Destination Elsewhere: The 10,000 Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow

"But you still know about doors, don't you? Because there are ten thousand stories about ten thousand doors, and we know them as well as we know our names.  They lead to Faerie, to Valhalla, Atlantis and Lemuria, Heaven and Hell, to all the directions a compass could never take you, to ELSEWHERE."

This is the fifth book I've read from the 2020 Hugo list, and the first one that I would have voted for over the winning "A Memory Called Empire". That one is a mystery involving Byzantine interplanetary intrigue.  The 10,000 Doors touched my soul and made me cry.

January is a girl being brought up in the early 20th Century,  in the emotionally distant home of a wealthy guardian while her father explores distant corners of a world not yet completely plundered by colonists. And there are doors to other worlds. Doors that foment leakage between worlds and that cause changes vital to humanity's cultural development.  Doors to outer and inner space.  

January is also a spirited, willful girl with a thirst for adventure, and therefore considered by society to be someone who needs to be "broken" for her own good, and taught to ignore nonsense and see only what her sensible betters see.

I cried a lot. But they're cathartic tears. Most of the time.

On Darwin's Shoulders: Genetics and the Origin of Species, by Theodosius Dobzhansky

Gene mutation, chromosome changes, restriction of the population size, natural selection, and development of isolating mechanisms are the known common denominators of many, if not all, evolutionary histories. Different phylogenetic lines vary, however, in that one or the other of these evolutionary agents may become limiting at different stages of the process. Polyploidy, self-fertilization, apogamy, and asexual reproduction create very special conditions, to which some references have been made in the foregoing chapters.

Interesting that I happened to read "Genetics and the Origin of Species" (part of the Great Books set, and scheduled to be read about now for a decade as part of that project) and "The 10,000 Doors of January" (put on the library's hold list earlier this year because Hugo nomination) at the same time.  The poetry and science complement each other nicely.

Dobzhansky follows and builds on Darwinian evolution by exploring causes and effects of change at the genetic level, and how groups of organisms change or don't, in response to mutations and genetic alteration within their number.  I have no idea whether Alix E. Harrow was influenced by this or any other genetic evolutionary theory, but her philosophy of the effects of Doors on the world is strikingly similar to Dobzhansky on mutations.  Doors can be called social mutation material, maybe.

Recommended, because it's a lot easier to read and understand than most of the Great Books science volumes.

 

America the Banal: USA, by John Dos Pasos

In the morning the rancher, a tall ruddy man named Thomas, with a resonant voice, went over to the barn and offered him work for a few days at the price of his board and lodging. They were kind to him, and had a pretty daughter named Mona that he kinder fell in love with. She was a plump rosycheeked girl, strong as a boy and afraid of nothing.  She punched him and wrestled with him; and, particularly after he'd gotten fattened up a little and rested, he could hardly sleep nights for thinking of her.

This book, actually a trilogy, spans most or all of the continental United States over three decades of the early 20th Century, interweaving like the Game of Thrones novels from the perspective of several characters of various backgrounds as they travel, make or fail to make fortunes, struggle for the rights of workers, fight in or avoid WWI, and experience amoral capitalism in the aftermath of victory.

Between the chapters involving the characters are biographical sketches of real historical figures like Thorstein Veblen, Joe Hill, and the Wright Brothers, sections of period news headlines and song lyrics, and first person stream of consciousness vignettes under the headline "The Camera Eye".

The main effect is one of a socialist's critical panorama of America. I found most of the barely interlocking plots forgettable, cliched and lacking the sense of an ending.

Oregon, my home state, is pretty good politically.  We’ve had vote-by-mail for decades, and automatic registration for a good while, too. It’s easy to vote here, and so Democrats regularly win large majorities, and the state is able to actually govern and offset some of the willful failure of the Republican-controlled Federal government. 

Two problems exist with an otherwise excellent map:  the existence of one vast sprawling district covering 2/3 of the state’s area, that is unwinnable by Democrats and spoils an otherwise perfect Congressional delegation; and the ability of the Republican state legislative minority to block good legislation by walking out and denying us a quorum. With a Democratic supermajority in both houses and a new incoming Democratic Secretary of State who will draw the districts unilaterally  if the Republicans walk out of the legislature, we are able to fix both problems.  And I’m going to show you how to do it.

My Congressional map assumes the projected addition of a sixth Congressional district, and is drawn to preserve county boundaries over making solid shapes. Of Oregon’s 36 counties, 29 are completely within one district, and only the most populous county, Multnomah, is within more than two districts.

DISTRICT 1 (green): Polk, Yamhill, all but the easternmost part of Washington County.  This is Suzanne Bonamici’s district, and the one that changes the least from the existing map.  It represents the area that has experienced the highest population growth and must lose a part of Washington County. It also switched Clatsop and Columbia to the north for Polk in the South, and has a 57% Democratic PVI. Bonamici will hold it easily.

THE NEW DISTRICT 2 (purple): Has nothing in common with the old district 2 except the swing county of Jackson, which has nominated unsuccessful Democratic candidates for the old district for as long as I’ve been paying attention.  Any one of them would have a much easier time running in my proposed new district, which also contains all of Josephine, Coos, Curry, Lincoln, Tillamook, Clatsop and Columbia counties, the coastal parts of Lane and Douglas (which are separated from the rest of their counties by the Coast mountain range), and extends into Multnomah west of the Willamette River and east of Washington County.

This district has a PVI of 55%Dem, and is anchored by Democrats in Ashland, NW Portland, and the ancestrally Democratic north and central coast, while absorbing Republicans from Josephine and Coos, who have long been a thorn in Pete DeFazio’s side.  It is also the district most likely to flip to the Republicans if a really big red wave were to occur nationally.  The Oregon coast is historically blue, but swung sharply to the Republicans in the 2020 elections, in what was one of the few sore spots for Oregon.  My hope is that Oregon Democrats would use this district to respect and include the coast more, and run candidates from one of the coastal counties.  A Jackson County Democrat would do well here too, but a nominee from Portland would be more likely to lose.

DISTRICT 3 (teal): Grant, Baker, Wheeler, Crook, Wallowa, Umatilla, Union, Morrow, Gilliam, Sherman, Wasco, Hood River, Northern and Eastern Multnomah. Don’t let the conservative eastern counties scare you. They are very thinly populated.  The first ten are solid GOP but together make up about 30% of the district. Wasco, Hood River and Multnomah east of Portland are light blue and make up another 30%.  The remaining 40% is in Portland and is the most solid blue voting bloc in the state.  At a 67% Dem PVI, it’s the bluest district on my map and will re-elect Earl Blumenauer for as long as he cares to run. 

I adhered to county lines on this district.  If aesthetically pleasing borders are a higher priority, this district could easily absorb the eastern tips of Jefferson and Deschutes, extending one straight line along the western border of Crook County, and take in the northeast section of Clackamas, without any threat to the district’s Democratic lean.

DISTRICT 4 (grey): Benton, non-coastal Lane and Douglas, Klamath, Lake, Harney and Malheur. This was not quite enough population, so I added the core of Albany in Linn County, right next to Benton. This is Pete DeFazio’s district, and gives him a boost in Democratic strength (PVI 55%D) by removing three conservative southwestern counties to the new 2nd and most of Linn to the 6th, while adding four geographically large but much less populous Republican Southeastern districts. The only real new population center to deal with is Klamath Falls, population 21,000.

DISTRICT 5 (red): The remainder of Washington County, and the western parts of Multnomah, Clackamas and Marion.  Bordered on the east by whichever is eastenmost of: I-5, the Willamette River, and the eastern city limits of Salem, and then east of that, alternately further into Portland for Democrats or the eastern Willamette valley for centrists and Republicans, to reach the goal of a 56% Dem PVI. This is a new district, made for the formerly red, blue trending city of Salem and Willamette Valley suburbs, with enough of Portland metro to keep it safely blue.

DISTRICT 6 (yellow): Deschutes, Jefferson, all of Linn except Albany, eastern Marion and Clackamas, and south-central Portland.  The “everything else” district. Includes blue-trending Bend, a lot of the Cascade range and conservative rural land (a lot of which burned down this past September), and enough of Multnomah to give the district a 58% Dem PVI, the second highest of the six. Kurt Schraeder will have to be more attentive to his own party or risk a primary challenge.

THE LEGISLATURE:  Oregon has a 30-seat Senate, each district of which composes two districts in the 60-seat lower House. Democrats currently hold supermajorities of 3/5 in both chambers (37 Representatives and 18 Senators in the 2021 legislature), but must increase their majority to a 2/3 super-DUPER majority in order to be able to govern without the Republicans blocking all legislation by refusing to show up for work.  Fortunately, the bluest parts of the state have gained population and the reddest have lost population, so an aggressive legislative redistricting is easy.  

My map below shows a proposed Senate redistricting with 7 solid Republican districts: Three in the east, two in the Southwest, and one on each side of the Willamette valley.  The other 23 run the gamut from solid Democrat to competitive.

Key changes to the existing map:

East of the cascades is a new, Democratic-leaning Senate district (shown in pale green) made from what is currently the bluest parts of House districts 59 and 54. Wasco County; the Warm Springs reservation in western Jefferson; northwestern Deschutes, including Sisters, and Bend.

The Western Willamette Valley currently has a Republican gerrymander in which Senate districts 12 and 13 are long parallel snakes that pair one solid GOP house district with one weak D-leaning one, for narrow Republican victories.  I’ve paired the two solid GOP districts and the northern Dem districts for a net gain of a Senate seat. 

Salem, whose six total legislative seats evolved from 2D/4R to 5D/1R over the course of the decade, is compacted into a 6D region by removing Turner and Aumsville from SD10 and adding the south part of Keizer.

SD20 is absorbed into the northern Portland suburbs of Clackamas. Due to population growth in Portland Metro, Portland in effect gains a blue seat without even changing.  HD39, the only red house district between districts 26 and 52 (and half of the only red Senate district) is absorbed by neighboring districts, and the House Republican leader, who currently runs in HD39, would likely run in the new HD18.

SD 5 and 26, now occupied by Republicans, are competitive as they are.  I bolstered them a little bit, and added Bandon and removed parts of Coos Bay to the 9th in a last ditch effort to save the red-trending southern half of SD5, but didn’t change much else.  SD26 currently elects Democrats in both of its House districts.

SD8, which currently has Albany and surrounding Lin County suburbs and only the Corvallis part of Benton (it was drawn in the last round to protect incumbent Frank Morse, one of the few moderate Republicans left, and since retired), has been changed to include all of Benton and just the blue part of Albany. The current Dem incumbent of HD16 could win either district, and the other would flip to Dem easily. 

SD3 adds some light blue precincts in Josephine County and loses some conservative precincts at the North end of Medford.  it *might* be possible so make two blue house seats out of this district, but it would break up Ashland along I-5.  

Net result: 23 Senate districts and 45 House districts that favor Democrats at least somewhat.  We could afford to lose a few and still have the super-DUPER majority needed to govern.

What do YOU think?

The Devil called down to Georgia,
He was making more deals with Newt
He was running blind, he was falling behind
And he'd lost his last lawsuit
So he locked himself in his office
And he called Brad Raffensperger
He said, "I want 11,000 votes
And I'm not afraid to perjure!

"I guess you didn't know it
But I'm the best that's ever been
And If I lose this election
They might send me to the pen
But I'm stronger than they think I am
They never could impeach me
And if you don't tell them that I won
I'll shake you like a peach tree!

"The Coup Klutz Klan is backing me
Likewise, my friends the Russians
So find them votes! You check your pockets!
Check your sofa cushions!

Donnie, rosin up your bow
And play some sour notes
'Cuz Hell's broke loose in Georgia
And they're out to steal the votes
And if you'd won another term
You'd make them liberals wail
But when you lose, you're going off to jail!

The Devil jumped up on his desk
And he said, "I'll start this mission!
Let's not have civil war
If we can end with mere sedition"
He'd beg and whine and threaten
He would yell and screech and piss
Then a band of Proud Bois joined in
And it sounded something like this:

Wahh, Wahh, Wahh, Wahh
Wahh, Wahh, Wahh, Wahh…

Then the Devil, he hung up the phone
And commenced to brag and boast
But Brad took his recording
And he called the Washington Post!

Springtime for Donald, sing and dance!
The Devil put a fire in the President's pants!
'Berders in the buffet, covfefe on the shelf
Mar-a-Lagofuck yourself!

Brad Raffensperger said,
"You won't be President again
I've seen you in that White House, 
You're the worst that's ever been!"
Don said, "I'm not beat yet
"I still have Senator Ron Johnson
"You ratted me out in Georgia
"....But they didn't in Wisconsin!!!"

