Daily Kos: AdmiralNaismith

Monthly Book Post, October 2018

Community

Thursday November 01, 2018 · 11:00 AM PDT

2018/11/01 · 11:00

Workers of the World Unite, and all that: Capital, by Karl Marx

In the United States of North America every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours' agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California. For "protection" against "the serpent of their agonies", the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the "inalienable rights of man" comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working day.

I've been grazing in Marx's huge tome since I read the Communist Manifesto in January.  And there's a reason the Manifesto is the one people have read.  Capital is a thick, serious economic treatise, and the more sexy quotes are about human misery, not liberation.

In fact, there's not much about communism or workers' paradise in here at all, except between the lines, implied in the central thesis that Capitalism necessarily contains the seeds of its own destruction.  The book itself is about the process of that inevitable destruction.

Read the introductory chapters, the last part, and if you're a glutton for punishment, the lengthy tenth chapter about the "working day" of the proletariat. Learn the concept of "surplus value" by which the ONLY source of profit for an industrialist is necessarily the direct theft of value from workers; and the concept of concentration of wealth, by which the resources of any given community end up in fewer and fewer hands as time passes, while the have-nots sink into ever-more squalid poverty.  Those parts have stood the test of time, and the efforts of Libertarians since Marx's day have failed to refute them.

The part that has been refuted has been Marx's theory that the ONLY result from the increasing concentration of wealth will and must be violent revolution of the proletariat.  It has been refuted by the periodic redistribution of wealth in crisis times by governments.  When things get bad enough, the state hits a "reset button", seizes wealth from the one percent, and gives it to the starving masses, and the cycle starts again.  This is the only known way of preventing violent revolution.  Hence the calls by "libertarians" who would otherwise be expected to advocate withholding all money from poor people, to teach them what a mistake they are making by choosing to be so poor--for the counterintuitive (for them) guaranteed income, or negative income tax, or national dividend, or other redistribution mechanisms that go against all their vaunted laissez-faire concepts.  It's how they avoid the guillotine.

As I write this, we're hitting a crisis point. the young, especially, are being forced into ever-more squalid living conditions, and people born bourgeoisie, who aspire to becoming aristocrats, are being harshly smacked down to proletariat status.  The smart money knows that that is when redistribution MUST happen. Unfortunately, the ignorant money is in charge.

Read the book, and prepare. Interesting times await.

General Disorder: The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated "poor white trash." The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.

I would probably have read President Grant's memoirs a little earlier, if I had known they ended with the Civil War. I had been hoping to find a firsthand account of his Presidency from back in the days when the Republicans were the good guys. I recall getting a distinctly unfavorable impression of Grant as both a general and a President from my conservative-approved "mainstream" childhood education, and I've been exceedingly suspicious as the years have gone by.

I'm also glad I read other civil war histories first, or I'd suspect Grant was exaggerating. Yes, he and the rest of the western front pretty much really did sweep through Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and the Carolinas in pretty much the same time it took the Virginia army to beat the rug

The battles are not particularly vivid, as described by Grant, but the strategy and tactics are explained, with great attention to the logistical problems of the war, and portraits of Sherman, Sheridan, and other generals.

Now, if only I could find a passage or two explaining what he was thinking during Credit Mobilier....

Early Feminist Rant: The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her.

A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her,—the light which, showing the way, forbids it.

At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears.

In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight—perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.

But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!

If there are earlier novels where the central theme involves women confronting the constraints of traditional gender roles, where the roles and not the protagonists are presented as being at fault, now's your chance to comment with suggestions. My spouse challenges me to read more books by women, which I figure will be easier as my long term reading plan reaches the 20th century and beyond, but it seems to me that The Awakening may be the first book of its kind (I'm limiting myself to fiction here, and deliberately classifying Wollestonecraft, et al., elsewhere)

The book made me acutely aware that I was seeing a not-male vision of things, and it was disorienting. For a goodly part of the book, I misidentified the setting, thinking "Grand Isle" was part of France, when in fact it is on the coast of Louisiana. Edna, the protagonist, is definitely the daughter of a Kentucky Colonel, but it seemed she was living abroad.

Her husband, who she calls "Mr. Pontellier", isn't particularly a bad man. He gives his wife space when she asks for it, even consenting to let her move into a separate house, ignoring other men who think he should assert dominance. He's just...not particularly aware. But then, edna doesn't tell him all that much.

And yes, "the awakening" of the title means her discovery of her sexuality, after having had children. And the implication is that all but one of the other women in her circle are still asleep. She becomes discontented, isolated, enamored of other men and possibly another woman, and the implication at the end is that she commits suicide. But it's not especially spelled out, which may be the point.

The Victorian Murders: Swing, Swing Together; Mad Hatter's Holiday, by Peter Lovesey; The Turkish Gambit, by Boris Akunin; The Valley of Fear, by Arthur Conan Doyle; No Justice, by James D. Brewer; Death on BlackHeath; Angel Court Affair, by Anne Perry

On the one hand, things were going badly; you might even say they could not possibly be any worse. Poor Petya was still languishing under lock and key--after the Plevna bloodbath the noxious Kazanzaki had lost interest in the cryptographer, but the threat of a court-martial remained as real as ever. And the fortunes of war had proved fickle--the golden fish that granted wishes had turned into a prickly scorpion fish and disappeared into the abyss, leaving their hands scratched and bleeding. But on the other hand (this was something Varya was ashamed to admit even to herself) her life had never been so...interesting. That was the word: interesting. That was it exactly.

--from The Turkish Gambit

"A touch! A distinct touch!" cried Holmes. "You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself. But in calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law—and there lie the glory and the wonder of it! The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every deviltry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations—that's the man! But so aloof is he from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's pension as a solatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? Is this a man to traduce? Foul-mouthed doctor and slandered professor—such would be your respective roles! That's genius, Watson. But if I am spared by lesser men, our day will surely come."

--from The Valley of Fear

For more than three hours he'd been chugging along the river in this half-assed shanty boat, pretending to watch the river ahead but stealing a glance at her every chance he got. And it wasn't just a friendly check to see how he was doing. She knew what Gil Nashton wanted and it was only a matter of time before he tried to get it. She was sick of him looking at her that way. He was nasty, and she could smell him from the other end of the boat, where she had moved to keep some distance between them. It'd been a month at least, she figured, since he'd had a bath. Was he crazy? How could he think any woman would find him attractive? She considered waiting in the shack, so he couldn't look at her, but she dared not turn her back. He was liable to drop anchor and come after her. At least out here she would see him coming.

---from No Justice

"It's novices that cause the trouble. They read the book and before they've finished a couple of chapters they're down at Kingston hiring a skiff. They throw in a tent and some meat pies and away they go just like them three duffers in the book. If they survive the first night at Runnymede, they spend the second in the Crown at Marlow--them that can get in--and next morning they come through here looking for the backwater to Wargrave. 'There shouldn't be a lock here', they say. 'What's this lock doing in our way? It isn't in the book.' 'Yes it is,' I say. 'Marsh lock, page 220.' The book is generally open on their knees, so they pick it up and frown into it and sure enough they find it mentioned. The reason why they never see it is that the backwater is mentioned first, even though it's half a mile upriver from here."

--from Swing, Swing Together

"I've had that heppen before and it didn't hurt as much. But I really like him. Annabelle told me afterward that if I had any sense I would agree with boys, because that's what they like, no matter how wrong they are. It isn't right and wrong. It's just being able to think what you want to and talk about it. But what if I do that and nobody ever loves me? Am I going to have to pretend all the time, or be alone for always?"
--from The Angel Court Affair

Like the Sergeant Cribb Books, my local library only has a handful of books in a larger new series I started this month: Boris Akunin and his detective Fandorin. The Turkish Gambit is told from the point of view of a Russian woman leaving home to meet her fiance in the Balkans during the Russo-Turkish war, and the reader is supposed to recognize Fandorin when he first appears as a deceptively innocuous stranger who surprises her with his ability to manipulate, win at fixed games of chance, and fight his way out of a tight spot. The colorful horse-and-cannon battles are richly described, and the complexity of both Balkan politics and Fandorin himself rival last year's series about Yashim the Eunnuch....except that this time, we're looking at Turkey from the outside.

Speaking of Sergeant Cribb, the "character and atmosphere" centered books I read this month center around rowing-excursions up the Thames, made popular by Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, and seaside holidays. Both crimes are nonsensical and not decipherable from clues (even when one has the hindsight of having seen the adaptations 35 years previously; I think they might have changed them for the tube).

James D. Brewer's brief series set on and around Reconstruction-era river boats keeps getting better. The third (of just four books to date) involves a visit from President Grant, some Pinkertons, and a star turn by one of Luke and Masie's friends, a woman who entertains passengers, and whose resourcefulness puts the male protagonists to shame.

The Valley of Fear is maybe the least known of the four Holmes novels, and my least favorite. It begins well enough, with a hint of Moriarty, a code-breaking, and a homicide in a stately old mansion. The second half, giving the backstory of one of the main characters, makes me realize what it might be like to be a Mormon reading A Study in Scarlet. It gets everything wrong. It depicts a radical Labor organization from the Robber Baron era as if they were terrorists who "own the town and have innocent people terrified", with not one word about the horrible treatment of coal miners by the capitalist class, or of the thousands of starving proletariats that the unions helped. There is even a depiction of a mining boss shot in front of an entire contingent of miners, and not only is he not a cruel slave-driver grinding the faces of the workers, but all the miners are shocked and horrified as if he was their friend. And yes, there were some mining companies that treated their employees well, but they weren't the ones who faced the desperate reprisals of the Mollies or the IWW now, were they? Doyle should maybe have stuck with England.

...And there's more Anne Perry.

Don't Hit Me With the Babka!: The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevski
“Do you know there is a limit of ignominy, beyond which man’s consciousness of shame cannot go, and after which begins satisfaction in shame? Well, of course humility is a great force in that sense, I admit that—though not in the sense in which religion accounts humility to be strength!

“Religion!—I admit eternal life—and perhaps I always did admit it.

“Admitted that consciousness is called into existence by the will of a Higher Power; admitted that this consciousness looks out upon the world and says ‘I am;’ and admitted that the Higher Power wills that the consciousness so called into existence, be suddenly extinguished (for so—for some unexplained reason—it is and must be)—still there comes the eternal question—why must I be humble through all this? Is it not enough that I am devoured, without my being expected to bless the power that devours me? Surely—surely I need not suppose that Somebody—there—will be offended because I do not wish to live out the fortnight allowed me? I don’t believe it.

“It is much simpler, and far more likely, to believe that my death is needed—the death of an insignificant atom—in order to fulfill the general harmony of the universe—in order to make even some plus or minus in the sum of existence. Just as every day the death of numbers of beings is necessary because without their annihilation the rest cannot live on—(although we must admit that the idea is not a particularly grand one in itself!)

“However—admit the fact! Admit that without such perpetual devouring of one another the world cannot continue to exist, or could never have been organized—I am ever ready to confess that I cannot understand why this is so—but I’ll tell you what I do know, for certain. If I have once been given to understand and realize that I am—what does it matter to me that the world is organized on a system full of errors and that otherwise it cannot be organized at all? Who will or can judge me after this? Say what you like—the thing is impossible and unjust!

This is one of the murkier of Dostoevski's top tier novels, many of which highlight great mental illnesses in their central characters. The Idiot, it seems to me, stands alone in framing Russian society in general as a mental illness, and the main character as one who suffers greatly by being one of the few who are mostly sane and good-hearted. On the other hand, Raskolnikov and the guy from Notes From Underground also considered themselves as good, sane victims of an insane society, so there may be much that I missed.

The Feminine Mistake: She, by H. Rider Haggard

“Why art thou so frightened, stranger?” asked the sweet voice again—a voice which seemed to draw the heart out of me, like the strains of softest music. “Is there that about me that should affright a man? Then surely are men changed from what they used to be!” And with a little coquettish movement she turned herself, and held up one arm, so as to show all her loveliness and the rich hair of raven blackness that streamed in soft ripples down her snowy robes, almost to her sandalled feet.

“It is thy beauty that makes me fear, oh Queen,” I answered humbly, scarcely knowing what to say, and I thought that as I did so I heard old Billali, who was still lying prostrate on the floor, mutter, “Good, my Baboon, good.”

“I see that men still know how to beguile us women with false words. Ah, stranger,” she answered, with a laugh that sounded like distant silver bells, “thou wast afraid because mine eyes were searching out thine heart, therefore wast thou afraid. Yet being but a woman, I forgive thee for the lie, for it was courteously said"

Omigosh, 19th century adventure stories for manly men were SO problematic.  Consider the story of Holly, the smart but ugly hunchback, and Leo, who is handsome as a Greek God but doesn't show much by way of personality, except that Holly as narrator never tires of reminding you how handsome he is.  They go to Darkest Africa in search of Leo's mysterious heritage, described on ancient pottery shards, and discover----SHE.

Omigosh, She is a woman!  And in charge! How discomforting!  Holly matter-of-factly says he has a hard time coping with her authority because he is a misogynist.  He actually uses that word, expecting that you, the presumably male reader, are one too, as all English blokes are, and will understand completely.

She--eventually they start using her actual name, Ayesha, though "She Who Must Be Obeyed" is also popular--is white even though we're in undiscovered parts of the African jungle, because having Victorian Englishmen experiencing fear and arousal over a Sub-Saharan African who looked like most Sub-Saharan Africans would be something something garbanzo and one can't have that, wot-wot?  The cover art depicts the mysterious ultimate in feminine magic beauty as consistent with 60s-era American Hollywood leading lady in a DeMille epic with flowing white robes and her hands raised incantationishly over flames.  Ayesha is thousands of years old, magical, and still in mourning for Leo's ancient look-alike ancestor who died sometime sometime kalamata.

And people once took this stuff seriously.

Oh, all right.  This was before Tolkein, even, and the fantasy genre had to start somewhere.  But whoo boy.

Man Levels Up: The Riddle of the Universe, by Ernst Heackel
The best and most plausible ground for athanatism is found in the hope that immortality will reunite us to the beloved friends who have been prematurely taken from us by some grim mischance. But even this supposed good fortune proves to be an illusion on closer inquiry; and in any case it would be greatly marred by the prospect of meeting the less agreeable acquaintances and the enemies who have troubled our existence here below. Even the closest family ties would involve many a difficulty. There are plenty of men who would gladly sacrifice all the glories of Paradise if it meant the eternal companionship of their “better half” and their mother-in-law. It is more than questionable whether Henry VIII. would like the prospect of living eternally with his six wives; or Augustus the Strong of Poland, who had a hundred mistresses and three hundred and fifty-two children. As he was on good terms with the Vicar of Christ, he must be assumed to be in Paradise, in spite of his sins, and in spite of the fact that his mad military ventures cost the lives of more than a hundred thousand Saxons.

Another insoluble difficulty faces the athanatist when he asks in what stage of their individual development the disembodied souls will spend their eternal life. Will the new-born infant develop its psychic powers in heaven under the same hard conditions of the “struggle for life” which educate man here on earth? Will the talented youth who has fallen in the wholesale murder of war unfold his rich, unused mental powers in Walhalla? Will the feeble, childish old man, who has filled the world with the fame of his deeds in the ripeness of his age, live forever in mental[Pg 209] decay? Or will he return to an earlier stage of development? If the immortal souls in Olympus are to live in a condition of rejuvenescence and perfectness, then both the stimulus to the formation of, and the interest in, personality disappear for them.

Well...that was a bit of a surprise.

I found the book in the religion section and was expecting more churchy bullshit.  Instead, I found a celebration of how science and philosophy have erased the idiotic superstitions forced upon a victimized mankind by the church.

It looks at evolution, not only of biology, but of geology and the cosmos, and eventually, of the human mind, classifying various areas of knowledge like Francis Bacon did hundreds of years earlier, and treating religious dogma with a burning sarcasm that would have gotten an author Inquisitioned in earlier days.  And Haeckel's relish in doing so is marvelous to read. Highly recommended.

Historical Curmudgeon: The Historical Romances (The Prince and the Pauper; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc), by Mark Twain

These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. There was something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families—including the voter's; and would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families—including his own .

They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man could have a say in the government. I said I had seen one—and that it would last until it had an Established Church.
---from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Omigosh, Twain makes me so happy.  Never mind Huckleberry Finn for now (I'll be reading that one next month and maybe eating my words); the Connecticut Yankee is, for my money, Twain's true masterpiece.  As Don Quixote has come to be a brilliant satire, not only of medieval romance, but of the morals and manners of Cervantes's time as well, the Connecticut Yankee shines a magnifying glass intentionally on the prejudices of chivalry and unintentionally on 19th century American capitalism as well.

The protagonist finds himself in a "romantic" kingdom, that is quickly unmasked as a barbaric, imperialist, educationally backward hellhole in which the codes of art and honor are weapons for grinding the faces of most of the people, and in which the church is more hypocritical, cruel, and dangerous than even a military horde.  Trope after trope is unhorsed and lands, clanking, on its ass.  I loved every page of it.

And then...but just read it. I don't want to spoil it.

And after doing all that, Twain takes the life of Joan of arc, an actual saint, and treats religion with actual compassion, as real virtue is shown belabored by church and state alike for its own purposes.

And the child's story of the prince and the pauper, salted with the kind of wisdom that children are likely to miss on a first reading and adults might too.

There's a lot of "humor" that I found very much not funny, such as the 'whipping boy" who begs the prince to continue to be naughty so that he can continue to have a job being beaten in punishment for the prince's wrongs.  And a lot of themse showing where Twain's sympathies lie and mine do too. All three books have plot elements involving royalty putting on peasant garb for an experiment and then being unable to reassert itself and being mocked and threatened with violence for seeming "uppity".  All three have clever, meritorious low-borns unable to rise to where they deserve to be, and horse's-ass high-borns doing incredible harm through being awarded, as their due, power above their worth.

Very highest recommendations.

The Opposite of Christianity: Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Chilo had done him the most terrible wrong that one man could do another. At the very thought of how he would act with a man who killed Lygia, for instance, the heart of Vinicius seethed up, as does water in a caldron; there were no torments which he would not inflict in his vengeance! But Glaucus had forgiven; Ursus, too, had forgiven,—Ursus, who might in fact kill whomever he wished in Rome with perfect impunity, for all he needed was to kill the king of the grove in Nemi, and take his place. Could the gladiator holding that office to which he had succeeded only by killing the previous “king,” resist the man whom Croton could not resist? There was only one answer to all these questions: that they refrained from killing him through a goodness so great that the like of it had not been in the world up to that time, and through an unbounded love of man, which commands to forget one’s self, one’s wrongs, one’s happiness and misfortune, and live for others. What reward those people were to receive for this, Vinicius heard in Ostrianum, but he could not understand it. He felt, however, that the earthly life connected with the duty of renouncing everything good and rich for the benefit of others must be wretched. So in what he thought of the Christians at that moment, besides the greatest astonishment, there was pity, and as it were a shade of contempt. It seemed to him that they were sheep which earlier or later must be eaten by wolves; his Roman nature could yield no recognition to people who let themselves be devoured. This one thing struck him, however,—that after Chilo’s departure the faces of all were bright with a certain deep joy. The Apostle approached Glaucus, placed his hand on his head, and said,—“In thee Christ has triumphed.”

This book, set in the time of Emperor Nero, is one of the oddest books I've read in a while. Imagine a great empire suffering under the rule of a half-mad tyrant given to abominable appetites, surrounded by incompetent and brutal sycophants, a ruler who continually makes a ghastly and ridiculous spectacle of himself every time he stands on his hind legs and speaks, but at whom few people dare laugh because he is so cruel. Are you with me so far?

That part may be easy to imagine, in this day and age. But now imagine that the Christians in this empire do NOT make up the incompetent tyrant's main base of support; that they do NOT hold him up as a role model for all that Christ stands for; that they do NOT celebrate lust, greed, envy, rage, gluttony, vanity and sloth as their sacraments; do NOT goad him toward bigger outrages against human decency than ever; and that they are in fact among his most persecuted opponents, whose most effective defensive weapons against him consist of displays of virtue and forgiveness, even when cruelly used to the extreme. That when one of their own is murdered viciously, they do NOT loudly express hope that their oppressor is forced to share a cell with a gigantic Ethiop with perverse sexual appetites, and that when a Jew is at their mercy, they let him go with sweet words of encouragement.

This bizarro world confused me completely until I remembered that this was european christianity and not American Christianity; that Nero was the forerunner of American-style Christianity and that the Europeans actually lived by tenets of the Gospels instead of condemning practitioners thereof as socialists, libtards, and enemies of the state.

Cleverly, Sienkiewicz made most of his protagonists slaves from the land that eventually became his native Poland, managed to redeem one of the slimiest villains in literature convincingly, and gave a part to a verbose cynic (Petronius, author of the Satyricon) that warmed the cockles of this cynic's heart.

You may have noticed, I have little use for churchy stuff, but this one actually moved me, with a display of what religion *could* be, if those who professed it took the doctrines of love and of being a spark in the darkness seriously, instead of, as is almost universal in America, pretending to believe in a God as an excuse to indulge one's appetite for cruelty.

Best Intro Ever: The History of Civilization in England, by Thomas H. Buckle

It would be easy to conduct this argument further, and to prove how, by an increasing love of intellectual pursuits, the military service necessarily declines, not only in reputation, but likewise in ability. In a backward state of society men of distinguished talents crowd to the army, and are proud to enroll themselves in its ranks. But, as society advances, new sources of activity are opened, and new professions arise, which, being essentially mental, offer to genius opportunities for success more rapid than any formerly known. The consequence is, that in England, where these opportunities are more numerous than elsewhere, it nearly always happens that if a father has a son whose faculties are remarkable, he brings him up to one of the lay professions, where intellect, when accompanied by industry, is sure to be rewarded. If, however, the inferiority of the boy is obvious, a suitable remedy is at hand: he is made either a soldier or a clergyman; he is sent into the army, or hidden in the church. And this, as we shall hereafter see, is one of the reasons why, as society advances, the ecclesiastical spirit and the military spirit never fail to decline. As soon as eminent men grow unwilling to enter any profession, the lustre of that profession will be tarnished:[199] first its reputation will be lessened, and then its power will be abridged. This is the process through which Europe is actually passing, in regard both to the church and to the army

All right...where to begin?

This is why I read hundreds of relatively obscure books on lists of "great western books", including mountains of deadly dull material.  Every so often, I discover someone like Henry Thomas Buckle, and all the sawdust without butter is suddenly worth it.

Despite the title, Buckle's masterwork is NOT a history of civilization in England.  It is a two-volume INTRODUCTION to the history of civilization in England that he planned to write and never got past the introduction.  He just kept on introducing and introducing, intending to get around to England by way of hundreds of pages on the history of civilization in France, Spain, and Scotland.  He also intended to summarize Germany, Ireland and the United states of America, but stopped or died or something before getting around to that, either.  The finished work would have filled a shelf of encyclopedias and, by my literary tastes, it would have been worth it to read the whole monstrous set.

The two volumes of introduction that exist are for my money the best history since Gibbon, and more readable and educational than half the contents of the Great Books and Harvard Classics set. There is greatness on every other page, and I don't say this because I agree with him.  Among other things, Buckle is an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, but he is wrong for the right reason.

Despite his capitalism, buckle would be denounced by modern Republicans as a snooty cultural elitist, because his central thesis is about the importance of education in the advance of civilization. Again and again, Buckle tells us that MORAL knowledge is stagnant (If anyone can identify any great moral truth that was unknown hundreds of years ago, please speak up.  Buckle's ghost and I will thank you) but that INTELLECTUAL advances are constantly expanding, and that therefore the advance or decline of civilization is dependent on the degree to which people apply intellect, especially in abstract and applies sciences.

Not surprisingly, churches and those governments that repress thought come in for vast quantities of colorful sarcasm and other abuse, particularly in the passages describing the history of Spain--a country dominated by churches and resistant to progress, where the collective mind has/had been utterly, utterly stultified, failing o prosper even by those technologies dropped into its lap by other nations.  Or of France, whose fortunes fluctuated based on the varying degrees in which it ignored or succumbed to Catholicism over the centuries.

And as I write this, I live in a once-great nation whose fortunes have appreciably sunk as the populace has sunk into religious dogmatism and the government has been replaced by one which openly wages war against knowledge and learning; where science is abused, teachers are openly treated with contempt, and commerce and great minds flee like rats from a sinking ship.  All through my reading of buckle, I could hear him railing at the Republicans: "Good God, what are you thinking?"

Very highest recommendations.

Literary Buckle: By the Open Sea, by August Strindberg

Borg had, in a couple of years, so ordered his affairs that he was a member of most of the learned societies of Europe. He was the holder of the Italian Order of the Crown, the French Instruction Publique, Te Austrian Order of Leopold, and the Russian Order of St. Anna, second class. But nothing helped with those about him. their scorn increased with every distinction, though these were founded on merit. If they could not deny the fact, they minimised its value, or pretended to be unaware of what was going on. This did not prevent them from using for their own hunting the track that he had beaten.

And right when I'm reading Buckle about how we need intellectual advances to progress as a civilization, along comes Strindberg with a dark tale about a man sent to rescue a fishing village from backwardness and scorned and laughed at by families that know better than he because their fathers always did it the old way. Echoes of that other great Scandinavian work, An Enemy of the People.

Spanish Flies: Fortunata and Jacinta, by Benito Perez Galdes

In the tertulias held in the cafe there are always two kinds of members: the ones who make the underbrush of a conversation by telling absurd news or gross jokes, and the ones who have the last word on whatever is being debated. The latter deliver doctoral judgments, thus bringing the jokes and nonsense down to their real level. Wherever there are men there is authority, and these cafe authorities who sometimes define, sometimes predict, and always influence the crowd because their opinions are apparently sound, constitute a sort of consensus that usually ends up in the press, where the consensus probably wasn't based on anything better.

And again...I happened to pick up Spain's biggest 19th century novel right when I was reading Buckle bagging on the Spaniards as backwards peasants hobbled by superstition and unable to better themselves, and sure enough, here was Galdes treating the people of Madrid, though with much more kind feeling than Buckle, as not much more advanced than in the days of Cervantes. Churchy stuff everywhere.  People doing things the same way their grandparents did them.

The main male character is a womanizing jerk who is involved with both of the title characters.  He loves the working-class, Amazonian Fortunata, but gets tired of her and leaves her pregnant. His family arranges his marriage to a cousin, Jacinta, who very much wants children.  He doesn't impregnate her. He keeps impregnating Fortunata. several times, Fortunata begins to move on and have a life of her own with some other guy, and Juanito gets jealous and sabotages the relationship so that he can get back to cheating on her, but gets tired of her and leaves her again.  Other men are undersized runts and shamed for it as less than masculine, especially by Fortunata.

There is so very much that is wrong with this story.  And yet, the Spanish apparently revere it, except that when the Nobel committee considered making Galdes a laureate, it was Spaniards who protested that he wasn't worthy, and so they gave the prize to someone else.  Buckle would have nodded and pointed and said, "See?"

Monthly Bookpost, September 2018

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday October 04, 2018 · 11:05 AM PDT

2018/10/04 · 11:05

Learning is Good: Essays on Science and Education, by Thomas Henry Huxley

How often have we not been told that the study of physical science is incompetent to confer culture; that it touches none of the higher problems of life; and, what is worse, that the continual devotion to scientific studies tends to generate a narrow and bigoted belief in the applicability of scientific methods to the search after truth of all kinds. How frequently one has reason to observe that no reply to a troublesome argument tells so well as calling its author a “mere scientific specialist.” And, as I am afraid it is not permissible to speak of this form of opposition to scientific education in the past tense; may we not expect to be told that this, not only omission, but prohibition, of “mere literary instruction and education” is a patent example of scientific narrow-mindedness?

Huxley, beloved ancestor of Aldous, comes to me at just the right moment, when I'm also looking at Dedekind, yet another scientific specialist whose contribution to The Great Western Canon requires much heavier concentration than the novels and most of the philosophy. I've been doing this for eight years now, and when I get ready to say "No more on the heavy duty science", along comes Huxley to make the case that knowing these things is essential to being a person of culture.

All right, Thomas. I'll stay at it.

Mind you, in Huxley's day, humanities involved a lot more attention to reading ancient classics in the original dead languages, and a lot more scriptural study. Therefore, Huxley's attempt to defend science as something that generalists should study instead of literature, philosophy and learned societal writings (when it seems to me, it's good to read all of it) is not especially persuasive. It involves pointing out that, for example, one can read Shakespeare and Milton in English and that therefore homer and Virgil can be dispensed with. More importantly, it points out that understanding abstract science leads to applied science and the inventions that make our world better, with plenty of examples developed during Huxley's own lifetime.

Huxley either coined, or believed he coined, the word "agnostic" to differentiate confident atheism from the belief that some spiritual mysteries of the cosmos and the origin of all things were beyond human comprehension.

I'm a little surprised that Mortimer Adler and the other Great Book gatekeepers didn't give TH Huxley more of a pedestal. The man actually left a promising scientific career to become a crusader for including science in the liberal arts. Then again, I now live in a time when we have come full circle and it has once again become fashionable for Men Of Business to deride scientists as not knowing anything, and to assert dominance over anything that threatens their private profits. fight this trend. read some Huxley. Vote Democrat.

I'll be a Monkey's Uncle: The Descent of Man, by Charles Darwin

The small strength and speed of man, his want of natural weapons, etc., are more than counterbalanced, firstly, by his intellectual powers, through which he has formed for himself weapons, tools, etc., though still remaining in a barbarous state, and, secondly, by his social qualities which lead him to give and receive aid from his fellow-men. No country in the world abounds in a greater degree with dangerous beasts than Southern Africa; no country presents more fearful physical hardships than the Arctic regions; yet one of the puniest of races, that of the Bushmen, maintains itself in Southern Africa, as do the dwarfed Esquimaux in the Arctic regions. The ancestors of man were, no doubt, inferior in intellect, and probably in social disposition, to the lowest existing savages; but it is quite conceivable that they might have existed, or even flourished, if they had advanced in intellect, whilst gradually losing their brute-like powers, such as that of climbing trees, etc. But these ancestors would not have been exposed to any special danger, even if far more helpless and defenceless than any existing savages, had they inhabited some warm continent or large island, such as Australia, New Guinea, or Borneo, which is now the home of the orang. And natural selection arising from the competition of tribe with tribe, in some such large area as one of these, together with the inherited effects of habit, would, under favourable conditions, have sufficed to raise man to his present high position in the organic scale.

DID YOU KNOW?--Darwin did not, in The Origin of Species, claim that mankind had evolved from monkeys; only that species in general evolved via natural selection. For human evolution, we turn to The Descent of Man, a good deal of which predicts shock and outrage and offended dignity, and tries to mollify it by pointing out that monkeys and domestic pets and other animals have demonstrated a high capacity for thought, compassion, and ethical concerns.

I find this reassuring, and hope that eventually men will show such signs, too.

More than half of the book is devoted to sexual selection, and the way in which animals develop traits designed to attract partners. Birds, mostly male birds, evolve glorious plumage, singing voices, crests, etc., to attract female birds. When the female birds reject them anyway, the birds tweet "Lols ur fat anyway", and go off to sulk.

The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing: The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain

We celebrated a lady’s birthday anniversary with toasts, speeches, a poem, and so forth. We also had a mock trial. No ship ever went to sea that hadn’t a mock trial on board. The purser was accused of stealing an overcoat from stateroom No. 10. A judge was appointed; also clerks, a crier of the court, constables, sheriffs; counsel for the State and for the defendant; witnesses were subpoenaed, and a jury empaneled after much challenging. The witnesses were stupid and unreliable and contradictory, as witnesses always are. The counsel were eloquent, argumentative, and vindictively abusive of each other, as was characteristic and proper. The case was at last submitted and duly finished by the judge with an absurd decision and a ridiculous sentence.

According to the introduction, Twain was most famous during his life, and made the most money, from his early travel journals.  The fiction was an afterthought that supposedly didn't get much attention at the time.

It's hard to tell how much of Innocents Abroad describes a real trip accurately.  Most or all of it seems plausible enough.  The schtick is that an educational cruise around the Mediterranean, with excursions to the great museums, cathedrals, historic sites, etc., of Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Holy Land, and Egypt, is presented from the point of view of a group of average American tourists from Missouri, lacking in education and tolerance for bullshit.  sometimes the humor is at the expense of rubes who can't tell great art, and sometimes it's at the expense of the attempted confidence tricks of experienced tour guides, that get smacked down by western Americans whose standard for beauty and manners was learned prospecting for gold in California. Twain's retelling of Peter Abelard's romance with Heloise as moralised by a cowboy, is particularly good.

And then sometimes it's not funny at all, but quite moving and beautiful.  You never know what you'll get with Twain.

Math you can count on!: Theory of Numbers, by Richard Dedekind

One of the most important theorems may be stated in the following manner: "If a magnitude x grows continually but not beyond all limits, it approaches a limiting value." I prove it in the following way: By hypothesis there exists one and hence there exist infinitely many numbers a2 such that x remains continually a1, hence every number a1 is less than every number a2 and consequently there exists a number a which is either the greatest in U1 or the least in U2. The former cannot be the case since x never ceases to grow, hence a is the least number in U2. Whatever number a1 be taken we shall have finally a1

This is another mercifully brief book of dense and groundbreaking math theorems not to be read for pleasure and identified by Adler as part of the "great conversation."

Dedekind developed irrational numbers and his treatise climaxes with one of those proofs that I vaguely remember from college, when my circle sat around, high, and saying "Whoah" a lot: That there is a one-to-one correspondence between the set of all integers, the set of all even integers, and the set of numbers that are squares of integers, because infinity is paradoxical.

The Victorian Murders: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle; Treason at Lisson Grove; Dorchester Terrace; Midnight at Marble Arch, by Anne Perry; Abracadaver, by Peter Lovesy

Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy grey shepherd’s check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head, and the expression of extreme chagrin and discontent upon his features.

Sherlock Holmes’ quick eye took in my occupation, and he shook his head with a smile as he noticed my questioning glances. “Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”

--from "The Red-Headed League"

"When we do catch somebody on one of these, we usually don't have to look too far...A woman of no virtue gets herself killed, there's usually a man of less virtue not far away."

