Reading The Hopeful, Part 1: Reading The Dead

Topographic Map of Utopia Planitia on Mars

In case you needed any evidence that I've been ranting on similar topics pretty consistently since this blog came into being in 2007, I used my search function to look up mentions of "utopia." One post in particular struck a chord with recent navel gazing on my part: "Who Can Really Save The World?" from July 2, 2009.

As I look back over these last seventeen years, things seemed almost benign and innocent in those days. The post's focus was on the question of individual vs. collective action as a means to fix things. The consensus of the replies to my take was that we need both. We can't do it alone, but we can't just ignore the impact of individuals. Since then, I've been reading both fiction and non-fiction considerations of possible solutions. But in 2009, our country had elected a thoughtful constitutional scholar who was also Black. I'm pretty sure I was a good deal more optimistic in those days than I am now.

In the 1990s I had read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars), and spent a great deal of time reading Ursula K. Le Guin's newer, more political works (I'd been reading her since the 70s). A bit later I began to discover hard science-fiction writers like Stephen Baxter, Liu Cixin, and Andy Weir, as well as visiting and revisiting the classics that had nourished my interest in SF since I first discovered Heinlein and Asimov and Clark as a ten year-old.

Lately, though, I've been especially gratified by Robinson's more recent contributions to my quest for a tinge of optimism. A few nights ago I finished (for the third time) his rather astonishing look at possibility: The Ministry For The Future. The particularly striking element of this long, dense extrapolation of possibility into practicabilty (not sure that's a word, actually), is that since the first time I read it, many of the near-future events depicted reflect current concerns and solutions in process. Nothing's pat, certain, or simple. But the thread of hope is there, and some very interesting ideas are worked through. This is not in any sense a Morrisian utopia, because the revolution Morris envisioned could not have happened without completely destroying the world as he knew it. 

So: I thought it might be helpful to compile a list of works--fiction, non-fiction, political/philosophical, interdisciplinary--that I've been reading or intend to read while I try to  make myself not-crazy. I've decided to begin with what amount to two literary obituaries, because they're still top of mind. [Note: I'm not linking the books mentioned because I don't have any affiliate agreements with booksellers and figure that you know where you shop.]

Reading the Dead

I have an unfortunate ability to discover potentially really inspiring or intellectually challenging writers just before or not long after they die. The first such discovery was the desert writer Ellen Meloy, who wrote The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (Pantheon, 2002). A  blurb for Howard Berkes's interview with Meloy on NPR's "All Things Considered" describes it as "a look at how color and light inform human behavior and in particular, the color turquoise, which ties together cultures from the American Southwest to ancient Persia and Afghanistan." A brief glance through the table of contents and a chapter or two were enough for me to buy it on the spot, and to read it almost immediately. At the time, I was just settling into my career as a design-school educator, still working on my not-yet-abandoned dissertation, getting used to life as a bungalow-owner, and still enormously homesick for the desert southwest. I'd had bypass surgery in 1995 after a trip home to the Owens Valley, and by 2002 I had started working on More News From Nowhere. A couple of years later I picked up a copy of her last book, Eating Stone, and found out that she had died suddenly at 58 in 2004 of a heart ailment. She was only a year older than I was. Only four books. Not fair.

Tatiana Schlossberg published Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have in 2019. On December 8, 2025, she wrote an article for the New Yorker about her experience with a rare form of leukemia: "A Further Shore" (it appeared in the online edition of the magazine on November 22, 2025 as "A Battle With My Blood." She died on December 30, 2025. Again, not fair. But you could read Inconspicuous Consumption, be somewhat heartened, and learn something useful. It's wise, witty, erudite, and should be read by everyone.

Of course, when you get to be as old as I am, and your research focuses on "dead white guys," or "the canon," you rely on solid journalism and criticism to discover younger, promising, multi-colored, -gendered, or ethnically diverse writers who appear in the pages of book reviews (in my case) in The New York Times or The Guardian or The New Yorker or The Idler or New Scientist. My tastes are eclectic and often whimsical. So my discoveries are often serendipitous and almost always surprise me. 

As I work on finishing More News From Nowhere, I'm going through several stacks of recent acquisitions with an eye toward annotating my sources, and in the next few posts I want to "out" some of the most thought-provoking works that have come to my attention recently.  I've divided my stacks into related volumes, and will offer them up in sequence to keep the posts short. 

I hope friends, followers, and accidental readers might find these helpful if you, like I, are finding the world as it is increasingly difficult to navigate. Good books with good ideas and helpful outlooks seem always to have a place in our lives, whether their writers are still with us or not. 

