A Forest in the Clouds

A Forest in the Clouds
© 2018 John Fowler
336 pages

John Fowler’s A Forest in the Clouds is his account of studying gorillas alongside famous naturalist Dian Fossey.   Although I picked it up for the gorillas (as one would), the memoir is overwhelmed by Fossey, who by Fowler’s account was an astonishingly eccentric and belligerent woman who viewed the science lab as a necessary evil to allow her to live on the mountain near the wildlife she loved.  Fowler presents Fossey as a  mercurial  control freak who regarded any gathering of students as a potential mutiny and waged a private war against local poachers.  Fowler contends that Fossey had little use for most people, especially the locals who she constantly verbally abused (employing both sounds imitating the gorillas and a polyglot mishmash of profanities to do so), and the amount of time readers spend in this unpleasant company does not make for an enjoyable  book. The narrative is easy to read, but the poor gorillas are nearly relegated to the background;  Fowler writes about what they’re doing often enough, but there’s little to learn about them here, besides the fact that their noses can be used like fingerprints, and they have no qualms about peeing all over a human they’re affectionately holding on to.  I’ve never read anything else about Fossey, so I don’t know if Fowler’s memory is perfect or exaggerating Fosser any. I’ll say this, though: my attempt to find background info on the African setting let me to this stunning photo.

Alone Together

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other

© 2011 Sherry Turkle

384 pages

Alone Together has been on my to-read list since it was released, though it’s taken me years to actually read it.  It took so long because I have a wariness of reading books which I know I’ll agree with beforehand, unless I’m in need of more thorough information about a subject – but recent citations of this book have brought it front and center and coaxed me into reading it.  Sherry Turkle has been studying human-machine interactions since the computer age began entry into consumer products, from a psychological point of view. Alone Together builds on her previous thoughts on the subject (produced in the eighties and nineties) to suggest that we have grown accustomed to treating things as people, and people as things

. 

I had my doubts about finishing this book at the start, because the first half proved to focus mostly on human-robot interactions, from the primitive (children and their Speak-n-Spells)  to the elaborate,  of people finding comfort in the ‘company’ of robotic dogs with programming designed to simulate personality and liveliness. Turks takes readers then through the changing relationships of the early internet age, as people created new identities for themselves online, and began having relationships – friendly, romantic,  adversarial – with other ethereal identities. Many people who found their ‘real’ lives less than fulfilling (because of their appearance, their poverty, their location)  began disconnecting from one to immerse themselves in  the others.  

There was an important difference between online relationships and “IRL” ones, however: online relationships were far more convenient. A conversation could be ended by closing a window;  an identity could be altered at will.  This posed interesting questions and concerns, especially to those who developed deep friendships with personalities they only knew from behind the screen;   how could they know if the person they’d been hearing the woes of was real, or just a character being played by someone else for curiosity‘s sake, or to express their own problems in another guise?  How much could these relationships be counted on when the parties could simply disappear without a trace?  

When smartphones and social media entered our lives, the odd nature of online relationships increasingly began to define our real ones. Now it was our family and friends whose messages we felt free to ignore;  it was our real-life profiles that we were putting on display.   Ignoring flashing IMs on a computer screen when we’re trying to focus on something else is one thing; ignoring people we’re with  to continually dip into another world is quite another. Turkle suggests that never-present behavior like this has grown to be endemic, as she records the frustrations of teenagers who have fought for their parents’ attention their entire lives. 

There’s a lot of unpack in a book like this,  which is disturbing throughout.  The unsettling content begins with lonely seniors finding some ersatz  version companionship in robotic pets,  whirring dogs and synthetic babies who ‘need’ their attention and make them feel both useful and connected to something.  It returns in full in the latter third of the book, when Turkle focuses on smartphones. I’ve mentioned the teens lifelong struggle to pull their parents away from their phones, but the kids themselves often report to Turkle how overwhelming their own phones are to them.  They may receive a hundred messages an hour, all of which demand a response, and one of them asked aloud – not of anyone, merely voicing his exhaustion -- “How long do  I have to do this?” 

A book like this is valuable, I think, for making us aware of our own attentive flightiness. Social media isn’t going anywhere, and here’s no question it adds to people’s lives. But those who are  at all concerned about the way technology molds our minds, or those who are interested in living with intention, rather than simply being  passive in letting technology shape our behavior rather than the other way around will find it helpful, if sometimes discouraging. 

