Terrorists in America: The Man They Wanted Me To Be (Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making), by Jared Yates Sexton

Though [the murder of Heather Heyer] and increasing disapproval of the alt-right hurt their membership. there are still legions of dedicated acolytes, most of them trolls who spend their time on shadowy forums like 4chan and on obscure Reddit forums having conversations about murdering liberals, skinning journalists, starting a new civil war, orchestrating mass genocide, destroying the Constitution and replacing it with a fascist regime, and instituting a new patriarchal order where men are allowed to rape and murder women. It's bewildering to think of how things have changed since the Greatest Generation gave their lives to fight fascism, but fear of the fall of the patriarchy has led to a rise in this ideology.

Part autobiography, part warning, part call to action, Sexton's sequel to the book I read last month,  The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore , interweaves the author's own experiences growing up in rural Indiana with his decorated WWII veteran grandfather, his abusive father and a series of abusive stepfathers, and the mother who tried to protect him.  It is a book identifying and exploring toxic masculinity: the wife-beaters, the mass shooters, the incels, the Trump voters, the Nazi marchers and militias.  They have already invaded our world; now we get the chance to enter theirs, to weep with pity and contempt, and to take steps to protect ourselves.

In Sexton's home town, the choices were: rich kid, athlete-bully, country boy and rebel, all of them toxic to boys and hostile to girls.  Sexton's dad and stepdads punished him for reading and for wanting to write; they vowed to make a man of him and get him to be tough, drunk and violent instead, and for a time, they succeeded.  Sexton almost dies in a car crash, almost ruins his future in journalism school getting arrested, and more than once puts the barrel of a gun in his mouth and fingers the trigger (spoiler: he has lived to write the book).

He watches his father change from ordinary asshole to dangerously unhinged Fox-viewing conspiracy monger, to fatal illness stemming from drinking, stress, and believing that only pussies go to the doctor, to, at the end, showing his long-repressed soft side, regretting his life choices and admitting to his son Jared that the whole patriarchy thing was bullshit.

And among that---the things that made the news during that period. The shootings and other murders by white men who were told that the American Dream belonged to them, and who lashed out murderously when they didn't get rich or laid fast enough to suit them. the ones who openly see the rise of the Republicans as an affirmation of their freedom to assert dominance over POC, over women, over nerds and liberals and anyone who doesn't conform to their rigid gender and sexuality roles.

They are dangerous.  That is still news to some.  

And yes, all men, including me, and if you're a man and honest with yourself, you too.  We all have the poison in us to some degree, but we can reduce it, see it for what it is, and choose differently, one day at a time. we can work to make a society in which we don't have to be toxic, and where we can get help in realizing our full potential as whole human beings.  the end of the book, where Sexton describes what men need to do and how to do it, is the best, most worthwhile part of the book.  Very highest recommendations.

Irish Bull: Mr. Dooley at his Very Best, by Finley Peter Dunne

In England a man is presoomed to be innocent till he's proved guilty, an' they take it f'r granted he's guilty. In this counthry a man is presoomed to be guilty ontil he's proved guilty an' after that he's presoomed to be innocent.....Th' prisoner is hauled in in chains an' th' judge, afther exprissin' his disloike iv his face with a look iv scorn, says "Murtherer, ye are entitled to a fair thrile. Ar-re ye guilty or not guilty?  Not guilty ye say? I thought ye wud. That's what th' likes iv ye always say. Well, I'll have this disagreeable business over with in a hurry.  I'll allow th' prosecution three hours to show ye up an' th' definse can have th' rest iv th' morning. Wake me up whin th' evidence is all in." And about Noon his honor is woke be a note from th' jury askin' how long they ar-re goin' to be kept fr'm their dinner.  He hauls th' black cap out iv th' bandbox an' puttin' it on over his wig he says, "Pris'ner at th' bar, it is now me lawful jooty to lave ye'er fate to a British jury. I will not attempt to infloonce them in anny way, i will not take th' time to brush away th' foolish ividence put in ye'er definse. Ye'er lawyers have done as well as they cud with nawthin' to go on. If anny of th' jury believe ye innocent let thim retire to their room and didcuss th' matther over a meal iv bread an' wather while th' chops burn on th' kitchen stove an' their clerks ar-re distributin' groceries free to th' neighborhood."

Another amazing collection of Mr. Dooley columns, for all I know the earliest set of American syndicated columns that they bothered to collect and publish in book form, and, it seems to me, deserving of a much more prominent place in the American canon than it has. possibly because the thick Irish brogue imitated in the writing is such a challenge to read.

Like all sets of short pieces, it has a wide range of value.  Some columns, like the criminal trial quoted above, are among the finest satire  I've ever seen; some are too dull to justify piecing through the dialect, and some are downright racist (content note for frequent use of n-words and other offensive epithets).  Taken as a whole, it sparkles.

Siding With Thanos: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, by Sigmund Freud

The facts that led us to believe in the dominion of the pleasure-principle in psychic life also find their expression in the assumption that it is an endeavor of the mental apparatus to keep the quantity of excitement in it as low as possible, or at least constant. It is the same thing, only brought into a different form, for if the work of the psychic apparatus is to keep the quantity of excitement low, then everything which it is capable of increasing must be felt to be dysfunctional, that is, unpleasant. The pleasure principle derives from the principle of constancy; in fact, the principle of constancy was deduced from the facts which forced us to accept the pleasure principle. At a more detailed discussion, we will also find Fechner 's principle subordinated to the tendency to stability , to which he has related the pleasure-unpleasure sensations.

Another tract by Freud emphasizing the idea that people's tendency to fuck up their lives (the primary basic argument against the assertion that humans seek pleasure and seek to avoid pain) are driven by a subconscious desire for drama, or chaos, or sensation of even pain as an alternative to dull ennui, or even death--in other words, that there is a psychological "payoff" in doing things that cause one to suffer.  I guess Dostoevsky, for one, agrees.

The whole discussion of death-wishes ("thanatos") and self-sabotage that is actually willed by some part of our fucked up minds made me painfully aware of my own psychological imperfections, the stuff I drink to get away from.  It made me wonder how the human race ever made it to the advanced stages, and to what extent people's superegos wanted Trump as punishment for their own sins.

Thinking it Through: Science and Hypothesis, by Henri Poincare

When a physicist finds a contradiction between two theories which are equally dear to him, he sometimes says: “Let us not be troubled, but let us hold fast to the two ends of the chain, lest we lose the intermediate links.” This argument of the embarrassed theologian would be ridiculous if we were to attribute to physical theories the interpretation given them by the man of the world. In case of contradiction one of them at least should be considered false. But this is no longer the case if we only seek in them what should be sought. It is quite possible that they both express true relations, and that the contradictions only exist in the images we have formed to ourselves of reality.

This is the first entry in the Great Books "20th Century Science" volume.  In the edition I read, the most fascinating part is the introduction describing who Poincare was:  allegedly the VERY LAST person to learn "all that there is to know" before the body of human knowledge became too great for one person to grok it all. He went from maths to physics to biology to philosophy like a food connoisseur at a five star all-you-can-eat buffet.

And his representative work is a great piece in generalism, even though it seems to be the scientific equivalent of Zeno's silly theorems (Science is not really knowable; it's just that every experiment, the results of which, are consistent with you theory, brings you some proportion of the remaining way towards truth)...which may actually be the case; nevertheless, we persist. 

Making Black Lives Matter: Chokehold, by Paul Butler

The Chokehold means that what happens in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, where the police routinely harrass and discriminate against African Americans--is not a flaw in the criminal justice system. ferguson and Baltimore are examples of how the system is SUPPOSED to work. The problem is not bad apple cops. The problem is police work itself.  American cops are the enforcers of a criminal justice regime that targets black men and sets them up to fail.

The Chokehold is how the police get away with shooting unarmed black people. Cops are rarely prosecuted because they are, literally, doing their jobs. This is why efforts to fix "problems" like excessive force and racial profiling are doomed to fail.  If it's not broke, you can't fix it. Police violence and selective enforcement are not so much flaws in the criminal justice system as they are integral features of it.  The Chokehold is why, literally speaking, black lives don't matter as much as white lives.

Butler is a former prosecutor in an environment where the State's priority was to seek rehabilitative sentences when the defendant was white, and to make an example of him if he was black.  And one of the inconvenient truths he has to tell us is that black men are better off when stopped by a white officer than a black one. Because, according to Butler, black cops (and prosecutors) are under pressure to prove which side they are on, and are often more harsh on people who look like them than white cops are.  And, knowing how too many white cops act with immediate excessive force, even deadly force, that's quite an indictment.

Butler's larger statement here is that the criminal "justice" system is working exactly as intended, and no reform short of abolishing prisons is going to meaningfully change anything.   The United States' mission is to make black men into a threat, and to then stop the "threat" with selective law enforcement, profile stops, unnecessary force, and harsh sentences.  When a black man is shot by a cop, that is what the cop has been paid to do.  

And yes, the book is specific to black men, and aware.  In the prologue and epilogue, Butler identifies and acknowledges ways in which other marginalized groups get targeted in different types of oppression that should be addressed in different books. The Chokehold, however, is specific.

E Pluribus Unum: The Principle of Individuality and Value, by Bernard Bosanquet

It is admitted that external action involves psycho-physical systems or "dispositions" which being started by their normal stimulus run down like clockwork to a habitual end. And it is common ground that so far as mental operations of this kind are concerned there is no final impossibility in their being translated into physiological terms. But it is urged that, so to speak, on top of these, a mind thus organised and habituated, the nature of purpose forces us to superadd a power of a wholly different order, by which new activities are freely generated in view of new experiences, the process remaining for certain phases independent of the physical series, and resuming relations with it at some further point.

Bosanquet sort of rang an alarm clock that caused me to suddenly grok a bit that has been in many earlier philosophical tracts that I had ignored out of boredom with dissertations about "the one and the many" that had seemed like meaningless navel gazing to me.  Rephrase it in terms of groups of people and the individual's role in a community, and it suddenly becomes interesting to anyone who has wanted to make societies and government by common consent work in an environment where quirky individualists, anarchists, libertarians, and assholes don't want to be told what to do.  

Bosanquet's thesis is that, yes, there is a big ineffable plan that we're supposed to be fulfilling, but that the plan (which one would think he'd say we had a duty to search out and fulfill) is less important than individuality.  On the other hand, the inherent value of a person (to others, or to the community) is dependent on that person's cooperation with the goal of the universe (which is a fancy way of saying you're worth more to society if you don't rock the boat).  It may be that the "Absolute"  or "God" is the sum of all conscious minds working together to become one.

I'm not sure I'm sold on it, but it fascinated me, which is more than i can say for a lot of philosophy.

Mathematical Pragmatism: Chance, Love and Logic, by Charles Sanders Pierce

Just as if a man, being seized with the conviction that paper was a good material to make things of, were to go to work to build a papier mache house, with roof of roofing paper, foundations of pasteboard, windows of parafinned paper, chimneys, bath thubs, locks, etc., all of different forms of paper, his experiment would probably afford valuable lessons to builders, while it would certainly make a detestable house, so those one-idea'd philosophies are exceedingly interesting and instructive, and yet are quite unsound.

And this one I'm not sure I got. Pierce was a contemporary, even a mentor maybe, to William James, who credits him with introducing him to "pragmatism"; yet his works were published much later. his other work that I have on my list is his "collected papers", which were arranged and printed some time after his death.

Whereas James speaks of pragmatism in terms of accepting a premise if doing so will bring positive results and it is at least as likely to be true as any competing theory---and emphasizes results--Pierce emphasizes likelihood of truth, and has several chapters about chance and probability, with complicated equations for determining the likelihood of, you know, dice throws, or turning up a red card.  If there is a way that that degree of mathematical calculation can be applied to such questions as which Gods, if any, exist, or which is the best form of government, I missed it

As for the "love" part of the title, that doesn't get addressed until the end of the book, where it contrasts heartless Darwinism and cold economic theory of human interactions with "creative evolution" and the use of heart and mind in planning a good society.

Parallel Lives: The Old Wives' Tale, by Arnold Bennet
With the profound, instinctive cruelty of youth, Constance and Sophia had assembled in their favourite haunt, the show-room, expressly to deride Maggie in her new clothes. They obscurely thought that a woman so ugly and soiled as Maggie was had no right to possess new clothes. Even her desire to take the air of a Thursday afternoon seemed to them unnatural and somewhat reprehensible. Why should she want to stir out of her kitchen? As for her tender yearnings, they positively grudged these to Maggie. That Maggie should give rein to chaste passion was more than grotesque; it was offensive and wicked. But let it not for an instant be doubted that they were nice, kind-hearted, well-behaved, and delightful girls! Because they were. They were not angels.

I'm amazed that this great tale existed without me ever knowing of it until this year.  It belongs right up there with the classics of Austen, the Brontes, and Balzac, and yet few people have heard of it, or, at least they do not discuss it around me or write about it in pieces that I read. But then, if I'd heard of all of the great classics, I'd have read them long ago.  With gaps in one's education, one gets to keep making discoveries well into middle age, and that's worth something.

The Old Wives' Tale is the story of two sisters: the shy, conservative Constance, who lives up to the expectations of elders; and the bold, liberal Sophia, whose field of fucks to give lies fallow.  And of their lives from childhood in the 1850s or so until old age and death in the early 20th Century; their parents, husbands and children, and the rural town in England that does not want to change, but has change thrust upon it nonetheless.

In the four major sections of the book, first the freshness, exuberance and thoughtlessness of young girlhood gives way to forced maturity and hardship; then there is a separation and we see Constance's path and then Sophia's; and then they are reunited in their old age, every line on their faces telling a story.  It is both universal and peculiar to their identities and times.  I was enthralled and think you may be too.  Very highest recommendations.

Prelude to Revolution, Mother, by Maxim Gorky
"The people are beginning to boil. Every now and then some disorder crops out. Yes! Last night the cossacks came to our neighbors, and kept up an ado till morning, and in the morning they led away a blacksmith. It's said they'll take him to the river at night and drown him. And the blacksmith--well, he was a wise man--he understood a great deal--and to understand, it seems, is forbidden. He used to come to us and say, "What sort of life is the cabman's life?"'It's true', we say. 'The life of a cabman is worse than a dog's.'"

Interestingly, this book--told as a simple fable about an old country woman (known as "Mother" in her village similarly to the way an old woman in an American village might be called "Auntie" by familiars who are not actually related to her)  in Russia who comes to join the communist resistance to the Tsar after witnessing oppression--came out right about the time the American book The Jungle, about a similar decision made by an immigrant from Eastern Europe in Chicago.  The two works are bookends to the same universal tale of tyranny in governments that serve only the interests of the rich, as told by those who are made to have less so that the rich may have more.  

It's a simple tale, but not for the squeamish.  There are descriptions of brutal beatings, arrests, and show trials, from which Gorky sometimes steps, Brecht-like, away to gesture and say "See?" Where Jurgis survives his ordeals in Chicago, Mother is not so lucky. The final moments of Mother describe the protagonist being beaten to death in the street by our friends the police, who keep the streets safe from the likes of her, for us.

Harvard Classics: The Story of a White Blackbird, by Alfred de Musset

“Very well!” I cried, indignant at my father’s injustice, “if that is how you feel, so be it! I will take my departure, I will relieve you of the sight of my unfortunate white tail by which you pull me about all day. I will leave you, Sir, I will fly; there will be enough other children to comfort you in your old age, since my mother lays three times a year; I will go far away and hide my misery from you, and perhaps,” I added sobbing, “perhaps I shall find, in our neighbor’s garden or in the gutters, some worms or spiders wherewith to support my sad existence.”
“As you please,” replied my father, who was not at all propitiated by my words. “Only let me see no more of you! You are no son of mine; you are no blackbird.”

a French Emo story, simply told.  The blackbird is born with white feathers and is thereby made (or makes himself) an outcast.  Nobody understands him!  Nevertheless, he persists. He will make his own song, knowing that it is the BEST song, no matter what the other birds think.  So there.  He will be reviled and thwarted and take pride in it all his life.  On the other hand, he just might have real talent.  Almost certainly autobiographical.

Science the Hell Out of It:  Scientific Autobiography, by Max Planck
I have satisfied my inner need for bearing witness, as fully as possible, both to the results of my scientific labors and to my gradually crystallized attitude toward general questions--such as the meaning of exact science, its relationship to religion, the connection between causality and free will--by always complying willingly with the ever increasing numbers of invitations to deliver lectures before academies, Universities, learned societies, and before the general public, and these lectures have been the source of many a valuable personal stimulation which i shall gratefully cherish in loving memory for the rest of my life.

This one was in the Great Books' 20th century science volume, and I'm not sure why.  It's less than 50 pages long, and is one of the most uninspiring autobiographies I've read.  It contains little about Planck's life, and even less about his contributions to quantum physics.  He does talk about his basic education, name-drops a few major scientists who peer-reviewed his work, and is disappointed that the powers of Europe were so inconsiderate as to allow his research to be disrupted by going to war.  He enlightens the reader with such gems as "And then i discovered the law of black body radiation", without explaining what that is.  

You'll learn more about him from his wikipedia page.

Does Anybody Poincare?  the Foundations of Science, by Henri Poincare

What is chance?  The ancients distinguished between phenomena seemingly obeying harmonious laws, established once for all, and those which they attributed to chance; these were the ones unpredictable because rebellious to all law.

I had thought this was a new book; it actually includes Science and Hypothesis, which i read in July, and two other survey works, The Value of Science and Science and Method, which give general descriptions of advances in mathematics, physics, probability and astronomy that, depressingly, were considered helpful to lay readers back in the day but seem very dense to me today.  There has been so very much dumbing down of the field since his day.

I've noticed a trend at the turn of the century in science and secular philosophy (Poincare, Planck, James, Santayana, Boquanset), possibly in reaction to earlier Darwinists who denounced religion as idiotic superstitions, asserting that no, science and philosophical reason do not conflict with the belief in a God, provided said God is vast enough and ineffable enough to defy human measurement, and provided that said belief gives useful comfort and inspiration to the human mind without leading it away from common sense.  These thinkers were hopefully no longer saying these things under the threat of Inquisitoial torture (though with the scopes monkey trial still to come, one never knows), and so perhaps they were either trying to reassure a public longing for spiritual comfort, or they were religious themselves for form's sake.

The Post-Modern Prometheus: Stronger, Faster and More Beautiful, by  Arwen Elys Dayton

"You're missing the whole point! You've changed your mind now because someone you loved died. But--but--kids in hospitals, that little girl in Tshikapa--they've been dying all along. You made us protest removing diseases, making their lives better. You drove them to attack us. You and Mamma kept that hole in Teddy's heart. You told him he needed that hole because that was how extra love got in and out!" They had said that, and Teddy had proudly repeated it to others. "But now it's YOUR loss that bothers you."

With great advances in longevity, genetic engineering, biotechnology promising a great new world of human potential, comes the vital question: What ways will humanity find to fuck up everything this time?

Dayton's book answers that question in a variety of ways.  Using a format similar to Asimov's I, Robot, she tells us a linear series of self-contained yet interlocking stories beginning not too long from now and ending in the far future.

Each story is centered on a child or teen who is given the new technology--a life-saving operation, an improved body...and with the new technology comes new bigotry, new hate crimes, new slavery and new war.  because this is who we are.  High recommendations, but it will break your heart.

Envy is ignorance; Imitation suicide: A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather
”My philosophy is that what you think of and plan for day by day, in spite of yourself, so to speak—you will get. You will get it more or less. That is, unless you are one of those people who get nothing in this world. There are such people. I have lived too much in mining works and construction camps not to know that...If you are not one of those, you will accomplish what you dream of most. Because a thing that is dreamed of in the way I mean, is already an accomplished fact. All our great West has been developed from such dreams; the homesteader’s, and the prospector’s and the contractor’s. We dreamed the railroads across the mountains, just as I dreamed my place on the Sweet Water. All these things will be everyday facts to the coming generation, but to us—“ Captain Forrester ended with a sort of grunt. Something forbidding had come into his voice, the lonely, defiant note that is so often heard in the voices of old Indians.

