It's a been a busy day by Halley standards. We've had just a mere glimpse of the speed of things back home and are retreating back into our shell. To plot. It's a nice shell, it's safe and warm and has lots of laughter all the time reverberating off walls. It's our place, our home. There are two places at the moment: here, and not here. You are not here. I am here. It's very, very simple.
But we also like to communicate with the world out there. Some people use the phone a lot, justifying the huge bills each month as their way of staying in touch with friends and family. Other people write emails. I write blogs. I sometimes forget why I do and then one of you nice folk out there, not here, writes and reminds me. It's not just about telling you, but also about reminding me. And a way to make me open my eyes to where I am. I would hate to have this incredible opportunity and find upon looking back that I can't really remember anything at all.
But I'm not writing for the future either – it's very much about now. Here and now. The present that I'm experiencing that I'll never, never be able to describe so well as in this moment. Ask me now about the journey down on the ship and already I muddle things up. It would be catastrophic, but I might forget completely to mention phosphorescence or flying fish!
There's a third reason for writing these blogs that I discovered upon my return to Blighty last year. You've heard the stories, you've seen some pictures, you've tried to travel with me. When we meet, your questions are sincere and interesting. I answer without even realising that I'm talking about It again.
When I got back to London, Felix had to hold my hand crossing Tottenham Court Road, he saved me a number of times from impending crashes with cars, he veered my eyes away from the tops of buildings (did you know there were gargoyles up there?) towards pavements and tube entrances. He did his best to find a route through greenery and spacious bars but still I felt overwhelmed. And I'd only been gone for four months. Phones and keys and dates to be in places... it was all so unnecessarily exhausting.
I found myself planning delightful days, entire days, with friends instead of the usual hurried meetings between meetings squeezed into a schedule you'll never be able to keep to. Friends who had been reading my scrawl would say,- those ice crystals sounded amazing, or, what do penguins smell like? Other friends hadn't read anything but it didn't matter, we just sat still and allowed experiences from both sides to slowly unravel. Both of these were delightful. The hard ones were with strangers or acquaintances who'd heard 'she's been to Antarctica' and would target me like that car at Piccadilly Circus. What was it like? Is it cold? Why did you go? What do you do? What are penguins like? What do you eat? Didn't you get bored? AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa!
If I was lucky, Felix or one my friends nearby would see the fear on my face and jump to my rescue. But sometimes I just had to go it alone. "Cold, white, flat." was my usual response. And then I'd feel bad for being a bitch. How do you describe this place in the midst of that bustle? How can you possibly squeeze even an idea of it into the soundbite of, what, 30 seconds, that your interrogator has scheduled in for an answer? So to them I could say, well, I wrote about stuff while I was there and if you're really interested, you can read that. If you're not, that's fine too: if I was you I probably wouldn't bother. It's true, I know me and I never research anything, I rarely read about adventures or follow stories, and I don't mind in the slightest if you don't follow these. This is my adventure and you're welcome to join me or not.
What prompted this? Ah yes. Our Busy Day. Well, in my last entry I mentioned that I'd been working on the Halley webpage. Today it finally got hosted, but looked different from bits that I'd sent. (We don't have internet access down here so I only know this because I asked Felix to send me the text.) I wrote to the guy in Cambridge and it now looks a lot more similar. So thank-you, friend in Cambridge.
It got edited in order to conform with the BAS corporate image. I understand even if I was a bit disappointed. Photos were removed and shrunk so the page would load up quicker, text was changed so it would seem as though we were working more and partying less. Millions of exclamation marks were added to the end of my sentences to ensure that everyone could tell which bits were meant to be tongue-in-cheek. It lost some of its charm perhaps but already I don't mind so much.
What I minded was not being asked to do the editing myself and, more importantly, not even being told that the changes had been made. I guess we have no idea what our past pages look like either. It's a time like this that I realise, a little sadly, that we are still the puppets of the organisation that we work for. On the whole, I think they're ok people to work for and I understand most of their decisions even if I don't always agree with them.
In the summer, I wrote a piece trying to describe the incompatibility of this beautiful vast continent with the industrial site that it becomes when the ship arrives, riddled with noise, politics, gossip and unnappeciative punters. In the winter, we love the peace, it's the best time of year. We'd like to think that once the ship leaves, They can't touch us. "What are they gonna do, fire you?!" is a common joke around here.
But on the whole we follow the rules. We write risk assessments for every possible activity, we fill in accident, incident and near miss forms every time something doesn't happen, we phone Cambridge if a field party is delayed due to bad weather and have regular email contact and phone calls with line management. We go to work every day. We could, it's true, go on strike. But we won't.
There have been years in the past that are infamous for their post-winter cliqueism – the classic was the catapult built one year to greet the ship's arrival. I think any good wintering team will necessarrily have a hard time when the new faces arrive; we are a team, but we're not deliberately antagonistic. We like to think we have power but in fact BAS owns us – we depend on them for food, clothing, heat, mail, and communication. They even prescribe how much alcohol we are allowed for the year and sell it to us.
