The Future’s Power

by Weston Cutter

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

 

Last year’s Herding Donkeysis the book that the experience of reading this book came closest to: a book I cracked, sat on the couch thinking casually this’ll do for now then found myself hours later still riveted, unable to focus on much else. Herding Donkeys was of course a fantastic, brisk and informative tracking of the rise of the democratic party starting with the lead-up to the election in ’04 (earlier, to a degree, but mainly, think Dean); Bottled Lightning‘s a fantastic, brisk and informative dual tracking of both 1) the use of electricity to power an automobile and 2) the present and potential future of lithium ion batteries. Aside from the little info nuggets you’ll pocket in reading the book (first big industrial investor in Lithium batteries? Oil companies. Present soft drink which originated as a lithiated beverage? 7-Up), the most useful thing Bottled Lightning will offer any reader is something like a framework for understanding out present energy moment, how we got here, and what might come next.

First: fear not, this book is not polemical, is no tirade. Fletcher’s not out to demonize anyone. I’m sure global warming comes up in the book, but I honestly can’t remember it, which is just to say that Bottled Lightning will (hopefully) help reframe the socio-political connections a reader might make between, say, a Prius driver and that person’s propensity to vote in certain ways (if Nocera, the fracking apologist, can so glowingly write about liking the Volt, there’s hope for us all). Sure: the reader needs to bring a decent amount of knowledge and info to the reading table to fully appreciate how significant it is for the future of the US’s middle class that there be easy transportation (seemingly, specifically, automotive transportation [/shakes head sadly about the lack of infrastructure funding for trains/]); still, just the info and technological background on batteries and the development of lithium ion is riveting enough.

Enough about the more political aspects: what’s massively cool about Bottled Lightning is the depth Fletcher offers about the development of modern batteries. It seems to me relatively easy to overlook or not think much about the insanely rapid dwindling of cell phones (thanks, lithium!); it’s also easy, at least for me, to forget that, along with the tech advances each year and iteration of whatever yr pocket-computer of your choosing, there are advances in batteries being made. Think about that for a second—better, think about that for a second after you’ve spent a full minute considering the fact that, aside from carbeuretors being replaced by fuel-injectors, there’s been almost no change in the engines we use in our cars since the advent of cars. That fact alone should make everybody jump up and down about the potential for lithium ion batteries (I keep saying lithium ion, by the way, because just saying ‘lithium’ wouldn’t be enough—there were generations of lithium batteries that existed, with different technology, before there were today’s [or this decade's, really] lithium ion batteries, which history Fletcher traces with clarity and grace, which is saying something; you may not end up understanding every last detail of the science involved in these batteries, but you’ll have, I’m guessing, a better grasp on it than you presently do).

Not least, Bottled Lightning does a quietly wonderful job of highlighting the fact that, should lithium end up being the essential component of our future’s automotive (and otherwise) power needs, the middle east, yes, will suddenly prove less globally significant…but that doesn’t remotely ensure geo-political stability (given that the largest supplies of lithium are in Bolivia and Chile, it’s worth taking some time to consider how their politics might influence the global Li supply).

That might be a good way to talk about this book: it does, page after page, a quietly wonderful job of telling a riveting, vital story. You’ll probably not read a more fundamentally useful book this year.

Ed Falco’s “Burning Man”

by Jeremy Griffin

We’ve made it pretty clear that we’re huge fans of Ed Falco, both the man and his work. Most of us were fortunate enough to study under him at Virginia Tech, where he heads up the MFA program. Of course, this does make it a bit difficult to speak objectively about his writing; how do you know I’m telling the truth when I tell you that his most recent story collection, Burning Man, is easily the best story collection in his entire catalogue?

Well, frankly, you don’t. So here’s what you do: you go out, you buy a goddamn copy of the book, and you see for damn yourself.

Because the truth is that if you’re familiar with Falco’s stuff, then you know you’re not taking any kind of risk; the author has been consistently praised for his ability to employ violence as a means of characterization and not necessarily as a cog in some giant Stephen Kingy plot machine (case in point: Falco was contacted by Mario Puzo’s estate to write a prequel to The Godfather; it will be out in 2012).

The characters in Burning Man are all bumbling through some complex set of circumstances that seems to worsen with every attempt to escape it, and in this sense, they are painfully real. For instance, there’s “Wild Girls,” in which an art professor, a female acquaintance, and a former student make the impetuous decision to have a threesome, only to find that the stakes of such an endeavor are much higher and much more difficult to understand than they believed. Falco doesn’t shy away from the taboo, but he doesn’t fetishize it, either. Sex, violence, drugs–the author approaches these issues with the same thoughtfulness he uses when the most trivial of details of his characters’ unique lives.