Johnny Reb' s War

Johnny Reb's War: Battlefield and Homefront
pub. 2001 David Williams
102 pages

Johnny Reb's War is a curious collection of two historical articles by David Williams, the contents of which were later encompassed by his impressively depressing People's History of the American Civil War as well as Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War. The two articles review the miserable conditions of the Confederate army (starving, barely clothed, and shoeless by 1862) on the eve of Antietam, as well as the prolonged plight of the southern poor in Georgia at home. The two intersect nicely, because the wretched conditions at the front, combined with the fact that their wives and children were starving, sick, and being plundered by their own government, led to crippling desertion; Jefferson Davis estimated in 1864 that as much as two thirds of the entire army had simply given up.

Those who have never explored this part of the Civil War before, of course, are in for surprises -- they will learn, from a source who is by no means sympathetic to the southern cause, that most southern combatants were poor yeomen who rallied to the Confederate banner only when Lincoln announced an invasion; that the wealthy planters who voted for secession not only exempted themselves from fighting in the war, but drastically weakened the army by focusing on cash crops they could only sell to the 'enemy', rather than food to supply their countrymen; and that the Confederate government bankrupted its moral support fairly quickly by imposing subscription, suspending habeaus corpus, and not checking corruption.

Williams provides a long train of stories and scathing comments pulled from contemporary newspapers and letters, but -- as with Williams' previous works -- I find myself wishing I could find similar information from different sources to get better perspective.  However, this was absolutely worth reading just for the  excuses southern soldiers would render to their superiors for killing livestock in Maryland. One insisted he'd been attacked by the pig and had been obliged to kill the porker in self-defense;  another claimed he'd felt sorry for all the dislocated animals after the battle and decided to put them out of their misery.   A related chuckle came from the report of a Confederate officer who detailed how Lee ordered a man executed for stealing a civilian hog; Stonewall Jackson left the execution to fate by putting the man into the frontlines. When the man survived Antietam, the recording officer noted that the accused had lost his pig, but saved his bacon.

Of Caesar, Aeneas, and Selma

This past week I've been dogsitting in the country, and if you've never enjoyed a rural sunset with a glass of wine and Chloe Feoranzo playing in the background, it's an experience I can recommend. While I was away, February ended, and I realized I hadn't commented on either of my classics club readings for the month...mostly because I couldn't think of that much to say about them, really.  I'd already read the 'story' of the Aeneid last year or so, and had been watching videos on it in preparation, and by the time I experienced story in verse I was tired of it.   Of The Conquest of Gaul...well, it's exactly as it says it is, a military history of the invasion of "Gaul", which here means western Europe and a weekend in Britain, with some sociological sketching on the Gauls and Germans by Caesar.  I found that more interesting than the military business, frankly, especially the fact that the German tribes  viewed agriculture with suspicion and frequently uprooted their own people who settled, lest they grow soft and corrupt.

More pleasantly, I re-read a book I stumbled upon ages ago, called The Other Side of Selma.  Though I grew  up here,  I never experienced Selma as a town and place until after college. Before then, I only traveled the commercial sprawl north of the city,  and entered the 'real' city only when I needed to visit the library.  The Other Side of Selma introduced me to it as a beloved city, however -- a place where people lived and loved, not merely a place for politicians to visit prior to elections and make speeches at. Its author, Dickie Williams, grew up in Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, but often traveled north to Selma for supplies. When he came of age, he began working at Swift's drug store on Broad Street,, and there began to collect stories he'd heard -- mostly funny,   like of a barber in the Hotel Albert who used to entertain people with sayings and tales from the old country of Russia, only to later be exposed by an actual Russian who visited the city and declared the barber's "Russian" to be  farcical gibberish.  Others are personal, like Williams' account of being asked by a woman in town how these diaphragms for women were inserted and used.  (This was in the fifties, so young Dickie was highly embarrassed to say the least.)    When I first read this, it made Selma come alive for me in a way it never had been: for the first time, I could imagine the Hotel Albert as a place that people went in and out of, where there were businesses and life, instead of  it being just the name of a building what once was and now isn't.  I don't know if that makes any sense, but my interest in re-experiencing that initial joy drove me to find one of two university libraries in the state that have a copy of this book so I could sit and read it. Unexpectedly, it seemed to have more hunting stories than anything else!     Interesting how we can latch on to one aspect of a book and so exaggerate it in our memories.

Ten of the Most Disturbing Quotes from Alone Together

I recently finished Alone Together and wanted to share some quotes from it while I collect my thoughts. It proved more disquieting than I'd anticipated.  Note:  as I am on my Chromebook until tomorrow evening (I've been dogsitting) I'm posting these quotes sans exterior marks so I don't have to manually adjust all the interior quotation marks.

