écriture Bright Mirror pour construire « un avenir lumineux »... Suivant le mouvement, Ligny a acheté un essai sur « les cent solutions les plus efficaces pour lutter contre le réchauffement climatique ». Devant son ordinateur, il montre l'esquisse d'un prochain roman « tourné vers les solutions ». Il a imaginé six tribus, six façons d'appréhender le monde : des technophiles qui inventent des outils conviviaux, des survivalistes qui se bunkérisent avec de la boustifaille lyophilisée, des primitivo-anarchistes qui reviennent à l'état de chasseurs-cueilleurs, etc.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Cette attention aux détails est d'autant plus importante que la SF peut migrer dans la réalité. En 2011, pour le compte d'un sous-traitant de La Poste, Ligny imagine une France numérisée où le facteur devient le seul lien social (monétisé). L'entreprise a depuis lancé le service « Veiller sur mes parents », fondé sur « les visites régulières du facteur et la téléassistance ». Y a-t-il un lien de cause à effet? « Je n'en sais rien, dit Ligny, mais je me suis posé la question. » Au rayon climat, les prophéties autoréalisatrices sont encore plus flippantes. Depuis toujours, la SF imagine doter d'autres planètes d'une atmosphère vivable. Aujourd'hui, la géo-ingénierie veut contrôler artificiellement le climat. Elle étudie, avec plus ou moins de sérieux, la modification de l'orbite terrestre, la pulvérisation de nanoparticules pour réfléchir les rayons du Soleil, le bricolage génétique des humains pour qu'ils soient plus petits et émettent moins de CO2 (oui, oui). La fuite dans l'imaginaire n'est peut-être pas du côté que l'on</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> croit</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-weight: 400;">L’Obs n°2887 05/03/2020</span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">by Rémi Royon</span></strong></span></div>
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<div class="press-review__date">
<strong><span style="font-size: x-large;"> Publié le 6 mars 2020</span></strong> </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-44582346829027889442020-03-07T21:49:00.000-08:002020-03-09T05:26:37.342-07:00lauren groff vs the preppers -- an online brouhaha that will have no end?"Look, climate change is the greatest problem of our time,<span style="color: red;"> the thing that is probably going to kill humanity.</span> We’re standing on the edge of the cliff, there’s a hurricane blowing, and we’re whistling merrily into the wind," Florida author Lauren Groff said. "It feels to me as if there’s <span style="color: red;">a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.</span><span style="color: blue;"> It often feels like the human future is closing down, becoming smaller and darker. How much time do we have left to turn things around with climate change? Ten, twenty, fifty years?"</span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"></span><br />
<a href="http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/were-standing-on-the-edge-of-the-cliff-an-interview-with-lauren-groff/">http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/were-standing-on-the-edge-of-the-cliff-an-interview-with-lauren-groff/</a><br />
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''For the piece, <span style="color: red;">I went undercover at a doomsday prepper camp in North Carolina. I thought I was going to die the entire time. It was the scariest thing I’ve done in a long time.''</span><br />
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<strong>JK: Did you tell your kids what you were going to do?</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>LG:</strong> <span style="color: red;">Yes, and they told all of my friends that weekend that “Mommy is at apocalypse camp!” I don’t own a gun. I didn’t even bring a multi-tool. And a great number of doomsday preppers believe in stocking up guns to use against what they call the “zombie hordes.”</span><br />
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<h1>
Waiting for the End of the World</h1>
<h2>
Apocalypse camp at the dawn of the Great Extinction</h2>
By <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://harpers.org/author/laurengroff/&source=gmail&ust=1583732728093000&usg=AFQjCNFmog2HFiewD6aNAIOoNnGX8Uhsig" href="https://harpers.org/author/laurengroff/" rel="author" target="_blank" title="Posts by Lauren Groff"><span style="color: #0066cc;">Lauren Groff</span></a><br />
<br />
EARLY COMMENTS ONLINE TWITTER:<br />
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@Orianabklyn -- <strong><span style="font-size: large;">"Survivalism, as it exists in America, is not rational. It is emotional. It is the twisting of hypermasculine fear into a semblance of preparedness and rationality." </span></strong><a class="twitter-atreply pretty-link js-nav" data-mentioned-user-id="3074230573" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/legroff"><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><strong><span style="font-size: large;"><s>@</s>legroff</span></strong></span></a><strong><span style="font-size: large;"> on Apocalypse Camp, preppers, and how we'll face the end of the world: </span></strong><a class="twitter-timeline-link" data-expanded-url="https://harpers.org/archive/2020/03/waiting-for-the-end-of-the-world-lauren-groff" dir="ltr" href="https://t.co/i9WEQXERjl" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" title="https://harpers.org/archive/2020/03/waiting-for-the-end-of-the-world-lauren-groff"></a><br />
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@RogueOttawan <strong><span style="font-size: large;">PINNEDdowninNCR</span></strong><br />
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''Sorry, that was "<strong>Lauren Groff</strong>", not Goff. I'm assuming <a class="twitter-atreply pretty-link js-nav" data-mentioned-user-id="3074230573" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/legroff"><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><s>@</s><b>legroff</b></span></a>. Twitterfingers on my part. On the larger point, I am ever more convinced different subgroups- hers, me, <strong>preppers</strong>, countless others, are increasingly ill-equipped to psychoanalyze one another using our own terms./ ''<br />
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Just read Lauren Groff on <a class="twitter-hashtag pretty-link js-nav" data-query-source="hashtag_click" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Harpers?src=hash"><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><s>#</s><b>Harpers</b></span></a> <a class="twitter-atreply pretty-link js-nav" data-mentioned-user-id="14287094" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/Harpers"><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><s>@</s><b>Harpers</b></span></a> on <a class="twitter-hashtag pretty-link js-nav" data-query-source="hashtag_click" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/preppers?src=hash"><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><s>#</s><b>preppers</b></span></a>. Fascinating bit of cross cultural commentary from, to me, one alien species exploring another.''</div>
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Interesting to note what strikes people. She comments on the overwhelming whiteness- no surprise. Mostly rural small town older people. How else? I liked her line "They seem proudly working class". The horror. What a thing to seem proud of. /</div>
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And while I get that preppers are a quite Individualist/<a class="twitter-hashtag pretty-link js-nav" data-query-source="hashtag_click" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/libertarian?src=hash"><span style="color: #1b95e0;"><s>#</s><b>libertarian</b></span></a> community, I noted her call to get them to "understand the necessity of the common good". "The common good" does not have a shared definition anywhere in the world. I'm pretty collectivist compared to prepper Americans. I doubt my idea of who the common good is, what it is, or its prospects are Lauren Goff's. Funny how easily we all slip into the idea that everyone shares our definition of the common good & thus any opposition must reject said good.</div>
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material possessions, and how this might fit into an elaborate and yet not subtle race/gender/psychopolitical model. There are considerations here obvious even to me, fat, soft, urbanite, classical music enthusiast Canadian. One is that under many conditions, many of your /</div>
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possessions ARE the survival of yourself or your own family or group. Under conditions of significant collapse, the more so. So protecting your material possessions is a stand-in for protecting yourself. This strikes me as obvious enough, so framing it with that phrase 'material/</div>
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<li><div class="TweetTextSize js-tweet-text tweet-text" data-aria-label-part="0" data-component-context="replies" data-conversation-id="1235319396387753984" data-conversation-section-quality="HighQuality" data-disclosure-type="" data-follows-you="false" data-has-parent-tweet="true" data-item-id="1235334475233533952" data-name="PinneddowninNCR" data-permalink-path="/RogueOttawan/status/1235334475233533952" data-reply-to-users-json="[{"id_str":"1016395407889436674","screen_name":"RogueOttawan","name":"PinneddowninNCR","emojified_name":{"text":"PinneddowninNCR","emojified_text_as_html":"PinneddowninNCR"}}]" data-screen-name="RogueOttawan" data-tweet-id="1235334475233533952" data-tweet-nonce="1235334475233533952-98eece05-1e42-471d-954e-e126e36c4434" data-tweet-stat-initialized="true" data-user-id="1016395407889436674" data-you-block="false" data-you-follow="false" lang="en">
possessions' seems a cynical way to manipulate the scenario to provoke an unwarranted emotional reaction in the reader. It feels uncharitable to assume that was the point. Another consideration is that, let's face it, few if any humans value all humans or their lives equally. /</div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>1.</strong></div>
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<em>A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.*</em></div>
<strong>I rose long before</strong> <strong>dawn, too thrilled to sleep, and set off to find my tribe</strong>. North from Greenville in the dark, past towns with names like Sans Souci and Travelers Rest, over the border into North Carolina, through land so choked by kudzu that the overgrown trees in the dark looked like great creatures petrified in mid-flight. The weirdness of this scene would, by the end of the weekend, show itself to be appropriate: my trip would be all about romanticism, and romanticism is a human collision with place that results, as Baudelaire put it, “neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling.” My rental car’s engine whined as it climbed the mountains. Day was just breaking when I nosed down a hill to Orchard Lake Campground, where tents were still being erected in the dimness.<br />
<pre>* All italicized quotations are from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.”</pre>
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<img alt="" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiL8vRTPvp5aeePPWedqm7upJa9UidhAzzum9HBiS2FU34fSWTKtmmaZRkYm6-yx9BKcX9cRSnQC1FXSfe3f3ru7SypuQtKJz09b3d9V4ZI9QdicPtdsIytTlAga40H81p49WXCzg7TfWD0u6QhUBT2YDshEq8C5sMB0iNnaw=s0-d-e1-ft" width="690" />Il<br />
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<span style="color: red;">I had come to this place September 27-29 just outside the town of Saluda, 40 miles south of Asheville, for Prepper Camp, a 3-day weekend gathering that would draw 1200 people to learn how to survive what they call TEOTWAWKI, or The End of the World as We Know It.</span> The camp was started in 2014 by a husband-and-wife team, <u>Rick and “Prepper Jane” Austin</u>, celebrities in the doomsday field. Its 6th iteration would take place on a late-September weekend with downpours forecast for all three days—I had bought waterproof everything—but which would turn out to be so uncannily hot that it could have been full-blown summer. I had left my husband Clay Kallmann in Gainesville with our 2 children, boys 6 and 9, Beckett and Sky. I put on my reporter's hat.<br />
<br />
In a still-dark field, a man wearing an orange shirt that read <span style="font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase;">i’m a parking cone</span> guided my car into place. The sky in its slow dawning revealed high blue shards of clouds, hills rich with goldenrod, a pond scummy at the edges. I reclined my seat to rest and to watch the preppers pass by. They were mostly male, between their late fifties and early seventies, with such an abundance of paunch that the only possible reaction was to marvel. These men were straight-up gravid. They seemed proudly working-class and most were former military, a fact made clear by the patches and medals they wore like over-the-hill Eagle Scouts. Nearly everyone was white. <span style="color: red;">Over the weekend, I would count exactly nine visibly non-white preppers, three of whom were presenters</span>. The camp’s organizers were surely aware of their target demographic; one volunteer had made up a little cartoon character named Pappy Prepper, a bearded old white man in camouflage pants, who in a promotional video for the gathering sang a song to the tune of “My Favorite Things”:<br />
<blockquote>
Ways to store water and defensive shooting<br />
Grow secret gardens and stop folks from looting . . .</blockquote>
As the day came on around me, I listened to the human parking cone cheerfully directing traffic. “You handicap?” he shouted toward a giant pickup.<br />
From the truck there was a hemming. At last, one of the men inside shouted, “He’s too proud to tell you he’s a wounded veteran.”<br />
“Aren’t we all!” said Parking Cone.<br />
A river of grim and portly old men flowed by, and I felt shy in my civilian womanhood and comparative youth. I waited until I saw a pair of women in hiking boots and flak vests, and gathered my courage to follow them out into the cluster of tents optimistically called the Prepper Camp Shopping Mall. Nearly all the instructors and speakers this weekend would be unpaid, trading their expertise for the opportunity to sell their books and other goods and to market their survivalist services. There were tents peddling batteries, huge water-storage tanks, medical equipment, army-navy surplus, and something called colloidal silver, which purportedly had antibiotic properties. (When I asked how it worked, the woman selling it gestured vaguely and said, “It just does!”) An angel-faced woman named Mary in a doeskin skirt advertised a permaculture school. An eager young man from a company called Ten Foot Wall sold a USB drive that can create virtual, hermetic computers within your computer, in order to block people and software from tracking your online movements and purchases. There was a table displaying weaponry, and propped at the edge of the nearby pond, there was a target in the shape of a human body. Even early in the morning, the pond was full of children tooling around in kayaks and canoes.<br />
<span style="color: red;">Prevalent iconography included eagles, crosses both Celtic and Latin, the Don’t Tread on Me snake flag (aka the Gadsden flag), and the Confederate Stars and Bars. There were MAGA hats galore, so many that by Sunday I would lose the thrill of fury at seeing one. There were T-shirts bearing such phrases as: <span style="font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase;">we are the virus they want to destroy; pro-god, pro-gun; live free or die hard; the calm before the storm</span>.</span> The right shoulder sleeves of many shirts featured backward flags, which I took to have sinister intent until I discovered that this was a convention of military uniforms, meant to show the banner flying as though in a breeze. My favorite tee depicted Ronald Reagan unbuttoning his dress shirt to reveal a chest made out of the American flag.<br />
A sweet-faced woman beaming over a basket of apples invited me to take one. <span style="font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase;">come hear a dramatic reading of the best-selling book in history!</span> a sign behind her read. The Bible? I guessed. Her face fell a little, but then she laughed. She was pushing her husband’s self-published disaster-survival fiction series; she’d put up the sign to lure people in. I said I’d love a reading. He, one <u>Timothy A. Van Sickel,</u> was a good sport and read to me in a sonorous voice from Genesis, and then from his own work. He read very nicely, I told him. One day three years ago, he said, he’d come home from his contracting job with the epiphany that his true mission was fiction—survivalist fiction, in particular. He’d published five books since then. Five books in three years! I marveled. I felt for him: he had the eager, shy desperation all authors feel when they have to hawk their souls in public. I wanted to tell him that boy howdy I could empathize, but I couldn’t out myself so early. Preppers are notoriously private, keeping their end-of-the-world plans so ferociously guarded that they even have a name for their secrecy: OPSEC, operational security. Self-published writers could be trusted because they worked outside the system; a literary insider in the preppers’ midst might be considered a double agent. Which of course, I had begun to see, I was.<br />
It was already too late to blend in, though. I hadn’t known before I arrived that at Prepper Camp camo and olive drab were the markers of belonging. Even very old ladies who certainly had never seen active duty wore camouflage sun hats and plastic clogs. I watched the people around me with a creeping sense of dismay. <span style="color: red;">With a jolt, I saw that I was also being watched in return. I understood then that being a woman alone in this place was already unusual; far worse, I was wearing East Coast liberal-arts-college clothes, a Patagonia fleece, and a North Face backpack. I looked like a good bourgeoise, the kind of woman who drinks kombucha and does yoga and reads <em>Harper’s</em> before bed.</span><br />
A blond giant with a militiaman’s face and two sullen-looking girls in their early twenties with blurry blue tattoos on their arms milled nearby. They were staring me down hard. “Well,” said the Viking. “Guess it takes all kinds.” The girls snorted. I blushed with a shame the intensity of which I hadn’t felt since I was a bullied middle schooler, and fled to the white open-sided tents around the pond where the classes would be held.<br />
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<strong>2.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.</em></div>
<span style="color: red;">Perhaps I should have expected to feel wildly out of place at Prepper Camp. I am a vegetarian atheist agnostic raised-Christian feminist in a creative field who sits to the left of most American socialists: I want immediate and radical action to halt climate change; Medicare and free public higher education for all; abortion pills offered for pennies in pharmacies and gas stations; the eradication of billionaires; the destruction of capitalism; and the rocketing of all the planet’s firearms into the sun.</span><br />
<span style="color: blue;">And yet I am also, in the darkest corners of my heart, a doomsday prepper myself. I live in Florida, where hurricane season runs officially from June through November, and both the Gulf and the Atlantic are regularly beset by calamitous storms. It just makes sense, living on that vulnerable spit of land between two roiling, unpredictable bodies of water, to ensure that one’s house has at least a two-month supply of food and at least nine modes of procuring drinking water in case society breaks and city services are cut off. (My family’s are: a rain barrel [1]; filtration straws [2]; a sun oven to pasteurize water with solar heat [3]; a Sawyer Squeeze water-filtration system [4]; a hundred-gallon airtight bladder, to be filled at the first sign of trouble [5]; a gas grill for boiling [6] and, in a pinch, dew collection [7]; iodine tablets [8]; and a tub with a tarp over it to let evaporation run off into a clean bowl [9].) We have medical kits in both of our cars and bug-out bags prepared for each family member, in case we have to flee in minutes.</span> This kind of preparation is all still somewhat in the realm of the normal. Less so: I have negotiated for my family a hideout in New England with a fully stocked tiny house that has a woodstove and solar heat, with forests around it for firewood and cleared land for gardening. There are established fruit trees, water sources, and plenty of wildlife, if necessity forces us to set aside our moral revulsion and kill our fellow creatures for sustenance. In both Florida and New England, I have libraries of foraging and food-storage books; if I don’t always have direct knowledge, I know where to find it. <span style="color: red;">I take boxing classes for self-defense; I have made my children learn archery. I have signed them up, for years, with the Boy Scouts so they will know how to build fires and handle knives safely, even though its soft-focus, quasi–Hitler Youth nationalism makes me queasy.</span><br />
