Recent Reads in September

 

Schulz – The Street of Crocodiles

 

The thing about Schulz is that he is great at making atmosphere. It reminds me of something from Kafka or Thomas Mann. I’m not sure if it is just a thing from time and place or something else.

 

The problem is that the thing with plot or character goes lacking where the whole thing seems to be the weather hanging over this mid-war black sea community. So, in all the stories it felt like something was wanting.

 

Rodney – Decolonial Marxism

 

I recently made it through the text that made Rodney’s name, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” and the bulk of these essays feel like the seed of that larger work. I sure have learned more about the African side of decolonialism through reading Rodney, but some of these essays are hit or miss – reading the text as a book started slow and didn’t pick up until the middle. This might be a question of the editing choices though.

 

Burmila – Chaotic Neutral

 

Burmila’s book is hard to read. It’s well written but it’s hard to read because as someone who doesn’t really identify with the Democrats, but hopes that they win over the other guys, a lot of the book is just a list of all the dumb things that the party has done over the years to marginalize themselves and not fight back against Republican selfishness.

 

For better or worse, he also eschews simple, pat answers at the end. It made me think of Selfa’s “ The Democrats: A Critical History” but snarkier. And you can feel that Burmila is a bit invested in the success of leftish electoralism and hasn’t fully given up.

 

Moore – Batman: The Killing Joke

 

I enjoyed this book – the art in the text is beautiful and well printed and looks clean and crisp printed in the hardcover. It’s worth holding on to. The story is interesting as well, with the Joker having some back-story and the end of the book closing on a hilarious joke. A worthwhile read for the evening.

 

 

Moore – Swamp Thing: Book Six

 

So, it feels that by the end of the arc, Moore started running out of ideas about what to do with the character. Thus, you end up with these books where Swamp Thing is making his way back home through space. The stories are more science fiction, more experimental, and less grounded than some of the other books in the series. I’m not 100% sure it works, but the entire arc ends up tying together well.

 

Recent Reads, August

 

Second Treatise of Government – John Locke

 

I’ve read a couple of things recently from enlightenment-era political philosophers that start from some supposed state of nature  but their idea of a state of nature is wrong from what we know of anthropology. I’m not sure if this entirely invalidates Locke here or Rousseau elsewhere.

A couple of things here that strike me. What Locke in this work was doing was basically writing in support of the status quo. But I find it weird that a hundred years later the framers in the colonies went and took his defense of a constitutional monarchy and then adjusted it a bit for a somewhat representative democracy.

There’s a lot of assumptions built in here that go unquestioned from what a “just” war is to slavery to patrilineal inheritance that probably should be unpacked a bit but are not.

 

Swamp Thing Book One – Moore

I was looking for a fun book to read to clear my mind and this fit the bill pretty well. Moore is an interesting writer, and the stories are compelling, even if the character constrains some of what can be done. It’s organic and very green in the environmental sense. I’ve already ordered the next couple of collections of the series.

The art, coloring, and page composition also work well with the story. I think of the early 80s as a period of reinvention in the genre with Moore and Miller and having read a few Miller texts recently and been underwhelmed, the Swamp Thing book feels like an amazingly coherent text in a way that The Dark Knight Returns wasn’t for me.

 

The Hurting Kind – Limon

Limon’s poems have these spare lines and the focus on nature that make me feel like I’m standing at the shore of a lake as the sun sets in the west behind me. They’re good poems and I can understand why they were award-nominated but they just weren’t for me in the moment I was reading them.

 

Floaters – Espada

 

I don’t know exactly why I liked these poems, but this collection is my jam. I like the structure, the longer, looping lines that are almost prosaic but not. I like the subject matter, this immigrant, class conscious text as the poems and their subjects navigates a world that is against them. I will definitely seek out more work by Martin Espada

 

Black Aperture – Rasmussen

This collection of poems centers around the subject of the suicide of the brother of the poetic first person – I am assuming it is the poet’s personal voice but well done if in a persona. The poems work on their own level individually but build up as if a composer were layering instrument over instrument to make a coherent whole. The poems feel youthful, but not like juvenilia but fresh like the spring after a frigid winter.

