Cat’s Cradle, Oranges, and Weather

I’m about fifty pages from the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. I’ve read a lot of Vonnegut’s short stories including Armageddon in Retrospect, which I absolutely loved. And so, there I stood in the Cudahy Family Library, waiting for László to find an Easter egg taped to the wall, when Cat’s Cradle caught my eye and I realized that I had never read any of his novels. This book was lauded at the time for its precise observations and satire of modernism of the early 60s. Though it seems we still have powerful people content to play around with nuclear weapons in the year 2026, I can’t help but reading it with an eye toward Artificial Intelligence and the people we’re meant to see as geniuses who are just playing around with that tech.

Stipulated, there are people in the world right now using AI for good and productive ends. It doesn’t take much to find plenty behaving like Dr. Felix Hoenikker inventing ice-nine. It’s also not hard to find people who want to solve genuinely novel and useful problems and end up with something we think is genius in two weeks, and then leave it strewn about the internet without thinking very hard about who it’s for or whether these problems in fact need to be solved. I don’t think we have ice-nine in any proverbial sheet pans now, but we really ought to think about it.

Our titans of industry are so admired for their apparent genius that we anoint them to run our government, where they rule through arbitrary decisions, vanity, and cherry-picked public policy outcomes. Some of them really want that ice-nine, by any means necessary.

As an aside, the use of the word “midget,” and associated stereotypes, struck me as pejorative in a way it likely didn’t for readers in the 1960s (or, heck, even the 90s). I’d like to think Vonnegut was a decent enough human that if he wrote it today, he would find different words to portray these characters without it, maybe at the encouragement of an editor. He was certainly a good enough writer to accomplish that.

Oranges (John McPhee)

I recently finished Oranges by John McPhee and I am still thinking about citrus all the time. Did you know you can grow a citrus tree that sets orange, lemon, and grapefruit all at once? Did you know that in the early days of making orange juice concentrate it was actually hard to find a glass of squeezed orange juice for sale in the state of Florida? Did you know some oranges grow better on lemon root stock but the lemons that grow from it aren’t very good or useful? How about that Valencia oranges were invented by an American in California. Or this: The concentration process extracts all the water out of the fruit leaving only the citrus sugars and manufacturers had to find a way to make it not taste like slightly burned sugar water: It’s called cutback, and involves adding fresh juice back to the concentrate.

Why and how to manufacture concentrate when fresh oranges are easily available seems to be the question driving McPhee. He doesn’t just look at the obvious answer to the question: There was a war going on and we needed an efficient way to deliver vitamin C. The war had ended 20 years ago, why are we still doing it? At times it almost reads like ethnography. McPhee is watching people do things with/to/about/around/among oranges, but in a way that also reveals a lot about who John McPhee is and why he cares about this (and thinks you should too). It shows in the writing and the tell is that he spilled enough orange ink for the New Yorker that he wrote himself into a book.

Now I’m eating oranges almost every day, and not just mandarins (another orange fact you learn in this book: tangerines, cuties, etc. are all “mandarins”).

Weather (Jenny Offil)

Something I’ve enjoyed about writing these posts about books as I read them rather than all together at the end of the year is: They’re fresher in my mind and I can give them the attention they deserve.

I read Jenny Offil’s Department of Speculation a couple years ago. Weather is her most recent novel, published in 2020. It has the same almost staccato rhythm to it that Speculation had. Scenes are short, sometimes one paragraph of maybe 20 words captures a whole interaction with a child or spouse that feels so authentic I forget it didn’t really happen to me specifically. I don’t know how she captures the often surreal experience of parenting a young child so well, but she does in a way that also reveals the joy and hilarity children can evoke in your life.

I recently texted my friend Andre to joke that we should start a social network for parents to post only about the funny things kids do and say that only other parents understand. Like: Did you really go to the bathroom if you didn’t announce it loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear? This book has some of those observations written maybe in a way that non-parents might also find them funny. It also has good dad jokes sprinkled in to settle out some of the more serious bits as the main character, Lizzie, slowly unwinds over the impending doom of climate change and begins prepping. I worry about what happens when Lizzie encounters Covid-19, and look forward to what Jenny has in store for us next.

Busy, busy, busy, as the Bokononists say.