<img alt="" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjK1oQZFG_fv7Shb3EnSC_ihetUYBZOAgH5VgAegcjiioDFZVVNW3VcVydylsojWLRsiAuLU_M-Eg3ZMbDOymzobYU6ixloT8JpmDJtHhI-IiHF1J1alN2fhwpO02rR5ch-ErXWxPtOa3uE7s0VMB2zeU_WtxBPatGK85HgZu2s=s0-d-e1-ft" width="200" />It is not that I have horrendous visions of an electromagnetic pulse taking out the world’s power grids, or of oil and gas production ceasing and leaving seven billion humans to revert to the pre-industrial era, or even of World War III being launched on an otherwise normal day because Trump can’t resist the urge to push the big red button. But I can see how fragile the institutions of society are and how ever-more frayed they are becoming under the weight of late-stage capitalism. I see in vivid near-hallucinations how climate change will exacerbate every human-rights issue until we cannibalize ourselves. There will be mass displacement, pandemics, tribalist violence, genocide, food and water scarcity, deforestation, desertification, cities underwater. The warming planet, the mass extinction that has already begun, the fact that I need my children to live at least beyond the span of my own life: these things murmur in my ears, give me waking nightmares. Such profound eschatological horror can only be slain by action. I ready myself for as many possibilities as I can so that I may keep my raging anxiety under control.<br />
And so, in the depths of my climate-grief insomnia, I read my little library of books and go online to prepper blogs and Reddit threads to find new and more efficient modes of survival. But it is lonely to lurk on the internet, a diabolical invention that isolates people even as it feigns connection. Also, a novelist is already a professional autodidact; when it comes to the survival of the human race, I want to be told the things I don’t know enough about to seek them out myself. Hence Prepper Camp. I was so excited about the tidal wave of information I would be facing among my doomsday peers that I couldn’t sleep for a week beforehand. <span style="color: red;">All that weekend, my children would tell my friends in Florida with wild grins that no, I wasn’t home: Mommy is at Apocalypse Camp!</span><br />
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<strong>3.</strong></div>
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<em>An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. </em></div>
When I was still at home, the classes on the schedule had seemed a bizarre blend of two types: hippie homesteading and paranoid militarism, without a great deal of intersection between the two. I was far more interested in the hippie classes, as they might give me useful practical knowledge and would not involve discussion of killing my fellow humans. One of my first classes was “SHTF (Shit-Hits-the-Fan) Intelligence,” which I believed was going to be about the extremely rarefied things one needed to know in a catastrophe: how to plan escape routes ahead of time, where to buy laminated maps, how to use a compass, and how to gauge whether to stay put or flee depending on what one understood of the catastrophe at hand. Instead, the instructor, a former soldier named <u>Samuel Culper</u> who heads up an organization called Forward Observer, described how his group tracks civil unrest via social media, police scanners, and on-the-ground observers.<br />
I couldn’t understand how tracking protests against police violence from a tent somewhere had anything to do with prepping. But I regained some sense of my enthusiasm by proceeding to classes on permaculture, which I believe in deeply. Industrial agriculture is poisoning the planet and our bodies; we’re all better off growing as much of our own food as possible. Our host, <span style="color: red;">Rick Austin, sweating through his khaki shirt in a circle from shoulder to sternum, gave such a thrilling talk about “Secret Gardens and Greenhouses” that I bought his book, <em>Secret Garden of Survival,</em> at the prepper mall afterward. Austin had been a commercial farmer, growing apples in New Hampshire and oranges in Florida, when he realized that agriculture’s traditional rows of plants were not designed for the plants’ sake, but for the sake of the machinery that sows and harvests it; in a post-doomsday world without heavy machinery, and with smaller-</span>scale, nonindustrial agriculture, farmers would do better to plant crops the way crops want to grow.<br />
Austin showed pictures of the evolution of a garden on his mountainside homestead, first stripped to the topsoil, then planted in “guilds” of fruit or nut trees surrounded by symbiotic plantings of berries and vines and useful nitrogen fixers. The result within only a few years was a garden so lush and productive it now doesn’t look like a garden, doesn’t need weeding, watering, pesticides, or nutrients, and provides many pounds of food per square foot.<br />
<img alt="" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgAg6KixdacPgzvT8jgH_TPtaKKCQbZWWBCsLIy1BaGEU-nAx7JTghQGBuRvg3TFbILRBTKqwUAxaklSN8QthmW9fGCzpA67Fkz_SAIYqyKzdcPO73-oUgZ0JRl7q09sp_8QnUsoowHJLzwFZSH7y7SIgA3te-I64BP7yhP=s0-d-e1-ft" width="300" />Gladness had taken root in me again. Next was a talk on “Frugal Homesteading” by a man who would end up being my favorite of all the instructors, <u>John Moody</u>, a goofy, smart guy who quickly got the audience on his side by calling one of the volunteers passing by a “discount Fabio.” Moody told us he had once attended seminary; had cured himself of duodenal ulcers with food; and had bought a farm with his family that initially had less than 0.5 percent viable soil and was now a functioning homestead. He was one of the few instructors who seemed willing to think beyond standard prepper lore. One of his tips was that survivalists often prioritized the wrong things. They may spend years prepping for an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from the sun that would in theory take out communication systems and thus all of civilization, though, as Moody said, “Most people in this room are going to die of diabetes and heart disease.” At this, the audience gasped in audible dismay.<br />
But to me, it felt a little validating to hear Moody say this:<span style="color: red;"> I had been astonished at how physically unfit nearly every attendee at Prepper Camp appeared to be. Even many of the younger preppers were obese, and health problems were visible and rampant. There were more canes and hiking sticks than athletic bodies. Moody said that when he heard an unfit man bragging, “I’m up to seven Glocks,” he wanted to reply, “Well, sell two and get a membership to Gold’s Gym.” Did people think they could fire a gun into a tornado, a storm surge, a wildfire?</span> Most attendees very clearly couldn’t run a single mile to escape disaster, and fitness is among the most essential tools for flight. (For that matter, I wondered why there were no classes on how to get sick or disabled people to safety. Were they planning to leave Grandma behind with a semiautomatic and a fistful of beef jerky and hope she’d still be there when they crept back a few weeks later?)<br />
Next up was “Anti-kidnapping and Hostage Survival,” where two “barrel-chested freedom fighters,” a man named <u>Billy Jensen</u> (former Green Beret and surveillance officer turned antiterrorism instructor) and a woman named <u>Check Freedman</u> (held hostage and raped at sixteen, she’d become a federal agent and “police asset”) taught us how not to get taken. I looked around the room at the aged and the infirm and the unfamous, the salt of the earth, wondering who, exactly, the intended audience was for this talk: Weren’t the people who got kidnapped usually journalists, or the wealthy, or the children of the powerful?<br />
At “Getting Your Head Right,” <u>Benjamin Raven Pressley</u> wore an olive vest with spangled wings on it, said he was part Cherokee, and called himself a “spiritual guide coach.” At “Gold and Silver,” <u>Keith Iton, one of two African-American presenters</u> I noted, urged us to collect gold and silver for the End Times. At “Homestead Herbals,” <u>Suzanne Upton</u> free-associated about which herbs were good for which diseases. Basil for high cholesterol, <em>Spilanthes</em> for numbing, bloodroot for warts, dandelion for the liver, pine pollen for androgens, sweet gum for the lungs. And so on, for an hour.<br />
Finally, at the “Sun Cooking” demonstration, there was the weekend’s first (and, it turned out, only) discussion of concerns outside the scope of the individual. <u>Paul Munsen</u>, president of Sun Ovens International, showed off his miracle cookers, which need only solar heat to work. In addition to his descriptions of baking bread and boiling eggs with the sun, he talked about climate change; deforestation; and the fact that 2.5 billion people today still cook over fires, which takes a huge amount of time, contributes to environmental collapse, and gives people respiratory diseases. He had met Nelson Mandela and spoke fondly of him. He even said the word “progressive” as though it were a good thing, bless him. I was shaken to realize that this was the first discussion of climate change I had heard all day; that though there was plenty of talk about defense against kidnappers and nuclear, biological, or chemical warfare, the actual calamity bearing down on humanity, that great elephant in the room pressing us all to the wall, had been almost entirely ignored.<br />
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<strong>4.</strong></div>
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<em>I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.</em></div>
During the brief dinner break, I went with a misty head to set up my tent in the overflow campground. The other preppers were just hanging out; they watched without speaking as I struggled with my equipment. I tried to be as quiet as possible—a mouse. God forbid they search my camp when I was gone, I thought. They’d find books of poetry. I began to think that it was perhaps an oversight to have brought no weapons, not even a multi-tool, to this place that now seemed very obviously teeming with them.<br />
Because I didn’t trust myself to make a campfire while others were watching, I had brought food that I didn’t have to cook: oranges, granola and almond milk, peanut butter and jelly. I ate in my tent, and with my hand-crank flashlight, I read Rick Austin’s book. It didn’t take more than twenty minutes; I finished pretty bummed out that I had spent $35 on the thing. Though it contains some good ideas, it suffers the lack of editorial attention typical of self-published works, offering only the vaguest recommendations, with eccentric punctuation and terrible photography, and it included the only instance of overt racism (putting aside the MAGA gear and Confederate flags) that I saw all weekend: a photo of the “zombie hordes” that Rick Austin believes will be swarming the land and stealing his food during the apocalypse, credited to the Associated Press, actually depicts desperate brown people wading with their children to dry land.<br />
<span style="color: red;">I thought back to something Jensen had said at the anti-kidnapping class: “As a soldier, though I’m a Christian, I have to dehumanize the people I’m fighting against.” All day, I had been set back on my heels by the survivalists’ suspicious attitude toward others. You could only treat suffering people as “zombies” if you stripped them of all their humanity.</span><br />
<div id="m_2356648663052392360gmail-attachment_277253" style="width: 700px;">
<img alt="" height="157" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiwbl63zl4BU1qkxI4QEri45ZHsz4yrEHybip_p_jY5eR8mUivf1spxBIJw2PpebCII7azuL6YXWRxDhAbJi5tPpyRHdT37gM-RrH2vjaLXleqYED7sQCdrf_j22eaKPoI4GyxVM-sne4V-ToFUvDriupfc5gE8NF7kC2RINg=s0-d-e1-ft" width="200" />Source photographs: Paul Munsen and Richard Cleveland. From Business Insider © 2019 Hilary Brueck/Insider Inc.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>5.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>To be great is to be misunderstood.</em></div>
I went back out into the dusk, sad and lonely. The air was hazed with smoke from campfires and smelled of delicious hot food. The campers had hooked up their phones and speakers to electrical outlets and were playing classic rock while they cooked. Boxer dogs seemed to be the favorite animals of these survivalists. Little kids rode along zip lines. The faint smell of sewage came off the pond, and a tulip tree by its edge was shedding yellow leaves. Older children jumped off the dock; parents called for them to come back to eat dinner.<br />
It would all have been so ordinary if it hadn’t been for the End Times hanging like a sword over our heads.<br />
The first part of the night’s official entertainment was the episode of National Geographic’s <em>Doomsday Preppers </em>that featured the Austins. It was called “You Said It Was Non-Lethal,” and in it Rick and Jane describe their decision to flee suburbia after their neighborhood’s economic ruin—to the point that some nearby single-family homes were being shared by four and five families and Jane was carjacked while leaving work.<br />
Watching the episode, I felt a little hurt on behalf of the pair: the tone of the show was impressed—by the preppers’ ingenuity and the genius of their great hidden garden full of food—but it was also very clearly poking fun at them. Jane came across as wild-eyed and manic, showing off a hygienic invention in case toilet paper is no longer available in the future: a pump-action garden sprayer filled with an herbal tisane and called a “heinie hydrant.” Rick and Jane were shown in goggles, thick rubber gloves, and respirators, making a Mace-like spray out of extremely hot peppers from their garden; then weeping and spitting and hacking when their protection proved insufficient. At the end of the episode, the couple was given a grade of 89 out of 100 for preparedness and a twenty-month initial survival time, which, I think, made the onscreen Rick a little sad. I don’t know whether the Austins had registered the ridicule in the way they had been depicted, though if they had, I have a hard time understanding their screening the episode for a group of people who admired them.<br />
<em>Doomsday Preppers</em> was followed by a feature film: 2018’s <em>Death of a Nation,</em> by Dinesh D’Souza, a work whose promotional materials featured an image of Abraham Lincoln’s face split with Donald Trump’s, the man least like him in temperament and policy ever to set foot in the White House.<br />
The film’s premise is that, just as Democrats worked against Lincoln, they are now working to retard the social progress represented by Donald Trump. When we reached the part presenting Adolf Hitler and the Nazis as liberals—“this is done by the do-gooders . . . the people who want to improve society”—I sat in the viewing tent surrounded by angry survivalists, swarmed by mosquitoes, and felt my grasp of reason and history assaulted.<br />
And as the spectacle proceeded, I found language for the questions that had been growing in me all day. What in the world did right-wing conspiracy theories have to do with preparing for disaster? What was the purpose of this exhibition of baseless propaganda? I looked around me, but the faces I saw were rapt: Why did it seem that I was the only person who saw how incredibly stupid this film was?<br />
<span style="color: red;">My loneliness drifted into fear when I imagined what would happen if my poker face slipped and the preppers could see all the disdainful liberal thoughts bouncing around in my head.</span><br />
At a certain point, something began to seem more wrong with the film than merely its lies. The music was pompous and loud, but the dramatization of Hitler and Eva Braun’s suicides took place with no explanation, as though it were an old-time silent movie. D’Souza was depicted onscreen first during a reenactment of his childhood in India; then as the adult D’Souza in New York City, speaking gravely. This is when it became obvious that some of the strangeness of the film was due to a technical problem: the spoken track was missing entirely, and only the background music was playing. D’Souza just flapped his lips. This felt appropriate.<br />
I left before the volunteers resolved these difficulties, trudging with my windup flashlight through the darkness to my campsite. I had set myself up between the tiny one-person tent of a man named Buddy, a construction worker from New Jersey who would later show me his femur-length machete, and the larger tent of a middle-aged man named Troy and his three bearded sons. Troy and Sons had a campsite so elaborate—with tables and chairs and a gas grill and fancy outdoor cots and lanterns—that I envied them. They were playing cards and eating filet mignon under golden lamplight. We spoke briefly, but all I wanted was to be alone, to let my pretenses fall away and read my goddamn poetry by flashlight. Once inside my own tent, I began shaking with relief after the long day of pent-up anxiety—that of being recognized and called out for the prepper imposter I had, this day, become aware that I was.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>6.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>All things are dissolved to their center by their cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear.</em></div>
The campsite was loud, and it was impossible to sleep given the inadequate pad beneath me, the giant ants crawling over my hands and neck, and my neighbors on both sides chatting away happily: <em>What’s the diff between kerosene and propane? </em>I heard. <em>I got some extra steak if you want</em>, I heard. <em>My credit has been froze for three years</em>, I heard. Something way off in the woods screamed girlishly and either Troy or a Son of Troy grunted “Fox” in explanation. <em>Raise. Call. Fold.</em> They were playing poker. But the thrill in the blood from the screaming fox made me think of emergencies, of Rick and Jane in their armed 360-degree eagles’ aerie in their overgrown Garden of Eden, with the chicks and coffee plants in the hidden greenhouse, and of what they would do if civilization really were blown to smithereens. It went against everything I knew about the essential altruism of humanity to imagine one of those people taking a potshot at some bewildered hiker who had gone up the wrong road. How terribly lonely it would be for Rick and Jane waiting out the apocalypse with their animals.<br />
I wondered what exactly could bring a person to that point where they were willing to hole up and just stop caring for their fellow man. One thing I do know about humans is that the stories we tell about ourselves are the people we become. And the American narrative of macho self-reliance, which the preppers had been preaching all day, is an extremely old story; it is, in fact, one of the oldest stories of this hemisphere, emerging out of the moral gymnastics it took for ostensible Christians to sail across the Atlantic and commit acts of genocide, rape, and war against other human beings in order to allow themselves to enslave them and to seize and control land that was never their own. These new Americans needed a way to frame their actions as heroic and inevitable, and they found it in the narrative of the noble frontiersman, the solitary figure pitched against the exigencies of unpredictable nature. This type existed before <em>Robinson Crusoe,</em> notably in real-life survival tales told by captured, enslaved, or castaway men and women; but it was Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel—about a seventeenth-century slaver capsized and stranded for twenty-eight years on an island near the Orinoco River, in South America—that solidified the specimen into an archetype. It’s no accident that the book is counted among the first English novels: it is a work of purest fiction—as fictional as Dinesh D’Souza’s movie, though both were packaged as documentaries.<br />
