One-Way Street

Little Dorrit on a Little Screen

Ann Kirschner conducts an interesting experiment that I would be interested in conducting myself. She compared the experience of reading Little Dorrit on four platforms: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and the iPhone. At stake is more than a consumer choice. She asks herself, "Do I love books or do I love reading" In other words, how important are books as culturally significant objects. Are they simply the only possible medium for a rich narrative form, or a symbol in a cultural system that distinguishes between low (TV, movies, rock music) and high (books, films)?

Kirschner's trial has a surprising conclusion: the iPod is hands down the best reading experience--better than her grad school Penguin edition, and better than the Kindle, which "does almost nothing that an iPhone can't do better — and most important, the iPhone is always with me." Besides, Kindles are for oldsters. She says most Kindle readers she knows are above 50 years old, suggesting that the Kindle won't have a long product life. 

From what I've seen--mostly on the CTA--Kindle readers are usually twentysomethings, and E Ink technologies are still relatively new, but Kirschner has a point: it's all about device convergence, and all about the story.

Rowing Into the Future

Walking through the “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe” exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, I paused before a monitor playing a grainy film of Fuller speaking to a group of college students some time during the 1960s. He looked, and talked, like an IBM engineer on peyote. I wonder what his audience made of Fuller. He was speaking about how the education system trammels the mind, a very au courant topic, but his volubility was driven by his undying love for the radio he operated in World War I. The campus talk was a portentous moment: the last prophet of technological utopia speaking to the last vanguard of unfettered humanism.

Fuller started his career as a loopy visionary and canny businessman with a scheme to cover the globe with 4D Lightful Towers, which were glass and steel towers serviced by zeppelins. He wanted to place them everywhere, including the poles. The scheme was as audacious in its conception as it was crude in its design. In the 1920s Fuller had not yet developed his considerable skills as a designer. The 4D Lightful Towers—the wordplay hinted at his love of language—were the template for every major plan he ever devised. He never lost his fascination with the idea of stuffing people into hives.

Fuller refined his vision of a phalanstère throughout his long career. The most enduring product of his Fourierian labors was the geodesic dome, most commonly applied to the design of a piece of playground equipment beloved by a generation of grade school children, including me. As his design skills developed he came up with increasingly more intriguing vehicle designs, the coolest of which was his Aerodynamic Dymaxion car, a cross between a Volkswagen van and a B-29 bomber that Fuller designed to accompany his Dymaxion house (above).

Like all prophets, Fuller was not a modest man. “I am convinced that human knowledge by others of what this book has to say is essential to human survival,” he declares in the foreword to his book Critical Path. His brand of technological messianism fell out of favor by the 1960s only to be revived and transformed in the current decade through our mania for green technologies. 

By now we know we’re probably going to have to give up on our desire for a flying car; it’s too polluting. Late in his life Fuller, ever prescient, seemed to realize this, so he built himself a catamaran version of a scull. An actual Fuller scull is on display in the final room of the “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe” exhibit. Everyone focuses on the Montreal Biosphère when remembering Fuller, but, to my mind, this scull is a better way to understand the future as Fuller conceived of it: rowing along a smooth river in an over-engineered yet elegant craft, at one with nature.

Factories of Literature

If one believes in the death of the book—I don’t—then its demise would seem to be hastened by the publishing industry’s current economic troubles, which, it should be noted, are relatively mild compared to some other industries I could name. Replacements for the book and its creator, the author, can be found everywhere. A Silicon Valley startup called Vook wants to blend fiction, video and Twitter streams into a multimedia platform for digital reading devices. The multimedia book will be too complex for a single author. Rather, books, or whatever, will be produced by teams of writers working like software coders—writers distributed across the globe working simultaneously to produce texts for online consumption.

That’s one model, anyway. Popmatter’s Rob Horning laments,

if books become a digitized commodity, the money won’t be there to produce high-quality ones (and authors all become de facto volunteers). So then we’ll have pseudo-books instead—a cordoned-off collection of curated blog posts masquerading as timely books, distributed online to hand-held reading devices along the lines of Kindle or a netbook.

