A Surge In Girlpower: The Power, by Naomi Alderman
Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done. As he plunges, she knows that she could do it. That she has had the strength, and perhaps she has had it enough for weeks or months, but only now is she certain. She can do it now and leave no possibility of misfires or reprisals. It seems the simplest thing in the world, like reaching out a hand and flicking off a light switch. She cannot think why she hasn't decided to turn out this old light before.
I hated this book, I couldn't put it down, and I intend to track down and read the other three books Alderman has written.
The premise is that a new generation of girls develops the ability to send painful or deadly electric shocks from their fingertips because something something plot device, and thereby become the dominant gender. Thus the patriarchal world of bullying, discrimination, rape, sex trafficking, organized crime, megalomaniacal dictatorships and bullshit philospohies and religions asserting patriarchy as the natural order of things and the will of God is torn down at last, women's freedom is achieved at last, and a wonderful new era takes its place, complete with bullying, discrimination, rape, sex trafficking, organized crime, megalomaniacal dictatorships and bullshit philospohies and religions asserting matriarchy as the natural order of things. Of course.
The good news is, they smash patriarchy. The bad news is, female dominance can be as shitty as male dominance, including to women. I'm disappointed. I had always thought that the gender socialized to understand emotional labor would rule with more kindness and nurturing, if put in charge.
Nevertheless, speculation about turning the existing world upside down is fascinating, and this book in particular is a masterpiece. Seems to me, men especially, should read it. They may feel horror, not the least at the realization that most of what they're reading about is really happening to other people, as they read this. The experience of walking a mile in their ill-fitting high heels may change theri thinking. Highest recommendations.
The Wreck of the F. Scott Fitzgerald: The great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Sometime before he introduced himself, I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
The legend goes down along Long Island Sound
Where the party life never was duller
Where the virtue's as thin as a glass of cold gin
And the gin has more warmth and more color.
I haven't completed the song version yet. Maybe I will some day. Right now, it's all mood and theme to me, more than specific lyrics. more accurately, the entire book is a series of prose-poetic lyrical descriptions, from the dog biscuit floating and dying in a dish of milk to the protagonist doing the same in a swimming pool, from the party guest who is astonished to find that his host's library contains actual books instead of fake shelves with the spines glued on to the literal ash heap where Tom Buchanan goes slumming for discarded people to victimize. Every page has important visuals.
I've read Gatsby more than once, and found myself coming away with different impressions of the major characters (except Tom, who is the same bag of diseased frathouse Kavenaugh penises every time). Sometimes I pity the Wilsons, and sometimes I despise them. Sometimes I think of Gatsby as a hero and a role model, and sometimes as a schmuck who should have just let the past go. Sometimes I see Daisy as a victimized figure as tragic as Gatsby, who might have been made happy by him, and other times as a walking Love Canal whose good qualities exist only in Gatsby's imagination. Whether the book is enjoyable depends on whether you can find at least one person to be likable.
This time around, I found myself focused on the clues to the life of the unreliable narrator, his backstory in a Midwest that is presented as more clean and wholesome than the big city that he and the other characters have left it for; his refusal to commit to a serious relationship before fixing a misunderstanding in his hometown involving a woman he hadn't even been dating, compared and contrasted with the casual hookups and infidelities that he learns of among all the other characters without explicitly judging them; the fact that he seems to be the only character in East or West Egg who has a job and is conscientious about getting work done, even though it has little to do with his long range career plans.
Most of the 20th century works in the Great Books set are either excerpts or short representative works meant to include an author rather than represent their best work. Portrait of the Artist instead of Ulysses, A Lost Lady instead of My Antonia, short stories by Henry James, Faulkner and Hemingway instead of their better known novels. Fitzgerald is different. He wrote some other works, but few people read them today. Gatsby is the thing he is known for.
You'll find the Buchanans and other loose cannons
Swigging Tanqueray, Plymouth and Boodle's
Then they speed off and make shattered lives in their wake
Without saying so much as a "Toodles!"
