THE ECOLOGY OF EMPIRE
WHAT CAN AN OIL-CRAZED AMERICA LEARN FROM VIRGIL’S OBSESSION WITH TREES?
DISCUSSED: The Aeneid, Hot 97, Conspicuous Consumption, Imperium Sine Fine, The Battle of Fallen Timbers, Charles Mears, The Deforestation of Michigan, Smelting, Pleasure Steamboats, Romulus and Remus, The Last March of the Ents, The Great Fire of 1871, The Third Punic War, “Gas Guzzler” Taxes, One-Legged Seagulls, Aqueducts
In the summer of 2002, I went a little mad. The previous fall, I had taught composition at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus. My second session met two days after September 11; displaced from my lower Manhattan apartment, subways disasterized, I walked to class from a friend’s home fifty-five blocks away, unsure if anyone would even show up. They did. Throughout the next few months I lived an itinerant existence, staying with friends, exes, and friends of friends, and organizing my home’s rehabilitation while working through comma splices, word order, and what my Russian student called “problem of definite article” with first-years who spoke seven languages and commuted to school from four boroughs. My reward for this effort was a laughable paycheck, an overwhelming sense of insufficiency, and the chance to audit a class. Thus it was that in June, as I and the city settled into an uneasy truce with normality, I bought a copy of Wheelock’s Latin Grammar and a fat pack of index cards. I had decided I had to learn Latin.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Why We're All Dead
Here's a teaser from the February issue of The Believer: the opening few paragraphs of Ginger Strand's piece on Virgil, the Roman empire's appetite for wood, and "The Ecology of Empire." Bedtime reading last night. Always good stuff in this ad-free monthly:
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2 comments:
"To believe in this livin is a hard way to go" John Prine
I am fascinated by the stories of peoples reactions to 9/11, politically, emotionally, etc..I spend time at a blog called neo-neocon,a gal who went from liberal to "independent" with that event.Along with Hitchens ,Geras, etc she describes her own process of change, transformation, enlightenment.She is a little easier to de-construct than some of the others, she denies it is fear based yet she has trouble locating the "other"in a rational historiography. You, on the other hand,"returned to normalcy", however that can be interpreted, as did I and I am trying to relate these reactions to ideology and philosophy.
On 9/11 I went fishing, as I do on most days, days when hundreds of thousands die of starvation, or are slaughtered in the Sudan,or die of aids or hurricanes or war or everything.I will go fishing again next week.
You know, I lived in Paris, France during a period where there were terrorist bombings in the Metro. People dying and stuff. We took the Metro anyway, as did most Parisians. It's not that this was "normal," but that you subconsciously calculated the risk and moved on with your life. You didn't freak out. That's what the War on Terror is - one immense freak-out (for political gain and profit).
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