Premium 304: Dynamiting The Sky (w/ special guest Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn)
Added 2024-05-13 12:00:05 +0000 UTCKathleen Dorothy Blackburn is a writer with a memoir out called Loose of Earth, about growing up in West Texas and all the things that come with that: bad water, faith healing, cancer and the death of a loved one, extractive economies, and much more. This is a wide ranging discussion on everything from Larry McMurtry, to Dune, to synthetic chemicals that stay in our bodies and the environment for, well, forever.
Please go buy Kathleen's book!! at: utpress.utexas.edu/9781477329627/
Comments
I read Lonesome Dove because of this episode. Loved it and blew through it in 4 days. Thanks for always giving great recs.
Betsy
2024-06-05 16:11:20 +0000 UTCLiving in Santa Fe it’s so crazy to hear them. Talk about how ugly and grim New Mexico is. Santa Fe is nothing like that. It’s beautiful.
Jessica Rios
2024-05-26 21:17:37 +0000 UTCGreat! Just got back from scouting for a place. Looks like I’ll be moving in June. I’m at Kdottie.blackburn@gmail.com
Kathleen Blackburn
2024-05-22 15:33:44 +0000 UTCI thought I was the lone swede listening to this. Now I'm already wondering how many more we need before we get a live show.
Anders Olsson
2024-05-17 21:21:56 +0000 UTCyou always know the lubbock return flight
dice
2024-05-16 23:25:45 +0000 UTCAs a New Mexican by way of Arizona, the first time I was in a place that had real water was while visiting a friend in Houston. I was shocked by how the water use felt ostentatious to me. Like I was jealous? I just remember thinking it seemed a little showy to have all that grass.
Jessica
2024-05-16 06:29:12 +0000 UTCIt's hilarious to think imagine someone listening to the fudge round music episode, being told that the patreon is all that kind of stuff then signing up and getting this instead
Anders Olsson
2024-05-15 19:47:14 +0000 UTCIn the Bedroom is fucking great!
Anders Olsson
2024-05-15 18:58:39 +0000 UTCIn The Bedroom!! 🫶🫶🫶 one of my favorite films and think it does maine & fishing towns justice
Trixie
2024-05-15 16:08:11 +0000 UTCrandom! just moved to High Falls NY. wife is going to grad school SUNY-NP in the fall. Spent the last decade in Texas!
Al Harris
2024-05-15 15:07:31 +0000 UTCGreat episode - Thank you. I've been lax about logging in to patreon to say thank you. I do appreciate them all in their various styles and flavours. This one was particularly good.
Anti Podean
2024-05-15 03:30:52 +0000 UTC//...I think my opinion about these new Dune movies is that the story and drama are sorta whatever (and occasionally clumsy), and that the visuals - and especially the costuming- is really cunt. //Also, there was a news-segment this evening on Swedish television about a place in the US called "cancer alley", that I had never heard about before. The US is such a profoundly undecent place. It's like if a Lovecraftian God was a country. At best, it's indifferent to whatever is going on in your life. ..the segment noted that a statistically abnormal amount of people who lived there had asthma (and cancer, and miscarriage/low birth weight, etc), and it did make me wonder if asthma is even "a real disease" in the sense that "some people just have asthma, and that's just how it goes". Like, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if it turns out - 20 years down the line - that a good 90% of people who "have asthma" is directly due to environmental pollution. Just in my general "growing up and interacting with americans online", it basically feels like "an american disease", in the sense that it sounds like its really prevalent in the US, and pretty rare in Europe. I know nobody who has asthma, I have never met anyone under 50 who has claimed to have it, but it seems extremely run-of-the-mill for really young people in the US to have it. (...just to be clear, I am not doubting anyone who has it, but suggesting that it might be over-represented in the US due to what is essentially political lack of action, that is in itself grounded in a pretty shockingly lackadaisical attitude to the well-being of humans who live there. )
Jesper Ohlsson
2024-05-15 00:11:59 +0000 UTCGood talk. It was funny you said about the coal vein on fire, I live not far from Centralia and that’s been burning since the 50’s. Also, I served in the army as a preventive medicine specialist. We are basically environmental samplers. We would conduct soil, air, water, testing, epidemiology, entomology, etc. basically take samples of what soldiers and the local populous was exposed to. Results would then be uploaded into a DOEHRS so when someone has cancer from exposures they can see what was present at that time. It’s very true, we are the test subjects, they are recording results, wherever the military steps foot it is enacting a protracted warfare on working people by contaminating the environment while it catalogues the results.