--from No Virtue

"Hungary will secede, and before you know how to stop it, you will have a war that will spread like fire until it embroils most of the world. Don't imagine that England will escape. It won't. There will be war from Ireland to the Middle East, and from Moscow to North Africa, maybe further. Perhaps all of Africa, because it is British, and then Australia will follow, and New Zealand. Even Canada. Perhaps eventually the United States as well!"

Pitt was stunned by the enormity of it, the horror and the absurdity of the view.

"No one would let that sort of thing happen," he said soberly. "You are suggesting that one act of violence in the Balkans would end in a conflagration that would consume the world. That's ridiculous."

--from Dorchester Terrace

Like everyone around them, the detectives shouted in appreciation whenever the ballet appeared, and crashed their pewter pots on the bar counter each time a dancer flung a leg higher than her companions; authenticity demanded it. But by mid-evening the shimmering fumes above the footlights increasingly set the performers apart from the audience. That, at least, was what Thackeray supposed after five pints of Kop's, though the cigar smoke and the gin vapours closer to hand may have played a part.

--from Abracadaver

Read the Adventures and you'll have read the essential Holmes. Most of the most famous stories are in this collection: "A Scandal in Bohemia"; "The Speckled Band", "The Red-Headed League"; "The Blue Carbuncle"; "A Case of Identity"....but no Moriarty, nor the strange behavior of the dog. If you've been following The Cummerbatch or Downey adaptations, or if you just like a good thriller, though, you'll probably want to read them all. You'll recognize Easter eggs in the adaptations.

No Virtue is the second in Brewer's very very good Reconstruction-era riverboat mystery series featuring a former Union navy man turned river captain and a sad-sack former Confederate soldier with some investigative skills and a trick leg. They have the makings of an uneasy peace that, as their grounds for mutual respect mature, could even become friendship. Pigs might fly. The character and atmosphere and historical detail are very satisfying, though the portrayal of Northerners as sinister carpetbaggers (and the frequent use of historically accurate words for POC) is offensive, and though the detection is clever, the nonsensical plot involving a fortune in confederate gold coins requires more than the usual suspension of disbelief. High recommendations.

High recommendations also to Peter Lovesey and Abracadaver. I'm not sure if it's memories of the old BBC adaptations of these tales that make me smile so fondly, or maybe it's just the distinct feel for specific oddball subcultures within Victorian London--the walking race, the bare knuckle fights, and here, the music hall stage. Except for the smoke, they made me want to go back and experience old vaudeville--though not the increasingly dangerous practical jokes that happen to the performers in this story, nor the eventual murder.

Finally, HOLY SHIT does Anne Perry need trigger warnings. The first two Thomas and Charlotte books I read this month are clumsy attempts at political intrigue in "Special Branch", with not-really believable treason plots, one of which has dire forebodings of the world war still to come. Midnight at Marble Arch, though, is uncannily timely. It was published in 2013, and yet the main crime has very disturbing parallels to what we also this month learned about the youth of an overprivileged nominee for the US Supreme Court, who thinks that rules are for little people and women are playthings for men of his status to take at will. Be careful when reading.

Portrait of a Weirdo: Against the Grain, by JK Huysmans

Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form. After each vacation, Jean returned to his masters more reflective and headstrong. These changes did not escape them. Subtle and observant, accustomed by their profession to plumb souls to their depths, they were fully aware of his unresponsiveness to their teachings. They knew that this student would never contribute to the glory of their order, and as his family was rich and apparently careless of his future, they soon renounced the idea of having him take up any of the professions their school offered. Although he willingly discussed with them those theological doctrines which intrigued his fancy by their subtleties and hair-splittings, they did not even think of training him for the religious orders, since, in spite of their efforts, his faith remained languid. As a last resort, through prudence and fear of the harm he might effect, they permitted him to pursue whatever studies pleased him and to neglect the others, being loath to antagonize this bold and independent spirit by the quibblings of the lay school assistants.

There's a long chapter in the middle of The Picture of Dorian Gray where Wilde's anti-hero is shown slipping into decadence by taking up a series of sensual hobbies, collections of jewels, tapestries, perfumes, etc. Wilde may have been influenced by Huysmans, since Against the Grain is pretty much a long drawn out version of that chapter, without any cursed painting.

The protagonist, des Essientes, is the last of a long line of French aristocracy, given to shunning society and seeking ever more bizzare sensual pleasures, such as setting up a collection of liquors in the arrangement of an orchestra and trying to taste them in different combinations so as to re-create symphonies that are tasted instead of heard. Or decorating the shell of a living tortoise with gold and jewels such that the weight crushes the shell and kills the animal. the whole book consists of episodes like this, usually juxtaposing expressions of the harshest cruelty right on the heels of some tender, sentimental emotion. Des Essientes is an extremely frightening person, especially in that he is not a fully developed character so much as a vehicle for displaying morbid and scary neuroses alongside displays of a developed conscience. I file it under "experiment."

Asshole in America Again: Flashman and the Redskins, Part 2 (Flashman #7-B) by George MacDonald Fraser

I can safely say that had it not been for my odyssey which began in Orleans and ended at Fort Laramie in '50, the history of the West would have been different. George Custer might still be boring 'em stiff at the Century Club, Reno wouldn't have drunk himself to death, a host of Indians and cavalrymen would probably have lived longer, and I'd have been spared a supreme terror as well as a...no, I shan't call it a heartbreak, for my old pump is too calloused an article to break. But it can feel a twist, even now, when I look back and see that lone rider silhouetted against the skyline at sunset, with the faint eerie sound of "Garryowen" drifting down the wind, and when I had rubbed the mist from my eyes, it was gone.

I've been reading the life of Flashman chronologically, and covered the first half in December 2017. There's a feel for the passage of time when you read the five intervening books that describe the prime of the antihero's life, from Crimea to India to Harper's Ferry to China to Abysinnia, with footnotes about the US Civil War and Mexico adventures that were never written. On the other hand, the first half is more a vignette than a reconstruction of a particular event, and the whole 19 chapters is one big set up for Chapter 20, in which the Battle of little Bighorn is fought, Flashy fleeing for dear life the whole time, and for the one chapter after that, which contains a Big Reveal; and if you wait several months between halves, you might misremember certain details. but, either way, it's a good read.

DID YOU KNOW?---Custer was only "General Custer" during the civil war, when he was barely an adult and officers were needed everywhere. After the war, he was cashiered, hated by Grant, and the second part of the book drips with ironic foreshadowing as we see him repeatedly begging for a command, begging for a chance to get into the action and fight Indians, the only real foe an isolationist nation had at the time and the only chance to maybe win some fame and rank back. Flashman, reminiscing about the Civil War acquaintanceship we never see, assures us that he was really a good competent soldier, but not so's you'd notice at this stage. In this version at least, the impulsive, reckless hotspur had it coming.

His Last Gasp: Virgin Soil, by Ivan Turgenev

It was a round head with rough black hair, a broad wrinkled forehead, bright brown eyes under thick eyebrows, a snub nose and a humorously-set mouth. The head looked round, nodded, smiled, showing a set of tiny white teeth, and came into the room with its feeble body, short arms, and bandy legs, which were a little lame. As soon as Mashurina and Ostrodumov caught sight of this head, an expression of contempt mixed with condescension came over their faces, as if each was thinking inwardly, “What a nuisance!” but neither moved nor uttered a single word. The newly arrived guest was not in the least taken aback by this reception, however; on the contrary it seemed to amuse him.

With the exceptions of King Lear of the Steppes and Spring Torrents, my experience of turgenev has been soporific. The characters are unmemorable and plodding, and they tend to do very little, very slowly. Virgin Soil is, thankfully, his last, and possibly the dullest of his major works. Young revolutionaries, before the revolution, discuss changing times and duty with deadly earnestness; they have uninspiring love interests; one of them eventually kills himself because Don't Hit Me With The Babka.

Farewell to Eliot: Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot
It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days’ work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy “Let there not be,” and the many-colored creation is shriveled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon. And looking at life parcel-wise, in the growth of a single lot, who having practiced vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between events, and false conceit of means whereby sequences may be compelled—like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of distance, seeing that which is afar off as if it were within a step or a grasp—precipitates the mistaken soul on destruction?

I was told that Eliot's last novel was her masterpiece. I was misinformed. The masterpiece was and is Middlemarch (see last month's bookpost). I had never read Daniel Deronda before, and was expecting a real treat, and got disappointed. I mean, it's not bad, exactly, but....

Daniel is not the central character. The main plot involves a woman named Gwendolen, initially a spoiled child, but who faces her family's sudden poverty and her own sacrificial marriage to a nasty rich man, and transitions to mature adulthood (compare and contrast with Fred Vincy's similar sudden poverty and evolution in Middlemarch). In a separate plot that, unlike the interweaving stories within Middlemarch, barely even crosses paths with the Gwendolen story, Daniel rescues a young Jewish woman from drowning, seeks to restore her to her family, and becomes interested in Judaism and Zionism, in a tale written over 60 years before the creation of Israel. One character expounds in great length upon Kabbalistic teachings, which is quite educational, but a little jarring if you were expecting a novel and not a lecture.

Worth reading, but not what I'd call "great".

Julien Sorrel Lite: Bel-Ami, by Guy de Maupassant

He glanced at men seated at the tables, men who could afford to slake their thirst, and he scowled at them. "Rascals!" he muttered. If he could have caught one of them at a corner in the dark he would have choked him without a scruple! He recalled the two years spent in Africa, and the manner in which he had extorted money from the Arabs. A smile hovered about his lips at the recollection of an escapade which had cost three men their lives, a foray which had given his two comrades and himself seventy fowls, two sheep, money, and something to laugh about for six months. The culprits were never found; indeed, they were not sought for, the Arab being looked upon as the soldier's prey.

So many books in this period are about rises and falls.  we have cautionary tales about people who fail through foolishness or villainy; tragic tales about people who fail despite goodness; more cautionary tales about people who make their fortunes after adversity, because they are pure of heart and work diligently.

And now and then, we get a tale like this, where the protagonist achieves great success by being an utter asshole.  But then, as with Stendahl, society is to blame.

Georges Dru Roy, the antihero, starts out as a young man with considerable goodness and desire to get ahead by playing according to the rules.  He soon learns that the "rules" involve pretty much any means necessary, and that the most admired people in society only pretend to value morals and manners.  Accordingly, he gets a job at a scandalous newspaper, manipulates and seduces a series of wealthy or clever women into writing articles for him, bankrolling his plans, and introducing him into high society, after which he abandons them unless he wants something further from them.  They don't mind.  The women are sleeping around for money and favors as much as he is, and know what they're signing up for.  The other men detect his villainy, and admire him for it, as a man going places, whom it would be dangerous to cross.

Maupassant was most famous as a writer of short stories, and this, his longest novel, is broken up into several vignette-like chapters in Dru Roy's life, many of which stand alone as stories in themselves, that work better when you have all the pieces.

Monthly Book Post, August 2018

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday September 06, 2018 · 11:00 AM PDT

2018/09/06 · 11:00

The Victorian Murders: No Bottom, by James D. Brewer; Seven Dials; Long Spoon Lane; Buckingham Palace Gardens, by Anne Perry; The Detective Wore Silk Drawers, by Peter Lovesey; Circus Train Conspiracy, by Edward Marston

As first mate, he was the lowest paid officer on the boat, but Jacob figured his $130 a month made him about the highest paid negro on the river. It had been six years since Luke gave him the job, and some of the passengers still mistook him for a roustabout or a dining room steward, but Jacob took that in stride as he kept Captain Luke's cargo secure and the roustabouts in line.

--from No Bottom

Meanix lasted one round more. his attendants miraculously got him to the vertical position in the half-minute, but he was semiconscious when he lurched out. One eye was closed and the other half blinded with mud and gore. His bloated lips slobbered blood and saliva. In the corner he had spat out two teeth into the slop bucket. One blow finished the fight. A long, low jab in the diaphragm. He doubled forward and plummetted to the mud. The sponge was tossed in beside him.

--from The Detective Wore Silk Drawers

"Is everyone out?", Narraway demanded.
"Yes sir, as far as we can tell--"

the rest of his answer was cut off by a shattering explosion. It came at first like a sharp crack, and then a roar and a tearing and crumbling. A huge chunk of one of the houses lifted in the air and then blew apart. Rubble fell crashing into the street and over other roofs, smashing slates and toppling chimneys. Dust and flames filled the air. People were shouting hysterically. Someone was screaming.

--from Longspoon Lane

The squeals became excited and acted as a guide. Trampling through the undergrowth, Mulryne rushed on with a sense of relief coursing through his body. The monkey was alive, after all. The search was over. When he got close to the area where the sound was coming from, however, he couldn't see the monkey. Instead, to his horror, he saw something that made his blood run cold. Having led a hard life, the Irishman was not easily shocked, but this sight stopped him in his tracks.

Sticking out of the ground, a human hand was waving to him.

--from The Circus Train Conspiracy

I was beginning to miss Miriam Grace Monfredo, but fortunately her series from before and during the US Civil War segues nicely into a whole nother series by James D. Brewer, taking place during the Reconstruction and in which the first, at least, is set among the riverboats of the Mississippi. The main characters are (former Union officer and river pilot) Luke Williamson and (former confederate soldier turned insurance investigator) Masey Baldridge. One of Luke's boats sinks and Baldridge investigates the claim and the two protagonists naturally hate one another, but...well, they come to an understanding as tough guys on opposite sides are wont to do in certain tales that emphasize that they both have a certain kind of cussed honor. Definitely looking forward to others in the series.

Peter Lovesey's Sergeant Cribb series was a decent, somewhat eccentric TV series in the early 80s, featuring crime in unusual subcultures of the era. Unfortunately, my library only has about half the series. The Detective Wore Silk Drawers is about illegal bare-knuckle prize fighting and captures character and atmosphere very well.

Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte novels are getting better, but Longspoon Lane is exceptional. It centers around a plot by corrupt police to push a bill through Parliament that would give police chilling and unprecedented surveillance and interrogation authority under the guise of preventing crime...and the book was written in 2005, right at the height of the W Administration's crackdown on civil liberties. Sometimes, I read the sort of popular crime fiction that highlights topical issues, with some hope that they will influence the public. In this case, it is obvious that not enough people listened to Perry, and the results sadden me.

Finally, I reach the last (so far) of Marsdon's Railway Detective series, and I don't mind. It is often only tangentially involved with railways, and the later volumes are full of obvious misdirection in which ALL of the suspects are eliminated and the culprit turns out to be someone barely or not at all mentioned prior to the final chapters.

Christ Syrup: Ben-Hymn, by Lew Wallace

The hand laid kindly upon his shoulder awoke the unfortunate Judah, and, looking up, he saw a face he never forgot--the face of a boy about his own age, shaded by locks of yellowish bright chestnut hair; a face lighted by dark-blue eyes, at the time so soft, so appealing, so full of love and holy purpose, that they had all the power of command and will. The spirit of the Jew, hardened though it was by days and nights of suffering, and so embittered by wrong that its dreams of revenge took in all the world, melted under the stranger's look, and became as a child's. He put his lips to the pitcher, and drank long and deep. Not a word was said to him, nor did he say a word.

I had never known much about this old popular novel, except that I'd heard it was made into a movie, that I haven't seen, known for having an epic chariot race. I was a little taken aback to see it subtitled "A tale of the Christ", but despite the prologue of the Three Wise Men meeting to seek the birth of the King of the Jews, it is not a preachy religious book. Jesus makes a cameo appearance or two, but no more. It is implied that Ben-Hur is favored to escape from harsh fates due to being true to his Jewish roots, while his enemy Messala gains the world and loses his soul, but if you can stand that, you can stand the story.

Instead we have a Monte Cristo style revenge tale, in which Messala takes advantage of an unhappy accident to destroy Ben-Hur's family and get him condemned to a brief life as a galley slave; Ben-Hur later returns having gained what he needs to destroy Messala. Not particularly deep, but entertaining and a quick read.

Humor from Sam the Eagle: People of Hemso, by August Strindberg

The minister stared at Carlsson and seemed to have no idea where he was. Noticing that he was holding something shiny, he remembered that he had given a speech last Christmas with a silver cup, and so he raised the lantern as if it were a goblet and began: "My friends, we are here today to celebrate a joyous occasion!"

At this point, he stared at Carlsson, trying to get some idea of the nature and purpose of the joyous occasion, since he was now completely at a loss--season, place, reason, and purpose had all deserted him. But Carlsson's grinning face offered him no solution to the mystery.

My first Strindberg novel (The Red Room) was billed as satire, and was quite stale. This one, my second, was billed as uncharacteristically humorous, for Strindberg--people who know him from his expressionist or controversialist plays will be surprised.

Yeah, well---Very Serious Swedes who live on an island with a fishing-based economy, and a young man who comes to make a living doing the land-based chores, rises because he (ha-ha) works harder and plans ahead than the others, marries a rich widow, makes some investments, loses through the failure of the investments, and eventually reaches no-longer-young adulthood with prospects of success still before him--this seems didactic, not funny.

The single somewhat-funny passage in the whole book, it seems to me, is the one I quoted above, involving the incompetent preacher about to marry him. Rowan Atkinson did it much better in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Thankfully short, but otherwise not highly recommended.

Why? Because We Like You: The Sense of Beauty, by George Santayana

The poet has only to study himself, and the art of expressing his own ideals, to find that he has expressed those of other people. He has but to He has but to enact in himself the part of each of his personages, and if he possesses that pliability and that definiteness of imagination which together make genius, he may express for his fellows those inward tendencies which in them have remained painfully dumb. He will be hailed as the master of the human soul. He may know nothing of men, may have almost no experience, but his creations will pass for models of naturalness, and for types of humanity.

The philosophy of the month is my introduction to Santayana, whose early book here is maybe one of the first American works on aesthetics, maybe one of the first attempts in America to care about something's beauty as opposed to how much it costs.

It talks a lot about the senses and how we know what we know before concluding that, in appreciating beauty, things are good because we like them; they are not liked because they are good. Further, he's not going to challenge others who have a liking for something different from what others like. Differences of opinion are what make for horse races, and all that.

Two by Maupassant: A Woman's life; Pierre and Jean, by Guy de Maupassant
All at once, she became aware of a soft warmth which was making itself felt through her skirts; it was the heat from the tiny being sleeping on her knees, and it moved her strangely. She suddenly drew back the covering from the child she had not yet seen, that she might look at her son's daughter; as the light fell on its face the little creature opened its blue eyes, and moved its lips, and then Jeanne hugged it closely to her, and, raising it in her arms, began to cover it with passionate kisses.

The late nineteenth Century, especially the French, seem to have a LOT of squandered fortunes. From Zola's drunkard to George Eliot's Tulliver family to Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, whether presented as silly or tragic, sinned against or sinning, I've gotten a deluge of cautionary tales about fucking up with money, and the severe pain to be found in not having the means of subsistence. Maupassant's long (for him) tales are more of the same.

A Woman's Life follows a woman from youth to old age as she is betrayed first by her parents, then by her husband, then by her son, and a substantial family fortune turns to nothing. She has cause to be thankful that she'd been nice to her peasant servant in youth, because the servant is who ends up rescuing her.

Pierre and Jean are brothers who make their friendship and what should be a blessing into a curse, when one of the brothers receives a substantial inheritance from a distant friend of the family. The other brother can't handle the slight, and ends up wrecking things needlessly.

Maupassant writes very well. This stuff is painful to read. So...let's not be like that, eh?

The Zero Balloons: Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne

"This very evening," returned Phileas Fogg. He took out and consulted a pocket almanac, and added, "As today is Wednesday, the 2nd of October, I shall be due in London in this very room of the Reform Club, on Saturday, the 21st of December, at a quarter before nine p.m.; or else the twenty thousand pounds, now deposited in my name at Baring's, will belong to you, in fact and in right, gentlemen. Here is a cheque for the amount."

A memorandum of the wager was at once drawn up and signed by the six parties, during which Phileas Fogg preserved a stoical composure. He certainly did not bet to win, and had only staked the twenty thousand pounds, half of his fortune, because he foresaw that he might have to expend the other half to carry out this difficult, not to say unattainable, project. As for his antagonists, they seemed much agitated; not so much by the value of their stake, as because they had some scruples about betting under conditions so difficult to their friend.

Yeah....Verne pioneered in sci-fi, but he was never one of my favorites, and he hasn't lasted as well as Wells, for all that the steampunk subculture owes to people feeding their imaginations off him.

As with Ben-Hur, I thought I'd known more of this than I did because of references to movie versions. I'd always assumed a good deal of the round the world travel involved balloons or zeppelins or some kind of air travel.

No balloons. In fact, the singularly colorless main character, Fogg, decides on a whim to place a large wager that he can go around the world in 80 days....and he does it. At about five pages per major line of longitude, on average. and spending pretty much the amount of the wager to do it. He goes by train and boat mostly, paying great sums of money to the engineers and captains to make them go fast enough to make it in time to catch the next train or boat, and so they make it. Except when they don't, in which case Fogg pays some more to get a substitute conveyance. There's a brief trip in a sledge, and another episode with an elephant, but...really, trains and boats.

And the effort to make comic relief out of the clumsy sidekick and the foolish, stubborn detective who follows them the whole way thinking they're escaping robbers, is just pathetic.

Life in a Northern Town: Middlemarch, by George Eliot

She would not have asked Mr. Casaubon at once to teach her the languages, dreading of all things to be tiresome instead of helpful; but it was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory? Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary—at least the alphabet and a few roots—in order to arrive at the core of things, and judge soundly on the social duties of the Christian. And she had not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a wise husband: she wished, poor child, to be wise herself. Miss Brooke was certainly very naive with all her alleged cleverness. Celia, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people's pretensions much more readily. To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

I'm not sure if I have a "Greatest Novel of the 19th Century" firmly in place, but I'll definitely put Middlemarch in my top three; top one on a good day. It has so very, very much. There's Dorothea Brooke, who marries for wisdom rather than for love, and who finds neither; Doctor Lydgate, whose equal and opposite bad marriage to a wife who goes behind his back to spend him into oblivion; Fred Vincy going through a bildungsroman under the guidance of a kindly manager of manorial estates; Bulstrode the banker, who several readings has convinced me actually means well as he wrestles temptation two falls out of three; Uncle Brooke and his comic disaster of a run for Parliament; and above it all, the village gossiping and commenting about the principal characters like a Greek chorus, alternating between having a sense of country wisdom and just being shallow, petty jerks.

I find that each time I read it, I find myself concentrating on different sets of characters and getting different insights on those I had concentrated on before. And I would love to be an evesdropper on a hypothetical conversation between Eliot and that other great lady of letters from the other end of the century, Jane Austen, as they discussed great shifts in morals, manners, and social skills and expectations across the intervening 80 years or so, and whether they had been for the better, or not so much.

Very highest recommendations.

Forest Hardy: The Woodlanders, by Thomas Hardy

She opened the casement instantly, and put out her hand to him, though she could only just perceive his outline. He clasped her fingers, and she noticed the heat of his palm, and its shakiness. "He has been walking fast in order to get here quickly", she thought. how could she know that he had just crawled out from the straw of the shelter hard by, and that the heat of his hand was feverishness?

When you think of Thomas Hardy, odds are good you remember his poetry, or such novels as Tess of the D'urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, or The Return of the Native. The Woodlanders is not among his best known works for a reason.

It struck me as a dress rehearsal for some of his better known plots, except that he wrote it after everything but Jude the Obscure. and instead of a small town full of bigots or a gloomy endless heath, the community lives in the forest. And the characters get wrongly paired off, have affairs, and some of them die tragically while others surrender to loveless, gloomy fate. If you've read the other books, it lacks the full catharsis you've come to expect and merely makes you feel moderately depressed. I can get that from the real world.

Stately Essays: The English constitution, by Walter Bagehot

People dread to be thought unsafe in proportion as they get their living by being thought to be safe. 'Literary men', it has been said, 'are outcasts, and they are eminent in a certain way notwithstanding. They can say strong things of their age, for no one expects that they will go out and act on them.' they are a kind of ticket-of-leave lunatics, from whom no harm is for the moment expected, who seem quiet, but on whose vagaries a practical public must have its eye. For statesmen, it is different--they must be thought men of judgment. The most morbidly agricultural counties were aggrieved when Mr. disraeli was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. They could not believe that he was a man of solidity, and they could not comprehend taxes by the author of Coningsby, or sums by an adherent of the Caucasus.

A book of political essays, mostly comparing the American and English forms of government as they existed in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, recommended by Jacques Barzun as an example of literary political writing. Contains many a clever turn of phrase and many a highlight of the aspirations and pitfalls of experiments in self-rule. I found it especially poignant when Bagehot underscored the need for experienced political professionals to steer the ship of state, at a time when the masses of my nation are keen to vote for incompetents at government, on the grounds that "he's not a professional politician", as if that was a virtue; and the results have been what Bagehot would have predicted.

Farewell to Nietzche: The Will to Power, by Friedrich Nietzche

What a tremendous amount can be accomplished by that intoxication which is called "love" but which is yet something other than love!--But everyone has his own knowledge of this. The muscular strength of a girl INCREASES as soon as a man comes into her vicinity; there are instruments to measure this. When the sexes are in yet closer contact, as, e.g., at dances and other social events, this strength is augmented to a degree that real feats of strength are possible; in the end one scarcely believes one's own eyes--or one's watch. In such cases, to be sure, we must reckon with the fact that dancing in itself, like every other swift movement, brings with it a kind of intoxication of the whole vascular, nervous, and muscular system. So one has to reckon with the combined effects of a twofold intoxication. And how wise it is at times to be a little tipsy!

I have never seen reference elsewhere to the idea of women hulking out from the mere presence of a man, and I suspect Nietzche made it up...but if such a thing were actually a phenomenon of nature, I would put it down, not to amorousness, but to the need of women to defend themselves from male sexual aggression.

The last of four Nietzche books from my summer reading list was put together after his death by his sister, who I'm told was a Nazi sympathizer who went out of her way to arrange them so as to appear to support Teutonic master race spin. Honestly, outside of the same old "ubermen should not be constrained by rules, and morality sucks the strength out of people" (which focuses on individuals, not classes of racial "superiors"), I didn't see much of this. I did see plenty of condemnation of those Neros and Caligulas who commit atrocities from high up in government while believing themselves to be above the law; and I especially see references to the tendency of Trumpish dictators to foster in the people nihilism and doubt in the existence of objective truth, the better to herd the masses like sheep for their own ends (which is exactly what today's "fake news" Republican Party is doing, and what Goebbels did before his soulmates the American Republicans). So it would seem that Nietzche was not as Nazi-like as his detractors make him out to be. His eternal celebration of great men (and it's always men, not people) as entitled to gratify their desires at the expense of the weak, does still reek of toxic masculinity.

And thus ends my review of Nietzche, who with Mill remains the most enduring philosopher of those on this year's reading list. I see considerable poison in him, and considerable (if ironically forced into limiting definitions) zest for living well by removing limits. And it seems to me that power can be defined simply as the removal of limits.

Until next month.

Monthly Book Post, July 2018

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday August 02, 2018 · 11:00 AM PDT

2018/08/02 · 11:00

American Black Utopia: Fire on the Mountain, by Terry Bisson

Lincoln was a Whig, backed by US capital, who had organized a fifth column of Southern whites to support an invasion of Nova Africa in 1870, right after the Independence War. If the whites couldn't keep the slaves, they at least wanted the land back. Though the invaders had been routed at the battle of Shoat's Bend without crossing the Cumberland river, "One nation, indivisible" had become a rallying cry for white nationalists on both sides of the border. The next five years, 1870-75, were as close to a civil war as Nova Africa was to see. When it began, the new nation south of the Tennessee River was 42 percent white; when it ended, it was 81 percent black. In the US, veterans and descendants of the "Exitus" formed the racist backbone of the rightist movements for years; in the Bible Wars of the 1920s, the Homestead Rebellion, even the Second Revolutionary War of '48. In Nova Africa the whites who embraced (or made their peace with) socialism were called "comebacks", even if they had never left, and Lincoln was no hero to them; but before his body had even been cut down in 1871, he had become a legend among the border whites in Kentucky, Virginia, and parts of Missouri.

Omigosh this is the best WHAT IF THE SOUTH HAD WON books I've ever seen. In fact, it's maybe the only good one.

You see, other than the usual Confederate wank-job stories that feature a separate nation in which slavery still exists ("It's a cultural thing. You have no right to judge us, you n******-loving busybodies!") even though everyone knows slavery was just bad business and they would surely have abolished it all on their own right after leaving and going to war to preserve it because something something garbanzo.....other than all that, this one is different.

This book has former slaves setting up the nation of Nova Africa.

Starting with the premise that John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry succeeded and established an armed resistance in the mountains of western Virginia, the plot goes into three different timelines involving a young slave with one of the "good" masters, making the decision to take up arms for freedom in the months immediately after Harper's Ferry; a recounting of how the insurrection turned into a full revolution supported by several international rebel forces; and a young woman in 1959 as the hundredth anniversary is celebrated.

It's plausible, and a compelling read that took me under a day to finish. I particularly liked the nice touch where the young woman rolls her eyes at the racist "alternative history novel" where the white nationalist aggressors had been fighting their own people just trying to keep the land.

Hating on Pleasure: The Kreutzer Sonata, by Leo Tolstoy

“A terrible thing is that sonata, especially the presto! And a terrible thing is music in general. What is it? Why does it do what it does? They say that music stirs the soul. Stupidity! A lie! It acts, it acts frightfully (I speak for myself), but not in an ennobling way. It acts neither in an ennobling nor a debasing way, but in an irritating way. How shall I say it? Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time. I become confounded with his soul, and with him I pass from one condition to another. But why that? I know nothing about it? But he who wrote Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ knew well why he found himself in a certain condition. That condition led him to certain actions, and for that reason to him had a meaning, but to me none, none whatever. And that is why music provokes an excitement which it does not bring to a conclusion. For instance, a military march is played; the soldier passes to the sound of this march, and the music is finished. A dance is played; I have finished dancing, and the music is finished. A mass is sung; I receive the sacrament, and again the music is finished. But any other music provokes an excitement, and this excitement is not accompanied by the thing that needs properly to be done, and that is why music is so dangerous, and sometimes acts so frightfully"

I had to go back and check that I was not reading Dostoevsky by mistake; Tolstoy's short novel about the morbid psychology of a murderer seems a lot more like something that other great Russian would produce.

The book starts with a collection of Russian stock characters on a train, discussing marriage, divorce, and love. The narration quickly shifts from an unnamed passenger to the main character, who tells him his story. This man, in an unhappy marriage, catches his wife with another man, and kills her, and is acquitted, but continues to spend his days having a sad about his crime. Tolstoy seems to extrapolate from this narrative that all marriages are as unhappy as this man's (the opposite of what he says in the opening to Anna Karenina), and that people, to be happy, should abstain from sex...and music...and pleasure in general.

YeahNope. I'm out.

Rake's Progress: The Drunkard, by Emile Zola

Gervaise bent herself like a gun-trigger on the heap of straw, with her clothes on and her feet drawn up under her rag of a skirt, so as to keep them warm. And huddled up, with her eyes wide open, she turned some scarcely amusing ideas over in her mind that morning. Ah! no, they couldn't continue living without food. She no longer felt her hunger, only she had a leaden weight on her chest and her brain seemed empty. Certainly there was nothing gay to look at in the four corners of the hovel. A perfect kennel now, where greyhounds, who wear wrappers in the streets, would not even have lived in effigy. Her pale eyes stared at the bare walls. Everything had long since gone to "uncle's." All that remained were the chest of drawers, the table and a chair. Even the marble top of the chest of drawers and the drawers themselves, had evaporated in the same direction as the bedstead. A fire could not have cleaned them out more completely; the little knick-knacks had melted, beginning with the ticker, a twelve franc watch, down to the family photos, the frames of which had been bought by a woman keeping a second-hand store; a very obliging woman, by the way, to whom Gervaise carried a saucepan, an iron, a comb and who gave her five, three or two sous in exchange, according to the article; enough, at all events to go upstairs again with a bit of bread. But now there only remained a broken pair of candle snuffers, which the woman refused to give her even a sou for.

Following on the heels of Tolstoy's Russian gloom, the French gloom of Zola is almost unbearable. The story follows a couple, mostly the wife, through a long process of degradation in which the husband, a successful roofer and teetotaler, falls off a roof and becomes addicted to alcohol during his long recovery from the severe injury. He ends up, extremely slowly, devolving into a domestic violence brute, incapable of useful work or love. His wife, Gervais, seeing the money go to alcohol, figures she might as well indulge herself in gluttony while the money lasts.

And so, between their incontenences, they spend the last half of the book descending into the most squalid poverty and degradation that a skilled author can describe. Their eldest child becomes a feral runaway; the younger children die of neglect. And then he dies raving, and she dies alone in the most squalid space in Paris, and is not discovered until the neighbors notice the smell, and that's how it ends.

I've found a lot of this in 19th century French naturalism, including the deaths of Madame Boary and Zola's Nana (who happens to be the feral child of The Drunkard and whose novel in her own name leaves her destroying countless men with her beauty before her perfect body rots into filth, in painstakingly given detail, of STD). Human beings with potentially great minds and souls are reduced to base appetites and collections of foul chemicals and bodily waste.

And of course, when I feel the urge to protest this sick presentation of humanity, I have to reflect that my own nation of millions has annointed a diseased collection of base appetites and bodily waste to be its President. So maybe Zola had a point.

The Victorian Murders: A Study in scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle; Children of Cain, by Miriam Grace Monfredo; Peril on the Royal train; Signal for Vengeance, by Robert Marsdon; Half Moon Street; Whitechapel Conspiracy; Southampton Row, by Anne Perry

Before asking to see McClellan, she should have made certain pinkerton was not in camp, but given the events of her ride here with Seth, it hadn't even crossed her mind. It could be a costly mistake, but it was her mistake, and not one for which Union soldiers should have to suffer.

--from Children of Cain

Because no churchyard would accept it, the grave was hidden behind some bushes in unconsecrated ground. Someone stepped silently forward to place a posy of wild flowers on the mound of earth before reflecting on how sweet vengeance could be.

--from Signal for Vengeance

Pitt's shoulders slumped. he felt bruised and weary. How would he tell charlotte? She would be furious for him, outraged at the unfairness of it. she would want to fight, but there was nothing to do. He knew that, he was only arguing with Cornwallis because the shock had not passed, the rage at the injustice of it. He had really believed his position, at least, was safe, after the Queen's acknowledgement of his worth."

