Month: May 2013

Kory Stamper notes how sci-fi influences our vocabulary:

Many words have their origins in science fiction and fantasy writing, but have been so far removed from their original contexts that we’ve forgotten. George Orwell gave us “doublespeak“; Carl Sagan is responsible for the term “nuclear winter“; and Isaac Asimov coined “microcomputer” and “robotics“. And, yes, “blaster”, as in “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.“

The genres also reintroduce or recontextualize already existing words:

Savvy writers of each genre also liked to resurrect and breathe new life into old words. JRR Tolkien not only gave us “hobbit”, he also popularized the plural “dwarves”, which has appeared in English with increasing frequency since the publication of The Hobbit in 1968. “Eldritch”, which dates to the 1500s, is linked in the modern mind almost exclusively to the stories of HP Lovecraft. The verb “terraform” that was most recently popularized by Joss Whedon’s show Firefly dates back to the 1940s, though it was uncommon until Firefly aired. Prior to 1977, storm troopers were Nazis.

Jessica Grose ponders Sylvia Plath’s astonishing productivity as a writer, despite being a mother and wife who battled mental illness:

Plath battled the depression that would ultimately fell her throughout her entire working life, but she still managed to be highly productive, even during the period when she was a single mother of two young children after separating from Hughes. Work was so important to her sense of self that Plath’s suicide attempt during that summer of ’53 was in part because her depression rendered her unable to write.

Among the reasons for Plath’s copius output? Grose cites Diane Middlebrook’s biography, Her Husband, on the importance of the poet’s daily writing schedule:

“Daily routines were the kind of thing Plath liked to describe in letters to her mother, so we know that [she and Hughes] planned to write for four to six hours a day, 8:30-12:00 in the morning, 4:00-6:00 in the afternoon. In later years, after they had children, they split the day into two parts: Plath took the hours after breakfast, and she aimed to be at work by 9:00; Hughes had the hours between lunch and tea. Despite the evident differences in their dispositions, routines suited both of them, and what they considered good work flowed from Hughes’s pen and Plath’s keyboard for the whole of their first two months of married life.”

Even in the frenzied final months of Plath’s life, during which she was plagued by anxiety, depression, and insomnia, she would write from 4 a.m., when her sleeping pills wore off, until 8 a.m., when her son and daughter woke up and needed her. She wrote much of the heralded poetry collection Ariel in this fashion.

Advancing American Art was a 1946 art collection selected by US State Department; the shows were intended to fight the Cold War by promoting American cultural values abroad. The experiment was a domestic flop:

The highly conservative radio host Fulton Lewis Jr derided the art as “so far advanced that it’s completely out of sight and no one in his sane mind is ever going to try and catch up to it”. Upset citizens wrote letters to their elected representatives, deriding the use of taxpayers’ money for the project. Those politicians in turn spoke out in the press and on Capitol Hill.

The objections to the works took various forms. Complaints were made against the darkness of the works, both in palette and content, by those who felt that they failed to portray the nation as a thriving war victor. The “foreign-sounding” names of many of the artists, many of whom were in fact immigrants, was also an issue.

Perhaps most troubling for some protestors was the political orientation of many of the artists. … [T]he unfamiliar style, and hence artistic merit, of the work was called into question. Perhaps the most damning derision in this area came from none other than President Harry Truman, who in a letter to a State Department official leaked to the press, dismissed the art as “merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people”.

The controversy came to a head in a series of Congressional hearings. While artists and museum officials around the country convened to try and save the programme, their counter protest was to no avail. Threats of State Department funding cuts put their other programmes at risk, which by that time included the popular Voice of America radio broadcasts, the Fulbright Programme and Unesco involvement. The outcomes of the hearings were the recall of the art to home, the dismissal of [State Department member Joseph LeRoy] Davidson and the elimination of his position.

A recreation of the exhibition can be seen at the University of Oklahoma through June 2nd. From there, it travels to Indiana University and the University of Georgia.

(Pictured: Around The Lighthouse, Karl Zerbe, n.d.)

The world’s highest mountain has become overcrowded and polluted, reports Mark Jenkins, in large part due to its draw as a tourist destination for inexperienced climbers:

Everest has always been a trophy, but now that almost 4,000 people have reached its summit, some more than once, the feat means less than it did a half century ago. Today roughly 90 percent of the climbers on Everest are guided clients, many without basic climbing skills. Having paid $30,000 to $120,000 to be on the mountain, too many callowly expect to reach the summit. A significant number do, but under appalling conditions. The two standard routes, the Northeast Ridge and the Southeast Ridge, are not only dangerously crowded but also disgustingly polluted, with garbage leaking out of the glaciers and pyramids of human excrement befouling the high camps. And then there are the deaths. Besides the four climbers who perished on the Southeast Ridge, six others lost their lives in 2012, including three Sherpas.

James Joyner is pessimistic:

The prospects of this happening are dismal. Nepal is a poor country and the government took in over $3 million in permit fees last year and climbers brought an estimated $12 million into the local economy. The corrupt, incompetent government diverts the money it brings in, re-investing very little in safety and cleanup of Everest.

Kashish Das Shrestha, a writer who offered insight into a sherpa’s view of the mountain’s “traffic jam” last year, compares his observations with Jenkins’s, noting the similarity of their visions for reform. From his May 2012 report:

While shutting down Everest for a season or two might seem radical, at least fiscally, it actually might not be.  There are 326 peaks that are open for mountaineering in Nepal. Of that, 25 are in the Solukhumbu region.

So shutting Everest down temporarily would not mean taking away revenues from Solukhumbu or the Sagarmatha National Park. It would only mean being able to offer a safer Mount Everest down the line, while promoting other peaks in the region and the country.

Mount Everest is not, and should not, be treated like an expensive amusement park. And nobody’s permit fee is bigger than somebody’s safety more than 7,000 meters above sea level.

In an update, he indicates that hope is not lost:

I was recently told that if one wanted the government to respond to certain public discourses, a document outlining the discourse or proposed policy suggestions had to be submitted to the relevant Minister or Secretary of the relevant Ministry. Perhaps it is worth submitting Mark’s and my propositions to those offices, as well as to the industry’s trade body, to see if there is a response.