See you on the dark side: Tolkien, Pink Floyd, and the Claremont Diner

The coronavirus shutdown has resulted in our literal confinement to interior spaces. But for me it has also meant that, without the welcome distractions of friends, libraries, concerts, bookstores, museums, parks, and my usual wanderings around the city, I've been increasingly confined to my own head. Like many of us, perhaps, as each day settles into a predictable repetition of an endless present, I've found myself thinking more about the past. And the internet is an amazing aid to memory: details that have long been fuzzy can be almost immediately clarified (although the collective memory, like my personal memory, can sometimes be unreliable, as you'll see below).

Mass market paperbacks of The Lord of the Rings trilogy; covers designed by Barbara Remington (1965). Image source: New York Times

Tolkien. One summer when I was approaching or in my early teens I discovered J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I had been an avid (but pretty much indiscriminate) reader before this: I read everything from Wilfred McCormick's Bronc Burnett series to Sherlock Holmes to James Bond to science fiction. But Tolkien's books took me into a very different imaginative realm, one in which ordinary, comfort-loving protagonists found themselves unwillingly caught up in a titanic struggle between good and evil. [1]

The story had everything to appeal to an adolescent boy: adventure, terror, chases, magic, deep caverns, dark forests, impassable mountains, and (not enough) beautiful elf-maidens. That summer I immersed myself in Tolkien's world and was so captivated by it that when in mid-summer I reached the end of LoTR, I started over again from the beginning and re-read the whole thing. [2]

Pink Floyd. This was also the summer I immersed myself in Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Its atmospheric music was the perfect soundtrack to my reading. Every day I would put the album on our cheap portable stereo, curl up on the comfy old couch in the family room, and rejoin Frodo and Sam on their quest; when the record reached the end of a side I would get up and flip it over. I would do this for hours, probably to the dismay of any family member within earshot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgXozIma-Oc

I owed the discovery of both Tolkien and Pink Floyd to a friend of my older sister whom I'll call Dale. He was a flamboyant character: his black hair was shoulder-length and frizzy, held in place by a headband, and he favored vests worn over tie-dyed t-shirts. He started coming over to our house regularly to visit my sister, but she would usually refuse to leave her room when he stopped by. That left Dale and me to entertain one another.

Perhaps Dale thought that the way to my sister's heart was to be kind to her younger brother; if so, I could have disabused him of that notion. But despite Dale's continued lack of success with my sister, a pattern developed: he would stop by once or twice a week in the afternoon, bringing two or three albums with him. We'd sit around that portable stereo while he played what he had brought: prog-rock bands like Yes, Jethro Tull, Traffic, ELP, and King Crimson. [3] Given that my listening until then had been largely AM-radio-driven—I had a small cube alarm-clock radio that I tuned into New York stations at very low volume late at night when I was supposed to be sleeping—Dale's music was ear-opening. [4]

His favorite band was Pink Floyd. Dale would play "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" (from Ummagumma), and wait for the moment when he could whisper the title phrase followed by a bloodcurdling scream. Or he'd play the 23-minute "Echoes" (from Meddle) and narrate the scenes from Lord of the Rings that the sounds evoked for him (which is probably what established the connection for me between Pink Floyd and Tolkien). But once he brought over Dark Side of the Moon, it was the one we played most often. Later I managed to acquire my own copy (perhaps at my next birthday).

The concert. Memory is fallible, and I don't remember how the possibility of seeing Pink Floyd live came about; Dale must have arranged the whole thing. The band was appearing at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, which was a good 45 minutes away by car. I have no idea how Dale talked my parents into allowing me to go. They must have paid him for the ticket, as well, because I couldn't have. This stub shows that the price of a ticket was $7.50—pretty steep in those days [5]:

Image source: https://digilander.libero.it/careful53/PFlisting/THPF02.htm

However it happened, the afternoon of the concert I found myself in a car filled with Dale and a group of his friends, most of whom were, like Dale, several years older than I was, heading down the highway towards the gritty industrial cities that lined the Jersey shore opposite Manhattan. Dale had assured my father that I'd be back around midnight.

We got to the venue fairly early, while it was still light, and in our inexperience parked as close to the stadium as we could get. (Better, we realized afterwards, to park near the exit.) We entered and took our seats, which were in the stands almost directly opposite the stage. A huge white pyramid/prism floated over the stage, and there was a large circular screen looming over the band, on which films would be projected during the second-half performance of the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon. There were wires stretching from the stage over the audience to the roof of the stadium behind us; during "On the Run," a large model plane with sparks shooting from its engines would slide down the wire (according to one story, it got stuck before crashing into the stage and fizzled out over the audience; I do remember being puzzled by the effect). [6]

Here is the opening song of the very concert I saw: "Raving and Drooling (I Fell On His Neck With A Scream)," an early version of "Sheep" (later issued on Animals, released in 1977)):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBdSJk6eFcQ

The lyrics are hard to make out, but this is what I hear:

Raving and drooling
I fell on his neck with a scream
He had a whole lot of
Terminal shock in his eyes
That's what you get
For pretending the rest are not real
Babbling and snapping at faraway flies
He will zig-zag his way back
Through memories of boredom and pain

Raving and drooling
I fell on his neck with a scream
He was caught in the middle
Between the illusion
Of safety in numbers
And being brought down to his knees

The whole first half of the concert was unfamiliar (here's the complete set list, and if you like you can actually listen to the entire concert). I learned later that the music they performed during that first hour was not only new, but unreleased material, a brave choice by the band: after "Raving and Drooling" came "You've Got To Be Crazy" (an early version of "Dogs," later issued on Animals), "Shine On You Crazy Diamond Parts I-V," "Have A Cigar," and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond Parts VI-IX" (all later issued on Wish You Were Here, released three months after the concert). I now know that the entire first half of the concert featured songs about Syd Barrett, the band's co-founder and original lead guitarist and singer, the "mad genius" who had been forced to leave the band and later was briefly institutionalized due to his erratic behavior. [7]

"Now there's a look in your eyes / like black holes in the sky": Syd Barrett in the late 1960s (left) and during the Wish You Were Here recording sessions in 1975 (right). Image sources: Mick Rock, YouTube (left); Nick Mason, Wikipedia (right)

During (I think) "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," spotlights were aimed at a mirrored circle that had risen over the stage; the reflected beams were quite spectacular in the twilight, shining through the haze of fog and pot smoke. A fair proportion of the latter was generated by the people sitting in the row directly in front of us, who seemed to be toking constantly from the time we arrived until the end of the concert. A stiff breeze was blowing straight into our faces, carrying their smoke into our eyes, noses, mouths, and lungs. I didn't get high—at least as far as I can tell judging by later experiences—but I can't vouch for the other members of our group, and we all got hungry. Perhaps our hunger wasn't chemically aided, as we had left for the concert in the late afternoon and by the time the concert ended, after the encore of "Echoes," it was nearly 11.

