Monthly Book Post, October 2015
This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein
What stopped Obama from seizing his historical moment to stabilize the economy and the climate at the same time was not lack of resources, or a lack of power. He had plenty of both. What stopped him was the invisible confinement of a powerful ideology that had convinced him--as it has convinced virtually all of his political counterparts--that there is something wrong with telling large corporations how to run their businesses even when they are running them into the ground, and that there is something sinister, even vaguely communist, about having a plan to build the kind of economy we need, even in the face of an existential crisis.
This is the single most depressing book I've read all year, but I finished it because it's stuff we can't just turn away from.
The thumbnail summary is: Climate change is worse than we thought, and becoming irreversible faster, and the only way anything is going to change is if fossil fuel extractors and other polluting industries decide that they're not interested in profits any more, or if the government and/or the public makes them stop.
We are SOOOO fucked. Industry won't stop because they're run by sociopaths who are old enough that they can expect to die before shit gets so real that they can't hide from it. Government won't do anything, because they are bought and paid for by industry (which is why, e.g., Rep. Joe Barton, elected from a state whose coast was hit by the BP oil spill, decided to use his committee hearing time to offer grief counseling to the poor unlucky BP executive who had lost so much profitable oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and apologized because ThoseDamnEnvironmentalists were giving him a hard time in his hour of grief). The public doesn't want to believe it because they believe they can't do anything about it, or they don't want to give up their consumerism while watching the rich bear no sacrifice at all, or because climate change is a partisan issue and the marching morons feel it their patriotic duty to vehemently oppose anything environmental, even as their own children have birth defects and their own habitat is infested with new storms, new drought, new fracking, new fires and new spills.
In fact, as the crisis increasingly requires desperate change, industry is doubling down on even worse extraction operations involving tar sands and fracking; Government is busily making it HARDER for any country's government to act--for example, by trade agreements allowing countries to sue to prevent environmental regulation or subsidies to green industry. And the public is punching scientists and paying extra to make their pickup trucks "roll coal" just to piss off the environmentalists.
Environmental advocate groups are failing to do their job; they act like pathetic little Neville Chamberlains who take donations and then lobby for cap-and-trade emissions laws and other insufficient economic incentives and attempts at compromise that industry just laughs at. The "green billionaires" focus on public relations stunts and act on the Panglossian assumptions that technology will find a way to rescue us because it will be necessary.
Klein's proposed solution--the thing standing between us and death--is direct action. Earth First! and indigenous nations and publicity stunts and lawsuits to force the government, kicking and screaming, to enforce its own laws. Which worked so well in the late 80s that of course we should have faith in it now.
Part of my soul died reading this book. It brought me back to the days in high school when many of my generation, me included, descended into nihilism and religion because what was the use? Everyone knew that we had no future, because Reagan and the Soviets were certain to have a world-ending nuclear war long before we ever had years beginning with a two. I vividly remember the end of the cold war and the wonderful, beautiful feeling that my terminal cancer diagnosis had been wrong! How wonderful, how alive I felt, how full of hope for a rich and full life after all.
Now, it's like having cancer all over again.
And that's my reaction, as an environmentalist. I just shut down in the face of so much gloom and doom. Now imagine the reaction of some average reader who doesn't accept the premises right away, and who is in fact looking for excuses to dispute and deny it.
We're fucked. All of us.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Hither comes Major Tolhurst, one of my old acquaintances in Cromwell's time and sometimes of our club, to see me, and I could do no less than carry him to the Miter; and thither having sent for Mr. Beane, a merchant, a neighbour of mine, we sat and talk--Tolhurst telling me the manner of their Collierys in the North. We broke up, and I home to dinner.
And to see my folly, as discontented as I am, when my wife came I could not forbear smiling all dinner, till she began to speak bad words again; and then I begun to be angry again. I went to my wife and agreed upon matters, and at last for my honour am forced to make her presently a new Moyre gown to be seen by Mrs. Clerke; which troubles me to part with so much money, but however it sets my wife and I to friends again, though I and she never were so heartily angry in our lives as today almost, and I doubt the heart-burning will not soon over. And the truth is, I am sorry for the tearing of so many poor loving letters of mine from Sea and elsewhere to her.
