The Loneliest Plantest (WSJ)

We are indeed “alone” in the universe, this book argues:

“One leg of Mr. Gribbin’s argument rests on the theorized life expectancy of advanced civilizations, which he claims is much more fleeting, on a cosmic timescale, than we care to admit. Our species has inhabited this planet for about one hundred-thousandth the age of the galaxy, and it was merely a century ago that we began to transmit radio waves. If technological civilizations did arise before ours, they might have succumbed to war or environmental degradation well before our primate ancestors stood upright.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204552304577116570107579152.html?KEYWORDS=loneliest+planet

A daily double from Pico Iyer in the Times this Sunday, including this piece on the virtues of silence:

“ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness…”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Pico%20Iyer&st=cse

and a review of his new book, The Man Within My Head, about Graham Greene:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/books/review/the-man-within-my-head-by-pico-iyer-book-review.html?scp=3&sq=Pico%20Iyer&st=cse

“Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.” Those who love Graham Greene — and their numbers are legion — will recognize this sentence, the first line of his quietly devastating novel “The Heart of the Matter,” published in 1948.

I’m just back from north-central Virginia, where I took a break from writing, made minimal use of the internet and saw no television.

Although it was a very quick trip, getting away from my little 10 blocks of Manhattan scrubbed my eyes and gave me some fresh country energy — the kind you get from open spaces, and sere, fallow fields and star-crowded skies.

There is no end, meanwhile, to one’s sense of wonder about the directional flight of time.

This time last year, I was in the far northern reaches of Namibia pursuing the research for  my current book project. I’d rented a car and driven deep into the night with my brother James to Ondangwa reaching our destination in eight or ten hours from Windhoek under  skies that alternated between sumptuous views of a glittering universe and downpours of biblical intensity.

That was the 30th. We spent the next day and into New Year’s eve evening with partying Chinese traders in their comptoir in Oshikango, hard by the border with Angola, listening to tales of all manner of enrichment, both licit and illicit and trying to avoid drinking to too many of their endless toasts, as they carved up and devoured pigs roasted on slowly turning spits.

I’d ruptured and nearly blown out a tire during a long, bumpy and winding drive over an unmarked trail to get to Oshikango, and we proceeded gingerly into the night from there to Oshikati to what turned out to be one of the best New Year’s celebrations I’ve seen in recent memory. The little town put on an incredibly thumping party that drew young people, all dressed in their best, by the hundreds from all over the Owambo region, with live music, a beauty contest, dancing, fireworks and much excitement.

That Namibia visit came early in my book’s research, and would be followed by visits to a dozen or so other African countries spread out over the remainder of that trip, and two subsequent trips, including my summer marathon, when I spent four months continuously on the move.

Although I endured truly great hardships now and then, my overall experience was extremely positive, and this travel alone would have made  2011 an especially memorable year for me. I have been even further blessed, though, with an energetic start to my book, whose theme is China and Africa, and as I wade knee deep through a rare and momentary spell of writing doldrums, I take comfort in knowing that I’m in a good position to finish on schedule, which is to say by early spring. I’m also happy to say that Disappearing Shanghai, a long-due book of my photography about that city will be coming out right about then.

I plan to begin posting galleries of photography from my recent African travels over the next few weeks. I’ll also round out my best 2011 reads in the next few days. There are just a few more to go.

Speaking of China, this has been the first year since 1998 that I haven’t been to East Asia, and that has felt strange to me all year. I toyed here and there with contriving a quick trip to avoid breaking this happy streak, but the requirements of researching my current book meant travel in Africa, while the demands of writing it meant planting myself at my desk for long hours each day.

I’ve already made plans to go to China early in 2012, though, and will likely return in the summer. I’ve also got a medium range project that involves all of northeast Asia. More on that later.

My brother James is due in Manhattan any minute from Joburg via the SF Bay area and a quick stop in DC. The year has time for one last party.

 

Happy New Years to one and all.

 

It will be a very long time before Chinese writers cease to mine the seemingly inexhaustible vein of material that comes from the ten years of chaos and upheaval of  the Cultural Revolution.



Indeed, Yu Hua, the author of the seventh book to appear on this list, China in Ten Words himself has come up with his own graphic way of taking note of this. If all the stories of fortunes reversed and lives thrust into chaos “were laid out one after another, they would stretch as endlessly as a highway and be as hard to tally as the forest.”