That encore infuriated Dale: "That wasn't 'Echoes'!" he insisted as we tried to find our way back out to the car. Listening to the recording of the concert I do hear an added saxophone solo by Dick Parry, which didn't fit with the gestalt of the song as we knew it, but then, couldn't the band change it as they saw fit? For Dale, a purist in these matters, the answer was no.

Once we found the car it took us more than an hour to make it out of the parking lot (that half the drivers in the place were stoned probably didn't help), and when we finally got on the road we immediately took the wrong freeway entrance. We'd been driving for at least 15 minutes when someone finally realized we were travelling in the wrong direction. It took more time to find an exit and get ourselves turned around. By the time we made it back into familiar territory it was well after 1 am. We were all starving, and someone had the brilliant idea of going to the Claremont Diner.

Image source: Cooky Cat

The Claremont Diner. At the intersection of Bloomfield Road and Route 23 in Verona stood the Claremont Diner, one of those stainless-steel-clad 1940s diners that stayed open around the clock. The Claremont served a legendary cheesecake, baked daily on the premises, and we all ordered a slice. We were long-haired, tired but giddy teenagers, must have been reeking of secondhand pot smoke, and as rambunctious teenaged boys were probably not the quietest or most well-behaved group; we were treated with wary skepticism by the weary night-shift waitresses. The cheesecake and coffee that we were finally served revived us, and as we were about to leave I took a slice of the cheesecake to go, thinking that I would enjoy it for dessert the next day. [8]

Claremont Diner cheesecakes awaiting customers.
Photo by Jeffrey J. Jensen, son of the Claremont's pastry chef. Image source: MyVeronaNJ

When I was dropped off at home it was about 3 in the morning. I tried to be as quiet as possible as I crept up the walk and inserted my key in the lock of the front door. Before I could turn it, though, the door suddenly opened and I was face to face with my father, dressed in his bathrobe. As he lost no time in informing me, he had been waiting up all night for my return, and was not happy about the hour.

I could sense that he was about to pronounce my doom and that I would be grounded for weeks (or the rest of the summer!), when I had a brainstorm. "I'm late because we stopped at the Claremont Diner," I said, "and—I brought you a slice of cheesecake." I held out the cardboard container containing the precious offering. My father grumbled that this didn't make up for my lateness, but he sat down at the kitchen table and ate my cheesecake while I watched, concealing my disappointment as best I could.

The cheesecake worked its magic, though, and the dreaded punishment never materialized. In fact, a few weeks later I was permitted to go with Dale and his friends to a local movie theater to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I'd learned what sacrifice I would need to make to appease the angry god on my return: a slice of Claremont Diner cheesecake.

Coda: About two months after the concert I attended, a nineteen-year-old named John Lydon was walking down King's Road in London wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt. Only, he had slashed holes in the silk-screened band photo and written "I HATE" above it in red marker. The manager of a new band approached him and asked him if he wanted to audition as the singer. Later that night Lydon mimed to Alice Cooper's single "I'm Eighteen (and I don't know what I want)." As the band's guitarist remembered it a couple of years later, "we thought he was really funny, I thought he was hysterical. And like he probably did—he thought we was a bunch of idiots. So we went on from there." [9]

Image source: Vintage Everyday

With John Lydon renaming himself Johnny Rotten the band went on to be the Sex Pistols, whose visceral three-minute blasts of confrontational anger were the musical antithesis of Pink Floyd's melancholy space music (although the musical differences disguise a shared lyrical theme of alienation). I would discover the Sex Pistols and other punk bands a few years later, and perhaps that discovery will be the subject of another post.

Next time: The problem is me: The Sex Pistols, Steve Jones, and Lonely Boy

Last time: What is happy?: The Cowsills in concert

---

1. If somehow you haven't read the books or seen the Peter Jackson films: the sorcerer Sauron, the Dark Lord who rules the blasted land of Mordor, suspects that the Ring of Power that will enable him to conquer Middle Earth has fallen into the possession of a hobbit living in the bucolic Shire. Sauron sends his armies of evil to find the ring; meanwhile, the hobbits and their small band of allies, the Fellowship of the Ring, learn that the Ring can't be used for good. The only way to defeat Sauron is to destroy the ring by hurling it into the fires where it was forged: Mount Doom, deep within Mordor.
2. Books were precious and expensive commodities. When I started LoTR, probably at Dale's recommendation, I cautiously bought only the first volume. When I finished it I rode my bicycle down to the local bookstore with my carefully saved allowance and counted out the coins to order the next. I should have rationed my reading so that I didn't finish a volume before I had saved enough money to order the next one, but I'm not sure I was so self-disciplined. In 1965 Barbara Remington had designed a set of covers for the mass-market paperbacks that, when placed together, formed a continuous image. But by the time I started reading the set the paperback cover art (and the cover price) were changing, so I wound up with a mismatched set. I recently found a boxed set of the paperbacks with the Remington covers at a book sale for 50 cents. I bought the set, even though I don't plan to re-read the novels—although if the coronavirus shutdown continues I may reconsider.
3. Dale also brought records by more obscure groups. Evidence that the internet is astounding, Exhibit 111,279,637,948: I remembered one album with a nautical/pirate theme and a gatefold cover, but that's all I could remember. In a couple of minutes of surfing I found it: Discogs.com allows you to filter by cover type (gatefold), year and genre. It was Dinosaur Swamps by The Flock.
4. Number 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1974 included 34-year-old Ringo Starr singing "You're sixteen, you're beautiful, and you're mine," Terry Jacks' version of Rod McKuen's "Seasons in the Sun," Ray Stevens' "The Streak," Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods' "Billy Don't Be A Hero," Paper Lace's "The Night Chicago Died," and Paul Anka's "Having My Baby." The competition is stiff, but it may qualify as the single worst year in pop music.
5. The ticket seems to read "Sat Jun 14 1975; Rain date June 15." The concert was not postponed by rain (the New York Times for 14 June predicts the weather to be "sunny and warm") but several internet sites and YouTube videos claim Sunday June 15 as the date of the concert. Unlikely: it's inconceivable that my parents would have allowed me to attend a concert on what would probably have been a school night (school wouldn't have ended until at least a week later).
6. The animations for the Dark Side of the Moon songs were by Ian Emes, and can be found on YouTube.
7. The words are attributed to Roger Waters, the band's bass player and lead singer after Barrett was forced to leave the band in 1968, in Nicholas Schaffner's Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey (New edition). Helter Skelter, 2005, p. 14.
8. Alas, a little more than a year later the Claremont Diner burned to the ground. More about its history (and the famous cheesecake) is available on the MyVeronaNJ blog.
9. Quoted in The Sex Pistols: The Inside Story, compiled and edited by Fred and Judy Vermorel, Universal, 1978, p. 15.

