THE VISUAL DISPLAY OF QUANTITATIVE INFORMATION - EDWARD R. TUFTE

S/O to Ed Tufte for writing the same book twice. A few weeks ago, I read and reviewed ENVISIONING INFORMATION and was taken. It was a pretty amazing and interesting book and as a physical object, it is really a top-10 book. TVDOQI is very much the same book. Tufte walks you through his personal theories and rules about how data should be displayed and reprints tons of examples to comment on. This book, TVDOQI, is slightly different in that it includes a historical element. Did you know one person, named William Playfair invented the bar graph, the line graph, the pie graph and the area graph? And he was also a spy? Weird stuff. Though Tufte wisely doesn’t get bogged down in the history of graphical representation, the rest of this book is just like EI, is a series of succinct, precise bits of advice and lots of beautifully produced examples. Here’s a sampling of some of the advice:

“It is no accident, since the relational graphic- in its barest form, the scatterplot and its variants- is the greatest of all graphical designs.”

“Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data- a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design.”

“Graphical excellence is that which gives the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.”

”The best graphics are about the useful and important, about life and death, about the universe. Beautiful graphics do not traffic in the trivial.” 

“And graphical excellence requires telling the truth about data.”

As you can see from the quotes, especially the last two, this book is a bit of time capsule. Written in ‘83, the book is sort of perched right at the edge of the loathsomely named “Information Age” where the amount of “data” and graphical representations of this data is orders of magnitude larger than when he wrote this. And it thinks people rightfully are suspicious of “large data '' and its ability to lie and manipulate. I guess it seems naive, sitting in 2020, to think that there is an agreed upon “truth” at the heart of a data set. Otherwise, there’s an interesting section at the front about how he, Tufte, left a lot of money on the table to design the book himself with a typesetter and thus make sure the book, as an object, was up to the standards he’s defending in the book. It turned out to be a great investment and puts this series in that rare category with 1000 PLATEAUS as books that are themselves examples of the thing the book is about. There’s also a surprising amount of Robert Venturi in the book; Tufte sees himself doing for graphics what Venturi did for architecture. He even steals his “Duck” criticism, calling out, “the We-Used-A-Computer-To-Build-A-Duck Syndrome.” Finally, he’s consistent about “data” being plural which you almost never see. You end up with sentences like, ”Aren’t data interesting?“ which are impressively pedantic. 1790 Graphs

LONG WHITE CON - ICEBERG SLIM

The quest to read all the Iceberg Slim continues. I think the man wrote only a dozen or so books and, thanks to Baby the Birdman, I’ve been able to get editions of most of them from the local library. This is the first of the Iceberg books I’ve read that features recurring characters. Specifically, Johnny O’Brien, the titular TRICK BABY, aka White Folks, is back. Actually, it’s stranger than that. Like the novel TRICK BABY, this book is a frame story, one where the first chapter is written by the character of Iceberg Slim who meets his old friend White Folks, a mix-raced con artist, and the rest of the book is White Folks’ story. This is made slightly stranger in this volume since the meat of the story is in 3rd person despite nominally being White Folk’s first-person account. Iceberg is most famous for his pimping but this book, like many of the others, focuses on con games. I would like to know how “realistic” the cons in this book are since, from my perspective in 2020, they’re pretty far out. They involve half-a-dozen people, nights spent practicing routines, disguise, fake offices and a whole fake ghost-town at one one point, seduction, sleight-of-hand, and legal corruption to work. Were people really getting swindled with such elaborate scams? One of the scams White Folks and friends run in this one is what I’d consider a reverse Scooby-Doo, by which I mean that instead of trying to convince someone a ghost-town is haunted so they can buy it for cheap, they try to convince someone a ghost-town is secretly full of cash and treasure and thus very valuable. Seems like a lot of work. This book also seems unfinished. It appears to be missing it’s last third, since it ends with White Folks’ partners being killed and without him resolving the unrequited love angle. Likewise, while this book does explore the racial dynamics of a racially ambiguous con man, TRICK BABY, was more insightful about them, even if it was at times didactic. Either way, Slim doesn’t get the respect he deserves and I’m excited I’ve still got some left. As always, I’ll leave with a list of the street names. Unlike previous books, not all of them are pimps, some are boxers or con men or whatnot, likewise, I tried not to repeat names from TRICK BABY. I need to compile a master list. ‘68 Long Cons.

-Aztec Billy

-The Utah Wonder

-Speedy Jackson

-Pearl

-High Ass Marvel

-High Pockets Kate

-Sure-Shot Kid

-One Pocket

-Precious Jimmy

-Sweet Dog

-Tango

-Black Sampson

-Tear-Off Thomas

ENVISIONING INFORMATION - EDWARD R. TUFTE

I read this on the recommendation of my father. We were both complaining about PowerPoint, which in my view competes only with the car alarm for worst invention invented since my birth (my dad was born before the H-bomb so he probably can’t say the same), and he mentioned how Tufte has a theory that PowerPoint played an important role in the Challenger disaster. I read up on that, very interesting and persuasive, then decided to check out one of his books. The library had this one, but it’s one of those books it would be great to own. Not unlike how the very style and structure of something like A THOUSAND PLATEAUS offers itself as an example of what it’s getting at, ENVISIONING INFORMATION itself is laid out beautifully and flows better than almost anything I’ve ever seen. Tufte is focused on how much information one can pack into “flatland” which is his term (borrowed from that weird book about sentient triangles) for the flat page. Actually, his real obsession seems to be critiquing and tearing apart bad design. Tons of railway schedules and maps are, rather gorgeously, reprinted only to be picked over and found wanting. Like a lot of good critiques, some of Tufte’s best stuff is negative. The thing that really stuck with me was how omnivorous Tufte is when it comes to displays of information. Of course there are some really complicated railway timetables (surprise, surprise, the Japanese make the best ones) and maps, but there’s also discussions of how to notate dance (something that’s intrigued me for a while), different ways a series of Massachusetts pictographs have been reproduced over time, alternative layouts for the periodic table, how Galileo notated his discoveries, color interactions and more. There’s a very interesting segment about the Vietnam memorial, for instance. Tufte’s prose style is surprisingly gnomic and given to declarations. He’ll write things like, “Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not features of attributes of information.” Which are pithy and catchy but don’t strike me as true. He’s quick to make his point and move on, which allows this book to be so broad without being a million pages long. But the draw here, and the reason I’d love to own this book, is how beautifully the examples are reprinted and laid out. It’s one of those books you can read in an hour or so then dip into while stoned, just flipping through the charts and graphs and information displays, for years. Coffee table/art books are among my favorite type and a type of book I, someday, aspire to own hundreds of, when my nomadism settles and collecting such costly and unwieldy items is more reasonable. A boy can dream. The only other thing I’d say about this book is the strangeness of reading it now in an age of computers and phones. Tufte’s obsession about how to display information on a page, especially really complicated information, has taken on a totally new dimension now that it’s displayed digitally. Which is not to say that Tufte’s insights can’t carry over, many popular apps are appallingly designed (Instagram, an app that is supposedly centered around photography, won’t display the pictures on full screens, for instance),it just means you have to do some extrapolation to guess what he’d say about a current design issue. Either way, I’ll be keeping this book on the table for a while, until the full 3 weeks are up on the rental, and, fingers crossed, one day I’ll own it. 1948 graphs and charts. 