<img alt="" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgfWLIuRD2sVHgy1Xi6FVCoO4ZAXdJSpS5zLE5r0BSRyOiRPDFtWN6gRafAcbYLCQGYueWgtUsh3aACfCVG8M8WRJpHLaTms5xEXRt81Sb-KnrF7H4Os5JuD31orKuYUiaHOf8IsCHsoi5-dLSoW7tnZnVhaMN4CAyG_bg=s0-d-e1-ft" width="300" />It is easy to be intoxicated by Robinson Crusoe, the character, even if one sees, through twenty-first-century eyes, the book’s broken moral compass. In his extreme emotional continence, inventiveness, almost impossible industry, he is the pinnacle of self-reliance. The reader—wooed by these virtues, which we have been told repeatedly are the height of manliness—cares deeply about Crusoe’s plight. We read anxiously of his parrot, his struggles with gunpowder, the way he slowly builds a miniature England on the island he makes his.<br />
And it is easy in all this wonder to forget that Crusoe’s predicament began with a mission to bring slaves back to the New World; he was an unapologetic murderer of the island’s cannibals; he imposed his language and religion on his young slave, Friday. Crusoe reappeared by other names in later fictions: in the stories about the historical figures Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, who both became elevated to legend through folklore; in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, returning as Natty Bumppo, aka Hawkeye, aka Leatherstocking, aka Deerslayer. Bumppo was also called La Longue Carabine—being a manly man, of course his rifle had to be enormous. Out of the West came an equivalently violent gunslinger: a type that was taciturn, competent, and living beyond the scope of social systems. John Wayne; Cormac McCarthy’s characters. In these pages in September 1968, Larry McMurtry wrote: “Cowboys are romantics, extreme romantics, and ninety-nine out of a hundred of them are sentimental to the core.” (This tracks with the preppers at camp. Although ostensibly preparing for the future, they were mostly concerned with the monsters of former eras—nuclear war or the loss of the electrical grid—not the far more monstrous contemporary threat of climate change ending all human life.)<br />
In non-fiction form, this romantic strain metamorphosed into the peculiar, homegrown utopian philosophy of transcendentalism, which gave flesh-and-blood Americans a codification of the laws of manhood. A notable inspiration for preppers, and a foundational text for the kind of libertarians who read, is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self-Reliance.”<br />
In my tent, I pulled the work up on my phone and slowly reread it.<br />
Emerson was still a relatively young man of thirty-eight when he published the essay, and it’s so full of passionate disdain that I have a hard time reading it in anything but a Holden Caulfield voice. But this is unfair. “Self-Reliance” is a profoundly poetic work, strange and circuitous, full of startling imagery and chockablock with aphorisms so constantly recycled in American daily life that a reader can feel déjà vu in encountering the full text for the first time. Emerson’s essay holds up the self as the bedrock from which all other authority rises. Those who view Emerson as a libertarian prototype cite his glorification of the individual, as when he says, “The only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it”; his opposition to institutions like government and religion; and his idea that community is a distraction. But I think this distills Emerson’s argument into something far smaller than its actual, and truly gigantic, oddness. Emerson’s argument is less libertarian than it is anarchic. He is not after the deification of the self—self as sun around which the planets of other people must orbit—but rather the radical de-emphasis of the institutions that bind and constrict an individual’s true use and purpose. Emerson’s philosophy is the opposite of the libertarian celebration of greed and selfishness and social Darwinism, the ideology’s fixation on personal freedom to the detriment of social security or collective advancement: Emerson posits a sort of Buddhist attention to the moment and awareness so deep it calls into question the structures that inhibit social change, the very things that lead to inequality. Self-reliance is not the same thing as self-interest.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>7.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.</em></div>
I was bleary from sleeplessness, smelly from not wanting to go into the showers used by a few hundred other souls. I ate with glum slowness; I had not talked to anyone for longer than a few minutes in over forty-eight hours, and my solitude was wearing.<br />
The day before, I had been so gladdened by John Moody that I nearly ran to the first class of the day—his discussion of elderberries. He quoted Pliny the Elder, Hippocrates, and Hans Christian Andersen. He explained that the Count from <em>Sesame Street</em> had a historical basis: in medieval times vampires were thought to have OCD, and if you put elderberries on your windowsills, any vampires would be so entranced by counting them that they wouldn’t come into your house. He so beautifully extolled the endless medical and diet-related benefits of elderberries that I was seduced into believing that all people with even ten square feet of soil should be growing them. (I bought his book, and back at home, I ordered elderberry plants.)<br />
Then I went on a “Wild Edible Survival” foraging walk with Richard Cleveland of the Earth School in nearby Hendersonville: we moved a few feet down the road as a mass of sixty or seventy people and plucked and sampled sassafras, plantain (nature’s Benadryl), dandelion, sour grass, and violet.<br />
At “Concealed Carry and Defensive Shooting,” the instructor, David Stutts, talked about “playing with guns,” and showed a video in which a child who looked to be under the age of twelve shot at a silhouette, from a table, as though he were in a restaurant. It filled me with nausea and grief; why should children be taught to kill other humans? Stutts also said that after homeowners had incapacitated robbers or looters by shooting them in the legs, and the malefactors were on the floor, bleeding, the vigilante homeowners could decide for themselves whether to wait for the police or just “finish the job.” He made it clear with a big clownish wink what he would do.<br />
“How to Build a Medical Kit” was presented by the Skinny Medic, a boyish paramedic who had named himself when he weighed 120 pounds following a high dose of prednisone. Now that he was healthy, he joked that he should be called the Dad Bod Medic. He listed what ought to be in a medical supply kit: headlamp, box of gloves, shears and hemostat, Betadine or iodine, saline flush, superglue, horse tack, Ace wraps, Combat Application Tourniquet, stretch gauze, plastic bag to seal chest wounds, Mylar space blanket, generic pain meds, and so on. This felt deeply helpful; my fingers ached from taking notes.<br />
Thunder sounded overhead. The skies darkened, and a very light rain drizzled down. Black flies descended with the rain and began to bite.<br />
<img alt="" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEiLlYM2X1jR24sQ23061Pe8gKLamTGLY8T7lDZLJMW4CbH71Dcl3gtmB-AgdoQzEBvPLzKRRcgDxNnYXbh9VKoCfS7k5YdyhXhiHYk7CryfJawkTbwEESZN30xBFgfhzbHJ4aVo6a6YJwecFauieS5d2HbCxEAi2JsmjI8h=s0-d-e1-ft" width="300" />At my next class, “Primitive Wilderness Survival,” I learned how to go “beyond prepping to recognize and utilize the resources in nature”: how to find water from the source and build a debris shelter. The instructor joked about his worst night in a shelter: “I slept like a baby—I cried all night and pooped my pants.” On to the Old Grouch’s “Simple and Quick Shelters,” where I learned how to make a different kind of shelter out of a poncho.<br />
My last class of the day was “Psychological Warfare.” The instructor was a super-fit black man named Hakim Isler, whose movie-star charisma made sense when I learned that he had been on <em>Naked and Afraid</em> and other survivalist television shows; he calls himself the Black MacGyver. He, too, was former military, from the SERE—or Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion—school, a combat veteran, and a fourth-degree black belt in To-Shin Do, which had led him to write a book called <em>Ninja Survival.</em><br />
Isler took us through the idea behind psychological operations, or psyops, which he learned when he was in MISO, or military information support operations. He spoke of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the five tenets of survival (there’s always an agenda, know what makes you tick, psyops is a two-way street, take notes, be flexible and open to change), and the four strategies of the field (fortify, align, divide, and overcome).<br />
I began to think that perhaps Isler was himself here to engage in psyops—to discover what makes preppers tick, to track their psychology, to understand the needs and weaknesses of this community, with the ultimate aim of somehow using that knowledge. Perhaps this class was a way of hiding in plain sight, being so brazen about his presence that nobody would ever suspect him of having an agenda. I thrilled to the idea; I felt, for the first time since the disillusionment of the day before, that there might be someone in this place who wasn’t a libertarian. Perhaps I wasn’t as lonely in my politics as I had felt. Or perhaps I was losing my mind.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>8.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines.</em></div>
Another sad dinner of PB&J and oranges, and back into the night to hear the keynote speaker. I needed all the resilience I could muster. The speaker was a man named Curtis Bowers, whose films, <em>Agenda: Grinding Amer</em><em>ica Down </em>and <em>Agenda 2: Masters of </em><em>Deceit,</em> tracked (to quote Prepper Camp material) the<br />
<blockquote>
history of the liberal, deep state, communist party agenda, to fundamentally change America to a communist country from within. The people behind this Agenda had a very detailed, 50 year plan, to destroy America, and they have achieved almost all of their goals from the 1960’s to today. Come to our Key Note Address to find out how we can save this country from the liberal socialist Globalist agenda.</blockquote>
There was almost too much to dislike in this description, beyond the fact that the word “globalist” has long been an anti-Semitic dog whistle. I knew I would have the urge to flee, so I planted myself in the center of the audience, where I would be surrounded by people eating up this bullshit and would have to remain seated until the end.<br />
Curtis Bowers came out. He was a mostly bald man hiding his head under a baseball cap, a former Republican state representative in Idaho, the owner of fondue restaurants, and the father of nine homeschooled children. “Doing my part to populate the earth,” he joked, to applause.<br />
He talked about reading the 1958 book <em>The Naked Communist</em> and realizing that the Communists had a long-term plan to destroy the “culture of morality” of America and to get people to “accept homosexuality and feminism.” He said in a voice rich with sadness that he couldn’t take his boys to Walmart because the covers of magazines show what used to be considered pornography.<br />
Other notions Curtis Bowers promulgated that night were: That the Communists planned, as a part of their agenda, to destroy “beautiful” art, meaning figurative art, and to institute abstract art in its stead. That Senator Joseph McCarthy “did not destroy a single person’s life.” That public-school teachers are trying to indoctrinate students with Communism.<br />
At the end of the talk, Bowers got a standing ovation.<br />
I steamed back to my tent and was kept awake by the ants, the night birds, and the neighbors, who were having a giant party at a campfire. I would have attended if I hadn’t been too frightened of being inadvertently shot by a gun hoarder who’d had too many beers.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>9.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. </em></div>
Sunday morning came cool and sunny. I ate my granola with almond milk and packed my rental car with a glad heart. The insomnia and constant orange-alert-level anxiety were wearing on me, and I had decided to run away to a hotel in Greenville after the day’s sessions, to luxuriate in a pool and a soft bed and order room service. I would enjoy the benefits of modern society for as long as shit and fan remained far from me. As I was rinsing out my bowl, I heard an electric crackle and looked up to see two police cars rolling through the grounds.<br />
Someone’s in trouble, I thought. Then, in one of the more surreal moments of my life, I watched them stop beside my rental car. One cop got out with a hand on his holster. “This car’s been reported stolen. You steal this car?” he said. No no no no no, I absolutely did not, I told him. I showed him the Hertz rental agreement.<br />
<img alt="" height="402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgNAqB4lrM1PPUyw2feLYDsvAQ_aWFwriim-VKJfgidE9n215b795z-0QFoPmtY8c9POM9YJYwWYSKHj0IqlvobdLco_nAQtMmSMHEo3GHqzYjG8BOmtSbhq0C6no6qyxYCuXuVhl3scttICF95hpDX64_LAw2zVIhcUY4L=s0-d-e1-ft" width="300" />All around me, preppers peeped out of their tents and pickup trucks to look at the cops, then at me, that weird lady who came to survivalist camp all alone, who kept herself quiet and apart, who had now invited cops into a camp for a group of people who had, let’s say, a fraught relationship with governmental authority. I thought of the weapons they surely had hidden in their cars and campsites, how so many of those were probably untraceable if not totally illegal. One of the policemen called dispatch to try to figure out what was going on. Someone in Atlanta, he was told, had reported that her boyfriend had stolen her car. I said that I wasn’t in Atlanta, I don’t have a boyfriend, I have a husband in Florida, and I’d been parked there since Friday morning. “She has, we’ve seen her!” one of the neighbors yelled across the way. OnStar had tracked my rental car down and disabled it remotely; no matter what, I was stuck until everything played out. One of the police officers was Sergeant Jeff Smith of the Polk County sheriff’s office, a handsome blond man with an athletic build who was courteous and kind. I grew a little crush on him, but that may have just been Stockholm syndrome. Jeff and I chatted between his bouts of calling here and there, Atlanta, dispatch, the cop who’d received the original call. Nearby, tent after tent was disassembled, cars rolled away, men speed-walked up the hill, fleeing the proximity of the law. Troy, in the next campsite over, heard me say that I was a writer, and his face darkened; then he and his sons took off with nary a word to me.<br />
Three hours passed. I missed the Sunday Christian service in the field, which would have been lovely; I’m a fan of collective action of many kinds. I missed the classes I had wanted to take that morning: “Undercover Soccer Mom,” “Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense,” “Escape from Restraints.” How ridiculous it all was. Here I stood (a good liberal!) among the few attendees at Prepper Camp glad to pay hefty taxes for such agents of the nanny state as police officers, and yet I was the one who had somehow found herself squirming under the nanny state’s attention. As far as the sergeant could tell, the mess-up was entirely Hertz’s fault: likely some functionary had mistyped my car’s VIN or license plate number. OnStar turned my car back on at last. The policemen drove off. Later, instead of apologizing, Hertz put me on a list of people banned from renting cars in the United States, for neglecting to report my car as stolen.<br />
After the cops left, I felt vulnerable, the object of the intense curiosity of the remaining preppers at camp. I couldn’t bear the weight of their suspicion, and I was so weary I knew my shell would break under questioning. I had a vision of myself being hauled before a kangaroo court presided over by Rick Austin. Passing under the radar had been hard. Now that I had inadvertently brought the pigs to their turf, I did not feel entirely safe. Before the police cars’ dust cloud blew away, I too zoomed off, down the mountain, returning to the glories of civilization for as long as we still have it.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<strong>10.</strong></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>But now we are a mob.</em></div>
I was terribly sad. I had found my people, perhaps, but I had not found my tribe.<br />
It should not have been a surprise to me—though it was—how rarely actual facts were invoked at Prepper Camp: instead I had heard a great deal of fear mitigated by practical-seeming ideas, lots of baseless venom spat in the direction of imagined liberals, but almost no science to give weight to any assertions, no analysis of the larger state of the world, no evidence of statistical knowledge. Survivalists had revealed themselves to be romantics. Prepper Camp was a castle built on emotion: fear of the inchoate other was so great that the survivalists felt justified in being prepared to kill other humans to protect their material goods.<br />
But scientists and historians who study catastrophes for a living have long known that there is, in fact, very little antisocial behavior that takes place after disasters. Rebecca Solnit’s extraordinary book <em>A Paradise Built in Hell </em>describes in great detail the collective sense of “immersion in the moment and solidarity with others” that follows large-scale calamities. The common person rises to the situation to help other people, and there can be a profound experience of well-being, inventiveness, and flexibility. In fact, the worst effects in the aftermath of disasters come when institutions try to impose top-down organization, as the military might. The presumption of mass chaos, looting, murders, rapes—this comes from something disaster scientists call “elite panic,” when people in positions of power fear the loss of their power and so overreact in violent ways. Solnit quotes the sociologist Kathleen Tierney’s description of the phenomenon:<br />
<blockquote>
fear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor.</blockquote>
Elite panic on behalf of white conservatives led to a vast increase in prepping during Barack Obama’s presidency; there was a downtick in interest after Donald Trump entered the White House—ironic, given the comparative risks of a catastrophic event then and now. Trump has made the Environmental Protection Agency into an auctioneer of public lands, which has in turn rapidly undone commonsense regulation. Not to mention that with his deregulation and outright looting of the environment in the interest of privatizing public wealth, he has pushed the Doomsday Clock much closer to midnight. But survivalism, as it exists now in America, is not rational. It is emotional. It is the twisting of hypermasculine fear into a semblance of preparedness and rationality.<br />
I lay in my hotel bed in Greenville, finally clean, and began to feel a strange and terrible sadness for the people I had left on the mountain. The majority of them had military backgrounds. I thought of how they had learned in the service to be powerful, effective, competent with weapons; I thought of their leaving the military and returning to a world where those virtues were far less valuable, even sometimes scorned. How strange it must be to go from the battlefield, always on high alert, capable of killing a fellow human, back to society, where people walked around nakedly vulnerable. Our support for veterans has never been strong, and it’s worsening rapidly. It must be alienating to feel devalued, to have to struggle to retain the kind of self-worth the military had built up in you, after you have given a great deal to your country. You start to believe that institutions have failed you. And so you begin to obsess over the end of society. You stock up on guns because you’ve been trained to believe that guns can protect you, and while you’re at it, you stock up on food and water and other things. You’ve become a prepper. You begin to imagine the end of society—which you see replicated so often in zombie films, television shows, disaster flicks, and dystopian literature that you can imagine it vividly—and perhaps you start to long for the apocalypse. It would solve so much of what makes you uncomfortable about the contemporary world.<br />
“Liberals are going to be one of the first ones to die,” Rick Austin said when he was featured in a jokey, five-minute <em>Daily Show</em> segment about liberal preppers. “Maybe in the apocalypse, there won’t be conservatives and liberals, there will just be people that survive,” the correspondent, Desi Lydic, noted hopefully. Austin nodded and said, “Exactly. And dead liberals.” (Then again, he also said, “Hillary Clinton is running the largest crime syndicate in America.”) There had been so much bitterness and fury toward the left at Prepper Camp that I began to wonder now whether preppers were actually hungry for a time of upheaval so that they could finally watch liberals get their comeuppance.<br />