What is happy?: The Cowsills in concert

I listen to classical music almost exclusively now, but there was a time (as regular readers of this blog may have gathered) when I went to a lot of rock shows. A recent e-mail from a friend got me reminiscing about some of the memorable shows I've seen, and I started compiling a list. I'll spare you the full version, since reading about a great show you didn't attend is like hearing about a great party that you missed. But I thought that—aided by the collective memory of the internet—I would share my experience of the very first rock concert I attended:

The Cowsills, Music Circus, Lambertville, New Jersey, 5 September 1970

My age wasn't yet in double digits when, for a birthday present, my father took me to St. John Terrell's Music Circus outside of Lambertville, New Jersey, to see The Cowsills.

They were a major part of my musical universe at the time, along with The Beatles, The Monkees, The Archies, and The Fifth Dimension (my mother's favorite group). In 1970 I think I only owned perhaps three albums in total—$3.98 was a lot of money on a $0.10 weekly allowance, so my mother must have helped me out—and two of them were by The Cowsills: Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools and Best of. (The third? The Monkees' Headquarters.)

Captain Sad and his Ship of Fools, 1968. Image sources: discogs.com

The Best of The Cowsills, 1968. Cover art by Jack Davis. Image source: discogs.com

If you've never heard of The Cowsills, they were the toothy, clean-cut, real-life models for TV's The Partridge Family (which didn't start airing until a few weeks after the concert I attended). The real Cowsills were more talented than most of their TV avatars; for evidence, a truncated version of their hit "The Rain, The Park, and Other Things" from their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on 29 October 1967:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gRWTlL3WGM

Dig 11-year-old drummer John's stick-twirling (at 0:20), the perfectly syncopated tambourine of 7-year-old Susan, who looks like she's having the time of her life, the cool violin bass of 13-year-old Barry, and the five-part backup vocals led by their mother Barbara. Eldest brother Bill is on lead guitar, and second-oldest brother Bob on keyboards; none of the children were yet out of their teens.

I know that as we grow older we can often be embarrassed by our first musical enthusiasms, and sure, the lyrics about the alluring but elusive Flower Girl are very much of their time. (The song was written by Artie Kornfeld and Steve Duboff; Kornfeld would go on to co-organize the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival.) But this song still sounds pretty great to me more than 50 years on, and their performance is charming. This configuration of the group isn't quite the one I saw; middle brother Paul would join the group in 1968, and in 1969 Bill would be kicked out by his father Bud, the group's manager.

The Music Circus concert was a surprise birthday present, so during the long drive across New Jersey with my father I was given no clue to where we were going. When we arrived and I saw the band's name on the roadside sign I was overwhelmed. This was my first concert, and it wasn't until we were pulling into the parking lot that I understood that attending a performance by a famous group was even possible. You could watch pop stars performing on TV and listen to their records, but didn't they inhabit their own realm apart from ordinary mortals? That for the price of a ticket anyone could share the same physical space with them and hear them play their music live was a brand-new idea for me.

My father being my father, we had left three hours early to make a one-hour drive, so we had time to kill. (Alas, I've inherited his neurotic anxiety about being late.) The Music Circus was a big-top tent (and a carousel!) set amid the pastureland of west Jersey; summer concerts began in the early evening, while it was still light, but we had arrived so early that the tent wasn't yet open. So we walked around to the back, where we encountered a crowd of girls, three or four years older than me, packed together at the dressing room door. Every time it would open a crack they would scream and make a rush for the door, which would hastily be shoved closed. I was completely baffled and dismayed by this behavior—why were they besieging the poor group?

The Music Circus in September 1968. Image source: St. John Terrell's Music Circus

My father, perhaps sensing my growing unease, suggested that we take a walk. We headed off across the fields surrounding the Music Circus, and soon the screaming girls were left behind. Ahead of us in the distance was an apparently deserted 19th-century farmhouse, and for lack of any other destination we walked towards it. But as we got closer I could hear the muffled sound of amplified instruments, growing louder. The band wasn't backstage after all—they were here, in the living room of this house now a few yards away, rehearsing for the concert.

If you're thinking that this is the story of how I met The Cowsills, I'm sorry to disappoint you. As soon as I realized where they were, I stopped dead in my tracks. My father urged me to climb the porch stairs and knock on the door, but that thought totally mortified me. The last thing I wanted to do was intrude on them. Unable to convince me to take a step further, my father finally gave up, took my hand and led me back to the big top, which was beginning to fill. It wouldn't be the last time I declined the chance to meet idols in the flesh.

I spent the time waiting for the band to come on stage looking through the concert program, which was 30 pages long and about the size of a record album, and which I kept as a treasured memento for many years afterward.

The Cowsills 1970 souvenir program cover. Image source: B.A. Presley's Cowsills site

As the tent slowly filled I found myself pretty much the only boy among about 2000 teenaged girls, who, when the lights went down and the band took the stage, began screaming nonstop: it was a terrifying, overwhelming wall of sound. The poor musicians pleaded with them to stop screaming and listen, to no avail. I was frightened and bewildered: why was the audience here if they didn't want to hear the band play? It was my introduction to the idea that pop concerts fulfill a variety of functions, many of them non-musical. In retrospect, I can see that for most of the audience, the concert was more of an occasion to scream en masse than to listen to the band. That auditory manifestation of power must have been exhilarating.

The concert itself was pretty much a blur. I was disoriented not only by the unremitting screaming but by the unfamiliar songs the band was playing, some of them covers and some drawn from their new album, II x II. The set list from a show one month later, which must be very similar to the show I saw, has been preserved by B.A. Presley. The concert apparently ended with "Hair," which had been their biggest hit the year before, but it to me it would just have been another song I didn't know (it was released after The Best of The Cowsills, but has since been included on CD versions of that album). That the most clean-cut pop group in America was singing a song extolling hair so long that it would "fly in the breeze / And get caught in the trees / Give a home for the fleas" was a joke that The Cowsills themselves embraced, but that I only appreciated somewhat later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3qhle8Oy9s

When the concert was over, night had fallen and I was completely wide-eyed. I wasn't sure whether I had even enjoyed it—I was definitely suffering from sensory overload. But something about the experience must have been captivating, because the very next rock concert my parents allowed me to attend, almost five years later, promised even more sensory overload: Pink Floyd performing Dark Side of the Moon, perhaps the subject of a future post.