OPEN VEINS OF LATIN AMERICA - EDUARDO GALEANO

This is a classic I’d never gotten around to. I’ve heard about it for a while, it’s one of those lefty-classics, and always had it pitched to me as a sort of “South of the Rio Grande A PEOPLE’S HISTORY” which isn’t the worst description. It does the Zinn-thing where it recasts the last 500 years of Latin American history as less of a heroic march of progress and more of a series of unimaginably evil events and programs. Though, if you’ve read A PEOPLE’S HISTORY you might be thinking, “wait, if Zinn’s book is ~700pgs and about 1 country (and only, really over the last 250 years) and this book is about  a dozen or so countries over 500 years, is this book 1,000+ pages or a book in a dozen volumes?” The answer, thankfully, is no. Galeano does assume you know something about Latin American History. He expects you to know about the Paraguayan War and who Papa Doc is. This is a lot to ask from a gringo, our history classes are boring propaganda about the USA and basically nothing about any other part of the world, so if you’re not deep in this stuff, you’ll want Wikipedia open. I’m pretty familiar with this stuff but it was exciting to read more about, say, William Walker, the famous filibuster, or this Taft quote Galeano digs up predicting anAmerican flag on the North Pole, the South Pole and the Panama canal. It’s instructive to see all this stuff laid out in one place. He does a good job following threads over the centuries, one that, as a reader and someone who pays attention to the news, you can update in real-time as you read. This book was published in ‘70 (my edition includes a 7-years-later final chapter) so there’s the most recent 50 years of Latin American history to take into account. For example, lots of ink is spilled over the plight of Bolivia. Galeano traces Europeans’ obsession with Bolivian silver which morphed into an obsession with tin and what these obsessions did to Bolivia. How European countries sent mineral attaches to the embassies of Latin America to focus on exploitative extraction. Interesting history, but just this year, Bolivia experienced an attempted right-wing coup, facilitated in part by the OAS, which seems to have been motivated, at least in part, by a desire for Bolivia’s lithium. The same old song, a song that this book traces back to the 1500s. Likewise, the political movements in Brazil and Venezuela, as well as the “War on Drugs” which doesn’t really get going until after this is published are all issues that you can pretty clearly see the roots of. Likewise, the contemporary structure of plunder, to use an A+ phrase of Galeano, is neo-liberal in design and outlook, and neoliberalism was just a twinkle in UofChicago’s eye when the book was written but it’s instructive to see what conditions it emerges into. This would be a great book to give a high schooler who’s just starting to think about the world and who it works. Apparently Chavez gave Obama a copy (amazing troll) and Allende, who writes the intro, fled Chile with only a copy of this book so it has quite a pedigree. Galeano complains that the prose is boring and that he’d make it more engaging if he were to rewrite it. I find this strange, the book is full of phrases like, “the neon-lit center is as resplendent as ever with the squandermania of a multimillionaire class.” which already places it in the top 5th percentile of engaging and artful writing in non-fiction history but maybe Spanish language histories are more inventive with their prose? English has a long tradition of dry-as-fuck history-prose so he’s got nothing to complain about. Either way, the book and the history are troubling and upsetting. All US Americans should be required to read it. Now I’ve got to find a Brazil specific history. 1519 open veins.

BEST OF IT, ERRATIC FACTS, FLAMINGO WATCHING - KAY RYAN

BEST OF IT, ERRATIC FACTS, FLAMINGO WATCHING - KAY RYAN Recently, I’ve had a compulsion to sort of cleanse the palate from these more heavy duty non-fiction slogs (almost all of which are pretty depressing) I find myself in the middle of. In a sort of happy accident, I came across Ryan’s poetry exactly when I was in the market for such writing. I’ve now gone a bit crazy and worked my way through most of her published oeuvre. Actually, the extent to which I’ve read through her work is a bit unclear. BEST OF IT, is, as you might guess from the title, a best of/greatest hits compilation that includes the text of several other chapbooks (including ELEPHANT ROCKS, which I’ve previously reviewed) from across her career. I’m not sure if BEST OF IT contains the full texts of these books, or if it is edited down. Either way, I’ve been delightfully ensconced in her poetry for a week or so. The poems are all very short, just a page or so, and, the best of them, snap like a whip at the end. It’s very easy to digest them in short bursts when you need a break from something else. These are poems with lots of surface charm; unlike a lot of poetry by living poets, Ryan is not going to make you sweat and ponder and reread to get any pleasure out of the poems. Quite the opposite, her poems offer tons of surface charm and the best ones touch something deep. A lot of this readability comes from her use of rhyme and rhythm. Instead of using end rhymes or an established meter, the poems twist and congeal around internal rhymes and the rhythms will morph and change across a given poem. Ex:

                  ...to rhyme

Anything with hibiscus

is interdicted anytime

children or anyone weakened 

by sickness is expected

. This lead to a strange phenomena whereby the order in which I read the poems seemed to really affect my judgement of them. More specifically, it would read a few poems, think they were okay, then have a dozen or so hit hard and excite me before I’d put the book down and save the rest for later. I think this is because it takes a few poems for me to attune to Ryan’s craft and structures. I semi-proved this by just picking the book up at random and running into the same issue, where the first few poems don’t resonate as much. Irregardless, I very much enjoyed these collections. She spends a lot of time dissecting idioms and popular phrases as well as inquires into silence and disappointments, both great themes for poetry. I’ve got several pages of quotes I pulled from the poems. Examples: “Tenderness and rot/share a border” “[failure is] a dank/but less ephemeral/efflorescence than success/is in general” “action creates/a taste/for itself” and on and on. Actually, pulling the lines out of the poems does a disservice since many of them are rhyming off and answering other lines. Either way, the only complainant that I have is that there is very little Kay Ryan left for me to read. I might take a break to savor the final 3 chapbooks that exist. 2011 recombinant rhymes.

SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE: L.A. IN THE SIXTIES - MIKE DAVIS & JON WEINER

Another monster book, this one clocks in at over 600 pages, but, unlike CRASHED, which I read simultaneously, this one never flags or gets dull. This is perhaps because this book is pretty micro-targeted to my interests. I’ve got a soft spot for LA (which I consider Amerika’s greatest “tier-1” city, and basically a worse version of Mexico City (which is high praise)) and, of course, I lived there for a while. I’m always interested in leftist history, though generally I’m against 60’s hagiography, and now that David Graeber is dead, Mike Davis might be my favorite living intellectual (YT man subcategory. It’s basically him, Chomsky and the other Davis), so this book was right up my alley. Basically, the only problem I have with the book is that it is pro-The Doors, who are perhaps the worst band of all time. But Davis and Weiner actually lived in LA in the 60’s so perhaps I’ll forgive them for that. The scope of this thing is unbelievable. It basically covers all leftist activities in all of Southern California (lots of San Diego stuff) from the early 60’s till about ‘74. Since Berkeley/San Fran/Oakland/The Bay is usually the focus of this sort of hippy-history, Davis/Weiner do touch on what was going on up north (as well as across the country), but they’re set in greater LA. There’s lots of city vs. valley stuff that’s very interesting. So not only do we get the “greatest hits” like the L.A. Panthers (and, of course, the US Organization), Angela Davis, the Chicano movement, the Sunset Strip riots, and the High School walk-outs, we also get a lot about more forgotten movements like Gay Liberation (even when I lived in LA, people did not know about the Black Cat), the Asian-American radicalism of Gidra, the battles over Venice, the LA Free Press, or the Women’s Self-Help clinic. Each of these subjects could and do support books by themselves, what Davis and Weiner are able to do is show the connections and resonances between the movements. For instance, the first gay pride parade, which was not only in LA, it was also the first time the word “pride” was used in this sense, there was a float that read, “in memory of those killed by pigs,” or the way the quasi-historical pan-Africanism of Ron Korenga offered inspiration and a theoretical pathway for the burgeoning Chicano movement and how they thought about race, culture and history. While there's a lot of LA specific things, like the idea of a “Contract City” and the ways that such an institution fucks with a tax base, it certainly would be possible to read this without a deep knowledge of LA. I also think you could dip into the chapters about the movements you are particularly interested in and get a lot out of it. There is just so much history in this. Here’s a short example of some of the throw-away facts I wrote down while reading: Gene Roddenberry was not only a cop, he partial based Spock on LA police chief Parker, the first Renaissance Faire took place in LA as a radio fundraiser in ‘63 and specifically aimed to recreate a “Pre-Capitalist 1580’s village, the parking lot in front of the infamous Jordan Downs was known as “the Pentagon” during the ‘64 riots, the Rand Corporation funded and spread the ideas of Game Theory, including both employing John Nash and developing the famous Prisoner’s dilemma, the first SWAT team was in LA to fight the Panthers, but their first deployment was at a peaceful anti-war march, and the TERF issues that are so prominent now were already at play during a ‘73 West Coast Lesbian Conference. I could go on with this stuff forever. I would say this wasn’t as mind-blowing as Davis’ other LA book, City of Quartz, but if you’re interested in Leftism or American history, you’ve got to read this. If you’re involved in a social movement now, I would also suggest you read it, we keep making the same mistakes and the only way out is going to be a sense of history. Mike Davis, live forever. ‘64 Doors