 

Hard to Be a God – Strugatsky Brothers

 

I found this book to be a real page turner. The conceit is that the protagonist is a visitor historian in this medieval like setting who can observe and participate but not really have any drastic life changing effect on the people in the world he is visiting. I like it because it really melds the idea of science fiction and fantasy in a way that is outside of the genre constraints I am used to as a western reader. The situation the authors create is interesting, the plot within that world is compelling, and the characters are fairly well fleshed out. This is a trifecta that is often not met in science fiction writing and I appreciate it.

 

Middlemarch – Eliot

Reading this felt like homework. I bought it a while back because someone said that it was one of the funniest books in the language and as someone with multiple degrees in English it felt wrong to not have read the text.

So, I started reading it in early March to be able to make a joke about the middle of march when I finish it, but it took me months and months to read. It did pick up, but the first several hundred pages or so are these character sketches where I was saying to myself “Oh, the title is after the town because the town is the main character.” We do start to focus on some people.

The thing is I do not care about these people or their problems (except maybe the ambitious doctor who is working to revolutionize science but is not readily accepted by the town with his new-fangled ways). Its all about who is married or going to marry whom and where is this inheritance going. It is incredibly well written and structured, but I just don’t care about these people.

A couple of other things. Sure, it is about the town but there’s no servants or tradespeople except for in passing, an invisibility that is noticeable by the absence. There’s one place where a couple is bankrupt, and they are lamenting that they will be only able to keep one servant. The horror! The other thing is that when it was written, it was a period piece written about the time of the passing of the first reform bill which was by then decades in the past. I’m guessing a lot of the humor is based on that but from this vantage point you need the footnotes and footnotes aren’t funny.

 

Discourse on Inequality – Rousseau

 

I have the Penguin edition of this text, which wraps the short two books of the discourse in a lengthy introduction and then copious notes. Rousseau’s text isn’t actually exceptionally long, but in spite of its brevity there are some interesting quotable parts, none more so than the first part of book two where he claims that the first person to make a fence was the creator of civilization. I’ve long liked that quote and it was the whole reason I read the text, wanting to see that in context.

It was mostly worth it, mainly since the book is so short. What really got me though was that the first book was mainly about the development of language. It kind of makes sense to examine that since in a way you could argue that the fact of language is one of the defining characteristics of humans. However, it was hard to read since (like other enlightenment era philosophers such as Locke’s “Second Treatise”) Rousseau posits a state of nature where people are not social but are isolated individuals. So, his basis of civilization and language development are wrong based on what we know now. I guess that’s ok in a way since each generation builds off the last, but it is jarring from my current position.

In concert with that issue of the state of nature is that the introduction here talks about Rousseau’s writing process in that he went to a cabin and walked in the woods to develop his ideas. It’s like Descartes sitting on a pot and recreating the world through his own reason – a wanting of empiricism in a world that was learning more about itself. What is really striking though is that I wanted more sources and there are truly little in the text but there’s a proof of some research that’s in the notes. It’s like this text is just the seed of a larger project that was taken off into a different direction.

 

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – Hume

I didn’t really connect to Hume here. Things just felt muddled, and I don’t know if it is Hume’s thought, how it was presented here, or something else.  Dude was huge into looking at causation but more than anything this book made me think of the bigger picture. Going back to Hume made me wonder what philosophy would have looked like in enlightenment Europe had the church not have had such a huge influence. You had to work from a Christian cosmology as a starting point and that was even the lens that the ancients were seen though. I can’t help but think that it was a hinderance. Or not – Kantian deontology needs some sort of basis for its ethics that are outside of the human realm so a posited perfect god might not be horrible. Perhaps it just slowed the development of utilitarianism.

 

Road to Nowhere – Paris Marx

Here Marx outlines the history and present of transportation and deconstructs how the current capitalistic visionaries are just basically throwing software at a broken system. While I was reading it, I kept mentally going back to that Henry Ford quote where if he asked the people what they wanted, he would have just given them a faster horse. What Elon Musk is doing is basically just doing that – giving the world a faster horse and not really creating the future of transportation that we need, a future that looks to the past but deals with current problems of mobility, climate, and livability.