Coda: In researching this post I came across information about the emotional and physical abuse (as well as financial mismanagement) visited on his family by the dictatorial, alcoholic patriarch Bud Cowsill; in the documentary Family Band Bob Cowsill says that he "created a house of fear." The band's sunny pop sound and cheerful public personae concealed that painful backstage reality. The group broke up in 1971 after recording one final album, but in the past three decades surviving members have periodically reunited, played live, and recorded; they maintain the official Cowsills website.

I also came across a website for the Lambertville Music Circus. Among the other performers appearing there during the summer of 1970 were Ike and Tina Turner, B.B. King, Little Richard, and Fleetwood Mac. Many thanks to the fans and fellow obsessives who have documented so much of this history, and prompted my very fallible memory to recall the things I couldn't think of yesterday.

Next time: See you on the dark side: Tolkien, Pink Floyd, and the Claremont Diner

Wild Nights with Emily

Emily Dickinson in 1847, at age 16. Image source: Smithsonian Magazine

Was Emily Dickinson, for decades, the lover of her sister-in-law Susan? Emphatically yes, is the answer provided from the first moments of writer/director Madeleine Olnek's film Wild Nights with Emily (2018). Olnek is drawing on scholarship from the past 25 years by Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart and others that has complicated the view of Emily as a "virgin recluse" (as she was described by her editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson [1]). The film's title comes from Emily's impassioned poem:

Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden -
Ah - the Sea!
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!

[2]

In fact, even though she and Susan (who was married to Emily's brother Austin) lived next door to one another for 30 years and could see each other virtually every day, Emily wrote more letters to Susan—by a factor of two—than to any other correspondent. Her missives were filled with poems and poem fragments; Susan was often Emily's first and most trusted reader.

Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, undated portrait (detail). Houghton Library, Harvard College Library. https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/d/656cd02e-3e8e-4a9b-837f-bc1e0689aea1/catalog

After Emily's death at age 55 in 1886, Susan spent several years trying to put together a selection of what she called Emily's "letter-poems." That edition would have placed many of the poems in their original contexts, but evidently Susan, faced with a vast amount of material, found it too difficult to choose what to include. An example of a letter-poem:

Morning
might come
by Accident,
Sister -
Night comes
by Event -
To believe the
final line of
the Card would
foreclose Faith -
Faith is Doubt -

       Sister -
Show me
Eternity, and

I will show
you Memory -
Both in one
package lain
And lifted
back again -

Be Sue, while
I am Emily -
Be next, what
you have ever
been, Infinity -

[3]

Image source: Emily Dickinson Archive

Where does letter end, and poem begin?

"She feels a little baffled by my possession of so many [manuscripts] of Emily's," Susan wrote of Emily's younger sister Lavinia after Emily's death. [4] Lavinia, concerned about the lack of progress Susan was making on her edition of the letter-poems, and perhaps also wanting a more conventional editorial approach, eventually asked Susan to return the dozens of small, hand-sewn books of poems that Emily had created. In a fateful decision, Lavinia passed the books on to Mabel Loomis Todd, so that she and Higginson could prepare their own edition of Emily's poetry for publication.

Todd was a strange choice, not only because of her lack of any obvious qualifications for the job, but because of her role in the Dickinson family: she had been carrying on an ill-concealed affair with Austin since 1882. Emily's feelings about Todd may be guessed, perhaps, by noting that although Todd visited Emily's home many times, she was never able to meet Emily face-to-face.

Mabel Loomis Todd, around the time of her arrival in Amherst [ca. 1881-82]. 

Image source: Emily Dickinson Museum

If Emily had misgivings about Todd, they were justified. Todd edited Emily's writing with a heavy hand. She cut apart Emily's hand-sewn books, destroying the groupings of poems that Emily herself had painstakingly placed together. Instead she categorized the poems by assigning them broad (not to say banal) themes such as "Life, Love, Time & Eternity, Nature." [5] Emily did not title her poems, so Todd supplied titles of her own invention. She also changed Emily's line-lengths and punctuation, removing the characteristic dashes that provided rhythm and emphasis. She and Higginson produced two volumes of Emily's work, Poems (1890) and Poems: Second Series (1891), after which Higginson withdrew because of disagreements with Todd's editorial actions.

Those actions were especially damaging when Todd edited Letters of Emily Dickinson (1894). She omitted any mention of Susan, Emily's chief correspondent. Worse, someone—Todd is the likely culprit, although Austin may also have lent a hand—went through the writings in which Emily referred to Susan and erased, scribbled over or literally cut out mentions of her. As Martha Nell Smith writes,

. . .the erasures, cut-aways, and blottings-out have gone, until the last decade, practically unremarked in critical study. For most critics and editors, these have not been worthy of critical examination. In fact, of particular interest for critical inquiry is that these elisions—both those that can be restored and those forever out of our grasp—have been and continue to be compulsively reenacted and recycled rather than rigorously examined in Dickinson studies. [6]

Of course, critics may just have overlooked the subtle alterations Todd made to Dickinson's manuscripts. Here is part of the surviving manuscript of a poem to Susan that begins "One sister have I in the house / And one a hedge away":

Image source: Mutilations: what was erased, inked over, cut away

This poem ends:

I spilt the dew,
But took the morn -
I chose this single star
From out the wide night's numbers -
Sue - forevermore!

[7]

It is one of many love poems addressed to Susan; here is another:

Her breast is fit for pearls,
But I was not a "Diver."
Her brow is fit for thrones
But I have not a crest.
Her heart is fit for home -
I - a Sparrow - build there
Sweet of twigs and twine
My perennial nest.

                         Emily. [8]

On the back of the manuscript the name "Sue," written by Emily, has been erased. In the 1894 Letters, Todd falsified the poem's addressee, claiming that it had been sent to editor Samuel Bowles and had been written as though addressed by him to his wife. Todd heterosexualized other references, as well. In a letter to Austin just after he and Susan had become engaged, Emily wrote, "Miss Susie was here on Friday, was here on Saturday, and Miss Emilie, there, on Thursday. . .Dear Austin, I am keen, but you are a good deal keener, I am something of a fox, but you are more of a hound! I guess we are very good friends tho', and I guess we both love [S]us[ie] just as well as we can." [9] The first and last letters of "Susie" were erased by Todd or Austin so that the phrase read "we both love us just as well as we can"—Emily's wry acknowledgement to Austin of their similar interest in Susan could not be allowed into print.

Despite Todd's elisions, Emily's letters to Susan were omitted from the 1894 edition of the letters because they were filled with language "too personal and adulatory ever to be printed." [10] Susan herself destroyed many of these letters after Emily's death, but some escaped.