Well shut my mouth and kiss my grits!
Your moral compass, you've smashed to bits
The biggest loser, playin' rough
Joe can't get here soon enough!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh7BZf7D5Bw

The Last of the Great Books:  The Problems of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell; The Nature of Life, by Conrad H. Waddington; Structural Anthropology, by Claude Levi-Strauss; The Waste Land , by TS Eliot

We shall find it convenient only to speak of things existing when they are in time, that is to say, when we can point to some time at which they exist (not excluding the possibility of their existing at all times). Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist. But universals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they subsist or have being, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence' as being timeless. The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as the world of being. The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world. According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other. The one we do not prefer will probably seem to us a pale shadow of the one we prefer, and hardly worthy to be regarded as in any sense real. But the truth is that both have the same claim on our impartial attention, both are real, and both are important to the metaphysician. Indeed no sooner have we distinguished the two worlds than it becomes necessary to consider their relations.

--Bertrand Russell

In the past we have, only too often, taken the attitude of a simple band of robbers, concerned only to get as much out of our surroundings as quickly as possible, with no thought of setting up a system capable of long-term operation. Perhaps the most practical effect that the natural philosophy of biology could have at the present time would be to show mankind a more scientific way of looking at his situation as an inhabitant of the world's surface.
--CH Waddington

The question then becomes that of ascertaining what kind of model deserves the name "structure"....First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system. It is made up of several elements, none of which can undergo a change without effecting changes in all other elements....Second, for any given model there should be a possibility of ordering a series of transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type....Third, the above properties make it possible to predict how the model will react if one or more of its elements are submitted to certain modifications...Finally, the model should be construed so as to make immediately intelligible all the observed facts.
--Claude Levi-Strauss

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

--TS Eliot

What a long, strange trip it's been.  In January, 2011, I began a decade-long project of reading the Great Books of the Western World (as well as the Harvard Classics, and many other assorted "great" works through history.  

In December, 2020, I finished the project, with these four books.

Heidegger and Wittgenstein officially come after Bertrand Russell, but I saved Russell for last on purpose.  Russell is that rare treasure: a philosopher who is not only enlightening but fun to read. He makes thinking look easy where so many others go out of their way to make comprehending them as difficult as possible.

The Problems of Philosophy is almost entirely a work of epistemology and how we can be certain that we know any given truth.  In a world where we have authoritarians openly substituting their own assertions of dominance (alternative facts, truthiness) for reality and claiming power as the only basis for truth, it is more important than ever to have a grasp of why we accept what we know to be real. Therefore, Russell's century-old book is quite topical indeed. Very highly recommended.

Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology is the last of the Social Science works in the set, and it tries hard to emphasize the "science" aspect of anthropology. Levi-Strauss's work attempted to assert common denominators in all cultures, extrapolating beliefs and priorities from such things as village layouts and common factors in myths. Like several of the later "great books", it reads like a college textbook.

More than half of the works in the 20th century science volume are tracts where the chapters are derived from a set of lectures previously given by the author.  Waddington's "The Nature Of Life", which, published in 1961 makes it the most recent book in the set, is one of those.  It follows nicely from the earlier Darwinand Dobzhanski works, by setting out basic cell structure and inheritance of genetic traits, and segueing into a discussion of evolution and the philosophy of humanity's place and importance in an infinite universe.

The Great Books set includes several book-length poems and some shorter poems that appear as part of the complete works of Virgil, Shakespeare and Milton. TS Eliot's "The Waste Land" is the only short poem in the whole set that is included separately, as its own work, and Adler assets in the introductory volume that it is a culmination of the entire Western Canon.

And so I saved it for the last work of the decade, reading it on New Year's Eve with a sense of bidding farewell to a long-term companion. And was disappointed.

In case the title didn't tip you off, it is extremely dreary, dripping with post-WWI angst and despair, and it doesn't so much drop cultural references as back them up in a truck and dump them, untranslated both in the poem and in its five page set of footnotes.  Which is probably why Mortimer Adler loved it so much. Not only do we get throwbacks to Dante and Milton and Frazier, but also to such universally known referents as Middleton's restoration-era play Women Beware Women and the philosopher F.H. Bradley.   It is excessively learned in some parts, and willfully ignorant in others, such as where Eliot includes a long section of tarot reading, partially quoted above, but admits in a footnote that he is unfamiliar with the tarot and just made up a bunch of the cards.

As usual when I find myself panning a highly regarded classic, I assume the fault may be with my philistinish ignorance and invite any fans of TS Eliot who may be reading, to comment and tell me what I'm missing.

(pause)

And....that's it for the Great Books, I guess. More than 2500 years of literature, history, science, philosophy and miscellaneous, from 2011 through 2020 and from 800 BC to roughly the end of WWI and beyond.  I could easily spend the next decade grazing in the Great Books of the 20th/early 21st Centuries, and do a much less thorough job than I did with all of the preceding history.  But not making any promises yet.

Swordfighting Goth Lesbian Necromancers IN SPACE!: Gideon IX, by Tamsyn Muir

Next to the drifts of dirt and stone that she had carefully kicked apart, skeletons burst out of the hard earth where they had hastily been interred. Hands erupted from little pockets in the ground, perfect, four-fingered and thumbed. Gideon, stupid with assumption, kicked them off and careened sideways. She ran. It didn't matter: every five feet--every five goddamned feet--bones burst from the ground, grasping her boots, her ankles, her trousers. She staggered away, desperate to find the limits of the field; there were none. The floor of the drillshaft was erupting in fingers and wrists, waving gently, as though buffeted by the wind.

This was the last of the 2020 Hugo-nominated novels that I read, and my mind is blown at the high quality of the set overall. At least four of the set would normally be my choice for Best Novel, but for the fact that they compete against each other. I still say that my personal preference lies withHarrow's The 10,000 doors of January simply because it gave me the most pleasure. But Gideon the Ninth strikes me as the most important book of the set, in the way that Dune is important. It breaks new ground and builds a world unlike any other, with a set of characters, mores and manners, and given circumstances that stay with the reader long after she puts the book down. People will cosplay the characters and be recognizable by other readers whether or not there's eventually an R-rated genre movie that brings an official costume look to the public consciousness.

We are IN A WORLD where society consists of nine "houses" with rivalry and limited contact. The First, ruling house invites each of the other eight to send their best necromancer and one bodyguard to a nearly deserted palace where something something garbanzo will happen, possibly including competition among them, possibly including a series of dead bodies, possibly with plot twists that stack and stack again, definitely including Hot Lesbian Sex and a lot of badass cussing and fighting and attitude. Very highest recommendations.

Christmas on Discworld: Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett

The Death of Rats couldn't see much of the donor of this munificence. The Big Red Hood hid all of the face, apart from a long white beard.

Finally, when the figure finished, it stood back and pulled a list out of its pocket. It held it up to its hood and appeared to be consulting it. It waved its other hand vaguely at the fireplace, the sooty footprints, the empty sherry glass and the stocking. Then it bent forward, as if reading some tiny print.

AH, YES, it said. ER....'HO-HO-HO'.".

I always check out a Discworld book for Christmas, as this stuff gives me more pleasure than almost any other reading, and 2020 was outstanding in at least one respect: It's the year when I got to Pratchett's send-up of Christmas and all of its tropes, from ancient tradition to Victorian tradition to 20th Century commercialist glurge.

Pratchett is one of a kind.  Some day, I will spend the days of advent reading this one out loud to those family members who consent, much as I once read Good Omens out loud and the way some more mundane families read Dickens. You, if you haven't already done so, should read it next Christmas, which will hopefully be a merrier one than what we've just had. the bar to clear is low.

Monday night you went to DC
Tuesday you became all greasy
Wednesday you rushed in without a plan
You were brandishing your gun
Thought a Civil War'd be fun
You will be remembered as the Coup Klutz Klan

I saw you at the Beer Hall Putz
With all of your cosplaytriots
The cops pulled back the gate and let you in
You were there for 45
And you made it out alive
So I guess that proves the color of your skin

You may be White!
You may be racist
Which is why you lived to trash the US Capitol
You had no right
You had no basis
Your hoods were black, your shirts were brown
And you may be White

Remember how we saw you there
You took a dump in Nancy's chair
You left your DNA there at the scene
You smashed windows into shards
And took selfies with the guards
You were surprised that anyone might intervene

Now we see your status will diminish
Starting wars that you can't finish
Even built a makeshift gallows on the grass
You're a felon and a chump
And you did it all for Trump
Now we're 25th Amendmenting his ass!

You may be White!
You may be racist
Thought it might be fun to trash the US Capitol
No masks in sight
So we've seen your faces
Your hats were red, your bellies yellow
But you were White.

Ahh, you may be White
You may be racist
And you just may be the traitors that we thought you were
You're in the light
Now you'll have to face this
Your shades were grey like your feet of clay
And you may be white.

Your hats were red and your shirts were brown
But you may be white

You did us wrong for the rabid Right
You did us wrong for the Rabid Right
(For the alt-right)
You did us wrong for the Rabid Right
(For the alt-right)
You did us wrong for the Rabid Right
(For the alt-right)
You did us wrong for the Rabid Right
(For the alt-right)
You did us wrong for the Rabid Right
(For the alt-right)....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ov660RWBBo

Happenings 1: Females, by Andrea Long Chu
Everyone is female, and everyone hates it. If this is true, then gender is simply the form that this self-loathing takes in any given case. All gender is internalized misogyny. A female is one who has eaten the loathing of another, like an amoeba that got its nucleus by swallowing its neighbor. Or, to put a finer point on it, gender is not just the misogynistic expectations a female internalizes, but also the process of internalizing itself, the self's gentle suicide in the name of someone else's desires, someone else's narcissism.

This book hearkens back to my college days, in which the environment was intensely feminist and in which theater students frequently staged "happenings", post-modern avant garde performances that many had trouble understanding. The performers did things like randomizing what happened by spinning a wheel of fortune and acting based on the result, so that the performance was never the same thing twice.

I mention this because that was the last time I heard of the extreme feminist SCUM (the society for cutting up men) and their 60s-era manifesto, until now. This book makes frequent references to a "happening" that SCUM did in the early 70s, and the thesis that all people are women.

Andrea long Chu presents as a transwoman (because this book is a self-referential happening, I don't know whether she is in reality, or whether it's part of the book's mind game. I just go with the flow).  The unnumbered chapters get progressively shorter, one vignette after another that ends by stepping back, Brecht-style and saying "See that?"

I'm not sure I do. But there is a lot of food for thought about gender identity.

Happenings 2: Reconstructing Trisha Brown, by Dr. Marianne Goldberg

An unintentional by-product of inhabiting the horizontal realm were feelings of "vulnerability, sexuality, infantilism, and laziness." Brown in Primary Accumulation asserted a new realm of movement--a self-satisfying one in which the female dancer has full access to all parts of her body. She placed her hands on her breasts, or her arms between her legs, or freely let her legs fall open, all postures that are usually suppressed in public.  The piece carries a subtext of a new kind of sexuality in which women have access to articulating and touching all parts of their bodies. Brown released muscular tensions that constrain and "civilize" the body's energy.

Reconstructing Trisha Brown is a partial biography of a dancer/choreographer whose 60s-70s era pieces seem consistent with "happenings" as described in Females. I received the book as a gift and, not having studied formal dance as the art and science of movement, to the extent described here, had some trouble following it.  

Trisha Brown made innovative use of space and power, using fans and magnets to experiment with gravity, staging events like "Man Walking Down The Side of a Building" on the outside of an actual multistory building, and pieces requiring more than usual muscular strength from the women who performed them.  Goldberg's writing as well as Brown's dance is experimental and non-linear.  I found the photo essay at the end illustrating some of the works described very helpful in understanding what they were trying to do with this book (Goldberg envisioned the reader turning the book this way and that to read it as a form of dance itself).

Happenings 3: three Lives & Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein

VEGETABLE: What is cut. What is cut by it. What is cut by it in.
It was a cress a crescent a cross and an unequal scream, it was upslanting, it was radiant and reasonable with little ins and red.
News. News capable of glees, cut in shoes, belike under pump of wide chalk, all this combing.

This was my introduction to Gertrude Stein, who I had heard of as a concept but never read before.  The three novellas making up Three Lives were not what I expected.  They are straightforward, dreary, very repetitive tales of women who live and die unfulfilled. They also, it seems to me, directly contradict the book jacket blurb, which describes "the good Anna", the protagonist of the first story, as "a kindly but domineering German servant", while there is nothing domineering about her. She spends her life living for the sake of others, doing without things to save money, and then giving her savings away, again and again, to ungrateful people she barely knows.