I saved this one for late in my Cather reading list because it's the one selected for inclusion in the Great Books set...and I've decided they selected this one in particular because it is short.  I mean, it's nice, but nothing like the much longer and more famous My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop.

I’m starting to really like Willa Cather. It seemed to me that Mrs. Forrester, the main character, could well have been Alexandra Bergson from Cather’s O Pioneers, a little later in time, while the prairie is transitioning from wild frontier to speed bump on the railroad between the seas, and both the prairie and the capable frontierswoman become the worse for wear. It’s not exactly ose so much as lightly sad, as we watch a model of grace and class become overwhelmed by changing American values and sacrifice what makes her great on the inside, in order to get by in the world. It’s hard to tell whether she comes down in the world because she sacrifices her values, or the other way around—but who cares; it’s a good tale is all.

Racism 101: So You Want To Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo
When I asked a group of people of color what they feared most when talking about racism, their number one concern was retaliation. One friend knows of at least two websites dedicated to smearing her because she called a white woman's language racist. One friend was fired from a job after a Facebook argument in which she said an associate was acting racist. One friend was subject to a months-long campaign to turn her community against her after stating that someone's actions were insensitive to people of color. Countless friends have had emails sent to their employers and educators by white people incensed that someone would insinuate that their actions are racist.

White people trying to figure out how to be a better, nonracist person need to read this.  So do people of color trying to find their voice to speak out, or to not offend marginalized races other than their own.  Oluo manages to address both groups at once.

The chapter titles are a handy menu to look up what questions you have at any given moment.  "What is intersectionality?""What is cultural appropriation?" "Why can't I say the N-word?""Why can't I touch your hair?""But what if I hate Al Sharpton?"

In most chapters, the answers begin with a true story from Oluo's life: Going to a place called the "African Lounge" looking for authentic African cuisine, only to find a burger joint with fake zebra-skin chairs and wall decorations of Zulus with spears.  Her brother targeted with over the top discipline for little shit at school, permanently impacting the love of learning he'd always had as a kid.  Tone-policing online and off.  Microaggressions she endured all the damn time, and how that experience impacts how "one little thing" affects her.  

And for all that, and for all the discomfort it may cause in people who look like me, to be confronted with the price other people pay for my privilege, it is not a preachy book.  For people who look like me, it's a chance to walk a bit in someone else's shoes, the better to empathize with their experience and to work for a better, fairer, more just world.  Highly recommended.

 Going to the Races: Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And other conversations about race, by Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD

In his first public statements, Sharpton's rhetoric was critical of some of the protesters, urging them to contain their anger and using terms like "gangster" and "thug" to describe them. In Ferguson, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and other established civil rights leaders were rejected as part of a generation out of touch with young people's struggles. Dontey Carter, a young Ferguson activist, said of the older leaders, "I feel in my heart that they failed us. They're the reason things are like this now. They don't represent us. That's why we're here for a new movement. And we have some warriors out here."

This is a 20th anniversary revised edition of a book first published in 1997 (new edition published 2017, with just enough time before it hit the press to comment on the Republican "Muslim Travel Ban" going into effect), and the lengthy prologue is the most riveting part: Tatum's message is that there is virtually NO good news. Other than the history-making Obama Presidency, every aspect of race relations in America has become considerably worse than it was just three years after the Crackdown On Civil Rights (called Clinton's Violent Crime bill by some).  And if the book had come out two years later, it would be worse yet.

Seems to me, the police violence, vote suppression, BBQ Becky incidents and staggering racial inequality in criminal sentencing have been with us for decades; the difference is that it is now being captured on camera and publicized on social media (the regular media having become the propaganda wing of the Republican Party ever since the Fairness doctrine was abolished) so that it can no longer be just pushed under the rug.  My hypothesis is that we will see a lot more of this before we eventually see much less.

The original edition that follows reads like a textbook on how black and white racial identities develop, and what must happen for these identities to become healthier.  A long chapter near the end gives a survey of Latinx, Native, Asian and Middle East/North African racial issues, but the main focus is on black people, white people, and routes toward understanding, forgiveness, healing and making a more perfect union among ALL of "we the people".  Highly recommended.

Birth of a Genre: The Bret Harte Reader
Besides Mr. oakhurst, who was known to be a coolly desperate man, and for whose intimidation the armed escort was intended, the expatriated party consisted of a young woman familiarly known as "The Duchess", another who had won the title of "Mother Shipton", and "Uncle Billy", a suspected sluice-robber and confirmed drunkard. The cavalcade provoked no comments from the spectators, nor was any word uttered by the escort. Only, when the gulch which marked the outermost limit of Poker Flat was reached, the leader spoke briefly and to the point. The exiles were forbidden to return at the peril of their lives.

--"The Outcasts of Poker Flat"

As far as I can tell, Harte wrote the first "westerns"; Owen Wister and Louis L'amour, and even Twain and Bierce were clearly influenced heavily by the tales herein. 

The general theme involves rough, unhewn men on the frontier, finding grace in the strangest places in a part of the world governed by forces larger than human civilization.  There is a lot of wry humor, and usually something sublime that packs a wallop.  

On the other hand, Harte was apparently racist as fuck, and his descriptions of especially the "heathen Chinee", who is reduced to a wily, inscrutable trickster, both offensively subhuman and infuriatingly likely to trick you (because Chinese = no morals) are horrible by today's standards.  See also, debunking the "noble savage" trope by asserting that NA are merely "savage".  The introduction to this 2001 collection asserts that the poem "Plain Language From Truthful James" was one of the most famous American poems of the 19th century.  Thankfully, I'd never heard of it before encountering this book, and hopefully you haven't either.

The stories are generally worth reading.  The racism appears most prominently in the poems and the nonfiction essays farther in.

My Heroine Addiction: This Fight is Our Fight, by Elizabeth Warren

Housing discrimination isn't the only way systemic racism pulls black and Latino families down.  Discrimination has been thoroughly documented in criminal justice, in employment, in education, in auto lending, in access to bankruptcy relief and in health care--even in access to stores that sell fresh produce. The cumulative impact of decade after decade of discrimination becomes painfully obvious in just a handfull of economic snapshots:

Among those who work full time, African-Americans earn 59 cents and Latinos 70 cents for every dollar earned by whites.

For each dollar a college degree adds to the income of a black or Latino graduate, the same degree adds about $11 to $13 for whites.

Compared to whites, African Americans are 80 percent more likely to be unemployed. For Latinos, that figure is 37 percent.

compared to white families, black families are 68 percent more likely and Latino families twice as likely, to have nothing in retirement savings.

I fanboy-squee for Elizabeth Warren, and this book is part of the reason why.  She just makes so much sense.  From a point by point exposure of the ways in which big corporations are fucking America over, to her plan to do something about it and give regular people a shot at the American dream, like she had in the 1960s when America cared about investing in our (white) youth, to examples from her tweet game, this is who Warren is and where she wants to bring us.  I close my eyes, and I'm THERE!

Along the way are the true stories of many people whom Warren has met along the campaign trail, who have been failed by the Republican America that has replaced the land of opportunity she once knew.  People Who had a fair chance, until people voted Republican and the companies that paid the middle class a wage that allowed them home ownership, health insurance, a chance to save for retirement and to get education, transferred operations to a foreign country, getting subsidies from our tax dollars to do so.  Or the companies "reorganized" and paid their full time workers "gig" rates or part time hours, and rearranged their schedules with notice of only a few days, limiting their ability to even plan for time off.  Or disreputable degree mills charged through the nose for worthless pieces of paper and actual universities raised their tuition to the point where the young sign up for a lifetime of debt where there used to be grants.  Often, the ability to get credit ran out before the credits needed to graduate could be had, and students ended up with no degree and no future.  After doing everything right.

DID YOU KNOW?--When Elizabeth Warren wanted to go to college, her mother hit her in the face and asked her why she needed to be better than the rest of her family. Nevertheless, she persisted, And got a full scholarship to GWU.

Blunt force Trauma: The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel Van der Kolk

Having been frequently ignored or abandoned leaves them clinging and needy, even with the people who have abused them. Having been chronically beaten, molested, and otherwise mistreated, they cannot help but define themselves as defective and worthless. They come by their self-loathing, sense of defectiveness, and worthlessness honestly. Was it any surprise that they didn't trust anyone? Finally, the combination of feeling fundamentally despicable and overreacting to slight frustrations makes it difficult for them to make friends.

This is a book about various therapeutic approaches to recovery from PTSD, especially from repressed memory of childhood trauma. It is good and it has useful information and it was recommended to me for personal reasons and is quite triggering, and I recommend it.  And that's pretty much all I feel like saying right now.

Philosophy Digest: The Nature of Truth, by Harold Henry Joachim;  Our Knowledge of the External World. by Bertrand Russell;  The Life of Reason, by George Santayana

There are no such things as "illusions of sense." Objects of sense, even when they occur in dreams, are the most indubitably real objects known to us. What then makes us call them unreal in dreams? Merely the unusual nature of their connection with other objects of sense.

--Russell

The first period in the life of science was brilliant but ineffectual. The Greeks' energy and liberty were too soon spent, and this very exuberance of their genius made this expression chaotic. Where every mind was so fresh and every tongue so clever, no scientific tradition could arise, and no laborious applications could be made to test the realm of rival notions and decide between them. Men of science were mere philosophers. Each began, not where his predecessor had ended, but at the very beginning.

--Santayana

A theory of truth as coherence, if it is to be adequate, must be an intelligible account of the ultimate coherence in which the one significant whole is self-revealed, and it must show the lesser forms of experience, with their less complete forms of coherence, as essential constitutive moments in this self-revelation. Thus, it must render intelligible the dual nature of human experience, which a mere theory of knowledge and a theory of art or conduct assume as the fundamental character of the subject-matter which they have respectively to study.

--Joachim

Three books of varying difficulty and value.  I'll start with Harold henry Joachim, whose text reads like am undergrad's philosophy essay, and I'll have to leave it to people who know the subject better than I do to explain why it's considered relevant. He basically talks about objective reality in terms of 'coherence", meaning that simple truths like "this box is red" don't count as real truth because they don't fit into a coherent whole, by which he means--I think--something that important white men will agree is important.  And then he ends by claiming to have merely proved what truth ISN'T. And at least has the grace to apologize.

Russell's thin volume makes me glad I've progressed through history to the point where I can read Russell. he makes SENSE to me and speaks conversationally, not like a pedantic lecturer.  Russell claims to be pioneering a revolutionary new approach to epistemology by subjecting it to--gasp!--logical analysis, which has never been tried before!

I admit to being VERY skeptical of anyone who says that something allegedly revolutionary is "just simple reason"---but what Russell puts his technique into effect by disproving the old Zeno problems about how Achilles will never catch up to the tortoise or how a spear that has just been thrown must be at rest--just by introducing the concept of continuity, which I guess hadn't been mentioned by the Big Brains of the past--well, maybe he's got something.

Santayana also claims to just be about simple reason.  I realized early on that it isn't Santayana's--or Russell's--fault; I've just come to have an instinctive revulsion to assertions that such-and-such follows from "reason", because it's been so frequently said (decades after both philosophers died) by fools on the Internet who assert bullshit as "reason" while actually asserting facts not in evidence or appealing to superstition, prejudice, or the urge to ridicule.  Santayana does in fact argue AGAINST this specifically, and the bulk of his five volumes (general reason, society, religion, art and science) involve applying 'reason' to facets of life that generally defy it.  Art, for example, is inherently self-justifying, and exists to delight the beholder.

Santayana and William James apparently had legendary comments-section type fights at Harvard, calling each other idiots on the subject of religion.  I'm not sure what the fuss was about.  It seemed to me that both James's pragmatism and Santayana's reason theory came to the same counterintuitive conclusion--giving religion a vote of confidence despite it relying entirely on faith and being almost by definition unprovable by logic.  Just the fact that it assists one in living a good life if one gains comfort and willpower by believing in  a good higher power and an afterlife  (and if you don't gain from such a belief, or cannot convince yourself that it's actually true, no reason to not just throw it out) is sufficient.  The rest is navel-gazing.

The History of the United States, by Henry Adams

Another super-long book that took me several months to finish.  I should have read it in an earlier year.  I was attracted by the idea of a history written at the beginning of the 20th century of our nation so far, before we'd even had either Roosevelt, the Depression, WWII, etc.  

I missed the fine print.  Adams wrote over 2,000 pages dealing ONLY with the 16 years of Jefferson and Madison's presidencies, with heavy emphasis on disagreements in DC (apparently, the people now known as the Democratic Party have ALWAYS managed to bicker and dither themselves into ineffective flailing, even when the opposition has been reduced to a rump party with no power. Democrats are their own opposition, and Republicans aren't even necessary); foreign relations, and the War of 1812.

Not sure about your education, but my three formal classes in American history (two of them in 8th and 11th grade) all skimmed over the War of 1812.  We got this vague bit about how we tried to invade Canada because something something garbanzo, our sailors being all impressed with the British navy, and something something burned down the White House, with the National Anthem, ensuing.  It took me until now to learn that the war lasted much longer than just 1812 and had as many exciting and important battles as the US Civil War, from Fort Detroit to Niagra Falls and Lake Champlain, and naval engagements all over Lake Erie.

Also, except for the details of the Louisiana Purchase, almost all histories I've read about the early 19th century had either the new USA growing over here, or the Napoleonic era over there.  Adams' history is the first one I've read that goes into detail about those things happening at the same time, with details about how Napoleon's absorption of Germany, or his invasion of Russia, affected American relations with the English.

Adams' history, in short, filled a glaring gap in my knowledge of my own country, that I hadn't realized I'd had.  Very high recommendations.

Adopting to the Times: Motherhood So White, by Nefertiti Austin
White women controlled who could get away with "oops" pregnancies. This was evident when Bristol Palin became a mother at 18. The conservatives spun a tale of teenage mistakes and gave the young mother a pass. Black folks cried foul, knowing that if Sasha or Malia came up pregnant, the Obamas would have been shamed off the campaign trail. However, white society wasn't the only source of judgment. Black people were also guilty of judging single mothers at the grocery store, gas station, post office, and parent-teacher conferences, assuming they were irresponsible Black Welfare Mothers rather than a woman in love or the maker of an innocent mistake. Single Black mothers were marginalized on both sides, and motherhood, one of the universal female experiences, found itself caught between two worlds, one black, one white. Black people had their own set of religious and class beliefs, and strong feelings about bringing another nappy-headed baby with no daddy into the world. We had drunk the Kool-Aid poured by white people and believed an oops pregnancy brought the race's curve down. Would that be the assumption from whites and Blacks when my son and I strolled down the street or played at the park?

This is me, a white, married father of our biological children, leaving my lane to learn something about the very different experience of being a black woman adopting into single motherhood. The contrast between the framing of white single mothers as Murphy Brown "badasses" and of black single mothers as....shameful scammers of government benefits.  Warnings about what if the child turns out to be a "crack baby". The need for extra attention because her toddler's normal toddler behavior will be criminalized and eventually considered appropriate for police attention. Discrimination by teachers.  Most of all, the utter absence of references telling the story from a black woman's perspective.

So Austin wrote her own.
Austin lives in Beverly Hills, and has some privilege, but lacks other privilege.  There is humor, and anger, and pathos in her story. We see the lessons she learned from her own upbringing, the hardships and challenges unique to one in her position, and overwhelmingly, the joy of raising the child she loves. High recommendations.

The Edwardian Murders: Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk, by Boris Akunin; Under the Dragon's Tail, by Maureen Jennings

"The baby's crowning, we're almost done," said Dolly. Her words were soothing, but her thoughts were steeped in malice. "I know what's going on, my fine lady. You're hoping it will die, then nobody'll ever know. But it's going to live, all right. And I know. I know all about your sin."

--from Under the Dragon's Tail

Pelagia bowed humbly, as if acknowledging that the bishop had a perfect right to his wrath, but there was little humility in her voice, and even less in her words. "That is your limitation as a male speaking, your Grace. In their judgments, men rely too excessively on their sight and the other five senses."
"Four", Mitrofanii corrected her.
"No, your Grage, five. Not everything that exists in the world can be detected by sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. There is another sense that has no name, which is given to us so that we might feel God's world not only with our bodies but with our souls. And it is strange that I, a plain nun weak in mind and spirit, am obliged to explain this to you.  Have you not sspoken of this sense numerous times in your sermons and in private conversations?

--from Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk

If you like mysteries, I recommend both of these writers.  Even if you don't like mysteries but enjoy high literature that happens to involve solving a crime  (like Umberto Eco), I particularly recommend Akunin, who manages to take what is essentially a Scooby Doo story involving intruders being scared away from the spooky old hermitage by appearances of what is supposed to be the legendary ghost that haunts it---and infuses it with Dostoevskian surrealism, Checkovian character subtlety, and Chestertonian religious insights.  All wrapped up by the reverent/irreverent nun who used to be a gymnastics instructor and who would certainly not take actual delight in confounding secular villains and uptight, sexist clergy alike, no never. That would be improper.

Maureen Jennings writes in the world of 1900-era Toronto, which might as well be 1900-era Liverpool or any other English workers' city waiting to burst into population for all this American can tell. The people are conservative and prudish, except the ones they make into outcasts, and the detective is an amiable middling fish in a small pond, who manages to stay just within his depth. Jennings' first novel, Except the Dying (the titles are all Shakespeare lines) apparently won great acclaim, but my local library has lost its copy.

Simply Walking into Mordor: The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer

  In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.

This is one of two mammoth works that kept the dull times off all year.  Twelve full volumes (I read one each month, and was relieved to discover that the 12th volume was all index and bibliography) of early 20th century anthropology, going from Scotland to New Guinea, from Zululand to Alaska and from Patagonia to Nepal, and pretty much everywhere in between, all ostensibly to discover why an ancient priesthood would kill its existing elder, but only after stealing the golden bough from the sacred tree he guarded.

(I myself would have asked, "If the way to attain this priesthood is by killing the existing elder, what kind of schmuck would seek that job in the first place?"  But I'm irreverent that way.)

From this riddle springs a huge panoply of myths and legends involving death and rebirth, scapegoating and ritual sacrifice, sympathetic magic, harvest magic and witch-smelling, endless parades of weddings and ceremonial funerals, menageries of holy critters, mountains of fetish objects and rivers of menstrual blood threatening to wither the crops. Fascinating are the similarities of beliefs and practices in far corners of an ancient globe.

Also fascinating and amusing is Frazer's repeated protest-too-much insistence that he doesn't really believe all this bullshit; it's set forth for anthropological value only.  And further, how he goes out of his way to distinguish "primitive superstition" from "religion", which is, of course, true.  This despite the central legends of a king who dies and is reborn to cleanse the village from defilement. I mean what kind of backwards culture would believe something like that, eh?  Oh, right....and yes, some of the primitive taboos are straight out of Leviticus.

I was impressed and fascinated, from the opening to the point where Frazer pulls off the ghostly witch doctor mask and reveals--Balder, the legendary Nordic God who was immune from everything but mistletoe, and who would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for that meddling Loki.  But after eleven volumes, I was more than glad to call it a study and move on.

Open Doors: Beneath a Sugar Sky; In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire

Let's be fair here," said Kade. "If my son came back from a journey to a magical land and told me straight up that he wanted to marry a woman who didn't have any internal organs, I'd probably spend some time trying to find a way to spin it so that he wasn't saying that."M/i>

"Oh, like you're attracted to girls because you think they have pretty kidneys," said Christopher.

Kade shrugged. "I like girls. Girls are beautiful. I like how they're soft and pretty and have skin and fatty deposits in all the places evolution has deemed appropriate. My favorite part, though, is how they have actual structural stability, on account of how they're not skeletons."