May 1852: . . ."Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor can the heart conceive" my Susie, whom I love. These days of heaven bring you nearer and nearer, and every bird that sings, and every bud that blooms, does but remind me more of that garden unseen, awaiting the hand that tills it. Dear Susie, when you come, how many boundless blossoms among those silent beds!. . .I shall think of you at sunset, and at sunrise, again; and at noon, and forenoon, and afternoon, and always, and evermore, till this little heart stops beating and is still.  Emilie [11]

June 1852: And now how soon I shall have you, shall hold you in my arms; you will forgive the tears, Susie, they are so glad to come that it is not in my heart to reprove them and send them home. I dont know why it is — but there's something in your name, now you are taken from me, which fills my heart so full, and my eye, too. . .

God is good, Susie, I trust he will save you, I pray that in his good time we once more meet each other, but if this life holds not another meeting for us, remember also, Susie, that it has no parting more, wherever that hour finds us, for which we have hoped so long, we shall not be separated, neither death, nor the grave can part us, so that we only love! Your Emilie — [12]

"Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say -" Image source: Emily Dickinson's Correspondences

11 June 1852: Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say - my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me; If you were here, and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language — [13]

27 June 1852: And very, very often when I have waked from sleep, not quite waked, I have been sure I saw you, and your dark eye beamed on me with such a look of tenderness that I could only weep, and bless God for you.

Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to?. . .

I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that now I must have you - that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast - I go to sleep at night, and the first thing I know, I am sitting there wide awake, and clasping my hands tightly, and thinking of next Saturday, and "never a bit" of you. . .

Why, Susie, it seems to me as if my absent Lover was coming home so soon - and my heart must be so busy, making ready for him. [14]

January 1855: I love you as dearly, Susie, as when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens, and it breaks my heart sometimes, because I do not hear from you. I wrote you many days ago - I wont say many weeks, because it will look sadder so, and then I cannot write - but Susie, it troubles me.

I miss you, mourn for you, and walk the Streets alone often at night, beside, I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face, yet not one word comes back to me from that silent West. If it is finished, tell me, and I will raise the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in; but if it lives and beats still, still lives and beats for me, then say me so, and I will strike the strings to one more strain of happiness before I die. [15]

Not many letters from Susan to Emily still exist, but one that does, from the early 1860s, suggests how profoundly their feelings were shared:

Private

I have intended to
write you Emily to-day but the
quiet has not been mine. I send
you this, lest I should seem to
have turned away from a kiss –
If you have suffered this past
summer I am sorry[.] I
Emily bear a sorrow that I
never uncover – – If a nightingale
sings with her breast against
a thorn, why not we [!]
When I can, I shall write —
                                                        Sue – [16]

Was the sorrow that Susan never spoke of that she was married to a man she didn't love? If so, was her marriage to Austin a strategy to remain close to Emily—literally next door—or was it a displacement of her feelings for Austin's sister?

I want to be careful not to assume too much about what these letters are saying Emily and Susan may have done in bed together. However, they could not be more clear about how they felt about one another. As Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith write in the introduction to Open My Heart Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, there are two factors that have led scholars and critics to minimize the significance of the love between Emily and Susan. The first is the image—assiduously promoted by Todd and Higginson, and aided by Austin Dickinson—of Emily as "the recluse spinster belle of Amherst."

The second factor is the view of intimate female friendships in the nineteenth century.  According to this view, women of Dickinson's time often indulged in highly romantic relationships with each other, but these relationships were merely affectionate and patently not sexual.  Such same-sex attractions, so the popular wisdom goes, had the character of an adolescent crush rather than a mature erotic love.  As this correspondence shows, however, Emily and Susan's relationship surpasses in depth, passion, and continuity the stereotype of the "intimate exchange" between women friends of the period.  The ardor of Dickinson's late teens and early twenties matured and deepened over the decades, and the romantic and erotic expressions from Emily to Susan continued until Dickinson's death in May 1886. [17]

Olnek's film Wild Nights with Emily vividly and at times humorously portrays the intensity of the relationship between Emily (Molly Shannon) and Susan (Susan Ziegler). And, quite rightly, Olnek feels free to imagine aspects of the love between her characters that the letters only imply. Her film offers a much-needed corrective to the image of the irascible, ill-mannered, and unrequitedly heterosexual Emily of Terence Davies' recent film A Quiet Passion. In that film Susan (played by Jodhi May) hardly appears, and the deep emotional connection between her and Emily (Cynthia Nixon) is not even hinted at—another "reenactment and recycling" of Susan's historical erasure. Wild Nights is a very welcome, funny, and moving restoration of Susan to the emotional center of Emily's life and work.

Molly Shannon (Emily Dickinson) and Susan Ziegler (Susan Dickinson) in Wild Nights with Emily. 

Image source: AfterEllen

---

1. Quoted by Lilia Melani, "Emily Dickinson -- Love." http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/wild.html
2. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44087/wild-nights-wild-nights-269
3. https://www.edickinson.org/faq#5 
4. Martha Nell Smith, "Susan and Emily Dickinson: their lives, in letters," in Wendy Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 51.
5. Smith, "Susan and Emily Dickinson," p. 56. 
6. Smith, "Introduction," Mutilations: what was erased, inked over and cut away, http://archive.emilydickinson.org/mutilation/mintro.html
7. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, eds., Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Amherst: Paris Press, 1998, p. 76.
8. Hart and Smith, Open Me Carefully, p. 91.
9. Hart and Smith, Open Me Carefully, p. 5.
10. Susan Dickinson, quoted in Smith, "Susan and Emily Dickinson," p. 54.
11. http://archive.emilydickinson.org/working/hb173.htm; dates of this and other quotes from Emily's letters to Susan follow those determined by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, eds., Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Amherst: Paris Press, 1998.
12. http://archive.emilydickinson.org/working/hl20.htm
13. http://archive.emilydickinson.org/working/hl2.htm
14. http://archive.emilydickinson.org/working/hl7.htm
15. http://archive.emilydickinson.org/working/hl1.htm
16. Hart and Smith, Open Me Carefully, p. 101.
17. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith "introduction," Open Me Carefully, p. xiv. http://archive.emilydickinson.org/classroom/spring99/edition/hart-smith/h-s-letters.htm

In memoriam: Andy Gill

Andy Gill and Jon King onstage, Hof Ter Lo, Antwerp, Belgium, 2nd May 1981. (Photo by Gie Knaeps/Getty Images. Source: NME)

Andy Gill's death was announced earlier today. He was the guitarist for the Gang of Four, who emerged in Leeds in the late 1970s inspired by the first wave of punk. By joining the dance beat of funk and disco (both highly suspect genres to most punks) to the squalling feedback of Andy Gill's guitar, they created a sound that was as radical as their anti-capitalist politics. I remember laughing in sheer disbelief the first time I heard Gill splattering jagged chords over the steady beat of drummer Hugo Burnham and bassist Dave Allen in "At Home He's A Tourist," while vocalist Jon King chanted the typically smart, bitter lyrics about how we are made to collude in our own oppression. ("She said she was ambitious / So she accepts the process.")

