Transepochal Steps

I’ve been reading Galbraith’s book on the 1929 crash and the depression. Eerily familiar. It’s a primer on what to ask and think about these dark days. It’s all about the ignorance of euphoria. It’s about the enablement of the bubble by the government (more passive last time). It’s about the lack of belief as it fell apart and the odd and useless gestures.

At least that time nobody put up a TRILLION dollars. The deleveraging of the investment trusts was horrific but virtually all of the real corporations underneath the fluff went under.

Great stuff, well written. Not sure why I never read any JK Galbraith before.

Frank Cunningham’s 1992 book, The Sculler at Ease is a small book with a lot of simply stated basic information about a complicated subject. There are a lot of books on the subject. Most are much bigger than this. But this one says it all without fluffing it up. Essentially, there is only a little you can say that applies to a lot of learning that can’t be written down.

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An Adirondack Passage by Christine Jerome is one of those autobiographical historical travel books. There are plenty of them. They mix up history with experience and a bunch of research kind of splashing it about on the way to and/or from somewhere. This was one.

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I forgot, I finished Hallie E. Bond’s encyclopedic Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks the other day. Hard to forget finishing something at large and complete. A bit specialized, I guess, but there’s a lot of content there
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I finished Stephen Jones’s Backwaters yesterday. It wasn’t qute as deeply religious an experience (joke) as Drifting (see the earlier post) but it is a good read. It all comes in the midst of the delivery of the new rowboat and the sculling classes at Jack London Aquatic Center

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Reading in fits and starts over the weekend. Tried The Road to McCarthy that a friend loved and am struggling to build momentum.Am part way through Hallie E. Bond’s Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks (see blog.the-guideboat.com for my bias on this). It’s good but draggy as well. More about that soon when I finish the bulk of the book but before the 1/3 of the book that’s bibliography and Appendix. Other than that, not much got read.

Orlov and Reinventing Collapse (see prior post) are rattling around making much more sense than Kunstler’s continuing shriek. Yes, the finanical system is tanking and yes this will hurt the housing market but no, we have no clue what the next turn of madness might be. An attack on Iran sends us a very different terible direction than a bailout of Chase Manhattan or Bank of America. It isn’t the steps that take us to collapse, it’s what do we do (as Dmitry actually discusses)? I’m sharpening a straight razon. That’s a skill I decided was part of step one.

In what may be the most interesting and least hysterical of the recent collapse books, Dmitry Orlov has a lot of fun poking fun at the US in Reinventing Collapse. He does a rather telling comparison between the US and the Soviet Union, coming to the conclusion that the differences may be more like the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans than between dogs and starfish. And his forumula for survival is refreshingly candid if amusingly expressed.

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Nick Turse got The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives published as part of the the American Empire Project under the Metropolitan label of Henry Holt. The American Empire Project claims or supports or endorses a whole bunch of Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson, so Nick’s in good company. I don’t know why I feel like this was the Cliff Notes …

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and a third of Nick Turse’s The Complex and I’m still in or just Drifting. I know better than to comment on the new book but the previous one rattles around. My favorite hysteric, James Howard Kunstler, screams in agony this week on his blog ClusterFuck, whining about July 4th holiday goers pulling their boats behind their cars and doing what several generations have done before them. His cries in terror of coming events amuse but do not inform …

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IT’s hard to write about Stephen Jones’s Drifting. It’s a long grinding epic of an autobiographical thing. It’s more about other things than the time on the water and yet it is the quintessential book on messing about in small boats and little chunks. of water.

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