štvrtok 26. augusta 2010

Seeing a Time (Soon) When We’ll All Be Dieting

By MARK BITTMAN
Fifty years ago, a billion people were undernourished or starving; the number is about the same today. That’s actually progress, since a billion represented a third of the human race then, and “only” a sixth now.
J. Carl Ganter/Circleofblue.Org
julian Cribb

THE COMING FAMINE

The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It
By Julian Cribb
248 pages. University of California Press. $24.95.

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Today we have another worry: roughly the same number of people eat too much. But, says Julian Cribb, a veteran science journalist from Australia, “The era of cheap, abundant food is over.”
Like many other experts, he argues that we have passed the peak of oil production, and it’s all downhill from now on. He then presents evidence that we have passed the peaks for water, fertilizer and land, and that we will all soon be made painfully aware that we have passed it for food, as wealthy nations experience shortages and rising prices, and poorer ones starve.
Much of “The Coming Famine” builds an argument that we’ve jumped off a cliff and that global chaos — a tidal wave of people fleeing their own countries for wherever they can find food — is all but guaranteed. The rest of the book concentrates on catching an outcropping of rock with a finger and scrambling back up. The writing is neither personality-filled nor especially fluid, but the sheer number of terrifying facts makes the book gripping.
Arguments that overpopulation will lead to famine or worse are nothing new, of course; in the early 19th century the Rev. Thomas Malthus contended that the human march toward progress would be derailed by a cycle of overpopulation that led to shortages and misery. And of the many who’ve followed in the Malthusian tradition, none have been correct: overpopulation has caused problems, but, as noted above, the percentage of people starving has actually declined.
Mr. Cribb is reporting on the fate of a planet whose resources have, in the last 200 years, been carelessly, even ruthlessly exploited for the benefit of the minority. Now that the majority is beginning to demand — or at least crave — the same kind of existence, it’s clear that, population boom or not, there simply isn’t enough of the Euro-American way of life to go around.
And while there is a sky-is-falling tone to his relatively brief (just over 200 pages) thesis — if it doesn’t make you restock your survivalist shelter with another hundred pounds of rice and beans — the book does offer sensible ways to help alleviate the “global feeding frenzy.”
Climate change, of course, is an important piece of Mr. Cribb’s puzzle, as are overexploitation of the sea and natural resources, overuse of chemical fertilizer, reliance on fossil fuels, protectionism, subsidies, biofuels, waste and other factors.
Most important are what he calls “the two elephants in the kitchen”: population growth and overconsumption. A projected 33 percent growth in population in the next 20 years, combined with increased consumption of meat as the global middle class grows larger, means that food production must grow by at least 50 percent in that same period.
Livestock is a major problem: the grain fed to American animals alone is enough to feed those billion hungry people. But what about the next couple of billion? Production, says Mr. Cribb, is headed in the wrong direction. Grain stockpiles shrank in the last decade, and the amount of available water for each human is plummeting. Yet to produce more food, we need more water; to produce more meat, we need much more water.
We also need more land, as much as “two more North Americas” to produce the fodder needed to meet projected demand. Yet existing land is being degraded by a variety of factors. (Mr. Cribb provides a nicely horrifying quote from some older Chinese farmers: “When we were young, we had trouble seeing the cattle in the grassland. Now we can see the mice.”)
In the decades following World War II, new technologies helped to increase sharply the worldwide agricultural yield. Mr. Cribb contends that were research adequately financed, a second such Green Revolution, with its own amazing discoveries, might be right around the corner. But the current meager financing picture diminishes that likelihood.
One of the book’s more interesting discussions is a comparison of organic and industrial farming. Mr. Cribb sees this as “a philosophical divide the world, in its present state, can ill afford,” and suggests that each camp draw lessons from the other to form a new kind of agriculture. Yet for the most part he comes down on the side of organic, or at least small-share farming, pointing out that entire countries support themselves without resorting to industrial farming.
If there is a way out of the morass, rationality and fairness will be its basis, and here Mr. Cribb is impassioned, even inspiring. He would have society mandate food and waste composting (waste should not be wasted); eliminate subsidies to the biggest agriculture companies; and finance research for new technology. (Big Food, he believes, should be compelled to contribute to this. Bravo.)
He proposes subsidizing small farms for their stewardship of the earth, and paying them fairer prices for production; taxing food to reflect its true costs to the environment; regulating practices that counter sustainability and rewarding those that promote it; and educating the public about the true costs of food. “An entire year of primary schooling” should be devoted to the importance of growing and eating food, he suggests.
Few experts without vested interests in corporate agriculture would disagree with any of this, though little progress is being made. Individuals, however, can make helpful changes more quickly. Dietary change is primary, and can be as simple as eating a salad instead of a cheeseburger and an apple instead of a bag of chips. Waste less food. Compost. Garden, even if (or especially if) you live in a city. Choose sustainable food, including fish. And so on.
None of these practices will matter much unless they’re adopted worldwide. “Even if North Americans and Europeans halved their meat and dairy consumption,” Mr. Cribb writes, “the saving could be completely swamped by the demand from six hundred million newly affluent Indian and Chinese consumers.”
Yet Mr. Cribb is not hopeless; he predicts that we’ll eventually “unlock new insights capable of making profound gains in food production and sustainability on a par with those of the Green Revolution.”
But finding a sustainable farming system is “perhaps the greatest challenge ever faced in the ten thousand years since agriculture began,” he writes. If the challenge is not met, we’re going to be reading scarier books than this one.
Mark Bittman, who writes “The Minimalist” column for The Times, is the author of the forthcoming “Food Matters Cookbook.”