"Are all boys as weird as the two of you, or did I get really lucky?" asked Cora.

--from Beneath a Sugar Sky

Omigosh, Seanan is SO good and such a delight to read, especially when juxtaposed with so many dusty tomes from or about at least a century prior.
The two short novels I read here are from a relatively new series loosely about children who find doors into alternative, magical worlds, one world made entirely of confectionery and the other containing a Goblin Market that enforces "fair value" in all commerce.  There are plot spoilers in both books early on, and so I will not describe them further, but they both have my highest recommendations.  Especially In an Absent Dream, which is frighteningly real for a fantasy tale, not least because it makes so much economic sense.

30 Years Manumitted: Amos Fortune, Free Man, by Elizabeth Yates

Amos bowed respectfully as he had long ago been taught to do in the presence of any white man, but neither years, suffering, nor hard work could bow the proud carriage of his head. The constable acknowledged the greeting though he could have wished that, being a short man himself, he had not had to look up to the Negro.

I don't normally include the books I read aloud to my son in my bookposts, but this Newberry-winning children's biography of a man my history lessons had neglected to tell me existed is worth a note.  As my boy grows up and I read more significant books ti him, more of these may be included.

It begins a little like Roots, as the young At-Mun, son of an African king, is kidnapped and brought to America as a slave in 1725, and luckily purchased at auction by a kind Quaker in Boston, who renames him Amos Fortune and allows him to purchase his freedom. The majority of the book tells the true story of Fortune's subsequent learning of a trade, his journey to Jaffrey, NH, where his life as a successful tanner and landowner is now celebrated, and of how he worked to buy and free other slaves.  The story is told simply, for young minds, and skirts over the worst aspects of slavery, but it is matter of fact about race prejudice in the northern colonies. Some of the more moving parts deal with Fortune's domestic ups and downs with his wife and daughter.

Journeys into Hell: Inferno & Under Fire, by Henri Barbusse

And now I am looking at her. The evening gently removes the ugliness, wipes away the poverty and the horror, and, in spite of me, changes the dust into a shadow, like a curse into a blessing. Nothing is left of her but a color, a mist, a shape, not even that; a shiver and the beating of her heart. Of her, there is nothing left but herself.

It is because she is alone. By some astonishing, almost divine chance, she is really alone. She is in that innocence, that perfect purity, solitude.

I am violating her solitude with my eyes, but she knows nothing about it, and she isn't violated.

--from Inferno

The book jacket of Inferno boldly says that Barbusse (whom I'd not heard of before. Had you?), and not Proust, or Gide, or Maupassant, or Anatole France, was THE definitive voice of Paris in the early 20th Century.  I was skeptical.

Maybe it was range. The short books (each took me an hour on the treadmill to get through), while both very French, deal with different subjects in a similar way.  In Inferno, an ordinary colorless Everyman type finds a hole in his boarding house bedroom wall, and manages to waste even MORE of his own existence than before by becoming a full time voyeur and watching the people in the next room, who, unlike him, have the capacity for intense feelings. They converse, have passionate love, face approaching death...and the narrator suffers.  

He doesn't suffer as much as the Western Front WWI conscripts of Under Fire, which is very similar to the much more famous All Quiet on the Western Front. After a brief prologue of wealthy old men in the club, chuckling over the news that war has been declared and predicting it will be over in time for the seaside season, we see the young men fighting to keep those rich men in the lifestyles to which they are accustomed, slogging through endless mud and blood and barbed wire and corpses and unexploded shells and festive things like that, growing increasingly numb and disoriented and descending into madness, and then most of them get deaded and the war continues.

Philosophy Digest: Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, by Edmund Husserl; The Idea of the Holy, by Rudolf Otto

Every immament perception necessarily guarantees the existence of its object. If reflective apprehension is directed to my experience, I apprehend an absolute Self whose existence is, in principle, undeniable, that is, the insight that it does not exist is, in principle, impossible; it would be nonsense to maintain the possibility of an experience given in such a way not truly existing.

--Husserl

The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by any other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no farther, for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsic religious feelings.

--Otto

I probably should have followed Otto's advice and let his book's primary argument stand at "To he who knows, no answer is necessary; to he who doesn't know, no explanation is possible." But it's a short book, and I'd already checked it out, so whatever.  The Idea of the Holy amounts to a restatement of the "sublime" section of Kant's Critique of Judgment, updated to include post-Kant developments in psychology and anthropology.

It cheerfully presents religious comfort as grounded in sensing oneself as an insignificant nothing in the presence of a huge, overwhelming, terrible to behold entity.  #FearAndTrembling...to the extent that I have any religious experience at all, it comes from contemplating those few human beings I know who are so good as to make me partially convinced that they are guided by something supernaturally loving and beautiful, nearly the opposite of "sublime." I therefore find little of interest in what Otto has to say, other than as an example of the historical reaction in early 20th century philosophy against the excesses of Darwin, Spencer, and other reductions of humanity to scientific bundles of insignificant chemicals; branches of the intelligentsia became interested in souls again.

Even so, I got more from Otto than I got from Husserl, who is an example of that German school that takes pride in being as incomprehensible as possible, inventing new words like "Noesis" and "Noema" for (I think) "she who perceives" and "that which is perceived".  I don't claim to have grokked Husserl, but it seems to me he goes back to Descartes and a starting point of doubting all sensory input, suspending everything one knows, and deriving experience from pure thought.  It also seems to me that Husserl goes to an "astral plane" (without saying those words) in which abstract forms are more real and more experienced than those phantasms that silly non-philosophers consider "real".

Born at the Wrong Time: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams

True ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge can do, and in our case, ignorance is fortified  by a certain element of nineteenth century indifference which refuses to be interested in what it cannot understand; a violent reaction from the thirteenth century which cared little to comprehend anything except the incomprehensible.

--from Mont Saint Michel and Chartres

Poor Henry Adams.  Great grandson of John, grandson of John Quincy, son of Charles who was ambassador to England during the Civil War.  He was born into an old fashioned family at the end of Colonial cultural time, and lived to see the Industrial Revolution, which confused and frightened him so much that he retreated back into Colonial living, and ultimately sought refuge and comfort in Medieval Studies.  Mont Saint Michel and Chartres begins with descriptions and thoughts upon European church architecture and proceeds to interpret literature from the Song of Roland to (shudder) Thomas Aquinas--all favorably.  

The Education of Henry Adams, his third-person autobiography, emphasizes the soul-crushing experience of watching the world change too quickly to suit him, watching the wholesome world of farmers and country parsons give way to smoke-belching factories, profit-maximizing capitalists, and science that reduces man to monkey (compare and contrast with Rudolf Otto, above). By the time he gets to 1900, he might as well be Sarah Connor viewing the rise of the machines and the "multiplicity of forces" threatening to dwarf humankind into insignificance.  Like most historians, he is careful to wring his hands over declining moral standards and the corruption, ignorance and greed of new generations.

Tell me about your mother: Misc. works by Sigmund Freud

Scientific thought is till in its infancy; there are very many of the great problems with which it has been as yet unable to cope. A philosophy of life based upon science has, apart from the emphasis it lays upon the real world, essentially negative characteristics, such as that it limits itself to truth and rejects illusions.

---from New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

I've continued to read the works from the Freud volume of the Great Books of the Western World set (Since August, "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,""The Ego and the Id", "Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety",  and " New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis") without the inclination to say very much about them. Including these in bookposts every time for the first half of the year has me all Freuded out. Fortunately, we approach the end.

These later works include the famous division of the psyche into Id/Ego/Superego, but also veer away (mostly) from the usual obsession with sex and feces, exploring crowd psychology, the development of healthy coping mechanisms, a laughably ridiculous attempt at "the psychology of women" written by and for dudes (Omigosh, what are women thinking? It's so mysterious! There are no ways to find out at all!), and suggestions about a philosophy of life.  The part quoted above is one of the last lines in the entire first edition of the Great Books set.

The Psychology of Conservative Republicans: Civilization and its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud

The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living to-day, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions. One would like to mix among the ranks of the believers in order to meet these philosophers, who think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing him by an impersonal, shadowy and abstract principle, and to address them with the warning words: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. And if some of the great men of the past acted in the same way,

This is why I read Dead White Guys of the Western Canon--a lot of the time, what they had to say is still relevant.  I prefer Freud's later publications, as the earlier, sex-obsessed ones are almost a joke.  Only towards the end of his life did Freud really start to explore aggression and violence as a primal motivating force, and only somewhat earlier did he talk about the death-wish.  

The central theme of Civilization and Its Discontents (the title is also a really cool band name, but I digress) is that government and societal mores act as an external Superego, restraining people from the most base impulses (physically attacking annoying people, helping yourself to whatever you want, shitting whenever and wherever nature first calls, etc.), and that the loudest rebel forces are those who most resent controlling those impulses--currently, the violent, grabby, scatological, opioid-abusing dregs of society who are unable to create, and who therefore seek only to destroy.  In other words, Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

I'm old enough to remember when the raging, do-whatever-you want, stimulus-response forces of destruction were disrupting Universities, burning draft cards, and abusing different drugs, and were identified as "leftists"...and these were the same low-impulse control narcissists and nihilists who grew up to get everything they wanted, take over the government as "neoconservatives", and still continue to destroy and destroy again.  The underlying political ideology is just details.

Freud used the word "thanatos" to describe the urge to destroy, even at the expense of oneself.  Today we have a blockbuster movie villain with a similar name, who the political right tellingly considers a protagonist, at least of the first movie, if only the Snapture was not so random and could be directed to wipe out the "inferior" races and creeds.

Communication Problems: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

Giuliani's words cut through the argument and the room fell silent abruptly. His voice was very mild when he spoke again. "Emilio, is there any truth to these charges?"

Brother Edward, having spotted the whiteness around the eyes that signaled migraine, was already on the way to Sandoz, hoping to get him out of the room before the vomiting started. But he stopped and waited for Emilio to speak.

"It's all true, I suppose," Emilio said, but the roaring in his head made it hard now to hear his own voice. And then everyone was shouting again, so probably no one heard him say, "But it's all wrong."

I was inspired to read this gut-wrenching work by a friend who wrote a song based on it for one of the music conventions I go to.  All the Trigger Warnings apply. I can't be more specific without spoilers, for the real horror, though foreshadowed, does not take place until the final chapters, but they are painful beyond belief.

It is a story of first contact with an alien civilization, by Catholic missionaries similar to those who did what they did when Europe came to North America, only without (yet) the armed colonizers.  We learn early on that the mission has ended in some sort of major disaster and that the lone, shellshocked survivor who returns to Earth, generally known as a good man and described as a "saint" in dispatches previously sent by his colleagues, is believed to have committed dishonorable crimes and sins. The narrative shifts from the Fathers in AD 2060, trying to bring this wreck of a man to the point where he can talk about what happened, to the story that begins 40 years earlier, with the discovery of a signal from outer space.

The survivor is a language expert, and much of the narrative is about learning the intricacies of the alien language. There are clues in the language about the hidden, devastating truth, but even having been warned, I was unprepared for the climax, and you likely won't be either.  

High recommendations, with caution.

Infinite Narnias: Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
She sighed, taking her hand off the autopsy table. "Put her here. I want to look at ther before we dissolve her."

"Is this a creepy perv thing?" asked Christopher, as he and Nancy maneuvered the body through the lab. "I'm not sure I can stay to help if it's a creepy perv thing."

"I don't like corpses in that way unless they've been reanimated," said Jack. "Corpses are incapable of offering informed consent, and are hence no better than vibrators."

I had not realized until I'd read the other three books to date in this series, that this one existed to begin it all, and it's a credit to McGuire that the later ones made sense without it.  It brings together and introduces Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children and the characters who inhabit it, all of whom have discovered (been selected by?) doorways to one of many alternative worlds, and have returned...changed. Often longing to find their way back to that other world.  Almost always made into outcasts among their earthly peer groups.

Oh, right.  And then the youths in the Home begin to turn up murdered, and the protagonist, who is the new kid and from a death world, is immediately scapegoated.  Tragic hijinks ensue. Very high recommendations.

All Alone in the Moonlight: Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life,  the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.  I know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose masters instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays.  They may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives, they could publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done, but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We do not receive wisdom; we discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

Last month, I spoke of The Golden Bough as one of two mammoth works that kept me occupied for most of the year.  The other is Remembrance of Things Past.

Exhausted by the effort, I was tempted to just plagiarize Russell Baker's incredible review of the work, but I will be honest and just link to it. here:  https://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~hays/humor/crawling_up_everest.html

I had an advantage over Russell Baker.  There have been new and more interesting English translations of  Remembrance of Things Past since his day.  Some of them even change the title to the more eye-catching In Search of Lost Time, and one has a choice on the Kinsey Scale from "bowdlerized' to "PG-13" to "lurid".  the second volume, for instance, which deals with the narrator's entrance into puberty, can be translated as Within a Budding Grove, Among Young Girls in Flower, or Surrounded By Hot Bitchez Manifesting Their Vaginal superpowers!.  Similarly, the volume Baker knew only as Cities on the Plain is now available as Sodom and Gommorah or as Hot Gay Sex Explained by Baron de Charlus!

I had the further advantage of reading works by Proust's contemporary, Sigmund Freud at the same time, which gave me perspective on Proust's mommy issues, hypochondria issues, gay BDSM issues, and all the other neuroses that come up along the way.  Further, I'd been reading the history and other literature of the era and knew something about what the French who still remembered the loss of Alsace/Lorraine and who discussed the Dreyfus Affair over their cafe au lait were thinking.  

The duller parts included endless, endless soirees and gatherings among gilded hypocrites who snobbed out on social rank in ways and to extents that modern Americans who aren't currently in high school can't relate to at all.  Unless they're in Big Hollywood, I guess.  Or those parts of Dixie where they accept or snub you based on whether you're descended from some famous confederate general whose plantation claimed ownership of over 200 quivering souls.  Or Boston Brahmins, or--OK, I take it back.  Not my people, but they're everywhere, bringing in hungry artists, musicians and poets to humiliate while pretending to admire their work.

And eventually, after woolgathering and meandering around in fractal patterns, the memories come around again and work off of each other, kind of the way they do in my life and maybe yours, if you've lived long enough for your past to be a mushel of dreams like that.  I recommend it, but only if you're over 40 and have a lot of time to spare.

forbidden Pleasures; A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster

Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described. He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue. Tall and refined, with shoulders that seemed braced square by an effort of the will, and a head that was tilted a little higher than the usual level of vision, he resembled those fastidious saints who guard the portals of a French cathedral. Well educated, well endowed, and not deficient physically, he remained in the grip of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the medieval, with dimmer vision, worshiped as asceticism. A Gothic statue implies celibacy, just as a Greek statue implies fruition, and perhaps this was what Mr. Beebe meant. And Freddy, who ignored history and art, perhaps meant the same when he failed to imagine Cecil wearing another fellow’s cap.

Don't Look Now: Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann

He loved the sea for profound reasons: the desire to rest of the hard-working artist, who longed to hide from the sophisticated variety of appearances on the breast of the simple, monstrous; from a forbidden, just opposite of his task and therefore alluring temptation to the unorganized, immoderate, eternal, to nothing. To rest on perfection is the longing of those who strive for excellence; and is not nothing a form of perfection? How he now dreamed so deeply into space, suddenly the horizontal of the edge of the shore was overlapped by a human figure, and when he caught up with him and gathered his gaze out of the unlimited, it was the handsome boy who passed from the left in front of him in the sand. He walked barefoot, ready to wade, his slender legs barely above his knees, slowly, but as lightly and proudly as if he was used to moving without shoes, and looked around for the huts standing across. But he had scarcely noticed the Russian family, who lived there in grateful harmony, when a storm covered his face with angry contempt.

Okay, I need a clue here....An aging, dull writer with writer's block decides to go have a festive vacation in Venice...the city of canals turns out to be dreary and filthy and full of literary disease imagery, except that there's a freakishly beautiful teenage boy at the same hotel, who inspires creepy perv thoughts in the dull writer.  The two characters never talk to each other, not once, but the man stalks the boy, and then (SPOILER) a plague happens, and the man dies while watching the boy at the beach....

...and this is somehow considered one of the great works of European literature?  Important enough to include in the second edition of the Great Books set alongside Heart of Darkness and Saint Joan?

I mean...I see the parallels with Mann's much greater work The Magic Mountain, which I did understand (and which also features a dull everyman in a disease-ridden environment, and was one of my late father's favorite books, but  digress)...and I figure the Coen Brothers were suitably impressed with it to include several references to it in their movie Barton Fink, especially in the climactic ending on the beach....but for the book itself, I just don't get it.  It inspired me with...nothing plus nothing, carry the nothing...yeah, i got nothing.

At least Humbert Humbert gets to tell his sick story in the unreliable first person, with a lively sense of humanity that makes one's skin crawl if one finds him a little bit likable in spite of his pedophilia.  With the forgettable Aschenbach, we are told in the stolid Teutonic third person that "He felt passion".  Unlike Humbert, Aschenbach does not actually act on his passion, but this restraint is presented as some sort of moral failing in that he's too fuddy duddy to live, not that he's a motherfucking adult who won't fiddle with kids even when he gets pants-feels.

If you've read this and liked it, or seen literary merit, please tell me what I missed. 'Tis charity to teach.  Otherwise...not recommended.

Maths Philosophy Digest: Introduction to Mathematics, by Alfred North Whitehead; Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell

Our perception of the flow of time and of the succession of events is a chief example of the application of these ideas of quantity. We measure time (as has been said in considering periodicity) by the repetition of similar events—the burning of successive inches of a uniform candle, the rotation of the earth relatively to the fixed stars, the rotation of the hands of a clock are all examples of such repetitions. Events of these types take the place of the foot-rule in relation to lengths. It is not necessary to assume that events of any one of these types are exactly equal in duration at each recurrence. What is necessary is that a rule should be known which will enable us to express the relative durations of, say, two examples of some type. For example, we may if we like suppose that the rate of the earth’s rotation is decreasing, so that each day is longer than the preceding by some minute fraction of a second. Such a rule enables us to compare the length of any day with that of any other day. But what is essential is that one series of repetitions, such as successive days, should be taken as the standard series; and, if the various events of that series are not taken as of equal duration, that a rule should be stated which regulates the duration to be assigned to each day in terms of the duration of any other day. --Whitehead

Whitehead and Russell collaborated on a work, the Principia Mathematica, that I flipped through and put back on the library shelf, for reasons similar to those for which I stared at the Talmud and thought to myself, "Maybe for a different decade of study, all by itself".  Instead, I chose an introductory volume by each author, and was glad I did.

Russell's Introduction is a distillation of the Principia in English, without all the thick use of symbols.  What it lacks in detail, it makes up in accessibility.  And really, me reading Russell's mathematical philosophy is like reading Noam Chomsky's linguistic studies when one really can't wait to get into his later, political, work.

Whitehead's little Introduction, on the other hand, is a life-saver for any autodidact who wants to be grounded in math without being a math major or engineer or someone who needs this stuff in their day job.  It's included in the Great Books set, and really, I should have read it BEFORE tackling the math of Archimedes, Newton, and Descartes. Because Whitehead explains it like they don't.
I had a math teacher in high school whose favorite thing to say was "Are you showing your work? You should be showing your work." He was unable to answer questions, like the ones I had about trigonometry. "I see your equation for finding the sine and cosine, but what ARE those things? Here is a circle. I see the radius, and the diameter, and this is an arc. Now show me the cosine! What is it?" My teacher stammered out "It's...a ratio." Whitehead draws two concentric circles with an angle stemming from the center and a vertical line from the point at which the top ray of the angle meets the innermost circle, to the other ray of the angle, and shows us that what line divided by each other are the sine and cosine.  i wish my math teacher had done that. Very high recommendations for Whitehead.