<span style="color: red;">But then I saw, to my horror, an uglier truth: that I was no better than my prepper brethren. And that because of my hypocrisy, I was probably even worse.</span><br />
Perhaps doomsday libertarians do secretly long for a chance to rid the earth of people who threaten their supremacy; but there is something equally anarchic in me that longs for society to break so that we can rebuild it to be kinder, more generous, more equitable. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Deep down, perhaps I am a prepper because I believe that the only way we are going to pry the world’s wealth out of the greedy, grasping hands of the billionaires who are willfully killing the environment is through a total collapse of the status quo. Perhaps I am a prepper because I have had enough: I am goddamn ready for the guillotines.</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
Maybe on both sides this secret death wish is born of an error, the conflation of society and the social fabric, which are in fact separate phenomena: society is made of the institutions that work together to ease human life; the social fabric is the beautiful anarchic bedrock of community and goodwill between human strangers. It is true that society is in deep trouble, but the social fabric is innate and strong, and this should be taken into consideration when preparing for a possible disaster. I was making the same mistake as people who had a vision of the world turned 180 degrees from my own. I was discounting the social fabric. All along, I had been making my survival preparations in a state of isolated intellectualization. I didn’t trust myself to make a pathetic little fire in front of other humans who knew how to do so better than I did. Faced with preppers who didn’t look or talk like me, I had become suspicious and afraid. My survivalism before Prepper Camp was revealed to be a paltry thing; it did not come from a community or out of a larger collective effort.<br />
<span style="color: red;">In the months after Prepper Camp, I have come to believe that liberals need to begin preparing in earnest for disaster situations.</span> Libertarians and radical conservatives seem to own disaster preparedness, but liberals and progressives, equally made of tender, breakable flesh and bone, are just as much subject to the whims of nature. We need to use our knowledge, to apply to disaster preparations an understanding of science and fact; we need to develop real and actionable survivalism so that regular people can be as useful as possible in catastrophic situations. Everyday citizens should be taking classes in emergency health care. They should learn to store food and forage and make shelters. Every household should have stocks of food that will last for at least two weeks, the means to find water, an escape plan, a bug-out bag.<br />
Individual action is good. Even better would be to counter individual self-obsession, to override the pervasive libertarian impulse to concentrate solely on the needs and desires of the self. Americans need to wake up to the necessity of immediate, powerful collective action. Self-reliance works only in stable civilizations, in which angry individualists like those I met at Prepper Camp have the leisure to concentrate on their own needs, to pretend that the concerns of the larger world simply don’t exist. I am here to tell you that we absolutely need the right-wing preppers’ decades of deep thought, their anxieties transformed into the everyday mastery of survival. Beyond learning from their mastery, we need to find a way to pull the loudest, angriest, most militant individualists into the collective, to make them understand the necessity of the common good.<br />
We have pushed ourselves beyond the point in the human narrative when we can worry only about ourselves. We have fucked ourselves into a massive die-off, killing half the world’s species. California is on fire, Australia is on fire; we are already suffering, with displaced populations and major failures to the electrical grid. Doomsday is here now. We need to act collectively, we need to act fast, if all humans—libertarian or progressive or the hapless masses of the unprepared—are going to have a chance to survive this warming world.<br />
<br />
Lauren Elizabeth Groff, 41, grew up in Cooperstown in upstate New York where as a little girl and teenager she attended Christian church services on Sundays. In 2006, she married her Amherst College sweetheart Clayton Kallman, a tall Jewish guy from Gainesville, in an interfaith wedding service presided over by a Christian pastor. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-62022639606453388182020-03-06T21:36:00.001-08:002020-03-06T21:44:48.158-08:00A Long Night of Climate in Literature -- The planet strikes back // Eine Lange Nacht vom Kilma in der Literatur -- Der Planet schlagt zuruck<div class="text">
<h1>
<span class="drk-overline">Eine Lange Nacht vom Klima in der Literatur</span>Der Planet schlägt zurück</h1>
<span style="color: red;"><strong>ENGLISH TRANSLATION HERE</strong></span> <span style="color: blue;">AND</span> <br />
<span style="color: lime;">GERMAN TEXT BELOW (scroll down)</span><br />
<br />
<div class="author">
Von Jane Tversted und Martin Zähringer<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">A Long Night of Climate in Literature -- The planet strikes back</span><br />
<br /><span style="color: blue;">By Jane Tversted and Martin Zähringer</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Listen to article</span> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <br />Image taken from the ISS on the eye of a hurricane. [Getty Images / NASA]<br />
<br />Hurricane Florence heading for the US East Coast. (Getty Images / NASA)<br />Climate is not only a matter for politics, but also for literature: "Climate Fiction" is a literary trend that has been reflecting and thinking about the challenges, fears and hopes of the climate debate for years.<br />
For literature, the climate is not only a challenge of a technical nature - how do I tell something so complex? -, it also combines the most diverse genres and forms of expression to create a broad literary field. The American journalist Dan Bloom described it in 2007 as climate fiction or CliFi.<br />
For two of their best experts, Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra, climate fiction is: "A kind of therapeutic space where the collective fear of the Anthropocene is expressed, shared and worked through."<br />
Literary protest against inadequate climate policy<br />
Climate fiction, according to a narrower definition, is the literature that acknowledges and addresses man-made climate change - in some cases long before the debate on it had reached the mainstream. But not only in the sense of a deterrent and frightening development, but, as Goodbody and Johns-Putra write: "With its potential for encouraging reflection and motivation, CliFi can also be seen as a vehicle for protest against the lack of climate policy".<br />
Axel Goodbody & Adeline Johns-Putra: "Cli-Fi. A Companion" (English)<br />Peter Lang, Oxford 2018<br />236 pages, 37,10 Euro<br />Read the introduction here.<br />
Axel Goodbody was Professor of German and European Culture in Bath, England, until his retirement. He has published widely on literary representations of nature and the environment. He is also the leading expert on German climate fiction.<br />
<br />An elderly gentleman in a jacket, glasses and thinning hair. He smiles, has raised his hand gesticulating and seems to be speaking into a microphone in front of him. (private)The Germanist and expert for climate fiction Axel Goodbody. (in private)<br />
Goodbody recognizes in climate fiction a kind of second phase, which follows the environmental literature of the seventies and eighties: "Climate change actually only became a public issue in the late 80's. But it wasn't until around 2000 that several works came out," says Goodbody, "and it wasn't until around 2010 that well-known writers came out on the subject.<br />
Climate researchers as heroes - and as shady characters<br />
The heroes of the narrative literature on climate change are often the climate researchers, for example in Barbara Kingsolver's "The Flight Behaviour of Butterflies" from 2014: Here the emerging scientist is a fighter for the good cause and is able to share his knowledge with his less knowledgeable environment.<br />
However, climate researchers do not always get off lightly and sometimes they tend to become anti-heroes of their failure. For example in the novel "The Prophecy" by Sven Böttcher, published in 2012. Climate science is not described here as an enterprise for saving the world, but rather as a marketplace determined by interests with very human and sometimes criminal actors.<br />
In his 2010 climate change novel "Solar", the British author Ian McEwan also focuses on the figure of the dubious scientist who develops into a climate capitalist who is only interested in his own advantage.<br />
Interview with Ian Mc Ewan about his novel "Solar":<br />
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<br />Science education as a positive narrative: Alice im Klimaland<br />
McEwan researched the technical aspects of his novel at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, among other places," recalls Margret Boysen, who studied geology and is head of the artists' programme there. Margret Boysen is also an author and makes climate science itself the subject of a novel: "Alice, Climate Change and the Cat Zeta".<br />
Margret Boysen: "Alice, climate change and the cat Zeta".<br />Edition Rugerup, Berlin 2016<br />278 pages, 21,90 Euro<br />
Boysen tells the story of Alice, a schoolgirl from Berlin, who visits the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research on Telegrafenberg with her class and accidentally ends up inside a super computer. Behind the computer screens she experiences the world of climate models, but with a few fantastic additions.<br />
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A blonde woman in black clothes looks diagonally upwards into the camera, smiling. (Wolfgang Schmidt/Margret Boysen)The geologist and author Margret Boysen, artistic director at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. (Wolfgang Schmidt/Margret Boysen)<br />
"The real motivation for the book, which began as early as 2010, when people started sending death threats to climate scientists," says Boysen. "And the mood was so anti-scientific that I thought you had to take up the cudgels for the science, how exciting it is, what strict quality controls the scientists actually subject themselves to.<br />
From climate activism to ecodictatorship?<br />
But not only climate science, but also climate activism is taken up in climate fiction. For example, in the first eco-thriller in German: "Palmers Krieg" by Dirk C. Fleck, published in 1992, the book describes the hijacking of an oil tanker from Tokyo to New York: an oil manager in an elevated position gets a fatal illness, goes into a state of self-discovery and changes sides. He wants to make sure that the world is informed about the dangers of the greenhouse effect and the role of the oil industry, and that governments take countermeasures against climate change.<br />
<br />Dirk C. Fleck is sitting on a sofa. (Martin Zähringer)The author and journalist Dirk C. Fleck. (Martin Zähringer)<br />
The motive of ecoterrorism has a real model in the so-called "Forest Wars" of the 80s and 90s on the American West Coast, when militant environmental groups like "Earth First" fought against deforestation with acts of sabotage. The American author T.C. Boyle also deals with this radical form of activism in his novel "Ein Freund der Erde" (A Friend of the Earth), published in 2000 (2001 in German). In both Fleck and Boyle, however, concern for the planet comes into conflict with concern for humanity: "To be a friend of the Earth, one must become an enemy of man," as Boyle puts it.<br />
<br />Tribes drift in the water in front of a Pacific Lumber Company plant. (Getty Images / Andrew Lichtenstein)The Pacific Lumber Company was involved in deforesting parts of the Headwaters Forest in 1998 (Getty Images / Andrew Lichtenstein)<br />
T.C. Boyle: "A Friend of the Earth"<br />Hanser, Munich 2001<br />360 pages, 19,90 Euro<br />
In 1993, one year after "Palmer's War", Fleck published the novel "GO! The Ecodictatorship". Here what remained in "Palmer's War" the wish of a radical eco-warrior is carried out: In 2020, a virus attack paralyzes the entire infrastructure of global capitalism and a twelve-member ecorate takes over. The ecodictatorship is the result of a last minute panic and basically the description of a totalitarian ideology, an eco-fascism that could prevail in the absence of a rational environmental policy.<br />
Since then, the CO2 concentration and the warming of the climate have increased significantly, as Fleck points out: "You can compare every value we measured then with the one we have today and everything has gotten ten times worse.<br />
Schellnhuber: Science must shake up<br />
And Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, climate system researcher and founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, observes: "Everyone is slowly coming to the conclusion: Shit - we're all going to die.<br />
<br />The German climate researcher and director of the Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, founded in 1992, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, sits at a desk full of books (dpa-Zentralbild)The German climate researcher and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (dpa-Zentralbild)<br />
Schellnhuber is also the author of an autobiographically narrated non-fiction book entitled "Selbstverbrennung" (self-immolation). The book reconstructs the history of climate science, which is particularly exciting because the story always takes place in a dramatic confrontation with politics and economic interests.<br />
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber: "Self-immolation. The fatal triangular relationship between climate, humans and carbon".<br />C. Bertelsmann, Munich 2015<br />784 pages, 29,99 Euro<br />
Schellnhuber sees a decisive responsibility for social education in climate science itself: "Because of my deeper insight into things, I am responsible for presenting the risk warnings, if necessary, in such a penetrating and dramatic manner until they have an effect.<br />
Is climate research becoming more radical?<br />
Writer Ilija Trojanow also did research at a climate institute for his book "Eistau" (Ice Dew), which was published by Hanser in 2011. The novel tells the tragedy of a glaciologist who is becoming increasingly radicalised. A tendency that is confirmed today:<br />
"You can clearly see that the people of Potsdam are now beginning to ask the question of the system, whereas ten years ago they thought they could solve the problem by means of regulations, by a more flexible approach and by a more flexible approach.<br />
<br />
A blonde woman in black clothes looks diagonally upwards into the camera, smiling. (Wolfgang Schmidt/Margret Boysen)The geologist and author Margret Boysen, artistic director at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. (Wolfgang Schmidt/Margret Boysen)<br />
"The real motivation for the book, which began as early as 2010, when people started sending death threats to climate scientists," says Boysen. "And the mood was so anti-scientific that I thought you had to take up the cudgels for the science, how exciting it is, what strict quality controls the scientists actually subject themselves to.<br />
From climate activism to ecodictatorship?<br />
But not only climate science, but also climate activism is taken up in climate fiction. For example, in the first eco-thriller in German: "Palmers Krieg" by Dirk C. Fleck, published in 1992, the book describes the hijacking of an oil tanker from Tokyo to New York: an oil manager in an elevated position gets a fatal illness, goes into a state of self-discovery and changes sides. He wants to make sure that the world is informed about the dangers of the greenhouse effect and the role of the oil industry, and that governments take countermeasures against climate change.<br />
<br />Dirk C. Fleck is sitting on a sofa. (Martin Zähringer)The author and journalist Dirk C. Fleck. (Martin Zähringer)<br />
The motive of ecoterrorism has a real model in the so-called "Forest Wars" of the 80s and 90s on the American West Coast, when militant environmental groups like "Earth First" fought against deforestation with acts of sabotage. The American author T.C. Boyle also deals with this radical form of activism in his novel "Ein Freund der Erde" (A Friend of the Earth), published in 2000 (2001 in German). In both Fleck and Boyle, however, concern for the planet comes into conflict with concern for humanity: "To be a friend of the Earth, one must become an enemy of man," as Boyle puts it.<br />
<br />Tribes drift in the water in front of a Pacific Lumber Company plant. (Getty Images / Andrew Lichtenstein)The Pacific Lumber Company was involved in deforesting parts of the Headwaters Forest in 1998 (Getty Images / Andrew Lichtenstein)<br />
T.C. Boyle: "A Friend of the Earth"<br />Hanser, Munich 2001<br />360 pages, 19,90 Euro<br />
In 1993, one year after "Palmer's War", Fleck published the novel "GO! The Ecodictatorship". Here what remained in "Palmer's War" the wish of a radical eco-warrior is carried out: In 2020, a virus attack paralyzes the entire infrastructure of global capitalism and a twelve-member ecorate takes over. The ecodictatorship is the result of a last minute panic and basically the description of a totalitarian ideology, an eco-fascism that could prevail in the absence of a rational environmental policy.<br />
Since then, the CO2 concentration and the warming of the climate have increased significantly, as Fleck points out: "You can compare every value we measured then with the one we have today and everything has gotten ten times worse.<br />
Schellnhuber: Science must shake up<br />
And Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, climate system researcher and founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, observes: "Everyone is slowly coming to the conclusion: Shit - we're all going to die.<br />
<br />The German climate researcher and director of the Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, founded in 1992, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, sits at a desk full of books (dpa-Zentralbild)The German climate researcher and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (dpa-Zentralbild)<br />
Schellnhuber is also the author of an autobiographically narrated non-fiction book entitled "Selbstverbrennung" (self-immolation). The book reconstructs the history of climate science, which is particularly exciting because the story always takes place in a dramatic confrontation with politics and economic interests.<br />
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber: "Self-immolation. The fatal triangular relationship between climate, humans and carbon".<br />C. Bertelsmann, Munich 2015<br />784 pages, 29,99 Euro<br />
Schellnhuber sees a decisive responsibility for social education in climate science itself: "Because of my deeper insight into things, I am responsible for presenting the risk warnings, if necessary, in such a penetrating and dramatic manner until they have an effect.<br />
Is climate research becoming more radical?<br />
Writer Ilija Trojanow also did research at a climate institute for his book "Eistau" (Ice Dew), which was published by Hanser in 2011. The novel tells the tragedy of a glaciologist who is becoming increasingly radicalised. A tendency that is confirmed today:<br />
"You can clearly see that the people of Potsdam are now beginning to ask the question of the system, whereas ten years ago they thought they could solve the problem by means of regulations, by a more flexible approach and by a more flexible approach.<br />
<br />
Interview with Ilija Trojanow about his book 'Ice Dew' (2011):<br />
<br />
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<br />Humanity can only save itself<br />
The counterpart to this radicalization - the widespread refusal to listen to science - is the Viennese writer Thomas Aiginger. In his novel from 2018 entitled "State of Emergency", he lets news from outer space stir up the climate debate.<br />
But the punch line in Aiginger's novel is that there can be no other actor in the fight against man-made climate catastrophe than man himself. But why do many people react with defensiveness to the climate researchers and activists? Aiginger sees one cause in feelings of guilt:<br />
