Spoiler Warning: This post contains extremely mild spoilers for Dark City, medium-sized Batman Begins spoilers, and sizable spoilers for Signs and The Wizard of Oz. I will put a friendly bold phrase after the spoiler paragraphs are done, for your skipping pleasure.

I watched the Director’s Cut of Dark City yesterday. The movie was already splendid, but the Director’s Cut was more or less flawless.

I was struck by the fact that the Strangers are afraid of water. This sounds familiar, so I started cataloging all the adversaries in film that are similarly afraid of water. I only got as far as the grays in Signs and the Wicked Witch of the West, but I feel certain there are more. In Dark City it’s particularly intriguing because the adversaries have a conflicted relationship with the human psyche. Sadly, I could not refer to von Franz’s _The Interpretation of Fairy Tales as it went in the first box of books I packed, but in it von Franz says that water in fairy tales represents the unconscious (which in Jungian theory is not just the forgotten and suppressed psyche, but the part of the psyche that contains the richest creative potential and which we must embrace in order to be whole Selves.) This makes sense if you consider water as a source of fear for the Strangers, and in fact water’s central role in the imaginative life of John Murdoch.

One of the writers of Dark City, David S. Goyer, also worked on Batman Begins, in which the villains try to use the water which connects the people of Gotham to drive them mad. It’s almost like they’re trying to poison the Collective Unconscious!

No worries! I try not to go crazy with the Jungianism, in general. It can be, as von Franz admits, just a way of “replac[ing] one myth by another”. But you all know I love water – water in the ocean, water falling from the sky, water running headlong off a basalt bluff. It’s interesting to think what place this necessary element, this harbinger and nurturer of life, holds in our collective imagination. It’s beautiful how the tropes of old hold true in our modern myth-making.

Any other hydrophobic movie villains to add to my list? Other movies whose waterways make for interesting musing?

I’m not, in general, one of those writers who complains about the submissions process. I got excited at my first personal rejection, after all, and while of course I overanalyze the heck out of rejection letters (that’s almost in the ‘writer’ job description), I don’t take them personally or assume it means the editor thinks my work is crap. Maybe the editors have brainwashed me or something, but I figure rejection means that story wasn’t right for that magazine at that time, and that a long wait means the staff and editors (at some mags, especially litmags, volunteers) have a lot of submissions to work through.

That said, this wheel does have a squeak. I think it’s worth mentioning because e-mail submissions are only becoming more common, and because, knowing as many up-and-coming writers dabbling in editing and ambitious villainesses plotting small presses as I do, someone might read it who will be a chief editor someday.

E-mail is unreliable. USPS does suffer the occasional train derailment or unscrupulous postman throwing his stack into a piano, but on the whole, if you send a manila envelope, it gets where it’s going. E-mail, on the other hand, often gets where it’s going and sits in a junk folder, or is intercepted by the journal’s ISP because someone on your ISP is a spammer. And there’s no way for you to know. After waiting a few months to allow a decent interval, you can query, but if that doesn’t receive a response either, does that mean the staff is swamped, or that your submission has company in limbo?

All I suggest is that venues that accept e-mail submissions send acknowledgments. (They’re pretty easy to automate, I think, and copy-paste is a low-tech fallback.) If the venues also indicate on their submissions guidelines that an acknowledgment should arrive within X days of your submission, then the writer will know if her submission got eaten by the internet or blackballed by the blacklist. She can then proceed to send it from a different provider, et cetera. Many magazines already do this, and it’s a boon to writers’ peace of mind.

I first mentioned my two book-cataloging affiliations in the “Against Friendship” social networking post:

From there, I also got into LibraryThing, which sadly seems to be superior but is not getting the new membership gestalt goodreads is.

I thought it was time to revisit the topic and really dig into the pros and cons of the two sites. Now, I do realize there are other book-cataloging websites – many. But it’s ridiculous enough to use two, so I haven’t tried any others.