Schooling the Bursar: The Higher Learning in America, by Thorstein Veblen

Under this rule, the academic staff becomes a body of graded subalterns, who share the confidence of the chief in varying degrees, but who have no decisive voice in the policy or the conduct of affairs of the concern in whose pay they are held. The faculty is conceived as a body of employees, hired to render certain services and turn out certain scheduled vendible results.

Veblen, the great American economist and professor, best known for The Theory of the Leisure Class, also wrote several lesser-known works, and after trying The Higher Learning in America, I intend to read more Veblen.  My God, the savage satire is AMAZING.

Or...not so much satire as telling the plain truth in ways that not only completely skewer the ridiculousness of the system in 1915 but also predict and explain the horrible shit going down in Academia today.  Vast expenditures on sports and architecture designed to impress rich visitors but that don't much impact the students and faculty who would prefer that the physical plant got some attention.  Bait-and-switch curricula supposedly taught by big-name celebrity profs but actually taught by adjuncts whose pay is calculated according to minimum daily caloric intake requirements of the adult human. Rich outsiders who lobby to have state revenue cut off from higher education and then "generously" offer to donate the difference provided their friends are hired to teach Atlas Shrugged as required reading, because failure to force-feed the young right wing conspiracy theories as fact would be "indoctrination".

Veblen saw all that coming, and he spoke truth to power.  By some uncanny coincidence, he shortly thereafter became unemployable as a professor despite his academic prestige and ended up going Thoreau in the wilderness of California.  Go figure.  

Ain't No Friends Here: I'm Still Here, by Austin Channing Brown

The death of hope gives way to a sadness that heals, to anger that inspires, to a wisdom that empowers me the next time i get to work, pick up my pen, join a march, tell my story.  The death of hope begins in fury, ferocious as a wildfire. It feels uncontrollable, disastrous at first, as if it will destroy everything in the vicinity--but in the middle of the fury, i am forced to find my center. What is left when hope is gone? What is left when the source of my hope has failed? Each death of hope has been painful and costly, but in the mourning there always rises a new clarity about the world, about the Church, about myself, about God.

I went looking for Austin Channing Brown's book after reading her online piece about how the Bush Recessions fucked up Generation-X, and black X-ers in particular.
Brown's parents named her Austin, ostensibly to honor her maternal grandmother's maiden name, but actually so that future employers would assume she was a white guy and not just throw her resume away without an interview.  The results began at age seven with a librarian assuming she must have stolen someone else's library card. And so it goes.
I must keep reading black voices until I get it.  Other voices speak of the days of slavery and Jim Crow; Brown concentrates on life in an era where white culture claims to value diversity and seeks to solve racism by having dialogues in which it is important to avoid blaming or seeming angry, and to express gratitude for having come this far and being allowed to be accepted as, sort of, people.

In one way, Brown is easier for me to understand because she's close to my age and going through the same world I am, with the differences very much highlighted.  In another way, she's more difficult because her life has been church-centered while mine has not, and so the parts about black churches (really, any churches) and relating her experiences to religious beliefs were especially hard for me to digest. Other people's mileage may vary.  High recommendations.  

The Edwardian Murders: Let Loose the Dogs; Vices of my Blood; Journeyman to Grief, by Maureen Jennings

I noticed he had an abrasion on his right cheek just below his eye. "Whats'a matter?" he asked, all slurred. "John Delaney's dead", i replied. I didn't say anything about an accident or how he was dead. I just said, "John Delaney's dead." That seemed to wake him up. "Well, he got what he deserved, didn't he?"...I realise my words were not charitable or Christian, but I was shocked by how callous he was. I said, "Then I hope you, too, get what you deserve, Harry Murdoch."

--from Let Loose the Dogs

Maureen Jennings grows on you.  The detection part is not a thing, as the culprit is either revealed at the beginning or the final clue comes late, and Detective Murdoch stumbles upon the truth by improbable coincidence.  The real strength of these books is in the well-drawn characters and the uncompromising depiction of conditions in need of reform. workhouses, dog fighting, sex workers, prison conditions, employment and unemployment.  If the 20th century saw some improvement in actual conditions, the attitudes that made the human misery of the innocents possible remains and threatens to bring the worst manifestations back.  Highly recommended as historical and topical.

Christmas Pratchett: Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett

"This is me asking you this. Is there any single page in this book, any recipe, which does not in some way relate to...goings on?"

Nanny Ogg, her face red as her apples, seemed to give this some lengthy consideration.

"Porridge", she said, eventually.

"Really?"

"Yes. Er, no. I tell a lie. It's got my special honey mixture in it."

Granny turned a page.
"What about this one. Maids of Honor?"
"Welllll, they starts out as Maids of Honor," said Nanny, fidgeting with her feet, "but they ends up Tarts."

Granny looked at the front cover again: The Joy Of Snacks".

Omigosh, I give myself the gift of Discworld for Christmas, and it hasn't failed to add to my holiday joy every time.  So much wit, so much surprising wisdom in the oddest places. It is not a safe place to be...but it's good.

The witches are among my favorite characters, and Maskerade centers around them.  It also sends up book publishing, the Phantom of the Opera, and the Scooby Doo trope.  I loved it. If you don't as well, I just don't get you.

And that's another year of reading done.  I finished the original Great Books set which started the urge to read through history; but there is a second edition with six volumes of 20th century selections, for me to round off the decade with in 2020.  See you then, and Happy New Year.

Historical Mystery: The Vanished Child, by Sarah Smith; Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel, by Boris Akunin; In the Shadow of Gotham, by Stefanie Pintoff

The doctor ran down the path, reached the house. Servants were coming downstairs, screaming and crying. William Knight was dead, shot dead, in the front room. A bloodbath, a shambles. Jay was gone. Richard Knight was downstairs, by his grandfather's body, deep in shock (Prepare to be astounded, my dear). The doctor asks the child, "Richard, did you see anything?" And what does Richard say?

"I won't tell." says Richard. I'll never tell.

Smith, Akunin, Pintoff.  Remember these names, because they write GOOD stuff, and not enough of it.  Akunin's was the last of three Sister Pelagias and six Fandorins.

Sarah Smith (quoted above) has an incredible first book, where the narrator is told to impersonate a missing heir and repudiate the inheritance so that surviving relatives can move on--but things become complicated in spoiler ways. I read a lot of these, but Vanished Child stands out as an unusually suspenseful page turner.  She wrote others, and I'm intrigued to see what happens in the next one.

Pintoff writes about 1900s NYC and surrounding areas. The character and atmosphere are wonderful, but the solution is a groaner.

First Dewey: Education and Experience 7 How We Think, by John Dewey

What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan. It is for this reason alone that I have emphasized the need for a sound philosophy of experience.
--from "Education and Experience"

Dewey and Bertrand Russell are the major philosophers I intend to read this year. Some of the big philosophy surveys (including Russell's) END with these two.

I know generally that Dewey (no relation to the guy who, according to the Chicago Tribune, defeated Truman) followed William James and was the father of the "progressive education" model that conservatives mock as "letting children run rampant through the schools doing what they want", but not much else.

"Education and Experience" is an essay chosen to represent Dewey in the second edition of Great Books, so I started with that.  it starts out talking about the difference between book-learning and learning by doing things, points out that both are necessary (it is hard to imagine a situation where there is either experience or education taking place without both), and proposes an increase in guided, controlled experiences as a foundation of education.

It may be that Dewey was a forerunner of having science labs, wood shop and home ec in the schools.

"How We Think" is about cognitive function and memory, and building on knowledge to learn new things. I read it going "Well, duh." It says things that one pretty much takes for granted if one is liberal and believes in education at all, instead of obeying declared authority and despising elitists who ask questions and know what they're talking about.

Snarky Economics: Vested Interests and the State of Industrial; Arts; Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times, by Thorstein Veblen
Unrestricted ownership of property, with inheritance, free contract, and self-help, is believed to have been highly expedient as well as eminently equitable under the circumstances which conditioned civilized life at the period when the civilized world made up its mind to that effect. And the discrepancy which has come in evidence at this later time is traceable to the fact that other things have not remained the same. The odious outcome has been made by disturbing causes, not by these enlightened principles of honest living. Security and unlimited discretion in the rights of ownership were once rightly made much of as a simple and obvious safeguard of self-direction and self-help for the common man; whereas, in the event, under a new order of circumstances, it all promises to be nothing more than a means of assured defeat and vexation to the common man.

Veblen mostly wrote short, snarky works that are to economics what Jack London is to literature: exposing the savage, deadly struggles beneath the surface of civilization and showing us how close we all are to the state of nature. Aristocrats preying on the poor, claiming ownership of things essential to life, and taking everything you have in exchange for what you need in order to live. A common theme in Veblen, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, Henry George and Tawney is that economic rules and values, such as private property, that make sense on small scales become absurd when expanded to justify godzillionaires. Most of us--except Republicans--understand the difference between taxing a peasant's only dollar and taxing the billionth dollar.  But here we are.

Russian Doll: Emily of Blue Moon, by L.M. Montgomery
"There isn't anybody in the world who loves me now," she said as she curled up on her bed by the window. But she was determined she would not cry.  The Murrays, who had hated her father, should not see her crying. She felt that she detested them all--except perhaps Aunt Laura.  How very big and empty the world had suddenly become. Nothing was interesting any more. It didn't matter that the squat apple tree between Adam-and-Eve had become a thing of rose-and-snow beauty--that the hills beyond the hollow were of green silk, purple-misted--that the daffodils were out in the garden, that the birches were hung all over with golden tassels, that the Wind Woman was blowing white young clouds across the sky.  None of these things had any charm or consolation for her now. In her inexperience, she believed they never would have again.

I read this one because a copy of the book plays a major role in the TV series Russian Doll, where the protagonist needs to give it to the small daughter of a single father before Bad Things happen.  It's never fully explained why, and the show is a little trippy, so I thought there was maybe a clue in the book.

Nope. In fact, since the girl protagonist's father dies early in the book, leaving the free-spirited girl to be miserably brought up by uptight aunts who find fault with every bit of her, I'd find it an odd choice to give to a girl with one parent.

But yes.  Prince Edward Island's most popular writer, more famous for Anne of Green Gables, has another series. This girl is possibly more free-spirited than Anne, but it's a similar 'growing up' story set in the same general environmant.

Cill My Landlord: The Acquisitive Society, by R.H. Tawney

The truth is that at present it is idle to seek to resist the demands of any group of workers by appeals to "the interests of society," because to-day, as long as the economic plane alone is considered, there is not one society but two, which dwell together in uneasy juxtaposition, like Sinbad and the Old Man of the Sea, but which in spirit, in ideals, and in economic interest, are worlds asunder. There is the society of those who live by labor, whatever their craft or profession, and the society of those who live on it. All the latter cannot command the sacrifices or the loyalty which are due to the former, for they have no title which will bear inspection. The instinct to ignore that tragic division instead of ending it is amiable, and sometimes generous. But it is a sentimentality which is like the morbid optimism of the consumptive who dares not admit even to himself the virulence of his disease. As long as the division exists, the general body of workers, while it may suffer from the struggles of any one group within it, nevertheless supports them by its sympathy, because all are interested in the results of the contest carried on by each. Different sections of workers will exercise mutual restraint only when the termination of the {136}struggle leaves them face to face with each other, and not as now, with the common enemy. The ideal of a united society in which no one group uses its power to encroach upon the standards of another is, in short, unattainable, except through the preliminary abolition of functionless property.

Another selection from the second edition of the Great Books set, Tawney is one economist I hadn't heard of outside the Great Books set. He's in the econ volume between Veblen and Keynes, and his small book is an example of Socialist Economics.

The big takeaway is to define landlords and investors as parasites on society who draw income from claiming ownership over things without doing any actual work. He wrote in England at a time when industrial workers labored under backbreaking conditions for pitiful wages, or starved, while the aristocracy lived in mansions and said "Wot-Wot" while their butlers got them out of comic scrapes. 20 years ago, I'd have said the problem had been mostly solved, but we're coming around to it again.  Wealth is a good thing that it is possible to have too much of.

Tawney does not want to abolish private property, but he would like it if nobody got seconds until everyone else had had a helping. Those who buy income-producing property with money they earned from their labors, or whose investments provide the capital to help others start a successful business are cool; those whose inheritances keep growing while they live off of the rents take money from needy people who worked for it and add no value.

Carnival of Carnage: The Killing Floor, by Lee Child
I'd killed one guy and blinded another. Now I'd have to confront my feelings. But I didn't feel much at all. Nothing, in fact.  No guilt, no remorse. None at all. I felt like I'd chased two roaches around the bathroom and stomped on them. But at least a roach is a rational, reasonable, evolved sort of a creature.

Too much heavy duty reading wears on you.  I figured it was time to look into Child's Jack Reacher thriller series, see what the fuss was about.

What the library had was a reprinting of the first in the series. You could tell by the "The first Jack Reacher tale!" blurb on the cover, and by Child's earnest attempt to alienate me before I even started it, with his pompous Benioff/Weissian introduction explaining how clever he is.  If you can see a bandwagon, says Child, it is too late to get on it...and so Child cleverly avoided the new (in 1997) tendency of action heroes to have moral complexity and more than two dimensions, and instead went very originally to the oldest action hero trope in existence, the brooding, silent, unstoppable, conscienceless tank-drifter made famous by Shane, Rambo, 80s era Schwarzenegger, and a dozen rogue cops for whom "there is only one law, and that's HIS law" #YouHaveTheRightToRemainDead
 
Like--what if the action hero NEVER loses a fight? What if he NEVER second-guesses himself, doesn't have any flaws, just comes into town, litters the place with the bodies of villains who are always dangerous but NEVER close to a match for him, and then goes, brooding, off into the sunset? No one's ever done that before, right?

In spite of the intro, I kept going.  Mike Hammer, Rambo and Chuck Norris are fun if you're in the right mood and don't overthink it, right?

So he wanders into a strange town, immediately gets arrested for a murder he knows nothing about (letting the reader know he could easily have overpowered the cops, but he plays along with them), and goes to one of those superpredator prisons where the black convicts immediately go "fresh meat" and try to rape him, the way black convicts are always written in these stories, and he kicke their asses, and then the Aryans come for him too, and he mutilates them, but gets away with it because the black convicts are eager to claim they did it because badass.  And then he finds out more things about the murder, that improbably makes it personal, and they commit more murders in gruesome ways to show how truly scum of the earth they are, and then Reacher kills them all and then he leaves.

And I'm probably going to read more, just because I need some eye-rolling junk food between the good stuff and because I tend to see a series through to the end.  If your mileage is like that, or if it isn't, you know what you're getting.

Frazer Lite: Folkways, by William Graham Sumner
The operation by which folkways are produced consists in the frequent repetition of petty acts, often by great numbers acting in concert or, at least, acting in the same way when face to face with the same need. The immediate motive is interest. It produces habit in the individual and custom in the group. It is, therefore, in the highest degree original and primitive. By habit and custom it exerts a strain on every individual within its range; therefore it rises to a societal force to which great classes of societal phenomena are due. Its earliest stages, its course, and laws may be studied; also its influence on individuals and their reaction on it. It is our present purpose so to study it. We have to recognize it as one of the chief forces by which a society is made to be what it is. Out of the unconscious experiment which every repetition of the ways includes, there issues pleasure or pain, and then, so far as the men are capable of reflection, convictions that the ways are conducive to societal welfare. These two experiences are not the same. The most uncivilized men, both in the food quest and in war, do things which are painful, but which have been found to be expedient. Perhaps these cases teach the sense of social welfare better than those which are pleasurable and favorable to welfare. The former cases call for some intelligent reflection on experience. When this conviction as to the relation to welfare is added to the folkways they are converted into mores, and, by virtue of the philosophical and ethical element added to them, they win utility and importance and become the source of the science and the art of living.

After taking the better part of a year to get through The Golden Bough, Sumner's single volume tome was smooth sailing. It either influenced or was influenced by Frazer, as it takes almost the same approach, without specifically stating that local cultural customs are religious--though most of the examples given are at least highly superstitious and irrational, and often based on Bible rules.  

Like Frazer, Sumner goes all around the world for examples, that have strange tendencies to be similar, even in very remote locations.

The customs studied involve slavery, cannibalism, courtship, marriage and sex rituals, practices that make one "unclean", blood feuds and justice, and public spectacles.  If there are patterns, we're left to draw our own conclusions, and no commentary is made as to whether any particular superstition, from homicidal ones to wearing ornamental jewelry, is empirically wrong.

It's a dry and humorless book, but worth the read for one interested in sociology.  Recommended.

Law for Non-Lawyers: The Common Law, by Oliver Wendell Holmes II

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage. The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly [2] corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.

Common Law is doctrine handed down by courts, as opposed to legislation.  If you agree with a judge's ruling, it is justice. If you disagree, it is "legislating from the bench", and an abomination against God and Man. Prior rulings are taken into account as precedents when arguing subsequent cases, hence Swift's observation "It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever has been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice, and the general reason of mankind.  These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of directing accordingly."

The Common Law is what lawyers would call a hornbook; a simple survey of  basic common law covering criminal prosecution, civil injury law, contracts and property (the first year curriculum of law school) in English law as carried over to the USA.  To an attorney, it's basic information, and not particularly useful, as over a century of new cases and legislation have occurred since and canceled out much of the old ones.  To a generalist, it has some value in lawyersplaining the law to nonlawyers and providing a snapshot of how people used to think, as a stepping stone to what's going on now.  Like an astronomer reading about the Ptolomeic geocentric universe model.  Otherwise, a dated antique.

Biology for Half-Dead Cats:  What is Life?, by Erwin Schrodinger

Let us see whether we cannot draw the correct non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (1) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to Laws of Nature; and (2) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I'– am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature.

Another Great Books selection, notable for postulating chromosomes as the way genetic material is passed on to offspring, which eventually gets metaphysical and suggests a basis for life after death based upon the premise that there is one supreme consciousness, of which each of us is a small part.  Watson and Crick gave Schrodinger credit for influencing their DNA research, when they should have mentioned Rosalind Franklin. #FuckingWatson #FuckingCrick

Schrodinger also suggests that the open ended nature of the universe solves any apparent paradox in the law of thermodynamics, in that the increasing order and complexity in a developing human body and soul is compensated for by an equal and opposite disorder and chaos elsewhere in the universe (such as in an old man descending into Trump support).

Murder, What Fun!  Whose Body; Clouds of Witness; Unnatural Death, by Dorothy Sayers

“Well,” said Peter, “I thought of payin' a little friendly call on Mr.—on the owner of this farm, that is to say. Country neighbours, and all that. Lonely kind of country, don't you see. Is he in, d'ye think?”

The man grunted.

“I'm glad to hear it,” said Peter; “it's so uncommonly jolly findin' all you Yorkshire people so kind and hospitable, what? Never mind who you are, always a seat at the fireside and that kind of thing. Excuse me, but do you know you're leanin' on the gate so as I can't open it? I'm sure it's a pure oversight, only you mayn't realise that just where you're standin' you get the maximum of leverage. What an awfully charmin' house this is, isn't it? All so jolly stark and grim and all the rest of it. No creepers or little rose-grown porches or anything suburban of that sort. Who lives in it?”

The man surveyed him up and down for some moments, and replied, “Mester Grimethorpe.”

“No, does he now?” said Lord Peter. “To think of that. Just the fellow I want to see. Model farmer, what? Wherever I go throughout the length and breadth of the North Riding I hear of Mr. Grimethorpe. 'Grimethorpe's butter is the best'; 'Grimethorpe's fleeces Never go to pieces'; 'Grimethorpe's pork Melts on the fork'; 'For Irish stews Take Grimethorpe's ewes'; 'A tummy lined with Grimethorpe's beef, Never, never comes to grief.' It has been my life's ambition to see Mr. Grimethorpe in the flesh. And you no doubt are his sturdy henchman and right-hand man. You leap from bed before the breaking day, To milk the kine amid the scented hay. You, when the shades of evening gather deep, Home from the mountain lead the mild-eyed sheep. You, by the ingle's red and welcoming blaze, Tell your sweet infants tales of olden days! A wonderful life, though a trifle monotonous p'raps in the winter. Allow me to clasp your honest hand.”