--from Southampton row

There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. “I’ve found it! I’ve found it,” he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. “I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by hoemoglobin, and by nothing else.” Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shone upon his features.

“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.

“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

“How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.

---from A Study in Scarlet

Here marks the point at which my mystery-reading enrichment begins to include mysteries actually written during the period. Sherlock Holmes may not count among the "great books", but his works are studied as thoroughly as any classic, and Sherlock fandom is one of the most fanatical and longstanding geek clubs ever established. To join the original Baker Street Irregulars, one had to complete a Holmes crossword puzzle and only applicants who were 100% correct were admitted. How's that for calling "Fake geek"?....It may be that i read these books long enough ago to take them for granted, and have encountered much better detective fiction since then, but this first Holmes adventure did not excite me. Out of a 14 chapter short novel, the first two chapters are introduction, and the crime is discovered, investigated, and solved in the next five, halfway through, with most of the remainder being the murderer's melodramatic backstory. Further, the very clever murderer, having been alerted by a false advertisement that 222-B Baker Street is a trap, unsuspiciously goes there for a follow-up visit, where his capture takes him completely by surprise. And what are we to make of the man dressed up as an old woman, who completely fools Holmes?

The last of the Seneca falls books attributes General McLellan's disastrous failure to advance on Richmond in 1862 to the army's refusal to listen to a woman who tries to report that Lee had left the city virtually defenseless. Typical.

The Railway Detective has taken to a formula where they present a parade of four or five suspects, spend most of the last half of the book having the detectives arrest one after another of them and discover why they didn't do it, before having the final chapter descend on someone you might not even have noticed during the story. so the challenge is to spot the only character they're not pointing at and find a far-fetched motive, while looking for clues as to what the other suspects were really up to. Which is a problem to me, when half a town ends up in jail for something or other each episode, and the so-called "compassionate" detective comes off looking like Judge Dredd. I'm almost at the end of this series, or I might be tempted not to continue.

And Anne Perry's series about the Pitts has gone about where her Monk series was when every book reflected the sinister ring of people blackmailed by so-and-so the child pornographer, only with this series, it's a shadowy conspiracy cult called the Inner Circle, which keeps getting Thomas Pitt demoted to working undercover in the shittiest neighborhoods of London and any tradesman or aristocrat might just be one of them. The Whitechapel Conspiracy, one of the few books not named after a street or neighborhood, is a decent contribution to the theories about Jack the Ripper.

Bourgeoies Twits of the Year: Bouvard and Pecuchet, by Gustav Flaubert

The evidence of their own superiority caused them pain. As they maintained immoral propositions, they must needs be immoral: calumnies were invented about them. Then a pitiable faculty developed itself in their minds, that of observing stupidity and no longer tolerating it. Trifling things made them feel sad: the advertisements in the newspapers, the profile of a shopkeeper, an idiotic remark overheard by chance. Thinking over what was said in their own village, and on the fact that there were even as far as the Antipodes other Coulons, other Marescots, other Foureaus, they felt, as it were, the heaviness of all the earth weighing down upon them.

Flaubert's last, mercifully unfinished novel is supposed to be a satire. It's about two sophomoric BFF clerks who inherit a small fortune, move into the country, and squander everything through foolish mismanagement and frequent midstream horse-changing. They get involved in one "popular" hobby or academic discipline after another, become obsessed and learn just enough of each to be dangerous to themselves (such as setting up a still without knowing you're supposed to leave a vent for the steam when boiling fluids). I usually hate this kind of humor, and Flaubert is no exception.
The best part of the book is an appendix in the form of a dictionary supposedly compiled by the friends referencing what to say when a given topic comes up in conversation ("Spice: The plural of spouse, ha-ha"). Sinclair Lewis referenced something like this when writing Babbit.

The Manafort of Magdala: Flashman on the March(Flashman #12), by George MacDonald Fraser

I couldn't foresee, as i stood content in the bow, watching the green fir foaming up from the forefront, feeling the soft Adriatic breeze on my face, hearing the oaths and laughter of the Jollies and the strangled wailing of some frenzied tenor in the crew--I couldn't foresee the screaming charge of long-haired warriors swinging their hideous sickle blades against the Sikh bayonets, or the huge mound of rotting corpses under the precipice at Islamgee, or the ghastly forest of crucifixes at Gondar, or feel the agonizing bite of steel bars against my body as I swung caged in the freezing gale above a yawning void, or imagine the ghastly transformation of an urbane, cultivated monarch into a murderous tyrant shrieking with hysterical glee as he slashed and hacked at his bound victims.

There is a little more Flashman to be read, in historical order, but Flashman on the March is the last novel Fraser wrote. It begins with tantalizing glimpses of the antihero's Civil War and Mexican War adventures that were never written, and continues with the British Abyssinian expedition--almost a dress parade, the victory was so thorough and quick--where, to make it frightening, Flashy does not march with the army, but goes undercover to transport treasure and recruit mercenary Africans to the cause--and to wench, and quake with fear, and be an all-around racist, imperialist, colonialist jerk, as usual. The torture, the escapes, the women, the war atrocities, and the stolid generals are different people, but the structure is the same. I got the impression that, at the end, Fraser was getting bored and phoning it in.

Today's Tom Sawyer Mean Mean Drive: Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzche

OUR Virtues?—It is probable that we, too, have still our virtues, although naturally they are not those sincere and massive virtues on account of which we hold our grandfathers in esteem and also at a little distance from us. We Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we firstlings of the twentieth century—with all our dangerous curiosity, our multifariousness and art of disguising, our mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense and spirit—we shall presumably, IF we must have virtues, have those only which have come to agreement with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations, with our most ardent requirements: well, then, let us look for them in our labyrinths!—where, as we know, so many things lose themselves, so many things get quite lost! And is there anything finer than to SEARCH for one's own virtues? Is it not almost to BELIEVE in one's own virtues? But this "believing in one's own virtues"—is it not practically the same as what was formerly called one's "good conscience," that long, respectable pigtail of an idea, which our grandfathers used to hang behind their heads, and often enough also behind their understandings? It seems, therefore, that however little we may imagine ourselves to be old-fashioned and grandfatherly respectable in other respects, in one thing we are nevertheless the worthy grandchildren of our grandfathers, we last Europeans with good consciences: we also still wear their pigtail.—Ah! if you only knew how soon, so very soon—it will be different!

After two prior Nietzche books, this feels like more of the same-old, but Beyond Good and Evil is probably the culmination of what passes for his "philosophy". It is included in the second edition of the Great Books series and is the most frequently quoted of his works, along with last month's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is more poetic and dramatic, but explores pretty much the same theme:  modern society shrinks the soul by imposing artificial restraints, while the truly free spirit does not need no wussy-ass 'morality"; men of action who have the courage to assert their will are what makes progress possible; true wisdom is achieved by turning conventional wisdom upside down.

As said before, I have a visceral negative reaction to what boils down to assertion of brute force as the highest good, advocated by a man who was personally a dork, to other men (and if there exists a woman who admires Nietzche, let her speak. I doubt that such a woman exists, as his writings went out of their way to insult women, and those brave female adventurers who dare to assert their will to power would, it seems to me, likely stomp his sac) who are personally dorks, who seek an excuse to assert dominance out of a sense of superiority they haven't earned.

Pretty much everyone I know who praises Nietzche is an overentitled gamergate-puppy-8chan-dark side of the geekverse twerp who talks when we want him to listen, or even worse, an incompetent Republican/Libertarian bully who thinks he's favored by social/economic Darwinism, and who destroys when he discovers he cannot create.  See also; Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Donald Fucking Trump.  They think they are the next stage in evolution, a whole new advanced species, when in reality they are assholes.  And i hate him all the more because my 20-year old self lapped him right up and ended up causing himself a whole lot of unnecessary misery.   Do not be like me.

There are better ways to let one's spirit soar and to feel powerful.  They involve joining forces with other great souls instead of asserting dominance, and cooperating to make a great world rather than blowing shit up.

Going with the Flow: The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi

Cardenia couldn't help it. She was exhilarated not because she was a fatalist or a misanthrope, happy that humanity was finally getting its comeuppance. She was exhilarated because finally the hazy nebulous shape of her reign, one whose meager main accomplishment was keeping parliament and the guilds from stomping on the unsuspecting planet of End with an influx of military boots, had suddenly snapped into focus. Cardenia now knew three things: One, she would be the very last emperox of the Interdependency. Two, the whole of her reign would be about saving as many human lives as possible, by any and every means possible. Three, that meant the end of the lie of the Interdependency.

Holy. Fucking Shit.

Scalzi's newest (which, thankfully, is part one of a whole new series, because I wanted more--not least because the major plot development only really comes to play in the final chapters) is both delightful to read and thought provoking in an end-of-civilization sort of way. Lots of powerful, wonderful women, including the supreme ruler of the system; lots of clever plot twists; lots of accessible language and fun science and laughter and treachery and apocalypse.

The given crisis is that the macguffin that enables faster than light travel (in this case a field of might-as-well-be wormholes) is about to collapse, leaving the planetary systems that comprise this empire stranded and alone, after the central government has gone to great lengths to make the systems "interdependent" by ensuring that none have the resources to make it without help--and profitable trade--from the others.  In Collapsing Empire, this circumstance is COMING; it hasn't happened yet, and when it begins to happen, the commercial interests will have a vested interest in declaring it to be "fake news" because to acknowledge it would interfere with profit.  And so the government will helplessly watch it happen because Not Politically Viable. Unless a few plucky protagonists who spend the book gradually coming together with each other, can make it different.

And they probably will, in subsequent books.

I fucking had a great time reading this, as i tend to do with Scalzi.  I ranked the book second in the Hugo novel list, mostly giving Kim Stanley Robinson extra points for New York 2140's gripping ecological relevance compared to Scalzi's fanciful alternative end of the world.   Very Highest recommendations.

Light Drama: The Hand of Ethelberta, by Thomas Hardy

He had learnt by this time her occupation, which was that of pupil-teacher at one of the schools in the town, whither she walked daily from a village near. If he had not been poor and the little teacher humble, Christopher might possibly have been tempted to inquire more briskly about her, and who knows how such a pursuit might have ended? But hard externals rule volatile sentiment, and under these untoward influences the girl and the book and the truth about its author were matters upon which he could not afford to expend much time. All Christopher did was to think now and then of the pretty innocent face and the round deep eyes, not once wondering if the mind which enlivened them ever thought of him.

Ethelberta's hand is noteworthy, as it both writes good stories and is sought after by young and old men in the book. The rest of Ethelberta fails for want of description.

I was taken aback to find that this light romance came from the same hand that wrote such gut-wrenching tragedies as The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude The Obscure. There's a reason that, if you've looked at Hardy lightly, you know four or five of his titles, and The Hand of Ethelberta is not one of them.

Riding in Boats With Boys: The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot

Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if they had not been done, with all the detail and exaggerated circumstance of an active imagination. Tom never did the same sort of foolish things as Maggie, having a wonderful instinctive discernment of what would turn to his advantage or disadvantage; and so it happened, that though he was much more wilful and inflexible than Maggie, his mother hardly ever called him naughty. But if Tom did make a mistake of that sort, he espoused it, and stood by it: he "didn't mind." If he broke the lash of his father's gigwhip by lashing the gate, he couldn't help it,–the whip shouldn't have got caught in the hinge. If Tom Tulliver whipped a gate, he was convinced, not that the whipping of gates by all boys was a justifiable act, but that he, Tom Tulliver, was justifiable in whipping that particular gate, and he wasn't going to be sorry. But Maggie, as she stood crying before the glass, felt it impossible that she should go down to dinner and endure the severe eyes and severe words of her aunts, while Tom and Lucy, and Martha, who waited at table, and perhaps her father and her uncles, would laugh at her; for if Tom had laughed at her, of course every one else would; and if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy, and had the apricot pudding and the custard! What could she do but sob? She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the slaughtered sheep. Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships; but it was not less bitter to Maggie–perhaps it was even more bitter–than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. "Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by," is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and trousers, but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another; what he felt when his school fellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfullness; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when he didn't know how to amuse himself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when his mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that "half," although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.

This book is included in the Harvard Classics shelf of fiction. It is masterfully written literature, and I can't stand it because of the plot.

It's like Laura Ingalls in Britain, gone horribly wrong. We have an idyllic, pastoral country setting where the miller's family has old fashioned values, the son works hard to advance himself and the daughter is a tender sweet young thing with a swarm of beaus competing for her attention...and then the father manages to get ruined, loses his will to live, and dies...the son goes into commerce and thrives in it, and makes much of the family fortune back again....and the daughter goes out into society, makes a favorable impression...and then falls victim to a life-ending scandal, merely for going on a boat ride with a gentleman suitor, fends off his whiny advances, and comes home having neither had sex nor eloped for riches, and the whole town, including her own brother, treats her like a harlot for this.

As an afterthought, brother and sister die young in a river-flooding incident.

And I'm like, WTF just happened. Was this a story with a moral, like maybe "Head off to the city if you love yourself, for county people will wreck you."

Black Lives Matter: Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adayemi

The shock travels through every pore in my skin, igniting my being, catching my breath. Time seems to freeze as I look down, locking eyes with the young captain. An unknown force burns behind his amber gaze, a prison I can't escape. Something in his spirit seems to draw onto mine. But before I can spend another second locked in his eyes, Nailah flies over the gate, severing our connection.

Adayemi seems to be a new author, whose book here is (yay!) part one of an exciting series set in a well-constructed world with a handy map for reference as the characters quest their way across it.

In essence, there is a race that once had several kinds of powerful magic, now gone, and another race that has seized the chance to enslave them, calling them filthy names and killing them without consequence. A chance arises to restore the magic, during which the son of the ruling warlord and the daughter who saw her powerful mage mother murdered by the authorities have a mind-meld and it becomes unclear whether one will kill the other or whether they will eventually become allies.

By the time the first part of the ritual is attempted and various plot twists happen, it is still not yet clear. I found it fast paced and gripping. The author admits in an afternote that the story was inspired by Black Lives Matter, just in case it isn't obvious.

A World of Pure Determination: Time and Free Will, by Henri Bergson

To say that a certain friend, under certain circumstances, will very probably act in a certain way, is not so much to predict the future conduct of our friend as to pass a judgment on his present character, that is to say, on his past. Although our feelings, our ideas, our character, are constantly altering, a sudden change is seldom observed; and it is still more seldom that we cannot say of a person whom we know that certain actions seem to accord fairly well with his nature and that certain others are absolutely inconsistent with it. All philosophers will agree on this point; for to say that a given action is consistent or inconsistent with the present character of a person whom one knows is not to bind the future to the present. But the determinist goes much further: he asserts that our solution is provisional simply because we never know all the conditions of the problem: that our forecast would gain in probability in proportion as we were provided with a larger number of these conditions; that, therefore, complete and perfect knowledge of all the antecedents without any exception would make our forecast infallibly true. Such, then, is the hypothesis which we have to examine.

There are times when I decide to define every action I take as either "empowerment" or "therapy". I begin my day with what I call "Getting Up Therapy", during which I empower myself my sonorously intoning the word AWAKEN, until my wife kicks me out of bed. I then further empower myself in the bathroom with Cleansing Empowerment Therapy, during which I purge my body of toxins, and so on.

I bring this up because Henri Bergson, who is thankfully both very readable and brief, has essentially proved the existence of free will by pointing out that the past is set immutably while the future is fluid and cannot be predicted with absolute certainty due to having many, many variables....and in order to maintain his academic cred, he has to cloak his thoughts by talking about "dynamic concepts" and "static concepts", and extended, unextended, qualitative, quantitative, etc., constructs, when what he really means, it seems to me, is the distinction between the past and the future.

Monthly Book Post, June 2018

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday July 05, 2018 · 11:00 AM PDT

2018/07/05 · 11:00

Huck Finn of the Thames: La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman

"Alexander knew what he must do. Very bravely he went to the authorities and told them about his family and the pagans they were sheltering, and the soldiers went to the family's house in the middle of the night. They knew which house it was because Alexander took a lamp up to the flat roof and signaled to them. The family was arrested, the pagans in the cellar were taken captive, and the next day they were all put to death in the marketplace. Alexander was given a reward, and he went on to become a great hunter of atheists and pagans. And after his death many years later, he was made a saint. The League of St. Alexander was set up in memory of the brave little boy, and its emblem is a picture of the lamp he carried up onto the roof to signal where to come."

My library has only four of the Hugo-nominated YA books, and I'd rank them:The Art of Starving; A Skinful of Shadows; La Belle Sauvage; Akata Witch.. All four are beyond excellent.

La Belle Sauvage is a prequel to His Dark Materials, and evidently the first in a new trilogy called The Book of Dust. It has Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, but the main characters are a boy named Malcolm and a girl named Alice, who try to protect a mysterious baby left at the village priory. The church and the shady Child Protective Service, as well as some other nasty people, are involved, and eventually the protagonists and their daemons take a long boat ride with the baby down the flooded Thames from Oxford to London by way of several supernatural sites.

The baby's name is Lyra, and she is said to have a destiny. You think?

I found it very suspenseful and thought provoking, just like the famous earlier trilogy.

Dam Nation: New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson

The truth is that the First Pulse was a profound shock, as how could it not be, raising sea level by ten feet in ten years. That was already enough to disrupt coastlines everywhere, also to grossly inconvenience all the major shipping ports around the world, and shipping is trade: those containers in their millions had been circulating by way of diesel-burning ships and trucks, moving around all the stuff people wanted, produced on one continent and consumed on another, following the highest rate of return which is the only rule that people observed at that time. So that very disregard for the consequences of their carbon burn had unleashed the ice that caused the rise of sea level that wrecked the global distribution system and caused a depression that was even more damaging to the people of that generation than the accompanying refugee crisis, which, using the unit popular at the time, was rated at fifty katrinas. Pretty bad, but the profound interruption of world trade was even worse, as far as business was concerned. So yes, the First Pulse was a first-order catastrophe, and it got people's attention, and changes were made, sure. People stopped burning carbon much faster than they thought they could before the First Pulse. They closed that barn door the very second the horses had gotten out. The four horses, to be exact.

This is the fourth of six Hugo-nominated novels, and a likely choice for readers who are concerned about scientific and political problems facing us in the real world today. I was not much of a Kim Stanley Robinson fan before, and was not looking forward to slogging through 600 pages, but I was surprised and delighted, and New York 2140 vaulted right to the top of my love list, to vie with Six Wakes.
It reminded me of John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, which also looks at the consequences of global pollution on real people, in a text that shifts perspective among several characters and teaches a lot of science and politics at the same time.

As you might guess from the title, it takes place mostly in and around NYC in 2140, after global warming has become irreversible and sea levels have risen to the point where lower Manhattan and Brooklyn are under water, with Venice-like canals between the buildings and connecting skybridges above. Previously high-end real estate, now partially submerged, has been abandoned to squatters and restorers,but the Big Money, as always, lurks behind the scenes, waiting for a chance to assert dominance as soon as it becomes profitable again.
There are coders who mysteriously disappear; a police detective and a lawyer who investigate the disappearance; a hedge fund manager trying to profit from the misery, a couple of street rats looking for salvage, a building superintendent, a vlogger transporting polar bears to the South Pole in her blimp, and an unnamed "citizen" commenting like a Greek Chorus on the hypothetical history of the years between now and the book wherever Robinson can't otherwise make his own views known on the subject of profit motives and their eternal clash with planetary health and other public necessities.

Their interlocking stories and the sweeping panorama of an all-too-believable dystopia of humanity's own making took mt breath away. And I don't normally mention cover illustrations, but the future NY skyline by Stephan Martiniere with its building-hugging docks, skybridges, anchored hot airships and ominous futuristic megaskyscrapers in the background above the more familiar Manhattan buildings, is a particular treat and an integral part of the work itself.
Very highest recommendations.

TL;DR: War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

From the close of the year 1811 intensified arming and concentrating of the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces—millions of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army—moved from the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward which since 1811 Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The historians tell us with naïve assurance that its causes were the wrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes of the diplomatists, and so on.

Okay, I lied. I did read it, for the second time even, and it took me parts of every weekend since January to get through all 1360 pages of a Great Important Book that's on every scholar's top ten lists of novels ever published.

War and Peace tries to do way too much, and somehow manages to pull it off, which is the main thing that makes it great. Part love story, part bildungsroman, part philosophical tract, part history textbook, it sweeps from lectures on Napoleon's invasion of Russia and disproof of the "great man" theory of history, to the youth, folly, education and transformation of Pierre Bezukhov (whose scenes with the captured Russian peasant are among my favorite parts...this time around) to another family trying to get the children suitably married to a brooding prince searching for the meaning of life.

And the contrasts between "war and peace" are only the tip of the dichotomy iceberg. There are French and Russians, city and country, wealthy and poor, hypocritical knowledge and blessed ignorance as true wisdom. In the 1990s, when there was a fad of remaking Austen and Shakespeare as high school teen emo dramas, I wondered what it would be like if they made a movie about Nerdy Peter who becomes popular when he suddenly wins the lottery, and is chosen to wear the school mascot outfit during the "civil war" homecoming game between the Frogs and the Bears. Probably be a spectacular failure among all except the meager percentage of Americans who know the book well, who would find it clever but be unable to explain it to anyone else.

Huge and epic and not overrated at all. Everyone should read it once.

Family Tiedowns: Provenance, by Ann Leckie

E looked straight at Ingray, then, and said, "So, when a Budrakim goes to Compassionate removal, it's only for show, is it? They send someone to fish them out, behind the scenes?" Eir expression didn't change, but eir voice was bitter.

Ingray drew breath to say, indignantly, No of course not, but found herself struck speechless by the fact that she had herself gotten a Budrakim out of Compassionate Removal.

If Raven Stratagem (see last month) is the military strategy porn of this year's Hugo lineup, then Provenance is the political/family intrigue porn of the batch. So far, anyhow; this is only the fourth I've read out of six, and I'd rank it somewhere in the solid middle.

It's set in the same universe as Leckie's "Ancillary" books, but in a different part and with different characters. The story begins with the smuggling of a condemned prisoner, who has stolen ancient family artifacts, off of the prison planet where identities are wiped, and escalates into an interplanetary incident and a struggle for dominance among members of a powerful family, the protagonist being the underappreciated daughter trying to be noticed. It has a lot to say about the concept of the family, and ablout loyalty to one's blood. Very high recommendations.

The Victorian Murders: Brothers of Cain; Sisters of Cain, by Miriam Grace Monfredo; Ashworth Hall; Brunswick Gardens; Bedford Square, by Ann Perry; Blood on the Line; The Stationmaster's Farewell, by Edward Marston

"Women doctors?" Dorothea Dix again interrupted, not only ignoring the folder but speaking in a tone that carried unmistakable irritation. "You trained with females, and you now expect to work with male physicians? Surely not."

"But I have worked with male physicians," Kathryn said, embarrassed by but unable to control the pleading note in her voice. "Miss Dix, if you will please just look at these letters, you will see that two of them are from men."

The woman's eyes narrowed to two dark slivers of disapproval, and she turned toward her office, saying briskly over her shoulder, "You shouldn't fret, my dear. Someone as lovely as you does not need a nursing position to find a husband."

"I do not wish to be a random organism descended from apes!" His voice thickened, close to tears. "I wish to be the creation of God, a God who has created everything around me and cares for it, who will redeem me for my weaknesses, forgive my errors and my sins, and who will somehow sort out the tangles of our human lives and make a kind of sense of them in the end." He dropped to a whisper. "And I can no longer believe it, except for moments when I am alone at night, and the past comes back to me, and I can forget all the books and the arguments and feel as I once used to."

--from Brunswick Square

A rousing cheer went up as the blaze suddenly strengthened and poked tongues of flame at the cathedral in blatant mockery. Smoke thickened and sparks fell in ever-widening showers of radiance. Fireworks exploded like a volley from an infantry regiment. The Bishop of Exeter had perished with the other guys tossed into the bonfire and the inferno roared on. It would be several hours before it burnt itself out and exposed the charred body of a human being among the embers. Crazed she might be, but Mrs. Rossiter's instincts had been sound. The stationmaster was there after all.

--from The Stationmaster's Farewell

I'm starting to have a more than usual moral problem with Edward Marston's usually innocuous and entertaining Railway Detective mysteries. Seems to me, Inspector Colback and Sgt. Leeming are becoming more like Judge Dredd than like anyone you want to root for. Blood on the Line, a procedural "how will they catch them?" tale, tries really hard to set up the lover-criminal couple as loathsome people, and fails, especially as the unwitting accomplices--a constable fooled into bending the rules; an old couple with a checkered past that has long since settled down into respectability--get caught in the action and subjected to much worse "justice' than most would say they deserved. Even the main antagonists, one feels, should have gotten away, and Colbeck comes out looking like a fascist. The Stationmaster's Farewell is somewhat better, but the solution is ludicrous and the amount of judgment passed is more severe than the crime warrants.

Miriam Grace Monfredo, on the other hand, just gets better, right when I'm reading Civil War history. By now, the focus has shifted away from the Seneca Falls library to the battlefields around Richmond, where Bronwyn (a Union spy) and Katheryn (a nurse) have adventures trying to save America in the midst of well-researched accounts of real history, like the attempt to sabotage the Monitor, and conditions at Libby prison. Especially nice is the episode where they have to rescue their brother Seth from the Confederates ("Brothers of Cain". get it?) Very high recommendations.

Anne Perry's mysteries today become topical for their time, as she brings us a murder in a country house during a meeting of Catholics and Protestants over a solution to the Irish problem; a murdered Darwinist in a house full of angry clergy, and a dead body pointedly dropped at the doorstep of a famous general. My problem with going through a whole series at once like this is that I spot the trend without even a giveaway clue and know who did it every time. Fortunately the historical enrichment is still worth it.

Humorless Satire: The Red Room, by August Stringberg

What had happened that this poor fellow should be so inexpressibly happy? We know that he had not drawn the winner in a lottery, that he had not inherited a fortune, that he had not been "honorably mentioned", that he had not won the sweet happiness which baffles description. What had happened then? Something very commonplace: he had found work.

I was once on a cruise with a deputy cruise director who resembled Sam the Eagle in appearance and disposition. He led games and other recreation activities designed for fun with a Very Serious Air, and when I sang my own parody lyrics instead of the original words during karaoke, the bottom dropped out of his world and he looked so panicked at my flagrant violation of natural order that I wondered if he was going to shut off the music and clear the room.

I mention him because Strindberg, at least in this semi-autobiographical book billed as a "satire on Swedish life", makes me think of that deputy cruise director. I think of satire as at least somewhat witty; The Red Room is not.

The main character, Arvid Falk, is a young man who finds success in writing after several false starts. The red room is a semiprivate room in a public house where he and his friends meet and try to figure out how to make something of their lives. They form an insurance syndicate, and are disappointed when they end up paying more in claims than they take in in premiums. They try to join the theater and are foiled by a drunk with power stage manager whom no one dares to oppose. And so on.

I'm told that the publication of this book was a seminal literary event in Scandinavia, one of the first Scandinavian novels, etc., and that it instantly made Stringberg famous. Seems to me, maybe it lost something in the translation.

Relaxations of a Great Mind: No Time to Spare, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men? If so, will they change the institution so radically that the men are likely to label it second-class, lower the pay, and abandon it? This has happened to some extent in several fields, such as the practice of teaching and medicine, increasingly in the hands of women. But the management of those fields, the power and the definition of their aims, still belongs to men. The question remains open.

With the possible exception of John Scalzi, writers of good books are never going to have their best work appear in blog posts. I even get slightly uncomfortable reading blog posts by people I admire for their much greater efforts, and wonder what it would have been like if Einstein or Melville or George Eliot had posted off-the-cuff ope-ed columns or musings on writing, with comments sections.

Le Guin's last book, a collection of blog entries, is on the Hugo list in the related work category, and I read it in about two hours. The first parts, Erma Bombeck-ish thoughts about growing old, and about her cats, made me cringe a little. Keep going. The third section, entitled "Trying to Make Sense of it", reminds us that we are in the presence of a great mind with important things to say about feminism, the degradation of America, and the warnings of unregulated capitalism, pollution, and selfishness; and that the earlier parts were mere relaxation. People are entitled to relax. Very high recommendations.

Culture Warrior: Iain M. Banks, by Paul Kincaid

In August 1987 the World Science Fiction Convention was staged in Brighton, and Banks was, of course, there. At one room party in a suite he found himself hemmed in on a balcony. In order to get back into the room, he found it simpler to scramble across to the next balcony. The story escalated, until people reported seeing him scaling the outside of the hotel. Since police had been coincidentally called to another room where there had been a theft reported, a further elaboration of the story had him being arrested and spending the night in the local gaol. It was, unsurprisingly, a story that Banks rather relished.

This one is on the Hugo "related work" list, I believe, because it is a biography of a much loved writer who has recently died. Unfortunately, the only book of his I've read so far has been Dead Air, which is not sci-fi and understandably gets little mention here, so the accolades are mostly wasted on me. It did make me want to read Banks's other books, which seem fascinating, and so in that sense Kincaid does his job very well.

Religious Porn: The Temptation of St. Anthony, by Gustav Flaubert

"All the women thou hast ever met—from the leman of the cross-roads, singing under the light of her lantern, even to the patrician lady scattering rose-petals abroad from her litter,—all the forms thou hast ever obtained glimpses of—all the imaginations of thy desire thou hast only to ask for them! I am not a woman: I am a world! My cloak has only to fall in order that thou mayest discover a succession of mysteries."

"Place but thy finger upon my shoulder: it will be as though a stream of fire shot through all thy veins. The possession of the least part of me will fill thee with a joy more vehement than the conquest of an Empire could give thee! Approach thy lips: there is a sweetness in my kisses as of a fruit dissolving within thy heart. Ah! how thou wilt lose thyself beneath my long hair, inhale the perfume of my bosom, madden thyself with the beauty of my limbs: and thus, consumed by the fire of my eyes, clasped within my arms as in a whirlwind...."

From the introduction, I learned that this book, about a third the length of Madame Bovary was the work that Flaubert spent the most years of his life refining, and that he always considered his masterpiece. Seems to me, he'd have done better to stick with desperate housewives.

I've been glad to get to the part of history where they have stopped obsequiously putting churchy stuff into every book considered any good...but then, I ended up with two this month (the other being Ibsen's "Emperor and Galilean", which I'm not reviewing here). I have noticed that, in typical Victorian fashion, both works were heavy on the sentimentality and the mysterious dazzling spectacle.

The story is simple: St. Anthony, a hermit in the desert, is dying, and must put up with various temptations from the Devil because something something garbanzo. The temptations begin with offers of food and money and sex, continue with theological debates, and reach climax with an impressive parade of non-Christian deities, from Buddha to the Greek mythos to some weird and scary entities like the ones Lovecraft hadn't yet made famous to Jehovah Himself, depicted as feeble and dying. Anthony pretty much writhes in spiritual torment throughout, while saying no to the lot. Go Anthony. And when it's all done, he falls down in bliss and is "saved." Okay, then.

Neurosis Nation: The Naked Heart, by Peter Gay

The Nineteenth Century was intensely preoccupied with the self, to the point of neurosis. During the very decades of the most sustained campaign for mastery of the world ever undertaken, bourgeois devoted much delightful and perhaps even more anxious time to introspection. It was while scientists and sociologists, physicians and reformers launced their concerted assaults on ignorance, poverty and disease that novelists, painters, biographers and even historians made self-exploration their cardinal business. Edgar Allen Poe promised instant glory to the one who could write "a very small book--my heart laid bare." He never did write it; nor did Charles Baudelaire, who adopted Poe's proposal and took some stabs at it. But there are swarms of bourgeois in the century who shared their naked heart with their contemporaries.

See also Pandaemonium, (April 2018 bookpost) and The Horror of Life (May 2018 bookpost). The Victorian Age seems fraught with new developments and approaches to mental illness. Gay looks at the collective conscious and unconscious in patterns that emerge from creative works of the day, from works in philosophy and history, to visual arts to novels and other prose fiction, to surviving letters and diaries.

Rather than attributing patterns of neuroses to advances in technology, sensitive genius, or loss of the consolations of religion, Gay hypothesizes widespread bourgeois guilt at colonizing the world and oppressing indigenous people. According to Gay, the One Percent, who did the colonizing, were unrepentantly gung-ho about it, just as they were/are on subjugating their own country's people to serve them, while the proletariat is too busy trying to scrounge a living to fret about world affairs. the Middle Class, on the other hand, is aware enough to see what is happening, and derives just enough residual benefit to feel responsible.

Enrichment Points: The War that Forged a Nation, by James McPherson

McClellan's 'bitter enemies' whom he had 'crushed' in September 1862 were not Confederates but instead other generals in the Union army and high officials in the US government--Generals John Pope and Irvin McDowell, who had been relieved of command and whose troops had been absorbed into McClellan's Army of the Potomac, and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who had wanted to cashier McClellan. If McClellan had exerted as much energy and determination in his battles against the enemy army as he did against these supposed enemies in his own army and government, the North might have won the war in 1862.

I call it "enrichment points" as this is sort of a supplement to Ordeal by Fire (see last month), which was a full length history text. This one is a dozen or so essays, mostly on the character of Abraham Lincoln, but also including some details about the Civil War in general that were mentioned but not in such depth in the larger book (such as the incredible ineptitude of McLellan, who McPherson believes could have wiped out the Confederate forces in Virginia and won the war in 1862 if he'd only wanted to; or the sheer scope of the Southern terrorism (mass shootings, school burnings, staged riots) that replaced reconstruction efforts with Jim Crow and another century of black servitude.

On the Raising of the Wrist: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzche
Tortuously do all good things come nigh to their goal. Like cats they curve their backs, they purr inwardly with their approaching happiness,—all good things laugh.

His step betrayeth whether a person already walketh on HIS OWN path: just see me walk! He, however, who cometh nigh to his goal, danceth.

And verily, a statue have I not become, not yet do I stand there stiff, stupid and stony, like a pillar; I love fast racing.

And though there be on earth fens and dense afflictions, he who hath light feet runneth even across the mud, and danceth, as upon well-swept ice.

Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers, and better still, if ye stand upon your heads!

