The Psychology of Conservative Republicans: Civilization and its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud
The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living to-day, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions. One would like to mix among the ranks of the believers in order to meet these philosophers, who think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing him by an impersonal, shadowy and abstract principle, and to address them with the warning words: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. And if some of the great men of the past acted in the same way,
This is why I read Dead White Guys of the Western Canon--a lot of the time, what they had to say is still relevant. I prefer Freud's later publications, as the earlier, sex-obsessed ones are almost a joke. Only towards the end of his life did Freud really start to explore aggression and violence as a primal motivating force, and only somewhat earlier did he talk about the death-wish.
The central theme of Civilization and Its Discontents (the title is also a really cool band name, but I digress) is that government and societal mores act as an external Superego, restraining people from the most base impulses (physically attacking annoying people, helping yourself to whatever you want, shitting whenever and wherever nature first calls, etc.), and that the loudest rebel forces are those who most resent controlling those impulses--currently, the violent, grabby, scatological, opioid-abusing dregs of society who are unable to create, and who therefore seek only to destroy. In other words, Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
I'm old enough to remember when the raging, do-whatever-you want, stimulus-response forces of destruction were disrupting Universities, burning draft cards, and abusing different drugs, and were identified as "leftists"...and these were the same low-impulse control narcissists and nihilists who grew up to get everything they wanted, take over the government as "neoconservatives", and still continue to destroy and destroy again. The underlying political ideology is just details.
Freud used the word "thanatos" to describe the urge to destroy, even at the expense of oneself. Today we have a blockbuster movie villain with a similar name, who the political right tellingly considers a protagonist, at least of the first movie, if only the Snapture was not so random and could be directed to wipe out the "inferior" races and creeds.
Communication Problems: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
Giuliani's words cut through the argument and the room fell silent abruptly. His voice was very mild when he spoke again. "Emilio, is there any truth to these charges?"
Brother Edward, having spotted the whiteness around the eyes that signaled migraine, was already on the way to Sandoz, hoping to get him out of the room before the vomiting started. But he stopped and waited for Emilio to speak.
"It's all true, I suppose," Emilio said, but the roaring in his head made it hard now to hear his own voice. And then everyone was shouting again, so probably no one heard him say, "But it's all wrong."
I was inspired to read this gut-wrenching work by a friend who wrote a song based on it for one of the music conventions I go to. All the Trigger Warnings apply. I can't be more specific without spoilers, for the real horror, though foreshadowed, does not take place until the final chapters, but they are painful beyond belief.
It is a story of first contact with an alien civilization, by Catholic missionaries similar to those who did what they did when Europe came to North America, only without (yet) the armed colonizers. We learn early on that the mission has ended in some sort of major disaster and that the lone, shellshocked survivor who returns to Earth, generally known as a good man and described as a "saint" in dispatches previously sent by his colleagues, is believed to have committed dishonorable crimes and sins. The narrative shifts from the Fathers in AD 2060, trying to bring this wreck of a man to the point where he can talk about what happened, to the story that begins 40 years earlier, with the discovery of a signal from outer space.
The survivor is a language expert, and much of the narrative is about learning the intricacies of the alien language. There are clues in the language about the hidden, devastating truth, but even having been warned, I was unprepared for the climax, and you likely won't be either.
High recommendations, with caution.
Infinite Narnias: Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
She sighed, taking her hand off the autopsy table. "Put her here. I want to look at ther before we dissolve her."
"Is this a creepy perv thing?" asked Christopher, as he and Nancy maneuvered the body through the lab. "I'm not sure I can stay to help if it's a creepy perv thing."
"I don't like corpses in that way unless they've been reanimated," said Jack. "Corpses are incapable of offering informed consent, and are hence no better than vibrators."
I had not realized until I'd read the other three books to date in this series, that this one existed to begin it all, and it's a credit to McGuire that the later ones made sense without it. It brings together and introduces Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children and the characters who inhabit it, all of whom have discovered (been selected by?) doorways to one of many alternative worlds, and have returned...changed. Often longing to find their way back to that other world. Almost always made into outcasts among their earthly peer groups.
Oh, right. And then the youths in the Home begin to turn up murdered, and the protagonist, who is the new kid and from a death world, is immediately scapegoated. Tragic hijinks ensue. Very high recommendations.