The first thing to address is, why use a book cataloging website at all? Since this discussion is predicated on my use patterns and preferences, it’s only fair to set them out. Everyone’s intentions vary, but for me the benefits have been:

• It reminds me to go read instead of messing with the internet.
• It allows me to access my friends’ opinions (or at least star-ratings) on books when I need them – when I’m trying to buy Christmas gifts at 2 am, for example.
• It’s helped me develop a practice of summarizing my thoughts on each book I read, which made annotating my grad school reading easy and has, I feel, made my opinions on books sharper and better expressed.
• It provides a central place to save all my well-intentioned ‘to-read’ books.
• It captures data on my books – to kibbitz over with my Mom at her yearly-book-tabulation time, to keep track of books borrowed or lent, et cetera.

Goodreads was designed as a social networking site for book-cataloging. Its home page is familiar to users of networks like Facebook – a log of the recent books added, reviews posted, “friendships” established by your friends on the site.

LibraryThing was designed by librarians. It’s centered around the collection of book data, and social networking has only gradually colonized it – as noted in “Against Friendship”, it originally had only ‘Interesting Libraries’ and ‘Private watchlist’ and now has ‘Friends’ as well. Its customizable home page, recently revamped, gives pride of place to a search-box that searches your own library of books. By default, the next item down is your recently added books.

That gives you the basic difference between the sites in a nutshell: GR is centered on the social aspects, LT is centered on your books. Still, it’s more than possible to use them in a very similar way. If I had to choose a word to sum up each, I’d call Goodreads “simple” and LibraryThing “robust.” Goodreads’ interface is clean, appealing and fairly self-explanatory, and the conceits of social networking have been widely disseminated, so the bar to new user entry is low. LibraryThing can be more intimidating, its wealth of information necessitating and populating many fields all over the screen.

That data, though, is fabulous. Unlike Goodreads, which is committed to a categorization system called ‘shelves’, LibraryThing uses tagging. This encourages the user to find her own ways to use the system – combining fairly utilitarian and obvious tags like “own, read, fiction, novel” with the personal and highly useful “lent to Grandma” (and subsequent “read by Grandma” – my Grandma’s local library closed, you see) or “Box 25.” In addition, the basic ‘library card’ information for your book on LT is well-designed. If your book has an author, a translator, an editor and an illustrator, you can enter all their names and label the rôle of each accordingly. You can, if you like, enter the date you bought or checked out the book and the day you started reading it, the date you finished. Goodreads has, by contrast, only “date read,” recently expanded from month and year to day, month, year. On Goodreads, book cover is linked to ISBN, an often inaccurate shortcut, whereas on LibraryThing you can choose from the covers uploaded by other users or a bunch of pretty blank covers as well as the ISBN-linked Amazon images. LibraryThing has a great book-adding interface that allows you to type the tags once for one group of book-adds and integrates a barcode scanner seamlessly. They have a versatile batch-edit mode for changes, and you can search hundreds of libraries worldwide as well as Amazon, whereas Goodreads only searches the various Amazon sites. If I’m going to spend time entering data on my books, I prefer to have complete and accurate information, so LibraryThing wins by a mile on that front.

Goodreads is free and runs on ad revenue, whereas LibraryThing is ad-free and free up to 200 books, after which you are asked to pay $10/year or $25 for a lifetime membership.

Probably as a consequence of the differences outlined above, LibraryThing has 473,080 users while Goodreads claims over 1,000,000. This despite LibraryThing being founded August, 2005 and Goodreads December, 2006. For the social aspects (accessing my friends’ opinions when I need them) the population difference makes Goodreads the victor – vast mobs of my acquaintances signed up for Goodreads (many of them, strangers to each other, at exactly the same time, in fact.) The social exchange Goodreads emphasizes is that of opinions, and therefore there are a lot more reviews on Goodreads in general, even if there aren’t any from your friends on a particular book. There’s also a nice feature (I was among the users petitioning for its addition) where you can mark which friend recommended a book to you. LibraryThing, being a little more focused on the collection and cataloging of books, generally has fewer reviews (in all fairness, while they have fewer ratings, they display a nice bar graph of them, which is helpful.) I hereby back up my anecdotal ‘feeling’ with data – I chose the first book my eyes fell on (The Blind Assassin) and found that on LibraryThing 5350 people have entered the book in their ‘library’, 1328 of whom have given it a star rating, and 79 of whom have entered a review. On Goodreads, it’s harder to determine exact numbers but I believe 9173 people have entered it, 7272 have given a star rating, and about 700 have entered at least a one-word review.

