Author: davidbiddle

That Warm Gooey Feeling: The New View of Climate Change

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment
Source: NASA Apollo 8
Source: NASA Earthrise from the moon – Apollo 8

Over at Mashable they just posted an interesting article on social media’s perception of the climate change issue. According to the article, “Internet has revelation that climate change action won’t kill the economy after all,” during the last year or so there has been a tremendously positive shift that “reflects the increasing realization in the business and policy-making communities that the transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and other emerging technologies constitutes an economic opportunity rather than an economic obstacle.”

Even though they present wonderful graphs and data to prove their case, Mashable rightly points out the biases of the researchers. They also note that studies about social media are often fraught with Continue reading →

Fighting Violence and Terror with Art, Joy and Youth

~ davidbiddle ~ 2 Comments

We’ve all been wondering how to counteract the lunacy and mayhem that seems to have seriously marked 2015 throughout the world. Right? It’s not just terrorists, out-of-control cops, and criminals. There’s a lot of hatred a certain category of people have been spewing on TV, social media, and, probably, in your neighborhood and workplace.

You may have your own answer, but to me the most powerful weapon global society has against all this fear and negativity is the freedom and joy of young people and the art they are making. Watch this video trailer below:

The full video can be accessed by clicking here: Community of Dancers Boston Edition. This is my youngest son Conor’s project. He is a 20-year-old film student (and hip-hop dancer) at Emerson College Continue reading →

Summer 2015: Books I’ve Read and Books I’ve Been Working On

~ davidbiddle ~ 1 Comment
Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector

I want to share some thoughts on what I read this summer, just so you know what writers do with all that spare time they have. At the end of this essay I also report on some of the stuff I have been working on.

This was my first summer being an empty nest writer. For the record, half of what writers do is read each other’s work. That’s probably why the job seems so great every once in a while.

My goodness, there is so much brilliant literature coming out these days — particularly by women. Beginning in July, I stumbled into all sorts of work by Renata Adler, Joy Williams, Cesar Aira, Shirley Jackson, Elena Ferrante, Mat Johnson, Lucia Berlin, Roxane Gay, and  Clarice Lispector (she who barks at God, see photo above). All of these folks are pushing language and literature forward. We worry, right?, about the notion that fiction is coming to rest on the surface of the toilet waters of the world. Not so. You just have to keep looking for them that knows how to float around the room. They’re out there. I was smitten in particular with Aira, Lispector, and Renata Adler.

Continue reading →

All the Light We Cannot See: A Quick Review

~ davidbiddle ~ 2 Comments

allthelight-209x300There’s no question that Tony Doerr is one of our most lyrical and thoughtful writers. If you haven’t read any of his work, I highly recommend his two collections of stories as a good place to start:

The Shell Collector (Scribner, 2001)

Memory Wall (Scribner, 2010)

I just finished his award winning new novel All the Light We Cannot See last night. I stayed up late reading in bed to finish the final 100 pages. The novel weaves two young people’s stories together during World War II. Werner is a young German orphan genius with a penchant for radio tweaking and communications hacking. Marie-Laure is a blind French girl whose father is the lock master in a museum in Paris. Both young people must deal with the utter horror of that war of wars, and the reader must go through the grueling trials and tribulations with them. We know it is inevitable that they meet. A great deal is inevitable in any story about Continue reading →

Thank-You for Making Your Broken Bird World

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I bid adieu to my Facebook wall and all the people who live there (for as long as I can, I think).

It felt really interesting to wake up this morning. That strange convolution was no longer tangled up inside my skull, cloaking my brain. What a strange thing not to realize every day for seven years.

So, maybe, it’s back to communicating the way I used to. The poem below is adapted from a letter to a friend I shall miss daily now, because Facebook isn’t bad, it’s just there and it makes using words easier than maybe using them should be.