CRASHED: HOW A DECADE OF FINANCIAL CRISEfS CHANGED THE WORLD - ADAM TOOZE

Woof. This book turned out to be much, much longer than I thought. I’m not even sure exactly where I heard of it. Something else I was reading mentioned it as “the best” or “one of the best” accounts of the 2008 crisis, and, since that’s a subject I’m always interested in, I ordered it from the library. It turned out to be 700 pages long. I didn’t think, initially, I’d read the whole thing, I’m interested in the crash, but not that interested. However, I ended up making it through. Tooze is a historian of Europe and is famous for writing huge books I haven’t read about the economic histories of WWI and WWII. So, as you can imagine, this book takes a much more global approach to the decade. At first, I was bored and wondered if I would skip the Euro-zone chapters. Yet, the writing was clear enough and the connections were interesting enough to keep me engaged. And the amazing analysis we get at the end of the book, explaining, say the Russia/Ukraine conflict, is only made possible by showing the connections. And the big takeaway, at least for me, was how interconnected these global systems were and are. So that not only did the US government prop up the entire US economy in 2008, it engaged in things like trillions in currency swap lines to foreign central banks, that propped up the world economy at large. There’s a quote from Chinese investor and Duke trustee Gao Xiqing calling this “socialism with American characteristics” which seems cruel and apt. The other main thing to note is how thoroughly the political left gets played in these years. Bernanke, Paulson and others manage to get Obama to pull out all the stops to protect a world-economic system that has, since roughly the 70’s, benefited a very small sliver of the population. Bernanke is quoted as saying, “We might not even have an economy on Monday” to press onto Obama the seriousness of the situation. Of course, by saying “ an economy” instead of, maybe, “our carefully constructed misery machine” he’s engaging in a truly breathtaking display of Capitalist Realism. We can only inject money until we revive the system as it stands. Altering the way things work, by say, nationalizing the banks or breaking up entities too big to fail, or bailing out small home-owners (China loaned over 220 million rural folks money to buy large appliances like TVs) is impossible and unthinkable. And Obama is quoted in this book telling bankers, “my administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” Insanity. If anyone should be spending all of their political capital defending financial capitalism and huge multinational banks, it should be the right. But the ostensible “left” in the US or Germany or France is stuck being the “adults” which here means defending a deeply unfair and cruel system while the right is able to draft off the anger this system inevitably produces. It is ludicrous that there are still free-markert “purists” or neoliberals of any stripe who are taken at all seriously. The system they’re promoting breaks constantly and requires unfathomably large injections of public money to function. This book covers over a decade and still isn’t up to date enough to cover the trillions spent trying to prop up a market that cannot survive a predictable pandemic. But they never have to live with consequences of their dumb ideas since there’s always a center-left technocrat willing to burn all the political capital they have to save this way of life. It was eye-opening and unsettling to see this play out again and again. Tooze knows so much about European politics, he made it possible to follow this dynamic over and over in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Germany, etc. It was especially enlightening to read about Eastern Europe/former Soviet Bloc countries, I simply did not know enough to connect Russia’s movements into Georgia and Ukraine with the 2008 collapse. It’s also predictable but still upsetting to see the degree of mask-off racism that’s built into the IMF. For years activists have harped on the fact that entities like the IMF are best understood as neocolonial tools and this book really highlights the way a supposedly “neutral” institution like the IMF was resisted by European countries because they associated it with, to quote our president, “shithole countries.” Sarkozy literally says, “Forget the IMF. It’s not for Europe, it’s for Burkina Faso.” Viktor Orbán is quoted as saying, “Neither the IMF nor the EU financial bodies are our bosses,” which brings into sharpest relief what this book is really getting at. To have a fluid, globally-integrated, financalized and growth-obsessed world economy, especially one that produces such stark differences between losers and winners, you must be constantly tinkering and propping up and adjusting. And this process must be beyond democratic control, since, after decades of this regime, it’s no longer really possible to feed people lines about how a booming stock-market helps all of us, or that our children will have a better life than us, or that we enjoy the quality of life of 50 years ago. Tooze points out that if you remove the bubble then the economic growth in the 2000’s is slower than the recovery period of 2008-on. So it’s been quite some time since this system has made any sense. Global warming is going to, and is already, bring all of these tension to untold levels of intensity. There’s a throw away fact in this book that China bought 10% of the arable land in Ukraine. The stark differences between the global rich and poor, an economic system that is unloved by all but is impossible to change, the ways this deadlock produces political extremism at all ends, our total inability to solve large scale problems, all of these issues are highlighted in the book and seem to be getting worse. This is some of the best history I’ve read in awhile. I wish there was a more compact version so more people would read it, but I’d really recommend you check it out. If you’re familiar with the “Giant Pool of Money” This American Life episodes, or “The Big Short,” think of this as the 201 class, where you go beyond the basics and see what the 2008 crash has meant a decade out. I’m convinced this is the account for at least the next 15 years. 2008 credit default swaps. 

ELEPHANT ROCKS - KAY RYAN

As is fairly clear from my EVERY BOOK REVIEWED project, I don’t read a ton of poetry. The last full book of poetry I read was back in July, and before that April. Even the Mary Karr book I read recently wasn’t poetry. Now, this is somewhat misleading since I read individual poems (magazines, online, etc.) not infrequently, and EVERY BOOK REVIEWED requires I read the entire book. But the point still stands, I’m not super plugged into poetry. I’m not even sure how I came across Ryan. I know I found the poem “Outsider Art” which ends with the wonderful lines: “We are not/ pleased the way we thought/ we would be pleased.” and heard that she eschews teaching at Ivy League schools, so I decided I liked her and wanted to read one of her books. I choose ELEPHANT ROCKS at random from the many books of her’s the library has and I read it all last night in one sitting before bed. The book is slender and the poems themselves are short and punchy. A sonnet stands out as on the longer end. And I’m very glad I got a whole chapbook, instead of scraping online for individual poems. It took me maybe 5-10 poems, read back to back, to really grok what Ryan is doing with rhythm and rhyme. For example, here’s a poem called SWEPT UP WHOLE in its entirety (italics in original):

You aren’t swept up whole, 

however it feels. You’re 

atomized. The wind passes.