Whether or not Horning is right is one question. But it’s worth looking at the last great revolution in authorship and the text to determine how concerned we need to be about digital texts.

The entire publishing and periodical industry assumed its current form during the explosion in mass printing technology during the 1830s. The number of books sold in France increased tenfold during the decade. By mid-century French newspapers had over 200,000 subscribers. “The multiplication of readers is the multiplication of loaves,” declared Victor Hugo (above), and “factories of literature” such as Balzac, Dumas, Eugene Sue, and Hugo worked feverishly to meet the increased demand for words. In 1848 Dumas claimed his novels provided work for 8,160 people. Balzac worked 16 hours a day at his fiction, gulping 50 cups of coffee to keep himself going. Balzac himself noted, “We have products; we no longer have works.” Anticipating the Web 2.0 technologies that allow authors to sell their works directly to readers, Balzac hatched a scheme to sell his fiction directly to readers, bypassing publishers altogether. The plan didn’t get very far.

The greatest threat to the traditional publishing industry occurred when new periodicals emerged with a whole new business model: instead of relying on a small, cultured and well-heeled readership that could afford to pay high subscription fees, the new periodicals relied primarily on advertising fees for revenue. Because most periodicals of the time were aligned with one political faction or another, the ad-based periodicals turned to fiction for a more subtle form of polemics. Thus was born the serial novel and the feuilleton.

Serialized fiction in periodicals gave us the massive nineteenth-century novel (sometimes critical parts were left out of the serial version of a novel to encourage people to buy the book) and the short story. Travel writing also emerged as a major genre during this period, as did the regional novel in reaction to the largely urban fiction of the feuilletons.

Interestingly in light of our current concerns about the decline of criticism in our newspapers, the feuilletons were accused of destroying literary criticism. Circulation demands and editorial policies meant that critics had to conform to a particular political viewpoint or, at the very least, not anger the paper’s subscribers.

The result of the birth of the mass publishing industry in the 1830s was the golden age of the novel, as well as the author as popular culture hero. When Victor Hugo died in 1885, two million French citizens visited the Arc de Triomphe, where his body lied in state. The novel lost its pre-eminent position in popular culture with the emergence of competing technologies, including, as especially, the cinema. But the genre has also remained stuck in the same basic techno-industrial model as in Hugo’s day. Really, we would be lucky to have a new technology enable new factories of literature.

Facebook

American Conservatives’ campaign to ensure Barack Obama fails is well under way, and now they want us to boycott Facebook. The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash winges about the social networking site in the classic conservative style, which is combination of priggish anachronisms (“I bought cassette tapes until 1999”), name calling (“Facetards”), and a high school sophomore’s command of irony (“it seemed only a matter of time before she started posting the nudes, some shots I took when I was trying to break into Washington journalism (I was young and needed the money).”).

I’ve been on Facebook for a few months now and, sure, I can see how it could eat your brain after a while, but no more so than reading too much Fred Barnes—or any Fred Barnes, come to think of it. I resisted joining Facebook for a long time, mostly because I already had one online presence to maintain—this blog—and that took enough time. But as the economy tanked and the anxieties intensified, it was nice to be able to check in with other people.

Currently I have 55 Facebook friends, and one of them is a dog. I’m practically a social outcast compared to a lot of people I know who have hundreds of Facebook friends. But all of these people I actually know in real life and consider friends, including Wolfie the dog. Like everyone else, I post photos. I look at other people's photos. I update my status whenever I’m so inclined. Sometimes that means twice a week, sometimes once every two weeks. One of my Facebook friends once posted a status update in which she claimed updating your status more than once a week meant you were a loser. A few days later, she resumed her regular thrice-weekly updates.