Like teenagers trying to rebel, we want to have our own voice. The webpage is one small, but very important, part of that. It's a place we direct our friends and family to, a place with lots of photos that we can't afford to send on our 1MB/month email allowance. It's a way of trying to describe to you out there what we're experiencing down here. If it's tongue-in-cheek, well, maybe that's a reflection of how we're feeling at the moment. So for the friends and family of everyone down here, click here for the original webpage. (If you don't understand the "on fire" reference at the end, try clicking on one of the photos...)
I've long been a fan of Gothamist: in my very first BlogWars posting, I anointed Jen Chung Queen of the Blogosphere, with a superior site to Gawker and The Kicker. A few days later, in BlogWars III, I said that "amateurs like Low Culture, Gothamist and even MemeFirst [are] keeping up with the pros like Gawker and The Kicker" – drawing a distinction between amateur and professional blogs.
The distinction's still there, but Gothamist, along with its publisher, Jake Dobkin, has now clearly moved from the amateur to the professional side of the dividing line. And with its new status comes new problems. As I noted on MemeFirst,
It's an expectations game: people don't mind when an amateur blogger goes on holiday, say, or posts infrequently when their day job starts making bigger demands on their time. Gawker and Weblogsinc can't get away with that. They're held to a higher standard.
Part of that higher standard is that the publishers of the websites in question become spokesmen for the whole blogging protoindustry. Jason Calacanis is a master of the art of rustling up publicity, but even he's not half as good as Nick Denton, who's probably had more stuff written about him than he's actually published.
Calacanis and Denton have long had a public rivalry, snarking at each other from their respective weblogs and keeping us all guessing as to how much they like or hate each other. Jake Dobkin, on the other hand, was generally seen as more of an amateur: while Calacanis and Denton both ran dotcom-era hot properties in their day, Dobkin is a fresh graduate from NYU biz school, while his resumé features mainly web design and information architecture work.
In the past couple of months, however, Gothamist has started growing like topsy. For most of its existence it was essentially a single weblog written by Jen Chung; now, says Dobkin, "the Gothamist collective has only twenty writers" (my emphasis).
That line comes from Dobkin's latest trolling expedition, but first a bit of background. Gothamist first started expanding with Gothamist Events, an absolutely wonderful what's-on guide which never really got the publicity or the praise that it deserves. Then came the Gothamist Interview (if you're talking to Jake), aka the Young Manhattanite Interview (if you're talking to Andrew Krucoff). Pretty soon, the spin-offs were coming thick and fast: Gothamist Weather, Ask Gothamist, Gothamist Sports; even Chicagoist. More are certain to come.
Somewhere along the line, Gothamist stopped being just another New York blog, and started being a proper business which was competing directly with Gawker. The Interview, for instance, got high praise from Nick Denton, who has said that he thinks it's a great feature and wishes he'd launched it rather than Dobkin.
All that was missing was for Dobkin to start taking potshots at Denton and Calacanis from his personal site, like those two have been doing for a while now. But Bluejake is a photolog, not suited for such things, and jacobdobkin.com isn't even a weblog. So he used Gothamist instead. The move wasn't unprecedented: he'd already dipped his toes into the water with a long post entitled "Gothamist Notes 1: What Not to Do When You Blog".
But it was only this month, with an entry entitled "Blogertisements!" that Dobkin really threw his gauntlet down and started taking on the Denton-Calacanis axis directly. Nike had decided to launch a website called Art of Speed, and publicise it with a weblog published by Gawker. Dobkin was not impressed – although he did sell an ad for Art of Speed to Nike, which can still be seen between the fourth and fifth posts on the Gothamist home page. In his Blogertisements post, Dobkin kept the tone relatively light and fluffy, but still called Denton "unspeakably devilish", said the blog "isn't too different from writing the text on the back of a cereal box", and used words like "contaminate".
Then, today, Dobkin ratcheted the rhetoric up another couple of notches, with a pretty blistering entry entitled "Calacanis Jumps the Shark?". Go there now, and you'll be presented with all manner of caveats and we-don't-really-mean-its, most of which weren't there originally. But even so, you'll still find some very sharp language: Dobkin refers to Calacanis's latest blog as "poopydiaperblog", and uses words like "mind-numbingly", "unspeakable", and "subpar". What's more, you'll also find, in the comments, the transcript of the IM conversation that Calacanis and Dobkin had after the piece was published. Dobkin didn't put it there himself, but he certainly hasn't taken it down, and let's just say that it does somewhat contradict Calacanis's claim elsewhere that "these days I’m just not as aggressive and confrontational". (The phrase "you are fucking asshole piece of shit" springs to mind as one counterexample.)