You recongeal. It’s

a surprise.

Or this section of CRUSTACEAN ISLAND, my favorite of this collection:

It would not be sad like whales

with their immense and patient sieving

and the sobering modesty

of their general way of living.

Her work has more sing-song and unconventional rhyme schemes and a use of enjambment and varying line-lengths that, in my uncultured mind, recalls Lil’ Wayne, in the way that the length of line and the amount/placement of interior rhyme morphs across the poem. Poems in general are best read aloud, and these really benefit from annunciation, it highlights the twisty nature of the connections in the poems. There’s lots of animals and reworking clichés. There’s several passages about the color purple that I was into. There’s a particular poem called “Why isn’t it more marked up” which I found to be an interesting twist on pessimism. Anyway, as always, I should read more poems. 73 interior slant rhymes.

EXODUS FROM THE LONG SUN - GENE WOLFE

When I was 18, in a basement in Chicago where I got as high as I ever had been at that point in my life, my buddy Nate and I came up with the idea of a spaceship you lived on your whole life, so large that it wouldn’t be clear to the non-original generation that they were on a spaceship at all. Great idea we both thought. The next morning I looked around Wikipedia and discovered the “generational ship” or “space ark” trope was and is quite established in SciFi. Fast forward over a decade and I’ve now finished the final volume in the premiere tetralogy that centers around this sort of hypothetical ship. Also, Ave Atque Vale Nate. One can’t help but compare these 4 books to the New Sun cycle, the other tetralogy that Wolfe is famous for. Overall, I’d say that I enjoyed Long Sun more but New Sun is better. More specifically, the thing you come to Wolfe for, the thing he does best, is overlaying a plot with lofty cosmic forces and mind-bending twists and expansions of the scale. And he pulls off all of this without spelling it out for you in the text at all. For instance, you have to read New Sun pretty closely at the beginning to grok that Severian is on distant-future Earth. And the degree to which New Sun keeps pulling of this trick really does make it untouchable, in my experience, among the epic genre fiction. That being said, it is so dense and confusing I’m sure I missed a lot and will need a few rereads across my life to really get. Re-reading I’m happy to do, though I think I’ll finish URTH OF THE NEW SUN, and the BOOK OF THE SHORT SUN trilogy to round out a primary reading of the greater Solar cycle, which is all of these series taken together. Severian is also such a cold, inhuman character. On the other hand, I found the mind-bending parts of Long Sun less mind-bending, overall, but the low-level plot more enjoyable and easier to follow. The last 100 or so pages of this book really does get much grander in scope very quickly. Throughout the previous 3 volumes, and half of the 4th, the plot moves very quickly. Book 1 takes place over a day. But, after we slowly put together that they're on a ship, and their gods are a brutal tyrant and his family who have been transformed into computer programs, the plot shifts to how to get people off the ship and onto a new world. It does end up hitting some of the familiar Wolfe beats. For instance, who is writing the book and under what conditions becomes important, just like in New Sun. Wolfe’s obsession with space-prison evolves into the whole whorl itself being a sort of enormous space prison. It of course, features an evil (or, in this case, a set of evil) gnostic god(s). I still have some questions about what exactly happened at the end, questions I’m sure a second reading would help with. It’s especially tricky in this book since characters can become possessed by gods or other supernatural forces at any moment, which makes it tricky to tell who’s speaking despite knowing who’s physically talking. Irregardless, I’m very sympathetic to the idea of the world being a prison or an evil god ruling so I was very entertained over the course of the series. Like I said, there’s another trilogy and another standalone novel in the Solar Cycle that I have yet to read. I’m hoping to finish them in the next year or so then plan a grand reread. 1 Evil Whorl 

SETTLERS: THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE WHITE PROLETARIAT FROM MAYFLOWER TO MODERN - J. SAKAI

I basically got this one on title alone. Actually, it’s original title, MYTHOLOGY OF THE WHITE PROLETARIAT: A SHORT COURSE IN UNDERSTANDING BABYLON is even better. A short course in understanding Babylon is such a wonderful subtitle, it was a real mistake to drop it. Irregardless, beyond the title, this book offers a clarity and series of insights that are very useful. Race in the USA has always been tricky to talk about and explain. This situation, if anything, has gotten slightly worse recently where the most recent crop of “anti-racist” books don’t offer non-mystifying explanations, don’t explore the connection between capitalism and racism (especially in Amerika) and don’t offer solutions that will actual build a world that we want to live in. My partner is being asked to read WHITE FRAGILITY for her job, she’s a public school teacher, which I believe I”ll read soon to get more into this critique. However SETTLERS does not suffer this problem. The book is very clear about causes, effects and solutions. I’m not familiar with J. Sakai, though I gather from this book that he’s a committed Maoist/Leninist, given how frequently he points out the need for a revolutionary vanguard party. His basic thesis is that Amerikan YTs are so deeply invested in YT supremacy and colonialism that they, despite their economic reality, don’t consider themselves proles and don’t act like it. This is basically that line about all Amerikans being temporarily embarrassed millionaires pushed into book form. Likewise, and more provocatively, minorities (including Black Amerikans) are allowed advancement and some of the spoils of Amerika only when they internalize settler values and eschew a global proletariat mindset. I found this part pretty intuitive and don’t need much convincing that Amerika is a racist empire. I was fascinated by his recounting of the causes of the Civil War and the choices made afterwards. I’ve never understood what the abolitionist plan was immediately after the war, and Sakai does a good job illuminating this period. Additionally, as someone who’s pretty pro-IWW it was interesting to read his take-down. Most provocatively, Sakai chides the IWW for not linking up with Zapata and Villa, who’s peaks of power corresponded to their’s. I’d never even considered that, which I suppose proves I have a Settler’s mindset. Overall, I would recommend this to people who aren’t super familiar with Amerkian history. It mostly covers familiar grounds but does have some fresh analysis. I wish it was being brought up more in our current “anti-racism reading list” era. 1911 Settlers. 

NIGHTWOOD -DJUNA BARNES

AVAILABLE

I read this based on the high recommendations and praise that Death Is Just Around The Corner constantly heaping on the book. Additionally, Williams Burroughs, my problematic fav, is also a big fan, which is impressive given that it’s a book by and about lesbians and huge, typically, a huge misogynist. There’s also a T. S. Elliot intro (more on that later) where he goes on about how much he likes it as well. It seems like one of those books that works best read many times over a lifetime. The language is the main draw; it’s amazingly written full of all sorts of bizarre, wonderful sentences, “we all carry about with us the house of death - the skeleton” or “a man is another person - a woman is yourself.” That second one brings us to the major theme of the book, lesbianism. In fact, the depiction the book gives of early 20th century gay and specifically lesbian life is what the book is most known for now. Which is somewhat flattening, given how well it’s written. The plot, such as it is, involves a strange, unknowable, “boy-like” woman who enchants and beguiles 2 other women and a husband. She is flighty and strange, and will literally just walk out the door and not come back and these various other people in her life go insane trying to be in love with her. But the book itself is mostly long speeches about art and the nature of love or nights or the differences between French and Italian priests, etc. There’s so much squeezed I can easily understand why people would become obsessed and reread. I liked it much more towards the end, after I caught the vibe, I’m sure a reread would open up the whole thing to me. The only thing I’d hold against it is the long passages, especially towards the beginning, about The Jew and his wiley ways. Obviously, the T. S. Eliot thing should have been a red-flag and if this did allow me to reflect on the “Wandering Jew” stereotype and how, as an anti-nationalist fairy-tale, I sort of consider it something to strive for, but either way, thumbs down to her weird mid-century antisemitism. Otherwise wonderful though, an amazing depiction of anguish. 36 Nights