 

Internet for the People – Tarnoff

I read this book in the weekend after the decision striking down Roe passed and let me tell you that this not the mindset that an author hopes that their readers have. Tarnoff shows how the development of the internet was in public hands and how it was given away to private interests and how we might take it back and why we should want that. I agree with all of that but reading it I felt like it was part of a larger and necessary project that involves the democratization of more of the economic sphere. It is important but when I was reading it, I felt that this part wasn’t urgent. I think the book was good, but I would advise you not to read it while you have utter despair for the state of the nation hanging over you.

 

People’s Republic of Walmart – Phillips and Rozworski

 

I really like the Verso and Jacobin crossover texts. They’re well designed and easy to read. Here the authors make the argument that basically central planning is already happening, it is just happening at the firm level. I like the argument and it is interesting, I just worry about the efficiency of the planning, as we know that the firms here like Wal-Mart and Amazon have a lot of waste embedded in them. If we wanted to scale that up to a higher level, we would want to minimize that waste. I’m still somewhat skeptical of any central planning based on Hayek’s knowledge argument from the uses of knowledge in society that was his ultimate answer to the socialist calculation debate, but this is an issue that has been explored since then and I think we’ve gotten closer to potential full efficiency. This book is a good introduction to these issues, and it is a worthwhile read. My only real complaint is that there no bibliography at the end – I really wanted to go to their sources and that’s not collected at the end.

 

The Foundation Trilogy – Asimov

 

I wrote my master’s thesis on this trilogy. I’ve read it cover to cover over a dozen times, and parts of it more than that. I have come to a conclusion about Asimov generally and this text specifically, and that is that Asimov was not that great of a writer when it came to plot or characters but awesome when it came to ideas. What do we know about his texts? Psychohistory and the three laws of robotics! But the characters and the things they do? Not much.

I didn’t go down this path to find out just what has been researched about the writing of the books, but I feel like Asimov came across the idea of Psychohistory (Basically history plus math and economics to tell (and control) the future). And he’s writing the first stories and the who arc is that there’s a crisis and then the characters go to the Time Vault and see Seldon, and the problem is solved though his Deus ex machina. That gets boring so he needed something outside of his own creation which is why he created the Mule and then had to bring in the Second Foundation. It’s like the old lady who swallowed the fly thing – and worse when you think of how he integrated everything in the late books he wrote in the 80s. Everything works if you don’t think too hard about it, but I literally spent years thinking about the thing and it falls apart on examination. Is it worth reading? Yes, a thousand times yes. But is it good? Not really.

Blackshirts and Reds – Parenti

I bought this because I had not read anything by Michael Parenti before and this was one of his shorter texts. The thing that struck me most about it was that I had thought that it was more recent, not 30 years old . The problem with that is that it still feels of the time and important – fascism is always present and needs awareness and pushback. We just have to keep fighting, in all eras.

 

Archaeologies of the Future – Jameson

 

This book is interesting in that it is structure as theory for the first half (postmodern utopias, dystopias, and anti-utopias) and then a set of essays in the second half where Jameson is applying the ideas he’s talking about as he examines various science fiction texts. I read this because I was working on the idea of utopia in science fiction but eventually didn’t use it since my project went a different direction. It was worthwhile and I read through it a couple of times since it was good background in helping me develop a vocabulary for critically thinking about and writing about science fiction  -- even if I didn’t understand half of what he was writing about.

 

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

 

I read this right as I was starting out on a project writing about science fiction for a school project. It was a lot of surface level on both the canon and the criticism, but it was a great jumping off point for my research as I took this and extended my research on specific texts and critics. If you’re looking for an introduction on science fiction criticism, this is a good starting point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Politics of Love

 I know that not everyone shares my personal politics, which are to the left of the general public. There may be places that they stand in contradiction to each other, and some things are hard to reconcile but I imagine most people’s personal politics aren’t 100% ideologically coherent – we all live contingent and reactive lives and often only deal with what’s in front of us at the moment.