Most of the personal animus seems to spring from the fact that Dobkin railed not only on Calacanis, but also, implicitly, on his mother, who co-writes the new blog. Evidently, insulting Jason Calacanis's mother is something one simply doesn't do: Calacanis says in the comments that "First, I take this very personal... you don't talk about people's mothers and wives in Brooklyn--not if you're smart". Now, Jake, what was that you were saying about how in 2004, "blogs will play a role in a major crime, either murder or assault"?
All this culminated in a slightly defensive public apology from Dobkin to Calacanis, with Dobkin saying that "was meant to be light hearted", and repeating in many different ways that he didn't mean to offend. On the other hand, he does say that publicising the IM transcript "was not my intention", which raises the question of why he's kept it up on the Gothamist comments.
In any case, it's clear that the war of the New York blog entrepeneurs, which heretofore has been a simple Denton vs Calacanis affair, is now very much a three-way affair. Dobkin says in the comments to the shark-jumping post that he "likes to take a close look at these things once or twice a month" – it's going to be very interesting to see what's next, in the wake of the Art of Speed and BloggingBaby posts. He's certainly demonstrated an ability to put people's backs up – which may or may not be a good thing in this line of business.
While writing my weekly letter to my Granny yesterday, I found myself stumped for words. Stumped for material more like. What to say? Nothing has changed since last week, there is no news to report. It's still cold, it's still dark, I still go to the lab to work and I still live with the same 17 people who I have lived with for the last four months. We have had no visitors, no mail, no dramatic new events unfolding. Don't get me wrong – we're happy here, laugh a lot, party, play games, watch videos, read books, have a million bizarre conversations and a few serious ones too. But there's not much to report.
I feel like I've already told you anything worth telling but that you somehow expect more. You want drama and excitement, courageous battles with the weather, brilliant diversions from near-miss incidents, comrades going mad with winter depression and skin shrivelling up through lack of fresh fruit. But it's not like that. When you're here, it just makes sense. But then maybe that means I'm taking it all for granted. So this morning I thought I'd pay a bit more attention to my daily routine and see what might be there out of the ordinary.
The sunshine lamp flooded my room with squintingly bright light around 7am this morning thanks to an old fridge defrost-timer that the wintering electrician rewired for me. Unimpressed, I crawled back under my duvet and hid my head. At about 7:45, my alarm clock went off, jolting me back out of dreamland for just long enough to hit the red button on the top. I was parched. At 8:45, I finally pulled myself out of bed, downed the glass of water I had left there the night before, climbed off the top bunk and into my issued clothing of thick thermal socks, green moleskin trousers and a thermal top. Yum. O god, you're thinking, is this the kind of detail she's going to go through the entire day in? No. Well, maybe, we'll see.
The point is, it's really hard to get out of bed in the morning (and the driest place on Earth). I've never found it easy, I know (past friends and housemates are already laughing that I bothered mentioning it), but it's really, really hard. One guy here even asked if gravity was stronger at the poles due to some effect of the rotation of the Earth! There is definitely a winter lethargy about the place. It's not that we don't get stuff done. We just get it done at our own pace, in our own time. There are plenty of theories about why this is; the most widely accepted is that daylight acts as a reset switch in your bodyclock, helping us to remain in approximate 24 hour synchronicity with each other. It's well documented that antarctic winterers can rapidly lose synchronicity from each other ultimately resulting, in extreme situations, in social breakdown. Which is precisely why I insist on dragging myself out to work for 9am and try to finish before dinner – something I have never done at home when I have had the freedom to work whatever hours I choose. Ironically, I have never lived such a disciplined life as here, where the only social constructs are those respected by the wintering contingent.
I digress. I get up, have breakfast, chat over a cup of tea, peg out, tog up and go out to the lab. Need that expanded too?
Get up but don't have a shower as water is limited and I like to have
a shower after I've hauled myself indoors, sweaty and tired, for the last time
of the day.
Breakfast is toast or cereal. Bread varies according to the person
on night-shift, apples and oranges are still around but the quality is a lottery,
and I often make yoghurt so that might go in a bowl as well.
Tea is obvious, chat usually is related to articles in the
newspaper that arrives in the middle of the night and has a scarily biased perspective
on everything. I am now an expert on the comings and goings on reality TV, Big
Brother, David Beckham's sex life and where the Royal Princes will be holidaying
next.
Peg out – well, there's a peg out board where you put your name
to the place you're going to and write it in a book along with the time you
expect to be back. The daily gash person keeps an eye on the book throughout
the day and tries to find you if you're out beyond your self-provided curfew.
It's a little Big Brother-ish but could save your life.