All Alone in the Moonlight: Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose masters instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays. They may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives, they could publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done, but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We do not receive wisdom; we discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
Last month, I spoke of The Golden Bough as one of two mammoth works that kept me occupied for most of the year. The other is Remembrance of Things Past.
Exhausted by the effort, I was tempted to just plagiarize Russell Baker's incredible review of the work, but I will be honest and just link to it. here: https://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~hays/humor/crawling_up_everest.html
I had an advantage over Russell Baker. There have been new and more interesting English translations of Remembrance of Things Past since his day. Some of them even change the title to the more eye-catching In Search of Lost Time, and one has a choice on the Kinsey Scale from "bowdlerized' to "PG-13" to "lurid". the second volume, for instance, which deals with the narrator's entrance into puberty, can be translated as Within a Budding Grove, Among Young Girls in Flower, or Surrounded By Hot Bitchez Manifesting Their Vaginal superpowers!. Similarly, the volume Baker knew only as Cities on the Plain is now available as Sodom and Gommorah or as Hot Gay Sex Explained by Baron de Charlus!
I had the further advantage of reading works by Proust's contemporary, Sigmund Freud at the same time, which gave me perspective on Proust's mommy issues, hypochondria issues, gay BDSM issues, and all the other neuroses that come up along the way. Further, I'd been reading the history and other literature of the era and knew something about what the French who still remembered the loss of Alsace/Lorraine and who discussed the Dreyfus Affair over their cafe au lait were thinking.
The duller parts included endless, endless soirees and gatherings among gilded hypocrites who snobbed out on social rank in ways and to extents that modern Americans who aren't currently in high school can't relate to at all. Unless they're in Big Hollywood, I guess. Or those parts of Dixie where they accept or snub you based on whether you're descended from some famous confederate general whose plantation claimed ownership of over 200 quivering souls. Or Boston Brahmins, or--OK, I take it back. Not my people, but they're everywhere, bringing in hungry artists, musicians and poets to humiliate while pretending to admire their work.
And eventually, after woolgathering and meandering around in fractal patterns, the memories come around again and work off of each other, kind of the way they do in my life and maybe yours, if you've lived long enough for your past to be a mushel of dreams like that. I recommend it, but only if you're over 40 and have a lot of time to spare.
forbidden Pleasures; A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster
Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described. He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue. Tall and refined, with shoulders that seemed braced square by an effort of the will, and a head that was tilted a little higher than the usual level of vision, he resembled those fastidious saints who guard the portals of a French cathedral. Well educated, well endowed, and not deficient physically, he remained in the grip of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the medieval, with dimmer vision, worshiped as asceticism. A Gothic statue implies celibacy, just as a Greek statue implies fruition, and perhaps this was what Mr. Beebe meant. And Freddy, who ignored history and art, perhaps meant the same when he failed to imagine Cecil wearing another fellow’s cap.
Don't Look Now: Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
He loved the sea for profound reasons: the desire to rest of the hard-working artist, who longed to hide from the sophisticated variety of appearances on the breast of the simple, monstrous; from a forbidden, just opposite of his task and therefore alluring temptation to the unorganized, immoderate, eternal, to nothing. To rest on perfection is the longing of those who strive for excellence; and is not nothing a form of perfection? How he now dreamed so deeply into space, suddenly the horizontal of the edge of the shore was overlapped by a human figure, and when he caught up with him and gathered his gaze out of the unlimited, it was the handsome boy who passed from the left in front of him in the sand. He walked barefoot, ready to wade, his slender legs barely above his knees, slowly, but as lightly and proudly as if he was used to moving without shoes, and looked around for the huts standing across. But he had scarcely noticed the Russian family, who lived there in grateful harmony, when a storm covered his face with angry contempt.
Okay, I need a clue here....An aging, dull writer with writer's block decides to go have a festive vacation in Venice...the city of canals turns out to be dreary and filthy and full of literary disease imagery, except that there's a freakishly beautiful teenage boy at the same hotel, who inspires creepy perv thoughts in the dull writer. The two characters never talk to each other, not once, but the man stalks the boy, and then (SPOILER) a plague happens, and the man dies while watching the boy at the beach....
...and this is somehow considered one of the great works of European literature? Important enough to include in the second edition of the Great Books set alongside Heart of Darkness and Saint Joan?
