10 Things Wrong with Environmental Thinking: half a book

I have been entertained by Tim Morton's posts on the endgame for his book Realist Magic.  So inspired by these posts, I compiled into a single document all that I have written so far on "10 Things Wrong", my work in progress (WIP), and the namesake for this blog.  I have been writing this book as a suite of vignettes, paying very little attention so far to the way these all connect up.  However, I have a pretty comprehensive outline, and though the connector pieces will be less interesting to write the task should be relatively painless.

So the grand total so far is 40,000 words, a 200 page double spaced draft.  Though it feels like progress - the heft alone is a delight! - nonetheless, I know I am less than half way there.

All of this has been written since June - and demonstrates the unexpected advantages of open-heart surgery.  If it were not for my enfeebled condition, I would not have sat at home day after day for a few of months writing and editing.  I had forgotten - not sure how it was possible to forget this - that it is very difficult to fit in work on a project like this when other professorial duties prevail.  Since I am having an exciting quarter - great students, working on a new proposal, and trying to get a manuscript on our restoration experiment completed, launching the Institute for Nature and Culture's new blog - I cannot complain.  I am concerned though that I will loose the urgency to get this completed and I would love to have the entire first draft completed by next summer. 

The Heart and the Beard: a surgical story told mainly in aphorisms (of 140 characters or less)

To celebrate the end of summer and my imminent return to work I am reproducing the story of my descent into and ascent from cardiac hell earlier this season.

To Vassia, best friend and partner in matters of the heart!

Context: The young doctors who had been prodding me a day or so after an appendectomy ran alarmed from my hospital bedside to call in a senior consultant.  As a consequence of the high temperature I was running, a heart murmur, presumably there since birth, sounded especially pronounced.  Each beat was followed by the acoustic swish of blood plashing back into the chambers of my heart.  A follow up with a cardiologist in Dublin confirmed that the aortic valve was defective (stenotic and regurgitative) and that, at some point in my life, it would need to be replaced.  I doubted this.  The year was 1978; I was fifteen years of age.  This, coincidentally, was also the year I grew my first beard.  A fine display of very fine chin-hair; I have sported aggressive facial hair since that time.

Though I doubted that my heart would ever need attention (I felt immortal in those days), nevertheless, I had my various doctors through the years examine it.  In the mid 1990s a doctor in Georgia, one whose name reminded me of non heart-healthy products, told me that without immediate surgery I would die.  The news was a jolt and so consternated my beloved that she got her one and only parking ticket as we ruminated upon this news in Jittery Joe’s in Athens.  Follow up examination revealed that the EKG leads used in that heart test had been switched round and the doctor had been seeing my heart inverted – the ventricles seemed atrophied and my atria appeared to be perched on that malformed muscle like outsized berets.

At the end of last year while traveling in India with students I  experienced some difficulties that retrospectively appeared to have been signs of congestive heart failure.  Subsequent visits with my physician, my cardiologist and my cardio-thoracic surgeon resulted in my going in for an aortic valve replacement on May 10th 2011.  Typically, I wait for years before writing about personal events; however, I had been tweeting on the topic in the weeks running up to this surgery, and had provided some commentary on the subsequent and ongoing recovery.  During the week of the surgery, a relatively miserable one, I had been digitally silent; however, I jotted down some observations which I now reproduce as part of this twitobiography (“The Missing Tweets”). In reviewing this output I noticed that my beard and my heart, twinned since my teen years, had co-starring roles in this little drama.