"That simply people who have now declared 20 years ago that climate change does not exist and that we can carry on as before simply cannot tolerate it when a 16-year-old girl comes along and tells them: You are to blame that my generation can no longer live like you do. I think that's hard for a lot of people to accept.<br />
Has climate change been deliberately covered up?<br />
Climate researcher Schellnhuber points to another cause of inaction besides displacement and inertia: "Of course there was indeed a controlled campaign. Of all people, the oil industry's research groups had already predicted global warming and the expected increase in CO2 with astonishing precision by the middle of the 20th century - but had not published their findings: "These results were classified and, on the contrary, the oil industry began to deliberately cast doubt on them.<br />
The Investigative Network Correctiv has researched current networks for business climate denial.<br />
The story of this missed opportunity to save the Earth is also covered by the American author Nathaniel Rich in his narrative non-fiction book "Losing Earth". Rich tells how the American government deliberately chose to ignore the information and warnings of science and environmental organisations and took the side of industrial lobbyists.<br />
Poems about the hurricane<br />
In the USA, the consequences of actively prevented climate protection are often felt above all by the black population. This was also the case when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005: almost 2000 people died in the floods and due to a lack of aid, hundreds of thousands became homeless - a large proportion of them African-Americans.<br />
Environmental justice is a traditional theme in African American literature and poetry in the USA. There are three volumes of poetry alone that deal only with Katrina. One is by Patricia Smith, a celebrated poet in the USA: "Blood Dazzler" - Blood Blenders, nominated for the National Book Award in 2010. In it, Smith describes the fates of the victims, but she also puts herself in the hurricane itself: "Katrina" is indeed "a woman who cares," says Smith.<br />
Patricia Smith reads from "Blood Dazzler" (2010):<br />
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<br />Climate crisis and capitalism<br />
Besides describing the present and the dystopian consequences of climate change, climate fiction also deals with glimmers of hope and possible solutions. A prominent representative of this direction is the Californian Kim Stanley Robinson.<br />
In his climate trilogy "Science in the Capital", published in 2004-2007, the well-known science fiction author plays through how saving the Earth could take place under the sign of advanced climate change.<br />
Lecture by Stanley Kim Robinson: How the climate is changing society<br />
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<br />In the novel "New York 2140" published in 2017, however, all rescue attempts came too late: Several tidal waves have wreaked havoc around the world. Downtown Manhattan is 50 feet underwater. The New Yorkers have developed a kind of eco-subculture and converted the office towers into housing cooperatives. <br />
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In the 2017 published novel "New York 2140" on the other hand, all rescue attempts came too late: Several tidal waves have wreaked havoc around the world, downtown Manhattan is 50 feet underwater. The New Yorkers have developed a kind of eco-subculture and converted the office towers into housing cooperatives. But New York is still the metropolis of finance capital and real estate speculation is flourishing in uptown Manhattan.<br />
Kim Stanley Robinson: "New York 2140"<br />Heyne, Munich 2017<br />816 pages, 16,99 Euro<br />
Against this background, Robinson devotes himself to the connection between the climate crisis and capitalism - and the question of what a different way of living together might look like. Among other things, he plays through the nationalization of the financial system. What may sound unrealistic today is only a question of time for Robinson:<br />
"As a science-fiction writer, you say: "What can't happen, won't happen. So capitalism cannot continue to expand and destroy everything, something will happen. It's not out what it will be and what it will be called, but it won't be capitalism."<br />
Read the full manuscript for the programme: Manuscript as PDF.<br />
Production of this Long Night:<br /> Authors: Jane Tversted and Martin Zähringer; Speakers: Sabine Arnhold, Cathlen Gawlich, Anika Mauer, Jörg Hartman, Michael Rotschopf, Lisa Hrdina; Director: Beate Ziegs; Editor: Dr. Monika Künzel; Web editing: Constantin Hühn<br />
About the authors:<br />Jane Tversted, born in Copenhagen, has lived in Berlin since 1993. She studied German and philosophy. She translates into Danish and has been publishing features, radio plays and reports for ARD and DLF since 2012.<br />
Martin Zähringer, born in the Black Forest, studied New German Literature and Nordic Studies in Berlin and Copenhagen and has been working as a literary critic for print and radio since 2004. Since 2012 he has been working as a feature author together with Jane Tversted.<br />
The team of authors works thematically at the interfaces of art, politics and society, primarily with an international focus. Last features from their pen: "Gemeinnützige Widerstand" SWR 2019, "Climate Fiction" WDR/DLF 2018. Together with the "Climate Cultures network berlin" they will curate the 3-day "Climate Fiction Festival" in June 2020 at the Literaturhaus Berlin.<br />
<br />More about the topic<br />
Climate Fiction & Co - Climate change as a marginal topic in German literature<br />(Deutschlandfunk Culture, Reading, 09.09.2019)<br />
Climate-Fiction Comic "Message" - blessing and curse of artificial intelligence<br />(German Radio, Corso, 04.03.2019)<br />
About climate change in literature - Climate Fiction<br />(Deutschlandfunk, The Feature, 30.11.2018)<br />
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Das Klima beschäftigt nicht nur die Politik, sondern auch die Literatur: „Climate Fiction“ ist eine literarische Strömung, die seit Jahren die Herausforderungen, Ängste und Hoffnungen der Klima-Debatte reflektiert und weiterdenkt.</div>
Das Klima ist für die Literatur nicht nur eine Herausforderung technischer Art – Wie erzähle ich so etwas Komplexes? –, es verbindet auch verschiedenste Genres und Ausdrucksformen zu einem weiten literarischen Feld. Der amerikanische Journalist Dan Bloom hat es im Jahr 2007 als Climate Fiction oder auch CliFi bezeichnet.<br />
Für zwei ihrer besten Kenner, Axel Goodbody und Adeline Johns-Putra, ist Climate Fiction: „Eine Art von therapeutischem Raum, in dem die Kollektivangst des Anthropozän geäußert, geteilt und durchgearbeitet wird.“<br />
<h2>
Literarischer Protest gegen mangelhafte Klimapolitik</h2>
Climate Fiction ist nach einer engeren Definition die Literatur, die den menschengemachten Klimawandel anerkennt und thematisiert – teils lange, bevor die Debatte darum im Mainstream angekommen war. Aber nicht nur im Sinne einer abschreckenden und furchterregenden Entwicklung, sondern, wie Goodbody und Johns-Putra schreiben: „Mit ihrem Potential an ermutigender Reflexion und Motivation kann man CliFi auch als einen Träger des Protestes gegen die fehlende Klimapolitik betrachten“.<br />
<div class="dradiokulturblock">
<strong>Axel Goodbody & Adeline Johns-Putra: „Cli-Fi. A Companion“ (engl.)</strong><br />
Peter Lang, Oxford 2018<br />
236 Seiten, 37,10 Euro<br />
Lesen Sie <a class="dradioLink" href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329970657_Introduction" target="_blank">hier</a> die Einleitung.</div>
Axel Goodbody war bis zu seiner Emeritierung als Professor für deutsche und europäische Kultur in Bath in England tätig. Er hat viel über literarische Repräsentationen von Natur und Umwelt publiziert. Außerdem ist er der führende Experte für die deutsche Climate Fiction.<br />
<span class="dkulturwithoutmargin" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; width: 635px;"><img alt="Ein älterer Herr mit Sakko, Brille und schütterem Haar. Er lächelt, hat die Hand gestikulierend erhoben und scheint gerade in ein Mikrofon vor ihm zu sprechen. (privat)" class="dkulturwithoutmargin" data-source="privat" src="https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/media/thumbs/b/b34aa212b093248b42912639172cf3fev1_abs_635x357_b3535db83dc50e27c1bb1392364c95a2.png?key=8a3eb7" style="height: 357px; width: 635px;" title="Ein älterer Herr mit Sakko, Brille und schütterem Haar. Er lächelt, hat die Hand gestikulierend erhoben und scheint gerade in ein Mikrofon vor ihm zu sprechen. (privat)" /><span class="dkulturwithoutmargin">Der Germanist und Experte für Climate Fiction Axel Goodbody. (privat)</span></span><br />
Goodbody erkennt in der Climate Fiction eine Art zweite Phase, die auf die Umweltliteratur der Siebziger und Achtziger folgt: „Das Thema Klimawandel ist eigentlich erst zum öffentlichen Thema geworden gegen Ende der 80er Jahre. Aber erst gegen 2000 herum kamen dann mehrere Werke heraus“, so Goodbody, „und eigentlich kamen erst bekannte Schriftsteller gegen 2010 zum Thema.“<br />
<h2>
Klimaforscher als Helden – und als zwielichtige Gestalten</h2>
Heldinnen und Helden der erzählenden Literatur zum Klimawandel sind oft die Klimaforscher, etwa in Barbara Kingsolvers „Das Flugverhalten der Schmetterlinge“ von 2014: Der auftretende Wissenschaftler ist hier ein Kämpfer für die gute Sache und in der Lage, seine weniger wissende Umgebung an seinem Wissen teilhaben zu lassen.<br />
Allerdings kommen die Klimaforscher nicht immer gut weg und geraten manchmal eher zu Antihelden ihres Versagens. Etwa im 2012 erschienenen Roman „Die Prophezeiung“ von Sven Böttcher. Die Klimawissenschaft wird hier nicht als Unternehmen der Weltrettung geschildert, sondern als von Interessen bestimmter Marktplatz mit sehr menschlichen und teils kriminellen Akteuren.<br />
Auch der britische Autor Ian McEwan setzt in seinem Klimawandelroman „Solar“ von 2010 auf die Figur des zwielichtigen Wissenschaftlers, der sich zu einem nur auf den eigenen Vorteil bedachten Klimakapitalisten entwickelt.<br />
<strong>Interview mit Ian Mc Ewan über seinen Roman „Solar“:</strong><br />
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<h2>
Wissenschaftsvermittlung als positive Erzählung: Alice im Klimaland</h2>
Für die fachlichen Aspekte seines Romans hat McEwan unter anderem am Potsdamer Institut für Klimafolgenforschung recherchiert, erinnert sich Margret Boysen, studierte Geologin und Leiterin des dortigen Künstlerprogramms. Margret Boysen ist auch Autorin und macht die Klimawissenschaft selbst zum Subjekt eines Romans: „Alice, der Klimawandel und die Katze Zeta“.<br />
<div class="dradiokulturblock">
<strong>Margret Boysen: „Alice, der Klimawandel und die Katze Zeta“</strong><br />
Edition Rugerup, Berlin 2016<br />
278 Seiten, 21,90 Euro</div>
Boysen erzählt die Geschichte der Berliner Schülerin Alice, die mit ihrer Schulklasse das Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung auf dem Telegrafenberg besucht und dabei versehentlich im Inneren eines Superrechners landet. Hinter den Computer-Bildschirmen erlebt sie die Welt der Klimamodelle, allerdings mit ein paar fantastischen Zusätzen.<br />
<em><span class="dkulturwithoutmargin" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; width: 635px;"><img alt="Eine blonde Frau in schwarzer Kleidung schaut lächelnd nach schräg oben in die Kamera. (Wolfgang Schmidt/Margret Boysen)" class="dkulturwithoutmargin" data-source="Wolfgang Schmidt/Margret Boysen" src="https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/media/thumbs/b/bdb9ef097a514a38a35c0532da7a02cev1_abs_635x357_b3535db83dc50e27c1bb1392364c95a2.jpg?key=aaa38e" style="height: 357px; width: 635px;" title="Eine blonde Frau in schwarzer Kleidung schaut lächelnd nach schräg oben in die Kamera. (Wolfgang Schmidt/Margret Boysen)" /><span class="dkulturwithoutmargin">Die Geologin und Autorin Margret Boysen, künstlerische Leiterin am Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung. (Wolfgang Schmidt/Margret Boysen)</span></span></em>„Die eigentliche Motivation für das Buch, das begann schon 2010, als man begann Klimawissenschaftlern Morddrohungen zu schicken“, erzählt Boysen. „Und die Stimmung war so antiwissenschaftlich, dass ich gedacht habe, man muss noch mal eine richtige Lanze brechen für die Wissenschaft, wie spannend die ist, welchen strengen Qualitätskontrollen sich eigentlich die Wissenschaftler aussetzen.“<br />
<h2>
Vom Klimaaktivismus zur Ökodiktatur?</h2>
Aber nicht nur die Klimawissenschaft, sondern auch der Klimaaktivismus wird in der Climate Fiction aufgegriffen. So etwa im ersten Ökothriller in deutscher Sprache: „Palmers Krieg“ von Dirk C. Fleck, erschienen 1992. Das Buch beschreibt die Entführung eines Öltankers von Tokio nach New York: Ein Ölmanager in gehobener Position bekommt eine tödliche Krankheit, geht in sich und wechselt die Seiten. Er will dafür sorgen, dass die Welt über die Gefahren des Treibhauseffektes und die Rolle der Ölindustrie informiert wird und dass die Regierungen Gegenmaßnahmen zum Klimawandel ergreifen.<br />
<span class="dkulturwithoutmargin" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; width: 635px;"><img alt="Dirk C. Fleck sitzt auf einem Sofa. (Martin Zähringer)" class="dkulturwithoutmargin" data-source="Martin Zähringer" src="https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/media/thumbs/7/7819f789dfd82f27785efd53d1a1c8c0v1_abs_635x357_b3535db83dc50e27c1bb1392364c95a2.jpg?key=2ea3f9" style="height: 357px; width: 635px;" title="Dirk C. Fleck sitzt auf einem Sofa. (Martin Zähringer)" /><span class="dkulturwithoutmargin">Der Autor und Journalist Dirk C. Fleck. (Martin Zähringer)</span></span><br />
Das Motiv des Ökoterrorismus hat ein reales Vorbild in den sogenannten „Waldkriegen“ der 80er und 90er Jahre an der amerikanischen Westküste, als militante Umweltgruppen wie „Earth First“ mit Sabotageakten gegen Abholzung kämpften. Diese radikale Form des Aktivismus verarbeitet auch der amerikanische Autor T.C. Boyle in seinem im Jahr 2000 (2001 auf Deutsch) erschienenen Roman „Ein Freund der Erde“. Bei Fleck wie bei Boyle gerät aber die Sorge um den Planeten mit der um die Menschheit in Konflikt: „Denn um ein Freund der Erde zu sein, muss man zum Feind des Menschen werden“, wie es bei Boyle heißt.<br />
<em><span class="dkulturwithoutmargin" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; width: 635px;"><img alt="Stämme treiben vor einem Werk der Pacific Lumber Company im Wasser. (Getty Images / Andrew Lichtenstein)" class="dkulturwithoutmargin" data-source="Getty Images / Andrew Lichtenstein" src="https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/media/thumbs/d/d9e575caacfbb8448b3bfa21d265a3e2v1_abs_635x357_b3535db83dc50e27c1bb1392364c95a2.jpg?key=1f3d40" style="height: 357px; width: 635px;" title="Stämme treiben vor einem Werk der Pacific Lumber Company im Wasser. (Getty Images / Andrew Lichtenstein)" /><span class="dkulturwithoutmargin">Die Pacific Lumber Company war beteiligt an der Abholzung Teile des Headwaters Forest im Jahr 1998. (Getty Images / Andrew Lichtenstein)</span></span></em><br />
<div class="dradiokulturblock">
<strong>T.C. Boyle: „Ein Freund der Erde“</strong><br />
Hanser, München 2001<br />
360 Seiten, 19,90 Euro</div>
1993, ein Jahr nach „Palmers Krieg“, veröffentlichte Fleck den Roman „GO! Die Ökodiktatur“. Hier wird das vollzogen, was in „Palmers Krieg“ noch der Wunsch eines radikalen Ökokriegers geblieben ist: Im Jahr 2020 legt eine Virenattacke die gesamte Infrastruktur des globalen Kapitalismus lahm und ein zwölfköpfiger Ökorat übernimmt die Macht. Die Ökodiktatur ist das Resultat einer Torschlusspanik und im Grunde die Beschreibung einer totalitären Ideologie, ein Ökofaschismus, der sich mangels einer rationalen Umweltpolitik durchsetzen könnte.<br />
Seither habe sich die CO2-Konzentration und die Erwärmung des Klimas noch deutlich verschärft, wie Fleck betont: „Da können Sie jeden Wert, den wir damals gemessen haben mit dem heutigen vergleichen und alles ist zehnmal schlimmer geworden.“<br />
<h2>
Schellnhuber: Wissenschaft muss aufrütteln</h2>
Und Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Klimasystemforscher und Gründer des Potsdam-Institutes für Klimafolgenforschung, beobachtet: „So ganz langsam überkommt alle die Gewissheit: Scheiße – wir werden alle verrecken.“<br />
<span class="dkulturwithoutmargin" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; width: 635px;"><img alt="Der deutsche Klimaforscher und Direktor des 1992 gegründeten Institutes für Klimafolgenforschung in Potsdam, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, sitzt an einem Schreibtisch voller Bücher (dpa-Zentralbild)" class="dkulturwithoutmargin" data-source="dpa-Zentralbild" src="https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/media/thumbs/7/7a1b355ceb12f76fdc13146e428d0e47v1_abs_635x357_b3535db83dc50e27c1bb1392364c95a2.jpg?key=067bbb" style="height: 357px; width: 635px;" title="Der deutsche Klimaforscher und Direktor des 1992 gegründeten Institutes für Klimafolgenforschung in Potsdam, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, sitzt an einem Schreibtisch voller Bücher (dpa-Zentralbild)" /><span class="dkulturwithoutmargin">Der deutsche Klimaforscher und Direktor des Potsdamer Institutes für Klimafolgenforschung Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (dpa-Zentralbild)</span></span><br />
Schellnhuber ist auch der Autor eines autobiografisch erzählenden Sachbuches mit dem Titel „Selbstverbrennung“. Das Buch rekonstruiert die Geschichte der Klimawissenschaften, was besonders spannend ist, weil sich die Geschichte immer in einer dramatischen Auseinandersetzung mit Politik und Wirtschaftsinteressen abspielt.<br />
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<strong>Hans Joachim Schellnhuber: „Selbstverbrennung. Die fatale Dreiecksbeziehung zwischen Klima, Mensch und Kohlenstoff“</strong><br />
C. Bertelsmann, München 2015<br />
784 Seiten, 29,99 Euro</div>
Eine entscheidende Verantwortung für gesellschaftliche Aufklärung sieht Schellnhuber bei der Klimawissenschaft selbst: „Ich bin aufgrund meiner tieferen Einsicht in die Dinge verantwortlich dafür, die Risikohinweise notfalls so penetrant und dramatisch vorzubringen, bis sie Wirkung zeigen.“<br />
<h2>
Radikalisiert sich die Klimaforschung?</h2>
Auch der Schriftsteller Ilija Trojanow hat für sein Buch „Eistau“, das 2011 bei Hanser erschien, an einem Klimainstitut recherchiert. Der Roman erzählt die Tragödie eines Gletscherforschers, der sich zunehmend radikalisiert. Eine Tendenz, die sich heute bestätige:<br />
„Man sieht ja auch ganz klar bei den Potsdamern, dass sie jetzt beginnen die Systemfrage zu stellen, während sie noch vor zehn Jahren dachten, mit ordnungspolitischen Regelungen, mit einer vernünftigen Bundesregierung, die auf ihre Empfehlungen hört, könne man die Sache wuppen, jetzt merken sie – Nee. Und ich glaube, dieser faule Klimapakt wird sie jetzt erst noch mehr radikalisieren.“<br />
<strong>Interview mit Ilija Trojanow über sein Buch „Eistau“ (2011):</strong><br />
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<h2>
Retten kann die Menschheit sich nur selbst</h2>
Das Gegenstück zu dieser Radikalisierung – die verbreitete Weigerung, auf die Wissenschaft zu hören – beschäftigt den Wiener Schriftsteller Thomas Aiginger. In seinem Roman aus dem Jahr 2018 mit dem Titel „Ausnahmezustand“ lässt er Nachrichten aus dem Weltall die Klimadebatte aufmischen.<br />
Die Pointe in Aigingers Roman ist aber, dass es keinen anderen Akteur im Kampf gegen die menschengemachte Klimakatastrophe geben kann als den Menschen selbst. Warum aber reagieren viele Menschen mit Abwehr auf die Klima-Forscherinnen und Aktivisten? Eine Ursache sieht Aiginger in Schuldgefühlen:<br />
„Dass einfach Menschen, die jetzt 20 Jahre erklärt haben, den Klimawandel gibt es nicht und wir können weitermachen wie bisher, das einfach nicht vertragen, wenn da ein 16 jähriges Mädchen daherkommt und ihnen sagt: Ihr seid schuld, dass meine Generation nicht mehr so leben kann wie ihr. Ich glaube, dass das für viele Menschen schwierig zu akzeptieren ist.“<br />
<h2>
Wurde der Klimawandel gezielt vertuscht?</h2>
Klimaforscher Schellnhuber weist neben Verdrängung und Trägheit noch auf eine andere Ursache der Untätigkeit hin: „Es gab natürlich tatsächlich eine gesteuerte Kampagne.“ Ausgerechnet die Forschergruppen der Ölindustrie hätten schon Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts die Erderwärmung und den zu erwartenden CO2-Anstieg erstaunlich präzise vorhergesagt – aber nicht veröffentlicht: „Diese Ergebnisse wurden klassifiziert und man begann, im Gegenteil, in der Ölindustrie ganz bewusst Zweifel zu streuen.“<br />
