When I was a boy, my mother, who is now long dead, offered me her version of literary criticism.
The most moving and best written passage of the Bible she told me was this: "Jesus wept."
She also told me that the greatest opening words of a novel were "Call me Ishmael," from Moby Dick. Now mind you, it's not like we ever read Moby Dick at home. I don't think we ever had a copy of it in our house. It's not like my mother read Moby Dick anywhere else either. My mother was a bright woman, a good woman, a kind woman but she had very little formal education. Probably her opinion about the literary merits of the opening words "Call me Ishmael," wasn't her own opinion at it all. She was probably just repeating an opinion that came from somewhere else, from a literary scholar who deigned to write a popular article in Reader's Digest or Ladies' Home Journal or Good Housekeeping.
But a boy can't have anything better than a mother who makes him think about the power of words and how they pack meaning. In this sense I was most fortunate. It was a profound teaching that she relayed in any case. She taught that to be succinct is to be powerful. Apparently I didn't learn that very well.
Around the time my mother's life was coming to an end, I developed all sorts of intellectual affectations, all of which by the way, were inappropriate for my economic and social station represented by my familial origins. (As far as social and economic standing, I considered myself moving up in the world when I began dating the daughter of a minor mafioso Capo who was so unimportant that no one even thought of ever rubbing him out.) One of the things I was sure about was that Moby Dick was a novel of great intellectual and cultural import and that an educated person would certainly be prepared at all times to discuss its finer points in great analytical depth. I vowed to read it and to understand the deeper meaning of being called Ishmael. So I bought the book.
I tried to read it. I swear. But to tell you the truth, there was only so much technical detail I could read about whale blubber rendering before being lulled insensible. If "Ishmael" is his first name, one hopes his surname is "Soporific."
I can't believe I take Ambien. Maybe I should buy another copy of "Moby Dick."
However miserably I may have failed at my attempt to become a literary sophisticate, something of my mother's lessons remained with me always. Although I am prolix and often write in an unbelievably pretentious and insensible manner, I always admire people who can pack a big punch in a few words, especially in opening words. I wish I could do that.
I have often thus weighed the impact of great opening lines in fiction. Lot's of people say great stuff about the opening words of Huckleberry Finn which are, "You don't know about me..."
Other people nominate Thomas Pynchon's "A screaming comes across the sky..." for greatest opening words.
I have no idea. You see I haven't read Huckleberry Finn either. Nor have I read Gravity's Rainbow, much beyond the stuff about bananas after which, as usually happens when I am trying to be literary, I fell asleep. I would like to tell you, like I once told a Professor of Literature once while trying to get her to go away, that Thomas Pynchon was a great literary influence on me, just like Mark Twain, but that would be an affectation.
I don't know anything about Thomas Pynchon or Mark Twain or great literature. I'm supposed to be talking about technetium, about which I know more than I know far more than I know about Mark Twain, and I've been meaning to get to that, but I've had writer's block. Thus am stranded talking about writing and how I was raised to have an opinion on greatest opening lines.
Even though I don't really read fiction anymore, as a man I am still the boy my mother raised, and I do have an opinion about the "greatest opening words" of a book. It's from a book I actually read, about a zillion times. For me, the greatest opening word of a book occurs, remarkably, after the book has already begun. It's a full sentence. I'll reproduce that sentence:
"Listen."
What makes this the greatest line ever to begin a novel is how it is set up. I offer a brief excerpt of that set up, from Slaughterhouse Five from the chapter that is not a chapter and is not a part of the story:
Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn't know that, either. There hadn't been much publicity.
I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on.
All I could say was, "I know, I know. I know."
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut may not think much of himself as a writer, but if there is anything to say about writing, it's all right there in Slaughterhouse-Five," which besides being clearest book about war ever written, in my opinion, doubles as a text book about writing itself. Vonnegut says that writing never succeeds in the broadest sense, that it is always, as they say, "pissing in the wind."
For instance, Kurt Vonnegut may have convinced me that war is always wrong, and that all of the participants, "good guys" and "bad guys" are always engaged in unjust and criminal behavior, but apparently few other people seem to have been as convinced by him as I have. People still seek popularity and power by appealing to war. It works just about every time. Pacifism is still seen as weak and ineffective even though the number of wars that have realized the objectives stated at the outset remains zero. A pacifist statement on September 12, 2001, for instance, produced only expressions of contempt for instance, at least to the extent that anyone was willing even to mouthe them.
So even though he composed a book with the most brilliant opening sentence ever written, "Listen." Vonnegut is right about writing: Writing is always a failure. It always falls short. Nothing new or convincing about ethics, about being human, about acting against evil, about acting against the human fondness for the lie can ever be said. Everything that needs saying has been out there for a long time, phrased both badly and brilliantly, in inventive ways and in repetitive ways.
All we have to do is "Listen."
Vonnegut reports that on telling someone that he is writing an anti-war book, someone suggested sarcastically that he should write an anti-glacier book instead.