CASTE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS - ISABEL WILKERSON

The library is now back open, sort of. You can’t go inside but you can “order” books online and pick them up. I was availing myself of this service when I noticed they had a bunch of “Peak Picks,” CASTE among them. I’m a big WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS booster and I heard Wilerson on Fresh Air talking about this book so I figured I’d knock it out real quick. The premise is simple, think about racial hierarchy as a version of a caste system, but Wilkerson manages to spin it off into some really interesting areas. When discussing or considering race it can be really hard to see the problems and contours of a system one was born into and which pervades every aspect of modern life, the classic fish/water problem. Wilkerson is able to see this system in a new light by re-framing it using a “foreign” set of concepts. She’ll tell anecdotes about racism she’s experienced in Amerika and use “upper-caste” instead of YT to get our attention and get us thinking about this in a new way. I found it pretty powerful and useful. I wouldn’t say I needed convincing that Amerika is racist to the bone, but seeing this as a caste issue helped. Especially in terms of the psychology of those involved and the quasi-religious feelings folks have towards their caste. When I lived in India I would occasionally be drinking and hanging out with large groups of Indians and, due to the insane heat, most of us would have our shirts off. I didn’t live in India long enough, nor was/am I smart enough, to have gotten a good handle of the caste system as exists in modern India. I could never tell what caste someone was by their name or the way they looked/spoke, like South Asians seemed to be able too. However, when me and my Indian friends would hang out shirtless, I could tell who was a Brahim because they’d be wearing a Janeu, a thread that upper-caste men wear around their torso. This was always interesting to me since these men were not devout Hindus in other ways. Most obviously since we were drinking alcohol most of these hang-out sessions.But it was a part of their culture that they kept, even if they’d tell you they didn’t harbor prejudice against lower-caste people. I found it fruitful to consider what the YT equivalent was to this. Additionally, Wikerson is so smart and erudite, she’s able to toss out intriguing ideas left and right. To take one example of many, she noted how Black immigrants to Amerika, Afrikans, Caribbeans and whatnot, cling onto ethnic markers like an accent to differentiate themselves from American Blacks. This is the opposite of what happens to YT immigrants, who rush to shed their “Polishness” or “Irishness” and integrate into a higher caste. The opposite dynamic is at play with Black immigrants. She’s also got a great anecdote about a black man in Alabama in the 20s who married a YT woman and was almost lynched until the town discovered that his wife was Sicilian and thus hardly YT at all. It’s also interesting to read about Supreme Court cases in 22-23 wherein a Japanese man sued claiming that he was white, in terms of skin color, and an upper-caste South Asian man sued saying that he was literally Aryan and thus should count as YT. It should come as no surprise that the court ruled against both of these men. If I was allowed to ask for more, I would’ve liked more about the history of Caste in India, its origins, how strong a hold it had in certain areas and certain epochs, what colonialism did to the caste system, how the other Indian religions reacted to it, etc. The stuff about the Dalit-rights movement was very interesting to me. Likewise, I would have liked an exploration of a Latin America caste system, ideally Brazil, since they were so focused on these tiny mini-castes (Octoroon, Mulato, etc.), a feature in the Indian Caste system. Amerika, of course, has the opposite approach, the famous one drop rule. I would have liked to see this systems compared at length, Wilkerson touches on them but briefly. Elsewhere, the Nazi stuff was best when it highlighted how much the Germans took from Amerika when they were building their caste system. The stuff about them studying Jim Crow was pretty remarkable. However, without the space to do a deep dive into Jewish history in Europe, it wasn’t as interesting to me since their system didn’t last that long. Irregardless, this book was really helpful in thinking about race. 5 Castes.

BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE - STEVEN PINKER

AVAILABLE

Allow me to coin a new phrase for a phenomena I encounter not infrequently: The Napoleon Dynamite Predicament. Basically, it occurs when there is a new, popular object (book, movie, TV show, Broadway Musical) that, as soon as I hear about it, I’m sure is not for me. After a trailer, or a 15 second explanation, I’m totally convinced I will hate this thing and loose some respect for the people who are insisting on how good it is and how much I’ll like it. Then, after careful avoidance, I do encounter the object and have exactly the experience I thought I’d have, namely, I hate it. Then people don’t think you gave it a fair chance since you had a bad attitude going in and you’re mad at them for insisting you engage with something you know you’ll dislike. It’s a whole cycle and the reason I won’t watch Hamilton. Anyway, that brings us to BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, a book I remember being very popular when it came out a few years ago. I heard about the premise, who wrote it, and who was effusively praising it and I filled it right under, “not for me.” However, fate has intervened. One of the positives of this nightmare quarantine season is that I’m much more in touch with some buddies of mine from High School who I now Zoom every other week or so. Recently, one of them was espousing a lot of ideology I consider crypto-Western chauvinist, borderline racist and historically ill-informed. We discussed a few of these and his love of BAooN kept coming up and was, to my eyes anyway, clearly the source of this thinking. I decided to read it so we could discuss it and I could try to get my friend into some smarter shit. I got teased at 2 used bookstores trying to buy this thing, which, now, having read it, is totally understandable. I’m sure you’ve heard of the premise of this book, violence is down, the world is better now than ever, but it turned out I had a few misunderstandings about what the book is about. I thought it was about how much more violence there was in early human history and how, since the end of WWII, there’s been a huge decline in violence around the world. Well, it turns out that he doesn’t spend very long on the early history stuff and he claims violence has been falling, rapidly and steadily, since the mid 18th century, a date he’s chosen since he credits the Enlightenment with these developments. I’m pretty into early human history so I was pretty excited to engage with a provocative thesis but Pinker finks out. By “violence” he means “murder” and by “early history” he means these 20 studies of contemporary Hunter/Gatherer tribes. He extrapolated a murder-rate from these studies and, lo and behold, they’re higher than the modern West. Case closed. This highlights the main problem with the book, he never defines anything. He never says what “violence” is and when he needs to place it on the chart, he replaces violence with a stat for murder and handwaves away any objections by saying that Murder is correlated with other forms of violent crime. Obviously, this misses the whole picture. Pinker almost realizes this himself when he, briefly, talks about slavery and how it “often” involved violence. That’s a very silly idea, the entire arrangement is violent. The slave is under violent control every minute they are a slave, not just when/if they’re murdered by their master. Same with being a colony (as you can probably guess, there’s a lot of colonialism apologia in this) or minority member of an aparthied society (which is how he can claim that South Africa underwent a period of “decivilization”in the early 90s. If you’re wondering, of course he doesn’t define “civilization”), or any subaltern group, Pinker doesn’t have the intellectual curiosity to investigate what that would be like and how “violence” forms these relationships. To him, violence is murder, and only murders that are captured in statistics so something like literal continents of genocide don’t factor in. The war stuff is equally silly. He defines war in a way to say there were only 4 after WWII since it only counts if two major powers are fighting each other and it also doesn’t count if they use proxies. Certainly he’s “right” by this metric but it is mostly about how the nature of war has changed, not that there is less of it. Maybe there is, but he certainly doesn’t prove it in this book. The whole paints a very wrong picture of world history where everybody everywhere is in a state of Hobbesian chaos until some time in the middle 18th century when wise Europeans invent the Enlightenment. Slowly, through the power of the ideas and their rationality alone, the world has pacified and despite a blip in the early/mid part of the 20th century, this mindset has permeated the world and placed us on a “rational elevator” to greater peace and prosperity. Silly whig history nonsense. There’s a bizarre but predictable, I suppose, subplot wherein Pinker tries to prove that Marxism is not only not an Enlightenment project and is responsible for most 20th century genocides, it’s also, at least in part, behind anti-communist purges, like in, say, Indonesia. This is coupled with long sections about how “Market Pricing” is the highest level of moral and logical thinking. Amazing. I wrote 13 pages in response to this, so if anyone who is reading this (no one reads this) thinks this is a smart and good book full of fascinating ideas, please reach out to me to chat before you embarrass yourself. I’ll be nice, I swear. I’ll leave you with an image that stayed with me the whole time I read this. Pinker, like so many of our fake-smart quasi-scientist pseudo-celebrities, was caught up in the whole Epstein thing. He had many dinners with the man (who he, in a cowardly manner, denounced only afterwards) and actually helped Dershowitz (leveraging his status as a Harvard Prof) get Epstein off in his original 2008 trial. There is some ambiguity as to exactly how connected Pinker was but I couldn’t help but imagine him, on a plane headed to Little St. James, sitting next to an underage sex slave. She’s looking out the window, she's scared but he can’t tell. He’s breathlessly telling her how much better the world is now. “Violence is down! People are so much smarter and more rational than they were. Can you imagine how’d they’d’ve treated you a few centuries ago? My god, what a time to be alive.” He babbles jubilantly as she stares out the window while the plane begins to descend. 1 better angel.

