Category Archives: reading

Among Others

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Jo Walton’s Among Others is an itch that won’t stay scratched since I finished reading it a couple of days ago. I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for some kinds of books, though I’m not sure I can define “some kinds” in any useful way, but I knows ’em when I feels ’em, and Among Others is definitely In The Club. Like friendship, In The Clubness isn’t necessarily transitive (i.e., you might or might not share my enthusiasms), but this book is worth the effort of trying to unpack what it is that I so enjoyed.

For one thing, it’s about books and reading. Indeed, it’s virtually a catalog of (mostly) 1970s scifi, with a few books that aren’t scifi at all, and some that are on the fantasy edge of scifi. The narrator (Morwenna Phelps Markova –it’s her journal that we read, covering Wednesday 5th September 1979 to Wednesday 20th February 1980) comments upon 128 books, many of which she reads during that less-than-6-months period [view list].

Most of the action takes place at a girls’ school in Shropshire, where Morwenna is in the Lower Fifth Form… already this is starting to sound preposterous, but hang on… Morwenna’s mother is a malign witch, implicated in the death of Morwenna’s twin sister Morganna. Magic is done, and not-done too. There are fairies, well beings who aren’t exactly fairies or elves or anything else you’ve ever met or perhaps even imagined… and there’s coming-of-age stuff, and dysfunctional family stuff, and bits of detail on Welsh topography and industrial history, and British boarding school mise en scène that makes Hogwarts seem particularly saccharine and vapid.

…but what the book is really about, it seems to me, is self-education via omnivorous reading and talking about reading and writing about reading, and it’s easy to accept that an especially bright 15-year-old could be as articulate as Morwenna is. The 1979-1980 time frame puts it outside the era in which personal computation steamrollered dead-tree media, and that’s worth thinking about in itself. It’s easy to forget that reading scifi was a major mode of geekery before video games and D&D arrived on the scene, and it’s interesting to consider what somebody who had in fact read all those books would know, and what view such a reader would have developed of humanity, of science, of the range of possibilities of social and cultural organization and of alternative possibilities. I think I’ve read about a quarter of the list, though I’m pretty hazy about some of the titles. Clearly Jo Walton has read them, and been intelligent aboout [ooooh Canadian spelling? or typo? you decide…] systematizing her evaluations as experienced via Morwenna.

I’ve harvested several reviews by bloggers, and picked out sentences that might encourage you to read the whole review:

…There were parts of the book which seemed so realistically personal that I felt awkward reading the passages…

we follow Mor, aged 15, as she voraciously read sf just as we did, and it gives her bursts of insight just as it did us. The sf she is reading is part of who she is, and who she is becoming, and it is so real it hurts.

…It is one of those books that you will read and find yourself wanting to underline passage after passage because of the way they speak to you…

…Not only is Among Others one of the most deep and thoughtful novels I’ve ever read, it was crafted in such a beautiful way that I will be thinking about it for a very long time…

…such a completely candid account of a teen girl’s intellectual growth. It’s rare to find a book that captures this process so well, probably due to our tendency to edit our memories as we grow and change and to attempt to harmonise them with the person we later became.

I have more to say, but haven’t quite figured how to cast it. Maybe I will once I see this in print…

From Charlie Stross

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I confess a hazy understanding of genomics (well, it’s probably even more vaporous than ‘hazy’), but this from the author of Accelerando‘s recent list of things to feel good about makes me think I should try again to wrap the mind around the subject:

There’s been enormous progress in genomics; we’re now on the threshold of truly understanding how little we understand. While the anticipated firehose of genome-based treatments hasn’t materialized, we now know why it hasn’t materialized, and it’s possible to start filling in the gaps in the map. Turns out that sequencing the human genome was merely the start. (It’s not a blueprint; it’s not even an algorithm for generating a human being. Rather, it’s like a snapshot of the static data structures embedded in an executing process. Debug that.) My bet is that we’re going to have to wait another decade. Then things are going to start to get very strange in medicine.

Academic vs. Popular

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This is pretty obvious, but I don’t think I’ve seen it so clearly stated:

Academic historians now write almost exclusively for one another and focus on the issues and debates within the discipline. Their limited readership —many history monographs sell fewer than a thousand copies— is not due principally to poor writing, as is usually thought; it is due instead to the kinds of specialized problems these monographs are trying to solve. Since, like papers in physics or chemistry, these books focus on narrow subjects and build upon one another, their writers usually presume that readers will have read the earlier books on the same subject; that is, they will possess some prior specialized knowledge that will enable them to participate in the conversations and debates that historians have among themselves. This is why most historical monographs are often difficult for general readers to read; new or innocent readers often have to educate themselves in the historiography of the subject before they can begin to make sense of many of these monographs.
…
The problem at present is that the monographs have become so numerous and so refined and so specialized that most academic historians have tended to throw up their hands at the possibility of synthesizing all these studies, of bringing them together in comprehensive narratives. Thus the academics have generally left narrative history-writing to the nonacademic historians and independent scholars who unfortunately often write without much concern for or much knowledge of the extensive monographic literature that exists.

