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.