And then the second, the longest tale of the three, was so off-puttingly racist that I almost didn't bother to finish.  It uses the n-word. The protagonist is the darker of two mixed-race girls, and the whole theme is that Melanctha "has the black blood strong in her", and is therefore duller, more shiftless and less moral than the other girl, who "has the white blood strong in her" and so grows up intelligent and civilized. And of course, Melanctha is suspected, abandoned, and presumed to have the worst of motives by everyone around her, who stop associating with her "because everyone told me who you are and what you've done" without specifying who or what.  Painful, racist, and not recommended.

Tender Buttons is much closer to what I'd expected from Gertrude Stein, to wit: non sequitur prose-poetic nonsense like the quoted part above. In short, a "happening".
 

Towards a good economy: The Entrepreneurial State, by Mariana Mazzucato

In finance, it is commonly accepted that there is a relationship between risk and return. After the financial crisis, many have rightly noted that finance has increasingly privatized the rewards of their activity while socializing the risk. This dysfunctional dynamic has also been happening in the innovation game. Risk-taking has been an increasingly

collective endeavor--with the State playing a leading role in the "open innovation" system--while the returns have been much less collectively distributed.

Mazzucato is the only book I read in February that does not count as a post-modern, structure-defying "happening".  It simply sets forth the degree to which governments rightly use public resources to develop abstract and applied sciences, and how private enterprise sponges off of this publicly created technology for private profit, often at the expense of the public.

Mazzucato painstakingly proves that, especially in the United States, the tendency of big business to privatize all of their gains and socialize all of their losses has gone out of control and threatens to damage the economy considerably.  One chapter shows how Apple's ipads and iphones were built from technology created by American tax dollars, yet fail to return the investment to the American public. Another chapter compares two companies that the American Government subsidized. One company, Tesla, became extremely profitable for private individuals, without crediting the government's role, and allowing public leech Elon Musk to become a godzillionaire without paying proportional taxes.  The other company, Solyndra, went bankrupt, letting America eat the loss (without correspondingly gaining from Tesla's success) and leading capitalists to chant the fiction that the USA"can't pick winners".  In fact, the USA picks a high number of winners, butalso takes risks that the private vulture capitalists will not.  And unlike the vulture capitalists, the USA does not reap the benefits of picking winners. It only shoulders the losses.

Unsurprisingly, The Entrepreneurial State climaxes with a call to reform. I for one am sold.

In Which Beowulf Gives Literally Zero Fucks: Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley
I'm the strongest and the boldest and the bravest and the best
Yes. I mean, I MAY have bathed in the blood of beasts,
Netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
And come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
And made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me!
They're asking for it, and I deal them death.

Prior to Headley's new translation, I had read Beowulf three times in my life, and what I had to say about it was this: " I didn't like it then, and I didn't like it the second time, and I only put up with it a third time because I'm on a decade-long literary odyssey and it's on all the Great Book lists (best and only surviving European manuscript of the seventh century and all).  It should have predated Homer by a millennium. The descriptions of mortal combat are about as dull as it is possible to be while describing people fighting monsters.  It doesn't even have quotable throwaway lines. It can, however, be read in about 90 minutes, and people of north European ancestry are expected to be at least familiar enough with it to recognize Beowulf, Grendel and Hrothgar. "

In other words, dull-dull-dull.

Headley's new translation, by contrast, is glorious, a feast of language that breathes life into the ancient tale while being fair to the original.  In Headley's ancient Scandinavia, the warriors call each other "Dude" and "Bro", trash-talk each other's masculinity,  and boast about what happens to people who fuck with them.  Grendel is a one-man Town v. Gown revolt against the elitist frat-house jocks who partay all night and who won't turn the damn music down.  His mother is a proud warrior woman bent on avenging her family's blood.  Headley doesn't quite specify that the victorious Geats make armpit farts and crush beer cans on their heads in celebration, but they do quaff their brewskis.  Oh, do they ever quaff them (quaffing is like guzzling, only it involves a lot more splashing of said brewskis into their capacious beards)!

One supercilious reviewer accused Headley of dumbing down great literature to appease high school sophomores.  Fuck that.  I'm almost 54 years old, and I needed this translation.  It made me realize how much cool stuff I'd missed the first three times because my eyes were all glazed over, moving across the dreary translations like a parched turtle going across the desert.  Very highest recommendations.

Odd vignettes: Locus Solus, by Raymond Roussel
The villa contains several rooms fitted out as luxurious model laboratories, run by numerous assistants. Here the professor devotes his entire life to science--for he is a bachelor with no commitments, whose large fortune at once removes any material difficulties incurred by the various targets he sets himself in the course of his strenuous labors.

The book consists of the eccentric professor giving a tour of his house and grounds to a group including the unnamed narrator, so that we can see what weirdnesses a genius with unlimited money can do with plot devices.

It consists of a series of "exposition, then explanation" stories: for example, the group beholds a woman prick her thumb on a rose thorn, causing her to bleed on a letter she is holding, then look away from the letter, directly into a red glass on which the sun is shining, causing a bright red glare to flash into her eye. She then goes into paroxysms of hysteria.  we are then told that the woman is the reanimated corpse of a famous countess who went fatally mad when the sight of her blood on a letter, and the bright flash of red from a glass had triggered her childhood memory of watching her father mauled to death by a tiger.  the scientist has had her corpse reanimated so that it can perform the dramatic moment, over and over.  And then we go on to the next exhibit, without further comment.  And then, when we've witnessed them all, the evening breaks up and we all go home.

roussel is weird.

The Dude of Brood: Kokoro, by Natsume Soseki

Though I had resolved to live as if I were dead, my heart would at times respond to the activity of the outside world, and seem almost to dance with pent-up energy. But as soon as I tried to break my way through the cloud that surrounded me, a frighteningly powerful force would rush upon me from I know not where, and grip my heart tight, until I could not move.  A voice would say to me, "You have no right to do anything. Stay where you are." Whatever desire I might have had for action would suddenly leave me. After a moment, the desire would come back, and I would once more try to break through. Again I would be restrained.  In fury and grief I would cry out, "Why do you stop me?" With a cruel laugh, the voice would answer, "You know very well why." Then i would bow in hopeless surrender.

The Other Dude of Brood: Rosshalde, by Herman Hesse
It was as though Otto had never fully understood his friend until that moment. Now he saw deep into the dark spring from which Johann's soul drew the strength and suffering in which is was steeped. And at the same time he felt a deep, joyous consolation at the fact that it was he, the old friend, to whom the sufferer had bared himself, whom he had accused, and whom he had begged for help.

Hesse was Swiss. writing about people in France; Soseki was Japanese. The uncanny similarities of the respective brooding protagonists may be due to the books being published, on opposite sides of the globe, right after WWI, in an atmosphere of international gloom.

Kokoro is about the friendship a narrator feels for the man he calls "Sensei", who lives with his wife near the university, visits a particular gravestone every so often, and who pointedly hides his light under a bushel, waiting for death.  The narrator tries to learn Sensei's secret, and when it comes, it seems to me to be one of the more anticlimactic moments in literature.  Sensei is upset about petty everyday betrayals by family members, that he chose not to fight, and racked with existential guilt over a tragedy he did not cause.

Meanwhile, the protagonist of Rosshalde is a painter who lives on a grand French estate, in separate quarters from his alienated wife, his younger son, and one manservant.  The elder son is away at school, and is also alienated from the paterfamilias, who loves only the small boy.  Like Sensei, he agonizes over minor past mistakes.  then the small boy becomes ill and might die, and the husband, the wife, and the elder son...are not particularly brought together by shared grief. They just muddle about, and the husband thinks about going off and leaving the estate to the wife.

Very little plot in either book. Just character and atmosphere and a sense of universal ennui.  Post WWI literature was depressing, and the authors hadn't even gotten to the sequel yet.

Rough Draft of the Thriller Genre: The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan

"I told the police you had gone over the hill. This is a lucky morning for you, Mr. Richard Hannay", he said, smiling.  As he spoke, his eyes half closed and immediately I remembered Scudder's description of a man who could 'hood his eyes like a hawk.' I saw that I had walked into the hands of my enemies.

One nice thing about continuing the Western Canon past WWI is that popular literature is now included, like Edgar Rice Borroughs and John Buchan. Not so nice is how clunky some of the dawn of the 'espionage thriller' tales were, and how many improbable coincidences strain the suspension of disbelief.

Hannay, the protagonist, suddenly involved in an espionage plot and suspected of a murder he didn't commit, chooses to flee to a random, remote part of Scotland---which just happens to be where he can find a relative of the very member of the Foreign Office who can help him, and also where the random house he dodges into just happens to be the home of one of the spies.  Also, Buchan can't make up his mind whether there are in England (1) three German spies, so expert in appearing English as to fool close inspection, or (2) such a large network of spies that there is nowhere one can be safe from their assassins.

Stick with the Hitchcock movie.

The Savage Noble: Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan of the Apes stroked her soft hair and tried to comfort and quiet her as Kala had him, when, as a little ape, he had been frightened by Sabor the lioness or Histah the snake.
Once he pressed his lips lightly upon her forehead., and she did not move, but closed her eyes and sighed. She could not analyze her feelings, nor did she wish to attempt it. She was satisfied to feel the safety of those strong arms, and to leave her future to fate, for the last few hours had taught her to trust this strange wild creature of the forest as she would have trusted but few of the men of her acquaintance.

Now that I've reached the 20th century, the western canon now includes "popular fiction". the good news is, I get credit for reading 'classics' for something like the original "Tarzan". The bad news is, classics from a century ago generally haven't aged well.

the premise of Tarzan of the Apes is that a baby born to jungle-marooned aristocrats and raised by apes necessarily grows into a great character because he is descended from English Aristocrats, and therefore has their inherent cultural superiority and noble character running through his blue blood.  As opposed to, you know, the human inhabitants of the African jungle, who are just savages, closer to beasts than humans.  Nope, nothing problematic about that at all.

And also, because he is raised in a state of nature, he is not made effeminate by the artificial trappings of civilization.  Unencumbered by manners and riches, he grows to the natural human height of seven feet tall or so, with huge knotted muscles that are to civilized man what a man is to a mewling baby...but because he is white and rich by birth, he can think and can rule the jungle.

the book is at its best when he has no more than animals for company, and he swings through the trees on vines, calling his yet-to-be-trademarked Tarzan yell.  when he starts playing tricks on the native villages, it becomes racially offensive, and when he meets another marooned party (that includes the woman called "Jane", a comically senile professor, and a man who just happens to be Tarzan's kinsman the new Lord Greystoke, it needs content notes for English terracentric rubbish.

But hey. It's Tarzan. What did one expect?
 

Timid New World: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

This morning, I looked out of a window in the Eighteenth South-Eastern Hall. on the other side of the Courtyard, I saw the Other looking out of a Window.  The Window was tall and dark; the Other's noble head with its high forehead and neatly trimmed beard was framed in one Corner.  He was lost in thought as he so often is. I waved to him. He did not see me. I waved more extravagantly. I jumped up and down with great energy. But the Windows of the House are many and he did not see me.

It's Hugo Award season once again, and once again I get to read six novels that have been nominated by fandom as the year's best genre fiction.  Piranesi is the first one I read, because it was the only one without reserve holds at my local library on the day the nominees were announced.

"Piranesi" is the name whimsically given to the narrator-protagonist by the "Other", the apparently only other living inhabitant of a city-sized building of endless rooms containing little but statuary. the building has an ocean among it, that floods dangerously on occasion. And the narrator wanders from room to room, taking many notes, and reporting back to the Other.

That's how the short novel begins.  the concept seemed a bit boring to me at first, but I'm glad I persevered to learn the backstory, the spoilery plot twists, and the fate of the two characters. Not gonna spoil it here, but please trust me that it was well worth the read and earned its spot on the Hugo list.  Or don't trust me, and gamble a couple of hours of your time to find out for yourself.  High recommendations.

Feminist Economics: the Value of Everything, by Mariana Mazzucato

Adam Smith was of the opinion that markets needed to be shaped.  Contrary to the modern interpretation of his work as "laissez-faire" (leave the market alone), he believed that the right kind of freedom is not the absence of government policy, but freedom from rent extraction. Smith would have been baffled by the current understanding of economic freedom as a minimum of non-private activity.

See this February's Bookpost for The Entrepreneurial State. Mazzucato's earlier book about the ways corporations socialize scientific innovation and then patent the results for their private profit.  I liked that book enough to go looking for more Mazzucato, whose jacket photo is what I think an economist should look like.