Gill's guitar was simultaneously rhythm and lead, but as with some other punk and post-punk bands he didn't play traditional guitar solos. Instead he filled his guitar breaks with the aural equivalent of a scream.

I saw the Gang of Four in Chicago after the release of Songs of the Free, when Sara Lee had replaced Dave Allen. It amazed me that four people dressed like young Thatcherite investment bankers on casual Friday could produce such a wall of sound. While Songs of the Free seemed like their subversive attempt to produce an ironic pop hit, live they had lost none of their visceral rawness; their sound seemed powerful enough to shake the foundations not only of the hall, but of a bankrupt social system. Alas, it turned out not to be.

Although the three primary instruments in the band carried a more-or-less equal weight in their sound, it turned out that Gill was the only irreplaceable member. "To Hell With Poverty" tells you why:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzYmNAODef4

"In this land—right now—some are insane, and they're in charge." Andy Gill is dead; let's get drunk on cheap wine.

Update 13 February 2021: Writing a friend about this post, I began wondering whether Gill (whose cause of death was listed as pneumonia and multiple organ failure) might have been an early COVID-19 victim. I rechecked the schedule of the Gang of Four's final tour; they played three concerts in China in November 2019, a detail which suddenly took on a new significance.

Doing some searching I belatedly discovered that Gill's widow, Catherine Mayer, had written a blog post back on 14 May 2020 about her suspicions that her husband had died from complications of COVID-19 infection. The evidence is compelling, especially because we now know that the virus was circulating long before the first case was reported to the World Health Organization on 31 December 2019: https://www.catherinemayer.co.uk/post/2020-vision-14-may-16-00.

Mayer also gave an interview to BBC Newscast shortly after publishing her post: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08dnym5.

Whatever the ultimate cause of Gill's untimely death, it's clear that COVID-19 cases and deaths have been drastically under-recorded.

Suggested reading: Think again edition

This edition of "Suggested reading" takes another look at some assumptions and finds that there's often something unexpected to be discovered. In this post I'll be thinking again about:

Image: Alexander Coggin/New York Times

1. The Spice Girls microgeneration

In the mid-to-late 90s the Spice Girls were inescapable. That they were a mashup of Madonna's commercial feminism-with-eyebrow-raising-elements and pseudo-Riot Girrl slogans ("Girl Power") drained of actual politics, with music that lacked the innovation of the first or the anger-fueled power of the second, seemed too obvious to be worth stating at the time. I mean, the roles they embodied included "Posh" and "Baby," neither of which seemed like they were exactly advancing the cause of women's equality. And why was the sole black Spice Girl "Scary"?

But then, I was an adult male in 1996 when their first single came out. Had I been a 10-year-old girl I think I would have found it irresistible. For women born in the mid- to late 1980s, the Spice Girls were often their first pop crushes and the BFF-celebrating "Wannabe" their anthem.

Love of the Spice Girls, writes Caity Weaver in "The Rise of the Spice Girls Generation" (New York Times, 19 July 2019), "spans borders, races, income levels, sexual orientations, political parties, religions, and all other aspects of adult identity, demarcating a distinct microgeneration."

As she reports on the audience of 30-ish women attending the Spice Girls' 2019 reunion concert in Dublin, Weaver reconsiders the Spice Girl phenomenon, then and now. She shows that more than just marketing was at work:

• The basis of their appeal was that "the Spice Girls were never meant to pass as kids; their skill was in depicting a young girl’s idea of adulthood. . .Being a Spice Girl seemed so easy and fun even a child could do it."

• Members of the Spice Girls generation "are human bridges between two eras [i.e., pre- and post-internet]. . .Their ancestral parallels are the earliest drifters of the Lost Generation, born in the mid-to-late 1880s"—those born just before a sweeping social upheaval, and for whom the new world can't quite be taken for granted because they remember the old. It's nice, also, that this comparison is not belabored or overexplained, which would perhaps make it seem less true. Like a beer bottle set down on the sidewalk in the midst of a moving throng, it's dropped and then quickly left behind.

• Speaking of which, Weaver uses a concert-goer's sidewalk "disposal" of her beer bottle as an illustration of the "breezy apologies particular to young women wherein the apology—often mistaken by other demographics for an expression of guilt—is in fact an announcement that the speaker is about to say or do whatever she wants. 'Gonna place that just there, sorry!'"

• After the concert, the crowd exiting the stadium becomes a de facto Take Back the Night march: "At 11 p.m. on that May evening, after the concert let out, they floated by darkened alleyways, uncowed by the prospective dangers that, were they not traveling en masse, would have forced them onto less direct, better-lit routes. There was not just safety, but joie de vivre in numbers. Marketing ploy or not, 'Girl power' had become a self-fulfilling prophecy." At least for one night.

Image source: Southern Living

2. Microphones and women's voices

One of the barriers that women pop singers and other public figures have to overcome may be sound technology itself, which is not gender-neutral. As Tina Tallon writes in "A Century of 'Shrill': How Bias in Technology Has Hurt Women’s Voices," (New Yorker, 3 September 2019), as microphone and broadcasting technologies were being developed a century ago lower frequencies were favored. Women's voices tend to be in the higher frequency ranges, and so were less intelligible unless the volume was raised—but that made them sound strident, since our ears are more sensitive to higher frequencies than lower ones. As Tallon writes, this problem has persisted: "Even today, many data-compression algorithms and bluetooth speakers disproportionately affect high frequencies and consonants, and women's voices lose definition, sounding thin and tinny." The next time a woman politician is accused of being "shrill," consider "how the design of the technology that transmits human voices has shaped this gendered invective since the dawn of the broadcast era: everything from microphones to modes of transmission have been optimized for lower voices."

Image source: Vulcan Post

3. Dating apps and data sharing

In "Wannabe" the Spice Girls sing, "If you want my future, forget my past." Forgetting the past has become virtually impossible thanks to widespread data "sharing" (i.e., selling) by web-based commercial services. Dating apps, where users share intimate information, are among the worst offenders. The Norwegian Consumer Council found that dating apps such as Grindr and OkCupid transmitted personal data to multiple corporate "partners," each of which in turn could send the data to dozens or hundreds of other companies.

As reported by Natasha Singer and Aaron Krolik in "Grindr and OkCupid Spread Personal Details, Study Says" (New York Times, 13 January 2020), the system is not limited to dating apps: app developers routinely incorporate software from ad tech firms in order to display ads to users. The ad tech firm software tracks app use, location and other data using a tracking code unique to each mobile device, and sends that information to advertisers. Even without real names, your identity and location can be determined because the same tracking code is used over multiple apps and sites.

