Magnason makes us watch, little reader-performers, all self-conscious blue, as: "The glacier vanishes softly, like a silent spring. It just melts, retreats slowly, calmly, but its appearance is strangely dead, almost like a slain fish." We've come to the place we potentially started from and know it for the first time, all bigbang and whimpery in our poopypants. Gosh, did I do that?
A second Icelander, Sjà ³n, makes us similarly suffer in the collection's closing piece, "On the Organic Diversity of Literature: Notes from My Little Astrophysical Observatory." Sjà ³n tells us he "spent seven weeks as an artist in residence at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research" and claims scientists there have "begun to question whether mankind possesses the intrinsic ability to respond to its imminent extinction." As if juicing up for his self-isolating stint amongst the Climate crew, Sjà ³n brought with him a thoughtful collection of books:
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti; In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 1, by Eugene Thacker; and Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures) by Donna J. Haraway-all of which deal explicitly with mankind's threats to itself and its possible disappearance from the face of the Earth.
Hear Ye, Hear Ye, read all about it. Old Werther's got syphilis and is now suicidal. Sad.
In between these ice bread slices is an enormous tasty turd burger bound to wipe the sh*t-eating grin off the face of even the most recalcitrant climate deniers. On point, Lina Mounzer gases it up in her piece from, and of, Lebanon, "The Funniest Sh*t You Ever Heard." Lebanon has become renowned for its decline into corruption since its Civil War ended in 1990, when its reconstruction began, contracts for work establishing the New Leb Order, and leading, inevitably, to an upstairs/downstairs economy that never favors the have-nots. As with every state now dealing with the ever-widening income gap, there has been growing tension in Lebanon.
Mounzer tells the story of being stalled one day in a line of cars going up a Tripoli hill: "One of the sewer drains had overflowed, blasting away its manhole cover, and a gleaming brown waterfall cascaded down the hill." I immediately thought of the Boston Molasses disaster of 1919, when a vat exploded and 2 million gallons of brown stuff swept down nearby streets, drowning 21 locals. (Boston baked beans is now a valuable commodity.) Back in Tripoli, nobody drowned, but lots of people laughed, at first, except for one guy who Mounzer says "got splattered, perhaps with the remnants of the very same meal he had consumed at his dinner table the night before, and then unloaded into his toilet that very morning."
But the best bit about this article was Mounzer's wonderful description of how all sh*t comes together, like the free-flow of ideas, until, ideally, the occasional plumbing is needed to get the revolution re-started. She writes,
Beneath every city, its underground twin... A network of pipes connecting to every shower drain, every kitchen sink, every toilet, disappearing a household's dirt and grease and vomit and urine and feces down the gullets of small pipes that flow down into the ground, that then feed into bigger pipes, and ever bigger pipes, all our sh*t merging: the organic, fibrous roughage of the rich, the nutrient-deficient poop of the poor, and all the middle-class crap in between, all democratically flowing together in a single system...
And when it breaks down you're paying union wages to fix it. But, then again, maybe not in the gig economy, where you feel lucky just to have a job.
And the near-comedy of the ineptitude of our dealings with our demise continues in Anuradha Roy's tale, "Drowning In Reverse," in which an Indian village (Old Tehri?) is flooded to make room for the construction of a novel "high altitude lake." While a protagonist laments and recalls fond memories, a bubbly government bobblehead, Mr. Negi, sees the bright side:
Midget submarines would take tourists past the underwater wreck of the old town-the palace, the market-all crumbling away, but the state had no doubt that visitors would flock there and pay good money to enjoy this mini Atlantis so far inland, a thrill very different from the region's standard menu of mountaineering and bird-watching.
Bizarre sh*t happens. After bin Laden was killed, Abbottabad put up an amusement park. Can you believe it? (BTW, an excellent video of Roy reading "Drowning in Reverse" can be listened to/viewed here."
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