Burnin’

Abercorn Commons is the first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified shopping mall to open in the U.S., and it’s located nearby in Savannah.

According to Savannah Morning News, Melaver Inc.–the site’s developer–is incorporating water, energy and materials conservation techniques to meet these standards. The elements include a cistern that harvests rainwater for irrigation; waterless urinals; energy efficient heating and air-conditioning systems; and a white roof coating to reflect heat.

The commercial real estate project is also home to the first ever LEED certified McDonald’s. The McDonald’s features large windows that allow daylight to reach 75 percent of the interior of the restaurant, reducing lighting costs. The restaurant also boasts bike racks, preferred parking for hybrid vehicles, porous pavement and a white roof.

Caterina is pointing to Smoking Dope With Thomas Pynchon by Andrew Gordon. It’s a critical take on Vineland, the Pynchon novel set in northern California. Humbolt County by my reading.

Part I: Entropy

I consider Pynchon a quintessential American novelist of the nineteen sixties because he came of age as an artist during that entropic decade and shows its stamp in all his work: V. (1963) covers the century from 1898 to 1956, but most of it was composed during the Kennedy years, and its zany mood reflects the liberatory burst of energy of the Thousand Days, that peculiar mix of Camelot idealism and Cold War paranoia also found in Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is set in the relatively innocent sixties of the early Beatles (when they were still the Adorable Moptops and the Fab Four) and of legal LSD. Nevertheless, all the attraction, danger, and destructive tendencies of the New Left and the counterculture are prophesied in the insidious underground web of the Trystero. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), ostensibly about World War II, was written during the Vietnam War and indirectly reflects that topsy turvy time; Pynchon also sneaks in references to Malcolm X, Kennedy, and Nixon. Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow discovers what many young Americans found out in the late sixties: that our Magical Mystery Tour in the Zone of Vietnam was a love affair with death, that the war never ends, and that your own country is your enemy. We weren’t in Kansas anymore, the Wicked Witch of the West was after us, but there was no Yellow Brick Road and no kindly Wizard to come to the rescue. Finally, Vineland (1990) is the sixties revisited from the perspective of the eighties, about all the unresolved issues, about our sympathy for the Devil and our betrayal of the revolution, and about the long arm of the Nixonian counterrevolution continuing under Reagan. And whether or not his four novels are set in the sixties, they are ultimately all of the sixties, and always conjure up the contradictory moods of that decade and evoke the peculiarly mixed response.

Pynchon is a recluse on the order of Salinger. Not much is known about him, nor his habits. Maybe for this reason, I found this bit on Wikipedia intriguing.

His earliest American ancestor, William Pynchon, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, and thereafter a long line of Pynchon descendants found wealth and repute on American soil. Pynchon’s family background and aspects of his ancestry have provided source material for his fictions, particularly in the Slothrop family histories related in “The Secret Integration” (1964) and Gravity’s Rainbow.

It makes sense, his keeping a low pro. Rich people are often brought up to do so. Whatever Pynchon’s motivations, I appreciate that there are writers in our world Oprah can’t interest, nor touch.

New York Times looks at non-fiction master, Gay Talese, in this morning’s edition.

Mr. Talese, the son of a tailor, carries himself like a papal guard and, now that his nudist phase is over, is the best-dressed writer in New York. He makes Tom Wolfe look like someone who collects Mark Twain outfits from a thrift shop.

According to The Creative Coast Initiative, the Savannah area is home to more than 300 knowledge-based businesses, representing multiple industries including: internet/web design, digital media, consulting, software development, among others. In my estimation, one new startup that has a real chance of standing out and becoming an international player is Evoca, a spontaneous podcast provider.