In The Value of Everything, Mazzucato takes on rent-seeking activity by billionaires who bribe their media and government sock puppets to chant that billionaires are too important to have to pay taxes. Mazzucato is English, and her data tends to be anglocentric, but there's enough skewering of the United States for Americans like me to see things we recognize. the book is dedicated to the radical notion that nurses, teachers, and civil servants produce value while the financial industries and overpaid CEOs  extract it, somehow ending up claiming ownership of much more wealth than they ever created.

I recommend it as useful ammo for anyone who has to deal with those sock puppets who hate public employees and other underpaid workers (until they need them) and who think having nice things and freedom from narcissistic bosses is some kind of evil.

The Legend lives on from the Sasquatch on down
In the Washington lake they call Moses
And Karma, they say, on Memorial Day
Comes much earlier than one supposes!

Memorial Day in Grant County, they say
Was a beautiful day, bright and sunny
To go out for a sail with one's cares in defrayal
But what happened that day wasn't funny

He went out that day with Pride flags on display
For gay rights, and sailboats, were his hobby
And along for the ride with their symbols of pride
Were his partner, and his brother Robbie

Just three hours since morn, they went down Parker Horn
Where the river gets twisted and windy
And just for a lark, they hit Blue Heron Park
Where the water meets Interstate-90!

Just then, into view came up Boat #2
And the flags seemed to make them contentious
Since they seemed to mean harm, Robbie said with alarm:
Be careful--their wake's gonna drench us!

Then those other boaters, they revved up their motors
And circles ran round, making donuts
They gave, as they lingered, catcalls and the finger
Then sped off, as if they might go nuts

They went round Diamond Point with their nose out of joint
Parker Horn at the boat's perpendicular
But then right in their path was the Deity's wrath:
"Fuck these homophobes, in particular!"

The boat's speed awoke a thick cloud of black smoke
And the engine stalled out, which ill boded
A few seconds later, the strained carburetor
Caught fire, and the engine exploded!

They jumped overboard, and for rescue implored
Underwater, they weren't quite so snobby
And who came into view to save that sorry crew
But the boat with the Pride flags and Robbie!

Their egos were burned and the lesson they learned
From their impromptu Water Aerobic
Was: Do not offend; you just might need a friend
If you wreck the SS Homophobic!

The Legend lives on from the Sasquatch on down
In the Washington lake they call Moses
And Karma, they say, on Memorial Day
Comes much earlier than one supposes

www.buzzfeednews.com/...

Dem Bones Goan' Rise Again: Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
All I can say is that it was complicated back in Canaan House, and sometimes a cute older girl shows you a lot of attention, because she's bored or whatever, and you sort of have this maybe flirting maybe not thing going on, right, and then it turns out she's an ancient warrior who's killed all your friends and she's coming for you, and then you both die and she turns up ages later in the broiling heat on a sacred space station and, like, it's COMPLICATED. Just saying that it happens all the time.

This is the second of the 2021 Hugo nominated novels that I read, and--whoo boy.  I am not sure I can be of much help in talking about it.  It's the second in a trilogy that started with Muir's 2020 Hugo-nominated Gideon The Ninth (Bookpost, November 2020).  the beginning of the book relies on plot spoilers from the earlier one.

Just--Hot Lesbian Punk Necromancers Animating Skeletons In Space.  Planets with souls that can be killed.  Plot twist after plot twist, and the best use of the Second Person narrative I've seen in my life so far.  You're either going to have a wild ride reading it, or you'll be like What the Actual Fuck for a while before not finishing.  L loved it, but I'm not sure I understood the whole thing.

Dynastic Cozy:The Rainbow, by DH Lawrence
Her whole soul was implicated with Skrebensky--not the young man of the world, but the undifferentiated man he was.  She was perfectly sure of herself, perfectly strong, stronger than all the world. The world was not strong--she was strong. The world existed only in a secondary sense--she existed supremely.

I'm finding it best to read the older books a few at a time, instead of trying to cram the "best" of a particular age into a single year.  Read amidst the Hugo books, it came across as a little dull, but then I've never particularly enjoyed DH lawrence.

The book is 460 pages and four generations of English country family gradually rising in status from farm to town.  Roughly the last half is the saga of Ursula, the kind of heroine portrayed in the early 20th century as "strong, independent woman", but sabotaged by the author into being a fool with an iron whim that gets her into trouble, and oh how she should have listened to her elders and betters. Ursula makes one wrong choice after another but, like Scarlett O'Hara, remains true to her own spirit, whatever the cost.

Murderbot:  Network Effect, by Martha Wells
I've had clients who thought they needed an absurd level of security (and I'm talking absurd even by my standards, and my code was developed by a bond company known for intense xenophobic paranoia, tempered only by desperate greed). I've also had clients who thought they didn't need any security at all, right up until something ate them(that's mostly a metaphor. My uneaten client stat is high).

The third book I read from the Hugo list confused me a bit, because the protagonist has appeared in a series of "Murderbot" novels, and Network effect is billed as "its first standalone novel.'

I read the full Jack Reacher series last year (and stopped including it in my Bookpost after I'd run out of things to say talking about the first five.  they're all the same story, and ,b>Network Effect is the same story, except that the Reacher character is closer to Robocop--controlled by an internal governor that can kill him if he breaks protocol, but still superpowered and bound only by his own moral code, which thankfully emphasizes protection of its clients.

The world Wells creates is innovative, the mystery a standard one enlivened by sci-fi tropes, and the Murderbot protagonist a sly, sharp parody of the Rambo/Reacher/human killing machine "hero" portrayed as an actual AI machine.  Amusing, and highly recommended.

Astronaut Women FTW: The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal

"I'm going to make a recommendation that, in the future, we paint the BusyBees bright orange."

"Hot pink. Then none of the men will touch them." helen winked. "Job security."

"With a bow on top." I could feel her watching me with the biscuit, so I put the next bit into my mouth."

"Maybe some lace?" She folded her log book and tucked it back into her flight suit.

The fourth of the 2021 Hugo nominated novels, and as of this writing, I feel like I've found my choice for favorite.  Which isn't fair to the other two.  we'll see what I'm saying in next month's bookpost...but The Relentless Moon will be hard to beat, I love it on so many levels.  It is genre fiction, modern history with a twist, inclusive social justice writing, and a clever espionage story, with excellent character and atmosphere.  I'd call it "The space age...as it should have been", except that this space age was hastened by an extinction-threatening meteor hit on earth, so I wouldn't want to change our actual timeline for this one.

I have a problem.  Kowal's first "Lady Astronauts" novel, The Calculating Stars, was nominated for the Hugo (and won it), and so I knew it existed, and read the living shit out of it.  there's a second book, The Fated Sky, that was not nominated, and I learned it existed from looking at the jacket of the third book in the series, which I had on three-week checkout with other holds on it, so I couldn't wait, and I read it while missing vital background information from the second book.

It was OK. I didn't really feel like I was missing enough to make the story suffer.  But we've leapt from the 50s to the 60s, with a moon colony actually in place, a different narrator from the first novel, and a right wing terrorist sect similar to 21st century anti-vaccination Q people trying to stop the space migration that could be the only thing that saves at least some of the Human Race.

The Right Wing terrorists are called "Earth First", which makes sense as analogous to "America First" terrorism, but which is jarring to an Oregonian to whom "Earth First!" means an environmental protective group that was often falsely accused of "terrorism".

The systemic sexism and racism of the American 1960s is portrayed just heavily enough that we can--almost--pat ourselves on the back for no longer thinking like that, but not enough to distract from the excitement of the space story.  Very highest recommendations.

A New York State of Mind: the City We Became, by NK Jemisin

They hit Second Avenue at Spanish Harlem. Working-class neighborhood, late on a weeknight; Bronca's unsurprised to see that the streets are mostly empty. Only the bodegas stand open, sentinels of The City That Never Sleeps And Occasionally Needs Milk At Two AM. Gentrification here has taken the form of endless coffee shops. For the last few blocks these have been indie places, proudly touting their locally roasted pour-overs, all with different decor and sign fronts. Then comes the proof that it's all over for the neighborhood's original character: they pass a Starbucks on the corner.

So last month, having read only four of the six Hugo-nominated novels, I gushed over Mary Robinette Kowal's The Relentless Moon.  Now that I've read all six, I THINK Kowal is still my choice for the Hugo, but it's close.  Oh boy, is it ever close.

I confess, I was not overly thrilled with NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, and didn't rank any of the three volumes as my number one choice, although I do not fault her history-making three consecutive Hugos for it.  I figure it's on me, and that the overwhelming number of my fellow geeky fans who voted for it saw something wonderful that I failed to appreciate.

I can admit that now, because The City We Became---holy shit. HOLY MOTHERFUCKNG SHIT THIS IS GLORIOUS!  I'm a transplanted New Yorker, and Jemisin makes the neighborhoods I used to frequent come alive!

No...she LITERALLY makes them come alive! The premise is that six strangers (fated chosen ones, whatever) gain superpowers representing the five boroughs of New York City, plus one more for the unified entity of NYC itself, because into every generation a chosen city is BORN, with the power to fight The Ancient Evil that seeks to destroy cities with the horrible weapons of gentrification, conformity, bigotry, misogyny, and long white tentacles that burst from the ground.  The Big Bad is reminiscent of those single-episode villains from Buffy the Vampire slayer, whose terror was rooted in the real-world monsters that threaten us today.

Seems to me, Hugo voters will have a hard time comparing Manny, Bronca and the others to Kowal's astronaut women. They are apples and citrus different in their excellence.  My taste gives the prize to Kowal by a hair, but I'll give Jemisin a song by way of consolation prize:

 

Start singin' the blues
I'm changing today
I'm gonna be a part of it!
New York, New York

Those neighborhood views
The all-night cafe
And the graffiti art of it!
New York, New York

I'm gonna wake up as a city that's in a fix
And find I'm part of the team!
One of the Six!

Those racist tattoos
They rub the wrong way
Find a replacement part for it
In old New York

If we can get Hong Kong
To show us what went wrong
we'll save the day, New York, New York!

I'm gonna wake up
On the south shore of Spuyten Duyv...il
And go from Inwood Hill Park
Down FDR Drive
Make it by dark and we'll make it alive!

Those tunnels that ooze
No trouble at all
Upset the applecart of it
Beneath City Hall!

What they did in R'lyeh
They'll try in Sheepshead Bay!
It's up to us, New York, New York!

 

Total Eclipse of the Heart: Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse

May you drown in shallow water.
May your song be never heard.
May you fall in love with a man.
May your mouth ever fill with salt.
---Teek curse

And finally, a book that is almost ,b>Dune-like in its exotic world-building, spiritual mystery, and intrigue plotting, which turns out to be another first volume of a series.  There is a central city where a long-standing religious cult rules by terror over the land. The former leader of the cult shocked his followers by choosing as his successor a woman from a low-born caste, and the other members are plotting against her.  There is a splinter cult, ruled by the first, that keeps its beliefs private, having learned that public practice results in massacre.  Meanwhile, across the sea, a young Chosen One with a Destiny makes his way towards the city on a ship whose captain has secrets of her own.

I loved it, and look forward to the next volume.  There is magic, training montages, spiritual searches for truth, betrayal, war, deadly perils, and plot twists.  Everything a geek could want.  Very high recommendations.

On reflection, here is my vote ranking the Hugo novels for the year.  If your mileage varies, that's cool, too.  Historically, my second choice usually wins, so Jemisin is in a good position to pick up her fourth award.  However, if my last choice wins, I'm not complaining. They are ALL very, very good.

1. The Relentless Moon

2. The City We Became

3. Black Sun

4. Piranesi

5. Harrow the Ninth

6. network Effect

 

Perspectives:  Rashomon, and Other Stories, by Ryungosuke Akutagawa

It did not take long for the crone, who had been lying there as if dead, to raise her naked body from among the corpses. Muttering and groaning, she crawled to the top of the stairway in the still-burning torchlight. Her short white hair hung forward from her head as she peered down toward the bottom of the gate. She saw only the cavernous blackness of night.

DID YOU KNOW??--Akutagawa's story "Rashomon" has nothing to do with the famous Kurasawa movie of the same name, that is shown to countless law students as an example of the unreliability of witness testimony.  That movie was based on a different Akutagawa story, "In a Bamboo Grove".  

There's also a reason most people outside Japan have only heard of the one story in which certain people concerned with a murder (including the ghost of the victim, brought to testify via seance) give conflicting versions of what happened.  Most of the other stories--if you've already read Poe and enjoyed him only moderately, you've already read these, and will be disappointed.  Same macabre atmosphere, same weird psychology, same plodding build-up to "big reveals" you saw coming a mile away.  

On the other hand, it feels good to me, to go from having read "The Western Canon" through WWI into the modern era when the great books list includes great books of the world, instead of only from Europe.  So there's that.