THEOLOGUS AUTODIDACTUS - IBN AL-NAFIS & A TRUE HISTORY - LUCIAN trans. FRANCIS HICKES

THEOLOGUS AUTODIDACTUS - IBN AL-NAFIS Part one in a series of 2 short “novels” (both were written before the concept of a “novel” had really been invented) that purport to be the earliest examples of Sci-Fi. There’s, apparently, a Japanese novel called THE TALE OF THE BAMBOO CUTTER that is also often mentioned when discussing early Sci-Fi but I couldn't find a copy so it’ll have to wait. TA was written in Egypt by Ibn al-Nafis sometimes around 1270. He’s mostly famous as a doctor, he apparently described pulmonary circulation before anyone else. The novel itself only really contains sci-fi elements at the beginning and the end. The story concerns Kamil, a man who is spontaneously generated in a cave by the lapping water of the tides. Allah gives him breath and he comes into being as a 11 or 12 year old. Kamil studies the plants and animals and nature around him on the island. You can tell the book was written by a doctor, the first thing Kamil thinks to do is to dissect animals to figure out how they, and by extension, he, works. Eventually, a group shipwrecks on his deserted island and they end up taking him to civilization. The bulk of the book consists of segments where Kamil, using only his logic and reason, elucidates the tenets of Islam. I’ve seen and I’m pretty familiar with the Christian version of this, the sort of Thomas Aquanis, logic-proves-what-I-believe-in school of theology, so it was very interesting to see the Islamic version. As the useful notes point out, the Islamic world was very obsessed, as YT Europe would come to be, with ancient Greece. The emphasis of logic and the idea that you can, from a position as a feral child, reason your way to the truth of Islam (or Christianity, or the Enlightenment), is very Platonic to me. Additionally, there is a fun part where he’s speculating as to what sort of person would be the final and most perfect prophet and reasons that he would have less than average compulsions and desires around food, but a healthy and manly appreciation for “perfumes and women” then we get a long translator's note about how there is indeed a tradition in Islam that credits Muhammad (PBUH) with a healthy love of perfume and sex. The book passes back into a sort of quasi-sci-fi in the final sections where Kamil reasons out how the world will end. Apparently the lateral movement of the sun will cease so the hot parts of the world will get too hot and the reverse for the cold parts. Society breaks down, lesbianism becomes commonplace and the world dissolves into chaos. Not quite sci-fi from where I’m sitting, more in the tradition of something like THE REVELATION OF SAINT JOHN. Though it does involve the sun, so in that sense, it presages Gene Wolfe and his sun-focused sci-fi. Finally, there’s several really fascinating passages about the sorts of people al-Nasif considers barbarians. He often contrasts people living in what we’d now consider sub-Saharan Africa (which he refers to as Sudan which I believe is the Arabic for “land of the blacks” and includes much more than modern Sudan) with the people living to his north, aka Scandinavians and Russians. It’s very interesting to get the Islamic take on it. He basically says it’s too hot in Sudan, the people there are slow and unmotivated. On the other hand, the northerners are scary boat people. Not quite numerous and smart enough to be a true threat, but a group of people to keep an eye on, for sure. 1268 self-generated men.

A TRUE HISTORY - LUCIAN trans. FRANCIS HICKES Another entry into the “early sci-fi” or “proto-sci-fi” mini-genre. I believe there’s also a Japanese book called, THE TALE OF THE BAMBOO CUTTER that is sometimes brought up in this discussion so I’ll have to get my hands on that one two. This novel is from the 2nd century AD and is less a philosophical pamphlet, like TA, it’s much more a crazy story. It’s sort of a bizarro ODYSSEY, in fact it features cameos from Odysseus and company, in the sense that it’s about a voyage blown off course and all the wild shit they run into. There’s fish in a wine river that get you drunk. There are flower-women who you, obviously, want to fuck but shouldn’t. They, the Greek sailors, get involved in war between the forces of the moon and the sun. A conflict in which both sides’ armies are made up of human/animal hybrids and are riding on things like giant fleas. They also get involved with a mini-sided war while living in a whale’s belly Pinocchio-style. And a third between the heroes that live in the Greek version of Heaven (Achilles, Plato, etc.) and the denizens of Greek hell (Ajax, Busyris, etc.). These Greeks seem to get into a lot of multi-sided, raging wars, for whatever reason. We find out in the later case that Plato lives his afterlife under exactly the system he spelled out in THE REPUBLIC, and that Socrates fights bravely in battle and is rewarded with space to build the Necracademia. In the whale episode, they end up escaping by starting a fire in the whale’s belly, which is exactly what happens to Raven in a Tlingit myth immortalized on a totem pole downtown. There’s an island with 2 temples, one to that which is true, and one to that which is false. All good stuff. It’s interesting that both this text and TA take up the question, in both cases quite literally and frankly, of whether or not there will be homosexual sex in heaven. You’ll be shocked to learn that they come up with very different answers. I’m not sure where the line is between fantasy and sci-fi. I would certainly put this more in the “fantasy” camp but it’s quite good. Lots of great Greek names and sexy Greek hi-jinks. 125 Giant Whales.