 

That said, my own personal politics come from a deeply empathetic place, one that knows some suffering and knows how big the world is and how each and every one of us has our own interesting story and hopes and dreams and fears and love.

 

Love – that’s where I come from. I love humans in all their varied and messy ways since we are all imperfect creatures continually trying to make sense of this big and confusing world. There are a few things that I don’t love though, and that includes cruelty and selfishness. These go against my fundamental empathy because it creates out-groups who it is ok to treat differently. I understand the impulse as we live on the edge of scarcity or deep within it. Though I understand the impulse, I cannot accept it. As the poet said, we must love one another, or die.

The Unhidden Curriculum: Bellemare's "Doing Economics"

Back when I was a baby in undergrad, I saw my professors and wanted to have their job. How nice, I thought, it must be to only teach a few classes a semester and have all that free time.
 
I sought out graduate school and even then, my main waring was that I should not got into debt for graduate school. It was not until I was in graduate school when I had a class that an introduction to graduate studies (this being an earlier version of myself who wanted to be a poet or something like that). Only then was there a glimpse of what it meant to work in and around academia as a profession and not just as a scholarly pursuit.
 
There’s a hidden curriculum that doesn’t stay hidden on purpose, I don’t think, but is more passed on down though folk wisdom. I imagine this is why PhDs are way more likely to have parents with terminal degrees than any random person on the street. There’s a lot below the surface that even if you are studying a subject that you just don’t know. There’s rules to these games and a lot of people walk though the door without even knowing that they’re playing a game.
 
In “Doing Economics,” Marc Bellemare tries to lay these rules out for people. He breaks down what you should have in your applied econ papers, and he breaks down what your approach should be to different kinds of presentations and even about how you should approach social media. One noticeable absence is how to navigate the job market, but I guess even with then more standardized search method econ has the market is heterogeneous enough and changes enough it would be a dated topic the day the book was published. The author does make acknowledgements of this absence.
 
My only real quibble is that I think the subtitle has the audience wrong. It might be worthwhile for junior scholars, but I think the real utility would be more for your motivated juniors who are thinking about going to graduate school. That introduction to grad studies was great in that it really showed me what the profession would be like. I might have better served professionally had I not moved across the country as a young man trying to pursue my dreams when I didn’t really even know what my dreams were. It all worked out in the end though, so I have no complaints.

We Pluribus Unum : No Thin Blue Lines

 

I want to talk about this flag but first I want to talk about infrastructure.

I live in a suburb that was founded in the late nineteenth century. Some of the houses date from then but there are a lot more that were built in the postwar boom in suburbanization. That means that the pipes we have under the street are getting old. The city was connected with water and sewer pipes and then streets and sidewalks were laid on top of that without much thought of how to access the pipes. The layout was not a problem when the village was shiny and new. But over time things break and you must access the pipes and sometimes that means digging a hole through asphalt and cement. Over time things degrade and you also might realize that the material you made the pipes with has a chance to leech heavy metal into the drinking water. Upgrades are necessary.

We’re looking at this with our sewers as the fall apart. There are connections that have lead that need to be replaced for safety reasons and legal reasons. The question is how to pay for it. Does it make sense to just have the homeowner connected closest to the problem pay out of pocket? Not really – it’s a big one-time expense that needs done and the whole community benefits. The most equitable way to fix it is through taxation or fees. Our village board is increasing the water rates. People aren’t happy since the cost of living continues to increase but this is the way that all users can invest in the system. It’s a village problem with a collective solution.

In the candy-colored world of elementary schools civics, this is what government is for at its most base level. It coordinates collective action to solve collective problems. Here our democratically elected board came to the decision that made the most sense for the community. But this isn’t always the case. People are often not involved in their civic life – our board elections only receive something like 20% turnout and even the presidential elections see a third of people not participating in the election for whatever reasons they have.