Here's the thing about Nietzche: I get that he was painting a picture of the great soul liberated from stultifying limitations. I find his poetic vision compelling---but I'm writing this while reeling from the news of yet another asshole who decided to "resist limitations' by gathering his weapons and going forth to slay as many people as he could before that tired oppressor of the good--the law--was able to take him down in turn. Every Epsilon/Morlock with the ability to read Nietzche considers himself to be the embodiment of the "Superman", so advanced in spirit and freedom that he need not be burdened by laws, or moral codes, or religion, or any other set of limits brought on by the greater society. You meet them online. even worse, you meet them cold-calling you to sell you something by way of asserting dominance, or circulating ballot measures to replace all income taxes with sales taxes. And yeah, it always seems to be a "him". women have more sense than to buy this level of toxic individualism and power-seeking, which may be why Nietzche was a raging misogynist.

I'm also reading from the benefit of 250 years of post-Nietzche history, and the things that happened in Germany when a whole lot of people became obsessed with "supermen" and "evolution from slave classes into masters".

I try. And like many extremists, Nietzche is partly right, even as he is scary-wrong elsewhere. Aiming towards perfection of the self is a good (Kant believed so, too). Laughing and standing on your head and not taking yourself too seriously (whole lot of Nietzche people seem to forget about this part) is good for the soul. and a whole lot of what passes for morals and manners can be bullshit---but it seems to me that these standards are imposed on the public from above, from those who pass themselves off as the overclass. They are not imposed by a weak "slave class" seeking to survive and leech off society by putting straitjackets on the strong. also, Nietzche doesn't seem to consider that it is possible to act out of love for others, instead of only out of fear or the desire to dominate lest one be dominated.

Nietzche is popular. Especially in places like America today, and especially among white guys who think they are wiser than they really are. This, it seems to me, is a large part of why we can't have nice things.

The Red Infinity Stone: Appearance and Reality, by Francis Herbert Bradley

Causation must be continuous. For suppose that it is not so. You would then be able to take a solid section from the flow of events, solid in the sense of containing no change. I do not merely mean that you could draw a line without breadth across the flow, and could find that this abstraction cut no alteration. I mean that you could take a slice off, and that this slice would have no change in it. But any such slice, being divisible, must have duration. If so, however, you would have your cause, enduring unchanged through a certain number of moments, and then suddenly changing. And this is clearly impossible, for what could have altered it? Not any other thing, for you have taken the whole course of events. And again, not itself, for you have got itself already without any change. In short, if the cause can endure unchanged for any the very smallest piece of duration, then it must endure for ever. It cannot pass into the effect, and it therefore is not a cause at all. On the other hand, causation CANNOT be continuous, for this would mean that the cause was entirely without duration. It would never be itself except in the time occupied by a line drawn across the succession. And since this time is not a time but a mere abstraction, the cause itself will be no better. It is unreal, a nonentity, and the whole succession of the world will consist of these nonentities. But this is much the same as to suppose that solid things are made of points and lines and surfaces. These may be fictions useful for some purposes, but still fictions they remain. The cause must be a real event, and yet there is no fragment of time in which it can be real. Causation is therefore not continuous; and so, unfortunately, it is not causation but mere appearance.

Oy, but metaphysics is difficult. At least Bradley wrote in English and was not translated from thick German. This is one of those books that extrapolates from the paradoxes inherent in infinite time and space to claim that time and space don't really exist, and that most of what we accept on instinct couldn't possibly be true.

Book of Mormon: Mormon, Ether, Moroni
And it came to pass that when the brother of Jared had said these words, behold, the Lord stretched forth his hand and touched the stones one by one with his finger. And the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared, and he saw the finger of the Lord; and it was as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood; and the brother of Jared fell down before the Lord, for he was struck with fear.

Aaaaand....the "shocking conclusion" to the American Western Testament is the dullest Apocalypse ever written. It pretty much continues the theme of # and 4 Nephi to its logical conclusion, where various nations fight each other until there's no one left. the Book of Ether even conjures up a whole new race of biblical descendants, the Jaredites, who fight with each other until the last few chapters count them down from thousands to hundreds to dozens to the last chief stabbing the last enemy before dying of his wounds.

Of the Nephites, Mormon exhorts them to change their wicked ways, and is ignored, and the Lamanites kill most of the Nephites, and the remaining Nephites go incognito or renounce Jesus, and in the end, Mormon's son Moroni, in trenchcoat and Groucho glasses disguise, finishes up by writing a few words against child baptism and in favor of Christ, and that's how the scripture ends.

Nothing about how the great cities disappear with no archaeological trace, or how the plants brought from the old world, that have flourished for centuries, vanish root branch and seed. Nothing about how the remaining Lamanites, still a set of kingdoms strong enough to annihilate God's chosen, eventually become tribes of adobe dwellers and wanderers with only simple tools.

To any Mormons reading my commentary, I apologize for any offense caused. All I can say is, I gave the book a fair reading over the past six months.

Twisted Brother: Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo

Our young friend, Jehan Frollo of the Mill, discovered, while putting on his breeches, that his purse gave forth no faintest chink of coin. “Poor purse!” said he, drawing it out of his pocket, “what, not a single little parisis? How cruelly have dice, Venus, and pots of beer disembowelled thee! Behold thee empty, wrinkled, and flabby, like the bosom of a fury! I would ask you, Messer Cicero and Messer Seneca, whose dog-eared volumes I see scattered upon the floor, of what use is it for me to know better than any master of the Mint or a Jew of the Pont-aux-Change that a gold crown piece is worth thirty-five unzain at twenty-five sous eight deniers parisis each, if I have not a single miserable black liard to risk upon the double-six?

Victor Hugo is a little earlier in my historical reading than most of what I'm focused on this year, but Notre Dame de Paris ("The Hunchback of Notre Dame") is part of the Harvard Classics fiction set, which I intend to complete by next year, and so I read it again.

This is the part where you can pretend I'm making snarky comparisons to the Disney movie and affecting disappointment that there are no singing, dancing gargoyles in the original. In fact, the novel is a very dark meld of genius and failure, with occasional delightful moments like Jehan bewailing his empty purse, above, and long melodramatic passages such as Esmeralda's reunification with her mother, that are over the top enough that some might find them silly. I didn't; in fact, that passage caught me at a vulnerable moment and cut me to the heart such that I was upset for hours afterwards.

I tried to be fair and pay particular attention to the long digressions about the cathedral's architecture and the panorama of Paris of the time. I still don't think it essential to, nor adding to one's appreciation of, the work. Your mileage may vary.

They Alive, Dammit! Unshakeable, by Tony Robbins

ARE YOU COMMITTED TO BEING HAPPY, NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU? To put this another way, will you commit to enjoying life not only when everything goes your way, but also when everything goes against you, when injustice happens, when somebody screws you over, when you lose someone or something you love, or when nobody seems to understand and appreciate you? Unless we make this definitive decision to stop suffering and live in a beautiful state, our survival minds will create suffering whenever our desires, expectations, or preferences are not met. what a waste of SO much of our lives!

I read Robbins's previous money book Master the Game, which is much longer, and which does in fact have some useful information about how to diversify an investment portfolio, periodically re-allocate assets, and avoid brokerage fees and higher taxes than you have to pay. Unshakeable does not have this kind of information. It is basically restating that the stock market has always made it through bear markets and kept climbing in the long run, so keep your money there during the coming collapse and don't panic. And also, here are the usual Tony Robbins mind games to psych yourself so that you do not panic as everything crashes. If you (1) don't have anything to invest or (2) already invest and have enough patience and cash reserves to wait out the bad years, you'll get nothing out of it. But it does at least take only an hour or two to read.

As always with Robbins, drink whenever one of the many famous names he drops has fallen into disgrace since he wrote the book gushing about his good and wise friends. *cough*CarlIchan*cough*

Monthly Book Post, May 2018

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday June 07, 2018 · 11:00 AM PDT

2018/06/07 · 11:00

The Spirit Within: A Skinful of Shadows, by Frances Hardinge
"Listen to me," said Mother. "The dead are like drowners. They are flailing in darkness, trying to grab whatever they can. They may not mean to harm you, but they will, if you let them....You will be sleeping here tonight. They will try to claw their way into your head. Whatever happens, do not let them in."

This is on the Hugo list in the new YA category, the third on the list that I've read, and I'm seeing a pattern of kids manifesting superpowers in a world where most of the grownups are fools or villains. Not sure why such stories would be topical right about now, but there it is.

This time it's in the middle of the English civil war between Charles I and Parliament, and the ironically named Makepeace lives with her mother in an upright, uptight Puritan village where Mother does not talk about Daddy's family. Pretty soon we find out why, and what Makepeace's powers are and the unexpected help she gets, and...the plot twists came so early and so frequently that I wouldn't dream of spoiling your joy by telling you about it. Just read it.

So far, I rank it below The Art of Starving and above Akata Witch and would not argue if you rank them in any order you want. All three are beyond fucking excellent.

Bully at Bull Run: Flashman and the Stone Wall (Flashman #13), by George MacDonald Fraser

No one had been too clear what my service was, since it saw me engaged on both sides, but I came out of it with their medal of honor and immense, if mysterious credit, and the only man who knew the whole truth got a bullet in the back at Ford's Theatre, so he wasn't telling.

The first half of Flashman's celebrated Civil War adventure takes him, in typical Fraser style, in roundabout geographical circles so that he can speak first hand on all of the major engagements. We thus see Flashman quaking through both Bull Run battles, in between which he winters with General McLellan in Virginia, flees a lynch mob with Mrs. Mandeville all the way to west Tennessee just in time for Shiloh, and ultimately gets taken prisoner by General Jackson at the site of his John Brown adventure from Flashman #10 and lives through Antietam fornicating in Dunkard Church while the guns go off and wondering why McLellan hasn't responded to the message he left wrapped around the cigars at Frederick. As usual, Flashman's assessment of the heroes who got more credit than he did is less than flattering. Jackson is a ham-fisted, pig-headed lout who wins more by stubbornness and luck than actual ability, and McLellan is second only to Elphinstone and George Custer at incompetent dithering--though not, as some later said, a secret traitor to the Union. He was simply that incompetent.

It's a great book. It also doesn't exist. I cried the day I learned Fraser had passed on without ever giving us the treasure hinted at in the other books. But I thank you, reader, for paying attention. (grin)

The Victorian Murders:The Hyde Park Headsman; Traitors' Gate; Pentecost Alley, by Anne Perry; Railway to the Grave, by Edward Marston; Must the Maiden Die by Miriam Grace Monfredo

The moon had been climbing, and now a square of grime-streaked window lets watery light enter. It throws across the floor a kneeling shadow with arms bent like those of the Virgin in prayer. The girl looks down at her hands. She cannot remember finding the knife but she must have, because she is pressing the handle so hard against her chest that she can barely draw breath. And she knows what she must do.

--from Must the Maiden Die

All three of the main serieses I've been reading for Victorian enrichment continue to improve.

The big one--The Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series tries to deviate from the set formula (HE investigates in low places while SHE investigates in high society) with the introduction of a secret society, possibly meant to be Masons, with figures in government and business who advance one another's careers and conspire to punish anyone who crosses them. Thomas runs afoul of them and spends a couple of the books fighting attempts to sabotage his cases and frame him for incompetence.

Marston's Railway detective has an adventure in Yorkshire looking for clues as to a respected friend of his supervisor's, whose wife recently disappeared, and who himself apparently committed suicide by walking into the path of an oncoming train. All of this in a small village in which everyone from the vicar to the railway officer has something to hide.

And Monfredo's Seneca Falls series, now in the midst of the US Civil War, continues to be the best of the lot. Far from the battlefields of Virginia and Tennessee, we get a reminder that the abolitionist North was not innocent on the question of involuntary servitude, as the main murder takes place in a suspiciously plantation-like estate where the chief suspect is a teenage (white) girl forced into service as an indentured servant, against her mother's wishes, for a master who sexually abuses her. The mother's subsequent attempts to gain custody and protect the girl reveal the rampant misogyny of the age. Content notes required, but very high recommendations for the mystery and the historical interest.

Civil War Summary: Ordeal by Fire, by James M. McPherson

Seldom has a country been less prepared for a major war than the United states was in 1861. The tiny regular army--fewer than 16,000 men--was scattered in small units all over the country, mostly west of the Mississippi. Nearly a third of the army's officers were resigning to join the Confederacy. The War Department in Washington drowsed in peacetime routine. All but one of the officers commanding the eight army bureaus had been in service since the War of 1812. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott was 74 years old and suffered from dropsy and vertigo. There was nothing resembling a general staff. There were no accurate military maps. When General Halleck began to direct operations in the western theater in 1862, he used maps obtained from a bookstore. West Point's strong points were engineering, mathematics and fortifications, but its students learned little of strategy, staff work, or the tactical command of troops in the field.

I was glad to have this Civil War history recommended to me by a bookpost fan.   It is comprehensive and does not attempt to make excuses for the South's treason committed for the claimed right to own people as property.  It does give a fair helping of demerits to the divided North, for being much less eager to end slavery than the textbooks say, for the incompetence and possibly divided loyalties of its generals who, with overwhelming numerical superiority and industrial advantages, throw away at least three chances to destroy Lee's army and end the war much more quickly than they did (though in fairness, McPherson also points out that the South was fighting guerilla warfare on its own turf, with knowledge of the unmapped roads, paths through the hills and marshes, and so on) and their utter failure to pursue meaningful reconstruction.

in fact, the chapters on reconstruction were the biggest eye-openers to me.  I have a distinct memory, from my New York high school days, of having read a history textbook (one that must have been approved by the Texas Board of "Education") and feeling indignation on behalf of the South, and their subjugation by sinister "carpetbaggers" who came to plunder them, redistribute plantation land to subhuman POC who didn't know what to do with it, and who were personally corrupt, as opposed to the saintly Democrats of Tammany Hall.  None of that, in fact, happened.. In fact, other than the establishment of schools for the KKK to burn down, the Union army was ordered to all but disband under President Johnson, and the defeated traitors were given leave to transition from cowed and helpless to armed and boiling with hatred for America within a year.  The freedmen never got their 40 acres, or the mule.  The teachable moment was lost, and the Dixie traitors(D)--now the Dixie Traitors(R) continue to give America the finger to this day.

Fail to learn from history, and get ready to repeat it, and all that.   This is not likely the only civil war history I read this year, but it's a good one.

Origen Story: The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin

"One person's normal is another person's Shattering." Your face aches from smiling. There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe, and you're terrible at it. "Would've been nice if we could've all had normal, of course, but not enough people wanted to share. So now we all burn."

I am used to nominating the eventual Hugo winner second on my list of favorites, which is what I did with the first in this trilogy. Last year, I found three other nominated novels that completely blew my mind, and which all were passed by in favor of the second. Stone Sky, the third book, is probably the favorite to do it again, and I won't be complaining if it does (I'll rank it above Raven Strategem but below Six Wakes, which REALLY excited me---but I tend to be a mystery fan, and your mileage may vary), and concede that my difficulties may have to do with personal taste. I had a hard time keeping track of the characters, had forgotten much of what had happened in the first two books, and was tired and kept nodding off during parts. Under those circumstances, my reading wasn't necessarily a fair one.

Goodbye to Mill: Utilitarianism, by John Stuart Mill

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded—namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.

I've read at least one book by Mill since December, and the masterful, brief Utilitarianism, is the last.   Mill didn't invent the concept of "the greatest good for the greatest number" (the credit usually goes to Jeremy Bentham), but Mill's is the best known and most concisely read defense of the theory against the competing theory that morals and ethics must depend upon absolute principles, regardless of how many are made happy by their observance.

It seemed to me, the discussion is pretty much over as soon as Mill points out that the absolutists, such as Kant, define their categorical imperative as "act such that you may consistently will that your conduct shall be a universal rule"--which presupposes the need for the happiness of the many to be served.  But Mill further refutes the usual nonsensical "what ifs" that make for philosophical navel gazing but don't happen in real life, such as an Omelas hypothesis where "what if" you could, by causing one person infinite unjust suffering, you could achieve universal happiness for everyone else? (#1, you can't; and #2, consider that, in deciding whether to approve such a system, you do not know whether YOU would be the one who suffers); or "what if" you could get a whole lot of gain for the many by murdering one wealthy miser and redistributing his money among the poor (Some may think they'd want that to be a law, but on reflection, one will see the higher value of having the security of living in a more just society than that).

Yes, as with the Epicureans, the philosopher achieves victory by definition, refuting what we commonly think of as self-interest with *enlightened* self-interest...and so the discussion continues.   Utilitarianism is part of the Great books seat, and it seems to me, everyone ought to read it at least once.

Incel Philosophy: The Genealogy of Morals, by Friederich Nietzche

No one has, up to the present, exhibited the faintest doubt or hesitation in judging the "good man" to be of a higher value than the "evil man," of a higher value with regard specifically to human progress, utility, and prosperity generally, not forgetting the future. What? Suppose the converse were the truth! What? Suppose there lurked in the "good man" a symptom of retrogression, such as a danger, a temptation, a poison, a narcotic, by means of which the present battened on the future! More comfortable and less risky perhaps than its opposite, but also pettier, meaner! So that morality would really be saddled with the guilt, if the maximum potentiality of the power and splendour of the human species were never to be attained? So that really morality would be the danger of dangers?

Replacing Mill with Nietzche, the philosopher that Otto in A Fish CalledWanda loved to cite when he wasn't warning everybody not to call him stupid, is frighteningly topical.  The Genealogy of Morals is positively soaking in toxic entitlement, unconscious privilege, and violent assertion of dominance.  Nietzche proposes that ethics are a scam invented by weak people (and by Jews, in particular) to unfairly subjugate the strong.  the Strong are the great people of the world--picture with Nietzche, a big, athletic, perfectly-physiqued viking warrior, who laughs with hearty good cheer as he asserts iron-grip control over the things of the earth that he was made to dominate.  Of course he is completely honest, since if you have no power to stop him, he will quite readily admit his intentions to burn villages, rape women, take all the valuables, and whatever it strikes his pleasure to do.   And to tell him he shouldn't is nothing more than the whining of the rightly subjugated, and invites unfortunate consequences.

Compare with the assertion of dominance of today's Republicans.

Compare with incels and gamergaters and other sleazy internet people who claim that to them should rightly belong the privilege of asserting dominance, especially over women, regardless of merit or effort or respect for other people's autonomy.  With Nietzche, they get to be ABOVE all that!

Truly, this is a frighteningly fucked-up and popular philosophy among people you should avoid for your own safety.  They will violate you and call it good.

Book of Mormon: Helaman, 3 and 4 Nephi, by Joseph Smith

And it came to pass, as they understood they cast their eyes up again towards heaven; and behold, they saw a Man descending out of heaven; and he was clothed in a white robe; and he came down and stood in the midst of them; and the eyes of the whole multitude were turned upon him, and they durst not open their mouths, even one to another, and wist not what it meant, for they thought it was an angel that had appeared unto them. And it came to pass that he stretched forth his hand and spake unto the people, saying: Behold, I am Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified shall come into the world.

The Book of Mormon is so out of place with all the other historical works that I've been reading that I've been tempted to just put it back on the shelf, except for (1) my mild OCD, and (2) the fact that I'm approaching the end.

The past few "books" of the work have been increasingly random attempts at alternative history of a land with no archaeological or botanical record of the great cities or plant life mentioned herein, with various tribes becoming more or less attentive to the sparsely defined Word of God. In 3 Nephi, we finally get a visitation from the ghost of Jesus, who does old favorites like a paraphrased Sermon on the Mount and a prophecy that those who are with him will be saved while those who forget will be tortured for eternity in fire. You know--the usual stuff.

Three Dimensional Chess: Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee

Every morning, Mikodez had a Kel infantry ration bar for breakfast. According to the Kel, consuming them voluntarily suggested interesting things about your mental health. Mikodez ate them in the hopes that they would immunize him to any poisons, and because they seemed to make his medications more effective. He knew poisons didn't work that way, and that the latter effect was illusory, but it was a nice thought. besides, he had to do something to atone for all the candy he put in his system.

When I reviewed Ninefox Gambit about this time last year, I heralded it as "Imagine Silence of the Lambs, with the distinction that Clarice is required to download Hannibal into her head to get his advice on how to get at Buffalo Bill, and then the two struggle for dominance within her head.

...I have little to add to that, because it would spoil the second in what appears to be a trilogy. This is a series in which the phrase "steep learning curve" appears frequently in the reviews, and I consider that about right. It's about mindgames, and gaslighting, in a military sort of venue, and although I'm told I qualify for the high IQ society, I found myself frequently just throwing my head back and letting the plot unfold around me while I surrendered to it. It will totally be off-putting to some readers, and satisfy the junk food cravings for others. This is why we have horse races. I rank it below the other two I've read so far, but it is not a put-down.

Singular Sensations: The Analysis of the Sensations, by Ernst Mach

By the help of his undulatory theory Huygens follows refraction. The same theory prevents him (for he thinks solely of the longitudinal waves with which he is familiar) from rightly grasping the fact of polarisation which he himself discovered, but which Newton, on the other hand, untrammelled by theories, perceives at once.

Mach is strange. His brief treatise on how we perceive reality (much of which is repeated in William James's Principles of Psychology, emphasizes perspective and other optical illusions, and segues from that (where Berkeley segued into denying the existence of matter) into defining the concepts of science as "useful fictions" that give names to complex phenomena, that we "know" through evolution.

English Bildungsroman: Pendennis, by William M. Thackeray

“Very right, my dear boy. Flames and darts and passion, and that sort of thing, do very well for a lad: and you were but a lad when that affair with the Fotheringill—Fotheringay—(what's her name?) came off. But a man of the world gives up those follies. You still may do very well. You have been bit, but you may recover. You are heir to a little independence; which everybody fancies is a doosid deal more. You have a good name, good wits, good manners, and a good person—and, begad! I don't see why you shouldn't marry a woman with money—get into Parliament—distinguish yourself, and—and, in fact, that sort of thing. Remember, it's as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman: and a devilish deal pleasanter to sit down to a good dinner, than to a scrag of mutton in lodgings. Make up your mind to that. A woman with a good jointure is a doosid deal easier a profession than the law, let me tell you that. Look out; I shall be on the watch for you: and I shall die content, my boy, if I can see you with a good ladylike wife, and a good carriage, and a good pair of horses, living in society, and seeing your friends, like a gentleman. Would you like to vegetate like your dear good mother at Fairoaks? Dammy, sir! life, without money and the best society isn't worth having.” It was thus this affectionate uncle spoke, and expounded to Pen his simple philosophy.

Not bad.

This is my farewell to Thackeray. I was OMG AWESOME about Vanity Fair, mostly didn't like his other stuff...and this was somewhere in the middle of all that. It's a classic story of a young man growing up--a little longer than most, it dwells a lot on youthful mistakes of a guy who is trying, before he finally comes into his own. The obvious love interest is a bit too saintly for belief, except when she suddenly, because of misunderstandings, judges him exceptionally harshly and casts him off--and the supporting cast has the decent mix of good intentions and surrenders to temptation that most humans have, to be compelling. I read it slowly, savoring the character and atmosphere.

If you liked David Copperfield and could still stand it if it had a narrator talking about the main character in the third person and suggesting to you what the moral lessons to be drawn are, you'll have fun with it.

Don't Hit Me With the Babka! The Horror of Life, by Roger L. Williams

Maupassant had been given podophyllin, a mild but bitter tasting laxative, by one of his many physicians, and some time that same month, one of them concluded that the remedy had been contributing to Maupassant's stomach trouble. When he mentioned that "podophyllin is your enemy", Maupassant understood that he had an enemy, M. Podophille by name, and he threatened to kill him should he meet him on the road. The physician warned Tassart not to let Maupassant out the door with a loaded weapon, and Tassart thought it was the better part of wisdom to remove the bullets from Maupassant's pistol at once. This seems to be the most reliable explanation of why Maupassant's pistol was empty when he later turned it upon himself.

I'm not sure how this book--short bios of five 19th century authors (Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Maupassant and Daudet) who all suffered from debilitating mental illness, got on my to-read list. The central thesis is the attempt, a century later, to medically diagnose them, with the usual answer being that they had syphilis. I found it somewhat interesting, but your mileage may vary.

Kill them all: Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Well, listen then. On the other side, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help and by thousands, on every side! A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman’s money which will be buried in a monastery! Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of families saved from destitution, from ruin, from vice, from the Lock hospitals—and all with her money. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of others; the other day she bit Lizaveta’s finger out of spite; it almost had to be amputated.”

“Of course she does not deserve to live,” remarked the officer, “but there it is, it’s nature.”

“Oh, well, brother, but we have to correct and direct nature, and, but for that, we should drown in an ocean of prejudice. But for that, there would never have been a single great man. They talk of duty, conscience—I don’t want to say anything against duty and conscience;—but the point is, what do we mean by them? Stay, I have another question to ask you. Listen!”

“No, you stay, I’ll ask you a question. Listen!”

“Well?”

“You are talking and speechifying away, but tell me, would you kill the old woman yourself?”

Who's the hero of the book by Dostoyev-uh-sky?
R-A-S--K-O-L--N-I-K-O-V

Raskolnikov! (Lizaveta!)
Raskolnikov! (Lizaveta!)
Forever let us hold our axes high (High! High! High!)

Raise the bottle, take a drink
And axe your family!
R-A-S-- (S this a good book?)
K-O-L-- (L, yeah!)

N-I-K-O-V!

If my selections for the month are any indication, it seems that many minds of the day were consumed with the same ethical questions. Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov at times avows Mill's utilitarianism, wrongly asserting that the theory would support the planned murder of an old miser for the redistribution of the wealth; other times he goes over to Nietzche and claims that certain "superior' people are above the law and may do what they want without being tied down by mere moral considerations (have you noticed that those who assert this kind of dreck always seem to believe that they themselves are conveniently part of the "superior" class of persons?). Seeing the results of this kind of ethical theory put into practice enriched my experience of all three books.

Knowing the Unknowable: First Principles, by Herbert Spencer
Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him duly realize the fact that opinion is the agency through which character adapts external arrangements to itself—that his opinion rightly forms part of this agency—is a unit of force, constituting, with other such units, the general power which works out social changes; and he will perceive that he may properly give full utterance to his innermost conviction: leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future; and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly consider himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the Unknown Cause; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain belief, he is thereby authorized to profess and act out that belief. For, to render in their highest sense the words of the poet—

——Nature is made better by no mean,

But nature makes that mean: over that art

Which you say adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes.

Spencer is mostly known as the main person Ayn Rand copied her "philosophy" of hating on the poor and downtrodden from, who leapt from Darwin's "survival of the fittest" evolutionary doctrine to "social Darwinisn" in which is is the natural order of things that "inferior" people not only fail to reproduce but should die of starvation outright. It turns out, Spencer's sociology is several volumes that I just don't want to torture myself with because he's second tier and it's all bullshit anyhow...but First Principles, the stepping stone from which all that follows, is more manageable. Read it, and you'll have read Spencer.

You get the basic atheism that American Republicans keep glossing over when asserting selfish predatory behavior as virtue--he starts out defining (accurately, it seems to me) much theology and metaphysics as fundamentally unprovable and therefore unknowable, and urges the thinker to pass on to that which is knowable.

He then does a bit of sleight of hand, transitioning from physical laws of motion to the claim that biological evolution "moves" in the same way, integrating matter and dissipating motion and leading to evolutionary entropy (including, he will assert later, the mongrelization of humanity and the development of the working classes he hated--which seems to me a lot like devolution and not evolution).

Plus, it's dry and dull as fuck. Enough.

Monthly Bookpost, April 2018

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday May 03, 2018 · 10:58 AM PDT

2018/05/03 · 10:58

Defense Against the Dork Arts: Crash Override, by Zoe Quinn

I'm a game designer for a reason. Games are, at their core, just systems, and systems are the terms in which I think. Unfortunately, I'm not alone--people participating in online abuse treat it like a game, too, seeing who can do the most damage to a target they see as a dehumanized mass of pixels on a screen, more like a monster in a game to be taken down than an actual human being with thoughts and hopes and weaknesses and moments of brilliance. But although what was done to me was heinous, those responsible for obliterating my old life have overlooked one important thing:

I'm better at games than they are.

She had everything....until THEY took it from her! NOW, she's back--and asses are going to get kicked! #ZoeQuinn #Badass

I first heard of Zoe Quinn a couple of years back, during the Culver City Game Jam (an attempt to make a show about indy game devs that failed due to the inability of one of the promoters to treat the participants like adults). I wrote a song about that and sent it to some of the game devs involved as a catharsis offering, but when i looked for Quinn, I learned that she had had to make herself hard to find right about then. Thus were my eyes opened to Depression Quest, Gamergate, and yet another clue towards the apparently limitless depths of toxic masculinity, misogyny and online cruelty which is still news to many men, but not to many women. Crash Override is the true story of Quinn's ordeal, how she survived it, and her subsequent career offering help to other victims of doxxing, swatting, threats and other online abuse, and karma to the perpetrators of abuse.

It's on this year's Hugo ballot, in the "related work" category that also includes work by and about giants like Harlan Ellison, Ian Banks, and Ursula LeGuin...but I'm already inclined to give Zoe Quinn the nod for the award. Her story and the how-tos of safety, especially for women, is incredibly important to all of fandom. Very highest recommendations.

For White Nerdboys Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Easter Egg is Enough: Ready Player One, by Ernest Kline

Wilson looked up into the lens of my hallway camera and smiled pleasantly. "Mr. Lynch," he said. "My name is Michael Wilson and I'm with the Credit and Collections division of Innovative Online Industries. I'm here because you have failed to make the last three payments on your IOI Visa card, which has an outstanding balance in excess of twenty thousand dollars. Our records also show that you are currently unemployed and have therefore been classified as impecunious. Under current federal law, you are now eligible for mandatory indenturement. You will remain indentured until you have paid your debt to our company in full, along with all applicable interest, including processing and late fees, and any other charges or penalties that you incur henceforth." Wilson motioned toward the dropcops. "These gentlemen are here to assist me in apprehending you and escorting you to your new place of employment. We request that you open your door and grant us access to your residence. Please be aware that we are authorized to seize any personal belongings you have inside. The sale value of these items will, of course, be deducted from your outstanding credit balance."

I haven't seen the movie, and I'm likely to wait for Netflix to have it, but the book is a pretty awesome geek candy bar of a "kid with a destiny to change the dystopian nightmare society" tale. As Dystopian futures go, Cline's post-peak oil depiction of an America where climate change was left ignored to do its thing, trailer parks are stacked on top of one another to save transportation, and government has become toothless, leaving corporations to do whatever they want with the unemployed, is grimmer and more realistic than some. Harry Potter's cupboard under the stairs has nothing on protagonist Wade Watts's abusive aunt in a fifteen-to-a-doublewide stack.

Instead of Hogwarts, we have a virtual reality universe to escape to, the eccentric billionaire owner of which has willed control to whoever solves his macguffin hunt. And so, we have exactly the situation in which millions of geek readers get to imagine their exact skillsets of online and arcade gaming, geek music, geek movie quotes and other geek trivia being in demand to gain incredible wealth and fame before the Evil Corporation That Cheats finds the macguffin first and turns humanity's one refuge from constant despair into a for-profit hellhole.

I had to stop myself from chowing it down in a single setting. The story is criticized for not being particularly inclusive, and people who don't look like me have valid complaints, but---as part of the main target market, who grew up in the 80s culture nostalgized by Cline, I found it frackin' Awesome

The Worst and the Dimmest: Fire and Fury, by Michael Wolff

The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks's The Producers. In that classic, Brooks's larcenous and dopey heroes, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, set out to sell more than 100 percent of the ownership stakes in the Broadway show they are producing. Since they will be found out only if the show is a hit, everything about the show is premised on its being a flop. Accordingly, they create a show so outlandish that it actually succeeds, thus dooming our heroes.....Donald Trump and his tiny hands of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.

You read it here first: This book--chronicling Mad Emperor Donald's first 100 days, from inauguration to October ( #AlternativeMath ) is not an expose. It is a whitewash, designed to distance the Republican Party from the inevitable results of their War Against America, and to promote the fiction that they are somehow different from the dystopian nightmare currently entrenched in the White Supremacist House, even as they do nothing to stop it, or even to mitigate it.

But go ahead and have fun laughing at the naked emperors, just for catharsis's sake. Just don't take your eye off the pea as the shell-game con artist thrusts it up his sleeve.

The main character and focal point isn't even Trump. It is Steve Bannon, elevated to Greek Tragic status, Dr. Gonzo to Trump's Raoul Duke, Littlefinger to Tiny-Hands's Joffrey, physically and morally ugly and proud that his offensive body odor, in his view, makes him more "authentic" to the working class than snooty elites who bother about their hygiene.

Ivanka is the token competent person--in fact, in Wolff's world, the ONLY somewhat competent members of the team are women--Ivanka, Katie Walsh, and Dina Powell, except that Ivanka is the only one who is unable to throw up her hands and just leave when it becomes clear that the men will neither listen to them nor even let them do the "women's work" of cleaning up their messes. Jared Kusher is a feckless, closeted Democrat, so loyal to his allegedly liberal core that he almost thinks about raising a hand and saying, "Ummm---guys? How about not?" during their planning sessions to bring about the destruction of the United States. Spicer is a (once respected, apparently) kicking boy, respected by no one, who knew as he took the job that he might never be able to work again. The Trump sons are Niedermeyer and Marmalarde. Nine top DC criminal law firms refuse to represent the president, rightly "afraid they would face a rebellion among their younger staff if they represented him, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid he would stiff them for the bill." Et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.

Trump himself, as you know, can't control himself, and supposedly has no idea what he's doing. Staff try to decide whether he's a militarist or a nationalist, and whether he knows the difference.

In reality, ALL of them, and Congressional Republicans, and the Koches, Adelsons and Mercers who have their hands elbow deep up the politicians' asses to make them talk, know exactly what they are doing, and intend the results. their MISSION is to destroy the united States Government, so that corporate feudalism may fill the void and do what it wants with you and I and all other Americans with no accountability from anyone.

Remember that. The day will come when the team of designated fall guys will no longer be in power (heck, half of the cast of Fire and Fury have exited to choruses of Oompa Loompas already), and on that day, the Republicans will groom another Republican--Cruz or Rubio or Rand Paul or Christie or Walker or Roy Moore--and push the narrative that putting them in charge would somehow count as "change". DO NOT TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PEA.