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Das Investigativ-Netzwerk <a class="dradioLink" href="https://correctiv.org/top-stories/2020/02/04/die-heartland-lobby/" target="_blank">Correctiv </a>hat über aktuelle Netzwerke zur <strong>geschäftsmäßigen Klimaleugnung</strong> recherchiert.</div>
Mit der Geschichte dieser verpassten Chance zur Rettung der Erde, befasst sich auch der amerikanische Schriftsteller Nathaniel Rich in seinem erzählenden Sachbuch „Losing Earth“. Rich berichtet darin, wie die amerikanische Regierung bewusst die Informationen und Warnungen der Wissenschaft und Umweltorganisationen zu ignorieren wählte und sich auf die Seite der Industrielobbyisten schlug.<br />
<h2>
Gedichte über den Hurrikan</h2>
Die Folgen des aktiv verhinderten Klimaschutzes bekommt in den USA oft vor allem die schwarze Bevölkerung zu spüren. So auch, als der Hurrikan Katrina 2005 New Orleans verwüstete: Fast 2000 Menschen starben in den Fluten und durch fehlende Hilfeleistungen, hunderttausende wurden obdachlos – ein Großteil davon Afroamerikaner.<br />
Die Umweltgerechtigkeit (Environmental Justice) ist ein traditionelles Thema in der afroamerikanischen Literatur und Poesie der USA. Es gibt allein drei Gedichtbände, die sich nur mit Katrina auseinandersetzen. Einer stammt von Patricia Smith, einer gefeierten Dichterin in den USA: „Blood Dazzler“ – Blut-Blender, 2010 für den National Book Award nominiert. Darin beschreibt Smith die Schicksale der Opfer, aber sie versetzt sich auch in den Hurrikan selbst hinein: „Katrina“ ist tatsächlich „eine Frau, die sich Gedanken macht“, so Smith.<br />
<strong>Patricia Smith liest aus „Blood Dazzler“ (2010):</strong><br />
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<h2>
Klimakrise und Kapitalismus</h2>
Neben der Gegenwartsbeschreibung und dystopischen Folgen des Klimawandels beschäftigt sich die Climate Fiction aber auch mit Hoffnungsschimmern und Lösungswegen. Ein prominenter Vertreter dieser Richtung ist der Kalifornier Kim Stanley Robinson.<br />
In seiner 2004-2007 erschienenen Klima-Trilogie „Science in the Capital“ spielt der bekannte Science-Fiction-Autor durch, wie sich die Rettung der Erde im Zeichen des fortgeschrittenen Klimawandels vollziehen könnte.<br />
<strong>Vortrag von Stanley Kim Robinson: Wie das Klima die Gesellschaft verändert</strong><br />
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Im 2017 erschienenen Roman „New York 2140“ sind hingegen alle Rettungsversuche zu spät gekommen: Mehrere Flutwellen haben weltweite Verwüstungen angerichtet, Downtown Manhattan steht 15 Meter unter Wasser. Die New Yorker haben eine Art Ökosubkultur entwickelt und die Bürotürme in Wohngenossenschaften umgewandelt. Aber New York ist noch immer die Metropole des Finanzkapitals und in Uptown Manhattan blüht die Immobilienspekulation.<br />
<div class="dradiokulturblock">
<strong>Kim Stanley Robinson: „New York 2140“</strong><br />
Heyne, München 2017<br />
816 Seiten, 16,99 Euro</div>
Vor diesem Hintergrund widmet sich Robinson dem Zusammenhang von Klimakrise und Kapitalismus – und der Frage, wie ein anderes Zusammenleben aussehen könnte. Unter anderem spielt er die Verstaatlichung des Finanzsystems durch. Was heute unrealistisch klingen mag, ist für Robinson nur eine Frage der Zeit:<br />
„Als Science-Fiction-Autor sagst du: Was nicht passieren kann, wird nicht passieren. Also kann der Kapitalismus nicht weiter expandieren und immer weiter alles zerstören, etwas wird passieren. Es ist nicht heraus, was es sein wird und wie man es nennen wird, aber es wird kein Kapitalismus sein.“<br />
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<strong>Produktion dieser Langen Nacht:</strong><br />
Autoren: Jane Tversted und Martin Zähringer; Sprecher: Sabine Arnhold, Cathlen Gawlich, Anika Mauer, Jörg Hartman, Michael Rotschopf, Lisa Hrdina; Regie: Beate Ziegs; Redaktion: Dr. Monika Künzel; Webbearbeitung: Constantin Hühn</div>
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<strong>Über die Autoren:</strong><br />
<strong>Jane Tversted</strong>, geboren in Kopenhagen, lebt seit 1993 in Berlin. Sie hat Germanistik und Philosophie studiert. Sie übersetzt ins Dänische und publiziert seit 2012 Feature, Hörspiele und Reportagen für ARD und DLF.<br />
<br />
<strong>Martin Zähringer</strong>, geboren im Schwarzwald, studierte in Berlin und Kopenhagen Neue Deutsche Literatur und Nordistik und arbeitet seit 2004 als Literaturkritiker für Print und Funk. Seit 2012 gemeinsam mit Jane Tversted als Featureautor tätig.<br />
<br />
Das <a class="dradioLink" href="http://www.tversted-zaehringer.com/" target="_blank">Autorenteam</a> bewegt sich thematisch an den Schnittstellen von Kunst, Politik und Gesellschaft, primär mit einem internationalen Fokus. Letzte Features aus ihrer Feder: „Gemeinnütziger Widerstand“ SWR 2019, „Climate Fiction“ WDR/DLF 2018. Mit dem "<a class="dradioLink" href="http://www.climate-cultures-network.com/" target="_blank">Climate Cultures network berlin</a>" kuratieren sie das 3-tägige „Climate Fiction Festival“ im Juni 2020 im Literaturhaus Berlin.</div>
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<h6>
Mehr zum Thema</h6>
<a class="linkInternal" href="https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/climate-fiction-co-der-klimawandel-als-randthema-in-der.1270.de.html?dram:article_id=458378" title="Climate Fiction & Co. Der Klimawandel als Randthema in der deutschen Literatur">Climate Fiction & Co. – Der Klimawandel als Randthema in der deutschen Literatur</a><br />
(Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Lesart, 09.09.2019)<br />
<a class="linkInternal" href="https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/climate-fiction-comic-message-segen-und-fluch-der.807.de.html?dram:article_id=442681" title="Climate-Fiction Comic "Message" Segen und Fluch der künstlichen Intelligenz ">Climate-Fiction Comic „Message“ – Segen und Fluch der künstlichen Intelligenz</a><br />
(Deutschlandfunk, Corso, 04.03.2019)<br />
<a class="linkInternal" href="https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/ueber-den-klimawandel-in-der-literatur-climate-fiction.3720.de.html?dram:article_id=431303" title="Über den Klimawandel in der Literatur Climate Fiction">Über den Klimawandel in der Literatur – Climate Fiction</a><br />
(Deutschlandfunk, Das Feature, 30.11.2018)</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-50785514305534912002020-03-03T20:58:00.005-08:002020-03-06T22:21:47.885-08:00Would someone remind Sam Jordison at The UK Guardian that he represents all Guardian readers not just himself!<strong><span style="font-size: large;"> UPDATE:</span></strong><br />
<a href="https://theweek.com/speedreads/900488/chinas-coronavirus-recovery-all-fake-whistleblowers-residents-claim"><span style="color: black; font-family: Courier New;"><strong>COVERUP IN BEIJING: Chinese whistleblowers say virus recovery 'fake, it's all fake' ...</strong></span></a><strong><span style="font-family: Courier New;"> </span></strong><a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8083543/Customs-NOT-screening-passengers-coronavirus-hot-spots.html"><span style="color: black; font-family: Courier New;"><strong>U.S. Customs STILL NOT screening passengers from hot-spots...</strong></span></a><strong><span style="font-family: Courier New;"> </span></strong><a href="https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/spectators-will-be-banned-at-ncaa-division-iii-basketball-tournament-games-at-johns-hopkins-due-to-coronavirus/"><span style="color: black; font-family: Courier New;"><strong>Fans Banned From NCAA Basketball Tournament... </strong></span></a><strong><span style="font-family: Courier New;"> </span></strong><a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/chaos-at-hospitals-due-to-shortage-of-coronavirus-tests/ar-BB10QubE"><span style="color: black; font-family: Courier New;"><strong>Chaos at hospitals...</strong></span></a><br /><a href="https://theweek.com/speedreads/900423/white-house-economic-adviser-larry-kudlow-claims-coronavirus-contained-says-americans-should-stay-work"><span style="color: black; font-family: Courier New;"><strong>KUDLOW: STAY AT WORK...</strong></span></a><strong><span style="font-family: Courier New;"> </span></strong><a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-coronavirus-hits-ibiza-first-21647695"><span style="color: black; font-family: Courier New;"><strong>POSITIVE IN IBIZA...</strong></span></a><strong><span style="font-family: Courier New;"> </span></strong><a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8082259/Vatican-City-reports-case-coronavirus-days-Pope-tested-negative.html"><span style="color: black; font-family: Courier New;"><strong>Vatican reports first case...</strong></span></a><strong><span style="font-family: Courier New;"> </span></strong><a href="https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/mecca-deserted-chilling-video-coronavirus-21643018"><span style="color: black; font-family: Courier New;"><strong>Mecca deserted in chilling video...</strong></span></a><strong><span style="font-family: Courier New;"> </span></strong><a href="https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-spreads-one-study-predicts-101552222.html"><strong><span style="color: black; font-family: Courier New;">Study predicts 15 million dead...</span></strong></a><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: large;"></span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: large;"> Reading group: which climate science fiction should we read in March? </span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: large;"></span></strong><br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></strong><strong><span style="font-size: large;">From Mary Shelley to Margaret Atwood, the genre has been worrying over climate change for centuries. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/03/reading-group-which-sf-climate-fiction-should-we-read-in-march">Please help The Guardian book guy and Sci-fi cult member Sam Jordison</a> choose one from many novels</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: large;"></span></strong><br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/03/reading-group-which-sf-climate-fiction-should-we-read-in-march">https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/03/reading-group-which-sf-climate-fiction-should-we-read-in-march</a><br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/03/reading-group-which-sf-climate-fiction-should-we-read-in-march">Sam, why not call them what they are -- cli-fi novels?</a></span></strong></div>
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<br />
I asked Sam Jordison at the Guardian in the UK: <span style="color: blue;">''Sam, why not call them what they are -- cli-fi novels?''</span><br />
<br />
He replied ''basically'' <span style="color: red;">FUCK YOU!</span> What he actually wrote in his reply to my polite comment was: <strong><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;">''Dan, I did think about it, but it hurt too much!"</span></strong><br />
<strong><span style="font-size: large;"></span></strong><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>I then replied to his silly juvenile joke, unbecoming of a books columnist the Guardian, and what did he do? He deleted by comment calling him a juvenile books editor at the Guardian and my post now reads: </strong><span style="color: red; font-size: small;">This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our </span><a data-link-name="community standards" href="http://www.theguardian.com/community-standards"><span style="color: red; font-size: small;">community standards</span></a><span style="color: red; font-size: small;">. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see </span><a data-link-name="FAQs" href="http://www.theguardian.com/community-faqs"><span style="color: red; font-size: small;">our FAQs</span></a><span style="color: red; font-size: small;">.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
<span style="color: red;">RE:</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
For this month’s reading group, we at the Guardian are after nominations for books that have something to say about the climate crisis. <span style="color: blue;">They can be sci-fi novels or <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">cli-fi novels.</a></span><br />
<br />
It’s been a while since we last tackled Skiffy, and since we’re in the middle of an ongoing climate emergency, we thought we’d focus on fiction that is based in the science endorsed by experts; a serious subject, but not at all limiting. <br />
<br />
The climate and changing weather have been among the most fertile subjects for speculative fiction since at least the days of the ark. Older, in fact, since flooding also had such a big influence on the epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. It’s perhaps stretching the definition of climate to say that if <a class="u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.theoi.com/Titan/Aiolos.html"><span style="color: #6b5840;">Aeolus</span></a> had kept his bag of winds closed, Aeneas would never <a class="u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section1/"><span style="color: #6b5840;">have been blown off course</span></a> and the subsequent body of western literature would have been utterly different. But it is true to say that nearly all ancient epics were governed by the moods of the Mediterranean climate, the furies of the equinox and Zephyr’s willingness to blow away the winter.<br />
<br />
There are plenty more recent classics to choose from. One of the very first books that we would recognise as (almost!) modern science fiction, for instance, was Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, detailing the world festering under a black sun, flooding and subsequent migrations. Then there are all the pioneering SF climate novels from the latter half of the 20th century, such as Kate Wilhelm’s <a class="u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/dec/15/hugos-sweet-birds-kate-wilhelm"><span style="color: #6b5840;">Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang</span></a> and JG Ballard’s <a class="u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/20/back-pages-the-drowned-world-jg-ballard-review-archive"><span style="color: #6b5840;">The Drowned World</span></a>. More recently, there have been hugely important novels such as <a class="u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/18/windup-girl-paolo-bacigalupi-review"><span style="color: #6b5840;">The Windup Girl</span></a> by Paolo Bacigalupi, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer’s <a class="u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/05/annihilation-review-jeff-vandermeer-afraid-turn-page"><span style="color: #6b5840;">Annihilation</span></a>, NK Jemisin’s mighty <a class="u-underline" data-link-name="in body link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/27/nk-jemisin-interview-fantasy-science-fiction-writing-racism-sexism"><span style="color: #6b5840;">Broken Earth trilogy</span></a>, and – depending on what you think might have happened – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. There are probably hundreds more to choose from; after all, this is one of the biggest stories of our time.<br />
<br />
If you want to put a book forward for consideration, just post a nomination in the comments below. If you say a thing or two about it, so much the better. Towards the end of the week, I’ll put the nominations in a waterproof hat and the one that comes out will be our subject for the month. I’m looking forward to seeing your suggestions <span style="color: red;">except that I will delete anything that Dan Bloom sends in as a comment or a reply to a comment. I, Sam Jordison am kind of the world and I can delete any Guardian reader I want!</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/03/reading-group-which-sf-climate-fiction-should-we-read-in-march">Sam, why not call them what they are -- cli-fi novels?</a></span></strong></div>
</div>
</div>
<br />
I asked Sam Jordison at the Guardian in the UK: <span style="color: blue;">''Sam, why not call them what they are -- cli-fi novels?''</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span><br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/03/reading-group-which-sf-climate-fiction-should-we-read-in-march">https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/mar/03/reading-group-which-sf-climate-fiction-should-we-read-in-march</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-34437481463133653262020-03-03T20:35:00.004-08:002020-03-03T20:36:24.943-08:00''Cli-Fi and Its Distant Cousin Sci-Fi"<br />
<br />
<br />
''Cli-Fi and Its Distant Cousin Sci-Fi''<br />
by Professor Darren Harris-Fain<br />
Auburn University at Montgomery USA<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">*** Slightly edited for clarification and amplification by this blog</span><br />
<br />
<br />
One of the first documented uses of<a href="http://cli-fi.net/"> “cli-fi,”</a> short for “climate fiction,” was an April 20,<br />
2013 story on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition (produced by Angela Evancie), which on its website titled<br />
the piece<a href="http://npr.org/"> “So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created a New Literary Genre?”</a> <br />
<br />
The answer<br />
to that question, of course, was yes! Remeber, this was 2013. Now it's 2020.<br />
<br />
Climate change has been the topic this new genre for<br />
decades, and that genre is “cli-fi”—climate fiction. It may be true that climate change is an<br />
increasingly frequent topic in contemporary realism; this is part of the reason why <a href="http://google.com/">TheCult Encyclopedia of Cult Science Fiction</a> says, “<em>Fiction centred on climate change is referred<br />to as Cli-Fi, a term coined by literary activist Dan Bloom in 2011 at <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">cli-fi.net</a> ''</em> (Langford).<br />
<br />
Before cli-fi was a thing, sci-fi was already on the scene.<br />
<br />
Before discussing how science fiction has dealt with climate change, it’s worth clarifying<br />
what we mean by “science fiction.” The term, now 90 years old, is misleading because much<br />
of it is not really about science, in contrast with how romance fiction includes romance, crime<br />
fiction includes crime, and Westerns are set in the West. It would be more accurate to call it<br />
“scientific worldview fantastic fiction,” because the fiction in science fiction is informed by the<br />
rationalist, materialist worldview that has developed since the rise of science in the modern era.<br />
It might also be just as accurate to call science fiction “the literature of change,” since it<br />
embraces scientific findings about how the way things are now is not the way they were in the<br />
past. History also tells us this, obviously, but the scientific worldview extends beyond history<br />
and tells us that our world is not only different from previous eras politically, culturally, and<br />
technologically but also, thanks to the disciplines of geology and biology, that our planet and our<br />
very selves are the result of major changes over the course of eons.<br />
<br />
Shaped by history as well as science, science fiction tends to project the inevitability of<br />
change into the future. Will we continue to evolve, and if so, how? How might new technologies<br />
change how we live? What if cataclysmic events—of terrestrial, extraterrestrial, or human<br />
origin—threaten our very existence? Science fiction offers imaginative possibilities for such<br />
scenarios and more.<br />
<br />
In this way, science fiction is a subgenre within the fantastic, that branch of imaginative<br />
literature that presents readers with situations that significantly deviate from the world we know,<br />
in contrast with contemporary and historical realism. Yet we should recognize that, even though<br />
it is fantastic, science fiction is not to be confused with fantasy, another branch of the fantastic.<br />
Fantasy, according to critical consensus, offers characters and/or situations that depart from the<br />
scientific worldview, whether in the form of ghosts, vampires, and other supernatural creatures<br />
or through the depiction of things like magic or characters like elves, dragons, and the like.<br />
Science fiction, on the other hand, is (mostly) consistent with our current state of scientific<br />
knowledge, even if it imagines characters and situations that do not exist in our world now.<br />
Fantasy could never happen, given what we know of the universe; science fiction conceivably<br />
could.<br />
<br />
In projecting possible futures, science fiction thus considers scientific plausibility and<br />
often attempts to extrapolate tenable developments from past knowledge and current situations.<br />