Togging up, now I could write a whole book on antarctic clothing but
in short here's what I add to my clothing in the boot room: 'mucklucks' on my
feet (big moon-boots, almost knee high, hard toe-capped), a thin fleece top,
all-in-one orange padded overalls, a balaclava, a neck-warmer, a dead-rabbit
mad bomber hat, a thick 'windy' cotton smock which blocks out the wind like
no other material I have ever experienced, goggles, thin glove liners and large
mitts. Plus an emergency back-pack with more clothing if I'm going to the CASLab
and a radio worn like vest under the outer layer to keep batteries warm. Ok,
so I'm togged up and ready to leave the building. It's probably 09:30.
As I was leaving, I realised that I needed to go via the Simpson platform to pick up some solutions I had mixed on Friday and some more deionised water for various machines at the lab. Last summer a wet chemistry facility was built on the Simpson platform since three of our instruments use liquid methods but, for space, safety and practicality reasons, there is nowhere to prepare liquids at the CASLab. The CASLab is about 1.3km from the Laws platform (where we live) but if you go via the Simpson, the journey is a bit longer. In any bad weather or reduced visibility conditions, we have to walk via the Simpson anyway as this is the way the handlines are routed.
Leaving the Laws I remember that I bust the binding on my skis last week so will have to walk. Since I'll be taking lots of liquids with me, I take the orange pulk sledge and harness, dump the emergency bag inside it and pull the lot to the Simpleton. It's not a long stop there – I pick up 5L of dilute sulphuric acid in a glass bottle, 3L of sulphanilamide solution, a few pots of pre-weighed powder, 3L of de-ionised water, 50ml of acetone and some crunchy granola bars. I'm sure I've forgotten something but it'll have to wait. It's cold outside so before leaving I make sure there are no bits of skin peeking through my various headgear. I got a reasonable sized patch of frost-nip last week on my left cheek and eye, now healing nicely, and I don't want to re-expose it. I load everything into the sledge and start the slog to the lab.
But what's 24-hour darkness like?, you're asking. Well, at this time of day, it's dark still, always dark. Today was quite cloudy so there wasn't even the joy of stars to carry me along the commute. The moon is waning but still shedding quite a lot of light and the lights from the lab are bright enough that I can follow them without needing a head torch. We had another brief storm last week that dumped a lot of soft snow unevenly in lumps and bumps across the ice so the walk is quite hard going. I fall over a couple of times and struggle when the sledge catches on sastrugi (the hard bumpy bits on the snow). I'm pulling less than 15kgs on the sledge but it feels like a lot more when we're going in opposite directions.
It seems to take an age to get to the lab, in reality it was probably about 20 or 25 minutes but I'm sweating loads when I do finally get there and relieved to get indoors. There are a bunch of outdoor checks I usually do upon arrival but today I'm too tired, and will cool off rapidly, so decide to do them when there's a bit more light outside. I get to the lab at 10:30.
Thankfully, everything seems fine once I get unwrapped and my breath back. First I check the telescope room but it's too cloudy to see any return signal from the mirror bouncing light back at us from 4km away. On a clear day, this is one of the most satisfying experiments as the return beam looks like a star on the horizon and is easy to optimise and focus onto the optical fibre. We're looking for absorbance of light by a range of atmospheric species: mainly halogen oxides and the nitrate radical. We don't expect to see much chemical activity during the winter months but it's important to measure this so we know how it compares to the increased signals when the sun returns. Year-round studies of this nature in Antarctica are still pretty special.
The next instrument I check measures formaldehyde in the air. It seems to be ticking away nicely but one of the reservoirs is running low: hence the sulphuric acid I brought with me. That should last another week or two now although the other liquid it uses is also running out and I'll have to make a new batch this week, maybe tomorrow afternoon. The HONO instrument is next – I refill the Helium bag and feed the empty reservoir next to it with 3L of deionised water. Sometimes it feels a bit like watering plants!
Next to this instrument is a gas chromatograph (GC) that measures Peroxy Acetyl Nitrate, or PAN, and I notice that its water reservoir, used for circulating coolant, is also low. This instrument stands in a rack. On the bench next to it is a GC that monitors non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHCs) that is working well at the moment. It needs a blank run though so I set up a Nitrogen cylinder and change the programme accordingly.
The last of my instruments to come on-line is around the corner next to the formaldehyde monitor; this measures peroxides and will hopefully be running soon. While checking these five machines, I have barely had to move my feet at all as they are crammed together around one human-sized patch of floor. Like the conductor of an orchestra!
I make a note of the various solutions I need to prepare next. Ok, so everything's moderately happy, fed and watered. I spend the rest of the morning paying them a bit more attention – running calibrations and blanks, troubleshooting things I don't understand, feeling a bit like a teacher in a room full of restless children, all wanting a bit more attention than I have the time to provide.