And So It Begins: Akata witch, by Nnedi Okorafor

Chittim is the currency of Leopard people. Chittim are always made of metal (copper, bronze, silver and gold) and always shaped like curved rods. The most valuable are the large copper ones, which are about the size of an orange and thick as an adult's thumb. The smallest ones are the size of a dove's egg. Least valuable are chittim made of gold.

When Chittim fall, they never do harm. So one can stand in a rain of chittim and never get hit. There is only one way to earn chittim: by gaining knowledge and wisdom. The smarter you become, the more chittim will fall and thus the richer you will be. As a free agent, don't expect to get rich.

In other words, chittim are Experience Points.

This is the third Okorofor I've read this year, and I'm liking her a lot. It's Hugo season, and Akata Witch is on the ballot in the new YA category, the first one I've read, but the others have a serious bar to clear.

I call it an African variant on the basic Harry Potter trope: A child with a destiny, descended from magical relatives (now deceased) and being brought up by uncaring, oblivious relatives, learns of a whole different world out there, meets some friends her own age, begins to develop magical abilities and learn the rules of this strange new culture, and defeats the first minion of the Big Bad.

In this case, the setting is Nigeria. Sunny, the heroine, was born in America and then brought to live here. Soon she will learn of the magic market, the good and bad juju, the special library, the special familiars, the rules to follow and the rules to break, and of the evil to be fought. Very high recommendations.

Who Run the World?: Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Margaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft, brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain. Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt; for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were [Pg 5]very much in her way. She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful. Her long, thick hair was her one beauty; but it was usually bundled into a net, to be out of her way. Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a fly-away look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman, and didn't like it. Elizabeth—or Beth, as every one called her—was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression, which was seldom disturbed. Her father called her "Little Tranquillity," and the name suited her excellently; for she seemed to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved. Amy, though the youngest, was a most important person,—in her own opinion at least. A regular snow-maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair, curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners. What the characters of the four sisters were we will leave to be found out.

I am not the target market for this book, but (1) it counts as 19th century literature; (2) I have resolved to read more women; and (3) hella women I know squeed over this during their childhoods and identified with Jo (I had figured this was because I pal around with tomboys who would choose her over the more dainty Marsh sisters, but in fact she is the central character and a stand-in for Alcott herself in what amounts to a docufictiondrama about her actual life), and so I ought to at least know what it's about.

Well...since I've been studying and trying to learn to do emotional labor, which girls are taught to do and boys mostly aren't even now (and presumably even more so then), I found it to be a story about girls and emotional labor. How very busy those March girls are! How they plan amateur performances and faire days at the school and household projects and visits to the poor, and how THERE they are for each other! I can see the appeal for anyone who has had close siblings with whom they did stuff. These girls make their corner of the world go round.

I was an only son in the 20th century when they dropped us in front of the television to keep us from getting into things. It's a whole nother world, and not written for the likes of me. But it's an American classic, and one that takes surprisingly long to read for something purportedly for kids.

Worth a Thousand Words: Are You My Mother, by Alison Bechdel

I'm clinging to a precipice of ice. I can't tell how far it falls away below me. Somehow, I have to haul myself up over the top. That's the only way the rescue helicopter can get to me. I manage to dig out a little square hole and wedge my arm into it. Now I can twist around and assess matters. The distance to the water is dizzying. I spit, and a long moment later it hits the surface. Apparently, I'm on an island. I can see the lights of the mainland.

Then the dream fast-forwards, and I'm safe at the top. I'm astonished to realize that the cliff had, in fact, been merely my childhood home, covered in ice. Now it's melted, and it is a beautiful Spring morning. I'd been hanging from the edge of the roof. Even if I had lost my grip, I wouldn't have fallen far. I try to show a neighbor, then my father, how perilous it had been, how amazing that I managed to save myself.

But in this thawed, mild climate, it is impossible to convey the extremity of my situation.

Once upon a time, when I was much younger, and less secure in myself, I felt threatened by Bechdel's Dykes to watch Out For comic strip, felt like she and her characters were my enemies. nowadays, it's hard to even remember why I would have felt that, but I strive to keep the memory, the better to grok toxic masculinity and work to loosen its grip on other guys.

A couple of years ago--you can find it in an old Bookpost--I read her previous graphic novel, Fun Home, a shockingly vulnerable story about Bechdel's relationship with her father, and felt so moved by it that I felt a longing to be friends with her. What a long, strange trip it's been.

Are You My Mother is more of the same, doubled down a bit. In the sequel, she's working out mommy issues and illustrating the process of the therapy she's going through WHILE writing the first book and discussing her father with her mother.

It gets intense, and very moving, and it's hard to believe how vulnerable Bechdel is willing to be in front of the world. but there it is. Very high recommendations.

Feminist Rant: On the subjugation of Women, by Harriet Taylor
Think what it is to a boy, to grow up to manhood in the belief that without any merit or any exertion of his own, though he may be the most frivolous and empty or the most ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact of being born a male he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race: including probably some whose real superiority to himself he has daily or hourly occasion to feel; but even if in his whole conduct he habitually follows a woman's guidance, still, if he is a fool, she thinks that of course she is not, and cannot be, equal in ability and judgment to himself; and if he is not a fool, he does worse—he sees that she is superior to him, and believes that, notwithstanding her superiority, he is entitled to command and she is bound to obey. What must be the effect on his character, of this lesson? And men of the cultivated classes are often not aware how deeply it sinks into the immense majority of male minds.

John Stuart Mill is universally credited as the author of On the Subjugation of Women, however, in his Autobiography (see January's Bookpost), Mill himself credits his wife for having written most or all of it--and for having contributed substantially to some of his other famous essays as well--and Mill had to sign his name to it so that it would be published at all. He was already established as a practical, sensible philosopher and so they would tolerate, just a little, silly notions about women having equal rights from him. It's not as if he was one of those shrill, hysterical screaming harpies who were pushing male tolerance of their misbehavior and disobedience beyond any reasonable limits.

Yes, we've come a long way since then. Not far enough, but ye gods. Taylor has to argue against customs so offensive that it's embarrassing that she had to point these things out. Wives' earnings and property belonging to her husband. Husbands with the authority to keep wives prisoner in their homes, or to summon police to bring her back if she fled an abusive relationship. The right to sexual relations against her will. Husbands as the official injured party in a suit for someone else having assaulted his wife (on a trespass to chattels theory?). No professional license, even when she has the degree and qualifications--which she doesn't, because she's not allowed to go to University.

Anyhow, Taylor disguised as Mill mansplains why these things are problematic, for those of you who might still be thinking it over.

I admit it. Over a lifetime, I've come to think of women as the superior gender, in large part because of their practice and capacity for emotional labor. they've been taught all their lives to consider others, and so they do. they know more about psychology, about body language, about what's happening in their particular community, what needs doing and how to do it. They can communicate effectively because they know how to listen. Meanwhile men are taught to be solitary, to keep emotions hidden, and to win contests instead of cooperating with others. Men turn to women for social and emotional comfort because other men suck at it. Seems to me, men will be happier people if they learn to be like women. Probably, the women will be happier too.

The Victorian Murders: Highgate Rise, Belgrave Square; Farriers' Lane, by Anne Perry; The Silver Locomotive Mystery, by Edward Marston; Through a Gold Eagle; The Stalking Horse, by Miriam Grace Monfredo

"If this usurer was blackmailing Lord Byam, I assume there may be other men of importance he was also blackmailing."

Drummond stiffened. Apparently the thought had not occurred to him.

"I suppose so," he said, quickly. "For God's sake, be discreet, Pitt!"

Pitt smiled with self-mockery. "It's the most discreet job of all, isn't it--tidying up after their lordships' indiscretions?"

---from Belgrave Square

When Neva had first arrived in town, she'd trained with Dr. Quentin Ives. Because of Ives's long-held position in town, she'd been grudgingly accepted--although Glynis guessed that many thought she was simply paid help, some sort of domestic. But now, with Neva starting her own practice, Glynis had learned--by way of Harriet's letters to Springfield--that there had been ample vocal opposition to a woman practicing medicine. Although, on one recent occasion, it hadn't been only vocal; someone had scribbled "We don't want no lady Jew doctor!" on an outside wall of the warehouse.

--from Through a Gold Eagle

The corpse lay on the bed, impervious to the breeze that blew in through the open window to rustle the curtains. When a fly came into the room, it described endless circles in the air before settling on the top of a large, open, empty leather bag.

--from The Silver Locomotive Mystery

The Silver Locomotive Mystery, related to trains only in that the MacGuffin is a stolen silver teapot in the shape of a train engine, is a pretty masterful detective story, probably the best of the seven "Railway detective" novels by Marston that I've read so far. Good character and atmosphere, suspense, and a couple of plot twists, at least one of which I should have seen coming and didn't. High recommendations.

The Seneca Falls series by Miriam Grace Monfredo arrives at the US Civil War. The two books read this month cover John Brown's raid, a historical counterfeiting conspiracy, the secession of the slave states, and a plot to assassinate lincoln before he is even inaugurated as President. the usual heroine Glynis Tryon takes a back seat in The Stalking Horse to her red-haired adventurous niece Bronwyn, who enlists as a Pinkerton detective to spy on the confederates and completely walks away with my heart. As always, a great series with highest recommendations.

And Perry's Pitt novels have settled into a delightful formula where HE is the policeman investigating the seedy high-crime neighborhoods, and SHE is the society lady with connections that get her into the households and social events where the police have difficulty treading. Supporting characters like formidable Aunt Vespasia and Gracie the young servant girl have additional specialty places to search for clues. Farrier's Lane, about a judge who was murdered while in the process of re-opening a case where a Jewish man who was "obviously guilty" had been convicted in an environment of particularly toxic antisemitism, is the best of the three I read this time.

School of Stuff-Doing: Prolegomena to Ethics, by Thomas Hill Green

There is a principle of self-development in man, independent of the excitement of new desires by those imaginations, which presuppose new experiences of pleasure. In virtue of this principle, one anticipates experience. In a certain sense, he makes it, instead of merely waiting to be made by it. He is capable of being moved by an idea of himself, as becoming that which he has it in him to be--an idea which does not represent previous experiences, but gradually brings an experience into being, gradually creates a filling for itself, in the shape of arts, laws, institutions and habits of living, which, so far as they go, exhibit the capabilities of man, define the idea of his end, afford a positive answer to the otherwise unanswerable question, what in particular is it that man has it in him to become.

Not bad for my philosophy of the month. Green is mostly understandable, and his theory makes sense as a reaction to Darwin and Mill's influence in Britain, at least if you've read the works that Green reacts to. Green's ethics seem similar to those of Hegel and other 19th century Germans, with the benefit that they don't have to be translated out of a heavy lugubrious prose.

Green immediately lost me by starting out with the announcement that he was going to prove a system of ethics by natural science, and then immediately diving into metaphysical claims that Man has an inner divine nature. Okay, why not just say that God commands stuff? But he got me back again by coming round to attacks on the Social Darwinism trope that horrible social conditions exist in conformance to natural law and cannot be changed by any means (the privileged were as fond of this idea in Victorian Britain as modern Americans are of The Prosperity Gospel and The Secret).

Green further goes after the hedonistic Utilitarianism that urges pleasure as the ultimate human driving force, replacing it with "self-actualization", or a human urge to perfect oneself, from which all sorts of worthy moral values may be derived, that would not be easily derived from mere pleasure-seeking. you can color me at least partly convinced.

Feast of Imaginary Delicacies: Vanity Fair, by William M. Thackeray

Ours is a ready-money society. We live among bankers and City big-wigs, and be hanged to them, and every man, as he talks to you, is jingling his guineas in his pocket. There is that jackass Fred Bullock is going to marry Maria—there's Goldmore, the East India Director, there's Dipley, in the tallow trade—OUR trade," George said, with an uneasy laugh and a blush. "Curse the whole pack of money-grubbing vulgarians! I fall asleep at their great heavy dinners. I feel ashamed in my father's great stupid parties. I've been accustomed to live with gentlemen, and men of the world and fashion, Emmy, not with a parcel of turtle-fed tradesmen. Dear little woman, you are the only person of our set who ever looked, or thought, or spoke like a lady: and you do it because you're an angel and can't help it. Don't remonstrate. You are the only lady. Didn't Miss Crawley remark it, who has lived in the best company in Europe? And as for Crawley, of the Life Guards, hang it, he's a fine fellow: and I like him for marrying the girl he had chosen."

I am amazed, after the dull and uninspiring Henry Esmond and The Virginians to return to Vanity Fair to be reminded that, yes, it really is one of the top ten Victorian era novels in existence. It may be that, like Harper Lee, Thackeray had one good one in him. Although, I am inspired to maybe give his other work just one more shot.

Vanity Fair is described as "a book without a hero" in that no one is entirely good or bad (George R.R. Martin made a similar claim about the Game of Thrones saga, though I would argue that there are several irredeemable villains to be found there). I would argue for Amelia and Dobbin to be at least as good as any "heroes' found in Shakespeare or Dickens, as their "flaws" tend to err on the side of being virtuous. Nevertheless, the rest of the very large cast of characters...yes, multi-faceted, problematic, and often likeable anyhow.

Take Becky Sharp, the character who has most gone down in history. Like Julien Sorrel in The Red and the Black, it seems to me she has been unfairly maligned by the critics, denounced as some sort of Machiavellian conscienceless bitch when, really, like sorrel, it seems to me she quite sensibly plays by the rules she is given to try to make a life for herself, and is condemned as not being of the right social class to get away with it. We first meet her leaving a girls' school where the headmistress has taught other girls to bully her as an inferior, using her labor for free, and sending her off to be a governess while her only friend Amelia is presented as a lady of quality.

In Thackeray's England, fortune and social standing matter more than character or love or humanity. We see a staggering panorama of fortunes made and lost, reputations made and lost, the privileged succeeding through privileged, and the unprivileged cast out when they otherwise would have done equally well. There are good intentions that pave the road to Hell, bad intentions that are turned aside in spite of themselves, old rich people shaking their wills at young relations, and young people led astray by folly and poverty.

The richness of the panorama, with Thackeray's narrative commentary (it is still hard for me to decide whether he meant Becky to be a villainess, a side effect, or a heroine undone solely due to social status) is among the most delightful, agonizing, and thought provoking prose fiction I've seen outside of Henry Fielding. Very highest recommendations.

Outings with the Girls: Unsuitable for Ladies (an anthology of women travellers) edited by Jane Robinson

And where should a lady go on her travels? The world has hardly been her oyster in the past, thanks to the old chivalraic image of the gentler, fairer, weaker sex (and chivalry is still not dead, believe me; even today's lone woman traveller finds herself prey to comments on her recklessness, bravery, or dubious femininity). Assuming she is the sort of person willing to go abroad without some champion to protect her, she is still hardly equipped with the constitution to endure epic desert treks or polar crossings, to conquer really respectable mountains, or hole herself up with some secret and tropic tribe somewhere.

With some commentary by Jane Robinson, this book consists of excerpts from the travel writing from two centuries of women (late 18th century to about 1990) who dared to set out and explore the world--gasp!--without a man!

The excerpts are grouped a bit awkwardly, beginning with all of the sections about deciding to travel, then all the English channel crossings, then chapters grouped by region, without regard to what year, and finally, all the bits about coming home again. It does not unify the sense of region; it makes the reading jarring. The best sections are the ones that go on for several pages by one author.

Ida Pfeiffer is here, sadly without her visit to Queen Ranavalona's Madagascar; however, Flashman fans will find Fanny Duberly's testimony that helped to bring the Charge of the Light Brigade home to all the English who had lain in their beds though it (she didn't quite bring a picnic basket to a grassy hill overlooking the war and sound polite golf claps throughout, but the effect is whimsical nonetheless), as well as more than one survivor of the Sepoy Mutiny. Also represented among dozens of authors are Lady Worley Montague, Lady Duff Gordon, Rebecca West, Izak Dinesen, Freya Stark, and Rose Macaulay. Susie Rijnhart contributes a heartbreaking account of the loss of her baby during a trip to Lhasa, and Amelie Murray writes a racist AF letter home, approving the institution of American slavery as a poor-law measure to protect the "negro" from idleness, drunkenness and theft--which maybe tells us more about intentional conditions in period workhouses than anything in Dickens.

Oh, and the sexual harassment they endure is always from white missionaries, never from the natives of the countries they visit,. Which is a surprise to exactly no one. A mixed bag, but high recommendations overall.

Youthful Folly: Spring Torrents, by Ivan Turgenev

Who is not acquainted with a German meal? A watery soup with bullet-like dumplings flavoured with cinnamon, boiled beef, dry as cork, with some white fat adhering to it, garnished with soapy potatoes, puffy beetroot, and some chewed-up looking horseradish, followed by a bluish eel, with capers and vinegar, a roast of meet with some jam, and the inevitable Mehlspeise--a sort of pudding with a sourish red sauce. However, the wine and beer are excellent. This was exactly the kind of meal that the Soden innkeeper now provided for his patrons.

Sometimes I guess you just have to be in the right mood. This is a simple tale like many I've read before, of a young man, foolishly in love, who does a foolish thing that wrecks everything and possibly costs him his one chance at true happiness. I am no longer young, and these days I often sneer at these stories or reach for the insulin.

This time, my heart broke right along with poor Sanin's, and I bawled internally and externally. The Spring torrents of the title flow from both German creeks and from young eyes, and, it being Spring, from my eyes as well.

I'm not sure I can explain it. Another day, I would have surely called it sappy and been unaffected. Are you feeling romantic today?

And yes, I started the year with some of Turgenev's earlier, more famous books, and didn't care much for them, and have found him very effective at producing moods and pathos in his later, less well-known writing. See last month's King Lear of the Steppes. This makes two short, powerful works of his that have floored me.

Churl in China: Flashman and the Dragon (Flashman #8), by George MacDonald Fraser

For a moment I stood rooted, hornily agog before all that magnificent meat, and then, as any gentleman would have done, I seized one in either hand, nearly crying. Which was absolutely as that designing bitch had calculated--she suddenly gripped my elbows. I instinctively jerked them down to my sides, and without stooping, or shoulder movement, or the least exertion at all, she lifted me clean off the deck! I was too dumbfounded to do anything but dangle while she held me (thirteen-stone-odd, bigod!) with only the strength of her forearms under my rigid elbows, grinned up into my face, and spoke quietly past the cheroot:

"Would you really beat a poor girl, fan-qui?"

Then, before I could reply, or hack her shins, or do anything sensible, she straightened her arms upwards, holding me helpless three feet up in the air, before abruptly letting go.

For me, Flashman's ninth chronological, eighth written adventure peaks early, with Flashman's sexual gymnastics with the gigantic bandit chief Szu-Zhan, but your mileage may vary. We also see him running guns to Canton, meeting with the Taiping resistance in Nanking, quaking with fear during the British assault on the imperial forts at Taku, being captured by despots, and being held a sex slave to the future empress Yehonala Tzu-Hsi at the emperor's Summer Palace. In other words, as usual, showing up during the key events of 1860 involving the Taipings versus the Imperials and the Imperials versus the British, just in time to be in maximum danger and to give running irreverent commentary on great events and people of history. As always, CN for horrible behavior, racist epithets, and misogyny. Flashman is an asshole and probably typical of the entitled British class of the day.

Book of Mormon: Alma
Now, as Alma was teaching and speaking unto the people upon the hill Onidah, there came a great multitude unto him, who were those of whom we have been speaking, of whom were poor in heart, because of their poverty as to the things of the world.

And they came unto Alma; and the one who was the foremost among them said unto him:

Behold, what shall these my brethren do, for they are despised of all men because of their poverty, yea, and more especially by our priests; for they have cast us out of our synagogues which we have labored abundantly to build with our own hands; and they have cast us out because of our exceeding poverty; and we have no place to worship our God; and behold, what shall we do?

And now when Alma heard this, he turned him about, his face immediately towards him, and he beheld with great joy; for he beheld that their afflictions had truly humbled them, and that they were in a preparation to hear the word.

This is the longest "chapter" of the LDS bible, and the part where it becomes most readily suspicious that Joseph smith just stream-of-consciousness wrote it on the fly, combining and making variants on the favorite parts of the Old testament histories and prophets.

There are at least five separate subtribes of Nephites, Lamanites, Ammonites, and I forget which else, that take turns falling from grace and declaring war on one another, with the righteous side of the day immune to being killed because God, intermixed with various preachings exhorting the people to repent of their wicked ways and follow the true path (directions of which consist mainly of "Obey the Word, and pray that the Word be revealed to you"), in endless loop, for over 150 pages of double-column. Great cities and edifices are erected, no trace of which have ever been found for real, even as Native American artifacts are found in abundance. Proceed as you wish.

Raging Socialist: Principles of Political Economy, by John Stuart Mill

We sometimes, for example, hear it said that governments ought to confine themselves affording protection against force and fraud. That, these two things apart, people should be free agents, able to take care of themselves, and that so long as a person practices no violence or deception, to the injury of others in person or property, legislatures and governments are in no way called on to concern themselves about him. But why should people be protected by their government, that is, by their own collective strength, against violence and fraud, and not against other evils, except that the expediency is more obvious? If nothing but what people cannot possibly do for themselves can be fit to be done for them by government, people might be required to protect themselves by their skill and courage even against force, or to beg or buy protection against it, as they actually do when the government is not capable of protecting them; and against fraud everyone has the protection of his own wits.

It amuses me that someone claimed as intellectual ammo by modern "Libertarians" (apparently on the grounds that he wrote a famous essay on Liberty--see February's book post--that they haven't read, and assume that the initial thesis is all there is) in fact stood for the opposite of what "Libertarians" want.

It was Mill who turned prior economists like Malthus and Adam smith on their heads by refuting economics as a "natural law" and pointed out accurately that--for good or ill--if society doesn't like the natural tendencies of money to concentrate into ever-fewer hands, society has the power to change them. after Mill, people in power had to either take responsibility for the suffering of the poor and alleviate their suffering, or admit that they just didn't want to.

Mill does pay some heed to laissez-faire as a principle, and finds it to be a good one some of the time, but--in the last of four thick chapters, and to me the best part of the work (the first parts are almost a textbook summarizing what economists have said so far) riddles laissez-fair with so many exceptions and counter-arguments that there's not much left outside the economic fictions where all people bargain on equal terms and are forthright in their dealings. Much thicker than most Mill, but highly recommended.

The Rise of the Machines: Pandaemonium, edited by Humphrey Jennings

In Tom Poole's letter, and in Blake's "London" and in the letter about "Pantisocracy", are presented three different ways of facing the world as it then was. Tom Poole explains to his friend that he is going on his adventure for the good of trade--but I suspect that this is a genteel cover for an unformulated, unadmitted desire to go towards the people. This is also covered up by calling the idea "romantick" and attempting to forestall criticism by laughing at himself and so on. What was there to be ashamed of? In this image, it is not Poole who is clearest, but the dim form of the class towards which his helm was pointed.

Blake, Londoner, is in no such tangle. He has but to wander the streets of London, his native city, with eyes and ears open; in this poem most of all the visionary was seeing reality. He was clear too about the causes of the misery he saw--'chartered street'; 'chartered Thames'. Fot the moment, at least Blake was not escaping, as Coleridge and Southey were preparing to do.

A chronologically arranged collection of hundreds of fragments, beginning with Milton's description of Pandaemonium in "Paradise Lost", and continuing with letters, sermons, poetry, pieces of essays, and etcetera, acting as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that make up the human misery and bullshit attending the lives of the people of Britain as the industrial revolution turned them from peasants and people into human resources. the statements of optimism and the benefits to people of keeping them from idleness, by the rich and powerful, are more chilling than the pleas and lamentations of the poor.

Booga-Booga, Kiddies! In a Glass Darkly, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
And now the charge was over, the huge Chief-Justice leaned back panting and gloating on the prisoner. Every one in the court turned about and gazed with steadfast hatred on the man in the dock. From the jury box where the twelve sworn brethren were whispering together, a sound in the general stillness like a prolonged hiss was heard, and then, in answer to the challenge of the officer, "How say you, gentlemen of the jury, guilty or not guilty?" came in a melancholy voice, the finding "Guilty."

The introduction to this collection of five dark tales brings up something I hadn't thought of: The 19th century was when large numbers of people in Europe stopped actually believing in ghosts, which is a big reason they started writing about them for entertainment purposes.

Le Fanu was one of the first mass market horror authors, and his writings are pretty tame by today's standards, and have even come to be cliches. The first three out of five are pretty much the same tale repeated: A man is being followed by some vengeful spirit, agonizes as it draws closer, and eventually dies coincidentally while medical experts rule natural causes and suggest madness. Still worth reading once.

The Biological Basis for Incels: The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin

Species inheriting nearly the same constitution from a common parent, and exposed to similar influences, naturally tend to present analogous variations, or these same species may occasionally revert to some of the characters of their ancient progenitors. Although new and important modifications may not arise from reversion and analogous variation, such modifications will add to the beautiful and harmonious diversity of nature.

Whatever the cause may be of each slight difference between the offspring and their parents—and a cause for each must exist—we have reason to believe that it is the steady accumulation of beneficial differences which has given rise to all the more important modifications of structure in relation to the habits of each species.

My library has a glorious edition of this one, compiled by David Quammen with a shit ton of glossy photographs of Darwin, Darwin's houses, little pictures of scrolls with relevant entries from The Voyage of the Beagle (see February's bookpost) and etchings and color photos of exotic plant and animal life with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what it is to be used as evidence against the creationists.

Oh yeah, and the text ain't bad either. Especially after seven years of Great Books reading in Apollonius, Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton and Faraday, it's nice when the science volume is not full of equations and is conversational in tone and easy to follow for once. One reason Darwin was so influential may be because he really is easy on the brain.

The case for natural selection and the evidence thereof, supported by observations in differences in species in different locations or explainable by migratory patterns is almost self-evident today and hard to even call controversial (the part about man evolving from apes doesn't occur until The Descent of Man, to be read later in the year. And yet, we still have to keep fighting for it because fundamentalists. Essential reading to know what you're talking about when you do.

Monthly Book Post, March 2018

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday April 05, 2018 · 11:00 AM PDT

2018/04/05 · 11:00

She's So Vine: Zahrah the Windseeker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

To many, to be dada meant you were born with strange powers. That you could walk into a room and a mysterious wind would knock things over or clocks would automatically stop. That your mere presence would cause flowers to grow underneath the soil instead of above. That you caused things to rebel or that you would grow up to be rebellious yourself! And what made things even worse was that I was a girl, and only boys and men were supposed to be rebellious. Girls were supposed to be soft, quiet, and pleasant.

See February's book post for the much more intense Who Fears Death Zahra the Windseeker is a much lighter, more enjoyable YA-style heroine, made an outcast at school because of the vines growing from her head; discovering her true powers; and eventually going on a quest in a forbidden jungle full of frightening supernatural creatures to save her best friend. Very high recommendations.

The Victorian Murders: Cardingdon Crescent; Silence in Hanover Close; Bethlehem Road, by Anne Perry; Iron horse; Murder on the Brighton Express, by Robert Marston; Blackwater Spirits, by Miriam Grace Monfredo

A small crowd of passengers stood beside the piles of luggage, and a collective gasp of horror went up. As the lid of the hatbox flipped open, its contents were tipped roughly out. Reginald Hibbert could not believe his eyes. Rolling around below him on the platform was a human head.

--from Iron Horse

Tassie March was coming up the stairs, her face calm and weary, but with a serenity unlike anything Charlotte had seen in her before. The restlessness was gone, all the tension relaxed. Her hands were held out in front of her, sleeves crumpled, smears of blood on the cuffs, and a dark stain near the hem of her skirt. She reached the top of the stairs just as Charlotte realized her own position and shrank back into the shadows. Tassie passed on tiptoe, less than a ard away from her, still with that unhurried smile, leaving a heavy, sickly and quite unmistakable odor behind her. No one who had smelled fresh blood could ever forget it.

--from Cardington Crescent

"Why do you want to disgrace me?" Papa had shouted. "Why do you think you can be a doctor? How did this happen--that my DAUGHTER wants to be a doctor? You should want to be a wife. And a mother. A respectable woman, as you have been taught by your own mama. Didn't you teach her this, sheva"

"I taught her," Sheva Cardoza said, gazing with annoyance at Neva. "She didn't listen. She never listens."

"But you are the one"--Papa now accused Mama, which Neva thought to be only fair--"the one who let your cousin ernestine send her to that deceitful school. A school that would teach girls that they can do just the same as boys. What were you thinking, Sheva?"

"I was thinking," Mama retorted, "that after Neva saw what it was about, she might give up this foolishness of doctoring."

--from Blackwater Spirits

Marston's Victorian railroad series continues to be a mixed bag. Iron Horse has very little to do with railroads, except that the severed head is found on a train early on, and people travel on trains to get to the Derby from London. It is a horse racing mystery that is worthy of Dick Francis in terms of suspense and guessing (it involves three ruthless horse trainers who hate each other, each with an entrant in the Derby and apparently each pulling shenanigans against the other two) with the exception that the solution is not worthy of the buildup to it. Similarly, Murder on the Brighton Express centers around a ridiculous attempt to murder a specific intended victim by derailing a train such that several innocents happen to die and the intended victim forseeably does not. The would-be killer is not presented as the kind of monster that it would take to actually create a sea of uninvolved dead bodies in an unlikely attempt to include just one hated person. Marston can do better than this.

Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte series is even more of a mixed bag. This month's set featured a murder in a cozy mansion (with Charlotte's sister considered a prime suspect); the re-opening of a cold case from which fresh murders ensue (in which Thomas himself is ridiculously framed and the justice system that knows him throws him under the bus despite the feeble evidence because plot line, and a series of murders of members of parliament on a bridge. the first two stories feature more than one plausible suspect, with the actuall killer apparently selected at random, with shockers not discoverable by any clues in the text, while the culprit in the third might as well be wearing a "I Did It" sign, but the motive is only suddenly discovered in the final chapter.

Miriam Grace Monfredo's series about Glynis the Librarian in pre-Civil War upstate NY, feeds the Social Justice Warrior in me yet again, having segued from feminism and abolitionism to temperance and Native rights, with a tale that references the massacre and repatriation of the Iriquois Nation, the picketing of a saloon, and the arrest of former Iroquois deputy Jacques Sundown for what might be the revenge killings of some drunk, wife-beeting white good-for-nothings for an old crime. It also introduces what I hopw will be a new recurring character, Dr. Cardoza. The term "blackwater spirits" is a clever pun referencing departed ancestors and hard liquor.

The Scholarly Basis for Bigotry: Race (A Study in Modern Superstition), by Jacques Barzun

Gobineau starts with the threefold division of mankind into white, yellow and black. To the first he ascribes all the noble qualities of manhood, leadership, energy, superiority. The yellow races have stability and fertility and the black are endowed with sensuality and the artistic impulse. At this point, Gobineau's scheme displays an interesting and refreshing novelty. It is only when two races mix, he says, that civilization occurs. Art and government are the signs of civilization and no single race can produce these by itself. But civilization leads to more and more mixing of "inferior blood" with that of the ruling caste, so that the "great race" is inevitably bastardized and decadence follows.

Barzun had the chutzpah to reference himself as suggested reading in a different book of his, and, being interested in racial issues, I took the bait. The book chronicles a history of racial beliefs held by Europeans during, mostly, the 19th and early 20th century, beginning briefly with Tacitus and Montesquieu, and continuing with more obscure authors. Thankfully, Barzun takes it for granted that the reader will agree with him that most or all of the referenced beliefs are hogwash or worse, designed to reinforce prejudice that the race that various writers belonged to were the superior one.

Mind you, most of the racial conflicts referenced are within "caucasian"; very little reference to non-caucasians exists; they are pushed aside in favor of sparring matches between, e.g, Aryans, Semites and Celts. Also, the book was written in 1938, while hitler was in power but before the war began, and so the asides to the reader about "contemporary beliefs" are...interesting.

Book of Mormon: Words of Mormon; Mosiah

And it came to pass that there was a man among them whose name was Abinadi; and he went forth among them, and began to prophesy, saying: Behold, thus saith the Lord, and thus hath he commanded me, saying, Go forth, and say unto this people, thus saith the Lord—Woe be unto this people, for I have seen their abominations, and their wickedness, and their whoredoms; and except they repent I will visit them in mine anger.

The "Words of Mormon" are an abrupt leap to what may be the end of the work, centuries after Omni and Abinadom, in which Mormon (the protagonist?) is introduced, writing briefly that most or all of the nation founded and continued in the preceding chapters, is now destroyed.

FOUR HUNDRED YEARS EARLIER

...the Book of Mosiah begins., after Omni but a long time before the Words of Mormon, we get the LDS equivalent of Samuel, Kings, and the Babylonian Captivity. Large cities of steel and iron are built (of which I'm pretty sure there is zero archaeological record in the Western United States), the Lamanites play the role of Philistines, harassing and making trouble for the Nephites; and so on. As in the old testament, a king becomes decadent and blasphemous; a prophet appears to warn them of God's wrath should they not repent of the wicked ways into which they have fallen; and the court responds with armpit farts and attempts to kill the prophet for fun. It doesn't end well for the Nephites while King Noah is alive.

1 Nephi, which tells of the voyage across the Pacific, is at least a story, but a dry and dully told one. Here, at least, we get some exciting conflicts with multiple factions making and breaking alliances, and it's not too bad a read if you keep your mind open.

The Irish MP: Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope

We are told that it is a bitter moment with the Lord Mayor when he leaves the Mansion House and becomes once more Alderman Jones of no. 75, Bucklersbury. Lord Chancellors going out of office have a great fall though they take pensions with them for their consolation. And the President of the United States when he leaves the glory of the White House and once more becomes a simple citizen must feel the change severely. But our hero, Phineas Finn, as he turned his back upon the scene of his many successes, and prepared himself for permanent residence in his own country was, I think, in a worse plight than any of the reduced divinities to which I have alluded. They at any rate had known that their fall would come. He, like Icarus, had flown up towards the sun, hoping that his wings of wax would bear him steadily aloft amongst the gods.

I find myself tiring of Trollope. His books are too thick for the stories they tell. On the one hand, they are straightforward and easy to read, in a what you see is what you get sort of way. On the other hand, the plots are slow and ponderous and contain many dialogues on the same subject, and long, repetitive passages about characters making decisions.