Which brings us to another, more delicate topic. I may sound elitist here, but I’m not running for office, so who cares? Probably as a consequence of the differences outlined above, LibraryThing’s smaller population is more serious about books. You see fewer, if any, really stupid or careless reviews, and the discussion groups (which I don’t really do much with on either site) seem to have lively, literate discussion.

So, returning to the reasons I use these sites, we see that both are equally good at reminding me to go read, at developing my reviewing skills, and keeping track of my books to read. Goodreads is better for showing me my friends’ opinions on books, and LibraryThing is lightyears better for capturing data on my library. Goodreads has been good about adding features, which has improved the site experience for me and captured more information, but they’re still far behind LT, and I really wonder if they should try to catch up. There are some limits they would have trouble shedding – they are really wed to the ‘shelf’ model for example, too wedded I think to swap it for tags, and adding tags on top of shelves would be klugey and make it more confusing for new users. If they try to make their site robust, they will sacrifice the simplicity and accessibility that have made them successful.

For me, LibraryThing is the clear winner. It’s versatile, and allows me to capture all the data I might ever want about my book collection and reading, the first time it comes up. It is fun to explore other people’s book collections, see library similarities and see the trends and recommendations that so much data produce. (Thanks for getting me started on it, Miss Thursday!) I keep up on Goodreads though, because the social aspect is fun, and I like to see what all my friends and classmates are reading. So I am doomed to keep both accounts, but I hope this blogget helps someone decide which one fits their book-cataloging needs.

The Grey City I
The Grey City II
The Grey City III
The Grey City IV
The Grey City V
The Grey City VI
The Grey City VII
The Grey City VIII
The Grey City IX
The Grey City X
The Grey City XI
The Grey City XII
The Grey City XIII
The Grey City XIV
The Grey City XV
The Grey City XVI
The Grey City XVII

Eirian stayed huddled in the flotsam at the edge of the Warrens long after the Runners had turned back into the darkness. Shudders rocked her, and set up tinny peals in the metal fence palings in which she sheltered.

Carys was dead. She had known at once but in an animal way, a kenning without thought to future or meaning. Carys was dead, and she had been driven to a wild, unknown part of this horrible city. Where would she go? How could she escape, and who could she ask now that she was alone? She huddled, oblivious to the light building in the hazy air by the minute.

There was a scent of tobacco smoke, and a footfall crunched on the cinder street. Eirian clutched at the poles around her, held her breath.

“Whaddid they want?” said a boy’s voice, and a much older girl replied:

“Wanted a good scare, most like, so they come down t’have a look at the Warrens.”

“Ran away quick enough.”

“Why they calls ‘em Runners, in’it?”

The speakers slouched a little closer to the gate, and Eirian saw them — a slab-faced boy of about her age and a terribly skinny young woman in a man’s waistcoat and trousers, smoking a bit of tobacco rolled in paper.

“Nothin’ goin’ on ’ere,” declared the girl. She tugged her cap low over her eyes, turned, and tossed the stub of her cigarette into the debris. Eirian yelped as the brand hit her cheek, and the strange girl’s hands were around her wrist before she realized her mistake.

“Intruder!” cried the boy as the other dragged her captive out into the ruddy bonfire light. “Who is it, Sly?” he said, shrinking back.

“It’s only a girl.”

Eirian felt moved to protest. “You’re a gi—”

Sly’s hand clamped under her chin and turned her face to the firelight. “Look what a fresh face she’s got – and the clothes! A Country lass, no doubt.” Her words were light, but she didn’t blink, and her chin had the set of fury.

The boy stared at Eirian’s illuminated face. “What’s that by her mouf?”

Sly said, “Looks like blood. Must have bit ’er lip, then.”

Eirian shook her head free and said, “I have not!” She scrubbed at her cheek with her already filthy apron, and glowered at Sly. “I bit that Runner.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “Bit a Runner? And lived to tell? Sly, maybe we should take her home, for all she’s a girl? P’raps somefing could be made of her.”

The lean girl scowled but nodded. “First, let’s show ’er the sights. Show ’er the secrets of the Warrens.” She leaned close to Eirian’s face, and her breath was full of stale smoke. “Then she’ll be one of us, like.” She spun and set off across the street, the boy prodding Eirian to follow.