Like the protagonist in “Wild Girls,” most of the main characters in this book are middle-aged men privately besieged by loneliness and the dim panic that tends to define the aging process. The most notable of these instances is the title story “Burning Man,” in which a writer/academic attempts to reunite with his estranged rock star brother at the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

In terms of the prose itself, the book is a wonder. Not that this has ever been an issue for Falco, but whereas some of his earlier works favored concise Carveresque sentences, many of the stories in Burning Man resonate with a poetic flourish: the sentences are smooth and fluid, teasing the ideas out with a kind of steady grace reminiscent of such literary powerhouses as Phillip Roth and Johnathan Franzen.

Many reviewers have already pointed out the book’s “relationship”—if we’re going to call it that—to the 9/11 attacks. The Nevada Review described it as (possibly) the first of its kind of post-9/11 books. This should come as no surprise considering that Falco is a native of Brooklyn and that tragic violence is a motif in many of his works. However, Falco always manages to explore this issue without all of that rubbernecky Grishamy sensationalism. Rather, his interest is the aftermath of the event, the grim internal struggles of those characters who must endure it. The events in “Among the Tootalonians” take place in New York a few years after the attacks, and while the characters maneuver through their lives with a sort of residual trepidation, Falco never explicitly references the attacks themselves.

Why?

Because it’s the characters that really matter here. Their wants. Their fears. The psychological forces that compel them into their curious predicaments. And no matter how grim those predicaments may be—whether we’re watching two survivors of nightclub bombing play chess, or we’re heading into the Nevada desert for one of the most infamous music festivals in the country—it is impossible not to follow these characters’ every step.

New York ≠ Vivaldi (+parks)

by Weston Cutter

Whistling Vivaldi by Claude M Steele

 

I’ll admit up front to having a possibly outsized interest in stereotype threat—the telling details that are pegged to us because of demographics or appearance. It’s weird how much this stuff arises, in strange ways all the time: every time you see someone on public transit reading a book it doesn’t appear they ‘should’ be reading, by whatever metric you’re using—that’s stereotype threat.

I’m a white, bookish, four-eyed dude, and so seeing me with some inscrutable book of poetry or something’s relatively easy—there’s no psychic dissonance. Plant me at a classroom’s front, though, and have me talk (without shame!) about being just riveted by this last season of the Bachelor, and things change…except only a little, because (and this is why I’m so interested in stereotype threat) my demographic gets away with just about anything re: stereotype threat as long as we can hide it behind irony (plus irony’s relationship to sincerity grows stranger by the day). Plus no matter how tough I want to look, I’d be hard pressed to actually look like trouble: in my twenties, when I listened to nothing but rap, I was still emphatically a white dude driving a truck listening to rap. Hardly a threat.

However: Claude Steele’s fantastic Whistling Vivaldi examines the negative pressures and weird trap-doors of stereotypic thinking we’ve mostly all got—the book’s title’s about a young black man who, on whistling classical music, neutralized the perceived threat he presented as to the white folks he walked by on sidewalks.

Let’s not be muddled, either: this shit’s awful—stereotype threats can be cutesy, to a degree (white dude talking about Brad and Emily), but more often than not they’re destructive and constrictig in all sorts of terrible ways (I feel no compulsion to exclusively read the sorts of books a dude with my background and/or looks should read, but, even if I did, that’d hardly be a problem; now imagine if I was a 15 year old on the hockey team with an interest in dudes and the wonkiest depths of poli science). And of course all of this stuff’s just righteously, desparetely twinned with ideas of identity—which, for all the freedom we’ve got re: identity, is still a damn scary arena, and one in which true transformation’s as hard as taking a baseball bat to the ocean. All that said: Steele’s Vivaldi is a riveting, great, eye- and mind-opening read, and you owe it to everyone you merely recognize instead of see to read this thing.

 

Genius of Place: the Life of Frederick Law Olmsted by Justin Martin

The Archeaology of Home by Katherine Greider

 

I’ll admit a bit of interest in city planning and historical stuff about urban areas, and that may or may not have anything to do with the woman I’m married to. Regardless: books about cities do it for me in all sorts of ways (my interest, I’d like to disinterestedly claim, started long before I met the woman who’s now my wife: I grew up in a big midwestern city, worked on a river for years on a boat that utilized century-old technology, and thrilled as a teenager to find old disused parts of the city which’d once been, we figured, sites of interest and drama and whatever…anyway).