This abstention is in part because people are alienated from the process. The government doesn’t feel like an extension of our collective will. Though you will hear about our representative democracy – “A republic if you can keep it” – the people who represent us, especially at the higher levels, feel like a breed apart. At the federal level, even our representatives in the house represent about 700,000 people in spite of Madison’s warnings in the Federalists papers. Writ large, the various representatives are not responsive to their constituents but more so to their donors. Reading about the mechanics of the job it sounds like half of a rep’s time is spent in dialing for dollars, fundraising for themselves and the party so they can get reelected. It sounds like a horrible job despite its prestige. I’m very conscious that in multiple roles I have that I serve the public. I’m a local elected official and I work for a nonprofit that has state contracts, so in diverse ways I am a steward of the public trust. I am not apart from the community but a part of the community.

Others have different approaches – typified by the thin blue line flag. This symbol leans into the othering of the government and its servants as something apart from the people. This flag says that you and I are different and through my role I am special. That’s not just so. The original flag is a symbol of unity. The thirteen colonies coming together to make one United States, a nation with problems in practice but with grand ideals at its foundation. The recent shootings and the failure of the police in  Uvalde have had me reflecting on this symbolism. The children who were shot down were our children. Someone else gave birth to them but they were all ours and we failed to protect them as we failed the young man pulled the trigger as well. It’s a collective problem with collective solutions. No one stands apart.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? For Student Loan Forgiveness

 
The most recent floated proposals on student loan cancellations is that the Biden administration wants to cancel ten thousand in loans per borrower, with an income limit of about 300K per family.

I support this, in part because it will materially help me out, but it doesn’t go far enough.

Here’s what I’m think happens if this goes through.

1)      A lot of people are actually helped. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money. It’s almost 1400 hours at the federal minimum wage which is like 34 weeks of full-time work.

2)      But it’s means tested. The whole problem with means testing versus universal programs is that means testing means that people fall through the cracks where they would otherwise be eligible. This is in itself a travesty when I’m sure a quick google would find all kinds of estimates of people who are eligible for current federal programs but don’t because there is onerous compliance. It might be less here since it would be a one-time thing but introducing hoops to the process means there will be people who won’t see relief.

3)      People are going to be mad. No matter what the dollar amount it will be spun out by the political opponents as a kind of handout to an undeserving population. They’re going to do this no matter what so why be snakebit and prematurely capitulate to the bad faith arguments?

4)      You proved, by doing any relief, that you have the legal authority to do all the relief.

5)      You don’t solve the debt burden problem. Ten thousand is a lot, but a small fraction for people who bought into the idea that you needed education to advance or are in low paying jobs that require a lot of education that will still have a lot of debt. I have teachers, social workers, and librarians in my orbit that will still have onerous debt burdens. The public service loan forgiveness program adjustments might help but are in their own morass of red tape and bureaucratic uncertainty.

6)      The important thing for me is that by doing a one-time, smaller fix you don’t create any urgency to fix the system. Higher education has evolved in the last 40 years as it has come under attack in how it is delivered and administered and paid for. Public schooling has moved from state support to individual tuition support and that tuition has been paid through loans and grants. It’s how we got here. There’s a lot of potential fixes for this constellation of  problems but they’ll remain in the ether as long as there’s no political urgency.  

The Opposite of a Hagiography: Winston Churchill by Tariq Ali

 

The subtitle here is “His Times, His Crimes,” and as much as I wanted it to be “His Life and Crimes,” the subtitle works. The book is a little over four hundred pages and there is a lot of the historical context baked in – much more than in a typical biography. Ali also covers his crimes, bringing to light things I didn’t know about the man. For example, his repression of a popular government in Greece in the post war era isn’t talked about much. The man was the spoiled child of the late Victorian elite and through his class position and the historical circumstances, his reputation gets elevated. This new biography shows why that is wrong.

Some books I read, May 2022

 Scorched Earth: Jonathan Crary

The author of this text really does not like modernity. And in this book he explains why. I think the only real problem with it is that he talks about the inevitable post-capitalist future but he doesn't really align with any sort of positive post-capitalist future. With path dependency it's hard to see how we go from here to anything good. Perhaps it will be in his next text.