Facebook is a bit like high school in that it induces self-consciousness. Like all conversations, once you get going you get stuck on the rails of language, the metonymic thrust from one topic to another that can leave you feeling a little stupid when you’re done. Everyone reveals too much on Facebook, except when they’re not revealing as much as they’d like to.

As for the evils of social networking, if you’re an information worker, chances are your social network is abstract to one degree or another anyway. Studies show that most Americans are much more likely to socialize with people who share their positions in the political economy than share a physical space like a town or a neighborhood. In other words, we’re more likely to socialize with someone in the next cubical pod than with someone who lives on our block.

Matt Labash would rather sit alone at home, hugging his tax breaks and listening to The Best of Rush Limbaugh on cassette tape. If that’s how he wants to spend the Obama presidency, that’s his choice. The rest of us will be on Facebook, exchanging banalities while we watch the world change.

Pay2Play

I still don’t have an iPhone. Right now I’m stuck between waiting for the next generation of iPhone (the “2,1”) and getting one now before they become passé. (One friend hints that they may already be there). In any case, I’m also still trying to arrange my own personal stimulus package, so no major purchases are imminent.

It’s too bad because the iPhone is still the closest gadget to my dream object: a Moleskine with OSX. When I do get around to buying an iPhone I’m going to buy Pay2Play. The game was developed by Juan Rubio, a native Chicagoan now living Vancouver. Based on the old DopeWars game, you play an Illinois governor with 30 days to go before your impeachment. You wheel and deal Senate seats and other state jobs for cash and favors.

Apple says it needs an “unexpected additional time for review” before it can approve Pay2Play for distribution on its app store, so I’ve not been able to ascertain the veracity of the game. The idea of an Illinois governor frantically trying to sell a Senate seat before he has to escape the state is realistic, but I don’t know if the game also comes with delusions of grandeur, a harridan of a wife, and Gary Cooper movies on endless loop. Also, because Pay2Play is a computer game, it has to have a goal. In real Illinois politics, pay to play is an end in itself, for the goal is not to escape but to stay exactly where you are, as if political clout will fend off death. This is, for instance, the strategy of Cook County Board President Todd Stroger, known locally as Urkel for his bespeckled, chirpy-voiced imitation of his late father, master pay-to-player John Stroger.

I don’t know that being Rod Blagojevich is anyone’s idea of a good time, even in a 3x4 inch space. But computer games are like dreams: the symbolic resolutions of waking life problems. Pay2Play replays the experience of turning something intangible that you already have (your social network) for something more tangible (economic security) before economic disaster strikes. The game isn’t about unseemly yet comic political favor-trading; it’s about mastery and control. After all, Blagojevich knew he was eventually going to lose his job, too, one way or another.

Podcasts from the Heptarchy

One of my first graduate courses in English was a research methods class taught by the department's sole medievalist. A few weeks into the term, once we got to know the professor well enough to ask such questions, a student asked him why he got interested in medieval literature in the first place. His answer was immediate and thoughtful, suggesting he'd been asked that question a lot. He mentioned the influence of a great teacher and an opportunity to do work in a relatively untrodden upon area of literary studies. Most of all, he said, was the period was appealing because it was so weird.

Some of that weirdness comes across in the podcasts on Old English literature by Stuart Lee, an English professor and occasional Director of Computing Services at Oxford University, which explains the podcasts. I'm a regular listener of Lee's podcast recordings of his lectures, available here and on iTunes. Each lecture begins with some shuffling of papers and a plea to mute cellphones. The lectures provide general historical context for the culture and literature of the pre-Conquest period. Lee delivers his lectures in the affable but exasperated tone typical of medievalists, who must deal continually with  misunderstandings about their period and the long shadow of J.R.R. Tolkien. Lee is an engaging lecturer--he typically speaks for 52 minutes or so without a break--and he keeps things moving along at a brisk pace. The only problem with the podcast is that Lee distributes handouts and shows film clips (most of them from really bad movies, an occupational hazard, I would think) that are not available online, at least outside the Oxford network. Podcast subscribers miss out on the film clips, which make the students giggle, as well as the beautiful illuminated manuscripts and the lines of Old English poetry Lee reads with flawless pronunciation.