CALDÉ OF THE LONG SUN - GENE WOLFE

AVAILABLE

We’re cruising right along with this Long Sun Tetralogy. I’ll have to take a break before the next and final chapter, since it’s proving elusive at the various used bookstores of Seattle. I might just have TheGiant mail it to me. Irregardless, I’m still digging this. Wolfe is the true king of sci-fi and the way he balances the whorl-building (pun intended) aspects with the “main story/plot” aspects is untouchable. I would say that compared with the NEW SUN series, the “main plot” of this series is much easier to follow and the main character is much less of a cipher. Tho this comes at the price of less overall weirdness in this series. Which is not to say that the series isn’t extremely weird. Wolfe has introduced several characters, some of whom are gods, who can possess humans and animals at will. This leads to the confusing task of trying to figure out who is speaking in a given scene and who is possessing who. We’re (both the reader and the character) are still working on how the Whorl functions and where its’ going and what the “rules” are, so to speak. We still need to see this mainframe that characters have alluded too, we still don’t know about the fliers, it still isn’t clear where this whole thing is going. Though, Wolfe is a skilled enough writer that I trust he both knows the answers to all of these questions, and he will revel them artfully. Otherwise, it is somewhat hard to review this as a stand alone. I think Wolfe does a good job with pacing, the stakes continue to be raised and the complexity of the situations deepens. The Whorl building stuff is all wonderful and keeps getting weirder and weirder. If I had 2 complaints, one would be that a lower-class sort of oaf figure keeps calling a woman he likes, “jugs” which bugs me for some reason, and I’m not sure what we’re to make of the bird that Silk keeps around. So far he doesn’t do anything, though he is in a lot of scenes. There is only one book left in the series (and then a whole other 3 books in a separate trilogy that takes places after this) and I am a touch worried about how much needs to be squeezed into the book to make this whole thing seem satisfying. But, if anyone can pull it off, it’s Wolfe. 303 Whorls

LAKE OF THE LONG SUN - GENE WOLFE

AVAILABLE

It’s really hard to imagine what reading these as they came out was like. As with most of America, I’m also reading the Song of Ice and Fire series so I somewhat understand what it’s like to have to wait a few years between books. It’s always hard to keep the world and the rules of this world, and the characters straight in between volumes. Of course, this Wolfe stuff is on another level. Fuck Tolkien, fuck Martin, fuck Herbert, fuck whomever you like for world-building, Wolfe is the king. The universes he creates are stranger and more realized and interesting than any writer I’ve ever read. Real heads know, LeGuin is oft-quoted calling him the Sci-Fi Melville. Anyway, due to the complexity and strangeness of his worlds, I feel it would be really hard to read these books with a year plus break in-between them. I read the BotNS tetralogy back-to-back-to-back-to-back and it was still hard as fuck to follow. This book I was able to read quickly and right after I finished NIGHTSIDE and it was still a bit of a struggle to catch all the hyper-subtle world building that Wolfe engages in. This book pushes the Whorl-world forward. We now have total confirmation that they’re on a ship that seems to have been in space for 300+ years, tho it is still unclear where they are going. Additionally, it’s finally connected to BotNS; apparently Pas is Typhon from the original series and he is the one who built the ship. I might have to go back and read the Typhon sections from BotNS, I don’t remember him mentioning a world-ship. If I recall correctly, he seemed like a figure meant to recall satan from that part of the bible where Jesus is in the wilderness and gets tempted (Wolfe is heavy on the catholic stuff). I remember him offering Severaian endless riches to worship him. Petera Silk is likewise made this offer by a character is LAKE OF THE LONG SUN. Satanic tempting is a big thing for Wolfe it seems. Also, lakes. If I remember correctly, lots of BotNS is lake-based. Anyway, the “plot” wasn’t significantly pushed forward in this volume. We learned a lot more about the Whorl itself and the original set-up. I very much enjoyed the angry robot that got laid-off. I’m hoping there’s more in-the-moment plot in the next 2 volumes. I’ll try to read them somewhat quickly to not lose this Wolfe-momentum. 300 planet ships.

THE LIAR’S CLUB - MARY KARR

AVAILABLE

Amazing. I’ve read some Karr before; I was interested in her poetry in college and her relationship with DFW back when I was reading through his work. I’ve read some of her various memoir works before but I saw this available at a used book store and figured I’d dive in and see what all the fuss was about. This is perhaps the best memoir I’ve ever read. Not in terms of how exciting or interesting the central-life was, but rather in terms of how well it’s written. Indeed, not too much goes on, plot-wise. Karr is born to a family of wild alcoholics in a poor east Texas town and reports on the dysfunction. As a quick aside, this is also the part of the country UGK is from. There is certainly no shortage of alcohol memoirs, or my-crazy-family memoirs. Karr’s writing is what sets this apart. She’s able to balance how she felt as a child, what the milieu of the shithole Texas town, the deep-traumas of her parents and family, all without getting didactic or merely lurid. The way she slowly uncovers the background of her parents, in order to give us some context for their destructive drinking deepens the emotional impact of the book. It’d be much easier and understandable if Karr had merely listed the myriad ways her parents had failed her, but she’s always able to situated it in a larger social picture. Actually, it was this social acuity that really surprised me. This book is the good version of HILLBILLY ELEGY. Like HE, it is a memoir of a writer growing up in a poor YT town and how/why people’s lives are ruined in such places. While Vance is remarkably uninterested in the actual causes, he’s content to simply tell them to work harder, Karr is more curious and actually able to diagnose why her town seems to be turning out broken men/women with shitty lives. She’s also much more honest and thoughtful about race (Vance has insane, deeply stupid theories about race-relations w/r/t rural YTs). Her dad hangs out with a group of oil-workers (like himself) one of whom, Shug, is black. “Nobody says flat out, you're just picking on Shug because he’s colored. It sometimes seems to me like we’re not supposed to notice that Shug’s colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug’s being colored strikes me as real obvious. And usually anybody’s differences get pounced on and picked at. This silence is a lie peculiar to a man’s skin color, which makes it extra serious and extra puzzling.” Karr is able to see and comment on subtle racial dynamics without simplification or easy answers. She’s also really good at describing a phenomena I haven’t experienced personally but many of my female friends have talked with me about. When the book opens and Karr is young, 6-7, she’s very close with her wild-man, roughneck dad. He takes her to the bars, she sees him fight people, he helps her shot and is generally a lot of fun. Karr captures how he grows distant and withdrawn as she ages and goes through puberty and becomes a “woman.” Since his category for women isn’t able to expand, nor can he make an exception for his daughter, they drift apart. He can’t abide a break in the gender roles and expectations and can’t relate to his daughter as well when he sees her as a woman, not a girl. There are a few brutal rapes in the book, but otherwise, I found it really easy and quick to read. It’s hard to overstate how good and clear of a writer Karr is. I think I’ll fuck with the other 2 memoirs of her’s. 61 shots of whiskey.

NIGHTSIDE OF THE LONG SUN - GENE WOLFE

AVAILABLE

I suppose I could go look it up, but I don’t think I reviewed the Book of the New Sun cycle, which must mean I read it over 2 years ago. Anyway, if you’re familiar with the contours and fashions of the Sci-Fi world, which I mostly am not, you’re certainly familiar with Gene Wolfe. My brother is much more into this genre than I and he insisted that BotNS slaps hard so I picked it up and it did indeed go hard. It’s quite a flex to write a tetralogy as a sequel to a tetralogy and the sheer length and commitment involved scared me off for a while. Wolfe books aren’t always the easiest to read. Wolfe’s whole thing, as I judge from BotNS, revolves around really well-crafted sentences and a really parsimonious stance w/r/t giving out information. It took a really long time to figure out how the world in BotNS works, even a little, you always have to infer because Wolfe never explain exactly what’s happening, and every time you figure something out (their school is an old spaceship, their on Earth but in the distant future, some of these people are robots, etc.) something much weirder happens. It’s a great vibe, but it takes a specific mindset. Given the fact that I’m just now, today, ending my quarantine, I had more than enough time to get into any mindset at all. The reward was the same. The world of NIGHTSIDE is called the Whorl which, I gather from both the book itself and it’s spoiler-ass back-cover, is a massive spaceship. Wolfe is god-level at slowly revealing how this world is set up and where, physically, things are from each other. Even by the end of this book, there’s a lot of things about this world I don’t understand, but I certainly get the sense that Wolfe understands them and isn’t rushing to get everything on the table. I liked the main character in this one Petera Silk, more than Severian, BotNS protagonist. Severian is the narrator in BotNS and goes to great lengths to obscure his motivations and feelings, which make him sort of empty and cipher to me. Silk isn’t the narrator so we see him more objectively and it’s easier to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. The BotLS world, so far, is straddling a world of space-religion, since Silk is a sort of priest/sacrificer, and space-crime since the main plot of this book involves an underworld boss named Blood and takes place in slums and whorehouses and whatnot. Maybe because I’ve already made it through one tetralogy, I found this much easier going than early BotNS, though the BotNS world is even more fantastical and gothic and strange. Maybe the Whorl will get there. I look forward to learning more about their space gods. 10,000 Long Suns.