TheRedHollow
2024-05-15 00:08:02 +0000 UTCGreat ep! Shouldve showed Kathleen the Cartman impression tho
Chris Laser
2024-05-14 23:43:35 +0000 UTCThank you for this episode - one of your best!
Michelle Miller
2024-05-14 23:07:41 +0000 UTCloved this one so much, thanks boys
Abigail Anna
2024-05-14 20:34:32 +0000 UTCNew Paltz welcomes you!!! Ask around about the 2020 water crisis, they shut down the college for a week due to gas in the water supply, then we came back for one week, then got sent home for COVID. Fun times!
Lindsay
2024-05-14 20:32:47 +0000 UTCI really enjoyed this episode. I appreciate y’all when you’re doin some literary criticism. I also appreciate you both when you’re doin some Dylan. It takes all sorts.
Kyle Turnbull
2024-05-14 20:03:38 +0000 UTCGreat episode fellas
Alex
2024-05-14 18:21:44 +0000 UTCI would trust Todd Field with Blood Meridian.
Richard Cochnar
2024-05-14 17:10:17 +0000 UTCBtw the border trilogy starts in my hometown(ish), San Angelo, TX. The town is also home to Goodfellow AFB, and wouldn’t you know, pretty high concentration of PFAS in that water! Looking forward to reading this memoir.
cimara
2024-05-14 12:38:14 +0000 UTCLlano estacado for me growing up
E
2024-05-14 10:04:32 +0000 UTCRecently heard a story from a Boomer about being brought out from elementary school in eastern Montana in (I think) the late 50s/early 60s to witness an underground nuke test. Apparently their teacher had caught wind of it and thought the kids should get to see something historic :-/
Joshua Davis
2024-05-14 03:47:12 +0000 UTCI didn’t end up doing my research on the topic, but I’m Hudson Valley born and grown (and still here) and could definitely point you in the direction of local folks who have done a lot of work and research around this. Happy to connect.
SF
2024-05-14 02:04:35 +0000 UTCKiller episode. Thank you!
Michael Palmer
2024-05-13 22:42:09 +0000 UTCI want to speak up for Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy that was mentioned. I read them years back and I found them to be some of the most beautiful and meditative works I’ve ever read. The Crossing especially is quite impactful.
Jordan Hunnicutt
2024-05-13 22:11:58 +0000 UTCAwesome episode. Will check this book out. By coincidence, I’m also in the middle of “Dark Waters.” Scary stuff indeeed.
Graham
2024-05-13 21:18:43 +0000 UTCWowza! Kathleen Blackburn! I’m buying this at my local book store immediately. Pre-ordering or whatever a few copies. Book club!
Kaz jennifer Louise Lasker Schwarz
2024-05-13 21:05:13 +0000 UTCHey it’s Kathleen Blackburn, thanks for your comment. I’m actually moving to New Paltz this summer…I’d love to hear more about your research.
Kathleen Blackburn
2024-05-13 19:46:37 +0000 UTC"DL vs Out" is a whole thing and tbh I dont understand it but there is a book on it called Masculinities, we should make the boys read it! LMAO
Trey
2024-05-13 18:10:09 +0000 UTCI had no idea who Oral Robets is, but figured the trillbillies might get a kick out of seeing him slandered with juvenile dunks. I checked wikipedia, and was surprised that his actual name is indeed Oral. ...I also did a quick google for "Oral Roberts pedophile", but got nothing. Sometimes the dunks aren't that low-hanging, and the type of guy you're clowning on is just non-sexually awful and exploitative. It sorta blows my mind that seemingly none of these prosperity gospel-people have had "a Shinzo Abe" situation happen to them, given that their whole deal is transparent exploitation up to the outmost limit of what you can get away with.