In the latest podcast, on the science, religion, and magic of the Old English period, Lee displays a picture of a crucifix. Evidently it's quite an object. "I grew up with that crucifix," Lee comments. If that point is lost to podcast listeners, the rest of the lecture is fascinating. Lee specializes in the period between the Anglo-Saxon migrations in the fifth century to the Norman conquest in 1066--a huge period of time. England as we know it emerged during this period, and the story Lee tells in each podcast is how this nation came into being. In the religion podcast he explains why the ruling Anglo-Saxon elite dropped their Germanic belief system for Christianity. The pagan beliefs were more fun--lots of slaughters and feasts--but Christianity was better at addressing some of the knottier questions of existence, like the afterlife. Compared to the church of the High Middle Ages (or Christianity today, for that matter), Anglo-Saxon Christianity was a casual affair. Priests could marry. Ordinary people could marry and divorce as local circumstances allowed, to the complete indifference of ecclesiastical authorities. The Bible was freely translated into the vernacular. The Christian virtue of suffering was lost on the warlike Anglo-Saxons, who still saw the necessity of making other people suffer.  Lee tiptoes around magic and pre-Christian beliefs, mostly because they're not well documented, and partly because they've morphed into irritating (to medievalists) New Age pan-theisms. "Not quite accurate," is how Lee characterizes these still fashionable beliefs.

Lee never directly addresses the main question a dilettante medievalist like myself would ask: just how accurate is Lord of the Rings, anyway? From listening to his podcasts I've gotten the impression that while Lee respects Tolkien's work, it's not quite accurate. Still, the wanderlust and nostalgia for lost homelands in Rings comes through in Lee's Anglo-Saxons. So does their humor and their fierce loyalties to family and community. Maybe next term Lee will come up with a video podcast. If he does, I'll certainly watch it on my (still to be purchased) iPod Touch.

Bricked

When I heard that Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters won the album of the year Grammy, I was inspired to revisit two musicians that I've always admired more than truly enjoyed. I interested was piqued further after reading Ben Ratliff's thoughtful remarks about River and the whole idea of a jazz album winning such a high-profile award. Alas, the morning of the Grammy awards my iPod bricked. It now feebly alternates between the Apple logo and an image of a sick iPod, and now my iMac wants nothing to do with it. Without an iPod I can't buy anything on iTunes  because my iMac's hard drive is filled, so I've reached the physical limits of my music collection. I can't buy anything new.

I have another iPod, a 2 gig Nano I use almost exclusively for running, using the Nike + system to track my runs. But I have something like 3,000 songs in my collection, so using the Nano as my primary iPod requires some tiresome song management, which is precisely why I continued using my old 40 gig click wheel. Even though I couldn't take it out in public without a slight sense of shame at its monochromatic screen and bulky profile, I kind of liked the click wheel model: it was the last iPod with a perfectly proportioned interface. It's still the most elegant iPod.

Of course, a bricked iPod means a trip to the Apple store for a shiny new iPod Touch, but Apple's technology is temporarily ahead of itself. With the new 32 gig flash drive the iPod Touch finally has a practical storage capacity, but the new model is $500 and history shows that Apple lowers its prices after the initial buyer frenzy. As cool as the Touch is, I'm resentful about my click wheel bricking almost three years to the day after I purchased it. With its complex interface and feature overload, how long will a Touch last?

I wonder how many people still maintain iPod playlists a year or two after purchase. I did, but lately I've gotten lazy and relied on the shuffle feature and a manual free-association trip through my collection. Ironically, my iPod ceased working during a period in which I was consciously trying to use it regularly again. I hadn't grown bored with the unit itself; I'd grown bored with my music. That's why I've lost interest in selecting songs to go on my Nano and I haven't made a playlist in a long time. The same phenomenon has occurred in iPhoto. I can't remember the last time we published a photo album online.