(Gordon S. Wood “The Real Washington at Last” NYRB 9 Dec 2010)

Judt on Milosz

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I don’t think I had read anything of Tony Judt’s writing until I revived my long-lapsed subscription to NYRB a year ago, just in time to catch his riveting last pieces. I’ve begun his Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, and it’ll take a while to absorb its immensity. In the most recent NYRB there’s a piece on Milosz’s Captive Minds (fortunately not behind the paywall and well worth reading in its entirety) that reminds me of things I should have been paying attention to, or should at least have encountered. Judt unpacks the (originally Arabic) concept of ‘Ketman’:

The second image is that of “Ketman,” borrowed from Arthur de Gobineau’s Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia, in which the French traveler reports the Persian phenomenon of elective identities. Those who have internalized the way of being called “Ketman” can live with the contradictions of saying one thing and believing another, adapting freely to each new requirement of their rulers while believing that they have preserved somewhere within themselves the autonomy of a free thinker—or at any rate a thinker who has freely chosen to subordinate himself to the ideas and dictates of others.
Ketman, in Miłosz’s words, “brings comfort, fostering dreams of what might be, and even the enclosing fence affords the solace of reverie.” Writing for the desk drawer becomes a sign of inner liberty. At least his audience would take him seriously if only they could read him…

Judt describes his own history of teaching Milosz to American students:

And indeed, when I first taught the book in the 1970s, I spent most of my time explaining to would-be radical students just why a “captive mind” was not a good thing. Thirty years on, my young audience is simply mystified: Why would someone sell his soul to any idea, much less a repressive one? By the turn of the twenty-first century, few of my North American students had ever met a Marxist. A self-abnegating commitment to a secular faith was beyond their imaginative reach. When I started out, my challenge was to explain why people became disillusioned with Marxism; today, the insuperable hurdle one faces is explaining the illusion itself.

At this point I started to anticipate his argument, thinking “but isn’t this just what they’ve done themselves?”, but I was unprepared for the clarity with which Judt sums it up:

Today, we can still hear sputtering echoes of the attempt to reignite the cold war around a crusade against “Islamo-fascism.” But the true mental captivity of our time lies elsewhere. Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History. Just as the hapless British Labour chancellor in 1929–1931, Philip Snowden, threw up his hands in the face of the Depression and declared that there was no point opposing the ineluctable laws of capitalism, so Europe’s leaders today scuttle into budgetary austerity to appease “the markets.”
But “the market”—like “dialectical materialism”—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers—mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers—who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the “Washington consensus” in vulnerable developing countries—with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation—has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent “commercial terms” on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

Two eloquent passages from the day’s reading

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I’ve had Dwight Macdonald’s Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm –and After (1960) for years, and nibbled at it betimes. The September 20th issue of The New Yorker has a Louis Menand review of The Oxford Book of Parodies (2010) which has this beautifully clear –indeed, all but anthropological– summary of what HAPPENED in the 50 intervening years:

In 1960, though, Macdonald was pushing on a door where there was still some resistance. Since then, literature has ceased to be the dominant middle-class cultural preference, and the barrier between the authentic and the parodic has collapsed. A “diffused parodic sense” is everywhere. The culture is flooded with ironic self-reflexivity and imitations of imitations: travesties, spoofs, skits, lampoons, pastiches, quotations, samplings, appropriations, repurposings. This has happened at the low end (television commercials that are parodies of television commercials) and the high (postmodern fiction). And since 1960 a giant continent of mainstream entertainment has emerged of which parody is the foundation, from National Lampoon, Monty Python, and “Saturday Night Live” to Spy, Weird Al Yankovic, “The Simpsons,” and The Onion.

…even the members of reading clubs could use some guidance making sense of a culture in which almost nothing is taken seriously unless it first makes fun of what it is. This practice may be partly self-protective: it is harder for someone to subvert you if you are already subverting yourself. But self-parody can also convey authority. The “Daily Show” is a parody of a news program, and a lot of people rely on it for news.

Still, anthologically speaking, where to start? When everything is quasi-parodic, when everything presents itself with a wink of self-conscious exaggeration, then it may be that parody is finished as the kind of genre you can represent within the confines of an Oxford Book… (pg 80)

And an hour or so later I found myself immersed in Joshua Clover’s “Busted: Stories of the Financial Crisis” from September 20 issue of The Nation, staring at another brilliant bit of analytical abstraction:

…When one converts, say, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps into a folksy story about the neighbors and their home insurance, the crisis appears more legible than its components, those acronymic phantasms of fictitious capital traded by the blind protocols of shell companies hoping to arbitrage a few billion pennies from minuscule imbalances in a great global system.