If you have suggestions to make in any of the categories I'll be including, please let me know--and offer your own observations about their worth. 

Topics to come: Enough, Analog, Slow, and various aspects of political economy and Tikkun Olam [link is to search results on The Farm]

Image notes: Whenever possible I like to exploit the good will of organizations I support, like Wikimedia Commons and the Public Domain Review, so while looking for depictions of "utopia" I was pretty sure that an image of this segment of Mars would show up. But the colors here were a real surprise, so I thought it might be interesting to see what the ESA came up with to describe the image: 

This colour-coded topographic image shows part of Utopia Planitia, a large basin on Mars. It was created from data collected by ESA’s Mars Express on 9 November 2024 (orbit 26327) and is based on a digital terrain model of the region. 

A wide, horizontal view of a planetary surface shown in cool turquoise and greenish-yellow tones. The terrain looks smooth in places and mottled in others, with faint circular shapes suggesting shallow craters. Subtle colour variations ripple across the surface, giving it a softly textured, almost painted appearance.  

When I was reading the Mars trilogy, I really wanted some good photos, and this would have been wonderful to use as a bookmark.

Coming to Terms With Technological Change

Olivetti Lettera 22

For over thirty years I've been wondering how to approach emerging questions introduced by innovations in information technology.  At first (in the '80s) I accepted new-fangled objects like computers and screens almost without question. And then I happily embraced e-mail, primarily because it enabled me to keep in more frequent touch with my father, who had been an eager early-adopter. During the last fifteen or so years of his life (he died at 83 in 2004) we enjoyed a lively correspondence that had been enhanced by the ability to exchange messages much more quickly than we could by post--although we continued using the older tech in order to include family members who hopped on the bandwagon more slowly. 

We were both less receptive toward portable telephones, although I reluctantly bought an early Nokia when my mother was ill and I was teaching, although land-line phones sufficed for everything but emergencies. But borrowing a friend's mobile phone in 1995 for a solo road trip to California (only weeks before I underwent bypass surgery) made portability's uses even clearer. It still took some active persuasion for me to buy my first iPhone, but one of my students convinced me of its efficiency, and I fell under Apple's spell.  I still have that old silverback, which had to be replaced within a year or so, but have reluctantly upgraded only when I had to. It's really too bad that Apple was, from the beginning, so committed to planned obsolescence that it would never develop anything that didn't need to be modified on a frequent schedule. Fast tech was born at the dawn of the era of fast food, fast fashion, and ever-increasing waste.

Oddly enough, my first gig at the Art Institute of Dallas was teaching "Computer Literacy" in 1989. I'm not sure why I was hired, except that I had been a TA at UTD in the computer science lab before a real teaching assistantship opened up. But by the time I became a full-time humanities instructor, I had realized that a course website would help me communicate better with my students and make it possible to provide resources for them that our high-tech multi-media focused college couldn't yet supply. 

So I bought a domain, started learning how to use Adobe PageMill, and created a site that became known as "Owldroppings" (don't ask). I switched over to Adobe Creative Suite when I got a free teaching copy, and that provided me with better tools for design and image manipulation. A couple of students hosted the site over the years, and I eventually learned enough about maintaining it to take over its management. Not long after that, a colleague convinced me that I really needed to start a blog. And so, nearly nineteen years ago, on June 22, 2007, I wrote this: 

I swore I would never do this. Who wants to read my stuff, anyway? But pressures mount in an academic/technical environment, and I was seduced by somebody else's blog.

I grew more enthusiastic about the enterprise as I got into it; then, of course, life got in the way and my output dwindled. But I have kept it up, if intermittently. The websites not so much.

My distaste for other social media, however, has remained steadfast in most ways. I've never had a Facebook or Twitter account, having been pretty ferocious in my opposition to what they and similar platforms were putting out from the day they were launched, despite the fact that my children and many other family members eagerly opened accounts on one or more of them. 

I actually had an Instagram account for a few years because I thought it might be good for putting pictures up on the blog, but only ever used it to follow a few bookstores--and recently got rid of it altogether. There is a Quora account (I joined in 2011 because Ursula K. Le Guin had one; but she left shortly after I arrived), on which I still hold forth very occasionally on topics about which I have some expertise. There's also a Pinterest account because it's still a good curatorial tool and substitutes for collections of magazine clippings--although mine has no social value to me or anyone else. My only regret about using it is that when it gets bought up by some greedy megacorp that decides I don't buy enough stuff from the advertisers, I'm outta there and so are all my beguiling boards and images. My feed is increasingly being populated by AI Slop, however, so perhaps it won't take an EMP to drive me away or obliterate my collections.