“Keep ’er close to me, Mouse,” Sly ordered as she reached the stoop of an empty-windowed house. “Don’t want ‘er fallin’ into any traps, do we?”

Mouse chivvied Eirian along, into the house and up a stair to the second floor. “First floor’s weak,” he said. “Fall right froo to th’basement.”

Sly traversed the second floor and leaned out of a long window, its sill dirty from many feet. After looking both ways, she stepped out. Eirian followed and found herself on a broad metal beam wedged between this building and the next. The big girl led across and paused on the sill of the opposite window. “Don’t touch the floor,” she said to Eirian. “I mean it.” She ducked into the house and swooped out of sight. Following, Eirian was nearly hit in the brow with a returning trapeze fashioned from two ships’ lines and a hefty ladder rung. She peered across to where Sly hunkered on a face-down wardrobe, then peeked over her shoulder. Mouse flapped his hands encouragingly.

She tightened her grip on the rung and pushed off from the window. She barely made it over the broad, bare floor, but Sly grabbed one rope and she was able to hop onto the creaking wardrobe. “Why can’t we touch the floor?” she puffed as Mouse made his flight.

“It tilts,” Sly said. “Flops down an’ dumps you onto great rusty spikes. For the Runners, Lor’bless’em.”

Similar dangers were pointed out to her, or occasionally avoided with such habitual grace that her guides forgot to mention them. Eirian leaned on a handrail, and Mouse had to grab her to stop her falling to a pavement far below. The deeper they went, the more certain Eirian was that she would never find her way out alone without misadventure, and the more people they heard or saw. Once Sly shushed them as they walked along a flat roof where five grown-ups were taking out pens and inks, wax and seals, preparing to harness the full morning light. Eirian peered at the pages before them, very official-looking, but Sly grabbed her sleeve and pulled her on.

Now the path returned to the ground, tracing a strange worm-trail between flimsy buildings and along streets almost crowded out of existence by ramshackle houses. Many corridors or alleys Eirian glanced down came to a sudden end at a wall, or stopped in a flurry of doors giving on various improvised shelters.

Sly paused to roll another smoke, and strolled along smoking and raising her cap or hand to passers-by. Some people, like the scrivening group, seemed to be setting about their work as the sun rose above the level of the buildings. Others were returning, heavy bags over their shoulders and strange implements in their hands. Women in bright clothes stumbled back likewise, some arm in arm with tough-looking men whose pockets bulged forth clubs or gun-butts. Their brusk calls and beery good-mornings set up a background babble like the cawing of crows.

“What is this place?” said Eirian.

“’Tis the Warrens,” Mouse said, confused.

“I know, you’ve said, but what do all these people do here? How do they eat? There is no market, no shops, no gardens…why do the roads go nowhere?”

“You ’ave ventured far from ’ome,” laughed Sly. “The Warrens is our place, in’it? A place for pickers, mashers, smashers, slickers, wheelers and nances, any as makes their way on the East side of the law. There’s plenty for sale for those as knows where to look.”

“You’re thieves?”

Sly rolled her eyes. “Such a flat. Yes, Bo Peep, we’re thieves.”

Mouse nodded. “An’ you can be one too, for a few years any rate. Girls make more as nances, once they get big.”

“But Sly-” Eirian began, but the girl grabbed her arm and twisted it, pushing her ahead.

“That spot there’s where Tooth Charlie killed Archie Deuce over a repeatin’ watch,” she said with feigned enthusiasm, and pointed to a broken hitching post. “Greatest smasher’s ever was, an’ Charlie mashed ’is ’ead in on that post.”

She shouldered onwards, and led them into twisting alleys where gray-faced women divided meager breakfasts for their broods. A tight squeeze between two clapboard sheds, and they were on a high wall above the broad, fetid river. A few yards downstream, a vast hulk of stained stone jutted into the current, and Mouse broke away towards it. Sly pushed Eirian along the wall to the bridge.