Whether the man was moved by this lyric outburst, or whether the failing light was not too dim to strike a pale sheen from the metal in Lord Peter's palm, at any rate he moved a trifle back from the gate.

I've come to the point in my history of books reading where the enrichment mysteries are not really classified as "historical", but were written during the periods when they happened.  After WWI, the interest in detective fiction took off, and where there were once only Doyle and Poe, there were dozens.  Sayers was considered a grandmaster, right up there with Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and her Peter Wimsey novels....must have improved with practice, because these, the first three in the set, are clever and intellectual, but are clunkers in terms of the challenge of whodunnit.

Whose Body is a novel approach to how a crime can be committed in a certain way by a certain improbable character (it begins with a naked John Doe discovered in someone's bathtub), but in order to eventually explain WHY that improbable character would do such a thing, Sayers has to resort to making the culprit secretly be an insane genius. Plus, the big reveal happens only halfway in. The second is obvious and a groaner once the red herrings are cleared away, and the third tells you who almost immediately and has Lord Peter Wimsey spend the novel deducing the how and why, while we watch the killer, who completely got away with the original crime, is eventually caught up in an impossibly complex set of plots to cover her tracks and tie up potential loose ends that ultimately would have proved nothing compared to the risks taken in committing further murders against, e.g., the maid who *might* have seen something.  

Additionally, Lord Peter is a legendary pompous asshole compared to even Sherlock Holmes.  "Well done, Buntley", he says to his weirdly loyal servant who has just knocked out the henchman from behind, "We've just time now. Still, we can't have this fellow following us, so if you'll kindly hand me that rope..." 

See also the quoted part above from Clouds of Witness, where he garrulously chats up an illiterate farmer in a wot-wot, say no more sort of way. This is supposed to be the comic relief, but I found it two dimensional and irritating. If your mileage varies, that's cool.

Quantum Salad: Atomic Theory & Description of Nature; Discussions with Einstein on Epistomological Problems, by Niels Bohr

In the following years, during which the atomic problems attracted the attention of rapidly increasing circles of physicists, the apparent contradictions inherent in quantum theory were felt ever more acutely. Illustrative of this situation is the discussion raised by the discovery of the Stern-Gerlach effect in 1922. On the one hand, this effect gave striking support to the idea of stationary states and in particular to the quantum theory of the Zeeman effect developed by Sommerfeld, on the other hand, as exposed so clearly by Einstein and Ehrenfest, it presented with unsurmountable difficulties any attempt at forming a picture of the behaviour of atoms in a magnetic field. Similar paradoxes were raised by the discovery by Compton (1924) of the change in wave-length accompanying the scattering of X-rays by electrons. This phenomenon afforded, as is well known, a most direct proof of the adequacy of Einstein's view regarding the transfer of energy and momentum in radiative processes; at the same time, it was equally clear that no simple picture of a corpuscular collision could offer an exhaustive description of the phenomenon. Under the impact of such difficulties, doubts were for a time entertained even regarding the conservation of energy and momentum in the individual radiation processes; a view, however, which very soon had to be abandoned in face of more refined experiments bringing out the correlation between the deflection of the photon and the corresponding electron recoil.

I'm finishing the Great Books set because I'm so close to the end, but I reiterate that the science volumes, in particular, are not the "means to a liberal education" that Mortimer Adler insists they are.  These are highly technical books that the lay reader needs other references to understand.  One does not learn physics by reading Newton, and one does not learn atomic theory by reading Niels Bohr, who casually mentions the importance of the Stern-Gerlach effect and its implications on the Zeeman effect and the Compton effect, without ever once saying what those things are.  He was addressing his droogs Einstein, Schrodinger and Heisenberg, who already knew.  

So I "read" Bohr, in the sense that my eyes passed across every word, but what he meant is easier gotten from my high school chemistry texts, which at least got me to temporarily understand these things.

Human Macavity: Fantomas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain

In imagination Charles Rambert[11] saw all manner of sinister and dramatic scenes, crimes and murders: hugely interested, intensely curious, craving for knowledge, he was ever trying to concoct plots and unravel mysteries. If for an instant he dozed off, the image of Fantômas took shape in his mind, but never twice the same: sometimes he saw a colossal figure with bestial face and muscular shoulders; sometimes a wan, thin creature, with strange and piercing eyes; sometimes a vague form, a phantom—Fantômas!

Oddly enough, I'd never heard of this original master criminal series until now.  Fantomas is apparently as famous as Moriarty, Blofeld, or Fu Manchu, only French.  He is a master of disguise and athletic like a cat burglar, and prefers deadly snakes and plague rats as accomplices to human henchmen...and yet, I found his stories a bit dull compared to the more familiar British thrillers.  YMMV.

Trash Books: Die Trying; Tripwire, Running Blind by Lee Child

--from Die Trying

Lee Child is a commercial success, as you can tell from the fact that I come back for more even though I feel unclean, for the same reasons I drink too much.  They are compelling junk stories where bad guys get theirs from a righteous vengeance machine.  

The problem with the trope of the indestructible, superhuman Chuck Norris/Rambo/ Die Hard hero is that, since he can take anyone, the story is not interesting unless you make the villains so over the top EEEEEVIL that you want to see them pulped. Otherwise, they're underdogs.  And so, the Jack Reacher villains are psychotically, sociopathically cruel beyond rhyme or reason.  Their eyes are frighteningly blank, unless they are enjoying themselves by hurting others.  They would just as soon kill you as look at you. They like it when you try to run. They will motivate you by torturing your partner while you are forced to watch. They're bigger than anyone except Reacher, and they like to taunt their victim by letting him think they made a mistake that will let him get away. Ha-Ha, NOPE!  And their cruelty is graphically, sickeningly  described, so that you know just how superlatively, impossibly, embodiment of EEEEEVIL they are. So that when Reacher comes to make them regret their life choices, you're DOWN for it.  Unless you threw the book away in disgust before that part.

And also, when trying to impress you about how muscular Reacher is, Child describes him as resembling  "a condom filled with walnuts."

Die Trying is about a Nazi separatist terror sect that catches Reacher when he just happens to be walking by their kidnapping heist, and who have opportunity after opportunity to just shoot this big threatening guy they don't even want, but they don't. Because it's only chapter two or five or twelve, and they need to take him someplace else to kill him, or use him as an extra hostage or try to win him over to their side.  Big boss unnecessarily tortures and kills people for fun and is paranoid about leaving loose ends, but THIS guy he spares over and over until he can finally get away and clear the entire armed compound, because something something garbanzo.  Tripwire has only four (not particularly competent) villains, and so they have to arrange the plot so that Reacher doesn't know who they are for a long time, while they slowly ruin a couple of innocents and kill others for pleasure. Running Blind has Reacher assisting the FBI in stopping a serial killer whose method of killing the victims is unknown and the Big Reveal is presented as if Child knows he fooled you. I can smugly let you know that I identified the murderer by name and the motive within the first eight chapters, but didn't get the method until one chapter before the reveal.

Sick Books: The Magic Mountain; Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, by Thomas Mann

Joachim, as the expert, gave him lessons in the art of wrapping himself the way they all did it up here, something every novice had to learn right off. You spread the blankets, first one, then the other, over the frame of the lounge chair, but so that a long piece was left dangling to the floor at the foot. Then you sat down and began to wrap the top one around you, first flinging it lengthwise all the way up to your armpit, then tucking the bottom up over the feet—and for that you had to sit up, bend forward, and grab the fold with both hands—and finally tugging the other side over, making sure that the double foot-tuck fit tight against both sides to form the smoothest and most regular package possible. And then you followed the same proceedure with the second blanket—but it was more difficult to handle, and as a bungling beginner Hans Castorp groaned quite a bit when he bent forward and reached out to practice the moves as he was taught them. Only a very few old veterans, Joachim said, were able to fling both blankets around them at once in three deft motions, but that was a rare and coveted skill, which demanded not only years of practice, but also a natural predisposition. And Hans Castorp had to laugh at that word as he leaned back with aching muscles.

--from The Magic Mountain
The above is a description of the daily rest cure at The Berghorf Institute, where characters go to relax from the stress of having to symbolize entire pre-WWI European nations and philosophical schools of thought, all vying for the young protagonist Castorp’s allegiance in Mann’s thick magnum opus.

My father used to tell me that he and my uncle used to pass the time at Barrayar University by wrapping themselves in blankets and sitting on the rooftop gardens, pretending to be the tubercular patients in this book. I don’t think I could have been more horrified if he’d told me their idea of a good time had been to go to the supermarket and play with the electric doors. As it turns out, the rest cure isn’t nearly as uberdorky as it sounds—the lounge chairs are the most luxuriant seats one could hope for, and the experience is like relaxing on a luxury deck chair on an arctic cruise ship, watching the ocean go by, except that you’re up in the alps, watching the view and thinking deep thoughts. That’s what the patients do all day. They navel-gaze, and think deep thoughts, and attend lectures and discussions about death and medicine and the scientific meaning of love and life with their heads in the clouds, while the silly frenetic people down below do all the mundane boring stuff like keeping the world running. People tend to go up there to visit a friend, and end up spending the best years of their lives there.
The philosophers tended to be ridiculous. One man would declare that the best government is the one that smiles and pats people on the head, and another would declare that no, the government must HIT people on the head, hit them hard, make them obey—and by the way, how elitist and patronizing and offensive the first man must be to talk of patting people on the head (Gosh, where have I heard THAT dialogue before?). Not until very late in the book when the old Dutch satyr Mynheer Peeperkorn showed up and put everyone to shame by simply living with passion did I find someone truly likable. Besides, it’s fun to say “Mynheer Peeperkorn”.

Definitely the accommodations and the food would make the Institute (and hopefully, the rooftop gardens at Barrayar U) a nice place to visit, but I’d much rather spend the best years of my life on a meandering cruise ship without all the death and illness and things.

Felix Krull is much less well known, but seemed like it might be interesting. Nope. It is perhaps the most boring "confessions of a master criminal" book I have ever seen.  Krull starts out as the son of an overburdened wine merchant who sells nasty wine, explaining to angry customers that he has to keep the price down by skimping on quality.  By the time he goes bankrupt and shoots himself, the kid has graduated from shoplifting sweets to scamming kisses from girls, and eventually performs cheap grifts on random people for a less-than charming, less-than-roguish existence. The main tone is about Krull deriving no satisfaction and existing as a cheerless dilettante. Meh.

Towards a Fabulous Sobriety: Quit Like a Woman, by Holly Whitaker

One time on Instagram, when I was no longer using drugs but was using men and social media and coffee in deep excess, I read a post from a man I was following. It said, "Don't call yourself sober if you're still using drugs. You are not sober." I wondered about him and that post, about what would make someone say such a thing.  I worte back to him that I had used drugs to help me stop using drugs. I used pot, Chipotle, nicotine, cocaine, a very unfortunate man named Justin, and half the coffee Starbucks produced in 2013 to stop drinking. But that shouldn't matter to him, should it?  Unless he owned the word 'sober' and I was missing something.

I read this sobriety book because I had seen a good review of it, and because my own relationship to alcohol is spotty enough for me to check in about these things.  The biggest take-away I got from it is that random people aren't as likely to hate and despise and pity others for their fuck-ups as one might think.  Holly Whitaker is kinda brutal about her own life story and what was done to her growing up and what she did to herself while hitting bottom--and yet all of it, warts and all, came across as fabulous and my overwhelming urge was to reach out and nurture and thank and congratulate her for her pain, honesty, and ultimate triumph, respectfully. I have fucked up, and so have you, and we can relate to that and bond.  The details are just details.   I went looking for her on FB and sent an as-yet unrequited friend req, just as I would have done for that other fucked-up genius Thorstein Veblen, except that he died decades before getting the chance to cast a cynical told-ya wink at social media.

And also, I learned some confirmation that I "think like a woman" to the extent that this is a book written for women, geared toward the "woman's" way of coping with this weird world, and I related to it a lot more than I relate to "masculine" self-help.   Among her advice:  The 12 steps are made for dudes and don't work for people like Whitaker or me; you get better results by pampering and validating yourself than by punishing yourself; people will help you if you ask; and the "sobriety illuminati" are to be avoided like plague rats.

The Future is Fierce:  AOC: Fighter, Phenom, Change Maker, by Prachi Gupta

Republicans were scandalized when they discovered that the "girl from the Bronx" grew up in the more affluent Westchester County. In 2018, Newsmax host John Cardillo tweeted a Google street view photo of Ocasio-Cortez's modest childhood home, arguing it was located in a "very nice area", and calling it "a far cry from the Bronx hood upbringing she's selling." Ocasio-Cortez snapped back on Twitter, "It is nice. Growing up, it was a good town for working people. My mom scrubbed toilets so I could live here & I grew up seeing how the zip code on is born in determines much of their opportunity. Your attempt to strip me of my family, my story, my home and my identity is exemplary of how scared you are of the power of all four of those things."

A celebratory biography of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who got elected to the House of Representatives at age 12 and singlehandedly lowered the average age of Congress to 90. Some of the new members  flipped Republican districts; some broker legislative deals; AOC is shaping public opinion, moving the Overton window to the middle, and resetting the agenda to a new New Deal, a green New Deal, and a place where everyone, not just the privileged few, can have a place at the table.  

AOC's Puerto Rican mother and Bronx small business owner father pooled money from relatives to get a house in Yorktown Heights so that their daughter could have an education and a shot at the American Dream.  Had they not, she wouldn't be where she is now.  Zip codes determine one's destiny.

The media is afraid of her and determined to bring her down at any price.  I've seen hit piece after hit piece trying to foment friction between AOC's "squad" of liberal spokeswomen of color and the more pragmatic women from red-to-blue districts, like Sharice Davids and Katie Porter. To their credit, neither side is taking the bait.  They realize that we need both quiet effectiveness and visible outspokenness to make overall changes happen.  We should, too.  High recommendations.

Feminist Economics: Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, by Katrine Marcal

If you want to be part of the story of economics, you have to be like Economic Man. You have to accept his version of masculinity. At the same time, what we call economics is always built on another story. Everything that is excluded so the Economic Man can be who he is.

So he can be able to say that there isn't anything else.

Somebody has to be emotion, so he can be reason. Somebody has to be body, so he doesn't have to be.  Somebody has to be dependent, so he can be independent. Somebody has to be tender, so he can conquer the world. Somebody has to be self-sacrificing, so he can be selfish.  Somebody has to prepare that steak so Adam Smith can say their labour doesn't matter.

Over the past four years, I've read weighty tomes on economics by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Marx, JS Mill, Henry George, Thorstein Veblen and RH Tawney.  Katrine Marcel puts them all to shame and is easier to read besides, in part because she identifies one thing that the old dead white guys didn't: Economic Man, as described by old white guys, is a FUCKING ASSHOLE, and we don't have to put up with him, and also he doesn't really exist.

"Economic Man" never does anything out of love, but only acts if there's something in it for him.  If he prefers ribs to chicken, he will ALWAYS choose ribs over chicken if they're available, no matter how many times he's had them this week so far.  His relationships are based on abstract profit and loss, and conveniently, the emotional labor of his partner doesn't count. It never has.

Also, I learned that those breathtaking photos of fetuses in the womb that first appeared in Time/Life periodicals in the 50s were really photos of dead tissue photographed outside the mother's body following miscarriages or the equivalent, and the framing of them--really, the most dependent life forms in existence--as if they were in a bubble in space was one manifestation of the fiction of "Economic Man" as a lone, self-contained individual with as much power as any other individual.

Fortunately, Marcal removes these comforting (to some) illusions gently, and shows us a better way based on cooperation, a good human nature, and the recognition that society is able to overcome even the most ingrained habits of "our savannah ancestors", and that greed and sociopathic individual struggle against all was never natural law and should not be worshipped or accepted as such.

Very highest recommendations.

There Ain' Na' Butter in Hell!:  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast and reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all Hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odor that, as Saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of Hell! Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of Hell.

Reminds me of the dorm room of a guy named Phil I once knew, and the camp bunk of another kid who was so pungent that his very name was "Grody". Not to mention my impressions of a certain movie that starred Adam Sandler...but I digress.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is supposed to be the quintessential Kunstlerroman (a Bildungsroman specifically about the coming of age of a young Art Fart), in which the protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, is supposed to be a stand-in for Joyce himself. 

And yes, there are mentions of the birth of a passion for writing in there. There are scenes in the beginning among Daedalus's family, where between bouts of drunken fighting over whether Charles Parnell was a superpatriot or a shameless philanderer, they sing of drinking and rebellion. There's Daedelus in school, respected as the top of the class and taunted as a nerd, on the same day, by the same people. By the end, we're treated to excerpts from his journal.

All of that fades in comparison to the central part of the book, which consists of the single most sadistic Catholic sermon I've ever failed to avoid. It dominates Portrait of the Artist the way John Galt's 100-page Jeremiad dominates Atlas Shrugged. It triggered flashbacks to child abuses I didn't even suffer. All about Hell, and about every possible physical and spiritual torment one could ever suffer there, and about how just and fair and right it is that the embodiment of all goodness should cast YOU, boy, to endure such torments forever and ever and ever (complete with further disquisition on the vastly, hugely long duration of infinite time) for such things as a lustful thought not confessed to the priest. Followed by the torments and nightmares and fantasies that plague poor Stephen (and, presumably, every other kid in the school) after the sermon. I wanted to reach into the book and grab him out of there and hold him and tell him he was safe, now. In fact, everything after that is just sort of a blur of relief, as he turns down the offer to join the priesthood (go figure), takes up weird stream of consciousness writing, and eventually flees Ireland entirely. Go Stephen. Nothing I hadn't learned already from the histories of the Magdalene Laundries and the Papal shielding of child-molester priests, but deeply disturbing nonetheless.
One of my friends has a big hate-on for Joyce and mocks people who mention him in literary criticism. Now I have an idea why. Actually, I have found Ulysses to be one of my favorites, that I come back to to graze from time to time. To the extent that there's a redeeming quality to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it's that I recognized and appreciated some cameos by characters, besides the Daedalus family, who go on to appear in Ulysses.

Also, for completeness's sake, I'll mention that I read Veblen's The Place of Science in Modern Civilization (a collection of essays spanning Marx, socialist theory, evolution, and racist eugenics doctrines, which almost comes to conclusions similar to Katrine Marcal, only much more verbosely and with an attitude of detached bemusement at those fools out there, without real caring for others), and John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct (a pragmatic theory of ethics that wants society to engineer human behavior in a BF Skinner sort of way so that we all want what's best), but I found both so deadly dull that I don't care to say more about either than this.

Murder, What Fun! The unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; Strong poison, by Dorothy Sayers
Bunter thanked him gravely for hi good opinion, and proffered a box of that equally nauseating mess called Turkish Delight, which not only gluts the palate and glues the teeth, but also smothers the consumer in a floury cloud of white sugar. Mr. Urquhart immediately plugged his mouth with a large lump of it, murmuring indistinctly that it was the genuine Eastern variety.

--from Strong Poison

So--I was a bit harsh on Lord Peter's exuberant approach to detection and the hackneyed plots last month, before I stopped objecting to the unbelievable situations and just ran with it. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club begins with the discovery that one of the older members sitting in the smoking room has been dead for no one can tell how long, and no one noticed, and moves on to one or more impossible plot twists, and---ok, it's just delightful, on a surreal level.  So is Strong poison, where I guessed the trick behind how it was done very early, and watching it and the motive get gradually drawn out was amusing.  Pretty sure Sayers had read Narnia, and wrote the passages about Turkish Delight specifically to make future generations wonder how Edmund could become ensorcelled by something so gross.