Greider’s The Archaeology of Home is a really great microhistory, sort of: instead of just being a history-of-this-one-thing (ingredient, writing implement, measuring device), it’s more of a history-through-the-lens-of-this-one-thing (there’s a critical difference, exceptionally fine though it may be), and the thing, in this case, is the building she lives in (a note from above: aside from growing up where I did and etc., my first apartment was in one of those great old off-Grand places in St. Paul—I dare anyone to live in such a place and sincerely not once wonder about what’d happened before in the same rooms or floors or buildings). Greider’s a great guide, and in the course of her attempt to understand and see clearly the full history of her place on E 7th in Manhattan, she takes on the real big, heavy notions: home, belonging, roots, etc. It’s great. Read the thing.

And if you don’t know Olmsted, just know this: Central Park. Also know this: one of the lasting glories of downtown parks (designed by Olmsted or whomever) is that they provide access to big fancy abstractions (beauty, harmony, nature) to everybody, rich and poor, landed gentry and food-stampers. Take that for granted such obviousness if you wish, but know that such an idea was radical as recently as 150 years ago (is still, lots of us’d argue, plenty radical), and also know that Olmsted was one of the people behind making sure cities were functional meritocracies, not just playgrounds for the heaviest-pocketed. Of course there’s huge ironic sorrow in the fact that his best-known park is, in fact, acres wide in the city that’s become the playground for the heaviest-pocketed, but that’s a different story: Genius of Place is a riveting and great intro to a fascinating architect not just of American places but American ideas.

Emily Aviation Fool

by Weston Cutter

Emily, Alone by Stewart O’Nan

Here’s an easy rule: pick at least five writers whose books you’ll read no matter what, right when they come out. Balance the list, obviously—it can’t all be hard-core nonfiction folks who do noodly academic stuff (Vendler, for those of us interested), and can’t all be crunchy lit-fiction. But regardless, pick some writers. Good candidates, if you don’t presently have a list: Jennifer Egan, Richard Powers, Elizabeth McCracken, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Lawrence Weschler…you get the idea.

Also: O’Nan. There may be no more reliable writer going at present—he’s count-on-able as an old Big Ben alarm clock, and even if you’re not overwhelmingly lit up by what he’s doing (I was only so-so on his last, Songs for the Missing), you’ll still find glory and beauty on every damn page. Emily, Alone, his latest, is gorgeous and makes some rich art of mundanity—in this case, in the later days of Emily Maxwell (apparently the protagonist ofWish You Were Here—Emily, Alone is a sequel, tho I didn’t read the one that preceded it and didn’t feel any deficit). Does it sound like a backhanded compliment to call this book quiet? Maybe that’s not even a fair word: the book’s almost ferociously grounded, relentlessly local (as some Local Newswriting students would have it)—you close the cover on this thing knowing Emily as well and dearly as you’ve known anyone on any page recently. If you’re human, you’ll recognize the awesome prospect of such an opportunity.

 

Such Men as These by David Sears

Pacific Air by David Sears

I’m not a fan of flying, and I’d be certain to pee myself if I were ever in a military jet, yet I was as into both of these books by Sears (Pacific Air just came out; Such Men hit a year ago but is coming now in paperback) as I was by the granddaddy of military flight books, The Right Stuff. I don’t know how many of us’d wake up one day and think: You know? I really want to read about the imbalance of aviation power between Japan and the US in WWII. Or: I’ve always wondered about how the aviation behind the Korean war presaged Vietnam in certain ways. Fortunately, regardless of whether you’ve wondered after such things, Sears has, in these two great and compulsively readable books, offered answers. Grab them both, and then thank anyone you know who served, ever.

 

Ship of Fool by William Trowbridge

Here’s what’s excellent: poetry that is both serious and funny. For instance, the start of “Fool Expelled From Eden”:

OK, not the Eden, wasted on that pair

of gorgeous nitwits, but a pretty nice place

by Fool’s lights, a little stucco number

tucked away in a little suburb bordered

by a mini-mall—just the spot to lever up

your dogs in the recliner and contemplate

the polka of the spheres,

There’s plenty more—stucco, in the poem, ends up being water-permeable—but let’s just focus quick on that moment in line five, that moment of someone “lever[ing] up / your dogs.” Anybody who knows poetry knows that things come alive or stay inert in the details, that a poem can spin and soar to wild life on as little as the absence of an object, on an interesting phrasing of something otherwise obvious. Along with these aspects, poetry (at least as it’s currently practiced, with voice mostly being the going currency [this is not a knock on Trowbridge—we all do this; what's the last poem you didn't like because of its structure? Subject, sure, that plays, but by and large subject's so closely tied together with voice it's hard to know beginnings and ends]) makes or breaks because of the voice of the speaker (or so I believe).