Scraps of Wisdom: The Collected Legal Papers of Oliver Wendell Holmes

I was walking homeward on Pennsylvania Avenue near the treasury, and as I looked beyond Sherman's statue to the west the sky was aflame with scarlet and crimson from the setting Sun. But, like the note of downfall in Wagner's opera, below the skyline there came from little globes the pallid discord of the electric lights.  And I thought to myself, the Gotterdammerung will end, and from those globes clustered like evil eggs will come the new masters of the sky. It is like the time in which we live.  But then I remembered the faith that I partly have expressed, faith in a universe not measured by our fears, a universe that has thought and more than thought inside of it, and as I gazed, after the sunset and above the electric lights there shone the stars.

This is not an enormous tome full of court opinions by a long-serving justice of the Supreme Court.   It's a thin volume of law review articles, speeches made at alumni dinners, introductions to law textbooks, and so on.  Most are fewer than ten pages; the works run the gamut from "sawdust without butter" to "entertaining turn of phrase here and there."

More than anything, I found Holmes politically depressing.  Through his legal career (which ended in 1932, before Black, Douglas, Brennan and RBG took the bench), he was considered America's greatest, most innovative jurist, a foil to stodgy old conservatives.  and yet...he's a stodgy old conservative. His writings are full of throwaway lines about how God has blessed the property owning classes with the wisdom to rule the working class, and how the masses have nothing to say worth paying heed to, and how communism posits a threat to the world, but not a serious one, since no one who counts can take it seriously.  these are not the main topics of his addresses; he just tosses them out so that the wise, enlightened Harvard faculty, or whatever audience he spoke for, will understand that he's just like them.  I'm disappointed. I had hoped one of America's legal heroes would be better than that.  three generations of conservatives is enough.

Just The Warts:  American Rule (How a nation conquered the world but failed its people), by Jared Yates Sexton

There was a sense that capitalism had all but conquered the United States, a feeling that the wealthy had gained unalterable control. The market they had constructed served their interests and functioned as the nation's circulatory system, and the government had been bought and sold many times over. And it wasn't as if the infection lay in one party alone. Working Americans were well aware that both the Democratic and Republican parties were servants of the wealthy, especially members of the Senate, which followed the design of the framers by being totally and openly in the pocket of the country's elites.

There's a trend on the left these days to ask MAGA people (or God-and-country liberals, or pretty much anyone else who identifies as patriotic, "When was America ever great?" no matter what you answer, they're prepared to shoot it down.

The Constitution? nope, just a bunch of rich, self-serving, landowning  white guys making sure the government would work for rich, self-serving, landowning white guys, and propping up slavery.  Washington bought the presidency by bribing the electors with lakes of alcohol, Ben Franklin sired a lot of bastards (giving a nuanced meaning to all the commemorative public houses that claim he slept there), and Jefferson raped his slave.

Ending slavery?  Nope, Eleven states tried to leave the union and went to war to preserve it, and the states that stopped them didn't give a rip about POC. Lincoln himself declared that he'd free all of the slaves or none of them, or halfsies, whichever it took to preserve the union. Southern states lie when they say they didn't secede over slavery, and northern states lie when they claim to have fought the war to end it.  And then, having won the war, the north shit the bed, put the losers back in charge, and even let them write the history (the US Civil war being maybe the only war ever where the losers got to write the history).

Winning World war II?  what a horrible moment for Uncle Sham!  DID YOU KNOW??---there were no "Allies" in WWII, and the Soviet Union beat Hitler all by itself!  The USA were Nazis themselves, and were on the verge of letting President Charles Lindbergh join with the Axis until those silly Japanese put the kibosh on that in December 1941.

(I am only slightly exaggerating the arguments here.  Sure, Stalingrad and all that. but also--supplies pipelines via Murmansk and Azkaban and all that. Normandy and all that.  they really couldn't have done it alone)

Don't even bother with the 1950s--widely cited as America's "golden age" when the rich were taxed at a fair rate and unions and middle class worth soared--that was just for white men.  The rest of us had Mccarthyism, Jim crow's dead cat bounce, and a surge in misogyny as returning WWII/Korea vets seized the jobs women had obtained during the wars.

And I trust none of you who are MY friends are so foolish as to bring up those hideous, disgraced former 'heroes" Andy Jackson, General Custer, Woody Wilson or WJ Bryan, right?

I maintain that the 1970s were America's zenith, and that it all began to fall with Ronald Reagan and his crackdowns on the middle class, unions, culture and ethics.  But there are objections to that too, usually involving disco.  after a couple of years of this, I've largely given up and have taken to saying America was "great" when Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers won the 1955 world series, or when Simon and Garfunkel played in Central Park.

All of this is by way of mentioning that if you believe America has always been a toxic cesspool, then American Rule is the book for you. Nothing but 250 years of unbroken American evil, oppression and cruelty.  and i have yet to find anything in it that isn't true.

As I write this, the howler monkeys on the right are screeching that the left hates America, and are descending on school boards across America to do to them what they failed to do to the US Capitol, demanding that no history be taught, on the grounds that real true american history would demoralize the children. If Republicans read books be non-conservatives, they might find this one and make it Exhibit One.  but that would miss the point.

The point, as Sexton says in the epilogue, is not that America has been an Evil nation now and then and forever.  the point is that we have to know what our mistakes have been, in order to correct them, and to make America GOOD.  that part I quoted at the top is not a description of America in 2020.  It's America in 1892, the year Andrew Carnegie, in a year of record profits, slashed his employees' wages below starvation level, and employed Pinkertons to shoot American workers in the street like rabid dogs during the ensuing strike.  All of what we are going through today happened before, 130 years ago, and the American people put a stop to it then, and it can be stopped once more.

Remember, and fight, and love America. warts and all.  Because we aren't just warts, no matter what we're told.

Larceny and Old Lace: Bunner Sisters, by Edith Wharton

When Mr. Ramy drew the pipe from his mouth and became, in his turn, confidential, the acuteness of their sympathy grew almost painful to the sisters.  With passionate participation, they listened to the story of his early struggles in Germany, and of the long illness which had been the cause of his misfortunes.

Edith Wharton is one of the most depressing novelists I can think of, and the short novel about the Bunner sisters is no more uplifting than her better known works.  The Bunners own a cozy little shop in downtown NYC, and the impression is that they're no longer young right at the beginning. since the action takes place over the course of many years, they must be ancient af by the time it ends.

And they get hurt by their environment over the course of it.  Their life savings taken, their hearts broken, their health ruined. and other than perhaps being overly trusting and believing in human goodness, nothing that happens to them can fairly be considered their fault.  My heart broke right along with the Bunners.

If you're like many Americans these days, your heart has been breaking too, and you may or may not be aware that you're not alone, that capitalism is crushing every one of us, all the more ruthlessly now that some of us are feeling our potential power to free ourselves, and the rich are desperate, desperate to crush us into submission so thoroughly that we will not even try.

This may be the right book at the wrong time. I grasped it because i'm going through post-WWI works in general.  You might want to look to it some other time, when you're feeling better.

 
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.

Heart of Lightness: The voyage Out, by Virginia Woolf
“You have beauty,” he said. The ship lurched. Rachel fell slightly forward. Richard took her in his arms and kissed her. Holding her tight, he kissed her passionately, so that she felt the hardness of his body and the roughness of his cheek printed upon hers. She fell back in her chair, with tremendous beats of the heart, each of which sent black waves across her eyes. He clasped his forehead in his hands.

“You tempt me,” he said. The tone of his voice was terrifying. He seemed choked in fright. They were both trembling. Rachel stood up and went. Her head was cold, her knees shaking, and the physical pain of the emotion was so great that she could only keep herself moving above the great leaps of her heart. She leant upon the rail of the ship, and gradually ceased to feel, for a chill of body and mind crept over her. Far out between the waves little black and white sea-birds were riding. Rising and falling with smooth and graceful movements in the hollows of the waves they seemed singularly detached and unconcerned.

I find Virginia Woolf difficult. I am not her intended audience, and that's fine. I'm told she was a woman writing for and about women, and that her "female writing style" is ineffable and mysterious to men. I am skeptical. I read plenty of female writers, many of whom are straight forward and more enjoyable and educational to me than a lot of stuff by men.  I enter Ms. Woolf's worlds, with permission, in an effort to understand.

The story is about a boat trip to the edges of civilization.  I compare and contrast with Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's male account of a boat trip to the edge of civilization.  Conrad wrote of central Africa unleashing the Beast Within; Woolf wrote about going to the shores of South America and finding freedom from the stultifying limits of Edwardian England.

Edwardians are silly.  They are so very formal and mannered in their sexual harassment.

Woolf's South America is as surreal as Conrad's Congo, but more gentle and soothing, possibly because the heroine Rachel Vinrace does not travel there seeking conquest and fortune, but relaxation. Peace happens. actual love stories happen. Santa Maria is more authentic and protecting than England, not less.  possibly this is the difference between imposing masculine v. feminine values and outlooks on places far from European "civilization." Recommended.

Critical Race Theory: Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson

"America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought, and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation.  When you live in an old house, you may not want to go to the basement after a storm, to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now."

Damn.  Just....damn.  I had to wait several months on the library waiting list to get a chance to read this one, and I'm glad I waited.  If Jared Yates Sexton's American Rule is America: irredeemably shitty nation, then Caste is America: A dream that can be mended.  Wilkerson doesn't coddle guilty white people, but she is a lot more gentle than Sexton. We didn't start the fire, but it's here and burning, and it falls to us to put it out.

Stop and look at what America collectively did, and remember that "Cancel culture" was and always will be a conservative dominant caste process.  American slaves were canceled by being raped to death in front of their children, who were forced to watch and learn their place in the caste system. Americans 100 years later were canceled by being strung up in the town lynching tree and set on fire in front of their parents, who were forced to watch and learn their place.  White families brought picnic lunches and had their children watch lynchings for pleasure, under the approving eye of the County Sheriff.

Wilkerson says their names.  The descendants of their murderers are the people who are now violently invading school board meetings, pretending to be outraged that their children are taught that differences in skin color were ever significant in America.

Central to the book are comparisons between the various caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, which infamously studied the American South for lessons as to how to effectively create an untouchable caste for Germans to be programmed to hate.  There were some things, such as the 'one drop" rule, which were too much for even the Nazis to stomach.  Well played, Alabama!

Wilkerson sets forth eight pillars by which a caste system is supported and perpetrated.  some pillars, such as justification by scripture and appeals to "natural law"; taboos on relations between the castes, and "impurity' of the lower castes (by which a swimming pool had to be drained and refilled after the 'dirty' caste had used it, before it was fit for the Brahmins or the white people)--are considered disgusting, idiotic superstitions today.  Other pillars such as forced segregation and reigns of terror (as exemplified by unofficial police mandates to murder as many black people as possible, and by the Karens who give them the pretext they need by calling 911 on black people who appear in White people spaces) are still going strong today.

this book makes you see what you can't then unsee, so that you know what the problem is and can be motivated to do something about it and challenge the caste system.  It makes you think the uncomfortable thoughts.  after reading the book, I began to think about American gender roles in terms of an artificial dominant/untouchable caste, too.  Very highest recommendations.

Women on Mars: The Foetid Sky, by Mary Robinette Kowal

"Do you remember where you were when mankind landed on Mars? I was on the bridge of the Nina, sitting in the copilot's seat with my pencil and paper, ready to plot. Parker sat in the seat next to me with nothing to do. we stared out the viewport and listened to the radio channels as the Terrazas entered the atmosphere of Mars."

This is the second in the Lady Astronauts set.  It was not nominated for a Hugo, and so I thought The Relentless Moon was the second, and realized my mistake when I read it.  I had to go back for TheFated Sky out of order.  It's all good.  The third book stood alone well enough, and the second was surprising enough even knowing what comes ahead.

I love this series, and voted for both the first and third volumes to get the Hugo.  It has all the excitement of imagining first trips into space, had they been made necessary two decades earlier due to an extinction-threatening meteor event, and all the social commentary of the racial and gender issues that existed in the 40s through 60s and how they would play out in a seven member spaceship crew, with a respectful treatment of mental health issues as well.  Very high recommendations.
 

Death by Virtue: Strait is the Gait, by Andre Gide
"I saw that strait gate through which we must strive to enter. I fancied it, in the dream into which I was plunged, as a sort of press into which I passed with effort and with an extremity of pain, but which had in it as well a foretaste of heavenly felicity. And again this gate became the door of Alissa's room."