Seafaring Writer: Martin Eden, by Jack London

“I hope I am learning to talk,” he stammered.  “There seems to be so much in me I want to say.  But it is all so big.  I can’t find ways to say what is really in me.  Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman.  I feel—oh, I can’t describe it—I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child.  It is a great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the selfsame feeling and sensation.  It is a lordly task.  See, I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies.  It is a breath of the universe I have breathed.  I know song and laughter, and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I would like to tell them to you, to the world.  But how can I?  My tongue is tied.

Jack London's accurate autobiographical novel about a robust, muscular working class man who wants to write for a living in turn of the (20th) century San Francisco.  He lurches with a sailor gait through the homes of the rich and mighty, confused by their manners, rejected as a tramp, dumped by his society girlfriend, and they all want him back when he's finally successful and rich.  Flashbacks of street fighting.  pawning and redeeming and pawning again his clothes and other possessions while publishers cheat him out of payment for his work.  Eventually successful, but too late to enjoy it, disgusted with hypocrisy, and--eerily autobiographical, he dies too young.
London's last novel.  And it is a bitter one.

The Philosopher's Story: Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
This book is to be published while the great issues that now divide the world remain undecided. As yet, and for some time to come, the world must be one of doubt. It must as yet be suspended equally between hope and fear.
It is likely that I shall die before the issue is decided.
I do not know whether my last words should be: 

The bright day is done
And we are for the dark,

or, as I sometimes allow myself to hope,

The world's great age begins anew
The golden years return
Heaven smiles, and faiths, and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

I have done what I could to add my small weight in an attempt to tip the balance on the side of hope, but it has been a puny effort against vast forces.
May others succeed where my generation failed.

I've spent a decade reading "great philosophy", found some few very useful tracts that changed my thinking, found a lot of navel gazing and a whole lot of barely comprehensible gibberish...Bertrand Russell has been one of the few who is both easy to read and, to me, full of almost self-evident common sense while still adding food for thought that I hadn't considered.  And this is just his life story, from the 1880s to the 1960s.

Don't let the three thick volumes intimidate you.  More than half consists of collected letters to and from him, including many great names in government, philosophy and science, yet easily skimmed.

Russell started out as a mathematical philosopher, attempting to analyze the universe as an embodiment of perfect logic--and during this period, he personally behaved problematically.  The horrors of two world wars proved to him the absurdity of pure reason, and he spent the remainder of his life as, it seems to me, one of the more good men of his time (which means that he was naturally hated and reviled and persecuted by the power structures of both Britain and America), trying to create a new rhyme and reason with which to view a cruel world and to find comfort and hope without resorting to religion or other magic thinking.

As with Justice William Douglas (another great mind who did great professional work and was great at writing in gentle, encouraging style while occasionally being an asshole in private life), I found myself longing to have a conversation with him while suspecting that, if the occasion arrived, he might dismiss me as a fool early on and break my heart.

Who's Afraid?  To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
The sea without a stain on it, thought Lily Briscoe, still standing and looking out over the bay.  The sea is stretched like silk across the bay. Distance had an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up in it, they felt, they were gone forever, they had become part of the nature of things. It was so calm; it was so quiet. The steamer itself had vanished, but the great scroll of smoke still hung in the air and drooped like a flag mournfully in valediction.

The revised Great Books set has four works by women. Austen, Eliot and Cather I enjoyed very much and read more of their work than just the included novels. Woolf is fog-enshrouded to me, maybe because I am a man.  The male characters are linear, patriarchal and disagreeable, but understandable.  The women think in poetry and big-picture feelings in a way that draws me but is hard for me to understand.  Entire chapters of narrative go by without me retaining more than a vague sense of what they're thinking, and I feel that if I were there, I would commit faux pas and earn eyerolls and thoughts about why are men?

Not much happens.  A six year old boy, part of a large family vacationing in the Hebrides, wants to take a day trip to the lighthouse on a nearby island, and becomes semipermanently enraged against his father for saying they can't go because weather.  Years later, they come back to the same island, and the father drags the unwilling now-teens off to the lighthouse, where they have a good time despite their long term resentment and maybe come to an understanding.  Looking on are the mother/wife who sees all and tries to comfort the boy, and the visiting artist Briscoe, who sees all in a different light, trying to make a pretty picture of it.  

I invite thoughts from readers who like Woolf.  I'm missing something that may be vital here.

Pulp Fiction: Echo burning; No Middle Name, by Lee Child

"You just killed two people. Then saw a third die and a house burn down...You comparing those people to cockroaches?"
He shook his head. "Not really. I like cockroaches better. They're just little packets of DNA scuttling around, doing what they have to do.  Those people didn't have to do what they did. They had a choice. They could have been upstanding human beings. But they chose not to be. Then they chose to mess with me, which was the final straw, and they got what they got. So I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I'm not even going to give it another thought. And if you do, I think you're wrong.""You're a hard man, Reacher."
"I think I'm a realistic man. And a decent enough guy, all told."
"You may find normal people don't agree."
He nodded.
"A lot of you don't," he said.

Another novel and a story collection from big name author Lee Child in a series I feel a little guilty about reading, because it's such junk food, but it does scratch an itch and requires little thought to gobble down.  The plot of Echo Burning was one where I saw all the twists coming about two chapters ahead, but not the whole thing at once, from the beginning, so I get to feel a little clever for having figured out the big bad and the reasons why before being told. 

Reacher has so much testosterone that he leaves oily trails of hair on the floor as he drags the knuckles of his extra-long arms across it. And his ethics are, when someone needs killing,  it's no different from squishing a roach. Not for everybody.  But definitely for some people. 

Those Meddling Kids: Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire
Summer kings and snow queens. Jacks in the green and corn Jennies: he knows the names, knows the secret stories whispered about them in the dark places of the world.  He knows better than to try for the naturally incarnate concepts. That will come later. When he controls the doctrine, when cause and consequence dance to his commands, then he'll be able to reach out and collect the other things that should be his by right.  He'll hold the universe in his hands, and woe betide any who question what he chooses to do with it.

As far as I know, this is a stand-alone book, not part of a series, and it is one of the best books by a very prolific writer whose work is consistently awesome. If you like the trendy trope most prominent in The Magicians where a children's series about an alternate universe turns out to have a basis in reality that the characters in the main story have to puzzle through to reach the climax, you'll have a fine time with Middlegame.

The fictional children's book is Over the Woodward Wall, by beloved 19th century author Asphodel Baker who was also an alchemist who created something nasty, which in turn created something else nasty...with the end result being our protagonists, a girl math genius and a boy word prodigy, separated at birth but with a psychic connection that lets them talk to each other as imaginary friends, across a continent. 

And then it gets weird.  THEN it gets weird.

What I've just told you is what's in the first few chapters.  Discover the rest for yourself. Very highest recommendations.

God is Not Yet Dead: The Word of God and the Word of Man, by Karl Barth

God himself, the real, the living God, and his love which comes in glory! These provide the solution. We have not yet begun to listen quietly to what the conscience asks when it reminds us, in our need and anxiety, of the righteousness of God. We have been much too eager to do something ourselves. Much too quickly have we made ourselves comfortable in temporary structures. We have mistaken our tent for our home; the moratorium for the normal course of things.

One work of 20th century theology was included in the revised Great Books edition, and now I've read it and can move on.

Barth is credited by Calvinist sects for "rescuing Protestantism from the dustbin of history" after over a century of Kant and liberal theology had discredited it.  If so, it seems to me he has some 'splaining to do, because the book here (which admittedly is presented as a sample, like most of the 20th century 'appendix' to the Great Books; Barth is more famous for a huge five volume dissertation that someone else can read if they want to) offers little that I hadn't seen in previous works.  It just pretends to be a bit more warm and kind than classical Calvinism.

Also, he begins with the relatively acceptable premise that, by "God", we mean the voice of the human conscience speaking within us.  I could roll with that.  I have heard it convincingly argued that success is achieved by doing the things you already know you should be doing, and not doing the things you already know you shouldn't be doing. Further, those people I am fortunate to know who strike me as "strong souls" and "living saints" are those who remain steadfast to their inner compass.

But then Barth baits and switches to the more dubious reverse view that the human conscience is communication from an external higher power; further, that said higher power is necessarily the Christian God.  And, of course, the problem with most or all theologies is that they cannot 'prove' their rightness compared to any other religion without presupposing the cosmic truth of assertions written by questionable human beings who knew no more as fact than we do.  

As Calvin before him, Barth's attempt to "prove'" Christian scripture as true above all other scripture springs entirely from the assertion that this ancient human writing is so much more beautiful and compelling than any other literature ever written (no it isn't) that one cannot help but be convinced of its divinity just from the words themselves...and if one fails to be transported by THESE words, then one is truly lost to sin and the Devil.  And also, the emperor's clothes are such that those who fail to see them are stupid or unfit for their office.  Oldest checkmate their is. 

And there we are.

Epic German Bible: Joseph and his Brothers, by Thomas Mann
Cain answered, “To be sure, I slew my brother, and that is sad enough. But Who created me as I am, jealous to the point that on occasion my conduct becomes so dissembling that I no longer know what I am doing? Are You not a jealous God, and did You not create me after Your likeness? Who put the evil impulse in me to do the deed that I have undeniably done? You say that You alone bear the burden of the whole world, and will You not also bear our sins?” Not bad, that. Exactly as if Cain, or Kayin, had taken counsel with Sammael beforehand, though perhaps the crafty hothead had no need to do so. Any rebuttal would have been difficult, which left only a crushing blow or indignant amusement.

 I read a lot of the other books on this month’s list in 24 hours or less. This one made up for the quickies by keeping me busy for the rest of the month, and part of February, too. It’s longer than Moby Dick and only twice as funny. Ye Gods! I hired a Sherpa guide at the outset to help me through the thick Teutonic prose, and he quit halfway in, accusing me of a deliberate plot to bore him to death.

The theme of this retelling of the last half of Genesis is, appropriately enough, descents into Hell, from which one emerges laden with treasures after the ordeal. And it happens in cycles: Jacob in Laban’s service; Joseph in the pit; Joseph in prison; the brothers during the famine. Always finding redemption and promotion through selfless service to a paternal master—a father, a Potiphar, a Pharaoh, who sees that you are good and uplifts you. Except when he or the jealous people he lifted you over get capricious and throw you down. Yes, except then. And when that happens, you stoically bear your fate until you get uplifted, or seasick, whichever lasts longer.

I enjoyed the way the book weaves Old Testament theology with the Egyptian, Babylonian and Sumerian religions, as well as foreshadowing the events of the New Testament. I enjoyed some of the scholarly discourses on the patterns that get repeated over and over. And yes, it hadn’t escaped me what a useful message it was for the Ultimate Ruler to spread, how unflinching service to masters was the path to redemption. I approved of the way Mann refused to gloss over the acts of utter cruelty and arrogance committed by the ones who are supposed to be otherwise “good guys”, and makes the stories a war of ambiguity against ambiguity, instead of light against dark. I could have done without the entire chapters claiming to prove logically, eg, how many years Joseph must have spent among the Ishmaelites, in Potiphar’s household, in jail, when Mann might as well have pulled different sets of numbers out of thin air. And if there had been a chapter on “the multi-coloredness of the coat”, I probably would have put it down unfinished.

But I got through it. Where’s my ticker-tape parade?

Right Quarantine Reading: Sweet Secrets and Road to Chaos, by Stephanie L. Weippert

"Transportal chocolate." He shrugged. "Whatever." Just because he hadn't heard of any candy with such a funny name didn't mean it wasn't good.  The label confirmed what his nose told him, and that was all that mattered. He ripped the back of the brown paper wrapped around the shiny silver and tossed it away, then tore the foil down the length to reveal the milk chocolate goodness.
  Brad returned just in time to watch Michael, with the end of a chocolate bar in his mouth and a shocked look on his face, fade away.

Two short fantasy books involving culture shock and transportation to magic new worlds.

Imagine if Vernon Dursley had been a good guy who treated his orphaned nephew Harry well, and who knew nothing about magic or Hogwarts.  Imagine further that, instead of notification by owl post, they just teleported Harry away without telling the Dursleys anything, and a terrified Uncle Vernon rushed out to rescue him.  That, if you squint a bit,  is the outline of Sweet Secrets, where food recipes are incantations, master chefs are powerful wizards, and children with aptitude are trafficked to Magic Culinary School. The plot alternates between the fascinated child and the stepfather trying to find him.

Road to Chaos is an entirely different world where the magic is mathematical, and the muggle protagonist is a grown actor suddenly caught in a plot involving a long lost relative who is a fugitive from the school's faculty after an experiment gone wrong, and is transported to foreign countries and then to a foreign everything.

Both tales end with room for sequels, and I'd like to read those if they come out. They also happen to be the only books from this month's book post that I actually enjoyed.

Wrong Quarantine Reading: Stories of Three Decades, by Thomas Mann
Looking back, we had the feeling that the horrible end of the affair had been preordained and lay in the nature of things; that the children had to be present at it was an added impropriety, due to the false colours in which the weird creature presented himself. Luckily for them, they did not know where the comedy left off and the tragedy began; and we let them remain in their happy belief that the whole thing had been a play up till the end.
---from "Mario and the Magician

A dwarf lives life cheerfully with no complaints about his disability until one day he falls in love with a great lady with a perfectly formed body. He stammers and is shy. She is kind to him. He declares his love, and she flees, repulsed. He immediately kills himself.

An old man is friendless and taunted by local children.  He rescues a dog that the children are torturing and tries to keep it as a pet. The dog hates him, too. one day the dog bites him and he injures it in self defense. As he treats the dog's wound over the course of weeks, the dog is responsive and becomes friendly to its benefactor. Late, when it is healed, it growls at the man again.  After a moment's thought, the man stabs the dog. The dog dies. The man bursts into tears.

A carnival hypnotist forces members of his audience to humiliate themselves while the crowd laughs and jeers. He laughs diabolically and boasts of his power to sap people's will. he is the embodiment of all evil. His final victim is a mild-mannered waiter, whom he subjects to the worst indignities of all. When he is released from his trance, the waiter shoots the hypnotist.  The audience is horrified.

All the tales are like this.  I read them for the same reasons people watch Tarantino movies and Game of Thrones, as if the ugliest and most grotesque aspects of human nature turned up like the squiggly bugs under a rock might make us feel content with our own mundane existences.  Except that this was just over the top depressing.

This was the last Thomas Mann on my reading list. Then i picked up something by his brother....

Garbage: Professor Unrat, by Heinrich Mann

Heinrich is less famous than his Nobel Laureate brother Tommy, but no less depressing.  Professor Unrat's name is a German pun on "trash".  He is a teacher whose pupils disrespect him and call him "Professor Trash".  He is consumed with fury at the nickname and is vicious to the pupils.  It is not clear whether teachers in this town are treated with veneration like the Japanese, or treated as the lowest, shittiest caste in society, as in America.  It is not clear whether the teacher has become a misanthrope because of the disrespect he endures, or whether he is treated badly because he was a jerk to begin with. By the end of the first chapter, both the class and the prof are established as assholes.

Then the prof follows one of the worst students to an assignation with an exotic dancer at the local era equivalent of a strip club, and asks the dancer to stop corrupting the kid.  She has a relationship with the prof instead, ruining them both. Again, it is not clear whether we're supposed to think she is a "vixen" who seduces him to be cruel, or if he's an old lecher who brings it on himself; neither are likeable characters.  Mercifully, their tale of trash was brief, and I'm not inclined to read more like this.

Is most German literature like this, or is that just a stereotype?

More Trash: Personal; One Shot; Persuader; 61 hours, by Lee Child

Since I can't get to the libraries during the quarantine, I've gone to the online version and headed for the Jack Reacher section because mindless drivel is about what I can handle these days. Since only a limited number of people can check out the same online books at once, I'm taking the series out of order. It's fine. There is almost no continuity, the adventures are all self-contained, and the guy is the same age in 2015 as he is in 1998. one copes.

One is probably not supposed to binge-read Jack Reacher like this.  Most of the stories are nominally "mysteries" with a big reveal, except it is always the same reveal. Some frequently mentioned detail that has no apparent connection to the main plot will be the central clue.  If there are multiple police officers or Feds, one of them will always be either the big bad or be not-really-secretly working for the big bad, usually because blackmail or threats to torture the law enforcement bigwig's partner or small child while they watch. And somehow, with all the town cops or an entire agency or military unit at their command, they just go along meekly until Reacher does them in.

And Reacher is more indestructible than Rambo, Chuck Norris and the A-team combined, and so none of the situations are all that suspenseful.  In the books I read this month, he fights a giant who can shrug off sledgehammer blows like mosquitoes; dives into a riptide and comes back from 50 feet under in choppy sea; walks through a subzero blizzard in casual clothes, just happens to be missed by the world's deadliest sharpshooter because reflexes; walks through open farmland to an impregnable fortress with security cameras without being spotted; survives an explosion that both blackens the ground for 400 yards around him and makes the nearest town high with meth fumes, and covers up the death of his assassin by randomly firing a bunch of assault weapons and telling the henchmen that they were ambushed by a gang.

Also, Lee Child fridges women. He has love interests killed in gruesome ways so that Reacher can hulk out and take revenge on the Most Evil Person Alive du jour in even more gruesome ways.  Because if the villain did not kill in truly horrible ways, then Reacher would be a monster instead of an avenging good guy. You need to know that before getting addicted to the series.

Ennui: The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, by Henry Adams

Poor Henry Adams lived in the wrong era, as his more famous works, longing for the "innocence" of the Middle Ages and pre-Civil War America, make clear.  In this collection of short works from the end of Adams' life, he writes the life of his grandfather John Quincy Adams, whom he considers a tragic failure of a man because he got to be President for only one term; frets about how distressingly masculine women are becoming in the 1920s--he worries that all their strenuousness will endanger the human race by interfering with their capacity to have babies-- and frets further about the impending heat death of the universe, weeping because the Earth will not carry on to infinity millennia after he is dead.

I wanted to reach into the book, pull the poor man out and take him to a filksing, get him roaring drunk, and have him partake in a rousing chorus of "Rocket Ride", "Pour Your Brother" and "Many Hearts, One Voice". He needs some serious help!

The Great Brain: Relativity, the Special and the General Theory, by Albert Einstein

If we are to have in the universe an average density of matter which differs from zero, however small may be that difference, then the universe cannot be quasi-Euclidean. On the contrary, the results of calculation indicate that if matter be distributed uniformly, the universe would necessarily be spherical (or elliptical). Since in reality the detailed distribution of matter is not uniform, the real universe will deviate in individual parts from the spherical; that is, the universe will be quasi-spherical. But it will be necessarily finite.

Einstein on relativity is included in the 20th Century science volume of the revised Great Books set, and is an example of what SHOULD be included in the scientific part of a basic collegiate liberal arts education, just the way Newton and Bohr should not.  It is actually understandable.

It's not easy, and the bit about Lorentz transformations is still lost on me, but the basic ideas critiquing Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics on a cosmic scale, the speed of light as a constant, and gravitational fields are explained with as little jargon as possible.

I imagine this is the book that writers of sci-fi plots skim for quotations about the "space/time continuum" and "gravitational time dilation." At least it challenged me without making me feel like a hopeless dunce.

Short story; The Prussian Officer, by DH Lawrence

Lawrence is represented in the Great Books set by this story.  I'm nonplussed.  I would have thought a better choice would be the more well-known and interesting "Rocking Horse Winner" , in which a boy with the magical power to affect horse races by riding on his rocking horse provides a wicked commentary on the rat race and the need for ever-more money.

This one--Meh.  A Prussian officer abuses his orderly; the orderly shoots him and runs off into the wilderness, where he dies of thirst and fever.  I was like, so what?

------

One would think that all the forced leisure of a quarantine would increase rather than decrease my reading time.  In my case, most of my spare reading was done on the gym cardio equipment, on the bus, or in the bathtub...and I'm not spending more time in the bathtub than I was before. In fact, my schedule has gone to the four winds, including the regular time I scheduled to write these posts.  If your mileage varies, that's cool.