I mean...I see the parallels with Mann's much greater work The Magic Mountain, which I did understand (and which also features a dull everyman in a disease-ridden environment, and was one of my late father's favorite books, but digress)...and I figure the Coen Brothers were suitably impressed with it to include several references to it in their movie Barton Fink, especially in the climactic ending on the beach....but for the book itself, I just don't get it. It inspired me with...nothing plus nothing, carry the nothing...yeah, i got nothing.
At least Humbert Humbert gets to tell his sick story in the unreliable first person, with a lively sense of humanity that makes one's skin crawl if one finds him a little bit likable in spite of his pedophilia. With the forgettable Aschenbach, we are told in the stolid Teutonic third person that "He felt passion". Unlike Humbert, Aschenbach does not actually act on his passion, but this restraint is presented as some sort of moral failing in that he's too fuddy duddy to live, not that he's a motherfucking adult who won't fiddle with kids even when he gets pants-feels.
If you've read this and liked it, or seen literary merit, please tell me what I missed. 'Tis charity to teach. Otherwise...not recommended.
Maths Philosophy Digest: Introduction to Mathematics, by Alfred North Whitehead; Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
Our perception of the flow of time and of the succession of events is a chief example of the application of these ideas of quantity. We measure time (as has been said in considering periodicity) by the repetition of similar events—the burning of successive inches of a uniform candle, the rotation of the earth relatively to the fixed stars, the rotation of the hands of a clock are all examples of such repetitions. Events of these types take the place of the foot-rule in relation to lengths. It is not necessary to assume that events of any one of these types are exactly equal in duration at each recurrence. What is necessary is that a rule should be known which will enable us to express the relative durations of, say, two examples of some type. For example, we may if we like suppose that the rate of the earth’s rotation is decreasing, so that each day is longer than the preceding by some minute fraction of a second. Such a rule enables us to compare the length of any day with that of any other day. But what is essential is that one series of repetitions, such as successive days, should be taken as the standard series; and, if the various events of that series are not taken as of equal duration, that a rule should be stated which regulates the duration to be assigned to each day in terms of the duration of any other day. --Whitehead
Whitehead and Russell collaborated on a work, the Principia Mathematica, that I flipped through and put back on the library shelf, for reasons similar to those for which I stared at the Talmud and thought to myself, "Maybe for a different decade of study, all by itself". Instead, I chose an introductory volume by each author, and was glad I did.
Russell's Introduction is a distillation of the Principia in English, without all the thick use of symbols. What it lacks in detail, it makes up in accessibility. And really, me reading Russell's mathematical philosophy is like reading Noam Chomsky's linguistic studies when one really can't wait to get into his later, political, work.
Whitehead's little Introduction, on the other hand, is a life-saver for any autodidact who wants to be grounded in math without being a math major or engineer or someone who needs this stuff in their day job. It's included in the Great Books set, and really, I should have read it BEFORE tackling the math of Archimedes, Newton, and Descartes. Because Whitehead explains it like they don't.
I had a math teacher in high school whose favorite thing to say was "Are you showing your work? You should be showing your work." He was unable to answer questions, like the ones I had about trigonometry. "I see your equation for finding the sine and cosine, but what ARE those things? Here is a circle. I see the radius, and the diameter, and this is an arc. Now show me the cosine! What is it?" My teacher stammered out "It's...a ratio." Whitehead draws two concentric circles with an angle stemming from the center and a vertical line from the point at which the top ray of the angle meets the innermost circle, to the other ray of the angle, and shows us that what line divided by each other are the sine and cosine. i wish my math teacher had done that. Very high recommendations for Whitehead.
Schooling the Bursar: The Higher Learning in America, by Thorstein Veblen
Under this rule, the academic staff becomes a body of graded subalterns, who share the confidence of the chief in varying degrees, but who have no decisive voice in the policy or the conduct of affairs of the concern in whose pay they are held. The faculty is conceived as a body of employees, hired to render certain services and turn out certain scheduled vendible results.
Veblen, the great American economist and professor, best known for The Theory of the Leisure Class, also wrote several lesser-known works, and after trying The Higher Learning in America, I intend to read more Veblen. My God, the savage satire is AMAZING.
Or...not so much satire as telling the plain truth in ways that not only completely skewer the ridiculousness of the system in 1915 but also predict and explain the horrible shit going down in Academia today. Vast expenditures on sports and architecture designed to impress rich visitors but that don't much impact the students and faculty who would prefer that the physical plant got some attention. Bait-and-switch curricula supposedly taught by big-name celebrity profs but actually taught by adjuncts whose pay is calculated according to minimum daily caloric intake requirements of the adult human. Rich outsiders who lobby to have state revenue cut off from higher education and then "generously" offer to donate the difference provided their friends are hired to teach Atlas Shrugged as required reading, because failure to force-feed the young right wing conspiracy theories as fact would be "indoctrination".
