Death By Consumption: GTFO
CONSUMED:
"We Got Goop'd" — Still Processing podcast, Aug. 16, 2018
Late summer, and we all just want to get away. This is when you start counting the weekends left in the year — we only have September and October, and then the holiday madness starts, and before you know it the whole bleak cycle restarts, then you die, etc. etc. etc.. I've always found Late August great and terrible, a month of only Sundays. Your time is free, your obligations are few, but can you really enjoy it fully, with everything you know you have to do soon? So, we try to escape.
It's been impossible to cook much this summer, but I've finally found myself, tentatively, stepping back into the kitchen. Mostly I've been using the NYTimes Cooking app, which I find both helpful and ridiculous. Helpful, because it contains many super-easy weeknight recipes like garlicky chicken with lemon and anchovy sauce, which I made a full meal out of by doubling the sauce, throwing in a bunch of veggies to bake with the chicken, and serving it all over rice. But ridiculous, like the many times they've listed "Asian" recipes, written by white people, which don't include Asian ingredients. Whoops!
I even managed to finish another Gwyneth recipe, which I cooked while coincidentally listening to the Still Processing podcast's episode on goop. The episode was a great, smart discussion on who Gwyneth has become in our culture, and what it means when we criticize her the way we all do, and it felt extra-relevant (and extra-ironic) to be listening to a critique about people who critique Gwyneth, while currently engaged in a decade-long performative act of critiquing her.
Earlier this month, a few of us went upstate to a crumbling old house in the woods and removed ourselves from society for a blissful two days. Justin and I went to Wisconsin for a weekend, and spent my family reunion throwing my little 2nd cousins around in a pool for hours. We went to the beach, and lamented all the times we should have gone to the beach this summer but didn't. I tried to dial down my Twitter-reading and dial up my book-reading, and I believed I could feel my brain halt its progression into mush. I tried to avoid the news. Nothing really worked, but I still tried to get away from it all this month.
The characters in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy" get away from it all completely: they move to Mars. The first book, Red Mars, starts with the "first hundred," the group of scientists from around the world (but mostly from the three global superpowers: the US, Russia, and Japan — some parts of this book are extremely 1992) hand-picked by the UN to start the colonization of Mars. The story spins outward from there, covering hundreds of years across the series. I've found it an unintentionally perfect time to finally start reading, with Mars the closest it's been to Earth in 15 years. I would read a few chapters and then take my dog out for a walk and look up at the fiery dot glowing just to the right of the moon — a fleck of red among the stars, unmistakably Mars. I've done this every night for the past few weeks and it never fails to make my jaw drop. "That's Mars!" everyone has grown tired of hearing me say.
The book is technically escapism, what with all the ~~~sPaCe DrAmA~~~ and interplanetary romance and such, but since it's Kim Stanley Robinson it's also the kind of "escapism" that asks you to make your way through sentences like: "He had recently begun to consider Wenger's index of autonomic balance, which used seven different variables to determine whether an individual was dominated by the sympathetic or the parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system." Yes, I had recently begun considering the same thing!!!
As with any Kim Stanley Robinson novel, you can just let passages like this wash over you, trusting that he'll make the point more simply known in time. And in the midst of the dumbest stretch of news since the Dark Ages, it's lovely to just let a smart person say smart things to you, even if you barely understand half of it. (It's also fun to see someone with actual intelligence think through every single detail of how we could terraform Mars, rather than the nonstop headlines about whatever nonsense Elon Musk, King of Mars, is up to.) (Is Azealia Banks still in Elon Musk's house though?)
But as I pushed through Green Mars, the second book in the series, I started to see the overall point: escapism is never truly possible. "News kept flooding in from afar, threatening to overwhelm them in its own way," he writes near the end of the second book, as the Antarctic melts on Earth, flooding the world and killing tens of millions of people. Burying your head in the sand is not possible, he argues, and it's sure as hell not okay. You're a human, so you bear a responsibility to humanity whether you like it or not, and you don't help anyone by turning a blind eye to bad things. Especially when you have the luxury of choosing to look away, whether it's because of your white skin or because you live millions of miles away on another planet.
There's a small moment in the first book, when all the warring factions on Mars come together to eat a meal, forced to the same table by circumstances. "The pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos. ... Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. ... And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other's company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the cities huddling under bombardment." Which is, more or less, to say: the bad shit outside hasn't stopped just because you're having a good time inside. It's important to remember that.
The only major detail I feel Kim Stanley Robinson got totally wrong is that Mars is mostly colonized by scientists and manual laborers, with the billionaires staying back on Earth, controlling things from afar, who only find themselves cut off from their plans to escape our dying planet once the Mars settlers launch a rebellion. As if our psychotic billionaire overlords would let anyone else be the first person to step foot on Mars. In the Mars Trilogy, the first person on Mars is John Boone, a classic American figure — all charisma and nerves of steel, a space cowboy through and through. In real life, the first person on Mars will be a decrepit, nearly dead Richard Branson, who will stumble out of his rocket to spray paint the Virgin logo on a boulder, inspiring Elon Musk to call him a pedophile on Twitter in a fit of rage. We live in a very dumb era, and it's only getting dumber, as much as classic sci-fi would love to make us think it'll get better in the future. It probably won't! At least it's almost autumn in the near-future. It'll be nice to feel cold again, right?
DEATH
Look, I know, "You really should read this article for the Poetry Foundation about the queer poems written by an Islamic man living in the 8th century," is a bit of a hard sell, but you really should read this article for the Poetry Foundation about the queer poems written by an Islamic man living in the 8th century. It's not only incredibly informative about the history of queerness and queer acceptance in the Arab world (in short: homosexuality was very common in the Islamic world until the Europeans colonized the Middle East and introduced them to the concept of "homosexuality" through the concept of homophobia — THANX GUYS), but it also quotes a few really great ancient poems.
My favorite is one from the 1700s in which a poet slut-shames another poet with the brutal last lines, "If the pricks that he has used to quench his cravings were put end to end, / And he mounted them, he would reach the sky, and truly exceed the stars in stature." Us gays have been loving our messy drama for CENTURIES.