Phineas is is a young, stouthearted Irishman persuaded to seek and obtain a seat in Parliament, while also seeking romance with a variety of eligible and ineligible women. What ensues are long descriptions and opinions about Anglo-Irish relations, Irish tenancy rights at a time when English men were considered to own Ireland and make the Irish pay rent across the Irish Sea; reformation of "rotten boroughs" in which small handfuls of voters controlled entire seats; and love and duty.

The characterizations of Lady Laura Standish and Madame Max "Mad Max" Goesler, two women who would have been excellent members of Parliament but for their failure to have penises, are outstanding, and there is historical value in the story. Otherwise, recommended only for scholars.

Sound and Fury: A Grammar of Assent, by John Henry Newman
I say I certainly should be very intolerant of such a notion as that I shall one day be Emperor of the French; I should think it too absurd even to be ridiculous, and that I must be mad before I could entertain it. And did a man try to persuade me that treachery, cruelty, or ingratitude were as praiseworthy as honesty and temperance, and that a man who lived the life of a knave and died the death of a brute had nothing to fear from future retribution, I should think there was no call on me to listen to his arguments, except with the hope of converting him, though he called me a bigot and a coward for refusing to inquire into his speculations. And if, in a matter in which my temporal interests were concerned, he attempted to reconcile me to fraudulent acts by what he called philosophical views, I should say to him, “Retro Satana,” and that, not from any suspicion of his ability to reverse immutable principles, but from a consciousness of my own moral changeableness, and a fear, on that account, that I might not be intellectually true to the truth. This, then, from the nature of the case, is a main characteristic of certitude in any matter, to be confident indeed that that certitude will last, but to be confident of this also, that, if it did fail, nevertheless, the thing itself, whatever it is, of which we are certain, will remain just as it is, true and irreversible.

This purportedly great work of philosophy/theology was hard for me to comprehend. Its central thesis seems to be that logic and observation are insufficient to really know that things are true; yet Newman frequently asserts that religion, in particular, must be accepted by real, personal apprehension--intelligent acceptance through actual, concrete experience, which seems to me to be the opposite of faith.

I was game for a new proof of the existence of God via real, concrete experience, but did not find one in Newman. As is usual with theologians meddling in reason, the existence of God is categorically proved by the fact that people have religious rituals; that people once wrote a book or several books full of assertions (called "revealed truth" by Newman), and the separate and independent growths of religious beliefs in most or all primitive societies. Oh yes, and conscience testifies.

Resorting to flimsy appeals like that after setting the reader up for belief via direct, concrete experience, is very, very disappointing.

Blow Winds and Drink thy Vodka: King Lear of the Steppes, by Ivan Turgenev

Harlov shook his head. ‘Talk away! Me believe you! Never again! You’ve murdered all trust in my heart! You’ve murdered everything! I was an eagle, and became a worm for you … and you,—would you even crush the worm? Have done! I loved you, you know very well,—but now you are no daughter to me, and I’m no father to you … I’m a doomed man! Don’t meddle! As for you, fire away, coward, mighty man of valour!’ Harlov bellowed suddenly at Sletkin. ‘Why is it you keep aiming and don’t shoot? Are you mindful of the law; if the recipient of a gift commits an attempt upon the life of the giver,’ Harlov enunciated distinctly, ‘then the giver is empowered to claim everything back again? Ha, ha! don’t be afraid, law-abiding man! I’d make no claims. I’ll make an end of everything myself.… Here goes!’

Of the Turgenev I've read so far, I found On the Eve and A House of Gentlefolk to be deadly dull, and Fathers and Sons to evoke some thought on the universality of generation gaps but not what I'd call fun. King Lear of the Steppes is the first Turgenev that I call a good and suspenseful story.

As the title tells you, it's pretty much a retelling of Lear with a Russian flavor. The narrator is a neighbor and friend of Harlov, a giant of a man who has built an estate outside a village in the middle of nowhere, and who is reduced to misery by giving away his property to his two daughters, in exchange for promises to care for him, which they don't keep.

The semblance to Shakespeare's plot is inexact. There is no third daughter to be punished despite true devotion; no Edmund and Edgar subplot; only one of the two daughters is married (CN for antisemitism; the Jewish husband is stereotyped as a monstrous hoarder of riches who encourages the daughters to cheat their father and who struts about, greedily asserting the estate to be his own property). The closest thing to a battle of opposing armies is a fight between two bands of peasants. But the portrayal of the cruelty towards Harlov, and his mighty rage against his ungrateful spawn, is vivid, gripping, and quite different from what I've found in other turgenev. Very high recommendations.

Merry Band of Brothers: The Virginians, by William M. Thackeray

These notes of admiration or interrogation, the Baroness took with equal complacency (speaking parenthetically, and, for his own part, the present chronicler cannot help putting in a little respectful remark here, and signifying his admiration of the conduct of ladies towards one another, and of the things which they say, which they forbear to say, and which they say behind each other's backs. With what smiles and curtseys they stab each other! with what compliments they hate each other! with what determination of long-suffering they won't be offended! with what innocent dexterity they can drop the drop of poison into the cup of conversation, hand round the goblet, smiling, to the whole family to drink, and make the dear, domestic circle miserable!)—I burst out of my parenthesis. I fancy my Baroness and Countess smiling at each other a hundred years ago, and giving each other the hand or the cheek, and calling each other, My dear, My dear creature, My dear Countess, My dear Baroness, My dear sister—even, when they were most ready to fight.

Thackeray apparently wrote one masterpiece, and a parcel of snoozers. The Virginians, which I thought might be an interesting Tocquevilleish commentary on American mores and manners written by a satirical Brit, is really set in England. the Virginians are descendants of Henry Esmond (see last month's bookpost), who went to America to seek his fortune after the end of his novel. The descendants are two brothers, one of whom is reported killed in the French & Indian war a few chapters in, the other of which comes back to meet the British wing of the family, makes and loses fortunes in gambling, gains and loses the favors of good and bad women, has his character besmirched and redeemed and besmirched again, and is deep down almost too saintly to be believed, except when he isn't (yes, except then).

Probably best read at a time when one is NOT simultaneously reading several other 19th century English novels. It's kinda nice, but not one of the best at all.

Asshole in America: Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (Flashman #10), by George MacDonald Fraser

And then it dawned on me that the old bugger was fairly revelling in it. He'd got his audience at last, hadn't he just, the first of that world-wide congregation who would rever his name and sing his song and enshrine him in history forever. I'll swear he knew it--Lee had asked him if he'd like the mob excluded, but JB wouldn't here of it; come one, come all was his style, so that he could preach to as many as possible. That they were his enemies, who'd come to vent their abomination of him and his notions, or to gloat, or just to indulge their curiosity, made it all the better for him; he could answer their harrying and abuse with urbanity and resolution--and that's where the legend was born, believe me, in that shabby little paymaster's office, for in whatever spirit they came, they left in something like awe...and admiration. "The gamest man I ever saw," the Governor said, and Jeb Stuart (who was bloody rude to him at the time, I may say) remarked to me years later that without men like JB, there wouldn't be an America.

Most of the Flashman books treat the reader to huge vistas of epic battles and epic battles involving armies of hundreds or thousands, from the Charge of the Light Brigade to Afghanistan to multiple campaigns of the Indian Mutiny. F&tAotL climaxes with an almost comically incompetent assault by 22 people on a small armoury in a village in the middle of nowhere, and the adventure is possibly the least hair-raisingly dangerous in the series (despite several chances to get shot, he spends the bulk of the actual fighting scandalously and typically wenching in the hotel across the street)...and yet the stakes and the history and the values are as epic as anything in Flashman. The village is Harper's Ferry, Virginia, the incompetent raid is led by John Brown, and the story is breath-takingly relevant right here and now.

There's a footnote chapter at the beginning about British involvement in South Africa at a time when natives and Boers were considered equal citizens, and then we see antebellum America and the prospect of Brown's raid interpreted by northern abolitionists, by the Southern forerunners of the Klan, and by the United States government. Apparently, everyone saw it coming, several factions wanted it for different reasons, and those who didn't want it and could have prevented it did not do so for reasons Fraser can only speculate on.

And then we have a portrait of one of America's larger than life, problematic Great Men, a curmudgeonly farmer and basket of contradictions who became a legend. A poor tactician whose greatest strength and weakness was the certainty that he was right, and whose moral vision and eloquence (as portrayed in the novel) could convert amoral cynics like Flashman and even pro-slavery enemies, into devotees of freedom, whose death by hanging was compared to the martyrdom of Socrates and Jesus in the earth-shaking impact they had on their respective nations. Fraser, who is nothing if not even-handed, convinced me, anyhow.

finally, there is the tragic arc of Joe Simmons, an apparently made-up character whose multiple changes in outlook and whose ultimate fate is the stuff of Greek Drama.

Even as an American, my basic education treated brown as nothing more than a historical footnote to be memorized in a line or two: Crispus Attucks (mulatto, killed at Boston massacre); Davey Crockett (frontiersman, killed at the Alamo); John Brown (abolitionist, hanged after botched raid on a slave state). the sense we were given was that he was a screwball, that other abolitionists distanced themselves from him, and why his a-mouldering body would be a rallying point for anyone was never explained. Apparently the only movie about him was made in the 1950s and depicted him as a wild-eyed dangerous terrorist and lunatic.

And yet, he was idolized by many, especially by younger voters and POC, at a time when the political choices included one party that aggressively denied the very humanity of large swaths of America, and another Party that stood for cautious centrism and infuriated the John browns of the world in its slowness to stand for the right thing. Today, the parties are reversed, but the truth goes marching on.

Seems to me, it's time for a new big budget biographical film about an American who stood up against evil. Very highest recommendations.

Nevertheless, He Persisted: A Plea for Captain John Brown, by Henry David Thoreau
He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater as she is. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. As he phrased it, "I know no more of grammar than one of your calves." But he went to the great university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty, for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. Such were his humanities and not any study of grammar. He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.

A brief Thoreau essay I hadn't read before, inspired by the Flashman book above. Probably notable for accurately predicting that the execution of Brown would shake the nation

And yes, the liberal party of the day gets most of the fire for being cautious and tut-tutting and distancing themselves from the "unseemly immoderation" of actually DOING something in support of a cause they claimed to champion but consistently dragged their feet on. Sound familiar? It does to me. Thoreau was a crotchety old curmudgeon by the time he wrote this, but I read it hearing the voices of some kids from Parkland.

All those in favor: On Representative Government, by John Stuart Mill

But it is important that not those alone who refuse to vote for any of the local candidates, but those also who vote for one of them and are defeated, should be enabled to find elsewhere the representation which they have not succeeded in obtaining in their own district. It is therefore provided that an elector may deliver a voting paper containing other names in addition to the one which stands foremost in his preference. His vote would only be counted for one candidate; but if the object of his first choice failed to be returned, from not having obtained the quota, his second perhaps might be more fortunate. He may extend his list to a greater number in the order of his preference, so that if the names which stand near the top of the list either can not make up the quota, or are able to make it up without his vote, the vote may still be used for some one whom it may assist in returning. To obtain the full number of members required to complete the House, as well as to prevent very popular candidates from engrossing nearly all the suffrages, it is necessary, however many votes a candidate may obtain, that no more of them than the quota should be counted for his return; the remainder of those who voted for him would have their votes counted for the next person on their respective lists who needed them, and could by their aid complete the quota.

The second of Mill's works to make it into the Great Books set, I found it astonishing, the far-reaching insights juxtaposed with monumental Fail that could be produced by one of the recognized Wise White Men of his age. It argues for elected representatives as the best form of government, straddling the extremes of mob rule and insulated monarchy, and makes several arguments for tweaking the basic concept in order to remove some of the flaws inherent in majority rule and aristocratic bodies.

Among the good, we have an argument for what amounts to proportional representation and instant runoff voting, which reformers in America are today trying to institute as an alternative to the current winner-take-all elections where two major parties control the entire government and a vote for any alternative party has the effect of benefiting the major party you like the least, who is allowed to be declared the winner with less than half the vote (thank you Stein voters for your help in inflicting dystopian nightmare on America instead of the imperfect but basically good Democratic alternative).

Among the bad, we have a variation on the puritanical "don't work, don't eat" philosophy, in which Mill says that someone without income should not be allowed to vote, as that would mean allowing moochers to help allocate other peoples' taxes. And in fact, we have this argument being made again today too, this time by Republicans who believe in one dollar, one vote, and would like to have the rich buy elections openly instead of secretly with the risk of something being found wrong with that(by pesky liberals anyhow) if caught.

And a good deal more talk about the protection of (some) minority rights, who should be allowed to vote (he does speak on behalf of votes for women, which at the time was still an idea running the gamut from a laughable idea to a dangerous one); how long a parliament should sit, how many members it should have per capita, how many chambers, how to organize local bodies as well as national ones, how to count the votes, and ideas ranging from "ahead of his time' to "long since gone the way of feudalism". Good thought provoking reading for anyone interested in politics.

Young folly: A Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert

This was a form of insult usual since the troubles of the month of September. Everyone echoed it. The guardians of public order were hooted and hissed. They began to grow pale. One of them could endure it no longer, and, seeing a low-sized young man approaching too close, laughing in his teeth, pushed him back so roughly, that he tumbled over on his back some five paces away, in front of a wine-merchant's shop. All made way; but almost immediately afterwards the policeman rolled on the ground himself, felled by a blow from a species of Hercules, whose hair hung down like a bundle of tow under an oilskin cap. Having stopped for a few minutes at the corner of the Rue Saint-Jacques, he had very quickly laid down a large case, which he had been carrying, in order to make a spring at the policeman, and, holding down that functionary, punched his face unmercifully. The other policemen rushed to the rescue of their comrade. The terrible shop-assistant was so powerfully built that it took four of them at least to get the better of him. Two of them shook him, while keeping a grip on his collar; two others dragged his arms; a fifth gave him digs of the knee in the ribs; and all of them called him "brigand," "assassin," "rioter." With his breast bare, and his clothes in rags, he protested that he was innocent; he could not, in cold blood, look at a child receiving a beating.

Flaubert's second most popular novel is not as laden with symbolic imagery as Madame Bovary, but it shares the abundance of weak, unlikeable characters. According to the introduction by translator Anthony Goldsmith, it has a lot to say about youthful idealism in turbulent 1840s France--and apparently, not much of it any good. In fact, at a time when I'm feeling just a little hope for American renewal at the hands of the Parkland shooting activists and other younger people, it's downright depressing.

The young as depicted by Flaubert are uniformly feckless, decadent, selfish, and prone to starting revolutions they can't finish. The problematic protagonist, Frederic, doesn't want to do much with his life but have fun; he gets an inheritance and leaves his loyal (but not really) country friends and family to take up life as a bon vivant in Paris, seducing no less than four women and ending up in a real relationship with none of them.

The chief object of his desire is a married woman, Mme. Arnaux, whose husband already cheats on her and squanders the family funds behind her back. She is presented as virtuous even as she commits infidelities with Frederic, who is not constant with her. There are "fun" riots, pregnancies and stillbirths, pointless duels and more pointless art, and when Frederic eventually returns to the country girl who had claimed to love him, she's married to a jerk and everyone lives jadedly and discontentedly ever after.

Mind you, Madame Bovary ended with multiple downers too, and no one achieving success except the scoundrels, and so I see a pattern here. As always with a book considered "great" that i find annoying, I invite any of you who may happen to like it to teach me what I'm missing.

Monthly Bookpost, February 2018

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday March 01, 2018 · 11:00 AM PST

2018/03/01 · 11:00

Two free science advancements: The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin

In the cases where we can trace the extinction of a species through man, either wholly or in one limited district, we know that it becomes rarer and rarer, and is then lost: it would be difficult to point out any just distinctionbetween a species destroyed by man or by the increase of its natural enemies. The evidence of rarity preceding extinction, is more striking in the successive tertiary strata, as remarked by several able observers; it has often been found that a shell very common in a tertiary stratum is now most rare, and has even long been thought to be extinct. If them, as appears probable, species first become rare and then extinct—if the too rapid increase of every species, even the most favoured, is steadily checked, as we must admit, though how and when it is hard to say—and if we see, without the smallest surprise, though unable to assign the precise reason, one species abundant and another closely allied species rare in the same district—why should we feel such great astonishment at the rarity being carried a step further to extinction? An action going on, on every side of us, and yet barely appreciable, might surely be carried a little further, without exciting our observation. Who would feel any great surprise at hearing that the Magalonyx was formerly are compared with the Megatherium, or that one of the fossil monkeys was few in number compared with one of the now living monkeys? and yet in this comparative rarity, we should have the plainest evidence of less favourable conditions for their existence. To admit that species generally become rare before they become extinct—to feel no surprise at the comparative rarity of one species with another, and yet to call in some extraordinary agent and to marvel greatly when a species ceases to exist, appears to me much the same as to admit that sickness in the individual is the prelude to death—to feel no surprise at sickness—but when the sick man dies to wonder, and to believe that he died through violence.

Patrick O'Brian had read his Darwin. The fictional naturalist explorations of Stephen Maturin are a more dramatic mirror image of Darwin's voyage to South America and many Pacific islands. The travel journal gives a lot of weight to native cultures, such as the gauchos of Argentina and the tragically fated aboriginals of Tierra del Fuego, but you can see some seeds of the evolutionary theory that rocked the world in his observations of the tortoises of the Galapagos islands, and why they appear to differ from island to island.

Strong Women and Superpowers: Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor

Of course she caught the bullet and Zoubeir did not. Tia's life was snuffed out by five more bullets as Zoubeir hid behind her body. he pushed her off him and ran, swift like his long-legged mother 17 years before. Once he was running, not even bullets could catch him.

You know how the story ends. He escaped and went on to become the greatest chief Suntown ever had. He never built a shrine or a temple or even a shack in the name of Tia. In the Great Book, her name is never mentioned again. He never mused about her or even asked where she was buried. Tia was a virgin. She was beautiful. She was poor. And she was a girl. It was her duty to sacrifice her life for his.

I've been hearing plenty about Okorofor as a rising star in the fantasy genre, and sure enough, I had to get on the reserve list for all of her books kept at our library, because they were ALL out.

I was a little surprised at the intensity of Who Fears Death, as I was led to expect YA. This book requires a content note for graphic descriptions of sexual abuse, murder, and supernatural death. In a post-apocolyptic Africa, the protagonist is born of a white-on-black rape and therefore shunned by both "tribes" and usually oppressed as a witch wherever she goes--which isn't too smart, as she actually does have supernatural powers, and it doesn't turn out so well for those who would attack her or those she loves.

Eventually, she and a small band set forth on a heroine's pilgrimage that asks the question so pertinent to our times: Can the power of women's rage rescue a sick society from itself? Very high recommendations.

The Victorian Murders: Resurrection Row; Bluegate Fields; Rutland Place, by Anne Perry; North Star Conspiracy, by Miriam Grace Monfredo; Why Kill Arthur Potter, by Ray Harrison; Railway Viaduct by Edward Marston

While the feminine propagandists of women's rights confined themselves to the holding of conventions and speech-making in concert rooms, the people were disposed to be amused by them, as they are by the wit of the clown in the circus, or the performance of Punch and Judy on fair days, or the minstrelsy of gentlemen with blackened faces on banjos, the tambourine, and bones...But people are beginning to inquire how far public sentiment should sanction or tolerate these unsexed women, who would step out from the true sphere of the mother, the wife, and the daughter, and taking upon themselves the duties and the business of men, stalk into the public gaze, and by engaging in the politics, the rough controversies, and trafficking of the world, upheave existing institutions and overturn the social relations of life...It was never contemplated that these exotic agitators would come up to our legislators and ask for the passage of laws upholding and sanctioning their wild and foolish doctrines.

--from North Star Conspiracy

"For heaven's sake, man! What's the matter with you!" Desmond reached up and grabbed at the skirts of the driver's coat and pulled sharply. "Control your animal!"

To his horror, the driver tilted toward him, overbalanced, and toppled down, falling untidily off the box over the wheel and onto the pavement at his feet.

--from Resurrection Row

The body of a man hurtled over the edge of the viaduct and fell swiftly through the air until it landed in the canal, hitting the water with such irresistable force that it splashed both banks. The mother put protective arms around her son, the other woman staggered back in horror, the three men in the barge exchanged looks of utter disbelief. It had been an astonishing sight, but the cows accorded it no more than a cursory glance before returning to the important business of chewing the cud. Hooper was exhilirated. Intending to portray the headlong dash of the train, he had been blessed with another stroke of good fortune. He had witnessed something that no artist could ever invent. As a result, his painting would now celebrate a murder.

--from The Railway Viaduct

"A young woman comes up to him and asks him to help her get a cab. Spun him some yarn about her mother being sick. He sees one discharging in Threadneedle Street, so he holds up traffic and beckons it over. By the time it comes, there's a hell of a tangle, buses and vans and carts all over the place. Not that it worries Silver! He hands the lady up, touches his helmet to her, and waves the cab on--then starts trying to sort out the mess. And all the time, her old man is doing a smash and grab on the silversmiths' round the corner! That was a laugh, that was! ...Mind you, he made up for it. He's pretty lively with a pencil, is Silver, and he made us a sketch of the woman. We could see straight away it was Nifty Larkin's judy. Picked 'em up with no trouble at all---swag still under the bed!"

--from Why Kill Arthur Potter?

If you read one series from the mystery sets I'm reading this year so far, make it Miriam Grace Monfredo. What her first, Seneca Falls Inheritance, did for early American feminism, North Star Conspiracy does equally well for the Fugitive Slave Act and the Underground Railroad. The story opens with Federal Marshals stopping a train to get on board and round up people who don't look like them, and who clearly aren't the ones they're supposed to be looking for (in those days, hundreds of FREE people were picked up by white men who merely SAID that they were the slaves they were looking for), in a book written in 1993, over two decades before ICE is making it happen all again. The central mystery takes a backseat to historical accuracy, which sends chills down one's spine, as 1850s New York is revealed as a state under Vichy occupation by an all-too-willing police force that never once hesitates to follow the Southern interlopers' orders. Very high recommendations.

Why Kill Arthur Potter is the first in a not-very-promising "unlikely buddy detectives" series in Victorian London, featuring an older working class inspector and a naive scion of the aristocracy who thinks crime detection might be fun. The two have different and complementary strengths and weaknesses, and will probably grudgingly get along as the series progresses.

The Railway Viaduct continues Edward Marston's series about Robert Colbeck, "the Railway Detective", beginning with a painter's capture on canvas of a body falling from a train, and continuing to a railroad construction site in France that has been subjected to increasingly deadly sabotage. despite offensive treatment of the Irish railway workers, it's a decent and cleverly plotted story.

Meanwhile, Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series about the star-crossed marriage of a police inspector to a society lady shunned for her cleverness continues with stories about a series of disenterred corpses, a homosexually violated youth, and a poisoning on the street where Charlotte lives. Although this series takes place a couple of decades later than Perry's excellent William Monk series that I read last year, the first volumes at least, were written while Preey was still learning how to do it, and are rather clunky. I'm staying with it, as I know her ability improves.

Untopical Musings: Selected Writings of Sydney Smith

To force an ignorant man into a court of justice, and to tell him that the Judge is his counsel, appears to us quite as foolish as to sit a hungry man down to his meals and to tell him that the table is his dinner. In the first place, a counsel should always have private and previous communication with the prisoner, which the Judge, of course, cannot have. The prisoner reveals to his counsel how far he is guilty, or is not; states to him all the circumstances of his case--and might often enable his advocate, if the advocate were allowed to speak, to explain a long string of circumstantial evidence in a manner favorable to the innocence of his client. Of all these advantages, the Judge, if he had every disposition to befriend the prisoner, is of course deprived.

Sydney Smith was a very witty reformer, with a gift for the turn of phrase to make an opponent's ideas seem ridiculous. And the ideas he attacks in this volume of letters and essays are, by modern standards, ridiculous. We can read Smith standing up on behalf of such apparently controversial ideas as: that the accused should have the right to hire a lawyer; that education could do with a bit less rote learning of dead languages; that spring guns and man-traps to deter "poaching" do more harm than good; and that life would be better if women received educations. Maybe it is partly due to smith's rhetoric that these ideas are now almost universally accepted outside today's Republican Party; I would have liked to see him take the side of justice on an issue we are still debating.

Snoozing on the Steppes: A House of Gentlefolk and Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev

HALF an hour later Nikolai Petrovitch went into the garden to his favourite arbour. He was overtaken by melancholy thoughts. For the first time he realised clearly the distance between him and his son; he foresaw that every day it would grow wider and wider. In vain, then, had he spent whole days sometimes in the winter at Petersburg over the newest books; in vain had he listened to the talk of the young men; in vain had he rejoiced when he succeeded in putting in his word too in their heated discussions. ‘My brother says we are right,’ he thought, ‘and apart from all vanity, I do think myself that they are further from the truth than we are, though at the same time I feel there is something behind them we have not got, some superiority over us.… Is it youth? No; not only youth. Doesn’t their superiority consist in there being fewer traces of the slaveowner in them than in us?’

Nikolai Petrovitch’s head sank despondently, and he passed his hand over his face. ‘But to renounce poetry?’ he thought again; ‘to have no feeling for art, for nature …'

The Harvard Classics devotes a volume to these two Turgenev works, including Fathers and Sons, his most famous. It concerns the Russian 19th century equivalent of a story about a decent young man coming home from college with his friend the Bernie-Bro, to spend time with his good father and Trumpkin uncle, and the excesses of virulent rhetoric that erupt between the friend and the uncle while father and son look on helplessly and become somewhat alienated from one another.

unfortunately for readers of Russian literature, Constance Garnett was for decades the only translator of major Russian works into English, and unless culture shock is more severe than I thought, she did a mockery of it. Drink some vodka every time Russian peasantry "fly at each other with their fists" and you'll pass out. I had to keep turning back, realizing that my eyes were passing across pages with practically zero interest or comprehension.

Snoozing through the Spanish Succession: Henry Esmond, by William M. Thackeray

"A fig, Dick, for your Mr. Addison", cries out the lady: "a gentleman who gives himself such airs and holds his head so high now. I hope your Ladyship thinks as I do: I can't bear those fair men with white eyelashes. A black man for me!" (All the black men at table applauded and made Mrs. Steele a bow for this compliment).

Thackeray is mostly known for his masterpiece, Vanity Fair, which is so good that I was astonished that this heavy lump of a book came from the same pen. As a bildungsroman, it vies with books translated from the German for sheer dullness.

I should have read it towards the end of 2015, when I was getting theough the reigns of Louis XIV and Queen Anne. Henry Esmond begins his childhood as James II is falling and his Catholic family needs to keep a low profile; continues as the boy is dispossessed half voluntarily out of his inheritance by people he had been benefactor to and soldiers off to the Continent during the War of the Spanish Succession, and concludes with cameos from Addison and Swift, as (SPOILER) he inexplicably fails to marry the young woman who has been his primary love interest all along, choosing instead to marry her mother. WTF, Thackeray?

Zola, Zo-Zo-zo-Zo-Zola, Za-za-Za-Za-Zola: therese Raquin, by Emile Zola

A year before, he would have burst into laughter, had he been told he would become the slave of a woman, to the point of risking his tranquility. The hidden forces of lust that had brought about this result had been secretly proceeding within him, to end by casting him, bound hand and foot, into the arms of Therese. At this hour, he was in dread lest he should omit to be prudent. He no longer dared go of an evening to the shop in the Arcade of the Pont Neuf lest he should commit some folly. He no longer belonged to himself. His ladylove, with her feline suppleness, her nervous flexibility, had glided, little by little, into each fibre of his body. This woman was as necessary to his life as eating and drinking.

This 19th century psychological thriller is what they had instead of James M. Cain in those days. Therese is in a similar position to Emma Bovary, in that she is dissatisfied with her marriage to a good-hearted but dull and plodding husband, and feels like having an affair---except that this time, the exciting "other man" plots with her to kill the husband, after which they both slowly go mad with guilt. My imagination had them in noir trenchcoats on rain-slick cobblestones, although the book predates all that, of course. Very high recommendations, especially for the scenes with the mother.

Book of Mormon: Jacob; Enos; Jarom; Omni

Behold, it is expedient that much should be done among this people, because of the hardness of their hearts, and the deafness of their ears, and the blindness of their minds, and the stiffness of their necks; nevertheless, God is exceedingly merciful unto them, and has not as yet swept them off from the face of the land.

Oddly enough, when I think of hard hearts and stiff necks (the stiff necked people are very frequently mentioned as examples of who not to be), the first people who come to mind are those Mormon Republican leaders like Orrin Hatch and Gordon Smith, who walk around smiling like a door to door salesman while casting judgment in all directions. This is not true of most Mormons I know in real life, whose necks are no stiffer than average.

In March 2013, I read all of those minor prophets, epistles, and other very short "books" of the Bible so that I could say I'd already completed half of it. the Book of Mormon has 15 "books", and after 1 and 2 Nephi, I'm 2/5 of the way through it by number, though these four make up just a few pages consisting of Nephi's progeny dutifully doing what their father before ordered and keeping custody of the plates and noting on their deathbeds that another few hundred years have gone by, everyone's sinning, and there's not enough room on the plates to say any more than that. Omni, in fact, has five generations saying over the course of a couple of pages, "Yeah, what the guy above me said." If Mormons have sermons based on text from their book, I'm guessing they don't choose Jacob, Enos, Jarom and Omni all that much. During their generations in western North America, Jesus has come and gone in Palestine, with nary a note on it to this branch of the Chosen.

In Defense of Comments Sections: On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill

A recent writer, in some respects of considerable merit, proposes (to use his own words,) not a crusade, but a civilizade, against this polygamous community, to put an end to what seems to him a retrograde step in civilization. It also appears so to me, but I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized. So long as the sufferers by the bad law do not invoke assistance from other communities, I cannot admit that persons entirely unconnected with them ought to step in and require that a condition of things with which all who are directly interested appear to be satisfied, should be put an end to because it is a scandal to persons some thousands of miles distant, who have no part or concern in it. Let them send missionaries, if they please, to preach against it; and let them, by any fair means, (of which silencing the teachers is not one,) oppose the progress of similar doctrines among their own people. If civilization has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilization. A civilization that can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy must first have become so degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it. If this be so, the sooner such a civilization receives notice to quit, the better. It can only go on from bad to worse, until destroyed and regenerated (like the Western Empire) by energetic barbarians.

John Stuart Mill never saw a Youtube comments section, and neither had I the first time I thrilled to his great essay on freedom of expression in which he famously said that even false ideas should not be suppressed, because by examining their falsity we reaffirm truth. I agreed with him enthusiastically right up until the long summer and fall of 2016 in which America examined the ugliest and most blatant falsehood of the day, and elected it President.

11/9 changed everything. I can no longer be a JS Mill free speech absolutist.

Or maybe I can. Because he's no more absolutist than Milton or Locke. Looking at his essay again, I do see that he would restrict that speech that poses an imminent threat of harm to others (the same speech that would be acceptable (or at least immune from prosecution) in an editorial endorsing a racist candidate for Congress would be actionable if made at a live speech egging on the Charlottesville Nazis.

Further, Libertarians do not have a friend in Mill, who considers restraint of trade a legitimate function of government acting in the public interest. And he equates churches with government when they seek to force church doctrine on the general public.

But the most damning address to Trumpism is the part I quoted. He was speaking about "primitive cultures" that go under due to colonialism, but I read it as applying equally to the devolution of American conservatism, which used to have some favorable points, into an openly bigoted fascist movement that rejects truth itself. If we who have reasoned discourse about great ideas have not the ability or the will to take down the Epsilon-Morlocks whose main contribution to comments sections consists of "Your gay", maybe we don't deserve to exist.

Jerk in Jhansi: Flashman in the Great Game (Flashman #5), by George MacDonald Fraser

I'm remembering how I came to Balmoral half a century ago, aye, and what it led to...the stifling heat of the parade ground at Meerut with the fettering-hammers clanging; the bite of the muzzle of the nine-pounder jammed into my body and my own blood steaming on the sun-scorched iron; old Wheeler bawling hoarsely as the black cavalry sabres come thundering across the maidan towards our flimsy rampart ("No surrender! One last volley, damn 'em, and aim at the horses!"); the burning bungalows; a skeleton hand in the dust; Colin Campbell scratching his grizzled head; the crimson stain spreading in the water below Suttee Ghat; a huge glittering pile of silver and gold and jewels and ivory bigger than anything you've ever seen...and two great brown liquid eyes shadowed with kohl, a single pearl resting on the satin skin above them, open red lips trembling.

I've been reading the series in the order in which they chronicle Flashy's life, not in order of publication. this one (fifth in the series but eighth chronologically) may well be the zenith of the whole series. Using the excuse of a secret mission and a romance with the Rani of jhansi, Fraser manages to put his antihero at eyewitness to most of the major events in the Indian Mutiny of 1856-58, describing not only Jhansi but Meeruit, Cawnpore, Lucknow and Gwalior.

As usual, Flashman is an amoral, hypocritical coward, though when he has nowhere to flee to, he manages to fight effectively this time. Also as usual, the book has something to say about the savagery in human nature, more striking with every "civilized" and "barbaric" location he visits. We see British colonists treating the people of India worse than despised animals; then, the natives rise up and commit mass butchery, including of imprisoned women and children; finally, the British put down the "mutiny" and commit equal and opposite atrocities against humanity, fired by righteous christian craving for revenge on the "savages." If you've read other Flashman, you know what to expect; if not, you might not want to begin with this one. The blood flows more than ankle-deep through the streets.

The Other Russia: The Enchanted Wanderer, by Nikolai Leskov

"How is it that you speak of it as...as if you're not certain?"

"Because how can I say for certain, when I can't even embrace all my extensive past living?"

"Why is that?"

"Because much that I did then wasn't even by my own will."

"And by whose, then?"

"By a parental promise."

"And what happened to you by this parental promise?"

"I kept dying all my life, and could never die."

"Really?"

"Precisely so, sir."

"Then please tell us your life."

Thus begins an odd, odd story of supernatural phenomena, parable, and almost-redemption, by a writer I'd not before heard of. Most people see 19th century Russia through the eyes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, whose tales center around the major cities, or Turgenev, who tends to write about genteel wealthy folks on country estates. The protagonist of The Enchanted Wanderer begins life as a serf, escapes from several nasty rural situations, and ends up fulfilling the destiny he'd tried to get away from in a monastery, becoming ultimately too poor to survive anywhere else. And there are angels and vengeful corpses.