For people who follow China  seriously, this produces something of an occupational hazard. After a while, so much that is written about this turbulent period (1966-’76) begins to  sound familiar, and even when the stories are extraordinary, as they so often are, the effect becomes somewhat repetitive — even monotonous. This is made worse when people write about the period – and there are many of them – more or less to to pander.

Yu Hua, who hails from Hangzhou, a metropolis that few Americans have ever heard of and  yet is bigger than almost any city in the United States, has none of these issues. As the previous author, most famously, of Brothers, and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, he has long earned his stripes as a highly original writer, and one who revels in taking on big social and historical themes.

At 225 pages, China in Ten Words is so brief that one couldn’t be blamed for suspected it as one of those tossed off efforts that famous writers sometimes lend themselves to, whether out of boredom, or contract requirements, or the need for funds, or simply because they can, which means for the heck of it. To the contrary, the result is one of the most intriguing recent contributions on the subject of the Cultural Revolution that this reader has come across.

No, Yu Hua has not come up with some astounding new material, or even a genuinely new perspective on the period. All in all, his stories of growing up in that era of generalized violence, and of yet of striking innocence in terms of some things, such as social and sexual mores, sound rather familiar. The breakthrough instead, if it is not too grand a claim to call it that, comes in the form of the extended parallels he draws between that era in China and our own. And here, I believe, Yu Hu, ever the astute social critic, has stumbled upon something really quite interesting.

The Cultural Revolution was an era of extraordinary concentration of power in the person of Mao Zedong. The Party remains powerful, of course, but by the measures of the past, authority has become highly diffuse. Both result in great violence, both in great injustices, even if their nature and description vary dramatically.

Here and there, Yu Hua takes great pleasure in skewering a body of opinion that exists in China (and which is nursed by the state) which is smug and self satisfied. “Our economic miracle — or should we say, the economic gain in which we so revel — relies to a significant extent on the absolute authority of local governments, for an administrative order on a piece of paper is all that’s required to implement drastic change.”

He is speaking, of course, of the administrative hocus pokus that has propelled real estate speculation and made huge fortunes out of thin air, while cheating ordinary people, the nameless masses, out of their land and their homes or their livelihoods, fueling combustible anger in places like Wukan and many other places.

He is mostly impressed by the great waste that accompanied the economic boom, likening it to useless backyard steel furnaces of the Great Leap Forward that boosted statistics but left the countryside polluted and denuded of trees.

“When I left South Africa at the end of a visit during the 2010 World Cup, the duty-free shop at Johannesburgs airport was selling vuvuzelas — Chinese-made plastic horns — for the equivalent of 100 yuan each, but on my return home I learned that the export price was only 2.6 yuan apiece,” he writes. “One company in Zhejiang manufactured 20 million vuvuzelas but ended up making a profit of only about 100,000 yuan. This examples gives a sense of China’s lopsided development: year after year chemical plants will dump industrial waste into our rivers, and although a single plant might succeed in generating a thirty-million-yuan boost to China’s GDP, to clean up the rivers it has ruined will cost ten times that amount. An authority I respect has put it this way: China’s model of development is to spend 100 yuan to gain 10 yuan in increased GDP.”

There is an extended meditation here about the seemingly almost arbitrary reversals of fates that the two eras, the Cultural Revolution and now, have brought about in the lives of Chinese people. Back then, as Yu Hua notes, Wang Hongwen, a simply security guard, rose at age 38 to officially become the country’s third leading politician, after Mao and Zhou En Lai. Today, it is seemingly ordinary people from the grassroots who dominate the lists of richest people. They are people who “think and dare to act,” and who “will adopt any method,” legal or not, to get ahead.

In the popular idiom of the revolutionary 1960s China, this was called “flipping pancakes,” he tells us. “Everyone was just a pancake, sizzling on the griddle, flipped from side to side by the hand of fate.”

For Yu Hua, the forms of the past may have changed but the essence of so many things has remained the same. We have gone from an era of radical redistribution of political power to an era of radical redistribution of economic power, but the arbitrary nature of fate and the injustices that it inevitably deals have remained constant.

“What is revolution,” Yu Hua asks? “The answer I have heard take many forms. Revolution fills life with unknowables, and one’s fate can take an entirely different course overnight; some people soar high in the blink of an eye, and others just as quickly stumble into the deepest pit. In revolution the social ties that bind one person to another are formed and broken unpredictably, and today’s brother-in-arms may become tomorrow’s class enemy.”

Or indeed today’s.

Here’s a profile from the New York Times magazine of the author, written by the formidable Pankaj Mishra: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25hua-t.html?scp=1&sq=Yu%20Hua%20profile&st=cse