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Deliverance’: A Dark Heart Still Beating


By DWIGHT GARNERdin
On the page and off, James Dickey (1923-1997) was a maximalist. His roomy, loquacious poems spill down the page in a waterfall style and in a voice he called “country surrealism.” It makes sense that he called some of these poems “walls of words,” similar to the record producer Phil Spector’s echoing “wall of sound.” Dickey’s music, rougher and weirder than Mr. Spector’s, was similarly packed with reverb.
Associated Press
The poet and author James Dickey in 1990.

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Everett Collection
James Dickey, center, in a cameo as a sheriff, doing a scene with Jon Voight in “Deliverance.”
It’s odd, then, that Dickey is probably best remembered for a spare novel, one from which he stripped most of the poetry, pulling out the finer phrasings like weeds. That novel was his first, “Deliverance” (1970), a book that turns a youthful 40 this year. It’s a novel that I was happy to discover upon rereading it by a deep lake this summer — Dickey’s stuff is always best read beside a vaguely sinister body of water — has lost little of its sleekness or power. The book’s anniversary shouldn’t slip by unnoticed.
“Deliverance” is the kind of novel few serious writers attempt any longer, a book about wilderness and survival whose DNA contains shards of both “Heart of Darkness” and “Huckleberry Finn.” It tells the story of four mild, middle-class men from suburban Atlanta who embark on a canoe trip, snaking down a remote Georgia river that will soon disappear beneath a dam. In the woods they find boiling rapids and two sinister mountain men. Before the novel is over, the carnage is nearly complete: three men have been crudely buried, one has been raped, and the survivors have had the bark peeled from their modern sensibilities.
These days our culture takes these kinds of narratives, about masculine midlife longing and regret, and de-fangs them, turning them into films like “Wild Hogs,” the benign John Travolta motorcycle trip movie. The novelists who take us into the woods and wilds, Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane invaluably among them, bring along slapstick and irony as critical mosquito repellent. (Was it Robert Bly, in his “Iron John” phase, who made it impossible for American men to walk purposefully into a forest without feeling as if drums and self-awareness needed to be involved?)
In the 1990s novelists signed over the deed to the adventure story to their nonfiction brethren, and that decade brought us Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” and Sebastian Junger’s “Perfect Storm.” The men of Generation X — the aging slackers in Sam Lipsyte’s recent novel, “The Ask,” and in the film “Greenberg” — have little wish to grow up at all, and should they have to, they’ll do it near gastropubs, art houses and public transportation.
Dickey wrote about men, neither dudes nor (although they were fathers) dads. The men in “Deliverance” meet real monsters and recognize their ability to become, in Dickey’s phrase, countermonsters.
“Deliverance” had its moment. The book got ecstatic reviews; its author was interviewed on “Today.” “Deliverance” tangled on best-seller lists with “Love Story,” “The Godfather” and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”
It was an unsettling book that arrived, as if on cue, at an unsettled time. In its primitive violence readers caught echoes of Vietnam, the Sharon Tate murders, even of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In its elegiac lament for a disappearing river, the book chimed along with America’s budding environmental movement.
“Deliverance” caught a second wind in 1972, when John Boorman’s excellent film version opened. It starred Burt Reynolds at the peak of his physical grace, and Jon Voight, with Dickey in a memorable, leering cameo as a sheriff. Dickey wrote the film’s screenplay, hewing closely to his novel’s plot and dialogue. The movie’s most memorable phrase (“squeal like a pig”) was, however, a demented bit of improv.
No wallflower, Dickey reveled in the attention “Deliverance” brought him. But he feared that the novel’s success would overshadow his poetry, a form he took more seriously. He was right to worry. “Deliverance” has had a complicated afterlife.
In 1998 the editors of the Modern Library placed the novel at No. 42 on its list of the century’s 100 Best Novels in English. Last year, however, “Deliverance” got little traction in a survey of the best Southern novels of all time, undertaken by the literary magazine The Oxford American. (It tied for 24th with three other books.)
The novel has the primal witchery of “Lord of the Flies,” but attempts to teach it in classrooms have mostly been rebuffed: the novel’s homosexual rape scene, and its musky sexuality throughout, are too much for many. “Deliverance” has its detractors among Southerners, too, for its portrait of mountain people as toothless sociopaths. When he was governor of Georgia, the future United States senator Zell Miller placed it on his list of most hated books.
Dickey’s novel, like his poetry, has been in critical decline — unfortunately, I think — partly because of his excesses off the page, excesses carefully documented in Henry Hart’s fine biography “James Dickey: The World as a Lie” (2000). He’s been perceived as too studiedly macho, too careerist, a serial exaggerator if not an outright fabulist. (He radically embellished his flying record during World War II.) He slept with too many women; he drank oceanically.
“I am crazy about being drunk,” he wrote. “I like it like Patton liked war.”