Songs About Bad Smells: Les Chants de Maldoror, by Isidoe-Lucien-Ducasse ("Le Comte de Lautreamont")

The swimmer is now in the presence of the female shark he has saved. They stare into each other's eyes for some minutes, each amazed at finding such ferocity in the other's eyes. They swim, circling each other, not losing sigght of the other, each one thinking, "Until now I was mistaken; here is one more evil than I."....Carnal desire closely follows this demonstration of friendship. Two sinewy thighs cling tightly to the monster's viscous skin, like two leeches, and arms and fins are entwined around the body of the beloved object, while throats and breasts are fused into a glaucous mass amid the exhalations of the seaweed.

All the content warnings. This book is one of the grossest things I've read since Naked Lunch, and The 120 Days of Sodom,. It also bears some resemblance to The Stranger, but where Camus's existentialist antihero merely kills one man, the narrator of Maldoror commits atrocities throughout the book.

He is an unreliable narrator who fancies himself a poet and writes in chapters that he calls "cantos". He is a sadist who, when he isn't actually inflicting pain, enjoys watching scenes of torture that he describes in graphic detail, inviting the reader to praise him for having the humanity to shed a tear or two while watching suffering so horrible that it makes me shudder just to read it in print. In the scene quoted above, he has just witnessed a shipwreck at sea, enjoyed watching sailors drown or get eaten by sharks, has shot the one guy who was maybe going to make it to the beach...and then, he writes that he had sex with a shark.

Why? Why is this considered literature?

Monthly Book Post, January 2018

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday February 01, 2018 · 12:52 PM PST

2018/02/01 · 12:52

It's been ten years since I began posting monthly quotes and commentary to keep track of the books I've been reading, and seven years since I began a project involving great works through history.

In 2018, I plan to read any old thing I want to, but with special concentration on the mid-to-late 19th Century. Philosophy of Mill and Nietzche. Economics of Marx and Henry George. Science of Darwin and Kelvin. History of the Victorian era, Garibaldi and Bismarck, the US Civil War and Robber Baron era. Scripture from the Book of Mormon. Literature by Thackeray, Tolstoi, George Eliot, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Plus the usual smattering of historical novels and mysteries, including more Anne Perry, Edward Marsdon, and --hey!--looks like a good year for a guy named Arthur Conan Doyle! Feel free to comment with suggestions for anything you think I ought to include that was written between 1848 and the fin de siecle. Hope you're amused.

Workers of the World Unite, and all that: The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

My kid is fascinated by the thin, black and red volume on my bookshelf. Twice he's pulled it down and asked me to read it to him. It's a ghost story about a spectre haunting Europe. And yes, we live happily ever after. On paper.

As with Hobbes's challenge to dispute his idea that persona must submit to absolute dictatorship as the ONLY alternative to endless war of all against all, the Manifesto can't be ignored and is hard to refute. Like other, much thicker "great books", it tells me something new every time I pick it up, every decade or so.

For example, lately I've been talking about the Republican party as intent on destroying government to institute Feudalism by corporation. I have been wrong. Under Feudalism, Serfs swore fealty to barons and other lords, and were fed and protected in return. Under capitalism, there are no serfs. There are "human resources" and "labor costs" that are explicitly to be reduced or eliminated to the extent possible. The capitalist overlords feel no duty to the proletariat. They WANT them to be numerous enough to be easily replaced like a worn screw, but otherwise just DEAD.

And people vote for them. Vote for their own chains, and offer physical violence to those who would guarantee them some degree of civil rights...and the rub is that Marx sees right through me, the "liberal" bourgeois, too; sees through my efforts at reform as a way to HOLD OFF the revolution that he wants and I don't. Marx's communism makes no distinction between the One Percent and the middle class bourgeoisie, except to note that people like me are on our way to becoming proletariats too, as capitalism erases the prestige of a law degree, professorship, scientific skillset or a medical licence. As the world's property concentrates into ever fewer hands, the professional classes shall be no different from journeyman plumbers, and plumbers will be no different from part time waitstaff. And eventually, when the concentration reaches critical mass, one of two things will happen. Either the government--what has been left of it by the Republicans--will step in, push the reset button, and redistribute the wealth so that the cycle can start again....or there will be violent uprisings and the carrion-eating birds will enjoy very frequent and delicious feasts all along the superhighways.

What's it going to be then, eh?

Mountains and Molehills: The Last Chronicle of Barset, by Anthony Trollope

Croquet is a pretty game out of doors, and chess is delightful in a drawing-room. Battledoor and shuttlecock and hunt-the-slipper have also their attractions. Proverbs are good, and cross questions with crooked answers may be made very amusing. But none of these games are equal to the game of love-making,—providing that the players can be quite sure that there shall be no heart in the matter. Any touch of heart not only destroys the pleasure of the game, but makes the player awkward and incapable and robs him of his skill. And thus it is that there are many people who cannot play the game at all. A deficiency of some needed internal physical strength prevents the owners of the heart from keeping a proper control over its valves, and thus emotion sets in, and the pulses are accelerated, and feeling supervenes. For such a one to attempt a game of love-making, is as though your friend with the gout should insist on playing croquet. A sense of the ridiculous, if nothing else, should in either case deter the afflicted one from the attempt. There was no such absurdity with our friend Mrs. Dobbs Broughton and Conway Dalrymple. Their valves and pulses were all right. They could play the game without the slightest danger of any inconvenient result;—of any inconvenient result, that is, as regarded their own feelings. Blind people cannot see and stupid people cannot understand,—and it might be that Mr. Dobbs Broughton, being both blind and stupid in such matters, might perceive something of the playing of the game and not know that it was only a game of skill.

This is the last of six in a series, about half of which I've read. The fictional county that includes Barchester and surrounding hamlets is the main character.

I was unlucky in that the book came to me at a time when I was sick of the tendency of many people to complicate their lives needlessly, apparently for the sake of drama. The text, except for some delightful paragraphs like the one quoted above, is simple; the characterizations are simple, and the choices of good and bad people alike so wrongheaded that I felt the urge to reach into the book and throttle some sense into them.

There's Josiah Crawley, the wretchedly poor deacon, who has apparently in a fit of absentmindedness, passed a 20 pound note that someone had mistakenly left at his house. Everyone knows that this is a man of good character who made a mistake, and yet, "on the principle of the thing", mechanations are set in court and in the clerical authority to ruin him. his enemies, who are doing it on a grudge, pretend to have the vapors over moral purity. his friends, who privately think he's senile, pretend that the very fact of him being a clergyman puts him above reproach. Crawley himself, out of either vanity or dedication to honor, repeatedly casts away chances to save himself, and volunteers to throw away the stipend that is the sole means of survival for himself and his family.

There's Crawley's poor but beautiful and virtuous daughter Grace, in love with Major Grantley, who loves him too, but Grace can't possibly marry the major while her father is under a cloud, because it would look bad, despite the major not caring at all about the scandal---except when he does, for appearances sake. the Major's father, too, won't allow the marriage although he finds Grace to be just perfect---because of the scandal. he threatens to disinherit his son, although both father and son know he'll never go through with it, but the son, to call the father's bluff, decides to voluntarily sign away his birthright and marry Grace in a way that would leave them both paupers. And so we have a whole family of folks who respect, admire and love one another, nobly giving up theirs and each other's happiness for principles they don't even care about.

Just stop it! the book is a passionate warning of what not to do. see also, Trollope's book He Knew he was Right, similarly full of people who long to be good to each other, if only they weren't so stubborn.

Around the World: 1848, the Story of a Year, by Raymond Postgate

With Taylor there was returned as vice president a man called Millard Fillmore, little noticed and of little importance. The campaign biography printed of him in the American Review is almost discourteous in its listlessness. He was 'born to comparative poverty' and had 'struggled bravely with difficulties', the voters read, and his chief characteristic was 'a thorough attention to duty.' The character of the rough and honest man who was his superior was far more important; those observers were correct who believed that in office he would prove better and more generous than his programme. They may have foreseen that he would in fact prevent the extension of slavery to California. They could not have foreseen that he would die suddenly in office, and his place be taken by the dull and rather mean-minded man whom the needs of party politics had put into the trivial office of vice president.

I had been missing the Durant's surveys of history, which stopped at Napoleon, and so it was nice to find this little nugget of a book that gives similar treatment to just one year, with a similar attention to historical events, morals and manners, the economic and home and family life of common people in several nations, and art. Whereas the Durants liked to show famous paintings and sculptures in little sets of glossy pages squashed together in the middle of the book, Postgate mostly shows old drawings that appeared in Punch like modern editorial cartoons, only barely legible, There are twelve chapters, one for each month of the year. A good, cozy historical read.

The Victorian Murders: The Cater Street Hangman; Paragon walk, by Anne Perry; The Railway Detective; The Excursion Train, by William Marston; The Seneca Falls Inheritance, by Miriam Grace Monfredo

"What has happened here? This used to be a quiet, a good place to live. There was nothing worse than a few broken romances, a little gossip. Now suddenly people are dead; we are all looking at each other and wondering! I am! I'm looking at men I've trusted for years, and wondering if it could be them, thinking thoughts about them that make me blush with shame. And I can see in their faces that they know I am suspicious!

---from The Cater Street Hangman

"It is safe. At times, I grant you, it can also be noisy, smelly, and a trifle uncomfortable, but it is, as a rule, safe. It gets passengers to their appointed destinations in one piece. Railway companies met with great fear and opposition, at first, but the public has now come to trust them. This is the Railway Age."

--from The Railway Detective

Some nice peaceful town! Zeke Clapper could leer like a satyr and she couldn't do anything about it, short of making a stupid scene. Cullen thought it was all right for men to brawl in the streets as long as they didn't kill each other. And young Daisy Ross worked herself to death taking in laundry so Bobby could take the money for whiskey. But what was Daisy supposed to do? She couldn't leave him. She had five children. The law said Bobby could keep her money AND the children, even though he was drunk half the time.

--from The Seneca Falls Inheritance

Last year, I read Anne Perry's William Monk series cover to cover. This year, I've taken up another series by Perry, this one taking place in a later part of the century, and involving policeman Thomas Pitt's socially awkward marriage to Charlotte, the clever daughter of a high society family where they don't believe girls should be clever and hide the paper to discourage her from such unladylike activities as==gasp-- reading the crime news. Father will tell you what's fit for you to know....Anyhow, The Cater Street Hangman, the first in the series, is one of those delightful intros to a series where all of the main characters, except Thomas and Charlotte, are suspects, because we don't yet know which close relatives will become recurring characters, or if someone very close will turn out to be the murderer. (see, eg, Ellis Peters and One Corpse Too Many). Callender Square and Paragon Walk appear to introduce a formula in which murders happen in a fashionable neighborhood where people connected mostly by living on the same street manage to have all their closeted skeletons revealed over time.

William Marston, whose series involving a Shakespearean Theater Company I enjoyed a few years ago, is back with a series set at the dawn of the Railway Age and featuring Inspector Robert Colbeck. I was expecting maybe Murder on the Orient Express style whodunnits, but the first two, at least, are police procedurals, the first involving a robbed mail train and the second a rather improbable set of stranglings on standard commuter runs, discovered after the passengers have disembarked.

The big happy surprise of the month for me is Miriam Grace Monfredo, whose first book (set in upstate New York in Postgate's favorite year of 1848) has an exciting mystery that fooled me; all of the cultural enrichment that is my nominal excuse to read period mysteries, and is a kickass feminist rant about the condition of women in 19th century USA. The heroine is an unmarried librarian subject to tut-tutting about the appropriateness of her books and whether she should be working at all instead of finding a husband; as well as unwelcome attention from men (fortunately, her friend and actual possible love interest happens to be the sheriff). The mystery involves an inheritance newly due to a woman from Boston who is murdered before she can claim it, immediately after the revolutionary law that allows her to inherit at all; and set against the backdrop of the Womens' rights conference of Seneca Falls, with cameo appearances by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglas, and a young Lucretia Mott. Very highest recommendations.

Chewing on Tinfoil: Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevski

One night as I was passing a tavern I saw through a lighted window some gentlemen fighting with billiard cues, and saw one of them thrown out of the window. At other times I should have felt very much disgusted, but I was in such a mood at the time, that I actually envied the gentleman thrown out of the window--and I envied him so much that I even went into the tavern and into the billiard-room. "Perhaps," I thought, "I'll have a fight, too, and they'll throw me out of the window." I was not drunk--but what is one to do--depression will drive a man to such a pitch of hysteria? But nothing happened. It seemed that I was not even equal to being thrown out of the window and I went away without having my fight.

UGH! This is the year I get down to Russian novels, and Notes from Underground, being only about 130 pages, seemed like a good way to ease oneself into the icy Baltic waters.....yeahno. I had forgotten how intensely psychological Dostoevsky gets, and this brief narrative by a pathetic, wretched man alienated from life was an absolute horror for me. It showed me the worst facets of myself, the things I hide from and have nightmares about. It is what my life would be like if I had never developed impulse control, empathy, or manners, and acted on every asshole impulse that popped into my head.

The Underground Man begins with a rambling manifesto of hatred and attempts to feel better than others in spite of having no money, no career, no love interest, no health or vigor, and no happiness. He then recounts a few attempts at connecting to others, that fail because he keeps whipsawing between feeble attempts to hurt others who do not care about him and desperate pleas for their love and friendship; between the urge to assert dominance and the urge to beg for pity.

The popularity of this book made me wonder if it wasn't just me, if maybe most or all people have these horrific inner dialogues, distinguished from the underground man mainly in that we think but do not act, we check these impulses once we are mature enough to see the disasters that will result.

I've been exploring the concept of emotional labor as social power lately, and viewed the underground man through the lens of "This is a man who does no emotional labor, which is why he is so alienated and unable to function."

Coward in the Crimea: Flashman at the Charge, by George MacDonald Fraser

"You are perfectly sober," said Liprandi. "And so, as I have ascertained, are your troopers who have been taken prisoner. I confess, I am astonished. Will you enlighten us, sir, colonel, what was the explanation of that...that extraordinary action by your light cavalry an hour ago? Believe me," he went on, "I seek no military intelligence from you, no advantage of information. But it is beyond precedent, beyond understanding! Why, in God's name, did you do it?"

Now, I didn't know at that time precisely what we had done. I guessed we must have lost three-quarters of the Light Brigade, by a hideous mistake, but I couldn't know I'd just taken part in the most famous cavalry action ever fought, one that was to sound round the world, and that even eye witnesses could scarcely believe. The Russians were amazed. It seemed to them that we must have been drunk, or mad. They weren't going to guess that it had been a ghastly accident, and I wasn't going to enlighten them. So I said:

"Ah well, you know, it was just to teach you fellows to keep your distance."

The fourth Flashman novel (the seventh chronologically) brings England's most repulsive Victorian war hero to the Crimean War, where, despite his best efforts to stay in hiding, he manages to take part in the Thin Red Line, Scarlett's charge, and the Charge of the Light Brigade (it's fiction, and Fraser wants to describe historical battles. shut up), with further adventures as a POW in Russia, and a Central Asian guerilla against imperialism. With enough time to roger wenches at improbable moments and win unearned praise and honors while breaking wind furiously in the vain attempt to blow himself away from danger. As usual.

DID YOU KNOW?--The Aral Sea, the area around which is the setting for the last third or so of the book, pretty much no longer exists due to climate change. It lay between what is now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and what was then the expanding Russian frontier. One of the cool things about the Flashman series is the illumination, not just of well-known events like the Light Brigade, but of fairly obscure but interesting corners of world history. As with Rajah Brooke (Flashman's Lady, September 2017 Bookpost), I feel like knowing more about Yakub Beg, Ko Dali's daughter, and the central Asian nations that were slaughtered and absorbed by Russia as the Cherokee and Sioux were slaughtered and absorbed by the United States.

There is a fine line dividing "fun" and "awful", and Fraser has managed to erase that line. Afficionados say that Vol. 4 is when Fraser started to really hit his stride.

The Work of the Weaver: Silas Marner, by George Eliot

And so, notwithstanding the honest persuasions of Mr. Macey and Dolly Winthrop, Silas spent his Christmas-day in loneliness, eating his meat in sadness of heart, though the meat had come to him as a neighbourly present. In the morning he looked out on the black frost that seemed to press cruelly on every blade of grass, while the half-icy red pool shivered under the bitter wind; but towards evening the snow began to fall, and curtained from him even that dreary outlook, shutting him close up with his narrow grief. And he sat in his robbed home through the livelong evening, not caring to close his shutters or lock his door, pressing his head between his hands and moaning, till the cold grasped him and told him that his fire was grey.

Nobody in this world but himself knew that he was the same Silas Marner who had once loved his fellow with tender love, and trusted in an unseen goodness. Even to himself that past experience had become dim.

Omigod, George Eliot has the power to take a maudlin, melodramatic plot involving a broken old miser and the love of a child and make it gut-wrenching and uplifting. This was my first reading of Silas Marner, and I'm almost ashamed to say I wept with catharsis over it, but I did. It is no longer than Notes From Underground, and it is Dostoevski's polar-opposite. Life-affirming.

The jacket speaks of a tale of "redemption", but Marner doesn't need redemption so much as he just needs a friend in the world. He is hard working, humble, and open, and so he is betrayed by those he most trusts, seeks solace in the money he earns, and then has that stolen as well. His successful attempt to heal a sick woman herbally merely makes the village distrust him as a witch. Meanwhile, the shitty rich people from the Squire's manor visit their own sins on Silas. And then the little girl comes into his life, and nothing is the same.

Redemption? More like a change of heart in the cruel God that has been torturing him without cause. Very high recommendations.

Philosophy of the month: Ethical Studies, by Francis Herbert Bradley

The unsophisticated person believes that there is a necessary connection between punishment and guilt. Punishment is the penalty that someone pays because he owes it. He merits the punishment because he has done wrong, and the wrong exists in the self or in the will of the doer. Punishment is thus an end in itself. Its purpose is not to correct the criminal, nor is it to protect society. It is the denial of wrong by the assertion of right.

Compare and contrast with comments sections arguing about what should be done with/to sexual harassers outed for old wrongs do to #MeToo. Bradley seems to have an answer.

his 19th century book is not particularly innovative, but it stands as a thankfully easily read tome that splits off from the Utilitarians to defend the devotion to duty for the sake of doing right, and rejecting pleasure (of the self, or of the greatest number) as a moral right. Bradley describes the moral person as: intelligent, capable of making moral distinctions, uncoerced, and actively involved in a situation in which not all of his behavior is predictible in advance. He is also big on "self-realization", which I think of as "emotional labor"--finding a connection to the universe through social power. Uses different words than I would, but topical nonetheless.

Book of Mormon: 1 and 2 Nephi

And the angel said unto me: Behold the formation of a church which is most abominable above all other churches, which slayeth the saints of God, yea, and tortureth them and bindeth them down, and yoketh them with a yoke of iron, and bringeth them down into captivity. And it came to pass that I beheld this great and abominable church; and I saw the devil that he was the founder of it.And I also saw gold, and silver, and silks, and scarlets, and fine-twined linen, and all manner of precious clothing; and I saw many harlots. And the angel spake unto me, saying: Behold the gold, and the silver, and the silks, and the scarlets, and the fine-twined linen, and the precious clothing, and the harlots, are the desires of this great and abominable church. And also for the praise of the world do they destroy the saints of God, and bring them down into captivity.

I read the whole Bible and Koran and Baghvad Gita in 2013, along with scriptural commentary from Augustine to Aquinas, and was grateful to put it behind me. Now, just when I've reached a period in history when the philosophers and poets are NOT going out of their way to reference religion in every last thing they write, along comes Joseph Smith with a new "ancient" holy text, allegedly written on plates of gold in perfect English in 600-ish BC and left in upstate NY for the chosen one to find as part of his destiny.

This is all new to me. Most Mormons I know, to their credit, do not proselytize at me, and I haven't even seen the musical...but because I'm steeping myself in the 19th century, I'll give it a go.

The first two "books" are about a fifth of the whole work between them, and are written by the son of a venerable Patriarch living in the Holy Land some time after the Pentateuch but before the Babylonian captivity. Among his brothers are a Jacob and a Joseph (not the father and son from Genesis), so that passages from the end of Genesis can be made to seem to refer to Nephi's destiny.

Of course, they are persecuted for urging the populace to repent of the wicked ways into which they have fallen, as prophets are wont to be, and so the family leaves and sails across the Pacific on Ark Lite to what it seems is meant to be California. Along the way are prophecies about white people settling North America centuries later and bringing with them a church corrupted by Satan, the trappings of which seems Catholic, but the core of which strikes the hate-based death cult which is modern Evangelical Christianity dead on the nose. I mean on the nose, which is significant in that much of the "prophecy" can be dismissed by skeptics as having been known history at the time the plates were "discovered", but Evangelism is new.

After the voyage, and various churlish uprisings by Nephi's brothers, 2 Nephi peters out with a whole lot of re-writing of Isaiah. I can barely come away with anything useful from the original Isaiah, and so this part was a soporific to me. To be continued...

Having been a deeply interested observer of the slavery quarrel in America, during the many years that preceded the open breach, I knew that it was in all its stages an aggressive enterprise of the slave-owners to extend the territory of slavery; under the combined influences of pecuniary interest, domineering temper, and the fanaticism of a class for its class privileges, influences so fully and powerfully depicted in the admirable work of my friend Professor Cairnes, The Slave Power. Their success, if they succeeded, would be a victory of the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the spirits of its friends all over the civilized world, while it would create a formidable military power, grounded on the worst and most anti-social form of the tyranny of men over men, and, by destroying for a long time the prestige of the great democratic republic, would give to all the privileged classes of Europe a false confidence, probably only to be extinguished in blood. On the other hand, if the spirit of the North was sufficiently roused to carry the war to a successful termination, and if that termination did not come too soon and too easily, I foresaw, from the laws of human nature, and the experience of revolutions, that when it did come it would in all probability be thorough: that the bulk of the Northern population, whose conscience had as yet been awakened only to the point of resisting the further extension of slavery, but whose fidelity to the Constitution of the United States made them disapprove of any attempt by the Federal Government to interfere with slavery in the States where it already existed, would acquire feelings of another kind when the Constitution had been shaken off by armed rebellion, would determine to have done for ever with the accursed thing, and would join their banner with that of the noble body of Abolitionists, of whom Garrison was the courageous and single-minded apostle, Wendell Phillips the eloquent orator, and John Brown the voluntary martyr.[8] Then, too, the whole mind of the United States would be let loose from its bonds, no longer corrupted by the supposed necessity of apologizing to foreigners for the most flagrant of all possible violations of the free principles of their Constitution; while the tendency of a fixed state of society to stereotype a set of national opinions would be at least temporarily checked, and the national mind would become more open to the recognition of whatever was bad in either the institutions or the customs of the people. These hopes, so far as related to slavery, have been completely, and in other respects are in course of being progressively realized. Foreseeing from the first this double set of consequences from the success or failure of the rebellion, it may be imagined with what feelings I contemplated the rush of nearly the whole upper and middle classes of my own country even those who passed for Liberals, into a furious pro-Southern partisanship: the working classes, and some of the literary and scientific men, being almost the sole exceptions to the general frenzy. I never before felt so keenly how little permanent improvement had reached the minds of our influential classes, and of what small value were the liberal opinions they had got into the habit of professing. None of the Continental Liberals committed the same frightful mistake. But the generation which had extorted negro emancipation from our West India planters had passed away; another had succeeded which had not learnt by many years of discussion and exposure to feel strongly the enormities of slavery; and the inattention habitual with Englishmen to whatever is going on in the world outside their own island, made them profoundly ignorant of all the antecedents of the struggle, insomuch that it was not generally believed in England, for the first year or two of the war, that the quarrel was one of slavery. There were men of high principle and unquestionable liberality of opinion, who thought it a dispute about tariffs, or assimilated it to the cases in which they were accustomed to sympathize, of a people struggling for independence.

Seems to me, John Stuart Mill is the 19th century's greatest giant of philosophy, though if you insist on Hegel or Nietzche, I'm not about to fight you on it. The Autobiography was one of his last works, but I read it first as an introduction to how he came to think the way he did.

It's somewhat awe inspiring, the account of his father's 'education of a genius' plan for him: Greek at age 3, most of the Greek classics in the original language by age 8, etc. I find myself wavering between admiration and suspicions of child abuse. Mill himself grew up to advocate something else, omigosh PLEASE something else!

I was impressed by his feminism, especially in the age he lived, and the full credit he gives to his wife, Harriet Taylor, as an equal partner in the writings where publishers struck her name, and the many discussions and arguments, as in the quoted part above, where he championed his idea of a just society. I would have liked him, rather than samuel Johnson, to have had a Boswell taking down his every conversation; seems to me it would have been a better book than Boswell.

Desperate Housewife: Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert

One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at lest flew up the chimney.

This is my third try at Flaubert's classic, loftily postulated in the introduction to have defined the novel and redefined prose fiction. I feel that one mark of "greatness" in a work is the ability to convey more upon second and third readings, and to say different things to people of different ages (compare and contrast one's first student reaction to MacBeth, for example, with the reaction one would have after some experience in the world of professional ambition and married life).

The first time I read Madame Bovary, as a college teen, I felt deeply sorry for the heroine, trapped in a marriage to an uninspiring country doctor in the dull village of Yonville (in English, Yawnville)....a decade later, with a career and a relationship, I found her to be annoying as fuck, an overentitled snowflake who thinks she's too good for everyone else. Now, in middle age, I find myself disliking almost all of the major characters and depressed at the implications of "realistic" fiction without a moral, in which bad characters prosper, good characters go under, and chains of happenings occur without apparent rhyme or reason. I was also struck by imagery I may have missed earlier, of flighty butterflies and people sealed in carriages and coffins.

Seems to me, none of these reactions are entirely wrong. What do YOU think?

Monthly Book Post, December 2017

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday January 04, 2018 · 1:22 PM PST

2018/01/04 · 13:22

They Went Low, We Went High: What Happened, by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Just look at don Blankenship, the coal boss who joined the protest against me on his way to prison. In recent years, even as the coal industry has struggled and workers have been laid off, top executives like him have pocketed huge pay increases, with "compensation" rising 60 percent between 2004 and 2016. Blankenship endangered his workers, undermined their union, and polluted their rivers and streams, all while making big profits and contributing millions to Republican candidates. He should have been the least popular man in West Virginia even before he was convicted in the wake of the death of twenty nine miners. Instead, he was welcomed by pro-Trump protesters in Williamson. One of them told a reporter that he'd vote for Blankenship for president if he ran. Meanwhile, I pledged to strengthen the laws to protect workers and hold bosses like Blankenship accountable--the fact that he received a jail sentence of just one year was appalling--yet I was the one being protested.

See my June Bookpost for Bernie's book. Bernie was mostly kind to Clinton, and Clinton is mostly kind to Sanders. They save their rage for the Republicans. We should, too.

There's a lot about her campaign, and the wonderful agenda she would have pursued as President, the opposite of what the Shit People are doing. A whole lot of thank yous to various people. To me, the most important and fascinating part is the analysis of her loss, which points out that she DID campaign heavily in Michigan and Pennsylvania, giving those states more attention than Obama had done both times; and that any national animosity against her personally, either from 25 years of Republican hatred, actual character problems, or misogyny in general, would not explain the Republican surge in the last days of the campaign.

the reasons we have the president we do amount to (1)Russian fuckery, and (2) James Comey, and (3) mainstream media fixation on James Comey and #ButHerEmails, reported more extensively than any Trump scandals. Thank Comey for everything that has happened and will happen during the Trump Administration.

The other big part, it seems to me, comes early in the book, where in an attempt to "humanize" herself, Clinton writes about "a day in my life", talking about her constant travels, hotel stays, exotic room service, personal trainers, the private jets she flies in, the big name fashion designers who make clothes for her personally...good God, the editor or PR director who allowed that passage in the book needs a trip to the woodshed. Granted, there is no reason why a world-powerful stateswoman and first lady should not have these things, and maybe we should ask ourselves if we are applying a double standard to women...but the idea that offhand referrals to a lifestyle so high in the stratosphere while America is reeling in decline and millions of marginally employed people have to choose between medication, utilities and food is NOT the way to get "regular Americans" to relate to you. And this, in her own book, doing it to herself.

Nevertheless, I cried all over again with the longing to have had the election go the other way. That we got the Government we deserve shall be to our collective lasting shame.

Cycles and Psychology: Villette, by Charlotte Bronte
Sitting down before this dark comforter, I presently fell into a deep argument with myself on life and its chances, on destiny and her decrees. My mind, calmer and stronger now than last night, made for itself some imperious rules, prohibiting under deadly penalties all weak retrospect of happiness past: commanding a patient journeying through the wilderness of the present, enjoining a reliance on faith--a watching of the cloud and pillar which subdue while they guide, and awe while they illumine--hushing the impulse to fond idolatry, checking the longing outlook for a far off promised land whose rivers are, perhaps, never to be, reached save in dying dreams, whose sweet pastures are to be viewed but from the desolate and sepulchral summit of a Nebo.

It's amazing to me that the same woman who wrote Jane Eyre also wrote Villette; the narrators are so different. Lucy, the heroine of Villette, observes other characters with the apparent detachment of the removed narrator of Wuthering Heights. Her background is barely given, and she immediately takes a back seat to the headstrong girl and the young man who happen to be staying in the same house with her early on in the book, who come back as adults later on. she describes seeing a ghostly, Gothic nun with the same detachment as she describes the girls' school in Europe where she teaches. And yet we care about her.

Particularly Ill: A System of Logic, by John Stuart Mill

The canon of Agreement: If cases in which a phenomenon occurs have in common only one thing, then that thing is the effect or the cause or part of the cause of the phenomenon.

The canon of Difference: If cases in which the phenomenon occurs differ from cases in which it does not in only one respect, that respect, or its absence, is the effect or cause or part of the cause of the phenomenon.

The canon of Residues: If we subtract from a phenomenon the effects which we know to be due to certain antecedents, then the remainder is the effect of the remaining antecedents.

The canon of Concomitant Variations: When one phenomenon varies whenever another does, then either there is a causal relation between the two or they are both related causally to a third thing.

I'll be doing more JS Mill in 2018, but wanted to get his longest and densest work out of the way early. It is, as you'd expect, a thick work on logic, with an emphasis on induction, a good deal of technical jargon, and digressions into other areas of logic. To me, the most interesting part of the work is the sixth and final volume, which addresses attempts to prove moral precepts by logic.

Conscience of Young America: Essays and English Traits by Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

I credit Emerson's essays for dragging me out of my teenage "Holden Caulfield" phase and letting me know that there was a whole lot of stuff I didn't yet understand at age 16 that was well worth exploring. Emerson and Thoreau were, it seems to me, america's first real philosophers, at a time when the nation was still young and there was a whole lot of unspoiled wilderness, even on the east coast. Emerson had us look to that wilderness for answers, as well as within.

His Essays and English Traits are a large volume that I have been grazing in since August. His writings aren't to be gobbled quickly, but to be digested almost a word at a time, if you're interested in what it means to be a person with a soul, an American, a citizen, and (in my words), one whose path is that of the Frosted Mini Wheat, not content to take one side when both sides have something good about them. I am large, I contain multitudes. Some books let you walk away thinking you've found the answers. This one at least got me asking the questions. Very high recommendations.

Russian Emo Tale: On the Eve, by Ivan Turgenev:

Strange was the dream she dreamed. It seemed that she was sailing in a boat over the Tsaritsino lake with some strangers. They were silent and sat motionless; no one was rowing. The boat floated on of itself. Yelena was not afraid, but bored. She was curious to know who these people were, and why she was with them. She looked, and the lake widened, the banks disappeared--now it was no longer a lake but a restless sea: enormous, azure, silent waves majestically rocked the boat; something thundering, threatening, rose up from the bottom, her unknown fellow travellers suddenly jumped up, shouted, waved their arms. Yelena recognized their faces; among them was her father. But a white whirlwind came flying over the waves. Everything whirled, everything was mingled in confusion.

I'm glad Turgenev's novels are short. They have the same problem that bothers me about some of Hemingway (eg: The Sun Also Rises in that the narrative has various things happen, one after another, not seeming to be connected with each other, and the book ends without me caring much about the characters.

On the Eve (meaning "on the eve of the Crimean War" implies that war happens because young men are bored and want something to do. Yelena, the heroine, has some suitors, including a sculptor, a student, and a boring government official favored by her father. She falls in love instead with the most physically frail "revolutionary" I've encountered in literature; between bouts of itching to stir things up in his native Bulgaria, he has fevers and pneumonia, and eventually dies tragically in bed in Venice, and Yelena runs off with his remains and her family never hears from again, and that's how the story ends. Whatever.

American Metaphors: Twice Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Yes, the wild dreamer was awake at last. To find the mysterious treasure, he was to till the earth around his mother's dwelling, and reap its products. Instead of warlike command, or regal or religious sway, he was to rule over the village children. And now the visionary maid had faded from his fancy, and in her place he saw the playmate of his childhood. Wouls all who cherish such wild wishes look around them, they would oftenest find their sphere of duty, of happiness, within those precincts, and in the station where Providence itself has cast their lot. Happy they who read the riddle without a weary world-search or a lifetime spent in vain!

---from "The Threefold Destiny"

This collection is odd, in that some of Hawthorne's best-known stories are not in it. No "Rappacini's Daughter". No "Young Goodman Brown." It does contain "Dr. Heidelberg's Experiment", that parable in which restored youth necessarily comes with the restoration of youthful folly and poor impulse control.

Hawthorne was a master of allegory, and a master of juxtaposition of America's contrasting and incompatible forces, as with the tale of Maypole dancers hungry for exuberance in nature and the watching Puritans equally hungry with the urge to punish them, or young lovely brides with old rich bridegrooms. Some few of the stories seem to fall with a wet thud, while the best of them reach straight to the soul. recommended as a mixed bag heavy on profound thought in the form of art.