And the data shared is sometimes highly personal:

Grindr, the world’s most popular gay dating app, transmitted user-tracking codes and the app’s name to more than a dozen companies, essentially tagging individuals with their sexual orientation. . .Grindr also sent a user's location to multiple companies, which may then share that data with many other businesses, the report said. When The New York Times tested Grindr's Android app, it shared precise latitude and longitude information with five companies.

Being involuntarily outed can still have harmful or fatal consequences in many places. And it's impossible to determine exactly where the data is going:

Grindr's app, for instance, includes software from MoPub, Twitter's ad service, which can collect the app's name and a user's precise device location, the report said. MoPub in turn says it may share user data with more than 180 partner companies. One of those partners is an ad tech company owned by AT&T, which may share data with more than 1,000 "third-party providers". . .

And so on, and so on. The data is not limited to the name of the app and the user's location:

. . .the OkCupid app sent a user's ethnicity and answers to personal profile questions—like "Have you used psychedelic drugs?"—to a firm that helps companies tailor marketing messages to users. The Times found that the OkCupid site had recently posted a list of more than 300 advertising and analytics "partners" with which it may share users' information. . .

As that psychedelic drug use question suggests, data about users' medical histories and health status can be involved: "In 2018, another Norwegian nonprofit group found that [Grindr] had been broadcasting users' H.I.V. status to two mobile app service companies. Grindr subsequently announced that it had stopped the practice." The article doesn't say what remedy was proposed for all the people whose H.I.V. status was exposed without their knowledge or explicit consent before Grindr changed its practice.

Image source: ZDnet

4. Consumer surveillance and its consequences

Women of the Spice Girls generation may remember quaint pre-internet concepts like privacy. As the dating apps examples show, the consequences of the disappearance of privacy are much more serious than our potential embarrassment about the contents of our iTunes library. The vast and unprecedented appropriation of our personal data by both profit-seeking corporations and governments can determine how we are able to live our lives.

ZestFinance, a company founded by Google's former chief information officer Doug Merrill, considers that "all data is credit data." In "Stained in Red" (London Review of Books, 4 April 2019), a review of Josh Lauer's Creditworthy: A history of consumer surveillance and financial identity in America (2018), Rachel O'Dwyer writes that ZestFinance compiles thousands of details about our technology use and online activity, and has incorporated them into an algorithm that is used to instantly determine our creditworthiness:

These details include the content of text messages; online browsing behaviour and purchases; education history; records of online money transfers; data use; phone type; and activity on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. . .For example, people who fill out the ZestFinance loan application in capital letters are deemed to be riskier borrowers than those who write in a combination of upper and lower case. . .Others have discovered that such categories as browser type and screen resolution play a role in determining credit scores. . .And a mathematical 'score' is harder to contest than a decision made by a person.

Particularly a score generated by a proprietary algorithm where the data used to generate the score, together with the inner workings of the algorithm itself, are a trade secret.

The maths behind the assessment of our worth is becoming harder to untangle and dispute at the very time it is playing an increasing part in shaping our future. Facebook is experimenting with a 'trustworthiness score' for its more than two billion users. And the Chinese government is developing a 'social credit' system that will assign a score to each of its 1.4 billion citizens based on an aggregation of economic and social factors. While it remains unclear what kinds of 'social' behaviour will be rewarded or penalised (one journalist wondered whether women would be penalised for remaining single or not having children), the government has made it clear that poor scores will affect people’s access to public transport, employment and basic social services.

John Lanchester wrote in his LRB article about Facebook, "You are the product," that "Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens." Intrusive governments are doing their best to catch up.

Image source: Pinterest/The Andy Warhol Museum

5. Facial recognition software and bias

As algorithms make more and more decisions affecting fundamental aspects of people's lives we should be very concerned about their built-in biases. As O'Dwyer writes,

. . .studies of machine learning algorithms show that they mirror historical forms of racial, economic and gender discrimination. Critics point to the inherent biases of those who write the code, and note that the machine learns from historical data riddled with prejudiced inferences. . .this automated bias could have a huge impact.

A case in point is ImageNet, a database of over 14 million photos downloaded from the Internet by Stanford researchers. In "'Nerd,' 'Nonsmoker,' 'Wrongdoer': How Might A.I. Label You?" (New York Times, 20 September 2019), Cade Metz reports,

ImageNet was a way of training A.I. systems and judging their accuracy. By analyzing various kinds of images—such as flowers, dogs and cars—these systems learned to identify them.

What was rarely discussed among communities knowledgeable about A.I. is that ImageNet also contained photos of thousands of people, each sorted into their own categories. This included straightforward tags like "cheerleaders," "welders" and "Boy Scouts" as well as highly charged labels like "failure, loser, non-starter, unsuccessful person" and "slattern, slut, slovenly woman, trollop". . .

ImageNet is just one of the many data sets that has been widely used and reused by tech giants, start-ups and academic labs as they trained various forms of artificial intelligence. Any flaws in these data sets have already spread far and wide. . .The fundamental truth is that A.I. learns from humans—and humans are biased creatures. "The way we classify images is a product of our worldview,"[artist Trevor Paglen] said. "Any kind of classification system is always going to reflect the values of the person doing the classifying."

Image source: Minnesota Public Radio

6. A.I. and white-collar jobs

There's one way in which developing A.I. technology does not discriminate: it may replace people who have higher-income creative or managerial jobs as well as those doing lower-wage repetitive manual labor. Stanford graduate student Michael Webb was able to show correlations between declines in employment and wages in sectors where the language in technology patents could be cross-referenced with descriptions of occupational tasks used by the Department of Labor. As Sheelah Kolhatkar writes in "Could New Research on A.I. and White-Collar Jobs Finally Bring About a Strong Policy Response?" (New Yorker, 14 January 2020), Webb's latest analysis of patents

found them using verbs such as "recognize," "detect," "control," "determine," and "classify," and nouns like "patterns," "images," and "abnormalities." The jobs that appear to face intrusion by these newer patents are different from the more manual jobs that were affected by industrial robots: intelligent machines may, for example, take on more tasks currently conducted by physicians, such as detecting cancer, making prognoses, and interpreting the results of retinal scans, as well as those of office workers that involve making determinations based on data, such as detecting fraud or investigating insurance claims. . .The findings suggest that nurses, doctors, managers, accountants, financial advisers, computer programmers, and salespeople might see significant shifts in their work. . .(Notably, jobs at the very top of the earning scale, such as C.E.O., are not shown to be deeply changed.) 

(Notably, we might say instead, the only people who seem to be insulated from the effects of A.I. are those who make decisions about its deployment.)