Which brings me to my current conundrum, confession, and concession. (Don't smirk; I worked hard on that.) 

Remember that course website ("Owldroppings"), the construction of which convinced me that not all modern technology was a waste of time and effort?  It hung around the interwebs for several years, even after I retired, and a couple of my former students decided it was worth preserving. So they deposited bits of it onto The Internet Archive's wonderful, magical Wayback Machine. In the meantime I had redesigned the home page and renamed it "Owl's Farm (The Website)," considered some ideas about what could happen to it, and then let it sit.

I had also constructed a site for what I had once thought might be my final attempt at a doctoral dissertation: a riff on William Morris's utopian novel, News From Nowhere, complete with resources and other materials related to what I called More News From Nowhere. And because I was teaching both Morris's book and mine in a course called "Technology and Utopia" at AiDallas, I published the first draft online. And there it sat. Until last week.

Since early this year I've been trying to reclaim both sites and bring them back to life. But I kept having technical problems with my software (a pre-cloud version of Dreamweaver), my computers (two old Macs running old operating systems), my understanding of how FTP works, and my host (Go Daddy) with whom I've been doing business for twenty years. I got frustrated a couple of times, and backed off when I couldn't understand what I was doing. This lasted for about six months, but last week I decided to try again and was introduced to a new platform that I automatically said NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO to. But the particular salesman I talked to (they call them "Guides") engaged me in conversation long enough for him to get on the Wayback Machine, scrape my material off, slap it into the Ai program, and produce pages that weren't awfully different from what I would have done.

In essence, the program did--in about a half an hour total--everything I had been trying to do since I retired. I feel a bit like Sibling Dex meeting the robot Mosscap for the first time in A Psalm for the Wild Built (thank you, Becky Chambers)!  "Cheese" (my guide; not his real name, but close) managed to convince me, not by using ad-speak or some tech-salesperson language with which I am inadequately familiar, but by showing me. And it's not AI Slop, either. It's my sensibilities tidied up a bit and translated into a newer, cleaner version of what I had constructed all those many years ago. I can edit everything (even code, although it's not code-based), add my own graphics and images, and pretty it up if I want to. I've since been working on both sites as I think about what I want to happen with them, making changes, publishing them, and getting on with my life.

I still have major problems with the current artificial intelligence obsession. I'll go into those in some depth later. I'll also feature a discussion of some of it in the novel. But for now I'm back to writing and editing, and have built (along with my robot, who's very affable and polite, and probably needs a name) workable update of the originals. If you're curious about the earlier material, you can always visit the Wayback Machine, although accessing More News From Nowhere can be confusing, the text has changed significantly, and will not be uploaded until I'm ready for feedback. I also haven't tried looking at older versions of owlfarmer.com. 

Once again, however, the right person has talked me back from absolutism and stridency to a position of reasonableness. I still deplore the latest trends in visual manipulation, although perhaps charts might be a good outlet for "designers" who simply want to type in a few parameters and push a button. But for those of us who learned from scratch how to design and edit code and were pretty successful at it, and who are now older than dirt and not all that good at it any more, this alternative may provide a path forward.

More News From Nowhere* and "Owl's Farm: The Website" are now linked at the top of this blog. "Owl's Farm (The Blog)" and "Owl's Cabinet of Wonders" will stay on Blogger and undergo only a few modifications and updates.

I hope you folks who are still here will stay with me.  

*Note: I am well aware of Nick Cage's song of the same name; the two works share a source of inspiration (Morris's book) and possible thematic elements (according to the Wikipedia account), but I've never heard the song itself. I began working on the material that led to my story in 1992 when I started conducting research on Morris and his critique of modern technology, so I was way ahead of Cage with that title.

Image credit: My first text-producing machine ever was an Olivetti Lettera 22. The photo is from Wikipedia's page, because the one I still own is a rusty, scruffy mess.  My mother had a friend who was an Olivetti salesman in Taiwan, and he gave her the 1961 script version. She gave it to me, and I typed papers on it in college. One professor wrote on the cover of what was otherwise an excellent paper on John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B, "This typewriter could drive a man to drink." Here's what it looked like:

I think there's a technological message in here. Somewhere.