Asshole in America: Flash for Freedom and Flashman & the Redskins, Part 1 (Flashman #3 and #7-A, by George MacDonald Fraser
I looked down at it just before the hatch gratings went on and it was an indescribable sight. Row upon row of black bodies, packed like cigars in a box, naked and gleaming, the dark mass striped with glittering dots of light where the eyes rolled in the sooty faces. The crying and moaning and whimpering blended into a miserable anthem that I'll never forget, with the clanking of the chains and the rustle of hundreds of incessantly stirring bodies, and the horrible smell of musk and foulness and burned flesh. My stomach doesn't turn easy, but I was sickened. If it had been left to me, then and there, I'd have let 'em go, the whole boiling of them, back to their lousy jungle. No doubt it's a deplorable weakness in my character, but this kind of work was a thought too much for me.

--from Flash for Freedom

"What bleating breast-beaters like you can't comprehend," I went on at the top of my voice, while the toadies pawed at me and yapped for the porters, "is that when selfish frightened men--in other words, ANY men, red or white, civilized or savage--come face to face in the middle of a wilderness that both of them want, the Lord alone knows why, then war breaks out, and the weaker goes under. Policies don't matter a spent piss--it's the men in fear and rage and uncertainty watching the woods and skyline, d'you see, you purblined bookworm you! And you burble about enlightenment, by God--"

--from Flashman and the Redskins

My first readings of the Flashman books was to appreciate them as ribald adventures. This time around, I am considerably unappreciative of the horrible behavior, not only of Flashman himself but of the institution of Victorian England and of virtually every culture encountered. I am, however, increasingly appreciative of the way the plots have been structured to maximize opportunities to describe historical events and trends.

Flash For Freedom, for example, begins with a glimpse of the Chartist riots of 1848 and an encounter with Benjamin Disraeli, but soon launches into an adventure that shines light on slavery and the slave trade in a way that takes Flashman from the purchase of human beings from African kings to the horrors of transatlantic slave shipping, trade in the West Indies, capture of ships by the American Navy; arguments among abolitionist politicians in DC (including a masterful portrayal of young Congressman Lincoln); the underground railroad, plantation life, slaves on the auction block, flight from slave catchers across the frozen Ohio River, and corrupt trials in the South. Flashman takes at least four assumed identities and roles in a disgusting chapter of American history, interspersed with the usual wenching, cowardice, hairsbreadth escapes, treachery, and Trumpian boorishness and cruelty by Flashman.

Similarly, Part 1 of Flashman and the Redskins (a two part novel that has related events over two periods 25 years apart) gives insight into the gold rush, the Santa Fe trail, white scalp hunters, Apache culture, and clashes between the First Nations and the invading whites in general, with cameos from Geronimo and Kit Carson. Highly recommended.

The 19th Century Murders: Corridors of the Night; Revenge in a Cold River; Echo of Murder, by Anne Perry; Drinking Gourd, by Barbara Hambly; The Complete Uncle Abner, by Melville Davison Post

What could Monk say that would not show he had been disturbed by the sudden moment of savage reality, whatever it meant? One thing he was now sure of: Whatever lay between himself and McNab, McNab remembered it very clearly, and he did not. He was losing his balance on the edge of the unknown.

--from Revenge in a Cold River

"Last year, Sheriff Brister in Madison Parish caught four runaways on their way north. A black man and a white girl was guiding them, a Quaker girl whose family lived in Monroe. A gang of men--Brister claimed later he had no idea where they came from or who they was, and didn't even pretend to try and find out--broke into the jail in Monroe and hanged the girl after....well, I hear they roughed her up pretty bad. Men attacked the family's home a few days later and burned it. Her family fled the state and was lucky to make it out. Doesn't matter what the law is, hereabouts."

--from Drinking Gourd

Their fathers had pushed the frontier of the dominion northward and westward and had held the land. They had fought the savage single-handed and desperately, by his own methods and with his own weapons. Ruthless and merciless, eye for eye and tooth for tooth, they returned what they were given. They did not send to Virginia for militia when the savage came; they fought him at their doors, and followed him through the forest, and took their toll of death. They were hardier than he was, and their hands were heavier and bloodier, until the old men in the tribes of the Ohio Valley forbade these raids because they cost too much, and turned the war parties south into Kentucky.

--from The Complete Uncle Abner

The last few books in the William Monk series are dark and have a new character, McNab, who hates Monk for some offense, not disclosed till very late, that Monk has forgotten due to the memory loss in the very first book of the series. Monk becomes a suspect in an old crime where he knows he was at the scene, but not what he did or why. The very last in the series so far, An Echo of Murder, published this year, looks at the brutal murder of a Hungarian immigrant with a clear axe to grind about the treatment of Muslim or Latinx immigrants in America today.

Drinking Gourd, the last (so far) of the Benjamin January mysteries, is also one of the best in terms of both plot and harrowing historical detail. January once again accepts a mission outside of New Orleans, where the very concept of "free people of color" is regarded as an obscenity, and where unaccompanied POC are kidnapped and sold into Hell, and where people are treated as no better than animals by other people who are morally, in fact, little better than animals. January is accompanied by a white ally pretending to be his owner, and part of the plot involves that white man being attacked and lingering at death's door while January and the reader are left to consider what will happen to January if the white man dies.

But the best series with which I'm closing out the year of historical mysteries is the single volume of Uncle Abner stories, in which the "detective" is a ponderous frontiersman at a time when the "frontier" was western Virginia before it was West Virginia. The crime solving isn't usually a fair puzzle--typical story has Abner's young nephew-narrator watch him "intently study some hoof-prints", and then ride over to so-and-so's cabin for a chat that culminates with Abner saying he recognized the print of that guy's horseshow with the wonky nail or whatever. The real joy is the description of the territory, and (as with Chesterton's Father Brown), the folksy example of actual Bible-based musings on human fallibility on salvation (Abner claims to be guided by God whenever he detects wrongdoing and sets it right in creative ways) as opposed to authoritarian preachiness so prevalent in religion today. I generally have little use for churchy stuff, but I can add Melville Davison Post to the list of writers who shows actual spiritual light in a field normally gilded over with flim-flam.

Weariness Under Fascism: Pereira Declares, by Antonio Tabucchi

Pereira declares that for some time past he has been in the habit of talking to the photo of his wife. He told it what he had done during the day, confided his thoughts to it, asked it for advice. It seems that I'm living in another world, said Pereira to the photograph. Even Father Antonio told me so, the problem is that all I do is think about death. It seems to me that the whole world is dead or on the point of death. And then Pereira thought about the child they hadn't had. He had longed for one, but he couldn't ask so much of the frail suffering woman who spent sleepless nights and long stretches in the sanatorium. And this grieved him. For if he'd had a son, a grown up son to sit at table with and talk to, he would not have needed to talk to that picture taken on a trip so long ago he could scarcely remember it. And he said: Well, never mind, which was how he always took leave of his wife's photograph. Then he went to the kitchen, sat down at the table, and took the cover off the pan with the fried chop in it.

This short novel set in fascist Portugal starts slow and discouraging, yet another weary protagonist making his way, oppressed and downtrodden, widowed and living alone, employed in a dull job (an office by himself, where he's supposed to write the cultural section of a newspaper located elsewhere and subject to censorship), doing and thinking not much, very slowly.

Then he is joined by the man young enough to be the son he never had, who wirtes unpublishably controversial pieces, and who attracts th attention of the secret police even as Pereira comes to care about him. As with Vir Kotto, we see heroism arise in unexpected places. further haunting the text is the frequent insertion of "Pereira declares" as an aside into various sentences, as if the story is Pereira's official statement. Very highly recommended.

19th Century Hipsters: The Dandy, from Brummell to Beerbohm, by Ellen Moers

The dandy's day began with a breakfast cup of chocolate and an idle hour of lounging in an embroidered dressing-gown, reading the morning paper for its society news (the all-important, carefully prepared lists of who had been where the night before) or the magazines, the burlesques, the salon verses devoted to exclusivism--and at the end of the era, the newest fashionable novel.

After the late breakfast and the leisurely recuperation came the great ritual of the dandy day: the long, portentous drama of the toilette. No society ever gave more time, more thought, more pages to male dress than the Regency. Minimal variations on the basic style, modest innovations in the cut of a lapel or the tilt of a hat made and broke dandy reputations.

I admit to being fascinated by this study of the 19th Century incarnation of that social type that exists in every era: that young aristocrat with a rigid, rigid code of exclusive fashion, cuisine, grooming, manners and culture, that excludes and snubs others over trifles, all in the name of shocking nonconformism with the prevailing aristocratic style. Moers's portrayal of famous gentlemen of leisure, dolled up with high collars, shiny silk top hats and monocles like the cartoon peanut in the peanut ads--Beau Brummell, Bulwer-Lytton, Thackeray, Dickens (?), Whistler and Wilde, simultaneously sneering at high and low society, instantly draws comparisons with today's stereotypical gentleman of leisure, sitting with a laptop and a frappegrandelatteccino in his gentrified neighborhood cafe, ranting about big business, the one percent, and working class Trump voters while humble-bragging about his software startup and the band you probably never heard of. Same guy, different time.

I tend to call them "grasshoppers". They are a side-effect, or possibly part of the cause, of history's most culturally interesting periods--ancient Greece, Republican Rome, the Renaissance, 18th century France, 19th century Britain, 20th century America. They thrive when there is a surplus of "ants' producing the economic wealth that supports both the "ants" and the eccentric lifestyles of the "grasshoppers"---and while they are, in part, greedy parasites, they also seem responsible for most of the lasting cultural enrichment by which societies are remembered long after they have declined and fallen. They are large. They contain multitudes.

Master Baiter: Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (Jon Cook, ed.)

The argument for keeping the people in a state of lasting wardship, or for treating them as lunatics, incapable of self-government, wears a very suspicious aspect, as it comes from those who are trustees to the estate, or keepers of the insane asylums. The long minority of the people would, at this rate, never expire, while those who had an interest had also the power to prevent them from arriving at years of discretion; their government-keepers have nothing to do but to drive the people mad by ill-treatment, and to keep them so by worse, in order to retain the pretense for applying the gag, the strait-waistcoat, and the whip as long as they please.

--from "What is the people?"

See last month's Winterslow for more Hazlett. I'm not sure why Jacques Barzun suggested Winterslow, which pretty much disappointed me, as a fitting introduction to the "great" 19th century essayist: that book was heavy on short biographies and lit-crit. Selected Writings has some of that, but is more broad. The real meat, it seems to me, is in his political writings, which include a blistering takedown of Malthus that can be applied to plenty of modern people who talk today about the undeserving poor and controlling the surplus population as an excuse to indulge their appetites for cruelty. Also of note is a section on "the self" which includes a welcome analysis of self-love and benevolence that is relevant to an age full of people who revere either Gandhi or Ayn Rand.

My Christmas Discworld: Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett

"I've found us somewhere to play!" said Glod.

"Where?" said Lias.

Glod told them.

"The Mended Drum?" said lias. "Dey throw axes!"

We'd be safe there. The guild won't play in there."

"Well yah. Dey lose members in dere. Dere MEMBERS lose members," said Lias.

"We'll get five dollars," said Glod. the troll hesitated.

"I could use five dollars," he conceded.

"One-third of five dollars," said Glod.

Lias's brow creased. "Is that more or less than five dollars?" he said.

"Look, it'll get us exposure," said Glod.

"I don't want exposure in der Drum," said Lias. "Exposure's the last thing I want in der Drum. In der Drum, I want something to hide behind."

"All we have to do is play something," said Glod. "Anything. The landlord is dead keen on pub entertainment."

"I thought they had a one-arm bandit."

"Yes, but he got arrested."

I traditionally read a Discworld novel for Christmas because the late, great Terry Pratchett brings the kind of joy one should experience during a special holiday. Should He Who Speaks In All Caps stay his hand, there are enough unread books in the series for me to keep up this tradition for a few decades yet.

Soul Music, to me, is one of the better ones. in addition to Death's Granddaughter discovering her destiny, the plot centers around "music with rocks" (because the troll percussionist hits rocks) and a band that cannot join the musicians' guild without paying the admission fee, and cannot earn money to pay the fee without joining the guild. They find a magic guitar in a mysterious music store, and the usual comic hijinks ensue. Great fun!

A Child's Christmas In Jail: Little Dorritt, by Charles Dickens

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn’t been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn’t been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.

Mortimer Adler's choice of what Dickens to include in the Great Books revised set is...interesting. Especially since he made several other western canon lists that didn't mention Little Dorrit. Whole lot of Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Tale of Two Cities, Christmas Carol, Bleak House, even Our Mutual Friend...but Little Dorrit, which isn't that familiar to anyone who hasn't made a point of reading All The Dickens Things, is what made the cut.

The main plot has to do with a past-young man named Clenham, who tries to be noble despite a family with dirty secrets that are mostly hinted at and not revealed till late in the book, and a young woman, Little Dorrit, who the reader may have trouble keeping in mind that she is 22 years old, as her name and shy demeanor continually suggest a child of naivete and unconquerable goodness.

Little Dorrit was born in the Marshalsea debtors' jail, where her father, a broken man, has been imprisoned. Dorritt the father is a flip side of the exuberant, positive debtor Micawber and the exuberent, irresponsible debtor Skimpole, in that he is not only exuberant, he has been crushed beyond the ability to function, to the point where a mid-book reversal of his misfortunes comes too late to heal him. Little Dorritt dotes on her father at great cost to herself, but whereas Micawber is grateful for kindness and Skimpole accepts it as his due, Mr. Dorritt seems to be unaware that any good is done to him at all. I had a hard time deciding whether Dickens meant for Mr. Dorritt to be a sympathetic victim or a contemptible wretch--the answer is probably both.

There are other strange, meandering plots that take forever to bear fruit, although the journey is maybe the important part; and the usual memorable characters--the Flintwiches, the Barnacles, Blandois the villain and Gowan the alternately feckless and deep artist stand out....but really, the point of the book seems to be an urging of reform against debtors' prisons, and given that, in 1990 when the second great books set was compiled, we had not had a Republican Congress or the Bush II presidency, and it was assumed that debtor jails were long a thing of the past, it's hard to see the claim to "essential literature" that it has.

And, in fact, the conditions at the Marshalsea, while not something one would voluntarily experience, are not like the kind of jail people go to today; it's more like a cheap rooming house that one is not allowed to leave.

Thus ends another year's reading. Next year, the mid-to-late 19th Century. hope you'll tune in.

Monthly Bookpost, November 2017

AdmiralNaismith

Community

Thursday December 07, 2017 · 11:01 AM PST

2017/12/07 · 11:01

Literary Leviathan: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion with a doorplate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from the poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of L100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 but a Fast-Fish. What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

Everyone should read Moby Dick at least once, and you book lovers probably mostly already have. It's one of the top ten great American literary achievements, and gets the number one spot on a lot of lists. It's the only American novel included in the Great Books of the Western World set (and the only American work at all besides The Federalist, some Founding Fathers documents like the Constitution, and William James on psychology. The second edition added Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, A Lost Lady, some O'Neill, Dewey, and Veblen.).

As a novel, its plot structure is horrible. It starts nicely enough, with the episodes of Ishmael, Queequeg the harpoonist, Father Mapple's pulpit and sermon, the Pequod and its crew, and the eventual appearance of Captain Ahab, an embodiment of the line that divides courage and daring from foolhardy stubbornness. Its ending is also epic, from Fedallah's prophecies to the inexorable final fight with the great white whale. In the middle are chapter after chapter detailing everything connected historically, scientifically and philosophically with whales and 19th century (and earlier) whale hunting. Students assigned to read it recoil in bored horror and most readers skip right through it and literally "cut to the chase" to get back to Ahab's quest for the whale.

My advice: don't skip those parts. They're there for a reason. They may not advance the plot, but they're a large part of the reason why Moby Dick is "great". It's not just a novel. It's a philosophic tract that springboards whales and whaling into life, the universe, and everything. (And yes, it seems to me that Douglas Adams's ill-fated traveling companion to a bowl of petunias was a distant relative of the Great White One. But I digress.)

The part I quoted above is the end of the chapter that begins detailing the laws of "fast fish" (physically connected in some way to a fishing boat) and "loose fish" (those not so connected, and therefore fair game for seizure by anyone). It starts out looking like a boring legal digression, and ends up being postulated as applicable to Columbus vs. the First Nations; intellectual property rights, and we the people.

And also, things would have worked out quite differently for Ahab if instead of Fedallah and Starbuck, he had had a Tough Lesbian Pal for a confidante.

Don't read it for pleasure and adventure. Read it at a time when you're in the mood to think. Very high recommendations.

Pride and Petticoats: Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. What could they do if they were there? The surgeon has his round of thirty miles, and sleeps at Cranford; but every man cannot be a surgeon. For keeping the trim gardens full of choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the railings; for rushing out at the geese p. 2that occasionally venture in to the gardens if the gates are left open; for deciding all questions of literature and politics without troubling themselves with unnecessary reasons or arguments; for obtaining clear and correct knowledge of everybody’s affairs in the parish; for keeping their neat maid-servants in admirable order; for kindness (somewhat dictatorial) to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other whenever they are in distress, the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. “A man,” as one of them observed to me once, “is so in the way in the house!” Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other’s proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions. Indeed, as each has her own individuality, not to say eccentricity, pretty strongly developed, nothing is so easy as verbal retaliation; but, somehow, good-will reigns among them to a considerable degree.

Cranford is not a novel so much as a loosely connected series of vignettes about life in a town where everyone knows everyone else. An equivalent American book would be Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. The characters and environment are similar to those found in Jane Austen, though somewhat more eccentric, and presented, roughly 50 years after Austen, as anachronisms on their way out. Pause to appreciate this bygone era, but let it pass and be gone, is the theme. Not so much lamenting lost youth as lost age; by Gaskell's time, things were moving faster and being displaced for newer things more quickly.

Shark Tank: Cousin Pons, by Honore de Balzac

To indicate how much heroism was contained in this phrase "ve vill go pric-a-prackink togezzer", it must be made plain that Schmucke was crassly ignorant in the knowledge of bric-a-brac. It needed all the motive force of his friendship for him to avoid breakages in the drawing room and study given over to Pons for his art collection. Schmucke was wholly devoted to music; he composed it for his own pleasure, and he gazed at all his friend's baubles as a fish supplied with a complimentary ticket would gaze at a flower-show in the Luxembourg gardens.

I do not know if anyone has read the entire "Human Comedy" series of Balzac; I know that the dozen or so works over the course of eight months has exhausted me. Balzac is too melodramatic, too given to digressions on minor characters, too steeped in one time and place that is too different from my own, and above all too painful in his themes of good but vulnerable fools ruined by treacherous society-approved self-interest and snobbishness and gossip, to be sustained for long at once.

Cousin Pons is presented as a mirror image of Cousin Bette (July 2017 bookpost) on the theme of "poor relations", with the "poor" title characters being presented as the aggressor (Bette) and as victim (Pons). The culture shock is odd today; Bette is by no means down and out, and her "rich" antagonists present well in society but are on the edge of ruin even without Bette's machinations, due mostly to the paterfamilias's over the top foolishness. Pons, meanwhile, is presented as a good and innocent poor man whose problems stem from a longing to have good dinners and from his painstakingly collected set of objects d'art. The collection is worth a fortune; an old man in Pons's situation today could easily sell a few items and dine well in restaurants for the rest of his days. In 19th Century France, one apparently had to be invited to dinners at the homes of high society; and Pons's mean, rich relatives savagely arrange to get Pons shunned and un-invited by everyone, solely out of spite, and in a way that presents pretty much everybody as mind-bogglingly callous.

Pons in turn spends so much of the book slowly dying of psychologically induced sickness, surrounded by greedy people trying to get the art collection that he had previously been giving away piecemeal to those who fed him well, that one either rejects it as unrealistic or suffers unbearably along with him. Only Clarissa Harlowe takes longer to die. No more.

Cost-Benefit Analysis: The Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick

The aim of Ethics is to render scientific--i.e., true, and as far as possible, systematic--the apparent cognitions that most men have of the rightness or reasonableness of conduct, whether the conduct be considered as right in itself, or as the means to some end considered as ultimately reasonable. These cognitions are normally accompanied by emotions of various kinds, known as "moral sentiments", but an ethical judgment cannot be explained as affirming merely the existence of such a sentiment; indeed, it is an essential characteristic of a moral feeling that it is bound up with an apparent cognition of something more than mere feeling.

In a period when the representative philosophy is long on heavy duty German metaphysicians who pride themselves on their incomprehensibility, it is nice to find a mostly simple Englishman talking about the much more interesting (to me, anyhow) study of learning right from wrong., without even begging the question by invoking "God".

Sidgwick compares and contrasts three popular ethical theories of the day: There is hedonism (the epicurean kind which we call "enlightened self interest" today), which presupposes capacity for impulse control and delayed gratification, and that society will remember what you do--and so the problem is not so much unbridled lust and gluttony as not understanding where true self-interest lies. For example, practitioners of ascetic religions (say that they) experience ecstasies that most people cannot even contemplate without first undergoing severe disciplines. Same with the feelings of pride and honor that come with following Bushido or other warrior codes.

Second, there is "intuitive" or Kantian ethics, that follow a priori (written in advance) principles of duty--with the difficulty that moral "laws" need qualification or exceptions. hence books of statutes that attempt to codify moral law and end up running to several volumes under most or all governments as legislatures are confronted with the need for exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions, and so on.

Finally, we have Benthamite Utilitarianism ("the greatest good for the greatest number", and clearly Sidgwick's personal choice) which bases ethics on the practical consequences to society, and which is hard to reconcile with egoism.

Sidgwick is big on impartiality as a virtue, and on benevolence towards humans in general. Although he loves Utilitarianism, his stated conclusion is more of an agreement to disagree with egoists than a full argument against them. A good book for students of ethics, dabblers, and serious scholars alike.

Libertarian Paradise: Hard Times, by Charles Dickens

The wonder was, it was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. Besides Mr. Bounderby’s gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions...However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

Hard Times is one of Dickens's shortest novels, quite short enough to be part of a standard high school curriculum; and it's maybe the most relevant of his novels to the present day. It has a factory where laborers are treated like crap, by a boss who pretends that treating them well would put the whole factory out of work, that unionization would horribly impair their freedom to make desperate bargains for sub-subsistence existence, and that he himself was born penniless and cast out into the gutter with nothing, and raised himself by his bootstraps. And people are still saying these things today.

It has a school that is run like a practical business (with a teacher named M'Choakumchild), priding itself on teaching practical facts in fields that will make them Useful, and in killing imagination in the bud. We get to see prime examples of how children who do brilliantly in this environment turn out, and how those who are considered failures turn out, with all the biting satire you might expect. And people still want schools like this today, when they want schools at all and do not wish instead for children to get unpaid internships at the School Of Hard Knocks.

It has a good man trapped in an unhappy marriage to a horrible woman, who is unable to have happiness with the good woman who can and would give it, because morals. And there is an equal and opposite wonderful woman trapped in a marriage to a beastly man, whose temptation to look for something better is seen as a descent down a staircase to damnation, and the other man treated by Dickens himself as a cad. And today, although there is easy divorce, poly communities are still savagely derided by the monogamous, and many kinds of healthy relationships are scorned, and NeoCalvinists in religion and government try to make them unavailable to all.

These are very relevant topics for a young mind to explore, in a book of under 300 pages, with lively, if occasionally two-dimensional characters to be held up as very needed examples and warnings to people in danger of suffering through the belief in nonsense. And yet, I am not aware of this book being taught in any secondary school.

And I can't think why.

Jerk in Germany: Royal Flash (Flashman #2), by George MacDonald Fraser

If I wasn't an Englishman, I would want to be a German. They say what they think, which isn't much as a rule, and they are admirably well-ordered. Everyone in Germany knows his place and stays in it, and grovels to those above him, which makes it an excellent country for gentlemen and bullies. In England, even in my young day, if you took liberties with a working man, you would be as likely as not to get a fist in your face, but the lower-class Germans were as docile as [n-word deleted] with white skins. The whole country is splendidly disciplined and organized, and with all their docility the inhabitants are still among the finest soldiers and workers on earth--as my old friend Bismarck has shown. The basis of all this, of course, is stupidity, which you must have in people before you can make them fight or work successfully. Well, the Germans will trouble the world yet, but since they are closer to us than anyone else, we may live to profit by it.

The second book written but the fourth in the chronology is a short one taking place mostly in continental Europe. Frasier's MO is to find historical events that happened not too far from each other, and to send Flashman so that he manages to encounter them all. Hence, an adventure that combines the adventuress Lola Montez in Munich with young Otto von Bismarck in Saxony, and an arrangement of The Prisoner of Zenda.

As always, CN because the protagonist is an utter asshole, a rapist and an English chauvinist who uses offensive words on almost every page. In other words, typical Victorian English white dude.

Meanwhile, in Australia: The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes

It is a quarter century since the Australian in London risked hearing languid sneers directed at his criminal ancestry. This colonial vestige was already dying a generation ago. Nevertheless, it was part of English attitudes to Australians before 1960, and especially before World War II. When it appeared, it would send upper middle class Australians into paroxysms of social embarrassment. None wanted to have convict ancestors, and few could be perfectly sure that some felon did not perch like a crow in their family tree. Fifty years ago, convict ancestry was a stain to be hidden.

Holy fucking shit, this history of how white men fucked up Australia is AMAZING. I found the book referenced in a foreword to one of Patrick o'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, and made a note to read it. I was glad I did. First, as part of the tapestry emerging from the Early 19th Century Canon as THE age of exploration in works from that age and from modern works (Dana, Melville, O'Brian, Fraser; prior to the 19th century there was Hakluyt and Marco Polo. after that, there was more to the world than just Europe.). Second because the popular mind, considering australia, never gets beyond "Australia was settled by convicts."

The Fatal Shore is a work about the simultaneous oppression of indigenous peoples and the lower classes of a "privileged" nation, and about the ways in which oppression of the marginalized unnecessarily fucks up life even for the privileged. Australia was governed by the USA Republicans of England, with predictably horrible results. Everybody suffered, as we suffer today, simply because of dogma that certain people were "naturally predisposed" as better than others, and that there is such a thing as "just deserts" (always punitive). There are chapters on climate and flora and fauna of the new (to white people) land, and chapters about criminal justice, and about the ways in which innocent people were ancestry-shamed for things people long-dead had done; chapters on resistance to authority and chapters on the savagery to which people descend in the utmost extremity.

Just read it. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Very highest recommendations.

The Art of the Essay: Winterslow, by William Hazlitt
On the question being started, Ayrton said, “I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Locke?” In this Ayrton, as usual, reckoned without his host. Everyone burst out a-laughing at the expression on Lamb’s face, in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. “Yes, the greatest names,” he stammered out hastily; “but they were not persons—not persons.” “Not persons,” said Ayrton, looking wise and foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be premature. “That is,” rejoined Lamb, “not characters, you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, you mean the ‘Essay on the Human Understanding,’ and the ‘Principia,’ which we have to this day. Beyond their contents there is nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want to see anyone bodilyfor, is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individuals, more than we can learn from their writings, and yet are curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like Kneller’s portraits of them. But who could paint Shakespeare?”

--from "Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen

Jacques Barzun highlights Hazlitt as a great writer of the times and urges Winterslow as an introduction to his work.

I wasn't convinced. These lit-crit essays just made me go "Meh". fortunately the book was short. There are many other Hazlitt collections, and I intend to try at least one more, that may be more representative of the whole of his work.

The First Crypt Keeper: Uncle Silas, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Next day was the funeral, that appalling necessity, smuggled away in whispers, by black familiars, unresisting, the loved one leaves home, without a farewell, to darken those doors no more, henceforward to lie outside, far away and forsaken, through the drowsy heats of summer, through days of snow and nights of tempest, without light or warmth, without a voice near. Oh, death, king of terrors! The body quakes and the spirit faints before thee. It is vain, with hands clasped over our eyes, to scream our reclamation; the horrible image will not be excluded.

One of the great classic gothic horror stories. I'd never read it before, and found it surprisingly tame, probably because I imagined it in Edward Gorey animation the whole time I was reading it. Other than a few prophecies, there is nothing supernatural about it, and unless you're reading The Lovely bones, a first person narrator is probably going to live through her ordeal.

There are, however, plenty of every-day horrible people. The heroine's moody, lugubrious father knows or should know that his brother Silas is an Evil man. YES--religious, and, YES--very fond of money and has none, and YES--his enemies tend to die, leaving poor, oppressed Silas under the shadow of suspicion. And so, what does Daddy do for his daughter, the one charm and love of his life? He decides to prove Silas's goodness and redeem him by putting it in his will that the girl must live with her Uncle Silas for three years "until she comes of age" (never mind that she's already 18 to begin with) AND makes Silas next of kin to the vast fortune she is to inherit if she lives. that way, her survival will PROVE that silas is an innocent man, since a villain would take advantage of the opportunity to do her in or something something garbanzo.

Mayhem ensues, and no one could possibly have predicted it. More along the lines of "creepy delight" than "gonna make you whimper all night just thinking about it", and you get credit for reading "literature". good recommendations.

The 19th Century Murders: Blind Justice; Blood on the Water, by Anne Perry; The Bellini Card; The Evil Eye; The Baklava Club, by Jason Goodwin; Crimson Angel, by Barbara Hambly

Brother in law or not--advocate of 'eradicating' the 'disgrace of slavery' or not--Jefferson Vitrack was a white man, and so January refrained from saying, "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard."

Instead he simply said, "No"

"Your journey would not go unremunerated", Vitrack hastened to assure him. "Whatever we find, you will be entitled to half of it for your trouble, as you would be going into Haiti alone. As a whit man, it would be impossible for me--"

"And as a black man, finished January gently, "the moment I set foot in Cuba, I would be at extreme risk of being kidnapped and shipped as a slave back to the United States, where I promise you, NOBODY is going to ask if I've been enslaved illegally or not--or more likely, to Brazil."

--from Crimson Angel

Monk had anticipated this news from the moment Hooper had told him Lord Ossett wished to see him. The whole issue was poisoned beyond any possibility of finding evidence uncontaminated by time, interference, emotion or confusion. And--worse than that--when they failed, as they certainly would, the blame would rest with them, not the Metropolitan Police who had actually mishandled it. People would remember only that it was the River Police who had ended it in disaster, confusion and injustice.

--from Blood on the Water

The dead, in Yashim's experience, could never wait. The shock of murder penetrated glass, and betrayal shattered stone. And death brought Yashim across the border of men's lives.

Right now, he thought savagely, a murder would suit him very well.

--from The Baklava club

Anne Perry continues to preach contemporary social justice issues wrapped up in a Victorian-era setting that shows that things rarely change. Blind Justice has Oliver Rathbone facing charges for doing a mind-bogglingly stupid thing in the course of a case, raising issues of legal and judicial ethics versus actual justice, while Blood on the Water, written in 2014, involves a Middle Eastern man scapegoated for an act of terrorism by a government that wants a fast closure of the case, and then turns to Monk and the river police to bail them out when their fuckup becomes apparent. There is suspense, but not as to whodunnit so much as what will happen next.

Barbara Hambly's tales of Benjamin January, a free man in a land where people who look like him are presumed to be things, get better and more instructive the farther abroad they go. Crimson Angel is an emotionally nasty but historically rich narrative that goes from NO to Cuba to Haiti and provides much detail about the differences between those lands in the 1830s, with particular detail given to the Hatian Revolution of the 1790s, often overlooked in American historical accounts by a nation that would prefer not to explain that a nation governed by black people existed in the western hemisphere while the Slave States were proudly asserting as fact that the people they enslaved were animals incapable of self-determination.

Goodwin's Yashim the eunuch series, set in early 19th century Istanbul and presiding over the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, is rich in Middle Eastern atmosphere, but the corrupt and decadent government and skullduggery involving collaboration with hostile Russians hits too close to home for me, at a time when I'm trying to escape into murder fiction. These are the last three in the series, and I read them out of duty, since they are supposed to be for historical enrichment and almost all of the others are set in England, always England.

Ayamase Before Bedtime: The Palm Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola

To my surprise, when I helped the lady to stand up from the frog on which she sat, the cowrie that was tied on her neck made a curious noise at once, and when the Skull who was watching her heard the noise, he woke up and blew the whistle to the rest, then the whole of them rushed to the place and surrounded the lady and me, but at the same time that they saw me there, one of them ran to a pit which was not so far from that spot; the pit was filled with cowries. He picked one cowrie out of the pit, after that he was running towards me, and the whole crowd wanted to tie the cowrie on my neck too. But before they could do that, I had changed myself into air, they could not trace me out again, but I was looking at them. I believed that the cowries in that pit were their power and to reduce the power of any human being whenever tied on his or her neck and also to make a person dumb.

This short Nigerian novel is in the form of a Yoruba folk tale. It makes little sense, has no moral, and meanders all over the place like a weird dream without rhyme nor reason. It reminded me of one of the narratives from the Arabian Nights, stretched out and full of digressions and fantasy.

The basic plot is that the narrator, a gentleman of leisure whose sole pastime is to snorfle down palm wine by the barrel, suffers when his tapster, the only man who can procure him so much palm wine, dies; he goes on a quest to bring the tapster back from the dead, to continue to serve him--and the quest takes him from one weird land to another, encountering talking skulls, witches, giant snakes, you name it, and eventually acquiring a magic egg that will produce all the palm wine he needs. Its main value, it seems to me, is its atmosphere, savage and evocative of times long past, and as a voice from outside the western literary world. Highly recommended.

Drinking from the Finger Bowl: Good Behavior, by Harold Nicolson

It is unnecessary to dwell on the great advantages that can be conferred on a community during the stage of growth and consolidation, by the existence of a hereditary governing class. Such a class restrains despotism, provides continuity of experience, and furnishes the State with a supply of potentially able, responsible and honest administrators. Yet if a governing class is to be of durable value, it must not degenerate into a stew pond for the culture of large carp with extended bellies and protruding eyes; it must be a lake, fed with clear freshets, with its inlets and outlets unencumbered and its waters constantly renewed.

A fun and well-written survey of the evolution of morals and manners throughout civilization, from the Chinese dynasties to Greeks, Roman and barbarians, French fops, English courtiers and "gentlemen", the German gemutlichkeit, and--dissected with withering sarcasm--the Victorian era school system and the moral lessons of respectability that would be laughable had they not inflicted such real horrors on impressionable children. See, also, Jesus Camp and other programs to kill moral thought in the young. Highly recommended.

Newer
Older

RSS

Check out our slate of Daily Kos-endorsed candidates