It was a nice morning all-in-all: not too hectic and I made some good progress. The lab is cramped and noisy though, so I was hoping to make it back in time for lunch at 1pm. Around midday I venture outside for the outdoor work, hoping it might have warmed up a bit. I go outside onto the platform and collect a small plastic jar for sampling snow. It's a dark day today so I need a torch to find the pole where we sample from, about 100m from the lab. Once back on the platform, I check the pressure in various gas cylinders, look at the air inlets on the roof to check they're not blocked, and pick up some freezer blocks to keep solutions indoors cool.
By the time I get back inside, less than 10 minutes, the end of my nose and tips of my fingers have gone white and are screamingly cold. The pain doesn't get better as I warm them up with the palm of my hand. Damn – I must have not covered up properly, I've been nipped again. It's time to leave, I want to leave, I'm hungry and not looking forward to the journey back. I get dressed again, this time with another balaclava and even bigger mitts from the emergency bag, grab the bag, empty bottles and a 20L jerrican full of waste chemicals that needs disposing back on base (to be eventally shipped back to the UK).
The air is dark, I can't see any definition in the snow, the sledge is heavy and difficult to pull on this lumpy surface. I'm being obstinate: I should really dump the sledge and pick it up tomorrow but some days you just don't want to let the weather beat you. So I keep going. Within a few minutes my goggles are steamed up and frozen – I put them on in a different order this time that obviously doesn't work. I can't see squat. Without them I can see lights of the Laws but risk getting more frostnip.
I realise that I'm not in a good mood and that it's unfortunate that today of all days is the day I decided to document in writing. Some days, when it's clear, the walk home is a joy. I chat to the stars, dance with the snow, sing to myself. But today, it's a slog. It's cold, it's dark, it's 1pm for crying out loud, I can't see a thing and am having to direct myself through a tiny slot between my furry hat, balaclava and windy hood. I tried wearing the goggles and hanging onto the handline but that was even more ludicrous. I know I'll be ok, I have no doubt about my safety or ability to get home, I just wish that I could be there now.
Forty minutes and a couple of stumbles later, I crawl indoors and collapse for a couple of minutes. Melodramatic drama queen! The gash dude did call me on the radio just after my last stumble which was kind of comforting – knowing that if I hadn't replied they would have come out looking for me. Nice to know that the system works, anyway.
A bowl of tomato soup and a bacon roll later, I'm laughing about it. I've checked the weather data and it's not as bad as it felt: only -31C with 15 knot winds. It felt a lot colder, I guess the subjective was -42C though. Still, at this time of year it usually has to reach -40C or windspeeds above 30 knots to get much of an oo and an aah around the table. What a wuss!
I've warmed up but my nose is sore, my cheek raw and I don't fancy returning to the lab. All is fine there and I have plenty I can be getting on with on the Simpson platform for the afternoon. But no, damn, I realise I might have left the gas store open when my fingers got frostnipped with the intention of closing it later. Damn. It would probably be ok for the night but if the wind picks up, not good – the bottles would get cold and the store fill with snow. It's my colleague's day off today (we alternate weekends and Mondays) but bless him, he offers to go out and check for me in the afternoon. I am so grateful! None of my face fancies more of that journey again today.
Truth be told, I'm a bit bored of this blow – it's not big enough to be exciting but is too big for any good outside activity. Like how you get bored of grey days and dull rain in Britain. Last week was much nicer: I was on melt-tank duty and often sat on the snow mound after the tank was full, looking at the night sky in the morning or enjoying the red glow if it was an afternoon dig. I even went for a walk on Saturday, the weather was so calm.
I spend the afternoon replying to work-related emails, fixing a pipette and analytical balance in the wet chem lab, and preparing some more chemicals. That winter lethargy seems to have crept back in again. Dinner's at 6pm, after that our usual banter and then I pick up a new book. My last books were 'Love in The Time of Cholera' followed by 'Touching the Void' (Joe Simpson) and am now starting 'Oranges are Not the Only Fruit'.
At 8pm we have our Monday night double bill of '24' and then, after my heart-rate calmed down, I plugged in my laptop and started writing this. It was a fairly typical day I guess, if a bit colder than usual. Somedays the weather is better but the lab is much worse. I'd rather have the former by far. I thought it was nothing to report but I guess it only feels normal if you do it every day.
I was wrong: my report on the death of the New York Times magazine was, as they say, exaggerated. In fact, the latest issue is the best magazine of any description I've read in many months, if not longer. There are still weaknesses, of course, but the beating heart of the New York Times magazine – the feature well – is as strong, this week at least, as any issue of the New Yorker you might care to mention over the past couple of years. The June 6 issue, called "Money 2004: The Moral Quandaries", would, if there was any justice in this world, win a National Magazine Award; unfortunately, it's not eligible.
There are weaknesses, of course, starting with the cover, which is a bad idea badly executed. The photography in general could be punched up a lot, and the Style pages in particular need a lot more imagination. ("I know – for an issue on white-collar crime, let's take black-and-white photos of models in trenchcoats being escorted down courthouse steps!") And the two profiles from new staffer Jon Gertner read like the puff-pieces one might expect from a writer who has just jumped ship from Money magazine: they're starry-eyed about these men's ideas not because the ideas are so particularly amazing, but because the men are rich and successful.