Metaphor and Possibility

McKinney, April 18 2026 (and below)

McKinney, December 30, 2023 (rare winter thunderstorm at sunset)

 
The appearance of mammatus clouds as the weather warms always seems to add a tinge of foreboding to both weather- and news-watching. They're so called because of their resemblance to udders or breasts, and are usually associated with thunderstorms.  I've always been a cloud fan (the atmospheric variety, that is), because of my father's meteorological interests. He had flown over and into Atlantic hurricanes during our time in Bermuda (ca. 1950) and often had a weather station in a back yard wherever we lived. Before I moved to north Texas, however, the most dramatic clouds I was familiar with were the lenticular "Sierra waves" that form regularly over the Owens River Valley. We watched this one develop at sunset during our last visit:

Lone Pine, California, June 2025

My first encounter with mammatus clouds occurred on April 10, 1979, just after I arrived in north Texas, on the day Wichita Falls was hit by an F4 tornado that killed 45 people. Although we were 140 miles away, the local sky was filled with the cloud formations I now always associate with the possibility of really bad storms. I was eight months pregnant with my daughter, and my son and our cats and I spent our first tornado watch in the bathtub, under a mattress. 

What brought all this cloud stuff to mind was an article in this week's New York Times Magazine, "Why Smart Products Have Started to Look Like the Dumb Choice." Nitsuh Abebe writes a column on language for the Magazine, and this one combines two of my particular interests: metaphor and the philosophical assessment of technology. 

Abebe takes us through the evolution of words like "smart" and "dumb" as metaphors, and explains how utterly absurd and problematic the designations have become. Smart phones, homes, TVs, and even kitchen appliances, now demand internet connectivity in order to work. I've been ranting about the notion of planned obsolescence for so long that I can hardly have a conversation with an appliance salesperson without spouting off about why I've had to buy a new refrigerator only ten years after I bought the one I now have to replace. And mine aren't even "smart" because I absolutely refuse to own an electronic object that talks to me. (And no, I do not use Siri.) I live in a hundred year-old house that can't even accommodate an automatic ice maker, so that a fridge that doesn't come with one is actually a selling point. 

Over the past twenty years, I've been working on a bit of speculative fiction that (among other things) imagines a world without electricity. As a thought experiment, this is the perfect exercise for examining our dependence on a now-pervasive technology that was unthinkable only 250 years ago. And the premise isn't built on disaster or dystopia; it's based on choice. The focus of my graduate research was on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, and central to Morris's philosophical approach to art and design was the education of desire. To Morris, human dignity, creativity, comity, and culture were all based on the distinction between need and want. His novel, News From Nowhere, imagined a world where work and art were conjoined rather than opposed. The machines responsible for the polluted air and waters of Victorian Britain were absent from Morris's utopia, and his musings inspired me to think about how the modern, post-industrial, digitally-dictated age might beget something more philosophically satisfying than what we're now experiencing.

Of course, it takes an old Luddite like me to even want to think about a life free of complex machines, but other visions of lower tech, more humane ways of living are emerging as I type. A newish literary genre commonly referred to as "solar punk" has generated a number of novels like Becky Chambers's Monk and Robot books (A Psalm for the Wild Built and A Prayer for the Crown Shy). Many of Ursula K. Le Guin's novels and short stories consider the relationship between need and want and delve deeply into human relationships with technologies. And then, of course, there are the deeply anti-technological and anti-industrial themes of J. R. R. Tolkien's novels. So I don't think it's coincidental that, as Abebe notes in his essay, "more than a quarter of younger Americans are curious about switching to a 'dumbphone.'" I'm also heartened by the growing interest in "retro" tech like vinyl records, portable turntables, and manual typewriters.

The current state of the world, with its various antagonisms--including greed, power hunger, and disregard for the consequences of the technologies we've fostered and embraced--doesn't offer many of us much hope that things will get better any time soon. But perhaps one way to approach the problems is to look for better metaphors: Sibling Dex in A Psalm for the Wild Built goes looking for cricket song. And Mosscap, the Robot, goes looking for what human beings need. 

I've been thinking lately, as I watch the fairyland of fireflies arise in our garden each evening (they're scarce anywhere else in the neighborhood, but because we don't use pesticides, we offer a sort of firefly utopia), I wonder if maybe fostering fireflies might be a good place to start. Or using the plenitude of cloud formations to represent the multitude of ways we could make things better. Mammatus clouds, for example, might be seen as motherly rather than scary, since they often signal the approach of thunderstorms that bring much-needed rain). 

A bit of silly speculation and wishful thinking, perhaps, but an alternative to spending time thinking along lines that will only make things worse: "The Cloud" as a "storage space" in which to cram all the digital output of the energy- and resource-consuming machines billionaires keep building to feed the coffers of people who don't really need any of it but produce simply because they can. 

I won't deal with this now, but we might start considering very seriously just who is going to benefit from all that stored "data" and all that AI.