Call me a gullible Mac Head, but I suspect that a new iPod will renew my enthusiasm for my music collection, just as a new iMac--another major purchase I need to make very soon--will revive my interest in digital photography. Apple detractors claim, with some justification, that the company's marketing strategy is mostly about making people junk their perfectly functional iPods and iMacs for incrementally better models. And yet I wonder if new technologies have a defamiliarization effect, making our old familiar content strange enough to force us to look at it again, as if we were seeing it for the first time. The Touch interface is genuinely new, and we'll be seeing a lot of that sort of thing in future computing devices, but for the most part the critics are right when they charge Apple's latest releases are more eye candy than anything substantively new. When genres become more and more dependent on the technologies of their mediums, they run the risk of suffering from the same obsolescence as the underlying technology. We cease to see (or hear) cultural objects very clearly. Maybe from time to time we need to change the window through which we access our content.

I just hope that the price of the 32 gig iPod Touch comes down before Jason Moran releases a new album, or I don't know what I'm going to do.

Air Guitar

On Christmas Day I had the chance to play Guitar Hero on a Wii system. It was a Christmas gift to my nephew or my brother-in-law, it's not really clear which.  On one level, the game makes perfect sense. But on another, there's something unsettling about it as well. Interpreting the experience of performing in a rock band for a video game seems completely natural. The audience demographic for video games and guitarist music is pretty much the same, and sooner or later someone was going to fuse the narcissistic fantasies of rock stardom and video games.

And yet Guitar Hero is yet another example of a collective experience rendered virtual. To put it in Benjaminian terms, the game turns erfahrung into erlebnis; it turns a contingent and transmissible experience into a repetitive and closed-ended one. A crucial part of being a guitar hero is creating music, not just aping other musicians, and the experience of being a rock star is exactly what's being conveyed in a rock song. In other words, the subtext of every rock song is rock stardom itself. Even the game's performance scenario isn't all it appears to be. You must satisfy the demands of an inscrutable other--a crowd of dancing zombies--and play a repertoire that has more to do with corporate license agreements than drugs, sex and rock and roll. On stage with your anonymous band mates, you are alone within a group. In this sense Guitar Hero is a lot like work.

Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, the hosts of Sound Opinions, recently denounced the game, asserting that parents would be better off giving their children real guitars. Kot and De DeRogatis have a point: by the time one masters all levels of the game one could be a serviceable rhythm guitarist in a respectable garage band. In fact, I've avoided game counsels partly because the skills they cultivate seem like a developmental dead end. It's possible, though, that Guitar Hero may be an exception. Others, like Slate contributor Joel Johnson,  have countered that Guitar Hero opens the door for a revival of amateur musicianship, which, in turn, will make better music fans and, eventually, higher quality music for all. This claim isn't as absurd or exaggerated as it may first appear. Guitar Hero doesn't teach notation or time schemes, but the basic concepts are present.

Playing Guitar Hero isn't without its frustrations, but it does force one to listen to music like a musician. The level one songs--the only ones the game let us play--are guitarist anthems of surprising complexity. Even a primitive thumper like Fog Hat's "Slow Ride" has tricky passages. Heart's gimmicky "Barracuda" has those churning power cords, of course, but also some off-tempo runs in the bridges. Most intriguing are the practice screens in which each song is broken down into its component parts, revealing much more intricate structures than the verse/chorus alternation that's usually sufficient to guide a listening experience of a rock song. If the mysteries of "Slow Ride" can be uncovered by a video game, then maybe there's hope for guitarist music after all.

My 2007

This isn't a best of list. I wouldn't pretend to have read or seen or listened enough to designate anything as the best of its kind.  Rather, I've put together an idiosyncratic list of the books, films, buildings and technologies that I learned the most from in 2007.

