Reflections on this census-taker and other thoughts of China Mieville

Like, I have read some books, man.

I’ve read some that have given people problems like Kafka and a Lot of Pynchon and Infinite Jest and even that Olipo stuff. I read Joyce, but never finished the Wake.

So I know for hard books. The books written by men that are not meant to be enjoyable but may be a bit of an enigma.  I studied Joyce, reading books about his books and his bragging that in a century the professors would be stroking their chins over his stuff.

That’s just where this book falls.

It’s not really bad. But it’s not good. The book is a problem, waiting to be solved.

I don’t think I know the moves.

I may be too old to learn.

Karen Ho's "Liquidated": Amongst the Wild of Wall Street

Ho writes the book that I think I would have written, had I been born in different circumstances. She was a graduate student in the Ivy League and she saw her peers go into the Street, so she did what any good anthropologist would do – she went native to study the flora and fauna of Wall Street.

In it, she looks at the prevailing orthodoxies of the natives and tries to debunk them, amongst these are shareholder value and the benefit of so many hours at your desk (free food and a car service help these brave souls). Ho was able to take the job because of her pedigree, and she used it to build connections –she was an excellent networker, I bet she has all the hot LinkedIn connections. In the book, she goes through the process from recruitment to disillusionment, She was able to do this since her own job was made redundant at a point before she wanted it to be, but then she did fieldwork to learn more about the natives.

What this book reminds me of most of all is the book by Kevin Roose from a couple of years that got a lot of notice, “Young Money”.  That book lacked in its breadth since it only really examined the situations of five or six people, where Ho tries to generalize her experience, and in my reading, she is much more effective than Roose was. The problem is that Roose had experience writing for a popular audience every day. Though this book has been through edits, it is still very much an academic book in the soft sciences / arts. I had seen the word “problematize” several times and it was only about half way through I thought I should keep track of that word as a proxy for how “Academic” the book was. A skilled editor could have cut half the book and made it a much more effective popular book. Ho could have done the press and maybe even had a TED talk. Talk about a missed opportunity! But for what it is, the book is very successful and very compelling for catching a brief period in time that will probably only differ in degree of the levels of tech for the next generation, no matter the humiliations that come about from recessions not foreseen or even caused by the financial sector.

Srnicek and Williams invent the future: A Source for Hope

When I was reading this, lying in bed my wife asked me what I was reading now – the format of the book is enough that it shook her out of the idea that it was just another book and instead made her ask.

I told her it might be the most important book I ever read. So many books that strike a criticism of the existing world and a future that can come through the mechanisms recommended in the book just have so many holes and they leave me feeling hopeless. But I keep reading them, both in the “Destroy Capitalism” and the “Reform Capitalism” genres. But the authors here have a smart take that make me optimistic view of how we get from here to there. We need a party moving forward the invented future. We need emancipation, a universal income, and we need to watch the rise of the robots. But we need to leverage that rise. The program is incomplete, but it is a foundation. And it is a source for optimism. The kids are all right.

Exorbitant Privilege: Haiku Review

Though Eichengreen is

A first rate historian

The book still feels long

False Starts: "The Mechanical" by Ian Tregillis

I’ve been reading a bit of more steampunk stuff, and this fit right in.

Overall, it was good, readable, and had interesting characters.

A couple of issues though; The narrative flits back and forth so some characters are central to a chapter and then they are gone for others. That makes this uneven, because there are a couple of characters that are not the most compelling. One of these is because there is a voice issue. The tech is advanced, but in the book, it was about 1920 by my estimation. There’s a character whose voice is off for the tech that was supposed to change things and the time, as we know it. It is a minor issue but sets you off from the narrative. The other thing is that it is steam-punky but there’s a compelling force behind the consciousness of these androids that are at the center of the book that feels unexplained in the narrative. Though it is hinted at, it feels like a hand-wave and overly reliant on magic and not some sort of tech. It didn’t work for me.

Ultimately, the issue for me is that there are more books out there in this sequence, and I’m not sure if I am interested in reading them. I haven’t bought the next one yet – it is at that point, where it feels the author could have closed the narrative, but instead left things open. I’m not sure if that is always the best move. It is better to establish yourself, for me, with a one off successful book than to leave things open-ended.

A Pessimistic Book as a Source for Hope: Spufford's "Red Plenty"

Years ago now, when this first came out, the blog “Crooked Timber” ran a symposium on the book that I read avidly. I remember at the time thinking that I should actually check the book out. When it came to it though, I had read enough around the book that I had felt like I had read the thing itself – the same way like I felt I was under no obligation to finish Piketty’s “Capital,” I think, because I had read so many blogs about it.

Come to think of it, that may be why I’ve never finished the namesake of that book, Marx’s Capital.

Alas, I digress. The good folks were running a symposium on another book and that reminded me that I wanted to read this book. I think it was worth it.

First of all, something must be said of the structure. It’s basically a look at the Soviet Union in the post-Stalin era where there was still some belief that the Soviet system might work. It is done in vignettes looking at different people as they lived and dealt with the economic and political systems of what is the American Eisenhower and Kennedy era. But there are a couple of weird things – It’s kind of like a Dos Passos or that other writer that stole his style and won prizes for it. The thing is that some of it is made up and the writer cannot speak or read Russian, so even the things that weren’t made up are a bit filtered through official records.

That said, the book was enjoyable for someone like me who is sympathetic to the Soviet Union in broad strokes even if having to condemn it in particulars. For the most part the tale is one of resigned acceptance of what must have been an optimism at some point – like most 30-year-olds today, you know. What it tells is the tale of trying to harness the rise of the computer but not being the innovator, and they technology always being the copy of the more inefficient but more entrepreneurial west. It is a shaded truth, and it actually opens one for optimism of what could be accomplished in central planning in terms of the computer we have and will have in the near future. Redundancy can be eliminated, leisure can be spread far and wide – plenty will be upon us. We just need to use the best of the systems that are available to us in terms of politics and economics and not let ideological rigidities preclude any possible strengths that are to be gleaned – because that is what the ultimate failure is that we really see both in Spufford’s book and the real world, a blindness induced by an idea of right that does not include all our rights.