The Dish

John Upton flags a recent study showing that wildfires are affecting more and more of the Western US each year:

The numbers of big fires that strike annually are on the rise throughout most of the region, from the Rocky Mountains’ pine forests to the wind-whipped deserts that border Mexico. Worsening droughts are taking searing tolls, helping to nudge vast biomes into combustion. The only region spared seems to be coastal California—and, even there, in the relative respite of a Mediterranean climate, the amount of land affected by large fires continues to grow.

Researchers recently pored over satellite fire data and climate data before concluding that monster wildfires—the types of uncontrolled blazes that tear through at least 1,000 acres of forests, parched grasslands, and neighborhoods—increased at a rate of seven every year throughout the region from 1984 to 2011. That helped push the amount of area that burned in such blazes up by an average of nearly 90,000 acres every year.

Becky Oskin talks to the study’s lead author, geographer Phil Dennison of the University of Utah:

“There are a lot of different causes for fire and a lot of different things that contribute to a fire regime, and those vary tremendously across the West,” Dennison said. But because the bump in wildfires seen in the study is so widespread, Dennison thinks one main factor likely underlies the trend: climate change. “This is over too short of a period to say this is definitely climate change, but it does point in the direction of changing climate having an impact on fire,” he said.

And Ari Phillips looks at the attention this problem is getting in Washington:

In February, President Obama called for shifting the costs of fighting the biggest wildfires to the same emergency fund that handles other natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. The move is intended to allow the U.S. Forest Service to avoid using their mitigation and prevention budget to pay for the costs of massive, and extremely costly, western fires.

Rose Eveleth suggests that the “curse” of the Unlucky Mummy – blamed in Britain for a variety of disasters in the late 19th and early 20th century, including the sinking of the Titanic – reflected  sublimated anxieties about colonialism:

As it happens, the Unlucky Mummy arrived in England during the perfect curse-making storm. … At the time, Britain was occupying Egypt. It had invaded the Middle Eastern country in 1882, bombarding Alexandria for 10 and a half hours from the sea in an attack that was largely one sided – the British didn’t lose a single boat. The fires that followed destroyed much of the city and two days later the British army entered Alexandria and took on Egyptian forces in a handful of skirmishes, the most notable being the battle at Tel-el-Kebir. Because the Egyptian land was flat and open, the British decided to attack at night. After an hour of fighting, the Egyptians fled. The British military stayed in Egypt in a variety of capacities until 1922.

While the occupation of Egypt was a military success, it was met with trepidation back home.

Should a European power intervene in the goings on of a Middle Eastern country? The British said they were there to help depose a tyrannical rule, but the British people weren’t sure that was their government’s job in the first place. But while the occupation troubled many, some didn’t want to outwardly express their anxieties. So they turned to objects that represented the country in question: Egyptian artifacts. “You can’t talk about how difficult it is to occupy another country because that’s unpatriotic,” says Roger Luckhurst, a professor of literature at Birkbeck College, University of London, who details the Unlucky Mummy’s journey through myth and reality in his 2012 book, The Mummy’s Curse. “This is a narrative that lets you talk about it in another way.” The idea that objects from Egypt like the mummy board would exact revenge was a way to express anxiety without actually talking about war.

(Photo of a 1909 Pearson’s cover featuring the story of the Unlucky Mummy via Wikimedia Commons)

In a review of Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight, Cynthia Ozick rails against the term:

With its echo of “grotesque,” the ubiquitous term “Kafkaesque” has long been frozen into permanence, both in the dictionary and in the most commonplace vernacular. Comparative and allusive, it has by now escaped the body of work it is meant to evoke. To say that such-and-such a circumstance is “Kafkaesque” is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism – even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like “The Hunger Artist.” Nothing is like “The Metamorphosis.”

Whoever utters “Kafkaesque” has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka’s devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque. The Kafkaesque is what Kafka presumably “stands for” – an unearned, even a usurping, explication. And from the very start, serious criticism has been overrun by the Kafkaesque, the lock that portends the key: homoeroticism for one maven, the father-son entanglement for another, the theological uncanny for yet another. Or else it is the slippery commotion of time; or of messianism; or of Thanatos as deliverance. The Kafkaesque, finally, is reductiveness posing as revelation.’

Update from a reader:

Can I please just say: POSEUR ALERT.

Ozick’s charges could be just as fairly leveled at pretty much any eponym: Orwellian, Shakespearean, Dickensian, Hobbesian, Darwinian, Marxist – even Calvinist or Lutheran. Encapsulating someone’s life’s work in a word is not meant to be all-encompassing; it’s a shorthand to refer to the main elements that made their work revolutionary.

I think it’s a straw man to presume that the term “Kafkaesque” subsumes the work of Kafka in any way. The word refers to a quality of modern society that Kafka captured so powerfully; it does not confine Kafka only to the word Kafkaesque. It seems almost reductive of her to impute that kind of intentional misunderstanding to anyone using the word.

Sitting in a deportation hearing without access to two-way translation while other people are deliberating incomprehensibly about your future? Absolutely Kafkaesque. Being told you don’t have standing to challenge government spying because the secrecy of the program makes it impossible to prove that you were indeed spied on? How is that not Kafkaesque?

Importantly, what term does Ozick propose to replace it? If it’s important enough to warrant a word, the word is important enough to need a good synonym if it’s put out of circulation.