But that's nit-picking. The rest of the book is good, starting with a thought-provoking essay on the spending habits of the poor from Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who famously spent years following the lives of an extended family in the Bronx. One day, she followed one family member as she did her supermarket shopping, seemingly without any regard to saving money or maximising value:
It wasn't that Lolli didn't know she was poor; it was that she couldn't see her way to being anything but. Perhaps it was the justness of her disregard for the future that shocked me to the core -- the surrender of tiny, mitigating hopes; perhaps I instinctively realized at that moment that the plodding strategies that had saved me could never do enough good for her.
The essay is echoed, 66 pages later, by former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes.
In the 1930's, when nearly a fifth of England's working class was on the dole, a helpful newspaper ran an article explaining how a family could eat a healthy diet on the approximately 30 shillings a week that the government paid in unemployment benefits. George Orwell analyzed the shopping list and the menus that had been calculated to the last halfpenny and admitted that the writer had done his homework. A family could survive, just barely, on the dole. But only a theoretical family. What the writer failed to take into account, Orwell said, was the need to break routine, to reward oneself with a treat, something ''a little bit 'tasty,''' and hang the cost.
The two pieces are talking about very different things, of course: Lolli wasn’t treating herself in the present, really, so much as she was refusing to subject herself to rigorous fiscal discipline for the sake of a future which she wouldn’t have in any case. But both are interesting meditations on the uniquely fraught nexus between food and money, and the way in which spending the latter on the former seems to bring out the worst in a certain kind of middle-class observer, who considers it, essentially, to be unethical.
Ethics, indeed, is the theme running through the whole issue, and it’s addressed directly by Rob Walker in his regular column on consumer culture. This week, he looks at Fair Trade coffee, and asks whether its sales (30 million pounds, roughly, in 2004) are high (up from 2 million pounds since 1999) or low (just 5% of premium coffee sales). The bigger question, of course, is whether it’s possible to sell ethics – a question addressed at some length by Michael Lewis, who neatly stilettoes one Kellie McElhaney, who teaches Corporate Social Responsibility at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Her
students recommended that Birkenstock ditch most of their good works and put all of their energy into a single very public act that connected up naturally to footwear. They shrewdly recommended that Birkenstock sponsor walks for causes. The cause did not matter so much as the fact that potential customers would be walking many miles on its behalf, and, somewhere along the line, encounter a giant sign that said birkenstock.
Lewis, as ever, is a master of the narrative journalistic form, even when there's really no narrative to tell. But he can certainly structure an argument: at the beginning, you can kind of see the point when McElhaney says that "I don't think unprofitable corporate goodness is sustainable" – after all, if you don't make any money, you can't give it away. By the end, however, Lewis has dug deeper:
The instinct to give quietly to a pediatric AIDS foundation is second cousin to the instinct not to use slave labor to make your shoes, or not to manipulate your earnings. It is part of a struggle against the market's relentless pressure on the business executive to behave a bit too selfishly -- to become one of those corporate villains whom investors can one day profitably sue.
And one of the reasons why we find this compelling is precisely because, elsewhere in the issue, Bruce Porter has spent 7,400 words following Jay Jones, a common-or-garden white-collar criminal, on his way from his mansion to the big house. There's a slight twinge of journalistic earnestness to Porter's piece: we're told that he teaches at Columbia Journalism School, and sometimes his obvious diligence can be a little holier-than-thou, if you've ever done any journalism yourself. But in one quote, from defense lawyer Benjamin Brafman, he manages to cut to the chase of exactly what it is about white-collar jail sentences that separates them from the majority of prison terms.
As a rule, he has noticed, the more unassailable a person's background, the harder it is for him to take the fall. The boiler-room shark, the Mafia interloper in the business world -- they seem capable of accepting punishment as just a disagreeable cost of doing business. But, Brafman says, ''when a person with an impeccable history, with no prior experience in the criminal-justice system, suddenly finds himself under investigation or under indictment, his world completely collapses around him. It's much worse than being told you have a terminal illness, because when you're told you have a terminal illness, everyone who loves you rallies around you, and all of your friends and family offer support and compassion and help because they recognize they might soon lose you. But if you're suddenly indicted, you're a pariah. You bring embarrassment and shame into your home and into your extended family. You lose your business; you lose your money; you have the possibility of going to prison. The life support you counted on for your entire existence begins to disappear. It's a terrible, terrible thing. I've seen middle-aged people in my office grow old in front of my eyes. And I don't think anyone ever recovers from the experience.''