So to my office again, and there the Scrivener brought me the end of the Manuscript which I am going to get together of things of the Navy--which pleases me much. So home--mighty friends with my wife again, and so to bed.
Thus ends yet another mighty literary undertaking of mine for the year. Ever since they rang in the new year, I've read a couple of months from the ten-volume diary every weekend, one of the ten years covered in it each month.
Pepys was a minor official in the part of the British Naval Office in charge of victualling warships at the time of the diary--becoming much more politically important in the years after the diary. He was also something of an asshole who brown-nosed like Uriah Heep, committed domestic violence against his wife, beat the servants, and committed adultery in his own home, and whose primary virtue, as far as the diary goes, was to paint himself honestly, "warts and all", without excuses (except that he encodes in Latin terms the physical details of his sexual exploits) in his private journal. He is also cultured, and has plenty of what might otherwise be delightful conversational insights about plays, books, food and drink, current events, and the navy--but when a man is abusing his privilege and his family, a part of me stops giving a ripe turd what he has to say about Webster's revenge tragedies or the need for better sewage along the Fleet.
The best part of the diary--the part that kept me going--is the rich and vivid panorama of life in 17th Century London--at least, for the economically privileged. The streets, the buildings, the coaches, the river, the docks, the ships, Whitehall, the playhouses and taverns and wenches and bookdealers, and a few great moments in history. The diary encompasses the end of the Commonwealth and the coronation of Charles II--with all of the attendant reversals of fortune and revivals of strife between Anglicans, Puritans and Catholics. There is war with the Dutch, including a famous incident when the Dutch fleet sailed right up the Thames and torched a sizeable part of the English fleet at dockside--one of the last serious plague outbreaks in London; and the Great Fire.
It's easy to read, if you can stand the stench of corruption wafting from the river, the King's court, the Naval office, and Pepys. I learned that there is a "Samuel Pepys Society" similar to the clubs obsessed with Jeremy Bentham and the Sherlock Holmes canon, that apparently loves Pepys and his world enough to play dress-up and have banquets and offer money prizes for contributions to Pepys scholarship, PR and cultural enrichment. Different roasts for different hosts.
Samuel Pepys, a Life, by Stephen Coote
As an expression of Pepys' mind the library is also the image of the man. Naturally its contents are as comprehensive as its owner's interests while its rigorous cataloguing shows that love of order so wholly characteristic of Pepys. One particular detail demonstrates this especially---the books, which are catalogued by number rather than by subject, are ranged in the lovely presses by size, little leather covered blocks raising slightly smaller ones to the height of their neighbours. Those on the highest levels, Pepys had to reach down with the help of a stool.
This one happened to be in my local library next to the multiple volumes of the diary, and I read it to see what happened after 1669. The diary itself took up only a decade, and predated the most influential part of his career at the Admiralty.
Most of the book is about the Diary years, since it is from the diary that the bulk of his biography can be found. Interestingly, either Pepys changed markedly once he stopped writing, or he put up such a good front that no one suspected what a douchetweazle he was. Could be the first--not only did Pepys believe he was going blind, but his wife died within months of the diary's end, leaving him devastated at the loss of someone he had treated so poorly, but whom he ultimately loved. Either life-change can alter a person's personality. Pepys attended fewer plays and had less of a home life, and thrust himself completely into the Naval Office, becoming a member of Parliament and making and confounding enemies all over Whitehall, becoming known for thoroughness, loyalty and dignity, and the most knowledgeable person in Britain about the navy.
Pepys' new sense of loyalty took him down. He set aside his dislike of Catholicism and James II in particular to stand by the unpopular king until the bitter end, solely out of a sense of duty to the crown, retiring from public life rather than continue under William III. The moral of the story is that people can change.