MIDNIGHT’S FURIES - NISID HAJARI

AVAILABLE This book taught me that the word, “goonda” which is a sub-continent specific word, apparently from the Hindi for “rascal,” meaning something like hired thug or goon. Interestingly, “thug” itself comes from India. It’s an interesting and useful term (there seems to be a lot of “goonda spotting” w/r/t these recent uprisings) but perhaps the most upbeat thing I learned from this book. Otherwise, the book is sort of in the model of KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST, WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES, or EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON, which are basically long lists of atrocities and the background that serves to make them all atrocious. While I have reservations about this genre as a whole, and specific quibbles with some of the books I listed, MIDNIGHT’S FURIES does manage to keep from being a harrowing slog. It mostly achieves this through brevity and concision. The amount of background you could do about the India/Pakistan partition is endless. 100+ lifetimes of scholarship. Why are East Bengal and West Punjab Islamic while the middle section of the country is largely non-islamic? What’s going on with Hyderabad? What’s the historical relation between Sikhs and Muslims? How did the British conquer such a large piece of territory? How did they rule it and how did the people living on the subcontinent resist this rule until they finally gained independence? Again, I think you could write a dozen 500 page books for each one of these topics and MIDNIGHT’S FURIES really helps itself by sidestepping them and just getting into the period around partition. We don’t even get a deep background about what someone as central as Ghandi’s life and activism was like before ~1945. This trade-off does allow Hajair to go deep on the events of those few years. I definitely knew that Muslims fled India to Pakistan and vice-versa for Hindu Pakistanis but I did not know the scale of the slaughter that caused this. I didn’t realize that multiple cities experienced multiple, multi-day rampages that left literally thousands dead. Choking-the-rivers-with-corpses, blackening-the-sky-with-carrion-birds, Brugel level shit. I lived in India for a little over a year, spending time in both Kolkata as well as Hyderabad and, despite these pogroms being within living memory, life did continue. I did meet Muslims and Hindus and Christians and Sikhs in all of these places and the was amazed at the time about how little animosity I was sensing. Which was not at all zero, I grew up in the South and I would still hear people making anti-islamic or anti-hindu or anti-whatever statements and expressing such sentiments, but it seemed on the level of racial tensions in the USA. And despite how horrendous the history of the US, it’s mind bending to consider how much longer and deeper and complicated the social relations in India are. I’ve always found it helpful to think about India this way: You know how ignorant people will occasionally refer to the country of “Africa,” lumping all of Africa’s diversity into one monolith? Something akin to that did happen on the subcontinent. While India is a tenth the size of Africa, imagine Britain had knitted together all of it’s African holdings at the end of colonialism and declared it one big new country. This obviously simplifies the issue a lot and doesn’t take into account the fact that the Indian National Congress wanted a huge, united India, it does sort of highlight how this country covers these regions that have different religions and cultures and languages and histories and climates and interests and lifeways. It’s amazing India can keep it together (tho, their current president did oversee a riot/massacre of Muslim very much like the ones described in this book when he was a governor) and honestly flabbergasting when viewed from the United States, a nation that deals with similar issues. Anyway, the book was very helpful in polishing my conception of India and Pakistan. The author seems pretty pro-India, tho after finishing, it’s hard to really imagine ways to make Jinnah look great. The whole thing really seems to end in tragedy, given the current situation. I didn’t “know-know” but I guess I always knew the guy who literally drew the border flew in to India, a place he’d never been before, drew the line without visiting the region, and left to never return again. And the literal date for independence was chosen on a whim by the Viceroy. There’s certainly a version of this book that focuses more on the British end of this but I’m glad I read this one first. Whenever the plague ends, I should return to India. 1947 religious sites.

NEUROTRIBES: THE LEGACY OF AUTISM AND THE FUTURE OF NEURODIVERSITY - STEVE SILBERMAN

I should have read this years ago. When it came out in 2015 it made a splash. Lots of reviews and NPR interviews and I was certainly not uncommon to see it’s substantial girth being lugged around at coffee shops. I’ve always been interested in autism and neurodiversity generally but, honestly, I found the topic daunting and confusing. I knew some autistic kids growing up and their presentations were so different I couldn’t really wrap my head around how they all had the same condition. This belief was reinforced and deepened when I began working with kids in the foster care system who are, disproportionately and unsurprisingly, autistic. I went through lots of trainings, both formal and informal and heard that if-you've-met-one-person-with-autism-you've-met-one-person-with-autism line a lot and tried my best to get my head around how some of those “afflicted” seemed to be withdrawn and non-verbal while others talked more than any kids I’ve ever met. Why was it useful to think of these kids as having the same “thing”?  Shouldda read this book. It’s much more of a history than an overview of the current thinking. It spends much of its considerable length tracing how different doctors working at different times/places as well as on different “ends” of the high-functioning/low-functioning axis came up with different terms, all describing, roughly, the same underlying condition. We get Kanner’s Syndrome, Childhood Schizophrenia, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Symbiotic Psychosis, Asperberg’s Syndrome and others before the recent synthesis of all of this into Autism Spectrum Disorder. I worked with a lot of kids that those terms would easily apply to. The book does a good job arguing for a view of Autism that thinks of it as based in a different way of thinking, that all or most of us have some access to, that is, to some degree, “turned up” in some people. Sometimes this gives us geniuses, other-times it gives us the sorts of people who used to (and still do) die in nightmarish state-institutions. There’s very interesting parallels drawn between the blind community’s and the transgender community’s (anecdotally, I do see a lot of pro-neurodiversity signs at transgender marches/political actions) struggle for rights, especially in their emphasis on changing the environment and attitudes of “regular” people to make society more accessible, rather than trying to force the individual into society or remove them totally. As I said, the book is long, there’s lots of tangents, like the ends and outs of how RAIN MAN got made, that could have been cut to make it more digestible. However, the shift in thinking that “neurodiversity” implies, the demolishment of the hierarchical, and ultimately eugenic, idea that there’s an “ideal man” or an “ideal brain” (this is the idea that underpins racism and nationalism and fascism and a host of other terrible ideas), is major and has huge implications. It takes a long time to trace this thinking and I’m glad Sliberman took the time. I still work with autistic folks (adults now, the autistic are over-represented, and under-diagnosed, amongst the homeless) and this has definitely helped me sharpen my thinking and diversify my tactics. I’d recommend it if you interact with autistic people, or want to think critically about where they fall on the neurodiversity spectrum. 1906 human brains.