Veblen saw all that coming, and he spoke truth to power. By some uncanny coincidence, he shortly thereafter became unemployable as a professor despite his academic prestige and ended up going Thoreau in the wilderness of California. Go figure.
Ain't No Friends Here: I'm Still Here, by Austin Channing Brown
The death of hope gives way to a sadness that heals, to anger that inspires, to a wisdom that empowers me the next time i get to work, pick up my pen, join a march, tell my story. The death of hope begins in fury, ferocious as a wildfire. It feels uncontrollable, disastrous at first, as if it will destroy everything in the vicinity--but in the middle of the fury, i am forced to find my center. What is left when hope is gone? What is left when the source of my hope has failed? Each death of hope has been painful and costly, but in the mourning there always rises a new clarity about the world, about the Church, about myself, about God.
I went looking for Austin Channing Brown's book after reading her online piece about how the Bush Recessions fucked up Generation-X, and black X-ers in particular.
Brown's parents named her Austin, ostensibly to honor her maternal grandmother's maiden name, but actually so that future employers would assume she was a white guy and not just throw her resume away without an interview. The results began at age seven with a librarian assuming she must have stolen someone else's library card. And so it goes.
I must keep reading black voices until I get it. Other voices speak of the days of slavery and Jim Crow; Brown concentrates on life in an era where white culture claims to value diversity and seeks to solve racism by having dialogues in which it is important to avoid blaming or seeming angry, and to express gratitude for having come this far and being allowed to be accepted as, sort of, people.
In one way, Brown is easier for me to understand because she's close to my age and going through the same world I am, with the differences very much highlighted. In another way, she's more difficult because her life has been church-centered while mine has not, and so the parts about black churches (really, any churches) and relating her experiences to religious beliefs were especially hard for me to digest. Other people's mileage may vary. High recommendations.
The Edwardian Murders: Let Loose the Dogs; Vices of my Blood; Journeyman to Grief, by Maureen Jennings
I noticed he had an abrasion on his right cheek just below his eye. "Whats'a matter?" he asked, all slurred. "John Delaney's dead", i replied. I didn't say anything about an accident or how he was dead. I just said, "John Delaney's dead." That seemed to wake him up. "Well, he got what he deserved, didn't he?"...I realise my words were not charitable or Christian, but I was shocked by how callous he was. I said, "Then I hope you, too, get what you deserve, Harry Murdoch."
--from Let Loose the Dogs
Maureen Jennings grows on you. The detection part is not a thing, as the culprit is either revealed at the beginning or the final clue comes late, and Detective Murdoch stumbles upon the truth by improbable coincidence. The real strength of these books is in the well-drawn characters and the uncompromising depiction of conditions in need of reform. workhouses, dog fighting, sex workers, prison conditions, employment and unemployment. If the 20th century saw some improvement in actual conditions, the attitudes that made the human misery of the innocents possible remains and threatens to bring the worst manifestations back. Highly recommended as historical and topical.
Christmas Pratchett: Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett
"This is me asking you this. Is there any single page in this book, any recipe, which does not in some way relate to...goings on?"
Nanny Ogg, her face red as her apples, seemed to give this some lengthy consideration.
"Porridge", she said, eventually.
"Really?"
"Yes. Er, no. I tell a lie. It's got my special honey mixture in it."
Granny turned a page.
"What about this one. Maids of Honor?"
"Welllll, they starts out as Maids of Honor," said Nanny, fidgeting with her feet, "but they ends up Tarts."
Granny looked at the front cover again: The Joy Of Snacks".
Omigosh, I give myself the gift of Discworld for Christmas, and it hasn't failed to add to my holiday joy every time. So much wit, so much surprising wisdom in the oddest places. It is not a safe place to be...but it's good.
The witches are among my favorite characters, and Maskerade centers around them. It also sends up book publishing, the Phantom of the Opera, and the Scooby Doo trope. I loved it. If you don't as well, I just don't get you.
And that's another year of reading done. I finished the original Great Books set which started the urge to read through history; but there is a second edition with six volumes of 20th century selections, for me to round off the decade with in 2020. See you then, and Happy New Year.