What those two passages share is an exemplary clarity of analysis and expression, to which I wish I could rise myself. Still, I know it when I see it.

Sandburg vs. Frost

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Harper’s put this up today:

The policeman buys shoes slow and careful; the teamster buys gloves slow and careful; they take care of their feet and hands; they live on their feet and hands.

The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one speaks to him; the city is asleep when he is on the job; he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and calls it a day’s work; he climbs two hundred wooden stairways; two horses are company for him; he never argues.

The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers of cinders; they empty cinders out of their shoes after the day’s work; they ask their wives to fix burnt holes in the knees of their trousers; their necks and ears are covered with a smut; they scour their necks and ears; they are brothers of cinders.

–Carl Sandburg, Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight, first published in Cornhuskers (1918)

…and I was reminded of Robert Frost’s sentiments re: Carl Sandburg, as disclosed in a letter to Lincoln MacVeagh (quoted in Paul Muldoon’s essay on The American Songbag, in the Marcus and Sollors New Literary History of America, pp 609-610):

We’ve been having a dose of Carl Sandburg. He’s another person I find it difficult to do justice to. He was possibly hours in town and he spent one of those washing his white hair and toughening his expression for his public performance. His mandolin pleased some people, his poetry a very few and his infantile talk none… I heard someone say he was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.

Some balance is restored, perhaps, by this from Christian Wiman in his essay on Frost in the same New Literary History of America (p 540):

Of course, there are more shoals than poems, more confusion than the songs that seem, briefly, to contain and control it. This is particularly true for modern poets and their inheritors. With this in mind, the buffoonery and bluster of Frost’s public persona become, perhaps a bit more explicable, as do all the cutesy, folksy poems that seem to have been written solely in the service of this persona.

Honors about even, don’t you think?

Palimpsestical urbanism

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Via Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House I’m enjoying an immersion in Istanbul, an Istanbul of not-so-distant future, replete with realized nanotechnologies. Several times I’ve almost gotten to copying out redolent passages, but this one tickled various bits of the mental spiderweb and tipped me over the edge:

Urbomancer. City witch… [she] discovered that a better living could be made just walking the city’s streets charting mental maps, recording how history was attracted to certain locations in layer upon layer of impacted lives in a cartography of meaning; delineating a spiritual geography of many gods and theisms; compiling an encyclopedia of how space had shaped mind and mind had shaped space through three thousand years of the Queen of Cities. Hers was a walking discipline, like the practices of the peripatetic dervishes. It proceeded at the speed of footsteps, which is the speed of history, and at that speed, on those long walks that are the science’s method, connections and correspondences appear. Strange symmetries appear between separated buildings as if some urban continental drift has taken place. Streets follow ancient, atavistic needs. Tramlines track ancient watercourses; the words of gods and emperors are spoken in stone. Human geographies, maps of the heart; fish markets far from the sea, districts in which trades have become fossilized, or die out in one generation only to return decades later. Subtle demarcations; odd transitions between restaurant cuisines: Aegean on this junction, Eastern down that alley. Cursed sites where no business has ever succeeded though a neighbor two doors down will flourish; addresses where if you live on one side of the street you are ten times more likely to be burgled than the other… (105-106)

…and in a Remarkable bit of Co-Incidence, along comes this blog posting on Tarlabaşi from David Hagerman, one of my favorite photographers (and see recent postings on FOOD in Istanbul at Robyn Eckhardt’s deliriously wonderful EatingAsia).

Reading Dave Hickey

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I take a certain (well, a considerable) pride in knowing about stuff that others don’t [yet] grok, but that means I’m occasionally blindsided by stuff I should have encountered but somehow missed. Can’t know it all, despite trying to live up to my patron saint Hugh of St-Victor’s injunction to omnia disce. So I’d never heard of Dave Hickey until I read a piece of his in NHLA. Smitten by his prose, I ordered Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997) and soaked it up in a few days. The title? It refers to Hickey’s comments on criticism:

…criticism is the weakest thing you can do in writing. It is the written equivalent of air guitar —flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music(163)

There’s a lot of similarly fine writing in the 20-odd essays, and plenty of art-world and pop-culture stuff that I knew next to nothing about, and Robert Christgau’s review is a good entrée into what-all is included. The essay that really got to me was the penultimate: “Frivolity and Unction” (originally in Art isses, Summer 1996, but available here as a pdf), which seems to be mostly a savaging of pretense and self-delusion in “the art world” … “seems to be” I say, since he’s mostly talking about that realm:

…I found myself wondering why the music and film communities could respond to bourgeois punditry with such equanimity, while the French Academy and the contemporary art world went certifiably ga-ga. I came up with the answer. Music and movie people are not in denial about the frivolity of their endeavor, while the contemporary art world, like the French Academy, feels called upon to maintain the aura of spectacular unction that signifies public virtue, in hopes of maintaining its public patronage… (202)

What if works of art were considered to be what they actually are –frivolous objects or entities with no intrinsic value that only acquire value through a complex process of socialization during which some are empowered by an ongoing sequence of private, mercantile, journalistic, and institutional investments… (204)

…the art world is no more about art than the sports world is about sport. The sports world conducts an ongoing referendum on the manner in which we should cooperate and compete. The art world conducts an ongoing referendum on how things should look and the way we should look at things –or it would, if art were regarded as sports are, as a wasteful, privileged endeavor through which very serious issues are sorted out. (204)

“Seems to be” I say, because it struck me that he’s NOT just talking about the art world, but about the [cultural] delusions constructed around multiple worlds (politics, business, the instantiation and manipulation of consumer demand, education…) in which we bamboozle ourselves about what we are doing and why. But is this realization anything more than the familiar Emperor’s Clothes critique of the purblind and muttonish stupor of my fellow citizens, which I’ve been belaboring for far too long? My encounter with this essay got spookier when it occurred to me to try substituting ‘education’ for ‘art’ in this paragraph:

So, I have been thinking, if art is ‘good’ enough to be deserving of public patronage, just what does it do? I would suggest that since such work must be designed in compliance with extant legislation and regulatory protocols, it can only work on behalf of this legislation and those protocols. It can encourage us not just to obey the laws that we all fought so hard to pass, but to believe them, to internalize the regulatory norms of civil society into a ‘cultural belief system.’ Unfortunately, art that aspires to this goal is nothing more or less than tribal art, a steady-state hedge against change and a guarantee of oppression in the name of consensus, however benign. (208)

And if everybody did awaken to what-all is really going on, or down, what then?

Dave Hickey’s prose

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Some writers have mastered the undefinable something that sucks the reader right in, even into subject areas that don’t seem like they’d be enticing. Today’s case in point is Dave Hickey’s “The Song in Country Music” in the seemingly bottomless Marcus/Sollors A New Literary History of America. The piece is mostly about Hank Williams‘s prosody, but along the way you’re exposed to a passel of vividness, a blast of James Agee cross-pollinated with Lester Bangs. Maud Newton quotes one section and Justin Hamm has another, but here’s the one that brought me up short and sent me off to Amazon to order more of Dave Hickey’s writing:

(Hank Williams) was country music’s first auteur. He had grown up in what Nashville musicians called the “trash gypsy” culture of the Alabama woods, with a shell-shocked father and a predatory mother, in a world without electricity, plumbing, or pavement, personally beleaguered by bottomless need, a profound sense of social inadequacy, a predisposition to drink, and a genetic intolerance for alcohol. Georgiana, Alabama existed somewhere below the fuzzy cloud line of Southern culture and outside the cozy realm of country community. It was a place for which the traditional longing and nostalgia of country music was some kind of terrible joke…

and one more bit, further down the same page:

For the kids out of the hills and woods, who had never seen an elevator, Williams’s success remained the stuff of dreams. If you could do just a tenth as well as Williams had, they thought, if you could just move up from destitution to poverty, rich and famous could go to hell. For the Dixie greasers who were Williams’s own kinsmen, the young Icarii on their motorcycles, Williams’s life only proved the Calvinism in their bones. Flem Snopes’s account book must be balanced: Every act of creativity must be followed by an equal and opposite act of wanton destruction.”… (pg. 844)

Frost, ya say?

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I’m making my way slowly through the Marcus and Sollors A New Literary History of America, savoring the articles in chronological order, and visiting territories I had no idea I’d find interesting. This morning it’s Christian Wiman’s “1915: Robert Frost leaves England for America” in which I find this lovingly constructed meditation on the essences of Nacirema culture:

One of the great ironies of American literature is that in a country in which, some new survey always seems to say, 95 percent of the people don’t simply believe in a personal God but can count the whiskers on his chin, so much of our best work should be so consistently fraught with anxious unbelief, galvanizing absence, spiritual terror… a spiritual energy that is both passion and plight, a metaphysical compulsion as fervid as it is unfixed. But this is perhaps not so surprising, since if one American impulse is toward a kind of spiritual vertigo, an equally strong one is the impulse to disguise this feeling with optimistic personae and evangelical enthusiasm. So much of American literature is about buried intensities because so much of American life is a mask. (pg. 537)