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1. I leave my story at a point of disturbing symmetry : we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.

2. The comparison with pets sharpens the question of what it means to have a relationship with a robot. I do not know whether a pet could sense Miriam’s unhappiness, her feelings of loss. I do know that in the moment of apparent connection between Miriam and her Paro, a moment that comforted her, the robot understood nothing. Miriam experienced an intimacy with another, but she was in fact alone. Her son had left her, and as she looked to the robot, I felt that we had abandoned her as well.

3. A “place” used to comprise a physical space and the people within it. What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent? At a café a block from my home, almost everyone is on a computer or smartphone as they drink their coffee. These people are not my friends, yet somehow I miss their presence.

4. We are overwhelmed across the generations. Teenagers complain that parents don’t look up from their phones at dinner and that they bring their phones to school sporting events. Hannah, sixteen, is a solemn, quiet high school junior. She tells me that for years she has tried to get her mother’s attention when her mother comes to fetch her after school or after dance lessons. Hannah says, “The car will start; she’ll be driving still looking down, looking at her messages, but still no hello.”

5. The media has tended to portray today’s young adults as a generation that no longer cares about privacy. I have found something else, something equally disquieting. High school and college students don’t really understand the rules. Are they being watched? Who is watching? Do you have to do something to provoke surveillance, or is it routine? Is surveillance legal? They don’t really understand the terms of service for Facebook or Gmail, the mail service that Google provides. They don’t know what protections they are “entitled” to. They don’t know what objections are reasonable or possible. If someone impersonates you by getting access to your cell phone, should that behavior be treated as illegal or as a prank? In teenagers’ experience, their elders—the generation that gave them this technology—don’t have ready answers to such questions.

6 Longed for here is the pleasure of full attention, coveted and rare. These teenagers grew up with parents who talked on their cell phones and scrolled through messages as they walked to the playground. Parents texted with one hand and pushed swings with the other. They glanced up at the jungle gym as they made calls. Teenagers describe childhoods with parents who were on their mobile devices while driving them to school or as the family watched Disney videos.

7 Children have always competed for their parents’ attention, but this generation has experienced something new. Previously, children had to deal with parents being off with work, friends, or each other. Today, children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.

8. Brad says that digital life cheats people out of learning how to read a person’s face and “their nuances of feeling.” And it cheats people out of what he calls “passively being yourself.” It is a curious locution. I come to understand that he means it as shorthand for authenticity. It refers to who you are when you are not “trying,” not performing. It refers to who you are when you are in a simple conversation, unplanned.

9. These young men are asking for time and touch, attention and immediacy. They imagine living with less conscious performance. They are curious about a world where people dealt in the tangible and did one thing at a time. This is ironic. For they belong to a generation that is known, and has been celebrated, for never doing one thing at a time.

10. A 2010 analysis of data from over fourteen thousand college students over the past thirty years shows that since the year 2000, young people have reported a dramatic decline in interest in other people. Today’s college students are, for example, far less likely to say that it is valuable to try to put oneself in the place of others or to try to understand their feelings.29 The authors of this study associate students’ lack of empathy with the availability of online games and social networking.

The Gatekeepers

The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency
pub. 2017, Chris Whipple
384 pages

True confession: I never paid that much attention to the chief of staff position within the White  House until I started watching The West Wing, a show marked by its characters' constant movement and work.  In The Gatekeepers, Chris Whipple introduces readers to the office as created by Eisenhower and Nixon, and then reviews how subsequent chiefs have played a pivotal role in executive success or failure.

Whipple traces modern chiefs of staff to Eisenhower's administration. Formerly commander of the Allied forces in Europe in World War 2, Eisenhower was no stranger to a complex, demanding job --and he imposed a little of the organization from the army onto the executive office, relying on a chief to vet  requests and control access to his office.   This proves throughout the book to be a critical role played by the chief, though it wasn't until Nixon that a formal WH staff organization was created.  An abundance of advisers only makes a wash of noise out of otherwise useful information, and distractions keep the executive from accomplishing much of anything. Whipple demonstrates how a good chief of staff can bring order to chaos -- demonstrating to a new-to-town Bill Clinton, for instance, that his office was leaching productivity by wandering from topic to topic within the day, rather than focusing on anything at all.  The chief also directs the flow of information by controlling access to the Oval Office: under an active chief, there might be an astonishingly short list of people permitted to access the office at will (a Cabinet officer or two), while others wait for appointments and the chief as chaperone. 
Another vital role of the chief is as the advisory who will and must say to the most powerful man on the planet -- "No."   Some people in DC are evidently aware of the bubble they live in, and aware that the White House can become host to its own private bubble only dimly aware of the reality  abroad and in the world. (The insulating effects of the Oval Office were explored to great effect in The Twilight of the Presidency).   A good chief of staff is aware  of limits to how much is possible, and pushes back when needed, serving to check his bosses's overreach. This doesn't always happen, and some of the saddest and most expensive mistakes of modern American history happen because no one pushed back enough.  Because the position of chief is so intense,  they rarely last more than two years -- so even an effective chief can quickly give way to one that's not quite up to the task.