Self-Quarantine: The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.

Kafka's famous tale of Gregor, the salesman who wakes up to find he has turned into a hideous insect, is in the revised Great Books set. I've read it before and always interpreted it in a different way.

This time, I read it as a metaphor for disability or old age and rejection of one as "useless" following inability to give any more. And never mind that two of the three family members who reject Gregor are his parents.  The man has been the sole supporter of the family for years, loses his ability to work in the first scene of the story, and is immediately loathed by the family that once depended on him, is confined to his room, has his back injured by a thrown apple, and the apple is left lodged in his back for the rest of the story as his neglected body becomes more worn, starved, and decayed as time passes.

He is the unwanted, useless relative shut up in the attic.  And eventually, he comes out and hears the rest of the family discussing what a useless, hideous burden he is to them, and he crawls back to his room and dies, unloved, as I will one day too, when my usefulness runs out. And as soon as he is dead, his sister is found to blossom into a young, marriageable maiden, but her time of rejection will one day come when the blossom fades.

My historical reading has become so depressing since I passed into 20th Century books.

Spiritual Costs of technology: Science and the Modern World, by Alfred North Whitehead

It may be doubted whether any properly general metaphysics can ever, without the illicit introduction of other considerations, get much further than Aristotle. But his conclusion does represent a first step without which no evidence on a narrower experiential basis can be of much avail in shaping the conception. For nothing, within any limited type of experience, can give intelligence to shape our ideas of any entity at the base of actual things, unless the general character of things requires that there be such an entity.

Te only nonfiction I read this month was a small book that I know was written in English, but it was hard to understand.  If my early 20th century reading has driven one point home, it is that there was an enormous intellectual reaction against the exponential rise in science that took off in the mid 19th Century, particularly against Darwin.  Evolutionary theory was blamed for capitalism and "social Darwinism", and the mathematics of Cantor and Dedekind, and accompanying contemplation of the infinity of time and space, were said to give rise to a nihilism in which humans were no longer the center of the universe and therefore why bother?

Whitehead's metaphysics was yet another attempt to bring back the necessity of thought as an influence on what would otherwise be a vast, meaningless void with bits of inconsequential matter here and there.  Whitehead, whose Introduction to Mathematics (Bookpost, November 2019) I found accessible and enjoyable, was almost incomprehensible to me with his use of relativity and quantum theory to demonstrate the evolution of thought over several centuries towards an apex yet to be determined.  

The Postwar Murders: O Jerusalem, by Laurie R. King

"Actually, no", Holmes said, completely ignoring the man's fury and sounding merely bored--an old and effective technique of his. "She will not wear those clothes, or anything like them. No burkah, no bangles, no veil. She will not walk behind us, she will not cook our food, she will not carry water on her head. This is not, you understand, my choice. I should be perfectly happy to have her clothed head to foot and in a subservient position--the novelty would be most entertaining. However, she will simply not do that, so we must either live with it or separate. The choice, gentlemen, is yours.:

I started Laurie King's series about the clever, badass Mary Russell who assists Sherlock Holmes during the period where Watson has left off, last year, but broke it off when I realized that most of the stories take place after WWI, and I was studying pre-WWI works that year.  Now I'm ready for more, and can't get to the library. Hrumph!

It's a pity. The series is delightful, and I am quite smitten with Mary Russell, who is often more than a match for Holmes and who doesn't clog up the adventure by having (much) sexual tension with a man old enough to be her dad, or with anyone else either.

In this episode, they go to post-Turkish Palestine on a mission from Mycroft, encountering and foiling the usual dastardly plot while visiting many historical/Biblical sites and wrestling with culture shock. Very high recommendations.

And that's it for the month. You might think that during a quarantine, I'd be reading more, but between my first attempt at running for local office and my need to take my son's second grade education in hand, without busses or gym cardio equipment to provide regular reading--no, I'm not.

Hope you all are well.

A Surge In Girlpower: The Power, by Naomi Alderman

Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done. As he plunges, she knows that she could do it. That she has had the strength, and perhaps she has had it enough for weeks or months, but only now is she certain. She can do it now and leave no possibility of misfires or reprisals. It seems the simplest thing in the world, like reaching out a hand and flicking off a light switch. She cannot think why she hasn't decided to turn out this old light before.

I hated this book, I couldn't put it down, and I intend to track down and read the other three books Alderman has written.

The premise is that a new generation of girls develops the ability to send painful or deadly electric shocks from their fingertips because something something plot device, and thereby become the dominant gender.  Thus the patriarchal world of bullying, discrimination, rape, sex trafficking, organized crime, megalomaniacal dictatorships and bullshit philospohies and religions asserting patriarchy as the natural order of things and the will of God is torn down at last, women's freedom is achieved at last, and a wonderful new era takes its place, complete with bullying, discrimination, rape, sex trafficking, organized crime, megalomaniacal dictatorships and bullshit philospohies and religions asserting matriarchy as the natural order of things. Of course.

The good news is, they smash patriarchy. The bad news is, female dominance can be as shitty as male dominance, including to women. I'm disappointed. I had always thought that the gender socialized to understand emotional labor would rule with more kindness and nurturing, if put in charge. 

Nevertheless, speculation about turning the existing world upside down is fascinating, and this book in particular is a masterpiece. Seems to me, men especially, should read it. They may feel horror, not the least at the realization that most of what they're reading about is really happening to other people, as they read this. The experience of walking a mile in their ill-fitting high heels may change theri thinking.  Highest recommendations.

The Wreck of the F. Scott Fitzgerald: The great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Sometime before he introduced himself, I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.

The legend goes down along Long Island Sound
Where the party life never was duller
Where the virtue's as thin as a glass of cold gin
And the gin has more warmth and more color.

I haven't completed the song version yet. Maybe I will some day. Right now, it's all mood and theme to me, more than specific lyrics. more accurately, the entire book is a series of prose-poetic lyrical descriptions, from the dog biscuit floating and dying in a dish of milk to the protagonist doing the same in a swimming pool, from the party guest who is astonished to find that his host's library contains actual books instead of fake shelves with the spines glued on to the literal ash heap where Tom Buchanan goes slumming for discarded people to victimize. Every page has important visuals.

I've read Gatsby more than once, and found myself coming away with different impressions of the major characters (except Tom, who is the same bag of diseased frathouse Kavenaugh penises every time). Sometimes I pity the Wilsons, and sometimes I despise them. Sometimes I think of Gatsby as a hero and a role model, and sometimes as a schmuck who should have just let the past go. Sometimes I see Daisy as a victimized figure as tragic as Gatsby, who might have been made happy by him, and other times as a walking Love Canal whose good qualities exist only in Gatsby's imagination. Whether the book is enjoyable depends on whether you can find at least one person to be likable. 

This time around, I found myself focused on the clues to the life of the unreliable narrator, his backstory in a Midwest that is presented as more clean and wholesome than the big city that he and the other characters have left it for; his refusal to commit to a serious relationship before fixing a misunderstanding in his hometown involving a woman he hadn't even been dating, compared and contrasted with the casual hookups and infidelities that he learns of among all the other characters without explicitly judging them; the fact that he seems to be the only character in East or West Egg who has a job and is conscientious about getting work done, even though it has little to do with his long range career plans.

Most of the 20th century works in the Great Books set are either excerpts or short representative works meant to include an author rather than represent their best work. Portrait of the Artist instead of Ulysses, A Lost Lady instead of My Antonia, short stories by Henry James, Faulkner and Hemingway instead of their better known novels.  Fitzgerald is different. He wrote some other works, but few people read them today. Gatsby is the thing he is known for.

You'll find the Buchanans and other loose cannons
Swigging Tanqueray, Plymouth and Boodle's
Then they speed off and make shattered lives in their wake
Without saying so much as a "Toodles!"

The legend goes down along Long Island Sound
Where the wallets of rich people fatten
Their souls are no wiser than Eckleburg's eyes
Shedding tears over Queens and Manhattan

Astronishment: The Expanding universe, by Sir Arthur Eddington

In the earliest days, when the universe was only just disturbed from equilibrium, and the rate of expansion was slow, light and other radiation went round and round the universe until it was absorbed. This merry-go-round lasted until the universe had expanded to 1003times its initial radius. Then the bell rang for the last lap; light waves then running will make just one more circuit during the rest of eternity. Those that started later will never get round.

The Expanding Universe is included in the 20th Century volumes of the revised Great Books set, and I'm relieved to find that it's one of the most readable, understandable scientific works in the set. 

Eddington's expanding universe model of the cosmos was in contrast to Einstein's model, in which the universe was globular, such that traveling straight in one direction would ultimately bring one back to the point of origin.  Seems to me, the Eddington model makes more sense, but that may be because it's more understandable to me.  The book also contains literary references and jokes, as books taken from a series of popular lectures are wont to do.  Highly recommended.

The Medical Text In Spite Of Itself: Introduction to Experimental Medicine, by Claude Bernard

Among the doctors there are some who could believe that medicine should remain a science of observation, that is to say a medicine capable of predicting the course and the outcome of diseases, but not having to act directly on the disease. There are others, and I am one of them, who thought that medicine could be an experimental science, that is to say a medicine capable of descending into the interior of the organism, and of finding the means of modifying and adjusting up to a certain point the hidden springs of the living machine. Observing physicians regarded the living organism as a small world contained in the large, as a kind of living and ephemeral planet whose movements were governed by laws that the simple observation could make us discover so as to predict the course and the evolution of vital phenomena in a healthy or sick state, but without ever having to modify their natural course in any way. This doctrine is found in all its purity in Hippocrates.

As opposed to Eddington, Claude Bernard is not particularly enjoyable, and if he has a point, I failed to comprehend it.  The first half, translated tediously from French, consists of droning endlessly about the difference between observation and experiment; it later progresses to the ethics of vivisection on live subjects who are not in need of surgery, and the need to keep a cold, detached air while the patient is screaming.  He's also one of about six great scientific authors from down the centuries who writes about the scientific method as if he invented it during his own lifetime.

He may have been a great and powerful scientist back in the day, but his book is dry as burnt toast.

Rank and Dominance: Essays in Sociology, by Max Weber

On a long railroad journey through what was then Indian territory, the author, sitting next to a traveling salesman of 'undertakers' hardware' (iron letters for tombstones), casually mentioned the still impressively strong church-mindedness. Thereupon the salesman remarked, 'Sir, for my part everybody may believe or not believe as he pleases, but if I saw a farmer or a business man not belonging to any church at all, I wouldn't trust him with fifty cents. Why pay me, if he doesn't believe in anything?' Now, that was a somewhat vague motivation.

(And the whole time, the real imperative was exactly the opposite, and it's been the church people who were untrustworthy. Why pay you, if they think they're the chosen people and can get away with any evil they want to, as long as they say a prayer for forgiveness afterwards?  But I digress)

Weber is in the revised Great books set, too.  I'm not sure quite when "sociology" was invented as a separate concept from political science and anthropology, but Weber was likely a pioneer in the field.  His sociology, sampling different ways in which societies and social status are organized in various world cultures, flows nicely from the surveys of religious/mystical traditions and traditional customs explored in Frazier's Golden Bough and Sumner's Folkways, both of which I read last year. 

Weber is famous for defining government as a body that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and for citing the three possible sources of government authority as "charisma, custom & tradition, and bureaucracy"  (hint; bureaucracy is the one you want, and the Republican Party in America has tried to sully the word and replace it with a hybrid of charisma and tradition).

The first half of the book, the political part, was the most interesting to me, as it compared and contrasted such bureaucracies as existed in France, Germany and Russia immediately prior to and during the 20th Century, with echoes of the endless minor officials who appear in Chekhov and Gogol, and who were humorlessly parodied by Kafka. There are further sections on religion and on the concept of social rank, from royal hierarchies to western economic strata to the caste system of India and the Chinese literati.  Weber would have been fascinated by the nonsensical politics in American high schools and corporate structures. An interesting read.

More Jack Reacher: The Enemy, The Hard Way, Bad Luck & Trouble, Wanted Man, by Lee Child

Day xxx of quarantine.  I've been feeding junk food to my mind as well as to my body. Shuttup. I don't even care.

A Boozy Beggar Who Could Think You Under The Table: Being and Time, and What is Metaphysics, by Martin Heidegger

Human existence can relate to be-ing only if it is itself beholden to no-thing. Going above and beyond being is of the essence of existence. This going beyond, however, is metaphysics itself. That is how metaphysics belongs to "the nature of man". It is neither a branch of academic philosophy nor a realm of scattered notions. Metaphysics is the basic event of existence. It is existence itself. Because the truth of metaphysics dwells in this unfathomable ground, it has about it the ever lurking possibility of deepest error about what is in closest proximity [to it]. Hence, no strictness of a science attains the seriousness of metaphysics. Philosophy can never be measured by the yardstick of the idea of science.

Being and Time is Heidegger's most important book. "What is Metaphysics?" is the brief essay that represents him in the revised Great Books set.  You can barely read the essay without first reading the book, since the essay refers to the book countlessly.

The answer to what metaphysics is is, "The study of why there is stuff rather than no stuff"...or as he puts it, "Why be-ing and not no-thing?" And yes, he or his translator puts hyphens into the words "being" and "nothing" each and every time he uses them, which is frequent, and jar-ring every time.

Like most of the German philosophers, his translators appear to take pride in rendering his thought as incomprehensible as possible, either so that only those who want it bad enough will understand at last, or because the thoughts are revealed as stoned college sophomore-level nonsense if you strip away the big words.  He goes on and on about "be-ing" and "no-thing", marveling at the apparent paradox that one cannot even discuss "no-thing" without rendering it into "be-ing" by giving it qualities....and yet elsewhere, he defines "be-ing" with such particularity that he gets to insist that people are the only entities that exist (a horse IS, but it does not EXIST.  Da fuq, Heidegger?). Seems to me, one cannot box "be-ing" as applying to only some things and then calling all of what lies outside "be-ing" as a void too all-encompassing to be described. Do things that ARE but do not EXIST count as being, or nothing?  This is why non-philosophers dismiss philosophy as ridiculous navel-gazing.

A synonym for "be-ing" is "Dasein", which again, is used throughout Being and Time instead of "existence", and again, has the effect of rendering the ideas thick and dull via unfamiliar words. It cost me mental energy to translate "dasein" into "existence" every time it appeared.

Heidegger also takes great mileage out of the fact that we are creatures coming out of the past, living in the present, and going towards the future. It's almost too much for his poor overwhelmed soul to handle, or at any rate, he is sure it's too much for ours.

I'm not sure I get it, not sure if I want to, and not sure there's anything worthwhile to be got.  If your mileage varies, I'd love to hear your explanation.
 

The Golden Age of Uncertainty, by Werner Heisenberg

It is obvious that the invention of new weapons, especially of the thermonuclear weapons, has fundamentally changed the political structure of the world. Not only has the concept of independent nations or states undergone a decisive change, since any nation which is not in possession of such weapons must depend in some way on those very few nations that do produce these arms in large quantity, but also the attempt of warfare on a large scale by means of such weapons has practically become an absurd form of suicide. Hence one frequently hears the optimistic view that therefore war has become obsolete, that it will not happen again. This view, unfortunately, is a much too optimistic oversimplification. On the contrary, the absurdity of warfare by means of thermonuclear weapons may, in a first approximation, act as an incentive for war on a small scale. Any nation or political group which is convinced of its historical or moral right to enforce some change of the present situation will feel that the use of conventional arms for this purpose will not involve any great risks; they will assume that the other side will certainly not have recourse to the nuclear weapons, since the other side being historically and morally wrong on this issue will not take the chance of war on a large scale.

Drink whenever something in the 20th century volumes of the Great Books set was originally presented as a series of lectures.

Physics and Philosophy was Heisenberg explaining quantum physics to...yes! Other scientists, who knew what all the big concepts were already. #ZeemanEffect #BohrSommerfieldModel  Fortunately, I'd already read works from the same 20th Century Science volume by Planck, Schrodinger, Einstein, Bohr and Eddington, so I got at least some of the main ideas, though it still left me struggling.

Heisenberg touches briefly here on his biggest generally known idea--the theory that experimental data is affected by the act of observing it--but this isn't the main paper in which he sets that forth.  Instead, his main idea is to feel the pain of those who thought they knew geometry until 19th century mathematicians started fucking with Euclid, and of people who thought they knew physics until relativistic quantum physics fucked with Newton.  The older versions lasted so long because they pragmatically get usable results in the human sized real world, and only break down when studying huge astronomical distances or matter so small that it could not even be identified or measured before the 20th century.  But where it breaks down, Heisenberg finds that no theory yet accounts for all of the data, and that further, theoretical science and all unobservable quantities can go out the window. We might as well get used to eternal paradox.

Seems to me, the late great Jordin Kare put it more succinctly in his song about the Unified Field Theory:

You've got your quantum mechanics, got your QED
Some special and some general relativity
But you might as well go looking, just as sure as you're born
For a unified field theory as a unicorn.

" Never had Faber College--and with a kind of surprise they remembered that it was their own college, every inch of it their own property--appeared to the Animals so desirable a place. As Flounder looked down the quad his eyes filled with tears. If he could have spoken his thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the smug elites of Omega House with their precious, pretentious manners and unauthentic hygiene.

"These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that day when Bluto had first stirred them to rebellion. If he himself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of fun-loving party animals set free from the constraints of political correctness, civilized behavior, and elitist GPAs, the frat brothers all equal, each drinking according to his capacity, the strong free to shoot spitballs at the weak, everyone telling it like it is and fuck your feelings. Instead--he did not know why--the college had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling incel militia roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades shoved into unmarked vans and taken to Bluto's and Otter's infamous pleasure dungeons after confessing to such crimes as rioting, studying, or attempting to vote.  

"The list of principles that had originally replaced Faber's elitist "Knowledge is good" seemed different every day, and where Flounder thought he remembered "Make Faber Great Again", "Only The Best Job Training", "It Wasn't Over When the Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor", and "Succeed Bigly", the inspirational messages had been changed gradually to "4 letters good, 14 words better", "Covfefe", "Fuck you Libtards" and "i dont care do u?". Finally, the senior Delta Animals had washed off the entire list of principles diuretically and simply written in their own vomit, "We support Our Leader, Comrade Blutarski."

"Further, Flounder's memories continued to trouble him, as they conflicted greatly with the pronouncements of Bluto and Otter as to the reasons for the rebellion.  Had their conflict with the elitist Omegas really arisen because the Omegas had been intellectuals? Liberals? Politically correct and obsessed with social justice at the expense of the innocent Party Animals?  Flounder wasn't sure this had been the case, but Bluto continually assured the first-years that it was, and Bluto was surely the wisest of them all.

"Bluto himself was now never spoken of simply as "Bluto." He was always referred to in formal style as "Our Leader, Comrade Blutarski," and the Deltas liked to invent for him such titles as Father of All Party Animals, Terror of Mankind, Protector of the Panty Raid, The Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah, and the like. In his speeches, Otter would talk with tears rolling down his cheeks of Bluto's great and infinite wisdom, his very stable genius, and the deep love he bore to all white working class Animals everywhere, except for the libtards, the losers, the nerds, the pussies, and the urban thugs from the University of Chicago. It had become usual to give Bluto the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune.

"There was no thought of rebellion or disobedience in Flounder's mind, not yet.  The days when he would dream of seeing Bluto's head on a pike where he could grin and wave gently at it, were still far in the future. He knew that, even as things were, they were far better off than they had been in the days of Dean Wormtongue, and that before all else it was needful to prevent the return of the elitist, snobby Omegas who looked down on them and called them deplorable. Whatever happened, Flounder would remain faithful, work hard, carry out the orders that were given to him, and accept the leadership of Bluto. But still, it was not for this that he and all the other animals had hoped and toiled. It was not for this that they had built the Deathmobile and faced the bullets of the ROTC. Such were Flounder's thoughts, though he lacked the words to express them.
 