Undoing the Demos: Wendy Brown

Before I say anything about the content of this book I think I need to say something about the physical nature of it. For some reason the Press decided to make it about an inch wider than a normal paperback should be so that it's really awkward to read.

As for the content, it's pretty good. Basically she tracks a social shift from a political creature to an economic creature on the broader umbrella of what neoliberalism is. My only real complaint is that it might lean a little too heavily on Foucault. I kept joking to myself when I was reading the difference between economics as a discipline as it exists and everything else is that economics doesn't mention Foucault, but once you mention Foucault they become sociology. I feel as if the work in her argument gets stronger towards the end as she leans less heavily on Foucault directly and develops her own evidence. Definitely worth reading but it took a minute to get through.

Squire: Sara Alfageeh & Nadia Shammas

Squire is a cute little story about a young girl who comes from a subordinate class in an Empire. To gain citizenship and to have Adventure she joins the army but over the course of the text she realizes that these Adventures and the violence that's part of it are too much. So what you end up here is an anti-war book starring a young girl and her friend group. It's not too didactic and I would say overall it works..

Dead Dog’s Bite: Tyler Boss

This book is kind of like a small town murder mystery where people are going missing and the main character is trying to uncover what's going on. It's not bad, just not really memorable. I'd say it's got some Shirley Jackson The Lottery vibes.

Fine: Rhea Ewing

I have a sense that gender is like sexuality and that it is a spectrum but also that it is fluid and that it could change over time. But also that how we talk about gender is also shaped by what's available in the culture. Trying to figure out who you are is a huge part of growing up and I think it's good that right now at least in the culture we're allowed to talk about where we fit in instead of trying to shove everything down. It's probably healthier psychologically for everybody involved. In this graphic examination Ewing Interviews a number of people about their own experience with gender over time. It's not systemic or scientific but it's a good journalistic examination. And I think that it's good that they did it in a graphic form so that it's more accessible than someone having to go pull Judith Butler off the shelf. The reader can see there are all sorts of types of gender expressions available to them and they are not stuck into a hard-and-fast binary. And this goes for everybody, not just anyone who might be questioning their own gender expressions. I think we'd all be best served if we understood that there isn't a hard-and-fast binary.

Hyperion: Dan Simmons

I came across this book when I was researching my Master's thesis on science fiction. It was mentioned that there was a book structured like the Canterbury Tales and I thought that was interesting. I have some mixed emotions about this text. because it is kind of like the Canterbury Tales in that there are pilgrims going to a place and they're telling a tale. The difference is that all the tales the pilgrims are telling here are related to the larger frame story. so there is more thematic coherence. 

I think the problem is that the larger frame story is kind of interesting in itself but I don't know if the structure that the author chose is the best way to develop the idea he had. Additionally, only a couple of the Pilgrim's Tales are actually interesting. It's a real slog to read as you transition from one story to another. He does some stuff with making each of the individual stories such that they could be stand-alone novellas. Two of them really work like that, and one doesn't fully rely on the frame story at all. So it's like this really ambitious book that doesn't fully come together. Finally. I think the worst sin of all for me is that it doesn't resolve within one text. So instead of a coherent novel it really more feels like a setup to a series and I'm not interested in reading more of the series. 

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction: Istvan Csicsey-Ronay Jr.

I really enjoyed the Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. It is a book of theory but it also has little bits of how the author would apply the theory to different texts and it shows how his theoretical concepts apply in practice. It's a very beautiful way of going about it. I think what was best for me is that he really gave me a vocabulary to describe and criticize science fiction in a academic manner. There are a lot of themes and tropes and characters and settings n that are present in science fiction that don't really have a place of your come from a place of criticism of realistic fiction,  and so it gives you a way to talk about it. This is the book I would give anybody who was trying to write a paper or to think more critically about science fiction. It's a very good starting place and you'll be glad you read it.

Mistaken Identity: Asad Haider

This book, when it comes down to it, is more than anything a call to solidarity across whatever traditional identity category you might draw. I think it is important because a lot of times as he points out that whatever these categories are drawn by the oppressor so that we really need to make sure we have solidarity because the world is hard and it's relentless.

SQLBI