For it had been a bridge, once. Though the wind scoured this part of the river of its full fog, Eirian could not clearly see the remnants of the bridge on the other side, but one arch persisted on the Warrens side, ending ragged. There had once been shops along the span, which accounted for the plain, unfinished look of its sides now that the wooden structures had fallen, rotted or burned away. Sly gestured, and Eirian walked carefully onto it.

“Why is it broken?”

“No one knows, now. We says we did it, and they,” with a gesture to the respectable other bank, “says they did it. But someone did it with a great lot of gunpowder, many years back. An’ no one’s managed to build another one since.”

Mouse had run to the farthest end of the bridge, and was drawing on the exposed rock with a bit of chalk.

“Look ’ere,” said Sly, and gestured to a great gap in the downriver side of the bridge, where several openings had been broken into one. The river coiled black and deep below. Sly flicked her cigarette butt over the side, and it fell long and slow to the water. “It’s called the ‘Ole. Maybe it’s as the river turns ‘ere it’s so deep — maybe it’s a trick of the sewers wot lets in just above. But it runs deep and pulls down, some say into tunnels from when the city was new, founded by foreign gemplemen who dug. Wherever it ends up, it don’t give anything back. An’ that’s why they say the Warrens keeps their dead.”

With a quick jerk, Sly tripped Eirian forward over the side and caught her by her apron sash. The fabric cinched away her breath, and she felt terror blaze into anger as she was suspended a hundred feet above the filthy, roiling water.

“I don’t want to hear another word out of you about Sly bein’ a girl.” She spoke low and quick, so Mouse would not be alarmed. “I ain’t starved meself since age eight to keep the change at bay just to be ruined by some farm girl with a smart mouth and a big head. Sly is a lad, you ‘ear? A slight one, ruined by years of starvin’ to keep small enough for a door panel or a window hentry, but a roisterin’ great lad all the same. Swear you’ll keep it dark.”

“What?”

“My secret! Swear I’m a boy or I’ll pitch you, sure’n I will!”

Eirian screwed her mouth shut and stared at the mesmerizing sweep of the river below, the way a great braid of the water rose as if taking breath and then dove under its fellows, dragging all the Warrens’ refuse down to pack into some long-forgotten grotto, dead upon dead, forever.

Grey City XIX

So I finally created a blogroll. I didn’t do this for a long time because when I first started blogging, it seemed more than likely that people who were reading my blog already knew each other’s blogs. But now, after my MFA program, I know a lot more bloggers, so I thought I’d link them here.

This blogroll will eventually be linked in the sidebar under Oddments, as “Friends”. I have used real names for bloggers who do so, leaving off last names or using handles by the same criterion. If you’re a bloggin’ friend of mine and you are not on the list, it may be because I thought you weren’t updating any more, or because I didn’t know if linking to you would break your desired level of anonymity. These are not all the blogs I read. That list would be long, fluctuate a great deal, and involve scads of people I don’t know, let alone call ‘friend’. There are a few blogs I read whose authors I’ve met only in passing, but don’t really know, so those aren’t listed.

I love tags. They’re intuitive, individual, flexible and informative. They appeal to the part of my mind that color-codes obsessively and also to the slapdash right-now portion (or portions). So one of the chief advantages to upgrading to a newer blog engine was the tags, the glorious tags.

I haven’t finished tagging the archives yet, but after Ryan wrote the Top Tags plugin, I was surprised to see certain trends emerging. For one, I hadn’t thought I blogged about ‘real life’ all that much. For another, I was disturbed to see ‘grouse’, my chosen tag for negativity and ranting, in the top 5. Am I really that negative? I wondered, and considered how many fewer items could be tagged with ‘huzzah’, grouse’s opposite number.

So I’ve been trying to be more positive. Oh yes, if something is a grouse (like yesterday’s Zyrtec-D rant) I dutifully and truthfully tag it that way. But I’m trying not to write as many, to think of more blog items that celebrate or interest rather than excoriate. Tagging is self-revelatory. C’mon, be honest, you’ve looked at your tag cloud on some site or other. It’s interesting to see in aggregate the choices and distinctions we make in individual places, and to compare them to the aggregate choices of other users and the site as a whole. And the thing about any sort of self-revelation is that sometimes it shows you things you didn’t really want to see. It gives you a chance to change.