The democratic impulse of the Internet, the ubiquity of the cell phone, and the power of oral expression have convinced us of one thing: it’s time to mobilize the voices. Our concept is simple. Just call one of our world-wide numbers from your cell phone or Skype account and record a message. Or you can upload a recording from your digital recorder. We’ll automatically store whatever you give us in your account. From there, you can organize your recordings, you can share them with the world, or you can keep them all to yourself. It’s spontaneous, it’s far-reaching, and, most importantly, it’s so easy. At Evoca, we intend to enrich the world by empowering your voice.

I signed up for their free service yesterday. Now I have five voice recordings of me performing my poems to offer. Just like that.

Evoca is basically Flickr for voice. A social media site with a million possibilities for users.

Beaufort has two of the top dining experiences available in the county, a fact Hilton Headers might have some trouble digesting. If so, my advise is take a Tums and point your boat or vehicle towards historic downtown Beaufort, where you can dine in the California-meets-Charleston nautically-restored room known as Saltus River Grill. High ceilings, raw ahi tuna, Oregon pinot noir–that’s the ticket.

Then come back for the coup, cross the river to Lady’s Island and take your first hard right onto an access road, and find Bateaux tucked into the splendor of the marsh. We dined there recently, and the hostess showed us to our window table where we proceeded to bask in the glory of the view, the company, terrific Portugese wine aged for 12 years, fresh salads, delicious entrees all around and the best rice pudding I’ve tasted in my life. Not cheap, but not outrageous, Bateaux is a must visit for anyone–local or otherwise–who appreciates the pursuit of dining perfection.

A few days ago, Pat Conroy, one of the Lowcountry’s more notable characters spoke out against unchecked development. He said, “I think southern Beaufort County is both lost and ruined.” Pretty tough words. For sure, the area is radically changed from Conroy’s youth, as is the rest of America. But for the newcomers fleeing a cold, gray, North, Hilton Head and Bluffton are the embodiment of that paradisical vision Conroy so longs for.

And it appears the place still has some fight in her. The Town of Hilton head is in battle with the Adventure Inn, over that property’s desire to build fire pits, bathrooms and other structures (look, tiki bars!) on the extreme beachside line of their land. I’m for the town in this. Stay the hell back from the dunes.

According to the Island Packet story, the inn’s owners say the town is incorrectly identifying the property as dunes and that environmental officials have said there are no dunes on the property.

Original redevelopment plans the inn submitted in January called for a building and other construction right up to the state setback line, which could have made the inn the closest development toward the ocean on that part of the island. That plan showed dunes in the area, a description the inn’s owners later said was made in error.

How’s that for some outside the Beltway spin?

I can actually sympathize with the property owners here, but only to a degree. They want to provide the ultimate island experience for their guests. No one can argue that’s not their right as operators, but I will argue that a different vision can be shared with visitors. The hotel could turn their negative into a positive by educating guests on the hotel’s sound design principals and embrace of ecotourism. Be proud of the fact that development is kept respectfully back, in honor of common sense and the stunning magnitude and power of the sea.

One of the first things I did upon moving to the Lowcountry 15 months ago was pick up a copy of Pat Conroy’s The Water Is Wide at a downtown Beaufort bookstore. It’s a great book. Conroy grew up here and he masterfully sets his best selling stories here. A couple of days ago the Beaufort Gazette set one of his nativist ecoriffs to type.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why Mayor Bill Rauch and most of the members of the City Council seem to loathe the exquisite and endangered town of Beaufort. I’ve made a career out of praising this town’s irreplaceable beauty and the incomparable sea islands that form the archipelago that makes Beaufort County the loveliest spot on Earth to me.

I think southern Beaufort County is both lost and ruined. Hilton Head has traffic jams that make me feel like I’m still in Atlanta. The coming of Sun City brought about the destruction of the jewel-like town of Bluffton.

Now I read that Mayor Rauch and the City Council are planning to annex a plantation where a developer plans to put in a modest 16,000 houses with a population that could reach 40,000 people. I can’t believe there have not been riots in the streets over this stupid proposal. If Rauch and his associates on the City Council succeed in this monstrous and unjustified annexation, Beaufort will soon be Hilton Head, Mount Pleasant, Myrtle Beach — the utter destruction of the South Carolina Lowcountry will begin its race to the finish line.