Monadology, by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Every present state of a simple substance (or, monad) is a natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future. Therefore, since on awakening after a period of unconsciousness we become conscious of our perceptions, we must, without having been conscious of them, have had perceptions immediately before; for one perception can come in a natural way only from another perception, just as a motion can come in a natural way only from a motion.
This one is probably Leibniz's most famous work, probably because it is the shortest, at just 25 pages. Good thing, too. I read the whole word salad three times, trying to figure it out, and probably failed.
Maybe it's the translation.
Monads are defined as "simple substances", which seem to alternately mean "atoms", because they're the smallest possible things, or "something that is similar throughout itself", like a large mass of clay or identical grains of sand, because every monad is a unique and beautiful snowflake that is different from all other monads and has the ability to change (which the smallest possible thing would not). As usual, Leibniz begins by defining as axiomatic the perfection of all things, because God, and passing from that to assertions that logically follow if all things are perfect, but which are pointless if you do not grant the axioms in the first place.
And then Leibniz pretty much stops talking about monads altogether, and instead spews more word salad about the capacity of man to know anything, thereby raising the question why he bothered with the monads in the first place.
Seems to me the main attraction of a philosophical system is that it might be true (see, e.g., Plato and Aristotle from my 2011 Bookposts, or Montaigne from 2014), followed by entertainment value, even if you don't believe it (say, Berkley or Nietzche), followed by the challenge of disproving someone you dislike who seems convincing (Machiavelli, Hobbes). Leibniz seems to offer NONE of these attractions, and you have to hunker down and strain just to figure out what he's trying to say in the first place. But at least this one is short.
Ethics, by Benedict De Spinoza
I f a man sees that he is too keen in the pursuit of honour, let him think over its right use, the end for which it should be pursued, and the means whereby he may attain it. Let him not think of its misuse, and its emptiness, and the fickleness of mankind, and the like, whereof no man thinks except through a morbidness of disposition; with thoughts like these do the most ambitious most torment themselves, when they despair of gaining the distinctions they hanker after, and in thus giving vent to their anger would fain appear wise. Wherefore it is certain that those, who cry out the loudest against the misuse of honour and the vanity of the world, are those who most greedily covet it. This is not peculiar to the ambitious, but is common to all who are ill-used by fortune, and who are infirm in spirit. For a poor man also, who is miserly, will talk incessantly of the misuse of wealth and of the vices of the rich; whereby he merely torments himself, and shows the world that he is intolerant, not only of his own poverty, but also of other people's riches. So, again, those who have been ill received by a woman they love think of nothing but the inconstancy, treachery, and other stock faults of the fair sex; all of which they consign to oblivion, directly they are again taken into favour by their sweetheart. Thus he who would govern his emotions and appetite solely by the love of freedom strives, as far as he can, to gain a knowledge of the virtues and their causes, and to fill his spirit with the joy which arises from the true knowledge of them: he will in no wise desire to dwell on men's faults, or to carp at his fellows, or to revel in a false show of freedom. Whosoever will diligently observe and practice these precepts (which indeed are not difficult) will verily, in a short space of time, be able, for the most part, to direct his actions according to the commandments of reason.
Spinioza's most famous work is nominally short, but requires some pretty deep study to understand. I've been poring slowly through the Ethics since the beginning of July. Spinoza writes, at least at first, in the style of Euclid, starting with axioms and attempting to prove theorems therefrom by logical analysis. Unfortunately, since one o his first axioms is assuming the existence of God (defined initially as a nonsectarian synthesis of everything that exists in the cosmos, but soon shifted to at least imply a higher consciousness), I did not find the proofs exactly geometrically unassailable. Further, because of this approach, Spinoza's first three sections consist of pretty dense forays into metaphysics, epistemology and psychology, before he actually gets into the good stuff about ethics and right behavior. These things are necessary to reach the conclusion that Spinoza's philosophy is completely proven to be true, but if you don't start with his axioms accepted as given, it does not work regardless.