Santiago Calatrava, The Chicago Spire. (Also here and here and here and here.)  Calatrava's 2,000-foot twisting tower is a high risk, high reward proposition. It could be the point around which the entire skyline coheres--what the Sears Tower was supposed to have been but never was. Or it could be an overweening presence that Chicagoans will be faintly embarrassed about, like an impulse purchase that we later regretted. Or it could be something in between, like the fat-man-in-the-bathtub renovation of Soldiers Field that we've learned to live with. Whatever it turns out to be, the Spire is emblematic of a renewed sense of architectural daring in the birthplace of modernist architecture.

The Kindle. Tech nerds have already dismissed Amazon's ebook reader based on a quick glance at Engadget (one wag said the Kindle looked like it was designed by the prop manager for Space 1999), but avid readers love it--at least those who have been lucky enough to get their hands on one. The furious debate about the Kindle has revealed how we read in 2007. It turns out that a lot of people are already reading on screens. It also turns out that people want to read more than books on an ebook reader. They want all the disparate material they read on a PC--HTML pages, PDFs, emails, Word documents, blogs--on a device that's as portable and easy on the eyes as a hardcover book. The Kindle has the potential to be not just the first commercially successful ebook reader, but an extension of the Internet as the new center of the public sphere. In other words, the Kindle isn't the death of the book, as some have feared, but the means to turn the Internet into a book.

John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet. This was the year I started reading Goethe seriously, and he stands out from the vein of post-romantics, modernists, and post-modernists I usually read not just in the awe-inspiring equipoise of his prose and poetry, but in his exemplary life. Michel Foucault and many others have pondered how to break down the barriers between art and life, but Goethe actually did it. No wonder Nietzsche cited him as one of the prototypes of the Übermensch.

Daniel Kraus, Musician. Continuing with the theme of art and life, Daniel Kraus's documentary on the Chicago jazz musician Ken Vandermark is a clear-eyed look at the reality of a working artist's daily life. Most profiles of artists in the media arise from the appearance of an artwork and, as a result, tend to be little more than extensions of the publicity apparatus. Kraus's film doesn't try to get to the "real" person behind the work. Instead, Kraus takes a sociological approach by showing the prosaic struggles necessary to maintain a career as a creative artist in the early twenty-first century. And Kraus doesn't neglect the art: Musician also conveys the power of Vandermark's performances.

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down. Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was more fun to read, and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End struck closer to home,  but Man Gone Down was the most moving novel I read all year. None of these novels were flawless: Wao had structural gaps, End resolved itself with a creaky plot device, and Man could have been 50 pages shorter. But each was distinguished by its narrative voice: Diaz's logorrheaic free indirect style, Ferris's innovative second person, and Thomas's realist first person. But of the three I think Thomas's novel will turn out to be the most influential and enduring. Plus, Thomas understands the vernacular of the tradition in which he's working better than Diaz or Ferris. Lots of novelists have tried to emulate the nineteenth-century novel form, usually by foisting all kinds of colorful minor characters upon the reader in misguided imitation of Dickens. Thomas takes an entirely different tack, combining Richard Wright with William Dean Howells--existentialist dread with a keen appreciation of New York City as spectacle. Man Gone Down is about seeing and invisibility as well as the city as a place of constant threat and unsuspected opportunity.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Okay, so this is a DVD release of a made-for-TV miniseries, but Criterion's DVD package is a major event in the film world nevertheless. (Besides, this has been an extraordinarily busy year for me and I haven't seen nearly as many films as I wanted to. DVDs have pretty much been my cinema for 2007.) Fassbinder's 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel is demanding on several levels, not the least of which is Fassbinder's manic dramatic sensibility.  In its eccentric, excessive ambition, Berlin is one of the touchstones of modernist European cinema. Because of its formidable length and poor video transfers, it's never been accessible to a wide audience. The Criterion DVDs solved the poor video transfer problem, at least.