Trowbridge’s Ship of Fool is a gorgeous, riveting, devouring read. It’s also sneaky as all get out: much like a bag of very delicious snacky carbohydrates, you’ll likely get into Ship of Fool and realize with a sort of shock awhile later that you’re more than halfway through the collection—it’s that sort of sneaky. Here’s what’s cool too: there’s sometimes a weird math of poetry, at least with contemporary stuff, in which we’re invited as readers to believe that if we don’t work hard it’s not serious or deep or whatever—and that argument’s of course total bullshit, but sometimes it takes a poem like “Rented Tux” to have the thing properly dashed. Oh, and if you needed more: Fool is a recurring character in this book, is in poem after poem, and, like that dynamo Miss Peach in Rosemurgy’s still-incredible The Stranger Manual, will keep you great and surprised company throughout.

Human Condition of the Father and/or Ghastly, Good.

by Weston Cutter

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer

I mean this in the best way: I’d read just about anything by Dyer (or anyway would try to read anything possible by him—I picked through Out of Sheer Rage and just couldn’t ever find my way to hang with it [this may or may not have had anything to do with the fact that I'd read no Lawrence]), but I don’t think I’d want to spend a ton of time with him. A weekend, okay, maybe 4-5 days, but I don’t think I’d want to be super close thereafter. Understand: I laughed as much reading Dyer’s Otherwise Known as I’ve laughed at anything recently (Fey’s Bossypants included), but this is, let’s not ignore, a book in which the author, in an essay regarding Def Leppard, puts on a pajama jacket and accosts a South Korean hotel waitstaffer. Note the emphasises phrase: dude owns a pajama jacket. Dude wears one.

This, of course, is the entirety of the spit-ball portion of the review: the reason one reads Dyer, in fact, is because of the pajama jacket—both that he’d own one and that he’d bother writing it into the scene. Dyer is somehow a perfect combination of de Botton and Hornby, but dude’s smart in ways neither of the other two are (there’s no way to dance out of that not looking like a dick, though I’m not trying to say anything about de Botton’s smarts, or Hornby’s; it’s just that Dyer’s dry, learned, snooty-but-omnivorous mind is rare—I can think of no writer whose high/lowbrow tendencies are so easily, seamlessly meshed). For instance: Dyer writes evocatively and excitingly on jazz, which is as hard to write well about as anything I know of (and not only does he write well on just jazz, dude writes well on one specific tiny jazz label, ECM, which label anybody can tell you is eminently worth coverage in long, rapturous essays). Here’s why you need to pick up Otherwise Known (aside from the fact that it’s Graywolf, therefore obviously): it’s maybe the most casually smart book I can think of from the last 3 years. Not casually brilliant (I think it is, but let’s not frieght the thing too heavily from the start)—casually smart. Wherever you’re going in the next few months, whatever you’re doing, I’ll bet money you’ll be better off with Dyer’s voice in yr head, his words at yr nightstand.

Reading My Father by Alexandra Styron

Just as good as all the reviews said it was. Also: one of the most weirdly nostalgic books of late—just because her dad was such a monumental guy, yet what writers are presently at work who’d maybe even conceivably be spoken of with such critical regard while they’re working? And Franzen’s not an answer: he’s not a towering intellect and great prose stylist. He’s just not. Hopefully Eugenides‘ and Sullivan’s upcoming fall releases will put them both at the forefront.

Regardless: you owe it to yourself to read Styron’s fantastic book about her father, and good Christ does she write good, generous sentences. The book, let’s not kid around, has its fair share of shadow, but I dare anyone not to feel the overwhelming love suffusing the thing, and to be almost knocked sideways by it.

The Good and the Ghastly by James Boice

I’ve been reading Boice since I caught a story of his ages back in McSwny’s I think 12, I’m not sure. Let’s be clear from the start: Boice is a monster, as promising a prose stylist as, say, Blake Butler or whoever else you’re most excited about at present. Boice’s style is, yes, of the declarative comma-free sort, though his sentences quite often pick up and pack a sort of accretive punch (not always: I like Boice’s stuff a lot, but I think his best books are still very much in him). Here’s what I sort of mean: “One day he sat on the sofa and watched her play Visa Classical Music Piece #3 for him. He watched her become lost in the music. He studied every contour and glow in her face, as if to confine it forever to memory. When she was done he was near tears.” By the by: The Good and the Ghastly‘s a post-apocalyptic gangster story set a millenium hence in which Visa owns everything. The story itself: yes, and buy into it, and be there. But you’re coming for the words themselves, for the style.

But look at that quoted bit above: it’s that one moment, of him studying “every contour and glow in her face.” That’s why you should buy this book and keep an eye on Boice: because, yes, sometimes the sentences don’t impart the desired energy or speed or propulsion, but some of the quick zigs he executes—seemingly with tremendous ease, as natural as someone gulps cold water on a hot day—are as quietly wow-inducing as anything you’re likely to come by. Check him now.