"At last, feeling this to be in some way a substitute for the words he was unable to find, Flounder began to sing "(You Make Me Want to) Shout". The other bros sitting round him took it up, and they sang it three times over--very tunefully, but slowly and mournfully, first a little bit softer, then a little bit louder, but in a way they had never sung it before.

"Before they could finish singing it for the third time, Comrade Leader Blutarski, dressed in an imperial Roman toga and accompanied by two greasy incels with AR-15s and horn rimmed glasses, appeared. Without a word, he snatched Flounder's guitar from his hands and smashed it to splinters. He then explained, between belches, that he didn't want to hear any more 'thug music', and that from now on, the Animals must sing only wholesome, morally uplifting White People music, such as "Louie Louie" and "Cat Scratch Fever."

"That boy is a P-I-G, pig!" muttered Babs, but nobody paid attention to Babs.  At Animal House, women were to be ogled and groped, not heard." 

Orwell's masterwork about the Delta Frat "animals" and their failed attempt to create a white working class paradise of armpit farts and hamberder food fights on the rubble of a once-prestigious east coast liberal arts college, pledging success without grace, class, intellect, social justice or manners, is a thinly disguised, deeply bitter satire about the fall of the American dream in the land that rebelled against and defeated King George (personified here by the unhinged, ranting, stuffed shirt Dean Wormtongue) and made a new land on the premise that all (white) men were created equal and that this land was made for you and me.

In America, the "party animal" class of white men spent upwards of two centuries fighting to be considered the equals of both the wealthy oligarchy and the scientists, professors, and other intellectuals, while fighting just as hard to prevent any other kinds of people from presuming to be equal to them. 

The predictable--some say the inevitable--result was that they ended up less equal than they had ever been before, bowing beneath a more severe and graceless oligarchy than this land had ever seen as a king's colony, working harder for less pay than any white working class before them, objects of contempt and pity to the civilized world, and an object lesson to other dictatorships on how to oppress the proletariat by convincing them that various untouchable castes are really the bourgeoisie. 

Few readers will forget Orwell's revolutionary allegories:  Bluto's rousing "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" speech. The Battle of the Cake Float and the expulsion of Dean Wormtongue and the Omega frat.  The eternal pledges of white male equality, the pledges of abstinence from violent hazing, military activity, golf, brown-nosing and examinations, and how the head Delts broke these pledges one by one.  The decline in Faber's status and resources, the failed attempt to impose tariffs on town businesses, the declaration of all bad news to be hoaxes, the increasing workloads, and the final epic spectacle of Bluto walking on his hind legs in crown and lodge attire among the heads of Omega House as they praise his golf scores and his brutal bullying of the party animals until Flounder and Pinto can no longer tell which one is Comrade Bluto and who are the mad, elitist monarchs.  Very highest recommendations. 

The No Body Problem: The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley

And see what happened to America, after. It became everything it accused others of being.  It tore itself apart, riddled by the rot of unfettered free speech, drowned in a deluge of propaganda foisted upon an uneducated public with no formalized training in critical thinking. Liberal democracies and scheming socialist regimes were doomed from the very start. You give a human being freedom and personhood as an innate right, and what do they have to fight for?

I came to the Hugo-nominated novels late this year. forgive me.  Kameron Hurley (I remember her from The Geek Feminist Revolution) is the author of the book the library happened to have on hand when I went looking.

I had to keep reminding myself that this was written in 2019, long before the George Floyd protests. It is insanely topical. It begins with the destruction of a major city, continues with a war to fight the aliens that caused it, and segues into both an action-packed war adventure centered around a technological innovation we've all seen on Star Trek, and a blistering commentary on corporate Feudalism and the weaknesses in America that can cause it to replace Democracy.  Which leads us to...

Byzantiumin Space: A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine
 

Through the groundcar's windows--smoky glass, paling to clear--what Mahit saw made very little sense. People didn't break things on Lsel--not property, not with cavalier abandon. The shell of a station was fragile and if some part of the machinery of it snapped, people would die, of breathing vacuum, of icy chill, of the hydroponics system shutting down. Casual vandalism on lsel was a matter of grafitti, elaborate hacks, blocking off hallways with the hull-breach expanding foam cannisters. But here in the streets of the City she was watching a Teixcalaanli woman, in a perfectly reasonable suit jacket and trousers, swing what looked like a metal pole into the window of a shop, and shatter the glass there. Do that, walk onward, and do it again.

...the book that actually won the Hugo. I learned from the author's page that Arkady Martine is a scholar of the Byzantine age and that she writes fiction and nonfiction "about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world." She has managed to re-create an approximate Byzantine Empire in space, complete with an incomprehensible system of government, far-reaching assertion of dominance over other civilizations presumed to be Barbarian and therefore not worthy of agency, and layer upon layer of political intrigue.

Enter Mahit Dzmare, an ambassador from one of the "Barbarian" colonies who is sent to the Empire to replace the previous ambassador.  Dzmare is implanted with the previous ambassador's memory chip, containing his personality and memories from five years ago and before, such that they can converse in Dzmare's head.

At which point they have to solve the prior ambassador's murder.  And I've taken you through chapter one.  It becomes a labyrinth after that.  A Byzantine one, in fact.

Like Light Brigade, it contains staggering commentary on events that have happened in Americasince the book was published. Very highest recommendations.
 

Dollars into Sense: the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it private enterprise on well tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would indeed be more sensible to build houses and the like, but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

Keynes's economic theory deserves a place with Adam Smith and Marx, in that he revolutionized economic thought. prior to Keynes, economists spoke of "economic law" as self-justifying and inviolable; one could no more change laissez-faire economics than one could break the law of gravity. There were reformers like Ricardo and Henry George who called for better treatment for the poor, but they were regarded as silly utopians. How fortunate that we've come so far since those days.

It was Keynes who discussed economic behavior, such as the tendency of the business class to maximize profits, as a bahavior that could be regulated by the government just as it regulates criminal behavior. He proved that a 'down' market would not necessarily correct itself--as we saw during the twin Bush recessions, where no amount of rate-cutting spurred new investment or innovation, and that 'up' markets were inherently self-saturating and would cycle downward.

His solution was for the State to prime the pump judiciously. Decades later, Thomas Pyketty would speak of the need to judiciously redistribute the wealth from time to time to head off violent revolution.

Oddly, Keynes was more conservative than I had thought. Although he favored government spending, he was against raising taxes on the rich to pay for policies that would ultimately benefit the rich the most, which raises the question how the government was expected to pay for pump-priming.

Keynes is intensely mathematical in some parts, but generally easy to follow and equipped with several bon mots. Highly recommended.

A Beery Swine Who Was Just as Sloshed as Schlegel: Philosophical Investigations, by Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you trained someone to emit a particular sound at the sight of something red, another at the sight of something yellow, and so on for other colours, still he would not yet be describing objects by their colours. Though he might be a help to us in giving a description. A description is a representation of a distribution in space (in that of time, for instance).

If I let my gaze wander around a room and suddenly it lights on an object of striking red colour, and I say "Red!", that is not a description.

Are the words "I am afraid" a description of a state of mind?

I say "I am afraid"; someone else asks me "What was that? A cry of fear, or do you want to tell me how you feel; or is it a reflection on your present state?" Could I always give him a clear answer? Could I never give him one?

I have five lists cataloguing the 'great works' of philosophy through history.  Three of them end before Wittgenstein, one ends with him, and one ends with Wittgenstein and Sartre.  Was Wittgenstein the climax of philosophy, or have the professors simply failed to agree on who gets to be considered great after 1950?  Philosophical Investigations, the final philosophical work in the Great Books revised set, would be an odd choice for the culmination of world philosophy.

Like Marcus Aurelius and Pascal, it consists of a series of related paragraphs and fragments, not intended by their author to be published in the final form they appear in, and arranged by others after his death. The unifying theme is language as a game and a tool for understanding, and it digs into what exactly we MEAN when we say certain things, with a thoroughness that eventually renders itself almost ridiculous, like if you repeated "tree" dozens of times, over and over, until it became just a sound.  

He also makes the reader aware of the thick layer of fog that lies between two consciousnesses, such that efforts to communicate are artificial and through a glass darkly.  Nevertheless, we mostly manage to make one another aware of what we mean.  Or....do we?

Great Books Wrapup: "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber", by Ernest Hemingway; "A Rose for Emily", by William Faulkner; "A Mathematician's Apology", by G.H. Hardy

It's that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives. Their figures stay boyish when they're fifty. The great American boy-men. Damned strange people. But he like this Macomber now. Damned strange fellow. Probably meant the end of cuckoldry too. Well, that would be a damned good thing. Damned good thing. Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don't know what started it. But over now. Hadn't had time to be afraid with the buff. That and being angry too. Motor car too. Motor cars made it familiar. Be a damn fire eater now. He'd seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.

--Hemingway

These are some of the shortest works in the entire Great Books set, and highlight that the 20th century volumes highlight representative works instead of the best, much longer work.  Hemingway and Faulkner are two American literary giants who get one short story each (I am bored by most of Hemingway and fascinated by Faulkner and may read a lot of Faulkenr next year while continuing to ignore most of Hemingway; if your mileage varies, that's cool)

"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is worth a read, because it is so vintage Hemingway it almost satirizes itself.  You can smell the testosterone dripping from every word. A big Manly Man hunter and safari guide takes the title character and his wife on a big game hunting safari. Macomber the tourist is charged at by a wounded lion, and runs away. Oh No! He is not a Manly Man. The guide pities and despises him. His wife henpecks him and then cuckolds him with the guide, who is a Manly Man (as one does). The next day they hunt buffalo. Macomber successfully stands his ground and shoots a buffalo, and loves it.  He is now a Manly Man! he has totally redeemed himself! Now he stands up to his wife's henpecking, frightening her with his newfound courage, and so she "accidentally" shoots him dead within a couple of pages (as one does).  The guide has a stoic about it, and there we are. If you can read it without bursting into peals of merry laughter at the Ernestness of it all, you too might be a Manly Man.

I first read the much shorter "A Rose for Emily" long ago, and considered it a horror story at the time.  I find that it grows a lot on a second reading a few decades later. I found myself with a lot of sympathy for Emily, who may have been the loneliest woman in America, sheltered away from the world by her patriarchal father, who drives all the suitors away as not good enough for her, until the bloom fades from her, at which point he dies, leaving her with nothing but the decaying antebellum mansion to live in as its location transitions to being the ugly neighborhood, generations come and go, and we eventually learn what became of the one other man who briefly paid attention to her.

Hardy was a pure mathematician, whose brief famous essay "A Mathematician's Apology" argues that math can be a self-justifying art form, beautiful irrespective of applied uses, and gives examples of what Hardy considers "perfect" math, such as the proof that there is an infinite number of primes.

If anyone feels like imitating me and attempting the great Books cover to cover, I suggest starting the math portion with Hardy, and with Whitehead's Introduction to Mathematics (see Book Post, December 2019) before trying to make sense of Archimedes or Newton. The moderns were writing for generalists, while the classical scientists were writing for specialists.

Misfits and Outcasts: The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders

My body collides with something. I feel dense fur, over an even thicker carapace. A single warm tentacle brushes my face, and I realize I'm standing a few centimeters away from a full-sized crocodile.

Her giant front pincer is close enough to crush my head in one lazy motion. I hear a low sound under the wind's endless chorus, and I'm sure this crocodile is opening her wide, round mouth full of sharp teeth to devour me, bones and all.

The fourth (in my order of reading) of the 2020 Hugo nominated novels alternates between the viewpoints of Sophie and Mouth, two young women in a strange world where the beasts have familiar names but are nothing like the "crocodiles" and "bisons" in our own world.  The main metropolis prides itself on clinging to "old-fashioned values", by which we mean vicious bullying and a police state that will exile kids into the deadly wilderness for stealing three food stamps.

Sophie is cast out of the repressive  big city, but finds her true self among the supposedly hideous monsters on the outside.  I am myopic.  I didn't figure out until halfway in what this was a metaphor for, and then I had to go back and start it over again.  It was worth it. Very imaginative, and very high recommendations.

I Don't Drink, And I Know Things: Nothing Good Can Come of This, by Kristi Coulter
Stay on the floor. It's the best place for you now. Know that the advice your brain is giving you--buy a gun, pull all your money out of the stock market, move into a women's separatist commune--is not helpful. Don't act on any of it right now. Try to stop crying. Know that whil you feel crazy right now, may in fact *be* crazy right now, you are sober.  If you find yourself saying 'I'm only sober because there's no alcohol in the house', stop. You've driven through snowstorms, power outages, with fevers or tear-swollen eyes to buy booze, and you could have done it tonight. Nothing stopped you from drinking tonight but you. Because whenever you thought about it--and how could you not?--a voice inside said, 'Sure, you could drink. But he will still be president.'

---Coulter on 11/9, the day that changed everything.

I meet the most amazing people via friends of friends on FaceBook.  Kristi Coulter is a smart, high-achieving woman from Seattle who writes cool posts and usually reflects my values. And so, when some troll tried to neg her about something something garbanzo not so great just someone who wrote a book, I was quick to be like "Congratulations, you just convinced me to buy the book." Until that comment I had no idea Coulter was a published author. There are hundreds of Facebook friends who enrich my world with fun memes and political rants and quirky observations, and I have no idea what their actual lives are like.  Now I know a little bit about one more of them.

Nothing Good Can Come From This is a collection of autobiographical essays, loosely centered around the themes of her decision to quit drinking and being a woman in a country that despises women.  Coulter carries a lot on her shoulders. She has imposter syndrome and other emotional difficulties that she's not afraid to share, and a lot of the thing going wrong with the world today hit her hard. She is bemused that some people around her call her 'strong' while inside she feels like she's barely hanging on.  On the other hand, she is also on the other side of the economic chasm from most of the rest of us, has a near-perfect marriage, and made a fortune putting in her dues at her high-stress job, from which she has now transferred and takes vacations to everywhere. Much of her vulnerability comes from constantly striving to be better than she was the day before.

Like not drinking. Unlike a lot of sobriety success stories, Coulter does not have a pathetic before picture of hitting bottom in a sea of vomit, broken friendships, job losses and arrests. She just, after some number of unsuccessful attempts, decided that alcohol was not making her better than she'd been yesterday, and stuck with the decision. In an environment where co-workers have their private coolers full of booze for drinking at work and the waitstaff pressures customers to buy cocktails and yet the bars at the lavish parties are not equipped with so much as a glass of soda water for the sober. Do they not use mixers in the high end of Seattle?

High recommendations for perspective on the world and the psyche, and for walking a path worthy of respect.
 

Parnell Verses the Crones: The complete poems of William Butler Yeats
O''DRISCOLL drove with a song

The wild duck and the drake

From the tall and the tufted reeds

Of the drear HartLake.

And he saw how the reeds grew dark

At the coming of night-tide,

And dreamed of the long dim hair

Of Bridget his bride.

He heard while he sang and dreamed

A piper piping away,

And never was piping so sad,

And never was piping so gay.

And he saw young men and young girls

Who danced on a level place,

And Bridget his bride among them,

With a sad and a gay face.

The dancers crowded about him

And many a sweet thing said,

And a young man brought him red wine

And a young girl white bread.

But Bridget drew him by the sleeve

Away from the merry bands,

To old men playing at cards

With a twinkling of ancient hands.

The bread and the wine had a doom,

For these were the host of the air;

He sat and played in a dream

Of her long dim hair.

He played with the merry old men

And thought not of evil chance,

Until one bore Bridget his bride

Away from the merry dance.

He bore her away in his arms,

The handsomest young man there,

And his neck and his breast and his arms

Were drowned in her long dim hair.

O'Driscoll scattered the cards

And out of his dream awoke:

Old men and young men and young girls

Were gone like a drifting smoke;

But he heard high up in the air

A piper piping away,

And never was piping so sad,

And never was piping so gay.

---"The Host of the Air"

I've been grazing on the collected Yeats in the bathtub all year, and finished it this month.  While we were quarantined indoors, the air outside thick and unbreathable with forest fire smoke, and the center unable to hold as rough beasts slouched towards Mar-a-Lago to be born, it was good to have visions of green Irish lands with crystal lakes and cliff tops and fresh sweet air.

And then he got all political. As one does.

Like a lot of modern era poets, Yeats is an enigma wrapped up in contradictions.  It's almost as if he started out as a young romantic idealist, and became pained and bitter (and fascist) in his old age. Fancy that happening to a man.

I went to Ireland last year, and was able to compare the things I saw with the visuals in Yeats's poetry.  The book is divided into "lyrical' and 'narrative/dramatic', so reading it in order, one transitions from verses about Irish mythology and lovely young women into harsher urban visions and odes to Parnell and the Easter rising, and then back into the myths and the long tales like "The Wanderings of Oisin" and "The Shadowy Waters".  Yeats is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live in his world.

We're a big family, but there's plenty to go around.

Or there would be, if Dad didn't spend so much of it in himself, and on spoiling the favorite sons and telling all of us how much better and more worthy they are than the rest of us.  

Dad refuses to work outside the home, and he won't parent any of us either, except to beat us, which he does frequently.  And yet, he's declared himself to be in charge of the family budget.  
Mom has a low-paying job that takes up most of her time, but she tries to meet our needs, the best she can.  

It's not easy.  We need food, and medicine, and books and supplies for school.  Mom saves and saves and saves, but then just when we've saved enough to do get what Mom promised us we could have, Dad finds the savings, and takes it, and goes to Vegas.  

Sometimes his sprees last for months, and he sends us NOTHING.  But we're mostly just relieved when he's gone, because when he comes back, he always calls us "sinners" and beats mom and the kids.  He reeks of booze and casino cigars and rage-sweat and Axe spray and all-you-can-eat buffets as he beats us and calls us "sinners".

And then he goes back to beating Mom while sneering at her and calling her "Mommy" in a sarcastic tone of voice.  "You're spoiling the children", he says, while giving lavish feasts to the one or two children he favors.  And then he destroys our schoolbooks, and says that books are for nerds.

He encourages the kids to fight with each other. He eggs on the few favorite sons, who are the biggest, and tries to get them to bully the girls, and the rainbow kids, and the ones with the dark skin, who he says are fair game because they're not his. And they often DO bully them, because he promises them treats and says that he'll have to give the treats to the other kids unless the favored kids take the treats away from them.

Once or twice, we got Dad's weapons and his money box away from him, and we gave them to Mom and told her it was our chance to leave Dad and go someplace where we could have a functional family without him.

And what Mom did was this:  She went back to Dad and said, "The kids think I should be in charge now.  Is that...Okay?"

And Dad said "No".

And Mom said, "We need to be a two-parent family", and she stayed with him. And before long, Dad got a hold of the weapons and the money box again, and he beat Mom black and blue and went off on another one of his spending binges, after which he came back and told us there was no money left for food and medicine, and that we were "sinners" who didn't deserve such things anyway.

Mom went back to saving and saving and saving again, and doing without, so that we could one day have nice things.  But then Dad got a hold of what she'd saved again, and squandered it.
We begged Mom. We BEGGED her for a fighting chance, for food and medicine and something to help us become thriving and independent, and a lot of the time she just stood there, crying to herself, while we begged her
.  
And then, every once in a while, she would snap.

And when that happened, Mom would lash out viciously at us, and say "SHUT UP, and stop asking for food and medicine!  You'll just make him mad! I can't get you those things!  I can't stop him from taking everything we've got!  I have no power!  Do you understand?  I HAVE NO POWER!!!"

And every time that happened, a couple more of the bigger kids would hear her, and think for a bit, and would then go over to Dad and ask if HE would protect them if they did what he wanted and helped to bully the rest of us.

And Dad would grin and say no, but that he'd hurt them a little less than the rest of us if they'd cooperate.  And they shrugged and agreed.

And that's why we're growing up to be the kind of people we are.  

Those of you that have eyes, let them read.  Those of you that have hearts, let them bleed.