So I’ve already managed to push grouse down to number five on the Top Five Tags list…let’s see if I can’t push it off altogether!

I’m a very allergic person. I’ve been on one antihistamine plus decongestant or another for years, which is often inconvenient. For one thing, the insurance companies don’t like paying for all those meds, so they get the fast-track to over-the-counter. For another, the decongestant in my pills, pseudoephedrine, can be misused as a meth precursor. So the law restricts how much I can buy, requires me to submit my name to a Federal database, requires the store to keep them behind the counter, yada yada. Oh, also (thanks, Wikipedia!) the feds require “Non-liquid dose form of regulated product may only be sold in unit dose blister packs.”

I go back and forth between on-brand and store-brand, between Zyrtec-D and Claritin-D – varying antihistamine is better for your allergies, and sometimes there are coupons! Claritin-D comes in standard blister sheets: 6 or 8 pills, perforated divisions, exactly the sort of packaging we’ve all been opening since our parents couldn’t get child-proof stuff open and we volunteered to help. You rip the blister, out pops the pill.

Zyrtec, on the other hand, has this:

First of all, this is a waste of resources. The box is bigger and more complex (internal divider) to hold piles of individual blister packs, the blister packs use more plastic and foil than a traditional blister sheet. Secondly, they are absolutely positively without any doubt not “Easy Open” (who thought of the phrase “Easy Open Blister” anyway? The word ‘blister’ not associated with leisure and ease, folks.). You have to fold the tear to get it started, the loooong tear sometimes goes awry and doesn’t hit the blister, and even when it does follow the curving perforation perfectly, it only removes a shred of the blister around the pill, leaving the patient to dig at the heavy foil for a while before she can get the damn thing out. That’s without getting into picayune stuff, like it being easier to estimate how many pills you have left from a sheet than from a jumble of blister sarcophagi.

I know, I know, free market, free country, why do I keep buying them? Because I still have some $5 off coupons, and when you need medication to breathe, $5 off three weeks’ supply is not bad. And I can’t believe that the company won’t wise up eventually. After all, I am not the only person to post a picture of this package to Flickr with a grumpy caption. They can’t kid themselves they’re saving the world from meth by adopting such ridiculous packaging when the other brands aren’t encasing their pseudoephedrine in hyperbranded pucks that look like mini-golf greens. Give over, guys. I just want to take my allergy pill and go to sleep without sneezing. You just want me to buy it. Why can’t we get along?

When you’re a kid, the facts that don’t make sense are all the more important for it. Other kids will fall into the same trap you did, and you can correct them. This is important stuff. These are the foundations of being right. “Koala bears aren’t bears,” for example; and “Panda bears aren’t bears.”

Except Giant Pandas are bears and have been for years (that article is from 1985). Now, I’m not sure whether I already had a panda vs. bear opinion in preschool, but it’s quite possible I’ve been wrong about this distinction my entire life. The change took a while to percolate out into public knowledge – I remember the zoo feeding us the Proconyid (raccoon family) line on field trips when they showed us the Red Pandas. It took even longer to filter into my consciousness. I actually realized today, after the first shock of hearing “panda” listed among the bears on a nature special, that I have been told this before. The information simply broke against the wall of kindergarten certainty that Pandas Aren’t Bears (compounded perhaps with a later tendency towards splitterism) and fell away.

So partially I’m blogging this so anyone else out there laboring under this misconception (and as enamored as I of Being Right) can learn the startling truth, and partially I’m admitting my error publicly so it will forever be cemented in my mind. From now on I will remember: Everything I thought I knew about Pandas was a lie!

Photo by Jason Hickey via Flickr.

The San Gabriel Mountains are some of the steepest on Earth. They’re geologically complex, riven by faults and scraped back and forth by plate tectonics. They are coming down.

I read about them in “Los Angeles vs. the San Gabriels”, the final essay in John McPhee’s The Control of Nature. McPhee’s description of the way the mountains’ unstable rock interacts with the local cycle of fire and flash-flood is chilling; what’s more disturbing is that at their feet, in the path of the debris flows, are expensive and expansive human settlements, sprawling bedroom communities of Los Angeles.