[via The Island Packet]

Al Franken recently shared the stage at Judaism University with Ann Coulter, a.k.a. Thin White Puke. Midwest Values Pac has Franken’s opening statement. There’s a lot of great stuff in it, but I’ll narrow in on one small segment for our purposes here.

In her book Slander, Ann tells her readers that Al Gore had a leg up on George W. Bush when applying to their respective colleges. Harvard and Yale. Ann writes:

Oddly, it was Bush who was routinely accused of having sailed through life on his father’s name. But the truth was the reverse. The media was manipulating the fact that many years later Bush’s father became president. When Bush was admitted to Yale, his father was a little-known congressman on the verge of losing his first Senate race. His father was a Yale alumnus, but so were a lot of other boys’ parents. It was Gore, not Bush, who had a famous father likely to impress college admissions committees.

What does Ann omit? Well, that Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush was also a Yale alum and had been Senator from Connecticut, the home state of Yale University. That Prescott Bush had been a trustee of Yale. That Prescott Bush had been the first chair of Yale’s Development Board — the folks who raise the money. That Prescott Bush sat on the Yale Corporation for twelve years. That Prescott Bush, like George W. Bush’s father, George H. W, Bush, had been a member of Skull and Bones. That the first Bush to go to Yale was Bush’s great great grandfather James Bush, who graduated in 1844. That in addition to his father, grandfather, and greatgreatgrandfather, Bush was the legacy of no less than twenty-seven other relatives who preceded him at Yale, including five great great uncles. Seven great uncles. Five uncles, and a number of first cousins.

In case you’re still wondering where W gets his sense of entitlement, his right to lie for the nation’s own good, reread that last paragraph. Bush and cronies like to paint a picture of a bumbling, God-fearing everyman, but W is worlds apart from that fictional creation. The truth is he was groomed from day one to be where he is today, to say what he says and to do what he does.

Dan Neil writing for the LA Times:

Here are words that no parent wants to hear: I’ve decided to major in English.

The English major presents for his or her parents a lexical quandary: What to call the graduate? My son the geologist, my daughter the physicist”these ring familiarly. But there is, ironically enough, no word in English for the English major. Our son the . . . um . . . who speaks English.

The high-minded, lowly employed English major has become a stock comedic character. And so I was cheered (note the archaic usage, so typical of an English major) recently when I found Richard A. Lanham’s The Economics of Attention amid a forlorn pile of books (personification–again, so typical) rejected by the book review editor. “The central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style,” read the cover blurb. “In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced.”

Really? No kidding? Sweet! I want to be director of well-turned phrases for the Federal Reserve.

An an English major, I used to endure the constant concern of relatives. “What are you going to do, teach?” All these years later, with no classroom experience to my credit, I have to say, why certainly, I’ll teach. I’ll teach that a man of letters is not by definition an effete, but rather a man like any other, ready to do the work of a laborer, pettifogger or Machiavellian executive.

A 73-year old Savannah man survived nine days on an uninhabited coastal island, after his 16-foot jon boat was blown out of his reach by a strong wind while he was collecting oysters.

George Hamilton, who was born on Hilton Head Island, ate oysters, mushrooms and cactus to stay alive during the ordeal. He used Marsh grass to construct a makeshift shelter, keeping him warm at night and shaded from the sun during the day. To stay hydrated, Hamilton gathered moisture from the Marsh grasses. He also found a bottle of gin and drank all of it.

After a boater spotted him and he was rescued, Hamilton told the Savannah Morning News his faith and a lifetime of fishing the coastal waterways helped him survive. “A man can survive if you do it right,” he said.

“There’s one thing about going fishing: You don’t get nothing for free. You pay for everything you take out of the sea. And if you don’t, one of these days the sea is going to take something from you.”