Image source: Business Insider

7. What are we there for?

Technologies have consequences not only for individual lives, but for whole societies. A question that may have occurred to you: why, if the United States exports almost as much oil as it imports, has it spent so many years, so many lives, and so much of its wealth to maintain troops in the Middle East? Tom Stevenson, in "What are we there for?" (London Review of Books, 9 May 2019):

United States Central Command is based at al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, the largest air force base in the world, with more than ten thousand US troops. Bahrain is the permanent dock of the Fifth Fleet, as well as having a US airbase and seven thousand US military personnel. The US has five thousand permanent troops, two naval bases and an airbase in the United Arab Emirates. In Kuwait, it has access to three army bases and an air force base. In Oman, it has four airbases and two naval bases. In Iraq, the US still has troops stationed at al-Asad airbase north-west of Baghdad. . .In Saudi Arabia itself, the US operates a military training mission based in Eskan village. Only Iran, which broke away from the US system in 1979, houses no American military bases.

The vast US military presence is certainly not there to promote democratic values: Qatar, Oman, and Saudi Arabia are all hereditary absolute monarchies, and UAE is a federation of hereditary absolute monarchies. No, the answer is exactly what you think it is—oil—but not because of US consumption. The US exports nearly five times as much oil as it imports from Persian Gulf countries. Together those countries account for only 16% of US oil imports, while Canada alone provides 43%. But, strangely, there aren't any US military bases in Canada.

Military control of Middle Eastern oil gives the US, as the head of the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs division stated in 1945, "a stupendous source of strategic power" over oil-importing countries. The leading oil-importing country is now China; according to one source, in 2018 China's oil imports from states bordering the Persian Gulf amounted to over $100 billion, or over 40% of the country's total.

Three-quarters of Gulf oil exports go to Asian economies, and the five largest importers of gas from Qatar are Japan, South Korea, India, China and Singapore. US dominance in the Gulf gives it decisive strategic influence over any potential Asian rival. 

That's not the only benefit for the US. "Saudi Arabia and the other five members of the Gulf Co-operation Council are collectively the world’s largest buyer of military equipment by a big margin," most from the US. "The deals are highly profitable for Western arms companies. . .Arms sales are useful principally as a way of bonding the Gulf monarchies to the Anglo-American military. Proprietary systems—from fighter jets to tanks and surveillance equipment—ensure lasting dependence, because training, maintenance and spare parts can be supplied only by the source country."

There's more: as David Spiro has documented in The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony (1999), in the early 1970s Treasury Secretary William Simon made the US guarantees of military "protection" to Saudi and Arab Gulf states "conditional on the use of oil sales to shore up the dollar. Under Simon’s deal, Saudi Arabia agreed to buy massive tranches of US Treasury bonds in secret off-market transactions. In addition, the US compelled Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC countries to set oil prices in dollars, and for many years Gulf oil shipments could be paid for only in dollars." After the end of the gold standard in 1971, "a de facto oil standard replaced gold, assuring the dollar’s value and pre-eminence."

Could one reason for US technological and political foot-dragging on sustainable alternative energy sources be the strategic and economic leverage it enjoys due to the control of fossil fuels? Just asking. . .

Speaking of global technological consequences:

Image source: The Guardian

8. The data are "irrefutable."

The burning of fossil fuels, of course, is the major reason for the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which in 2018 averaged over 407 parts per million (ppm); in May 2019 it was measured at 414.7 ppm. The last time carbon levels were this high was 3 million years ago, when seas were 50-80 feet higher and average temperatures were at least 2-3 degrees Celsius hotter.

Average surface air temperatures for the first 5 months of 2019 put it on track to be the third warmest year since 1880, often taken as the baseline year for comparison of global climate records. The warmest year was 2016, and the second-warmest was 2015. In fact, the past five years are the hottest on record; if the 2019 numbers hold up, nine of the ten hottest are from the past ten years, and all are from the past two decades.

But average surface air temperatures are not the best measure of planetary warming, and the news is actually worse than these disastrous statistics would indicate. As Damian Carrington writes in "Ocean temperatures hit record high as rate of heating accelerates" (The Guardian, 13 January 2020), about a new study performed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other collaborators,

The world’s oceans are the clearest measure of the climate emergency because they absorb more than 90% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other human activities.

"The oceans are really what tells you how fast the Earth is warming," said Prof John Abraham at the University of St Thomas, in Minnesota, US, and one of the team behind the new analysis. "Using the oceans, we see a continued, uninterrupted and accelerating warming rate of planet Earth. This is dire news."

"We found that 2019 was not only the warmest year on record, it displayed the largest single-year increase of the entire decade, a sobering reminder that human-caused heating of our planet continues unabated," said Prof Michael Mann, at Penn State University, US, and another team member.

The average rate of ocean heating since 1987 is four and half times greater than the average rate over the previous three decades. Warmer oceans cause bigger and more destructive storms, more intense droughts, higher sea levels and the accelerated melting of sea ice. Warmer oceans hold less oxygen, impacting marine biodiversity and threatening the marine food supply. And finally, warmer oceans are less able to absorb carbon dioxide, increasing the amount that remains in the atmosphere, which further increases warming.

"The data we have is irrefutable, but we still have hope because humans can still take action," [Abraham] said. "We just haven’t taken meaningful action yet."

Actually, Prof. Abraham is wrong. We have taken meaningful action, just in the wrong direction: we've increased the rate at which we are pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In the 1960s atmospheric carbon dioxide was increasing by about 0.6 ppm each year. In the decade following James Hansen's 1988 Congressional testimony warning about carbon dioxide and climate change, the rate averaged 1.3 ppm. In the first decade of the 2000s the average increase was 2.0 ppm; in 2017 it was 2.2 ppm; in 2018 it was 2.5 ppm. If through heroic efforts we are able to hold the annual increase at this level instead of increasing it still further, average atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will surpass 500 ppm 37 years from now. And this is a highly optimistic scenario; the latest (2012) edition of the OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050 anticipates crossing that threshold much sooner, sometime around 2040.

To bring this post full circle, if either scenario unfolds the Spice Girls are likely to still be around to see it. The oldest, Geri Halliwell, would turn 68 in 2040, and 85 in 2057. When she was born in August 1972 the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 326 ppm; within her lifetime it is likely to increase by more than 50%. The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were above 500 ppm was 25 million years ago. As the OECD report states, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide to such levels "might also exceed some critical 'tipping-points', causing dramatic natural changes [such as the release of methane from thawing tundra or the disappearance of ice from the Arctic in summer] that could have catastrophic or irreversible outcomes for natural systems and society."

Update 4 June 2020:  The data are in, and 2019 exceeded expectations: it was actually the second hottest year on record, after 2016. Ocean heat content was the highest ever recorded, and both the Arctic and Antarctic oceans recorded their second-smallest average annual sea-ice coverage since 1979.