I highly recommend reading the book; in fact, I’ve already lent my copy to my family so they can read it, or else I’d be quoting more extensively. But my own reaction to the book made me think. Reading about families buying or building uninsurable multi-million dollar homes in the foothills of these moving mountains, I was incredulous. How could they live there just because it’s pretty and less smoggy than other parts of the LA Valley? How could they trust their lives and the integrity of their homes to the partial protection of a debris basin?

Photo by yikai1 via Flickr.

There are other stories in the book that mystify me as much. In “Atchafalaya,” the first essay, the author describes a city in Louisiana in a uniquely precarious position — “Water approaches Morgan City from every side.” (page 80) — one entirely dependent on the Army Corps of Engineers for the sea walls that protect them from flood. Years have passed since Control of Nature was published, so I went to check the city’s Wikipedia page to see how they’ve fared. The words ‘wall’ and ‘flood’ don’t appear; apparently no one deemed the dangers notable.

We all live with risks, calculated or ignored. It’s easy to disapprove of the choice to build new mansions in the foothills of the San Gabriels, and hard to understand the Caltech geologists who outline the dangers of the mountain front for McPhee and then admit to living there. Easy to condemn the citizens who shrugged off their town government’s attempts to educate them about the season’s high likelihood of flows, refused to engage in mitigation activity, then sued that city when flows devastated their property. But what of the hardy men and women McPhee interviewed who live in the mountains because they love nature, who know the dangers better than anyone and stand in defiance in order to live in the wilderness? Is it knowledge that makes risk-taking acceptable in the eyes of an observer? Is it love?

Photo by Barry Maas via Flickr.

I have lived most of my life in Oregon. I’ve known, most of that life, that there are dangers. The weather is generally mild, and floods are not too common or dangerous, but underneath the state it’s a different story. The Juan de Fuca and North American plates have been locked without a major earthquake since 1700. I’ve been told all my life that we’re overdue for a big quake, and learned in college that much of the earthquake proofing in the Northwest is proven against San Andreas style shaking, not the subduction zone movement it will someday need to withstand.

But I love Oregon. I want to move back there, and I accept the risk. When friends from the Midwest ask about earthquakes, I usually say, “Yeah, it’ll happen someday, and it may kill me, but it may not.” It sounds fatalistic, but it does represent my position: A quake will occur, possibly within my lifetime, possibly later. It is likely to be massive, so there’s a limit to how much I can do about it. It’s an omnipresent, huge threat, but its very omnipresence and size make it ignorable. I can’t stress about it every minute, and when it happens, I’ll either be too dead to care or able to stop fretting about it for the rest of my life. Living in San Jose concerns me a little more, but not worrying is a similar process here, pretty easy to accomplish.

But tornado season every year? Regular flooding of the Mississippi? Knowing that every time the chapparal on the mountains burns, two good rains in a row could move a hill down into my neighborhood? I couldn’t cope with those risks.

This isn’t just a question of my comfort levels and yours; of my childhood practicing earthquake drills and learning about the volcano that erupted nine months before I was born versus Ryan’s childhood of riding the schoolbus home playing ‘spot the twisters’. Our cities are crowded; people want to live on the fringe where rents are low, or in the foothills above the smog. People want to retire further away, to remote but growing towns vulnerable to forest fire. The rich want to build beach houses on shifting dunes, while others cannot afford to move out of the floodplain, out of the trailer park in Tornado Alley, out of the path of the Mississippi. Our world is crowded. And, as the ice caps melt, our field of options will get smaller.

We all underwrite each other’s choices. Within the US, by paying for rescue, for flood or high-risk home insurance, for disaster relief with our taxes. Across the globe, with international aid and our emotional investment in the lives lost at the edge. Who is going to decide what risks are reasonable? Whose freedom to risk can be respected, and whose should not? In this society of contradictions, where rugged individualism is espoused and habitual litigiousness is practiced, who has the right to decide where you or I make a home?

Another story of mine has been accepted for publication! Full details over on the author site, but in general: it’ll be out next year, it’s a realistic short story called “Ashes”, and it’s in a well-respected literary journal published in my own home state of Oregon.

I feel like dancing, but in these shoes I would scare the cat half to death; I’ve already charged around in a state of giddiness until she looked feral and harried. I’ll settle for an imaginary jig.