Now, that, admittedly, is a defense lawyer speaking. But we're given the opposing side of the story at some length, in a first-person account by Mark Costello of nine years prosecuting white-collar criminals. We get the full range of outcomes here: Jamie Olis, the former Dynegy director now serving 25 years for a crime which didn't really enrich him at all; contrasted with the multimillion-dollar fraud, which took more than three years to fully unravel, and which ended in a non-custodial sentence because the fraudster had a sick son.
We know that sentences for white-collar crime are a crapshoot: the crime is usually incredibly hard to prove, and juries don't like to wade through the intricacies of hugely complicated frauds. And as Costello notes, even if you've been able to bring a case to court, and the defendant has been found guilty, the sentence can often amount to little more than a slap on the wrist.
Which is why I don't shed too many tears for Jamie Olis, or for Martha Stewart, if and when she ever goes down. It's not that what they did, specifically, was deserving of whatever sentence they will receive. But someone has to be convicted and locked up for something, or else fraudsters – who already have more de facto impunity than virtually anybody other than third-world dictators – will simply have no incentive whatsoever to cease committing their crimes. Here's Brafman again:
Other kinds of business-class fraudsters, he says, become so successful and powerful that they can't imagine that the laws applying to others are also meant for them. ''I've met people in different professions who are simply stunned by the suggestions that they are subject to prosecution, that they could end up in jail and the government would have the temerity to take them on.''
What kinds of business-class fraudsters could he be talking about? Surely CEOs – the Ken Lays and Dennis Koslowskis and Martha Stewarts of this world, members of the G-V classes who sail above the real world in a bubble of wealth, power and privilege. If you can't get them for their crimes, then by all means get them for their cover-ups. Martha needs to do time, simply to put some fear into her fellow CEOs.
The best piece of all in the magazine, however, doesn't look big, it looks small. Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt have found an absolute gold mine in Paul F., a trained economist who now runs a bagels-and-doughnuts service for local offices. His business runs on the honour system: throw a buck in the box for a bagel, or 50 cents for a doughnut. And, of course, he's kept detailed data on delinquency rates, which go up when the weather is bad, or Christmas is nigh, or even when the office exceeds a certain size. There are some wonderful results:
He says he believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He reached this conclusion in part after delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors -- an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service and administrative employees. Maybe, he says, the executives stole bagels out of a sense of entitlement. (Or maybe cheating is how they got to be executives.) His biggest surprise? ''I had idly assumed that in places where security clearance was required for an individual to have a job, the employees would be more honest than elsewhere. That hasn't turned out to be true.'''
But wait! As they say, that's not all: this issue of the New York Times magazine also includes Augusten Burroughs overdosing on credit cards and alcohol; a photo essay on people fired from WorldCom; and – to top it all off – Paul Krugman laying into Alan Greenspan.
It's not often I write good things about the New York Times, and I'm sure I'll go back to bashing it in short order. But credit where credit is due: this one issue of the Sunday magazine is absolutely magnificent: top-notch. If the editors can maintain this kind of quality week in and week out (which I have to say I doubt), it will certainly be one of the best magazines in America today.
I've long had an interest in what was going on at 90-96 Clinton Street, between Rivington and Delancey. For a long time it was one of the neighbourhood's better 99-cent stores, before a long demolition job started which carefully left the façade intact. Weirdly, the façade was then torn down anyway, and a bland new apartment building went up in its place.
I checked it out yesterday: I'm interested in how the process of gentrification does or doesn't affect the quality of new apartment buildings. I expected something pretty snazzy, since I'd noticed during construction that there were some duplex apartments – people who pay a premium for higher ceilings generally want, well, a premium apartment.
In fact, however, 90 Clinton is one of the shoddiest buildings I've seen. Everything from the paint jobs to to the tiling looks as though it was done as hurriedly and cheaply as possible, and the apartment themselves are almost comically nasty. The kitchens, especially, are really gruesome: the stoves are electric, with old-fashioned coil elements (no halogen here, or gas), and in the one I looked at, the doors to both the cupboard and the oven couldn't open all the way because they bumped into the light fixture and another cupboard's door handle, respectively.
The duplex apartments felt pokey, with long, narrow rooms which seemed expressly
designed to minimise whatever benefit you got from the extra height. Even the
windows are stupid: each double-height room has two air-conditioner sleeves,
one down at room level, and one slightly more than halfway up, right in the
middle of where you want the windows to be. At the back, a rickety wooden staircase
leads up to a dingy sleeping den upstairs, which not only receives very little
sunlight, but doesn't even have an built-in light of its own. As for the bathrooms...
well, you get the picture.
Of course, as a paid-up Lower East Side ironist, I naturally looked up as I left the building, to the big sign advertising "luxury rentals". The obvious reaction is that "luxury" has lost all of its original meaning in recent years, and now simply means "expensive": the duplexes, with one small bedroom and one smaller, open loft space, rent for between $2700 and $2900 per month. By comparison, a proper 2-bedroom in my building, around the corner, with high ceilings and rooms which all have doors, is currently on the market for $2400 a month.