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise. I'll have more on this book in a future post--I'm nearly done reading it. It could have been called Everything You Want to Know about Modern Classical Music But Were Afraid to Ask Lest You Have to Sit Through a Clanking, Screeching Avant-Garde Work for Four Orchestras and a Barking Dog. This book has made a lot of "best of" lists because Ross managed to execute the daunting task he set before himself--tell the history of the twentieth century through its music, and make the history a pleasure to read. More importantly, he makes us actually want to listen to those unloved experimental pieces from classical music's post-Stravinsky period.

SimApocalypse

Back when I had spare time--i.e., before I had children--I sometimes played SimCity. As the game grew more realistic with each edition, SimCity grew more engrossing and more frustrating. I became exasperated with my lazy Sims' refusal to walk more than a couple of blocks to see a doctor. I proved to be as inept at managing city budgets as I was at managing my own budget. Whenever a coal-burning power plant collapsed in a toxic heap, I was invariably short of funds to build a cleaner one to replace it, forcing me to raise taxes during brownouts. My department heads were supposed to help me avoid this sort of problem, but their contradictory, at times nonsensical advice induced the same sputtering incoherence as Mayor Daley is exhibiting these days. I kept playing, though, spurred on by the game's combination of whimsical humor and authoritarian power.  The feeling of omnipotence is a nice complement to the cloistered effect of being on a PC for long periods of time. 

Yesterday Electronic Arts launched the latest edition of the SimCity franchise, SimCity Societies. SimCity has always included pollution as a factor in its games, but it's never been as important as placing a health clinic on every corner. The latest version ups the environmental ante, making environmental factors like rising sea levels a much more important element in the game.  Because the game was created in eco-friendly San Francisco, you can bet you'll have to disperse windmills throughout your city and make sure your waste water is recycled, or you'll hear plenty of loud complaints from your Sims--and Sims are a cranky lot. Supposedly, in this edition Sims can be induced to walk to work, but in my experience Sims wouldn't leave their houses if you issued them flying carpets.

If you can stand the whining, I would think creating a putrid metropolis would be most people's first impulse. The temptation to hasten global disaster is all part of the pleasures of apocalyptic thinking. The Western tradition is rich with apocalyptic brooding, and that strain of thought is just below the surface of some neo-conservative and Christian fundamentalist rhetoric. For this reason one would think these people would have been among the first to embrace Al Gore's message about global warming. Anyway, as any veteran of SimCity knows, after one has completed the sewer system and built the airport, you start to hope for a tornado or an alien attack to give you an excuse to clean up some of the less successful parts of your city. (Sims never die, but their houses burst into pieces very elegantly.) In short, disaster is all part of the pursuit of social perfection.

It's interesting that the game makers continue to carefully limit themselves to a single city, even when playing with global ecological disaster. A player is polluting one small corner of the earth, or constructing an oasis so rigorously green you can drink out of sidewalk puddles. This seems entirely consistent with our current approach to global warming: the solution rests solely in personal consumer choices; we're not going to force our national politicians to do anything about it, no matter how many hectoring columns Thomas Friedman writes. I once played the SimCity franchise's first foray into eco-politics, SimEarth. The game wasn't successful, in part, because of the totalized nature of the game. The Gaia theory upon which the game was based dictated that one oil spill meant your whole planet was doomed, and, since there were no department heads to blame things on, it was your fault alone. It was despairing. On the other hand, the rewards for keeping a healthy planet weren't exactly obvious. In my ecologically sound world, antelope munched on grass. Rabbits hopped around. It was boring. I longed to create one fetid corner of my world--one Gary, Indiana in paradise, just to keep things real.

SimCity Societies may end up teaching us the limits of our desire to clean up our world. Speaking for myself, I have a limited capacity for good acts that don't have an immediate payback. I've noticed, for instance, that the more I recycle the less I floss. If I buy the game and use up my thirty minutes of free time a week while both my children nap, I know I'll probably create a low-tax sinkhole and try to distract my Sims with stadiums and plenty of health care clinics. And this time I'll ignore my department heads.