It is therefore not surprising that, in its history from the nineteenth century to the present, its<br />
3<br />
authors have considered how the environment might change, either through natural disasters or<br />
human-made ones or through the long passage of time. However, it should be stressed that<br />
science fiction writers are not trying to predict the future; rather, they’re projecting possible<br />
futures based on current knowledge as settings for fictional narratives. As a result, science fiction<br />
writers often get things wrong—but sometimes they get things right.<br />
<br />
One of the earliest practitioners of science fiction to envision an altered environment was<br />
H. G. Wells, beginning with his novel The Time Machine (1895). The Time Traveller (his name<br />
is never given) describes his adventures voyaging through the fourth dimension. Most of the<br />
novel occurs in AD 802,701, and this world of the far future does not seem radically changed in<br />
terms of climate, though he does witness the disappearance of his house and its replacement with<br />
a garden. However, it is decidedly different in terms of the ruins of civilization the Traveller<br />
encounters, with much of the former London recaptured by vegetation and the bifurcation of<br />
humanity into two separate species. Threatened by the Morlocks who have stolen his machine,<br />
the Traveller manages to reactivate the device and travel millions of years beyond his late-<br />
Victorian time, there witnessing a dying Earth. The sky is no longer blue, and the air is thinner.<br />
Green vegetation is everywhere, but the only living creatures he sees are a huge butterfly and<br />
dozens of monstrous crustaceans. The sea, ringed with salt, barely moves in this windless world.<br />
<br />
As the Traveller says:<br />
I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the<br />
world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony<br />
beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-<br />
looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s lungs: all<br />
contributed to an appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years, and there was the<br />
4<br />
same red sun—a little larger, a little duller—the same dying sea, the same chill<br />
air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green<br />
weed and the red rocks. (Wells, The Time Machine 65)<br />
<br />
The Traveller moves even further into the future, “watching with a strange fascination the<br />
sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last,<br />
more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure<br />
nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens” (65). Wells imagines a far-future world where life<br />
may go on, but the climate changes due to the inexorable forces of nature—a natural world not<br />
designed with any endpoint in mind by a God for whom humanity is a special creation.<br />
Wells also questions the existence of a supernatural being whose providence governs<br />
human affairs in his short story “The Star” (1897). In the near future (near to the late Victorians,<br />
that is), Earth is threatened by a celestial object hurtling through the solar system that, after<br />
colliding and merging with Neptune, continues toward the sun, looking like a new star in the<br />
heavens. As it heads toward Earth, it increases in size, and eventually the heat of the object is<br />
felt. Scientists fear it will collide with Earth as well, but complete catastrophe is averted as the<br />
“star” instead passes by the Earth and heads toward the sun. Even so, such a massive object<br />
passing so near the planet brings forth extreme meteorological disasters as it approaches: storms<br />
and floods, earthquakes and volcanoes, and intense heat; its gravitational pull also alters Earth’s<br />
orbit. Even after the “star” is gone, “men perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of<br />
yore, and the sun larger …” (152). Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin Bay become “green and<br />
gracious” (152), the ice at the poles is considerably melted, and humanity moves “northward and<br />
southward toward the poles of the earth” (152) because of the planet’s increased warmth. The<br />
calamity is not of human origin, but Wells’s story nonetheless reveals a scientific view about the<br />
5<br />
precarious nature of our climate. Later writers would pick up the theme of an altered climate due<br />
to astronomical phenomena, among them Larry Niven in “Inconstant Moon” (1971).<br />
<br />
A changed climate caused by calamity is also present in Richard Jefferies’s novel After<br />
London; or, Wild England (1885). The nature of the disaster, vaguely understood from the<br />
perspective of the twenty-first century, is never made clear (though some suspect it was caused<br />
by a celestial body passing near the earth, as in Wells’s story), but its results are manifest:<br />
England’s climate has been altered, a vast lake covers much of the center of the country, and<br />
most of the country has been reclaimed by forests except for London, which has become a toxic<br />
swamp.<br />
<br />
In these three works and many others found in the history of science fiction, climate<br />
change is presented as a natural phenomenon, with humanity helpless in the face of powerful<br />
physical forces to do anything about it. However, Victorian writers earlier than Wells noted how<br />
industrialization was affecting the world around them, thus implicating civilization for its<br />
discontents. In chapter 5 of Book 1 of Hard Times (1854), for example, Charles Dickens<br />
famously depicts the smoke-filled sky of his fictional northern industrial village of Coketown,<br />
with its “black canal” and “a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye…” (17).<br />
Other Victorians extrapolated the effects of industrial pollution into the future. These<br />
include William Delisle Hay in The Doom of the Great City (1880) and Robert Barr in “The<br />
Doom of London” (The Idler, 1892), both describing a London poisoned by smog from the<br />
futuristic perspective of the mid twentieth century. However, the Victorian belief in progress<br />
often extended to an optimistic view that, while the nineteenth century might have lived under<br />
the cloud of the pollution generated by industrialism, further advances would lead to cleaning up<br />
the mess. This view would be continued by many authors into the twentieth century.<br />
6<br />
It is remarkable that in the utopias and other futuristic projections created by science<br />
fiction authors in the late Victorian period and into the first half of the twentieth century, future<br />
cities are routinely depicted as well organized and spotlessly clean—kind of like the Disney<br />
parks’ Tomorrowland, only without Space Mountain. Even in early dystopias like Aldous<br />
Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the “bad<br />
places” imagined by these authors are bad because of their social and political structures, not<br />
because they’ve damaged the planet.<br />
<br />
It is not until the 1950s that science fiction writers consider climate change a realistic<br />
possibility for the future, and they do so within a specific historical context: the end of World<br />
War II and the beginning of the Cold War, both presenting the threat of nuclear war and the<br />
concomitant altering of the environment through radiation and radioactive waste. Scores of short<br />
stories and novels were written imagining how climate change wrought by nuclear war could<br />
render the planet either entirely or partially toxic. Similarly, the publication of Rachel Carson’s<br />
Silent Spring in 1962 and subsequent discussions of the effects of a variety of pollutants spurred<br />
science fiction writers to extrapolate present-day concerns into futuristic depictions of a polluted<br />
planet.<br />
<br />
These developments in the 1950s and 1960s coincide with a broader development in<br />
American and British science fiction: the debate between optimism and pessimism. In contrast<br />
with British dystopias like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, American science<br />
fiction of the first half of the twentieth century tended to follow Jules Verne and progress-<br />
minded Victorians as a model in imagining futures filled with technological and economic<br />
advances. After the war, however, many writers, both American and British, began approaching<br />
7<br />
the human future more pessimistically, and possible devastation of the environment was just one<br />
avenue they pursued.<br />
<br />
A key figure in this shift was J. G. Ballard. The first of Ballard’s early novels about post-<br />
apocalyptic scenarios, The Wind from Nowhere (1961), does not explain the cause of the<br />
catastrophes: a powerful global wind eventually dries the seas and the Great Lakes. However, in<br />
The Drowned World (1962) it is clear global warming is the precipitating event. The year is<br />
2145, and much of the planet has been flooded due to increased temperatures. Likewise, in The<br />
Burning World (1964) a massive drought, attributed to the dumping of industrial waste into the<br />
world’s oceans, has dried up smaller bodies of water.<br />
Ballard was not the only British writer to tackle the topic of disasters and catastrophes.<br />
<br />
Among those who do so in connection with climate, John Christopher’s The World in Winter<br />
(1962) imagines the effects of reduced solar radiation on the planet, specifically the United<br />
Kingdom, which becomes an abandoned frozen wasteland from which many flee to Nigeria.<br />
Other British writers imagined environmental catastrophes caused by human efforts to control<br />
the weather, as in John Boland’s White August (1955)—Christmas weather in July!—and John<br />
Bowen’s After the Rain (1958)—time to build another ark! Indeed, one key distinction between<br />
much science fiction and mainstream climate fiction is that the former often follow the<br />
Frankenstein motif of humanity attempting to control nature and creating havoc as a result,<br />
whereas the latter tends to depict climate change not as a result of humanity’s overreaching but<br />
rather stemming from long-term developments and either its resistance to curtailing its industrial<br />
and technological advances, its indifference to the effects of climate change, or its denial of the<br />
scientific consensus.<br />
8<br />
The environmental impact of pollution is addressed somewhat in Harry Harrison’s Make<br />
Room! Make Room! (1966) and directly in John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972); both<br />
novels employ multiple points of view, as if to emphasize the effects on humanity as a whole and<br />
not just a handful of characters. Such works coincided with the rise of the ecology movement in<br />
the late 1960s and the 1970s. This movement also influenced the writing of the utopian novel<br />
Ecotopia (1975) by Ernest Callenbach, in which Washington, Oregon, and part of northern<br />
California secede from the U.S. and establish an environmentally conscious state designed to<br />
avert the ecological damage found in a story like James Blish’s “We All Die Naked” (1969), in<br />
which rising carbon dioxide levels, causing the greenhouse effect, lead to melting polar ice and<br />
rising sea levels, with New York City now a new Venice.<br />
<br />
Since the 1970s, science fiction authors depicting possible future scenarios—especially if<br />
working in the dystopian mode—have frequently presented settings ravaged by pollution,<br />
radiation, or both. For instance, even though the focus of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s<br />
Tale (1985) lies elsewhere, the increasing infertility that drives much of its premise stems from<br />
environmental damage caused by pollution and radiation. Several science fiction novels deal<br />
with the effects of rising sea levels caused by the greenhouse effect. One example is David<br />
Brin’s Earth (1990); in its AD 2038 setting, global warming has contributed to rising sea levels<br />
and increasingly severe storms and threats to a growing number of species.<br />
<br />
Regrettably, some science fiction authors, like some segments of the American public<br />
and its politicians, have expressed skepticism about climate change, among them Michael<br />
Crichton’s State of Fear (2004), which was lambasted by scientists for its inaccuracies and<br />
misrepresentations, and Fallen Angels (1991) by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael<br />
9<br />
Flynn. The latter ironically is in fact a climate change novel; the authors cast doubt on global<br />
warming only to project another ice age instead. However, such examples are outliers in the<br />
field. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the realities of climate change have<br />
become so accepted “[o]wing to the increasing scientific consensus that our energy-intensive<br />
technological civilization is measurably and in all likelihood irreversibly affecting Earth’s<br />
climate” that “consideration of climate change has become virtually inevitable in serious Near<br />
Future sf of the twenty-first century” (Scott Langford).<br />
<br />
The contemporary science fiction writer who has addressed climate change most<br />
extensively is the American author Kim Stanley Robinson. For much of his career he has written<br />
novelistic trilogies, all of which connect in some fashion to environmental concerns. His first, the<br />
Three Californias trilogy, imagines three different futures for Orange County, California. In the<br />
third volume, Pacific Edge (1990), Robinson depicts an ecological utopia comparable to<br />
Callenbach’s Ecotopia, imagining how southern California could change course from its present<br />
state to a greener future. The prospect of transforming an existing landscape is also a key concept<br />
in Robinson’s Mars trilogy, whose middle volume, Green Mars (1993), concerns the<br />
terraforming of Mars’s alien environment into a Terran-friendly world. His third trilogy, the<br />
Science in the Capital series, is the most focused on climate change in his oeuvre. In Forty Signs<br />
of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007), Robinson<br />
depicts a near-future Washington, D.C. that suffers the effects of climate change and characters<br />
who strive to address the matter. Robinson also addresses climate change in standalone novels<br />
like 2312 (2012) and New York 2140 (2017).<br />
10<br />
Given the privileging of literary fiction within certain circles and the low opinion some<br />
still have of science fiction, it is understandable that some people think climate fiction is distinct<br />
from science fiction, even if both address climate change. However, if one wishes to get a better<br />
picture of how authors have speculated about the possible effects of climate change, one should<br />
expand one’s view to take in science fiction and not just “literary” authors who have belatedly<br />
joined the discussion.<br />
<br />
11<br />
Works Cited<br />
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times, Norton Critical Edition, edited by George Ford and Sylvère<br />
Monod, Norton, 1966.<br />
Evancie, Angela. “So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created a New Literary Genres?”<br />
National Public Radio, 20 Apr. 2013, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2013/04/20/176713022/so">https://www.npr.org/2013/04/20/176713022/so</a>-<br />
hot-right-now-has-climate-change-created-a-new-literary-genre<br />
Langford, David. “Climate Change.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3 rd ed., edited by John<br />
Clute et al., e-book, 31 Aug. 2018, <a href="http://www.sf/">http://www.sf</a>-<br />
encyclopedia.com/entry/climate_change. Accessed 18 Nov. 2019.<br />
Wells, H. G. “The Star.” Selected Stories of H. G. Wells, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin, Modern<br />
Library, 2004, pp. 142–52.<br />
—. The Time Machine, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Stephen Arata, Norton,Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-17000656087128134012020-02-29T20:34:00.002-08:002020-02-29T20:34:52.619-08:00Jenny Offill’s Cli-Fi Novella‘Weather’ explores what it means to survive in trying times<div class="asset-masthead text-center" style="background-color: #f3f4f2; box-sizing: border-box; color: #262b28; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures contextual; margin: 20px 0px 40px; position: relative; text-align: center !important;">
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Review: Jenny Offill’s Cli-Fi Novella‘Weather’ explores what it means to survive in trying times</span></h1>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><ul class="list-inline" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style: none; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: -5px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; display: block; line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px;"><span class="tnt-byline" itemprop="author" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: adelle-sans, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">By Catherine Holmes</span></span><span style="font-family: miller-text;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"> </span></span></span></li>
<span style="font-family: miller-text; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0.96px; text-align: start;">Reviewer</span><span style="font-family: miller-text; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0.96px; text-align: start;"> </span><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: miller-text; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0.96px; text-align: start;">Catherine Holmes</strong><span style="font-family: miller-text; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0.96px; text-align: start;"> </span><span style="font-family: miller-text; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0.96px; text-align: start;">teaches English at the College of Charleston</span></ul>
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From the front lines of a planet in disrepair comes Jenny Offill’s “Weather,” a pliable, resistant novel that hangs on to the jokey voice of its predecessor, “Dept. of Speculation.”</div>
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Many readers (I am one) fall hard for Offill’s spare, fractured method. The story of “Dept. of Speculation” comes in blocks of text, almost like puzzle pieces, that readers can connect for a fuller picture of its narrator’s domestic crisis. “Weather” is equally piecemeal, and Lizzie, its narrator, is obsessed with gathering fragments against the ruin of time.</div>
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Offill describes herself as a “meat-eating, plane-flying, march-hating person” who began writing “Weather” as a cli-fi survival manual for her daughter. Lizzie is also a parent who becomes an “accidental activist” like her creator.</div>
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Lizzie (married to Ben, a Jewish academic, and we don’t learn her name until almost halfway into the novel) is a “feral librarian” — that is, one without a library degree. She gave up on her Ph.D. program, and Sylvia, her dissertation director, pulled strings to arrange the job.</div>
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Quickly, we come to realize that her life is thronged with people, some of them nameless: the “doomed adjunct” whom she loads with supplies when no one’s watching; the “man in the shabby suit” who works for hospice and tells her things she wants to know (for instance, that it’s important to stay in a house for three days after a death, to experience the “manifestations”); Mohan at the bodega, who will keep the cat that wanders in because his wife no longer loves him; Henry, her drug-addicted brother; Ben, her educational-game-designing husband; Eli, her son and the sweetest kid going; and others.</div>
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At the end of the novel, Lizzie will say, “All these people. I have so many people, you wouldn’t believe it.” It is not an offhand comment. They are the essence of her life.</div>
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Lizzie is anxious. She can’t sleep without Ambien and is happy to learn she’s “habituated,” not addicted. Her child’s fancy former preschool sends a newsletter with a list of the top 10 childhood fears. Darkness doesn’t make the list, but “blood, sharks, and loneliness are eight, nine, and ten.” And Lizzie? Her greatest fear is “the acceleration of days.”</div>
