Can you feel it

No school for Samuel: MLK Jr. Day, then two “snow days” (temps below zero °F). And he has a stomach bug. He’s lain on the sofa, except to puke. It’s been our day’s work to keep Daniel from harassing him.

During one glorious moment, Samuel ran to the toilet to puke, but Daniel was sitting there already, doing his business, so Samuel puked on Daniel. I was so proud of them both for going where they were supposed to go. We tossed Daniel into the shower.

Abel has done some puking, but that’s normal.

More about the weather. I’ve made a list of books about natural/​ecological disasters, for this coming reading year (it begins in May). One book per month. Some, I’ve already read portions of. The list also is inspired by the SoCal fires.

• Maclean, Young Men and Fire
• Stewart, Storm
• Egan, The Worst Hard Time
• Hughes, In Hazard
• Steinberg, Acts of God
• Krakauer, Into Thin Air
• Grunwald, The Swamp
• Stewart, Fire
• Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
• Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
• Jacobsen, Nuclear War
• Weisman, The World Without Us

This is a manly list. The only woman on it is Jacobsen. Then again, these last couple of years I’ve read the “Little House” books, which feature fire, blizzards, locusts, and tornadoes; Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; and short disasterpieces by Didion.

One might complain that some of these disasters aren’t so “natural,” that humans are to blame for them. I agree. So would van Inwagen, who minimizes the distinction between natural and freely chosen evil. And so would various authors on the list (especially, I gather, Steinberg and Davis). But the point isn’t to allocate responsibility; it’s to imagine stuff and people getting burned up, or blown or washed away. There’s grandeur and pathos in these disasters. My former tutee at IUSB, an old Black woman, recalled how a tornado hit South Bend and she and the other children were dismissed from school to go die at home. They ran to their houses, into the wind. That’s like something out of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a colleague said, not a little incredulously, when I told him. Yes, exactly.

For nerds

The latest video from Un mundo inmenso takes us on a quick tour through utopian social theory, with mentions of Plato, More, Bellamy, and Nozick …

… as a prelude to discussion of a homegrown work, Arjirópolis or Argirópolis (1850) by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the author of Facundo.

Sarmiento wrote a lot of things. Even so, I’m a little shocked that I hadn’t heard of this book. I’m especially shocked that there’s no mention of it in the best English edition of Facundo.

I’m not shocked that Argirópolis wasn’t translated until recently, or that the translation’s price is $70. But there’s no fee attached to the Spanish original, in which Sarmiento uses utopian spelling (Arjentina, Uruguai, fewer accent marks, i rather than y, etc., etc.).

To call this book “utopian” is a bit misleading. A utopia is a no-place, or a no-place-in-particular, but the new country is precisely situated: it’s a confederation formed from Paraguay, Uruguay, and river-adjacent parts of Argentina, with a new capital on an island in the Río de la Plata. As in Facundo, the local geography determines the politics; the new land subscribes to no replicable political philosophy, though certain countries (e.g., the USA) serve as its models.

This is perhaps one of the more prescient “utopian” works, anticipating and even recommending the subservient role that Latin American countries would assume in global trade. Sarmiento is said to have been a Latin American apologist for neoliberalism well ahead of his time. To assess whether this is fair, I’d have to read the book.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

If the world had only twenty countries of roughly equal surface area, what would they be?, Un mundo inmenso asks in another recent video.

So: the channel has turned to counterfactual speculation. I hope it isn’t running out of things from actuality to discuss. This is an immense world, after all.