Gide wrote that this was the opposite of his better known book The Immoralist, about a happy rogue.  This is a morality tale about how the church makes good people miserable.  Alissa loves narrator Jerome, but has resolved to remain virginal for life so as to be fit to pass through the strait gate to Paradise. Jerome loves Alissa too, and remains true to her for life, though she continually rebuffs him, and eventually wastes away to death rather than be fulfilled in his arms.  A third character, Juliette, loves Jerome, but he isn't having any because he's obsessed with Alissa, and so Juliette settles on a loveless marriage to some other bro.

Church 3, humanity 0. Well played.

A Surfeit of Nonsense: Impressions of Africa, by Raymond Roussel
"Still armed with his long stick, Rhejed leaped forward and struck the bird sharply on the back of the head, so that it fell without a cry. But seeking to inspect his new victim at closer quarters, the child felt as though riveted to the ground by an invincible force. His right foot rested on a flat, heavy stone covered by the rodent's slobber. This substance, already half dry, formed an irresistibly powerful glue, and Rehjed was able to disengage his bare foot only by violent effort and at the cost of deep and painful sores."

For the first few pages, I thought it was going to be a nonfiction account of a post-WWI era Frenchman's tour of French-occupied Africa, maybe with Kipling-level racism, maybe with a call for reform, maybe an account of regional customs and life, with an emphasis on "My, how exotic", from the European point of view. I spent the previous decade reading western Great Books from Homer to TS Eliot, and outside of Egypt and the Mediterranean coast, there were few mentions of Africa at all.  Ibn Battutah, Olaudah equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and Joseph Conrad in the Congo were about it. So—show me the African continent of a century ago!

Roussel did not.  He might as well have shown me Oz.

Last year, I read Roussel's other main work, Locus Solus, a series of weird performances and experiments that take place in a weird millionaire's mansion.  Impressions of Africa has a shipful of weird artists and scientists who go to some unnamed part of Africa not far inland from the mid west coast, and perform a series of weird vignettes. there is also a subplot about a prince whose throne is plotted against by his wicked brother in the kingdom next door.

I had to cheat and look it up, it made so little sense.  I was told that the entire point of Roussel's vignettes involve puns and wordplay that make sense in the original French (like, three or four pages about a scientist melting down the various colored panes of glass from a stained glass window, painstakingly transforming the various colored glasses into vegetables, and making a salad of them, with the punchline being "window dressing").

I feel cheated.

Modern Fairy Tale: The Charwoman's Daughter, by James Stephens

"Bruises, unless they are desperate indeed, will heal at the last for no other reason than that they must. The inexorable compulsion of all things is toward health or destruction, life or death, and we hasten our joys or our woes to the logical extreme. It is urgent, therefore, that we be joyous if we wish to live. Our heads may be as solid as is possible, but our hearts and our heels shall be light or we are ruined.  As for the golden mean, let us have nothing to do with that thing at all; it may be only gilded. It is very likely made of tin of a dull color and a lamentable sound, unworthy even of being stolen; and unless our treasures may be stolen, they are no use to us."

This short book by the author of the BRILLIANT tale "The Crock of Gold" is a work of beauty.  It was written a few years after the Easter Rebellion and has nothing to do with the rebellion. It's Cinderella without the wicked step-family. The charwoman and her daughter live in a squalid garret in Dublin and don't have enough to eat, and the physical description of their poverty is starkly drawn. And yet, the tone of the book is cheerful. They have each other. Unspoken fellowship is communicated between them and the others of their class.  The girl has St. Stephen's Green to wander in (I visited during the Dublin Worldcon and it is a beautiful park) and to strike an acquaintance with all of the pigeons to the point where she recognizes them individually.

Just read it.  It will take you away from here for the hour or so it takes to read it, and you will be glad.  High recommendations.

Politics in Oregon mirrors politics in DC:

Democrats:  Oh please, please negotiate with us!  We'll pre-emptively redraw the Congressional boundaries in your favor so you don't have to!

Republicans: No.

Oregon is one of few states in which Democrats are fortunate enough to completely control the redistricting process for their State Legislature and for the Congressional delegation.  Democrats have a 3/5 majority in both houses of the legislature, the Secretary of State is a Democrat, and almost all sitting judges were appointed by a stream of Democratic Governors that has been unbroken since 1987.

The one tool that Republicans have is the ability to deny a quorum to the legislative session by failing to appear.  If they do this in the redistricting session, the SoS draws the legislative districts unilaterally (meaning, Democrats win), and a panel of judges appointed by the liberal Chief Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court chooses the Congressional map (meaning, they almost certainly select the official map made by a majority of the legislature, and Democrats win).

And so, naturally, the Republican minority has stonewalled, obstructed, walked out, held their breath, and refused to participate at every turn.  Just like in Congress, with the distinction that there is no filibuster and their refusal to participate effectively forfeits their ability to influence the redistricting at all.  But they don’t care.  Hatred of Oregon is their only motivation, and creating clusterfucks and destruction their only goal.

And so, equally naturally, the Democratic majority has done its best to kick away its own power and unnecessarily empower the Republicans to block them further.

Earlier in the year, House Speaker Tina Kotek, normally a good Democrat, outraged our members of Congress by agreeing to let the House Redistricting committee contain equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, allowing any maps not approved of by the minority party to die in committee...which they did.

Democrats further drew up a Congressional map which, unlike my proposed 6D, 0R map pictured above, allows Republican Cliff Bentz to keep his sprawling Greater Idaho district while making the other five seats reasonably solid.  All right, taking off my “partisan Democrat” hat, it seems like a reasonable compromise.  But, in typical Neville Chamberlain fashion, they OPENED with the reasonable compromise, allowing the Republicans to screech with performative horror and call THAT the gerrymander.

Meanwhile, Republicans unveiled their own map, which was predictably, an obscenity...and then refused to budge an inch from it.

Similarly, I can make a map that restricts Republicans in the legislature to 7 out of 30 State Senators and 16 out of 60 Representatives.  Democrats bent over backwards to be fair, and produced maps that gave Republicans between 8 and 12 Senators and 17 to 19 House members, close to the current lineup.

All of that is old news.  

This week, the Senate approved the Congressional and legislative maps immediately.  House Republicans could probably have influenced the maps further rightward just by holding up Lucy’s football and promising to really and truly not pull the ball away, this time.  Instead, they opted to refuse to negotiate at all.  

Speaker Kotek eventually did the sensible thing and removed the extra Republicans from the redistricting committee. It was the only way for anything at all to pass.  Republicans again performatively screeched that their precious right to obstruct and destroy was being stolen from them. 

Again, Kotek had not been required to offer them this chance to participate at all.  She did so out of a misguided hope that Republicans would cooperate towards a reasonable compromise, just like they have never done since the Newtist era.  The Republicans had their opportunity, and they squandered it.

Which brings us to today’s news.

Remember: a Republican walkout gives the Democrats the power to draw the legislative maps they want—presumably more partisan than the maps currently on the table, and likely to give 2/3 Democratic majorities to both Houses, such that they will no longer need any Republicans to achieve a quorum; and lets the judges, who will presumably look favorably on the legislature’s choice, draw the Congressional map.

And so the House Democrats unilaterally redrew the Congressional map to give the Republicans Oregon’s new Congressional district, for a shocking 4-2 split.

And the Republicans rejected it and walked out.

Assuming they don’t come back by the end of the day Monday, they will have ended their ability to participate, and cost themselves a Congressional seat and some legislative seats, JUST for the benefit of crying crocodile tears and shouting the fiction that Oregon Democrats are too partisan.  

And our elected legislature will have been prevented from unnecessarily sending a second Republican to tamper with the Federal government, by the very Republicans who would have benefited from it.  The ones Democrats were supposed to be opposing in the first place.

Today, the Oregon legislature, with a 3/5 majority in both houses, and the ability to control the redistricting process decided, in the interest of bipartisanship, to make traitor Dem Kurt Schraeder’s district primary-proof from the left, and to preserve the status quo in the state legislature.

The single most important thing the legislature needed to do was to make 40 safe House seats for Democrats and 20 Senate seats, so that Republicans could no longer derail massively popular legislation by not showing up for work and denying the lege a quorum.  

This could easily have been done, and was in fact done in the initial set of maps passed by the Oregon Senate.  All the Democrats had to do was either pass it in the normal course or let the Republicans run out the clock on the special redistricting session so that Secretary of State Shemia Fagan could enact the maps herself.

And, once again, the Democratic majority kicked its power away.

A PDF of the new map can be found here.

olis.oregonlegislature.gov/…

The map fails to make HD9, which went Republican for the first time in 40 years in 2020, safer.  In fact it makes it worse.

It fails to make districts 1 through 4 contain all of non-coastal Douglas County, Curry and Josephine Counties and all of rural Coos County, leaving northeastern Jackson County to merge with the conservative eastern districts.  Instead, it takes Democrats away from the Hood River/Wasco-based 52nd District and puts them in the 59th without, however, making the 59th competitive.

It fails to take District 7 out of Douglas County and make it Democratic.

It fails to make Senate District 8 (House Districts 15 and 16) out of Albany and all of Benton County, for two safe D districts.  It leaves district 15 safely red.  

It fails to remove Turner and Aumsville from District 19, leaving that district solidly Republican too.

It fails to combine District 39, the only GOP district in the Portland metro area, with a solidly Democratic district that would elect a Democratic State Senator.

It unnecessarily divides Hood River County, removing Democrats from District 52.

It fails to remove Redmond from District 53 and replace it with the Warm Springs reservation, with the result that District 53, and thus Senate District 27, will remain Republican.

House Democrats have enabled the Republican minority to block legislation for another decade.

And their ONLY reward for this is that the Republican minority voted unanimously against it and is already screeching from the rooftops about the “far, FAR left socialist gerrymander” forced down their throats, and vowing lawsuits and total war against the Democrats, and by extension, against Oregon. No one could possibly have predicted that this would happen.

This is why we can’t have nice things.  

Pin the Tail on Your Inner Donkey: Awaken the Giant Within, by Tony Robbins

What you're doing is not producing the result you want, and you have to change your approach. Remember that your perceptions are controlled by what you focus on, and the meanings you interpret from things. And you can change your perception in a moment, just by changing the way you're using you physiology or by asking yourself a better question.

I have a love-hate relationship with Tony Robbins and his philosophy of success.  He is problematic as fuck, and not as popular with younger generations as he was with mine, but the core of his self-improvement formula really did improve my life.  I used to listen to his "personal power" cassette tapes while working out, and come back to Awaken the Giant Within every so often for a checkup.  If you don't know what a cassette tape is, ask an old person.

Basic Tony Robbins:  If you're not successful, you should change  (1) your state of mind and/or (2) your behavior.  EVERYTHING comes down to those two things. People are hard-wired to pursue pleasure and avoid pain; therefore, you get where you want to go by associating massive pleasure with doing what you should do to get there, and massive pain with doing the other thing.

Which means, if you want to lose weight, you psych yourself for it with a combination of fat-shaming yourself and constantly picturing the healthier, stronger, more attractive you that you want to be, and you WILL get there.  (Remember, this is for people who WANT to change their bodies, not for people who are content the way they are. It's still problematic, but maybe not quire as much as one might think).  Similarly, if you're not satisfied with the amount of money you have, think positive thinky-thoughts and WANT it more, and you'll get a better job, own your own business, become rich as Bezos, if only you're motivated enough.

And if you have a disability that prohibits exercise and the only available jobs pay shit wages, then---you're not trying hard enough.  Actually, the book is completely silent about that part.

But there are other things. Changing your state of mind instantly with physicality.  I have gotten myself temporarily out of depressive episodes by grinning a big dorky grin and saying "Da-WOOOO-ba" in a Warner Bros. cartoon voice or by doing the robot dance.

Or the use of words like "curious" instead of "confused", "misunderstood" instead of "rejected", "a wee bit peeved" instead of "angry" and "challenged" instead of "overwhelmed" Robbins calls this "transformational vocabulary".  I call it "fun with words", and my friends the words have gotten me through some really bad times.

Oh, wait. Did I say "really bad times"?  I meant "surprising, moving and shaking, times of opportunity."

Robbins doesn't drop names. He backs them up into a truck and dumps them.  He has met with and interviewed hundreds of successful politicians, business leaders, athletes and entertainers to find out what they did to make it to the top.  His books are full of true anecdotes about people with dreams who achieved those dreams, just like you can if you set goals and think like these wonderful, successful role models did.  Unfortunately, this book was written some time before being published in 1991, and some of the amazing, successful people Robbins holds up as role models have not aged well.  read his book, and savor the irony of inspirational feel-good stories about John  DeLorean, Pete Rose,  Lee Iacocca, T. Boone Pickens, OJ Simpson, Mother Theresa, and---YES! Bill Cosby, and---YES! Donald Trump.