Thank-you for Making Your Broken-Bird World

(For Nancy Anonymous)
Your land of broken birds is a set of 
427 switches 
So delightfully random yet crafted
As if out of scented wax, feathers, 
Star crusts and weed flowers. 
The effect of reading them is the same 
Effect you'd get in a deep forest 
When you find a lever on a tree 
That you click up and down really fast 
To the point where you don't know if it's 
Your eyes fluttering open and shut, or 
The whole world is flickering and you're 
The only one that notices 
Anymore/anyway 
Because, of course, the biggest problem 
In life is getting so used to things that go 
On and off people take them for granted
Or let them become boring, like love, it seems now,
Which is why I stand with my hand on the lever
Tonight
And why your work is so important. 
This is what you have called 
A Broken-Bird World. Right?
Related articles

Divesting in Trustee Wussyness: College Campuses and Climate Change Action

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment

Climate Divestment Whose Side

This spring Swarthmore College’s students, alumni and faculty stood up to demand that the school’s Board of Managers (their trustees) divest funding in fossil fuel businesses and technologies. I reported on that here in “The State of the War on Climate Change” a few weeks ago. The Board of Managers voted down that option just days later.

What I also reported on in that essay was that this is just the beginning of campus actions to divest in Continue reading →

The State of the War on Climate Change: Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

~ davidbiddle ~ 1 Comment
Bill McKibben (Source: 350.org)
Bill McKibben (Source: 350.org)

Talking Writing magazine just posted an interview I did with climate activist and environmental journalist Bill McKibben called “We Don’t Require Leaders.” I urge you to go check it out. McKibben surprised me with some of his answers. The whole climate equation and how it impacts culture and politics is not simple or predictable.

I did a lot of research for my interview. You can never get in all your questions. Nor can you make all the points you want to make in your interview introduction. I want to add a bit here, then, if that’s okay. It’s my contribution this week to what will likely otherwise be a finger snapping coverage of Earth Day by mainstream media. Continue reading →

No Translation Possible: On Reading Roberto Bolaño

~ davidbiddle ~ 1 Comment
“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”
– Roberto Bolaño, “The Savage Detectives” 
Patti Smith with a Roberto Bolaño portrait
Patti Smith with a Roberto Bolaño portrait

I have discovered the work of Chilean poet/novelist/essayist, Roberto Bolaño, in the past year. For years I stayed away from this dude because it seemed like he was probably one of those difficult writers who made a reader’s journey very time consuming and dicey. Boy, was I wrong!

I want to admit here first that I’m mesmerized by what Bolaño produced in his all too short career. I can’t say I’m an addict, but I do love reading pretty much anything he’s ever written. The experience is uncanny. He tends not to overload sentences. Tends not to get too lyrical or philosophical. Most certainly he does not take himself or whatever work he’s doing too seriously (not too seriously does not mean he writes frivolously).

Continue reading →

“Natural Symbols”: On the Brutality of Popular Opinion and Why You Think You’re Always Right

~ davidbiddle ~ 3 Comments

Mary Douglas, Anthropologist
Mary Douglas, Anthropologist

Anthropologist Mary Douglas published a book called Natural Symbols 45 years ago. It’s a gateway into thinking about how individuals encode their perceptions of reality through the complex cosmology of cultural symbols they live in — bodily or “natural” symbols in particular. The idea of the book was to develop a way of talking about how well the individual is integrated into society.  Social integration is the idea of “order” that each of us carries with us everyday. In a nutshell, she was at play with the ideas of taboo and purity. These are at the root of everything. Either you love and embrace things or you hate and reject them. And you tend to learn these from society at large.

Ya’ think that’s some boring shit? Well, maybe, except when you actually try to understand what the hell is going on in the world today.

What we just went through last fall, standing in little pockets around the country in judgment of police in Ferguson, Missouri and Staten Island was an extreme case of how “natural symbols” work in real life. There was a huge amount of emotion attached to these two Continue reading →