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The Protean Master of the Ballets Russes


By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Published: August 25, 2010
When he died, at 57, Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev (1872-1929) was many things: the most celebrated of Russian émigrés; the impresario of the Ballets Russes, the world’s most famous ballet company; a pivotal figure in the recent histories of opera, stage design, visual arts, classical music, as well as theatrical dance; the hub of successive schools of artistic modernism; the man who had taken ballet from state patronage into the world of commercial sponsors; the most celebrated homosexual since Oscar Wilde.
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Serge Diaghilev in 1916.

DIAGHILEV

A Life
By Sjeng Scheijen
Translated by Jane Hedley-Prôle and S. J. Leinbach
Illustrated. 552 pages. Oxford University Press. $39.95.

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Bob Bronshoff
Sjeng Scheijen
Jeanette Ortiz-Burnett/The New York Times

He died in bed in Venice, in the Grand Hôtel des Bains de Mer, on the Lido. The new biography by Sjeng Scheijen, “Diaghilev: A Life,” does not, however, end there. Three weeks later his half-brother Valentin Diaghilev was executed in Solovki, the Soviet Union’s first concentration camp. Serge’s death made front-page news across the world. News of Valentin’s death never reached his own children.
Previous biographies — this is the first in-depth volume since Richard Buckle’s in 1979 — have said little or nothing of the family Diaghilev left behind in Russia. Mr. Scheijen, a Dutch expert in Russian art, demonstrates, however, that Diaghilev made repeated efforts to contact them. In late 1927 Serge became aware of Valentin’s disappearance and prompted the French Foreign Ministry to apply its full weight on Valentin’s behalf. Only when the Soviet authorities no longer feared any repercussions that Serge might have prompted did they proceed to have Valentin killed.
Diaghilev’s early life had been Chekhovian; he grew up as a member of one of the most well-to-do families in Perm, the setting of “The Three Sisters,” in the western part of Russia. Mr. Scheijen draws from the many letters he wrote to his cherished stepmother, in which we first feel Diaghilev’s celebrated charm. But, in a stroke worthy of “The Cherry Orchard,” Diaghilev’s family life was shattered by bankruptcy in 1890, when his father’s and uncles’ estate had to be sold.
This bankruptcy is among Mr. Scheijen’s many revelations. For fluency of storytelling, “Diaghilev: A Life” easily surpasses both Mr. Buckle’s dense biography “Diaghilev” and Lynn Garafola’s intellectual analysis “Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes” (1989). Mr. Scheijen draws happily from a wide range of sources that have become available in recent years in Russia and the West, notably the diaries of the German diplomat and arts patron Count Harry Kessler and the archives of the composer Serge Prokofiev, both of whom were intimate members of Diaghilev’s circle for many years.
Yet Mr. Buckle’s approach — that of both celebrity hound and aesthete — and Ms. Garafola’s probing application of modern historical methods both yield a far more intense wealth of detail. They also demonstrate a much greater sheer excitement over Diaghilev’s achievements. The often cool Mr. Scheijen brings us the latest information but omits too many of the facts already in the common domain. And at many moments he prefers to concentrate on his archival discoveries rather than to re-examine central areas of Diaghilev’s artistic work.