I found The Gatekeepers an utterly fascinating work, and one largely nonpartisan -- though Whipple does seem protective of the Clintons,   he doesn't shy away from documenting the disorder that popped up there.  It's certainly an interesting lens to see presidencies through -- viewing, for instance, Carter's ineffectiveness as owing to the utter lack of a chief at all for much of his administration.  Although the book doesn't cover the current administration very much (nor can it, given the publication date),   given the current executive's willfulness and the highly irregular nature of his own staffing decisions, it is unlikely that a future version of this book would regard its chiefs a success stories.

Top Ten Places in Books I'd Want to Visit

This week Top Ten Tuesday is asking us to share places from books we'd like to visit.  Allllllllllllllll aboard!


1. Hogwart's

2. Al's Diner with a Portal to 1958, a la 11/22/1968

Obviously this one is immediately on my mind because of watching the Hulu series  based on 11/22/1963,     but one of the reasons I was drawn to that book so much was because of the setting.  I grew up listening largely to music from the 1950s and 60s -- it was the only non-church music  my parents would listen to in the car  or in our home --   and watching series like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or The Wonder Years.   Granted, I wouldn't want to live in 1958 (insert the usual reasons, from pervasive smoking to race relations), but  how I'd love to visit it...again and again,  using the diner for historical tourism. Penn Station? The Hotel Albert?   It'd all be there waiting for me.


3.  Amsterdam, from The City of Bikes

 

Granted, this one isn't impossible. Once I pay off my student loans (OCTOBER OCTOBER OCTOBER),   I'll be able to travel more, and I could theoretically handle even a jaunt across the Atlantic.  I suspect, however, Amsterdam is more meaningful to me as an ideal rather than a reality, and if I got there I'd be overwhelmed by the crowds and the noise. 

4. The Flat of One Bertie Wooster (P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves-and-Wooster stories)

Honestly, I'd pop in to let Jeeves serve me some English drink I've never heard of ("A lemon squash,  Jeeves, thank you") and then listen to Bertie talk, because he's a riot.   Perhaps I could even witness him being shanghaied by one of his aunts.

5. The Oasis, Ready Player One

I realize that the real world Wade and company live in is definitely a craptastic wasteland, but I am only visiting after all, and if I'm visiting  you really can't get more value for money than the friggin' Oasis. 

6. Narnia, The Chronicles thereof

 The best bits of the medieval era -- castles, swords,   quests -- without the constant smell of manure, urine, and death.

7. The Shire, LOTR

 A quiet life surrounded by friends, food, drink, and gardens? Count me in, and if Gandalf shows up I'm not at home. And if those dwarves show up I'm most definitely not home.


8. Tara

 

 I've been in my share of grand antebellum estates and savored their smell and sights, but I've never been to a country plantation home, one that would have commanded the surrounding countryside like its kingdom in miniature.  Those who have read Gone with the Wind know that Tara -- for Scarlett -- means stability and home more than anything else, and the movie delivers that feeling well:

 ASHLEY: Tara, the red earth of Tara.

Mr. O'HARA: That land's the only thing that matters, it's the only thing that lasts.
ASHLEY: Something you love better than me, though you may not know it... Tara.
Mr. O'HARA: ...From which you get your strength...
ASHLEY: ... the red earth of Tara.
Mr. O'HARA: Lands the only thing that matters...
ASHLEY: something you love better than me...

ASHLEY: ...the red earth of

Tara...Tara!... Tara!... Tara!
SCARLETT: Tara! Home.

 9. The Nautilus, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

I can still remember being fascinated by the idea of the submarine having a Star Trek-like viewing window as a kid. 

10. The Abbey, Redwall

 

EULALIAAAAAAAAA!

C'mon...it's a medieval-like castle-monastery thing filled with woodland creatures who wear robes and pack swords and bows. I'd want to be one of the animals, of course (little awkward otherwise).