Jesper Ohlsson
2024-05-13 17:47:25 +0000 UTC..."Operation Plowshare" (that was briefly discussed in the beginning/first-part of the episode) was basically - at least as I see it - the bad conscience of the US having done the unthinkable, and actually used the kind of bomb that a bunch of different countries were working on independently (and whose morality about it at the time is sorta irrelevant once one of them actually deployed it; the tension-point was not "can we make it" but "can we actually use it?"). As I understand it, the name has a biblical connection, in the "let's turn your weapons of war into plowshares, ie, tools for agriculture and life" sense, and there's a somewhat sweet impulse to try to see if this invention of incredible death could be used for something benign, like "quickly excavating a new mine". As it turns out, though, the answer was no - which makes the invention of the bomb even grimmer, when you have it confirmed for you that "no, this thing we made can really only be used for snuffing out hundreds of thousands of people. At least in its current configuration as a bomb". Fellow left-leaning engineering podcast "Well there's your problem" had an episode about it that you can listen to here: https://youtu.be/ek2P-Ui46GE I'm not an engineer, and you don't need to be to get something out of it (their podcast doesn't rely on technical expertise). ...the short of why you can't use nukes as an engineering tool is that the benefit of the massive explosion is vastly off-set with the human cost of spreading a bunch of radioactive material that either contaminates the general area, but more worryingly gets fused with fine particles, that can travel - essentially - across the globe (the jungles of South America are, for example, heavily dependant on "trade-winds" from the Sahara Desert, in the sense that particles from "just a desert in Africa" helps build up bio-diversity across the world through particles that are light enough to travel thousands of miles). The thing about nukes is that it's less about making any one place a no-go-zone forever, but that you're spreading harmful materials in an uncontrolled manner (places like Hiroshima is demonstrably fine these days, for example). So whatever use that the nuke would have - it's explosive power - could easily be matched with dynamite (or whatever), and without the headache of unleashing a bunch of airborn radioactive particles. "The atomic bomb" is basically this sad thing we made, and whose demonstrably "single-purpose-use" is this uncomfortable reminder of some of our worst impulses ("yeah, we *can* build this, but should we? ..Are we doing all this mostly because we feel it's gay to talk to people who are strangers to us?)
Jesper Ohlsson
2024-05-13 17:43:50 +0000 UTChttps://www.kingdomlifewv.com/pastor-bj-roberts/
Evan
2024-05-13 17:41:32 +0000 UTCThat scene in Blood Meridian with the Comanche attack and the guy in the wedding dress… I got scared reading that on a plane. Felt just like you described it. All I want from a movie of Blood Meridian is for Michael Berryman to get a chance to be the Judge.
Eva
2024-05-13 17:38:31 +0000 UTC...explaining the concept of "gay" to manly cowboy couples.
Evan
2024-05-13 17:37:24 +0000 UTCIn the middle of this was an interesting thread on how people react to realities they don’t want to acknowledge as reality. Oh, I can’t die from this disease that is currently incurable. If medicine won’t cure me I know god can
William
2024-05-13 16:45:47 +0000 UTCThe patreon comes out when I start my work week, then the free episode comes out when my work week ends! Thank God almighty for 4 day work weeks! And thank God for the trillbillies!
Tanner
2024-05-13 16:44:15 +0000 UTCYou know, there was probably A Lot of Brokeback Mountain style "un-spoken" romances actually in the old west, boys will be boys after all.
Trey
2024-05-13 16:27:14 +0000 UTCI almost wrote my masters thesis on PFAS in Newburgh, NY drinking water caused by firefighting foam at Stewart Air Force Base. This stuff is fascinating and so so messed up. Thanks for this episode.
SF
2024-05-13 15:55:38 +0000 UTCthe more we look for PFAS/PFOA in the water the more we'll find it. lot of people in rural parts around capdist NY have life long testing now to see just how much it will fuck up our kidneys, livers, testes, etc.
creetch
2024-05-13 15:48:12 +0000 UTCThumbs up for Dark Waters; it really was a movie that came and went, which is odd since it's a well-made movie by Todd Haynes, and the closing text is an absolutely gut-punching "99% of all living things have these forever-chemicals in them", or something to that effect. It's hard to accurately grade which company has done the most global damage, but DuPont is definitely in the running (by reach alone). I made the move from teflon-coated pans to cast-iron stuff after watching it, which is a little embarassing to admit, in that it probably doesn't really matter much. The damage is already done, and unless I personally cook all my meals it - much like microplastics - is just going to continue to happen. ....that, and "oh I'll just change my personal habits if I'm getting poisoned, then" is an irritating ethos to have foisted on you, when - in a just world - the people at DuPont should have been publicly executed for any number of incredible crimes.
Jesper Ohlsson
2024-05-13 15:43:00 +0000 UTCThis is the best episode in a long time. Thanks.
Jim McKenna
2024-05-13 14:50:18 +0000 UTCI started The Crossing a few weeks ago. I got to the point in the novel where the kid and the wolf get to a situation that can only go a few ways, none of them good, and I just stopped and returned the book to the library. McCarthy is a genius of course but he's also relentless, and these days I just can't take any more of that.
Richie A
2024-05-13 13:52:13 +0000 UTCOral Roberts? More like giving head, Roberts, amirite? (I'm right)
Jesper Ohlsson
2024-05-13 13:47:58 +0000 UTCStraight up basking in this episode, thank y’all
cimara
2024-05-13 12:20:33 +0000 UTC