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Every year on her birthday, she checks in with Virginia Woolf’s diaries to see her thoughts on reaching the same age. On the day she turned 44 (Lizzie’s age), Woolf wrote that she was heading toward death, “as the river shoots to Niagara ...”</div>
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Offill ratchets up the accelerating days and dread when she gives Lizzie a second job, as an assistant answering Sylvia’s email. Since she became a star doomsday podcaster (“Hell and High Water”), Sylvia’s mail is through the roof.</div>
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Offill writes as if from the long historical perspective. Her end-times narrative is both desperate and funny. People do crazy things and think crazy thoughts when the stakes have already been lost. There’s talk of de-extinction. Saber-tooth tigers, maybe woolly mammoths, could make a come-back.</div>
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Lizzie is not giving up. She ponders how to “channel all this dread into action.” She buys a telescope because she wants to see. She buys running shoes because she wants to run. She tries the Unitarian Church. It turns out they are not her tribe: “All that eye contact.” Meanwhile, Sylvia has given up and gone to the darkest place in North America, somewhere in Nevada.</div>
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Our narrator is just getting started. She has a fling with “prepper” web sites, where she learns: 1. how to start a fire with a gum wrapper and a battery and 2. what to do if you run out of candles (make one by stabbing a hole in a can of oil-packed tuna and inserting a wick made of newspaper). She and Ben have semi-serious conversations about who they’ll invite to join them on their “doomstead.”</div>
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Lizzie is such a charming empath, her sensibility so offbeat, and her dread of climate catastrophe so real that they overshadow other threats. As she is peopling am imaginary doomstead; Lizzie’s actual household is in jeopardy. Ben and Eli break away for a three-week “glamping” trip, and Lizzie finds herself flirting with someone she meets on the subway.</div>
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At the heart of “Weather” are questions about what it will mean to be among the survivors. After the book ends, all alone on a page is the following web address: <a href="http://www.obligatorynoteofhope.com/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0074d9; font-weight: 700; padding-bottom: 0.16rem; text-decoration-color: rgb(29, 138, 203); text-decoration-skip-ink: auto; transition: color 0.16s ease-in-out 0s, text-decoration-color 0.16s ease-in-out 0s;" target="_blank">www.obligatorynoteofhope.com</a>. Click it, and you’ll find 45 “Tips for Trying Times,” beginning with Tip 1, “Read and Reread” and ending with Tip 45, “Make Wishes for the New Year” from the “Collected Letters” of Ernest Shackleton: “May the new one bring us good fortune, a safe deliverance from this anxious time and all good things to those we love so far away.”</div>
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Jenny Offill’s wonderful cli-fi ends with its own plea to close distances: “The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.”</div>
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Reviewer <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Catherine Holmes</strong> teaches English at the College of Charleston.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-34274337322250247642020-02-29T20:16:00.000-08:002020-02-29T20:16:03.668-08:00''THE OIL EATERS'' -- A QUEER DYSTOPIAN CLI-FI STORY by James Schwartz<div dir="auto">
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''Hello Dan Bloom at The Cli-Fi Report,</div>
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I came across <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">your cli-fi blog</a> and love it! With your permission, I would like to contribute a cli-fi short story I wrote.</div>
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- Best,</div>
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JAMES SCHWARTZ in Hawaii''</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">''THE OIL EATERS'' </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">A QUEER DYSTOPIAN CLI-FI STORY </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">BY </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">JAMES SCHWARTZ</span> (copyright 2020)</div>
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<b><u>JAMES SCHWARTZ</u></b> is a poet, writer, slam performer and author of 5 poetry collections including ''The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America.''</div>
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<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://literaryparty.blogspot.com&source=gmail&ust=1583122043712000&usg=AFQjCNGHOm2a5GPsf3mA4J10S5xHiopFGA" href="http://literaryparty.blogspot.com/" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://literaryparty.blogspot.<wbr></wbr>com</a> he/him </div>
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<span style="color: cyan; font-size: x-large;"><b>@queeraspoetry </b></span></div>
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INTRODUCTION</div>
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["The Oil Eaters" is from James Schwartz, the author of "The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America"<br />
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A dystopian cli-fi short story set in a post-apocalyptic planet in ruin and following the journey of a queer hustler, Julian, whose survival depends on navigating a warring post Capitalism Collapse world of Colonizers and the First Nationmen, wastelands of toxic rains and Oil Outposts.</div>
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The story begins with Julian on the move in the Midwest ("Gateway to Amish Artifacts Country") hustling truck drivers around the now volcanic Turtle Island, seducing a First Nationmen warrior and following his quest for survival in the land of "The Oil Eaters". </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">PART ONE</span></div>
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Sometimes Julian dreamed about the City of Refuge, passing through onyx lava rock walls, all sins and crimes absolved on a faraway Pacific isle. </div>
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Sometimes he dreamed about ancient heaus to Lono and gods even older. </div>
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Other times he witnessed the volcanoes erupting in magnificent splendor against the heavy darkness of the tropics. </div>
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Always he awoke with a sense of panting disorientation.</div>
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Julian squinted, stepping out of the cheerful Swiss style motel and into the crisp autumn sunshine. The motel - its sign promising to be your #1 Choice in Accommodations - and Gateway to Amish Artifacts Country - stood close to the toll road, diesel perfuming the morning. </div>
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He sat for several minutes by the curb smoking a cigarette. Eventually the man emerged from their room, slamming the door behind him with an air of satisfaction.</div>
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"I'm going north." </div>
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The man gestured at the toll road but Julian shook his head at him until he strode away across the parking lot where his rig sat. The semi sputtered to life and became a speck on the horizon.</div>
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Julian had counted the cash in the predawn hour, the trucker snoring and sprawled over nearly the entire bed. He had been more generous than Julian had anticipated, the stack of hundred dollar bills held together by a Bank of Oil Outposts clasp. </div>
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Julian was from the Colonizers, a failed offshoot of the Europea Capitalists that had flourished on Turtle Island until the Great Oil Collapse.</div>
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He had still been a child but could recall the grim white faces of The Capitalists on television, the burning cities and mass protests against the Extinction.</div>
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The world was quieter now but traffic flowed across Turtle Island's highways to the Oil Outposts.</div>
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He walked to the highway, sticking out his thumb. Almost immediately a passing semi slowed to a halt. Julian leapt up into the passenger seat, brushing his shoulder length sandy hair away from his delicate features and grinned at Timothy the Trucker, Tallahassee bound.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">PART TWO </span></div>
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They reached Nashville after dark, the cityscape half in darkness. Julian sucked him off in the parking lot, one hand massaging his thigh, the other curled around a gold cross that hung from a chain around his neck.</div>
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Timothy the Trucker noticed the cross gleaming in his dashboard lights.</div>
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"You believe in the Messiah?"</div>
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Julian responded by slipping the cross between his lips and running it up and down his length. Timothy gasped almost comically before ejaculating with a series of grunts. </div>
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As they left the Outpost the noxious chemical rains begin to fall. Julian pulled the hood of his oversized sweatshirt (Detroit vs. Everybody) over his head and fell asleep. Timothy listened to 100.3 XM, Today's Oil Outpost Hits.</div>
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Signs:</div>
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Toxic Rain Alert</div>
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Keep Windows Up, Do Not Expose Skin </div>
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Entering First Nation Land At Your Own Risk </div>
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Atlanta Shores / Jacksonville Shores </div>
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Volcanic Activity Ahead </div>
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Julian jumped out of the truck at the Tallahassee Outpost store with a backward wave and a considerable amount of cash. The store was stocked with respirators, breathing masks, topical burn creams and umbrellas. </div>
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For a brief moment he froze - The store was manned by a First Nationmen warrior. He eyed the umbrellas, selecting one in case he couldn't get a ride and made his way to the service counter. </div>
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The warrior eyed him with hostility.</div>
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"I do not serve Colonizers here." </div>
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His gaze fell to Julian's crucifix necklace with distaste.</div>
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Too late Julian realized he had forgotten to tuck it out of sight. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">PART THREE </span></div>
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"I am decolonized" </div>
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Julian answered coolly, tossing cash on the counter. </div>
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The First Nationman suddenly roared with laughter. </div>
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"You are a brave one." </div>
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His smile was appreciative.</div>
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"I am in service to all First Nationmen." </div>
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Julian smirked at him.</div>
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He would live to see another day.</div>
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The Swamps were a respite, no toxic rain fell here and the warrior granted him sanctuary.</div>
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Julian remembered seeing birds on television but never in his life until now.</div>
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The Swamps housed a flock of feral, grey-white creatures with talons that gripped the branches of withered cypress trees and eyed him with ferocious intensity and shrieked at him as he guided a canoe carved by the warrior through the Swamps and amid ropes of dead Spanish moss.</div>
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His warrior-lover, named Ata, fucked him with smooth, fluid grace by the fire at night and once up against a tree that shed pearl colored sap when touched. </div>
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Julian was an expert at manipulating men to orgasm but the warrior was not satisfied until his deep penetration brought Julian to a shuddering climax, only then releasing him with reluctance.</div>
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Ata tore the chain from Julian's neck and hurled it into the toxic brown waters that covered the Swampland.</div>
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On instinct Julian dove into the waters after it, retrieving the now corroded cross and spent the next week ill, spitting up blood and wracked by a burning fever.</div>
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Ata sneered at him curled by the fire, gasping for breath.</div>
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"You are Whore" He kicked Julian, catching him in the throat and triggering a coughing fit.</div>
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Julian left the First Nationmen sanctuary in the ochre colored night, unseen volcanoes shaking the earth and splitting the highways.</div>
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He hitched rides north and west, one trucker forcing him to fellate his dick by knifepoint, piercing the blade into his neck as he came. </div>
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In several days Julian had reached the Oil Outpost of Los Angeles Shores where the Pacific Ocean surged through abandoned skyscrapers.</div>
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He remembered the oceans on television which bore little resemblance to the heaving black garbage piles that rose and fell around the buildings.</div>
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This was the largest city of Oil Eaters remaining since the Capitalism Collapse. </div>
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Julian entered the cathedral silently, walking up the aisle past the altar adorned by a massive crucifix fashioned from the sea- metals.</div>
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Outside the church walls he could hear the sounds of the Oil Eaters at work in the refinery and the crashing waves of garbage. </div>
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He knelt before the throne also forged from the garbage and kissed the feet of the Holy Oil Eater. </div>
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"Forgive me Father for I have sinned."</div>
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The figure on the throne was a long deceased corpse, it's skeleton black and corroded, its vestments in tatters.</div>
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In the silence of the sanctuary Julian imagined he could hear the birds. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">THE END</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-643722651058300432020-02-26T21:05:00.002-08:002020-02-26T21:05:18.124-08:00Cli-Fi -- If you haven't heard of the term yet, then as Bill suggests, Google it.<br />
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In a recent exchange on Twitter, the climate activist Bill McKibben wrote to Elizabeth Evans and Doug Gordon, who were in on the conversation:<br />
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"Must-read: Kim Stanley Robinson's ''New York 2140.'' If you love New York, it's one of the best books since E.B. White. And it has a lot of boats in it'.'<br />
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To which Evans replied with a question she had:: "Holy Cow. Is there an evolving genre of climate fiction?"<br />
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To which Bill replied in the affirmative: "indeed, Google "cli-fi."<br />
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This news this week from Twitter brings to mind an essay Bill wrote in 2009 titled: ''Four years after my pleading essay in Grist in 2005, climate art is hot."<br />
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Of that ''pleading little essay'' he wrote in 2005? <br />
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"It was probably the last moment I could have written it," Bill said in 2009, again in Grist. "Clearly there were lots and lots of people already thinking the same way, because ever since it’s seemed to me as if deep and moving images and sounds and words have been flooding out into the world.''<br />
That torrent of art has been, often, deeply disturbing -- it should be deeply disturbing, given what we’re doing to the Earth, McKibben noted, careful to capitalize the word Earth, even though his editors told him not to.<br />
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That's why, In his spirited exchange on Twitter in 2020, the veteran climate activist wrote to his two friends Elizabeth and Doug, who were in on the Twitter conversation:<br />
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"Must-read: Kim Stanley Robinson's ''New York 2140.'' If you love New York, it's one of the best books since E.B. White. And it has a lot of boats in it'.'<br />
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And to which Evans replied, as noted above: "Holy Cow. Is there an evolving genre of climate fiction?"<br />
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And to which Bill replied in the affirmative: <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">"indeed, Google "cli-fi."</a><br />
<br />"Artists, in a sense, are the antibodies of the cultural bloodstream," McKibben wrote in that 2009 essay. "They sense trouble early, and rally to isolate and expose and defeat it, to bring to bear the human power for love and beauty and meaning against the worst results of carelessness and greed and stupidity. So when art both of great worth, and in great quantities, begins to cluster around an issue, it means that civilization has identified it finally as a threat. Artists and scientists perform this function most reliably; politicians are a lagging indicator.''<br />
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And now in 2020, Bill has fully embraced the new literary genre of cli-fi, first promoted just two years after he wrote that 2009 essay. <br />
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If you haven't heard of the term yet, then as Bill suggests, <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">Google it.</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-949421001644904537.post-19373028157722295812020-02-26T20:08:00.000-08:002020-02-26T20:55:24.022-08:00To which Bill replied in the affirmative: "indeed, Google "cli-fi"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<span style="color: red;"><strong>on Twitter on Feb, 25, 2020 <span style="color: cyan;">@BillMcKibben</span>, in replying to @BrooklynSpoke wrote:</strong></span><br />
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<strong><span style="color: blue;">"Must read: Kim Stanley Robinson's ''New York 2140.'' If you love New York, it's one of the best books since E.B. White. And it has a lot of boats in it''</span></strong><br />
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To which <span style="color: cyan;">@WallaceWriter</span> and <span style="color: cyan;">@BrooklynSpoke</span> replied:<span style="color: cyan;"><strong> <span style="color: red; font-size: large;">"Holy Cow! Is there an evolving genre of climate fiction?"</span></strong></span><br />
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<strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">To which Bill replied in the affirmative: <span style="color: cyan;">"indeed, Google <a href="http://cli-fi.net/">"cli-fi"</a></span></span></strong><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0