Ironically enough, I am here, inspired by the anti-glacier movement, writing at Daily Kos in a derivative style and saying absolutely nothing new. About what am I writing? The anti-glacier movement, of course. The anti-glacier movement - and how crazy is it that there literally is an anti-glacier movement lead by the President of the United States, the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia, the Executive Committee at Exxon and a large swath of the world's public - doesn't involve writing or rhetoric all that much. The cause of the disappearance of the glaciers is human behavior, specifically the action of burning fossil fuels, and by inaction, the curious contention made by some, that we can't do anything about fossil fuels because we need them to live.
Another irony: Occassionally the response I get when I write things here consists of statements like, "You write in an interesting way, but I am unconvinced by anything you say." That's not how I see it. I think I write poorly but that nevertheless everything I say should be convincing. After all, I am not writing about abstractions like the moral dimensions of the human soul. I am, instead, writing about things like technetium.
Technetium is an element that is mostly found in what some people call "dangerous nuclear waste." It's not something new. As I pointed out in my most recent diary entry A Very Fine Exploded Head: Henry Moseley and "Dangerous Nuclear Waste" the very first technetium was produced sixty years ago, and since then the massive (exajoule scale) production of nuclear power - as well as the regrettable manufacture of nuclear weapons - has produced almost 80 tons of this hitherto unknown element.
Much of this technetium has ended up in the ocean, where it has mostly been dumped, deliberately.
Here is a horrific account of the terrible technetium problem in Norwegian waters.
Norway, a country that has filled the North Sea with oil rigs and natural gas rigs, complains vociferously about this technetium. Norway, which up until recently, relied almost exclusively on hydroelectricity to generate its electricity, has forsworn nuclear power on the grounds that it is "too dangerous." The until recently is the operative word, of course, since Norway has just built its first huge electrical generation plant that is not a hydroelectric plant. What kind of plant, you ask?
You probably think that Norway is building wonderful wind capacity, because someone told you a fantastic story about the wonderful hydrogen facility on the Norwegian island of Utsira that is powered by wind. If you're like most people, you're most impressed by this facility which was the subject of international news.
Here's a story about the "Green" island of Utsira from the shitheads at the MSM who mostly survive by assuming that everyone is stupid.
Energy Independence! Renewable Energy!
So how many homes are fueled by this fabulous hydrogen facility that prompted thousands of websites entries and caused thousands of tons of fossil fuels to be burned so people could learn all about it.
Read the article. Listen. THE NUMBER OF HOUSES ON UTSIRA USING HYDROGEN GENERATED BY THE WIND IS ten.
Ten.
Ten. Listen. Ten.
What is the world population? Oh, about six billion. We seem to be inordinately worked up about these ten Norwegian homes on an outlying island.
So with this grand project that has assumed great attention from every pathetic fool uneducated enough to have driven Mom's Lincoln Navigator to a Greenpeace meeting, how is the project proceeding?
Do the Norwegians plan to build more hydrogen/wind plants based on the Utsira experience that has been filmed by camera crews from around the world? Anyone who wishes to correct me if I am wrong is invited to do so, but so far as I am aware the answer has remained for several years now, a big, fat, loud, resounding "No!"
The Norwegian history of wind power has consisted mostly of laughing at their Danish cousins, who are still the big wind power boys on the block.
The Norwegians are rich. They can afford bullshit marketing schemes like Utsira for the old shell game. Why are they rich? Is from selling Lutefisk in Minnesota? No. Norway is rich because it sells, fossil fuels. Until recently Norway, until depletion began to kick in, was the fourth largest oil exporter in the world.
So then, with all this "experience" of wind and hydrogen, what kind of power plant did Norway build recently?
I ask you again.
What kind of plant did they build?!?
Extra! Extra! Read all about it.
Here is the bald facing bullshit lying marketing campaign about this new plant that dumps filth - that would be carbon dioxide - into the atomsphere with absolutely no restrictions:
Norway’s first commercial onshore gas-fired power plant is being built by Naturkraft at Kårstø in Rogaland, western Norway. The 420MW plant claims the lowest climate-gas emissions of any fossil fuel-based power plant in Europe. A filtering system will cut NOx emissions by more than 80%. Although the plant will be built without gas scrubbing for CO2 emissions, this may be installed later. Total investments are estimated at around NOK2bn.
"The project will deliver up to 3.5 terawatt hours (TWh) a year to the Norwegian power grid."The Kårstø plant uses the vast gas resources from the Norwegian Continental Shelf, and should start electricity production in the autumn of 2007. The project will deliver up to 3.5 terawatt hours (TWh) a year to the Norwegian power grid, corresponding to around 3% of Norway's total electricity production. That corresponds to the consumption of about 175,000 households. The plant will use up to 600 million m³ of natural gas/year, or 0.5% of Norway's annual gas exports.
All I do, just like my literary hero Kurt Vonnegut (who undoubtedly would despise many things I say) is to repeat myself. I say the same thing over and over and over and over. This is what I say: The alternative to nuclear power is not wind, not solar, not geothermal or any of that stuff that people keep talking about in spite of the longstanding failure of the non-hydro renewable energy industry to produce even 5 exajoules of the 470 exajoules of energy used by the human race. The alternative to nuclear power is fossil fuels.
