Cold and heat

The "home heating season" at our house began last Friday, when Olga and I noticed as we ate our bagels at breakfast that we could actually see our breath. Heating oil prices being what they are, this is not a step taken lightly, but we have a lot going against us at our new place. It faces west, so it only gets a few hours of sunlight at the end of the day, and just to the east of us is a stand of huge fir and maple trees that cast a nice shade in the summer, but ensure we live in darkness and cave-like chill. We think a lot about the absurdity of all this. In Russia, no middle class family sits in their own home wrapped in blankets watching their breath turn to frost. And none of them risk bankrupting themselves to pay for heating fuel either. The old joke goes that in Russia your thermostat is you window: you open it to let the extra heat out. One of the positive legacies of socialism are home utilities. In most cities, every district has its own cogeneration plant that pipes steaming hot water to each apartment for heating and hot water service. It is massively inefficient, though it isn't an urgent public policy priority because Russia has the resources, and as with almost everything, the situation is dramatically different in the provinces. Half of the Siberian city of Kransoyarsk was without heat or hot water for several weeks last winter because one of their plants blew up. All that is very bad, but when I first heard this coming winter in New England referred to as a potential "frozen Katrina" -- with ordinary people freezing to death in their homes because they can't afford to heat themselves -- I began to wonder. Sure, the Russian way is built on faulty assumptions about its sustainability and disregards society's most vulnerable members, but isn't it the same here? Isn't our dependence on oil furnaces and getting by with paltry insulation a reflection of the mistaken belief that heating oil would always be cheap and abundant? and isn't LIHEAP such a pressing political issue around here because there are way too many people who are broken by the costs of heating? It seems like another subtle reminder that the way things are done here in the States isn't perfect. It also points out one of the most common and absurd stereotypes I've encountered here, in which people respond to our year in Moscow by joking that it must've been cold. Well, actually, no. America is cold. Every place I went in Russia was heated abundantly and comfortably, and when you go outside, you dress for it. Hats, gloves, scarves, thermal underwear. Russians know that you don't screw around with winter, and as a result, it isn't that bad. Compare this with here, where winter is a long slog of dull, low-level misery. Of wet and chills and once the holidays are over, a kind of sunlight-free existential despair. It is no wonder that so many northern retirees cite simply avoiding the winter as the reason they pulled up roots and moved South.

Two ways of looking at a cruise ship

Most of the work I've read by David Foster Wallace, who killed himself last week, has been his journalism and nonfiction. I never read his fiction, but of course was quite aware of his singular place in American arts and letters, especially in the 1990s. I've had friends whose opinions I respect both slam and praise him, and I think that in itself is a sort of accomplishment. But there is one thing about him that has never set well with me. In one of my magazine writing classes at Columbia, we were assigned to read Wallace's impressive January 1996 folio "Shipping Out," a long essay about the cruise ship industry and the nature of vacation, relaxation and modern American life. It was a big hit in class, as it should be because it is really very insightful and well-written. At the same time, in another class, we read some James Agee, and I was impressed enough to check out of Butler Library a volume of his collected journalism pieces. Included was a feature for Fortune magazine from September 1937 entitled "Havana Cruise," a long essay about the then-fledgling cruise industry. In subject matter and approach, these two articles are very very similar. I've never been able to square how a writer as well-read and knowledgeable -- not to mention as obsessively enamored with footnotes of all shapes and sizes -- failed to include at least a passing mention of Agee's work. I'm not suggesting there is any wrongdoing of any sort, I just can't figure it out. That said, the two articles are really very interesting in presenting what I would call the modernist and postmodernist approach to narrative journalism. With a caveat that I haven't really sat down and read through them in nearly ten years, I remember Agee's story is earnest, serious, obsessed with "breaking news" and the idea of the new. Wallace's is a bit more fun, full of jokes and asides, and seems more interested in hashing out ideas and experiences in an effort to connect seemingly random and inconsequential themes into some kind of bigger coherence. What they both share is a bit of self-indulgence (Agee's sometimes pretentious verbiage [too much Joyce]; Wallace's distractions into pop culture ephemera and jumping into rabbit-holes of his own whim) and an overwhelming sense of dread (especially well done in Agee's piece. He had a much better sense of drama). Both are excellent reads.

Regarding the politics of others

While abroad I was able to follow American politics pretty closely thanks to our wonderful wired modern world. But one of the great things about this past year is it has given me a little more perspective about how people look at one another's politics.

Consider the Sarah Palin nomination, which to me is probably the least funny thing to ever happen in American politics, but to the rest of the world is kinda amusing. In a column in the Telegraph last week, Mary Riddell lamented a bit jealously that UK conservatives weren't as colorful.

"We're playing personality politics without the personalities and, in that climate, woe betide any grey figure bold enough... to stick his eyebrows above the parapet.

"Can no Tory front-bencher conjure up a pregnant teenage daughter and a non-Etonian 'redneck' boyfriend?"

Crimmy, serious people debating serious issues about the nation and its future, without the reality television show bullsh*t? Sounds great to me.

When seen from the outside looking in, political life tends to flatten and simplify in distorting ways. On a serious note, it means that Americans refuse to acknowledge the political complexity and nuance of today's Russia in favor of a simple "the USSR is back!" narrative (which makes a dummy like Mikheil Saakashvili the inexplicable underdog freedom fighter). But on a personality level, it works the same way. We look at Nicolas Sarkozy, jet-setting with his hot new model/singer wife, or Silvio Berlusconi penning syrupy love songs with cruise ship lounge singers, and we ask ourselves how anybody could possibly take these people seriously. Well, here we have Sarah Palin, and I'm asking the same question (not two years ago, she was the mayor of a town smaller than Williamstown. Have you seen its "City Hall"?).