And now, Robbins has his own sexual harassment scandals. Remember the lesson of Croesus and Solon, and never meet your heroes.

Bottom line: There's a variety of good stuff that often works in Awaken the Giant Within.  It's a resource I return to frequently (and so is Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People), and I highly recommend everyone read it at least once, but it is not perfect (for a discussion of the barnacle-encrusted underbelly of the S.S. Positive Thinking, see Brightsided, by Barbara Ehrenreich).

Little Ado About Nothing: The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, by May Sinclair

"Ugly. Being naughty was just that. Doing ugly things. Being good was being beautiful like Mamma. She wanted to be like her mother. Sitting up there and being good felt delicious. And the smooth cream with the milk running under it, was delicious too."

Poor Harriet Frean! Her life (not the reading experience) is one of the dreariest in fiction.  She lives with her parents; her parents age and die, she runs out of inheritance and has to live in a smaller drearier house; eventually, she dies too.  It's a short book; Sinclair spares us from having to endure every moment.

The most significant point of Frean's life is when a young man, engaged to someone else, declares his love for her and wants to break the engagement and marry her instead.  she tells him it wouldn't be fair to his current fiancee and sends him back to her. Her father, whom she adores, says she did the right thing.  The couple, who didn't really like one another, have a miserable life, and Harriet has no life worth speaking of.

Again, after her father dies, Harriet and the widowed mother have the chance to live in a pretty place by the seaside, where the air is clean. they turn it down because "it wouldn't be right to abandon father's grave." the bad air of the village contributes to the early deaths of both women.

Similarities with this plot exist in many first-wave feminism stories, from The Awakening to The Bell Jar. Women with nothing expected from them (except self-sacrifice) and nothing given to them, whose lives are wasted for want of an opportunity to grow into their full power and thrive.

Sea Sickness: The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad

"It never occurred to me that I didn't know in what soundness of mind actually consisted, and what a delicate and on the whole unimportant matter it was. With some idea of not hurting his feelings, I blinked at him in an interested manner. But when he proceeded to ask me mysteriously whether I remembered what had passed just now between that steward of ours and that man Hamilton, I only grunted sour assent and turned away my head."

The introduction swears that this is a WWI novel, or a metaphor for it.  I see no connection.  This is yet another one of Conrad's psychological sea adventure, set around Singapore and the Indian Ocean.  In the first part of the book, fate tries to steer the narrator into avoiding a horrific small ship command, but he ends up on the ship, becalmed. with disease and madness rendering the crew useless in the face of the consequences of the previous captain's fuckery. With a lot of meditation about ghosts and fate and other somber subjects.  as usual.

Wodehouse Without the Humor: Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley.

"And what will be MY place in the Rational State?", Dennis drowsily inquired from under his shading hand."
"Mr. Scogan looked at him for a moment in silence. "It's difficult to see where you would fit in," he said at last. "You couldn't do manual work; you're too independent and unsuggestible to belong to the Larger Herd; you have none of the characteristics required in a Man of Faith. As for the Directing Intelligences, they will have to be marvelously clear and merciless and penetrating." He paused and shook his head. "No, I can see no place for you. Only the lethal chamber."

There's a hint of Brave New World in the planned rational utopia of the odious Mr. Scogan; otherwise Crome Yellow is quite far from what most people think of when they think of Huxley. It's about a young man who spends a bit of vacation time at a country estate populated with independently wealthy dilettantes too earnest to be funny and too eccentric to be taken seriously. They spend their days fiddling around with art, philosophy, writing and games, lecture and read to the protagonist; then, after flirting unsuccessfully with one of the women for a while (she feels sorry for him), he goes back to London.

They have names like Bracegirdle and Barbecue-Smith, and I expected them to be wot-wotting like Bertie Wooster, but they didn't. they were too dull to be fops, and too clever to be upper class twits, and I might have enjoyed a weekend's conversation with some of them, if I could get the others to shut up.

The book jacket billed it as a "satire', though it didn't make much of a point about society; neither was it intellectual nor funny.  Stuff happened, and then more stuff, and then it ended. But for the brief romance and sketchy characterizations, nothing really happened.  And so it goes.

Daisy Buchanan of Europe: The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen

"It has occurred to the writer to call this important history The Green Hat because a green hat was the first thing about her that he saw: as also it was, in a way, the last thing about her that he saw.  It was bright green, of a sort of felt, and bravely worn: being, no doubt, one of those that women who have many hats affect 'pour le sport'."

I draw comparisons with The Great Gatsby because of the similarity of the time period, the casual entitled destructiveness of the wealthy main characters, and the fact that these were among the first stories in which motor vehicles were an essential part of the plot.

Iris Storm, the woman in the green hat, is not really much of a Daisy Buchanan. She is considered a "scandalous woman", largely due to an incident that happened on her wedding night.  Most of her peer group--as with Crome Yellow, they're of the Bertie Wooster caste, with the comic foppishness stripped away to reveal the nasty underbelly--her peer group either shuns and scolds her, or patronizes and pities her, or attempts bunglingly to be friendly, all the while acknowledging that they don't understand her, in a "Wot shall we do about Iris?" sort of way. And, about the time my patience was worn to the breaking point, the denouement made it all worth it.  So I won't say it out loud, even though you've probably guessed the gist of it already.  Well recommended.

All of Brecht in one Volume: The Last Days of Mankind, by Karl Kraus
"During the Battle of the Somme. Gate in front of a villa. A company of front-line soldiers, wearing their death-defying countenances, marches by into the foremost line trenches.

"CROWN PRINCE: (at the gate, in a tennis outfit, waving to them with his racket): Do a good job!"

I'm finding that most post-WWI books are ither less than 150 pages, or more than 500.  The Last Days of Mankind, selected for its appropriate-for-these-tinmes-title, is longer than Faust, and seems to me impossible to perform outside of a minimalist Brechtian style, as countless unnamed privates, officers, judges, beggars, war prostitutes, idle rich onlookers, and personifications enact an alternate WWI that continues until there's no one left to fight. There are cameos by Hindenburg and other historical characters with actual names, but the only two characters with distinct long-term identities are "The Optimist" and "The Pessimist", who appear in parks and cafes between war scenes, to comment and punctuate like a Greek Chorus about how foolish everyone is.

There is much bitter, cynical humor. A court-martial officer who has just sentenced some young soldiers to be shot is told that the sentence cannot be carried out because the accused were juveniles who are legally too young for execution.  Instead of changing the sentence, he alters their ages on the official documents, to make it right.  Soldiers dying under horrific war conditions, without boots, blankets, food nor medicine, have nice patriotic notes sent home to their families, asserting that they died after important service to their nation, well-cared for and given the best medical treatment.  Retreating soldiers are shot for having failed to drive off the enemy, by their own officers, who subsequently wonder why there is now no one between them and the enemy.

And so it goes.  Eventually, the Human race has succeeded in killing itself off, and the Voice of God says "I did not will this", and that's how the play ends.  I could hear the Kurt Weill music--still uncomposed as of Kraus's time--throughout.
 

More Human Misery: Summer; The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edith Wharton

"She was awakened by a rattling at her door and jumped out of bed.She heard Mr. Royall's voice, low and peremptory, and opened the door, fearing an accident. No other thought had occurred to her, but when she saw him in the doorway, a ray from the autumn moon falling on his discomposed face, she understood.
"You go right back from here," she said, in a shrill voice that startled her. "You ain't going to have that key tonight."
"Charity, let me in. I don't want the key.  I'm a lonesome man."

I am getting seriously tired of Edith Wharton and her constant parade of lives ruined by combinations of hypocritical societal backbiting and poor choices, but I suffered through centuries of this crap from male authors through history, and I can put up with wharton too. She's part of the western canon.

Summer is about a girl brought down from an off-grid mountain hamlet somewhere in the Berkshires and raised in a nearby rural village by an amorous foster father, She dreams of going to a "big city" like Pittsfield, but doesn't make it because she's seduced by a young man who is going slumming before he marries a society girl.  So she ends up with a wasted life in the middle of nowhere.

The couple in Glimpses of the Moon has no money, and spends their summer living among high society Europeans as their guests while pretending to be of them.  each has the opportunity to divorce and marry someone more suited to them, who could support them...they even make commitments in ways that end up deeply embarrassing the other parties and burning bridges when they decide to resentfully stay with each other instead.

Everybody wins.

Should have stayed lost:  The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West

"Ah", he said, "Madness is an indictment not of the people one lives with, only of the high gods! If there was anything, it's evident that it was not your fault."

Another short one, written soon after WWI, about a shellshocked soldier coming back to his native village with partial memory loss.  he's forgotten which of two women he's really married to, and their mission is to bring his mind back so that he can be sent back to the front and get killed properly this time. Cheerful.

Vignettes: Cane, by Jean Toomer

Becky was the white woman who had two negro sons. She's dead; they've gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound.

From the very Caucasian-looking portrait on the cover, I had thought Jean Toomer was a Frenchman whose name was pronounced "Too-may". In fact, he was a major contributor to the Harlem Renaissance  who was completely neglected in my education.

Cane is a collection of racially tinged poems, vignettes and short tales, set in the rural South and the urban North.  More impressionist than plotted. Content note: the N-word is used frequently, and there are instances of extreme violence, usually more implied than graphic.

Town-o, town-o: The Fox, by DH Lawrence

"He had a ruddy, roundish face, with fairish hair, rather long, flattened to his forehead with sweat.  His eyes were blue, and very bright and sharp. On his cheeks, on the fresh ruddy skin were fine fair hairs, like down but sharper. It gave him a slightly glistening look."

The allegory is ham-fisted.  Two women are trying to work a small farm that they own together, but a fox keeps running off with their poultry.  the women are helpless. They can't stop the fox.  One of the women is even stared down by the fox hypnotically.

And then a man with a scheme, and with the facial features described above, comes along and resolves to marry that same woman and take the farm from them. As one does. you see where this is going immediately, right?

And it goes there. It's a novella. it's worth reading and it does what it does well.

Integrity in Action: My Life in Court, by Louis Nizer

"The principle by which I have guided my legal work is that law is truth in action. It is man's highest achievement, because it is the only weapon he has fashioned whose force rests solely on the sanctity of reason. The more it is codified, the more it is in danger of petrifying. Its primary function, to do justice, becomes circumscribed by rules and precedents, which all too often interfere with its attainment. In order to give stability to law, our legislatures enact statutes to warn us, and our courts issue legal opinions to guide us, but these become immense catalogs that can obstruct the view of simple justice.  Their very complexity requires interpretive processes that provide new areas for conflict and error. The journey through the forest, which was to give us shade and shelter, becomes a hazardous undertaking in itself, and so diverts us that we may forget our original destination."

I was given this book as a gift shortly before graduating from law school, and I never read it until now.  I read biographies of Clarence Darrow, William Douglas, Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, F. Lee Bailey, Melvin Belli, Alan Derschowitz and William Kunstler.
I never got around to Nizer largely because I didn't know who he was.  His name never came up in my legal studies or career, not once.

Nizer was a New York attorney in private practice, who had a high reputation for integrity and thorough preparation for trials. What he calls his "biography" is really a casebook of seven or eight civil litigation trials from defamation to personal injury to rich-people divorce, presented from initial consultation to verdict or appeal.  More than half the text consists of transcript excerpts from Nizer's cross-examinations, which sometimes lasted weeks.  Paper companies loved him; he had a team of assistants to carry the massive files full of documents to his trials.

His biography was apparently intended for casual readers, but it seems to me you need an understanding of civil litigation and a keen interest in the subject matter to read it for pleasure. I responded positively to it, naturally enough, and people considering law school could do worse than to go through it while deciding whether a legal career is right for them.

SuperMom: I'm Not Starfire, by Mariko Tamaki and Yoshi Yoshitani

"And this...is Claire. What can you say about Claire that doesn't make you sound like the voice-over for a teen movie?"

I reflexively put a hold request on this one because some asshole recorded himself on Youtube burning a copy because something something garbanzo.  I had no idea what it was.

Turns out it's a YA graphic novel.  not what I normally read, but if some asshole wants to burn it, it can't be all bad.  fortunately my kid watches Teen Titans Go, and so I know something about who Starfire and her team are.

The protagonist is Mandy, Starfire's ordinary mortal daughter, who doesn't have superpowers, though her peers at school insist that she secretly does.  Mandy is alienated from everyone, wears a lot of black, and goes around in a mood.  I can relate.  She's also decided not to go to college and has already walked out on her SAT test, which her superhero Mom doesn't yet know.  And then Claire comes into her life...

It's a standard YA plot, which I found emotionally potent and sweet.  I can't even tell what the fuss was about that made someone feel like burning it, but if you burn books, fuck you.