Ballet was not Diaghilev’s first, second or third love. But he found in it the ideal vehicle to bring other arts together. It’s also likely that it stimulated, and sublimated, his sexuality. As he developed a taste for younger men, so ballet brought him the male beauties he desired; and his status gave him maximum casting-couch power.
In several cases, his lovers — who included, successively, the star dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Anton Dolin and Serge Lifar — needed no seduction from him; they were ambitious. And this gay Pygmalion was most galvanized when he could turn these male Galateas into artists the world would worship. Ballet had hitherto been essentially a heterosexual art glorifying femininity, but now a long series of Diaghilev ballets cast more luster on hero than heroine, while at least two of them (“Jeux,” “Les Biches”) actively encouraged homosexual nuances.
Mr. Scheijen tackles this revealingly but calmly. At several points art and life for Diaghilev were indivisible. Notoriously possessive, he dismissed both Nijinsky (in 1913) and Massine (in 1921) from his company when first one, then the other, married. Then, in private, he broke down, both times. Mr. Scheijen shows that the loss of Massine — the more intelligent, worldly and self-sufficient, if less legendary, of the two — caused Diaghilev the greater crisis. He needed to be in love to keep working at his ferocious pace, but Mr. Scheijen’s narrative implies that after Massine he was never again so passionately involved.
The book only skims Diaghilev’s rediscovery of ballet classicism in his ill-fated decision to mount “The Sleeping Princess” (better known today as “The Sleeping Beauty”), the greatest of the 19th-century ballets originally choreographed by Marius Petipa. Diaghilev, who in 1900 had objected to Petipa as a leader of ballet’s academic old guard, had come full circle by 1921; this ruinously expensive project was motored by his and Stravinsky’s enthusiasm for what they now recognized as a masterpiece of classicism.
The exceptional ballerina Olga Spessivtseva was among the new blood Diaghilev transfused into that ballet’s old framework. But once Mr. Scheijen has recorded that the “Sleeping Princess” was a fiasco (planned as a long-running blockbuster, it closed after only 107 performances, leaving Diaghilev with astronomical debts), he never mentions Petipa or Spessivtseva again. Nor does he relate that, according to Stravinsky, its disastrous first night caused Diaghilev another breakdown. You wouldn’t know from this narrative that, between 1922 and 1929, Diaghilev presented hundreds of successful performances of one-act excerpts from choreography attributed to Petipa. He programmed these alongside his modern repertory, revitalizing ballet by showing the connections between past and present.
Diaghilev’s mixed feelings for George Balanchine get short shrift too. Balanchine was always grateful (other sources reveal) for the artistic education Diaghilev gave him, and the two men enjoyed talking. Yet Diaghilev felt more detached than he had been with those choreographers he had both bedded and molded; Balanchine was heterosexual, independent and remarkably proficient.
Even so, Diaghilev took more pleasure in the young man’s masterpiece “Apollon Musagète” (1928, known today as “Apollo”) than Mr. Scheijen does. “What he is doing is magnificent,” Diaghilev commented on “Apollo" in rehearsal. “It is pure classicism, such as we have not seen since Petipa’s.”
Mr. Scheijen’s biography, while it is an important addition to the large shelf of Diaghilev literature, cannot stand as the definitive one. It’s a tribute to Diaghilev’s Protean diversity that no biography of him fully satisfies.

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