Camus and the toads

For a future post on Camus as an Algerian writer, I’ve been reading Olivier Todd’s biography. Though Todd argues convincingly that Camus was not the colonialist or imperialist he is sometimes charged with being, I found that I didn’t care much for his personality. His biographer has mixed feelings about him too, noting that “Despising people came easily to Camus, justifiably or not.”

One passage, though, did help me warm to him. In 1942 Camus traveled to the mountains in the Vivarais region of France, for his health. He stayed at a family hotel at a place called Le Panelier.

In good weather, Camus would sit on a stone bench in front of the hotel and listen to the toads; he found them pretty animals and enjoyed hearing their flutelike song in the evenings.

Bad Money by Kevin Phillips

Note: My review of the graphic novel Aya is now up at Words Without Borders.

Bad Money is the third book I’ve read recently about the current financial meltdown: after The Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles R. Morris and The New Paradigm for Financial Markets by George Soros, which will soon be reissued with new material and a snappier title: The Crash of 2008 and What It Means.

Maybe it’s time to give it a rest. Bad Money is packed with detail about our current financial plight, but it is so multifaceted and tightly written that no clear central argument emerges—at least not for me. Phillips takes an “a plague on both your houses” attitude toward recent Republican and Democratic administrations, blaming Clinton as well as Bush for excessive coziness with the kings of the financial sector, and the Federal Reserve for pumping up the Internet and housing bubbles with low interest rates. But he is more interested in global realpolitik, especially as it relates to the oil business and global warming. Here’s a paragraph on p. 151 where it all comes together. As he does elsewhere in Bad Money, he refers to his previous books, where perhaps some of these ideas are unpacked in a more leisurely way:

For such a short word, oil seems awfully long on consequences—the future of the U.S. energy supply, the value of the dollar and American purchasing power, global warming and the fate of the world’s climate. Unfortunately, all three predicaments seem to be converging in a relatively proximate time frame.... In several sections [of American Theocracy] I suggested five time lines and countdowns. The first involved oil and the possibility that “not only had American oil production peaked but global oil production outside of OPEC might be within five to ten years of doing so.” The second involved the concern of the U.S. oil giants over slackening discoveries, stagnant production, and the need for huge new reserves like those in Iraq. The third set of jitters involved precarious debt levels and the dollar—“a handful of Americans, aware of the interplay of oil and currency flows, worried about OPEC’s potential threat to the dollar,” and as for debt, “some who observe financial and credit markets see a speculative credit bubble, a housing bubble and $4 trillion of U.S. international indebtedness triggering a crisis within much the same time frame.” With respect to the global-warming countdown (the fourth), “particularly concerned climatologists talk about the 2010s.”

You need a scorecard to keep track of all the crises. Fortunately, Phillips thinks we no longer need to worry much about the fifth time line, concerning religious fundamentalists who see “biblical prophecy and Armageddon unfolding in the Middle East.”

What a relief. And while he predicts that a “six-pack” of Asian powers may soon dominate the globe, and points out parallels between present-day America and the decline of previous empires, Phillips does offer one encouraging note: “Spain, Holland, and Britain are far more prosperous today than they were at the heights of their global reach.” So if, in the end, the U.S. is no longer the world’s only superpower but simply a nation among other nations, that might not be so bad.

Thoreau and Darwin

Not every Obamicon turns out well, but I think these two are visually striking and make their point effectively. Thoreau’s Obamicon is currently featured at The Blog of Henry David Thoreau, and several variations of the Darwin image are available as buttons, poster, and T-shirts. 

Walking with Henry

Note: Today marks the first anniversary of this blog. I’ve enjoyed writing it more than I would have imagined. Many thanks to all of you who have read it, commented on it, or followed it on my Facebook page. (My third post for Words Without Borders also appears today.)

The op-ed page of the Sunday Times features an item on Thoreau by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Here’s how it begins:

“You must walk like a camel,” Thoreau writes, and I feel my lower lip drooping and a hunch coming into my back. This isn’t what he means, of course. He means that I must ruminate while walking. The temperature is in the 30s, the wind has settled, the snow gone from the corn stubble. I admit that I set my thoughts aside for a few minutes on the uphill leg of this walk. But they are back, bringing Thoreau with them.

By his standards, I’m walking all wrong. But then Thoreau is a prig. He is often right, about almost anything. What makes him priggish is the self-rejoicing in his rightness. What saves him is the self-contradiction rampaging through his work.

The charge of priggishness is often made about Thoreau, and I have to admit there is some justice in it, especially regarding Walden. But as I’ve said elsewhere, there is much less of this in the Journal: more doubt, more of what Klinkenborg calls self-contradiction.

While on his winter walk, Klinkenborg sees a man “sharpening a chain saw, cutting firewood from the debris piled up on the banks.” I was reminded of what Thoreau says in Walden about collecting his own firewood and cutting it at home, rather than have it cut and delivered for him.

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was ploughing, they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.

Axis of evil

I saw this poster today on St. James Place in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. It’s perhaps relevant that it was put up on an abandoned house.