Artists and Murder in Scotland: The five Red Herrings, by Dorothy Sayers

"(Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the Sergeant what he was to look for and why, but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page)"

I intend to finish the Peter Wimsey series because they are classic whodunnit puzzles that follow "fair play" rules, such as the big hint above that something is missing from the crime scene and you have enough information to deduce what it is. And I did figure out what it was.

But then it became obvious that the solution was going to hinge on studying railway timetables, and i just didn't want it that much. I figured out which of the six suspects was the murderer anyway.

I find Peter Wimsey insufferable, with his "Murder--what fun!" attitude, his privileged lifestyle, and the use of witty comments and quirks instead of actual character.  Still...classic detection.

Artists and Murder in France: Tarr, by Wyndham Lewis

"He impressed you as having inherited himself last week, and as under a great press of business to grasp the details and resources of the concern. Not very much satisfaction at his inheritance and no swank. Great capacity was printed all over him. He did not appear to have been modified as yet by any sedentary, sentimental or other discipline or habit. He was at his first push in an ardent and exotic world, with a good fund of passion from a frigid climate of his own."

I was this year years old when I learned that Wyndham Lewis existed.  I'm annoyed that he's part of "the canon'--three novels, of which this is considered the most important.  Dude was an English fascist who used to say Hitler wasn't such a bad man. Tarr is supposed to be a book about Neitzchean "great spirits" and also funny. I found it neither.  Tarr and his friend Kreissler are dilettante artists supported by generational wealth, who don't do much except treat women badly and have inflated senses of their own importance. Tarr steeps in ironic detachment and figures most other people are phonies and fools.  Kreissler, who is really the central character, escalates from "socially awkward creeper" to "murderer" over the course of the story. we are supposed to sympathize with his tortured descent into madness and find his bumbling to be humorous; in fact, given the number of white dudes committing mass shootings today because people got sick of enabling their alpha male fantasies, he is alternately pathetic and scary. Not recommended.

Middle-Age Suicide (Don't Do It): Amok, by Stefan Zweig

"She tapped the table lightly with her knuckles. So she was nervous too. Then she said, quickly and suddenly, 'Do you know what I want you to do for me, doctor, or don't you?'"
"I believe I do. But let's be quite plain about it. You want an end put to your condition...you want me to cure you of your fainting fits and nausea by...by removing the cause. Is that it?'"
"Yes."
'The word fell like a guillotine."

Such hushed tones, such circumspection, and they're only talking about an appendectomy!

Oh all right, no they're not. It's a different routine medical procedure, but the way the story is told, with the other a-word never appearing in the story, not once, the plot is consistent with the removal of an appendix. In fact, I read the rest of the story from that frame of mind, and it was almost farce.  the doctor refuses to perform the operation. he tries to blackmail her for sex, in exchange for performing the operation. she refuses, and instead has it done in a filthy back alley, and dies, and the doctor goes to great lengths to cover up the cause of death, and then kills himself in remorse.  There, I've spoiled the plot for you so you don't have to torture yourself reading this senseless tale of unnecessary death by fucked-up society.

And then there are three other stories in this book, all of which end with the protagonists committing suicide over thwarted obsession (the "Amok" of the title refers to going mad with obsession, and losing control of oneself)

I too, have suffered from obsession and come close to suicide from it, but I turned back from the brink and have kept existing. Even though I've never recovered from the pain, it was the right choice.  There will be time for eternal nothing later on, eventually. The plights in Amok made me reflect how foolish and pathetic this kind of despair can be.

I've also had two girlfriends who, deep into the relationship, tremblingly confessed to me that they'd had abortions long before they ever hooked up with me, and who just about sobbed with gratitude that the news changed nothing about my feelings for them. Why on earth should it?  And yet, a century ago, people like Zweig were writing like this was the sin that dare not speak its name.  See also, Tess of the D'urbervilles, where a man presented as "good" betrays and abandons the wife he had fully loved yesterday, just because he learns she had been raped and impregnated long before he met her.

Old times are weird.  Old times are supposed to have changed by now.


Original Dystopia: We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin

"All eyes were directed upward; in the pure morning blue, still moist with the tears of night, a small dark spot appeared. Now it was dark, now bathed in the rays of the sun. It was He, descending to us from the sky, He—the new Jehovah—in an aero, He, as wise and as lovingly cruel as the Jehovah of the ancients. Nearer and nearer, and higher toward him were drawn millions of hearts. Already he saw us. And in my mind with Him I looked over everything from the heights: concentric circles of stands marked with dotted blue lines of unifs,—like circles of a spider-web strewn with microscopic suns (the shining of the badges). And in the centre there soon the wise white spider would occupy his place—the Well-Doer clad in white, the Well-Doer who wisely tangled our hands and feet in the salutary net of happiness."

Mary Shelley was probably the first SF writer; Wells and Verne preceded Zamyatin; and James DeMille and Poe wrote culture shock tales about encounters with strange societies...but We may well be the first dystopian fiction.

I'm surprised it isn't more popular today, especially as a straw man for Libertarians.  Published soon after the Russian revolution by a dissident who eventually became an exile, it was an innovative work that clearly influenced Huxley, Orwell and Vonnegut.

In this one world order, society is a hive. Pronouns are we/us, and proper names are numbers. Most buildings are made of glass, so that everyone can be watched.  Employment and reproductive partners are assigned by the hive, and symptoms of having a soul are considered a disease that must be treated via chemical lobotomy.

Much of the plot has become standard dystopian trope fodder.  The protagonist agonizes over his duty to report himself for improper thoughts.  He is inspired to question society because he falls in love with a brave, cute woman in the secret resistance. The hive city fears nature and keeps the people imprisoned within a wall separating them from the forests outside. The dictator in charge has the title of "Beloved One", and failure to worship him is unfathomable.

So it goes.

A World Without Socialism: The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell

"It was one of the ordinary poverty crimes. The man had been without employment for many weeks and they had been living by pawning or selling their furniture and other possessions. But even this resource must have failed at last, and when one day the neighbours noticed that the blinds remained down and that there was a strange silence about the house, no one coming out or going in, suspicions that something was wrong were quickly aroused. When the police entered the house, they found, in one of the upper rooms, the dead bodies of the woman and the two children, with their throats severed, laid out side by side upon the bed, which was saturated with their blood.

"There was no bedstead and no furniture in the room except the straw mattress and the ragged clothes and blankets which formed the bed upon the floor.

"The man's body was found in the kitchen, lying with outstretched arms face downwards on the floor, surrounded by the blood that had poured from the wound in his throat which had evidently been inflicted by the razor that was grasped in his right hand.

"No particle of food was found in the house, and on a nail in the wall in the kitchen was hung a piece of blood-smeared paper on which was written in pencil:

'This is not my crime, but society's.'

"The report went on to explain that the deed must have been perpetrated during a fit of temporary insanity brought on by the sufferings the man had endured."

Interestingly, I read both this book and We at the same time. One a dystopia about ultimate collectivism, and the other a dystopia about unfettered capitalism. I guess between them, you can get both sides about what's wrong with the world.  the difference is that We depicts a fantastic world unlike any society that has actually been tried.  The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists was the actual England of its time, in a terrible world before minimum wages, workplace safety standards, access to health care; building codes; pollution controls, unionization, and other aspects of socialism that we in America take for granted today. Oh, wait...

Seems to me, people really, really need to read this book and reflect that life doesn't have to be like this.  Workers fought for decades to make a better life than what is shown here, and i have lived to se American sociaty collectively throw it all away because it benefits certain marginalized castes as well as themselves.

The main characters include several builders and painters, and the contracting company they work for. Because England is capitalist, the contractor gets jobs only by presenting the low bid, and attempts to make up for it by using low quality materials and abusing the employees.  Way more people are scrambling for employment than there is available work, and so periodic announcements are made that the wages will be reduced again. Take it or leave it; if you walk out, someone else will do it.  Those too old and infirm to work any more end up going to the poorhouse to die. Starving children go to Sunday school where they are given instructions to collect alms from the parents who can't afford to feed them.

The protagonist is one of the builders, talented but underpaid and downright cheated, with a hungry family and no way out. He periodically brings up the need for socialism among his co-workers, who laugh at him, take him out of context, or fail to understand him.

And all this was written 100 years ago. We're supposed to have had a century of progress since then.

Rural Farmers Are A Natural Democratic Constituency:  Grounded, by Senator Jon Tester
"You know what's at stake," she reminded me. Of course I did. The future of America's very democracy was on the line. So was the health care of millions of Americans. Our clean air and water. Opportunities for our grandkids. Those were outcomes that made the exhaustion all worth it. And That's how Sharla kept me going each morning after an emotional evening. By the final few weeks of that almost two-year campaign cycle, I had hit a wall, but thanks to Sharla, I still kept my stride.

The media wants you to think men like Jon Tester ought to be Republicans. He's a big, white, family man and farmer with a flat-top haircut who lives in rural Montana (as opposed to, you know, urban Montana). His State voted for the asshole by huge margins both times.  Reading Grounded, though, it's hard to imagine such a man being anything but a Democrat.

Being a family farmer (the only one in the Senate), he cares about family farms and about the effects of climate change.  He cares about pollution. He chooses to grow organic crops because he gets higher prices for value. He cares about veterans and tirelessly works to get the VA to be more efficient.  Montana has a higher than average Native American population and more public land than average, and so he cares about those issues too.  And, he tells us, in small rural communities, people know each other and rely on honesty and trustworthiness.

You tell me: which political party does that sound like?   And yet, every six years, Tester, who looks like he just got off a horse, gets a tough race from slick Republican dudes in suits whose accents remind everyone that they weren't born in Montana.

Grounded goes back and forth between personal autobiography about his farm in Big Sandy and political autobiography about his campaigns and world events.  He comes across as friendly, full of common sense, and the kind of candidate you'd want to have a drink with.  If I have a complaint, it is that the subtitle, "Lessons on winning back rural America" is misleading.  Only in the epilogue does he offer any kind of advice to Democrats about making inroads in rural areas. And here they are:

1. Go outside your comfort zone. (meaning, go to rural neighborhoods and meet people). VALID. My congressman, Pete DeFazio, is a master of this, and regularly wins in rural Douglas County as well as in Eugene.

2. Listen to rural America.  MOSTLY VALID.  I listen to them, and it's mostly a lesson in having thick enough skin to take unearned abuse.  But you have to do that as a politician.  In Bill Clinton's first campaign, he went to a NASCAR race in South Carolina where he just stood there getting roundly booed with the cameras rolling...and I respected that.

3. Don't overthink the message: VERY VALID.  Stop saying "stimulus bill", "recovery", and "reinvestment".  Say "jobs" and "money" and "your health".

4. Reclaim fiscal responsibility.  INVALID.  Democrats have always been the party of fiscal responsibility. We spend what should be spent, raise the necessary revenue and take the heat for it, and have lowered deficits in every Presidency while Republicans have slashed taxes, spent what they couldn't afford, and acted like a kid with his first credit card.  We've been DOING this one, and the media has been chanting the opposite.

5. Give 'em a reason  (to vote Democrat): VALID. The endless fundraising appeals focused on the evil that Republicans are doing aren't working.  They even piss me off, and I'm motivated.  Tell us what you intend to do, and if you get elected, be seen working to do it.  Let us know you're in our corner.

Jon Tester is in our corner.  If your Senators are too, that's cool.

The Road to Damascus: Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by TE Lawrence

"When at last it came, Jemal's great attack on wadi Musa made no noise. Maulud presided beautifully. He opened his centre, and with the greatest humour let in the Turks until they broke their faces against the vertical cliffs of the Arab refuge. Then, while they were still puzzled and hurt, he came down simultaneously on both flanks. They never again attacked a prepared Arab position."

This is the first hand account of "Lawrence of Arabia" about his role in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks during WWI.  The dominant images from WWI usually involve endless mud trenches and barbed wire, and when the Turks are mentioned at all, it's usually in the context of Gallipoli and the European front.

Lawrence was instrumental for the British in the Turks' Southern front, capturing the Turks' single Red Sea port at Aqaba, waylaying and destroying railroad supply lines, and ultimately capturing Damascus.  Instead of muddy trenches, this war involves long desert journeys, heat strokes, venomous insects and snakes, endless diplomacy and culture shock, and treachery.

The book is rough going, and kept me busy for several weeks. 660 pages and 122 chapters, more chronology than history. Lawrence describes himself turning back in a deadly desert trek to rescue a lost member, the excruciating pain and swelling of a scorpion sting and shooting his own troops for mutiny, with the same monotonous dispassion and detachment as someone recounting genealogical tables.  Military history buffs and anthropologists will like it; most others will do better with the Peter O'Toole movie.