I want fossil fuels banned. It is my argument, which I can prove with numbers, that fossil fuels, all of them, including the oil and natural gas sold by Norway, are unacceptably dangerous.
With all of their hydroelectric power, and their small population, Norway has always been proud of its ability to produce its electricity via hydroelectricity, which is of course, the only form of renewable energy available on a ten exajoule scale.
Typical of all of the fraudulent posturing there is talk about how they could capture the carbon dioxide, except that they aren't doing so and won't do so.
Norway is at the center of the another big load of shit in which talk is substituted for action. This of course is sequestration, which is the subject of an earlier diary of mine.
Statoil, the Norwegian carbon dioxide - whoops I mean oil - company has a big "on again, off again" sequestration plan that it likes to talk about.
This is the Sleipner project, which since 1996, has "sequestered" about a million tons of carbon dioxide per year. Whence comes this carbon dioxide? If you muttered something about a fossil fuel burning plant, mark yourself wrong. The carbon dioxide at the Sleipner facility comes from a mining facility. Specifically, the carbon dioxide at Sleipner is stripped out of natural gas that is being mined and is reinjected.
You don't believe me? Read it and weep.
Located beneath the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, the extensive Sleipner West natural gas field is characterized by a high (9 percent) concentration of CO2, well above the 2.5-percent limit imposed by European export specifications. Statoil strips excess CO2 from the recovered gas in a tower on its offshore production platform before exporting the gas to the European community. Injecting the captured CO2 into a confined aquifer-800 meters below the seabed and 2,500 meters above the Sleipner West hydrocarbon reservoir-results in no tax on Statoil for its atmospheric emissions.
How stupid, exactly, is that?
Not as stupid as you might think. Every single deposit of coal, oil, or natural gas represents sequestered carbon. Thus the best way to sequester carbon is not to dig it up or pump it out or outgas it in the first place. This approach is the one I recommend.
Let me repeat this, because I am sick about how this ridiculous marketing scheme plays out. Let me put it in bold and then repeat it in Italics. Here we go, the first time: The carbon dioxide sequestered at Sleipner was already sequestered, until the Norwegians started venting it. Here we go again, the second time: The carbon dioxide sequestered at Sleipner was already sequestered, until the Norwegians started venting it.
Norway though, wants to talk about the technetium. This is because Norway, when it isn't indiscriminately selling fossil fuels that end up being indiscriminately dumped into the atomsphere after being transformed into dangerous fossil fuel waste - what I call carbon dioxide - also sells fish. It's outrageous, say the Norwegians, that what they call "dangerous nuclear waste," specifically technetium, can be detected in their fish.
This is one thing that the Norwegians do with their fish: They soak it in lye, hoping that the fish are not transformed into soap, soak it so long that it turns to an oozing kind of jelled animal called "lutefisk." They then said oozing fish soaked in lye in water for weeks to keep it from killing anyone who eats it. (And let's be certain that without the water soaking lutefisk would be fatal to anyone who ate it, since it would be the same as eating Drano. It is an interesting side note to this diary that Kurt Vonnegut's mother committed suicide by eating Drano.) Then they sell it for high prices.
Wow. The power of marketing.
Since the Norwegian side business to selling dangerous fossil fuels around the world is marketing, they are hyperconcious of anyone thinking bad thoughts about their products, including their fish. So they want to complain about technetium, since many people - not me - regard technetium, which can be detected in fish in the Norwegian North Sea, as "dangerous nuclear waste." It is of course, hard to sell food that contains "dangerous nuclear waste," so the Norwegians don't like it.
So, how much technetium is found in Norwegian fish and whence comes it? Well if you must know, the vast majority of the technetium in Norwegian fish actually comes from the historical operations of the nuclear fuel recycling facility in Cumbria, UK, the facility at Sellafield.
Wow. That's terrible.
But I am making like a Norwegian and talking about everybody else's "waste," to distract attention from my own "wastes." My subject is technetium.
I am going to come back here and talk more about technetium, because Norway (and everybody else) wants to talk about "dangerous nuclear waste," even though they spend far less time talking about "dangerous fossil fuel wastes," that are far more, well, "dangerous."
What? "More dangerous?"
OK. How many people here have heard about the warnings issued to pregnant women not to eat too much fish?
Here's a warning from the US FDA: Hey, Pregnant Lady! Be careful with the swordfish!?!
About what is this warning? Well it's about mercury. Whence comes the mercury in swordfish, mackerel, and tide fish? Mostly it comes from burning fossil fuels to make electric power.
Now, who here, if anyone has seen a warning to pregnant women not to eat Norwegian fish, including lutefisk, because of the technetium?
Anyone?
Going once... Going twice... Going three times...
Assuming that I am not killed by an act of nuclear terrorism or some other means, assuming I do not suffer in the future from writer's block, assuming that I don't just give up because writing about anything is always a failure, I will be back in the future to talk more about the environmental, medical, and technological chemistry and properties of technetium.