The legend goes down along Long Island Sound
Where the wallets of rich people fatten
Their souls are no wiser than Eckleburg's eyes
Shedding tears over Queens and Manhattan
Astronishment: The Expanding universe, by Sir Arthur Eddington
In the earliest days, when the universe was only just disturbed from equilibrium, and the rate of expansion was slow, light and other radiation went round and round the universe until it was absorbed. This merry-go-round lasted until the universe had expanded to 1003times its initial radius. Then the bell rang for the last lap; light waves then running will make just one more circuit during the rest of eternity. Those that started later will never get round.
The Expanding Universe is included in the 20th Century volumes of the revised Great Books set, and I'm relieved to find that it's one of the most readable, understandable scientific works in the set.
Eddington's expanding universe model of the cosmos was in contrast to Einstein's model, in which the universe was globular, such that traveling straight in one direction would ultimately bring one back to the point of origin. Seems to me, the Eddington model makes more sense, but that may be because it's more understandable to me. The book also contains literary references and jokes, as books taken from a series of popular lectures are wont to do. Highly recommended.
The Medical Text In Spite Of Itself: Introduction to Experimental Medicine, by Claude Bernard
Among the doctors there are some who could believe that medicine should remain a science of observation, that is to say a medicine capable of predicting the course and the outcome of diseases, but not having to act directly on the disease. There are others, and I am one of them, who thought that medicine could be an experimental science, that is to say a medicine capable of descending into the interior of the organism, and of finding the means of modifying and adjusting up to a certain point the hidden springs of the living machine. Observing physicians regarded the living organism as a small world contained in the large, as a kind of living and ephemeral planet whose movements were governed by laws that the simple observation could make us discover so as to predict the course and the evolution of vital phenomena in a healthy or sick state, but without ever having to modify their natural course in any way. This doctrine is found in all its purity in Hippocrates.
As opposed to Eddington, Claude Bernard is not particularly enjoyable, and if he has a point, I failed to comprehend it. The first half, translated tediously from French, consists of droning endlessly about the difference between observation and experiment; it later progresses to the ethics of vivisection on live subjects who are not in need of surgery, and the need to keep a cold, detached air while the patient is screaming. He's also one of about six great scientific authors from down the centuries who writes about the scientific method as if he invented it during his own lifetime.
He may have been a great and powerful scientist back in the day, but his book is dry as burnt toast.
Rank and Dominance: Essays in Sociology, by Max Weber
On a long railroad journey through what was then Indian territory, the author, sitting next to a traveling salesman of 'undertakers' hardware' (iron letters for tombstones), casually mentioned the still impressively strong church-mindedness. Thereupon the salesman remarked, 'Sir, for my part everybody may believe or not believe as he pleases, but if I saw a farmer or a business man not belonging to any church at all, I wouldn't trust him with fifty cents. Why pay me, if he doesn't believe in anything?' Now, that was a somewhat vague motivation.
(And the whole time, the real imperative was exactly the opposite, and it's been the church people who were untrustworthy. Why pay you, if they think they're the chosen people and can get away with any evil they want to, as long as they say a prayer for forgiveness afterwards? But I digress)
Weber is in the revised Great books set, too. I'm not sure quite when "sociology" was invented as a separate concept from political science and anthropology, but Weber was likely a pioneer in the field. His sociology, sampling different ways in which societies and social status are organized in various world cultures, flows nicely from the surveys of religious/mystical traditions and traditional customs explored in Frazier's Golden Bough and Sumner's Folkways, both of which I read last year.
Weber is famous for defining government as a body that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and for citing the three possible sources of government authority as "charisma, custom & tradition, and bureaucracy" (hint; bureaucracy is the one you want, and the Republican Party in America has tried to sully the word and replace it with a hybrid of charisma and tradition).
The first half of the book, the political part, was the most interesting to me, as it compared and contrasted such bureaucracies as existed in France, Germany and Russia immediately prior to and during the 20th Century, with echoes of the endless minor officials who appear in Chekhov and Gogol, and who were humorlessly parodied by Kafka. There are further sections on religion and on the concept of social rank, from royal hierarchies to western economic strata to the caste system of India and the Chinese literati. Weber would have been fascinated by the nonsensical politics in American high schools and corporate structures. An interesting read.
More Jack Reacher: The Enemy, The Hard Way, Bad Luck & Trouble, Wanted Man, by Lee Child
Day xxx of quarantine. I've been feeding junk food to my mind as well as to my body. Shuttup. I don't even care.