But then I had an epiphany: "luxury" is to developers as "like" is to valley girls: it's actually a completely meaningless word, which gets thrown around willy-nilly when they can't think of anything substantive to say. In an attempt to back this up, I'm hereby launching a competition: a free drink to anybody who can find a new market-rate development in Manhattan, either condos or rentals, which doesn't call itself "luxury". Any takers?
It's been a while – thanks for prompting me. I have no excuses except to say I've been working on the Halley May webpage which I hope you'll enjoy. A refreshing change from my usual drivel, this one contains loads of photos and chat about everyone else on base. (Who was it asked for the Hollywood trailer in a comment?!) Also, Simon here has put a bunch more photos on his website so for those of you with some time to waste on the internet, have fun!
Thinking about time. Here's what I came up with. Stars moving overhead, Orion setting to the northwest as I walk home from the lab, the Southern Cross moving from the south, the glow of rainbow hue from below the horizon to the north east in the early afternoon. Midday stars. Time referenced to events: before the storm, the night of the aurora, the full moon.
And then there are human changes. Beards growing, the length of my hair, everyone gradually becoming more chunky with hibernation fat, body cycles. Growing familiarity between compatriots: inside jokes, jests, rumours, a new comfort level, a sense of safety within the devil you know. Subtle changes to personalities, people coming out of their shells, surprise reactions, mood swings, the unveiling of pasts and sharing of thoughts. And, for structure, base activities: Monday is '24', doc school on Tuesday, Workshop Wednesday, aerobics and curry on Thursday, Friday night at the bar, end of the working week, Saturday some themed festivity, Sunday telly throughout the day and big screen movie. These are the ways I notice time passing.
A dear friend wrote to me recently asking about time and why we never have enough of it. It's an age old question I guess and one that shouldn't be relevant here. I was about to say it is timeless but I'm more aware of the passage of time here than ever before. Just not as defined by watches and clocks, schedules, meetings, events and plans. I remember the horror I felt last summer when Louisa and I were trying to meet up and our first available opportunity was 6 weeks ahead. Now I'm back in the days of todays and tomorrows. If I don't do something, it's because it's not been made a priority.
Work is different, I'll never have enough time to do all the things we want to do in the lab. Instruments will continually break and need attention. Most of my time is spent on maintenance of kit and on top of that there are specific investigations we want to do at different times of year. Work is work but it's still pretty varied and to a large extent I am in control of what I do.
But my free time, that's my choice how it's spent. No shopping, communal cooking and cleaning (and we get the day off work to do that), no commuting, no old friends to catch up with or must-see events, no choice of parties on a Saturday night!
How do I spend my time here? On some level it's much the same as home – as many distractions as you could ever want and an equal number of good intentions. There's always someone to chat with, always some conversation happening or sit-com running to pass the time. It actually takes effort to take yourself away. Another thing everyone's scurrying off to do is make their mid-winter presents. I've lost hours in the dark room and am trying to teach myself the guitar. But I'm never bored, never wondering "what shall I do now".
But it's also not like home at all. We are, very much, in a communal bubble. All experiencing this strange continual cold and dark, all restricted by the weather, all living in a world with the same structure of time: melt-tank digging, gash day, weekends, midwinter. The thought of being dropped back in a world where your daily existence is totally different from that of your partner or housemate is a little scary. We have to take in so much at home, process so much information every second. Even if you try to empty your thoughts, a hundred more rush in. Here, I guess, it is a slower and simpler life.
I'm busy, I'm never bored, but I'm not stressed either. There are stressful moments for sure, and at times like that you crave anonymity and a space to escape to almost as much as a fresh mango (please, please don't torment me with even the memory of one!), but that blows over just like everything else. It's like a microcosm of society, a time to try and understand yourself and other people on a most basic and simple level. Myth holds that folk leave this place with the 'Halley Stare' and that we all go a bit mad but it's not true! Everyone I've met who's wintered just seems more at ease with themselves and perhaps aware of what they do and don't like. Maybe that's just it – I won't care if you think I'm mad, it doesn't matter any more.
Felix thought I might write less frequently during the winter and said he'd nag me. Instead, the rest of you have, and I appreciate it. At some point, my time here as become my 'norm' and I feel like there's not much left to say. Not much changes on a week-to-week basis. Not much that I imagine you'd be interested in anyway. We keep doing our things, having our weird, wonderful and increasingly more bizarre chats, watching films, drinking wine. It's very comfortable. I was going to say it's even busy but not compaerd to your lives – busy here means that there's something going on every night. But you'd never dream of combining two events in one day!
Yes, maybe time has slowed down... or maybe I've slowed down to the comfortable speed that we're meant to enjoy time at. At this speed, there's plenty of time for everything you want to do and never enough for the things you don't. Perfect.