The ultimate conclusion is a pretty simple one that humans are enslaved to emotional passions and that ethics consists in learning to subdue one's passions. I'll go with that. Seems to me, the main difference between the mature and the immature soul is the ability to (1) recognize one's emotions--such as feelings of sexual attraction to an unsuitable person, and to (2) put those emotions to one side when appropriate, as in making the choice not to act on one's inappropriate sexual feelings.
The Durants have made the interesting observation that ethical philosophy is divided into seemingly incompatible camps---there are those (Christ, Gandhi) who teach that LOVE is the highest good, and urge meek submission to evil; those (Machiavelli, Nietzche) who teach that POWER is the highest good, and urge macho domination; and those (Socrates, Aristotle) who teach that WISDOM is the highest good, and urge reasoned discourse and understanding--and that only Spinoza seems to have found a way to unite them. Instead of dominating others, the will to power is satisfied by dominating one's passions and developing a healthy strength of purpose that cannot be shaken by emotional turbulence, and without which happiness and love of self and others cannot be fully developed. Again, I can go with this.
I tend to go with the "I know it when I see it" theory of human goodness. There's about half a dozen people I've been favored to know who consistently impress me with what I call "strength of soul", and if you're one of them reading this, I have told you who you are, frequently. Seems to me, I may have been calling Spinozean ethics "strength of soul" the whole time. Mastery over emotion so as to be able to act with integrity (faithfulness to the ideals one has claimed for oneself) in moments of decision. Could we do this at all times, would we not be the strongest people there are?
Spinoza was considered a living saint by many while he lived, and was of course therefore persecuted mercilessly by Christians and Jews alike. I think i would have liked to know him.
Simplicius Simplicissimus, by Hans Jacob Christoph Von Grimmelshausen
Now as I entered the stricken field at my appointed end with my match alight at both ends, and saw my adversary before my eyes, I made as if I shook out the old priming as I walked. Yet I did not so, but spread priming powder only on the cover of the pan, blew up my match, and passed my two fingers over the pan, as is the custom, and before I could see the white of the eye of my opponent, who kept me well in sight, I took aim and set fire to the false priming powder in the cover of the pan. Then the enemy, believing that my musket had missed fire and that the touch-hole was stopped, rode straight down upon me, pistol in hand, and all too anxious to pay me there and then for my presumption, but before he was aware I had the pan open and shut again, and gave him such a welcome that ball and fall came together.
I added this one to my 17th century reading list for completeness: You may have noticed I've been real short on prose fiction, and on anything that wasn't French or English. The Durants praised the Simplicissimus as "the most famous book to come out of Germany between Luther and Lessing" (they apparently count Leibniz as French, since he did most of his writing after relocating to Paris; if so, that makes Simplicissimus the only German work of the century that I read.
Which makes it worthwhile, even for the flaws. The book reminded me of Rabelais, if instead of having been translated by the wonderful Jacques LeClercq, it had been translated by a heavy-handed Teutonic scholar whose sense of "humor" ran to the didactic.
It's really one long folktale with a peasant everyman narrator, torn from his family by war, who becomes in turn, a forest hermit, a huntsman, a philosopher, a conscripted soldier, a court fool, a thief, a woman, a ghost, a rich merchant, and back to being a peasant and hermit. He has encounters with everyone from big fat mean overlords to the Devil to people in all walks of life who make detached conversation about life with him.
See various 20th century books (The Good Soldier Schweik comes to mind, as does most of Brecht) written among the world wars for more of the stoic central European approach to coping in war time. This was written about and during the Thirty Years War, and it shows. When the guns are going off, you take an air of detached bemusement, and/or probably get killed.
The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien
"It is true," he said, "that you cannot commit a crime and that the right arm of the law cannot lay its finger on you irrespective of the degree of your criminality. Anything you do is a lie and nothing that happens to you is true."
I nodded my agreement comfortably.
"For that reason alone," said the Sergeant, "we can take you and hang the life out of you and you are not hanged at all and there is no entry to be made in the death papers. The particular death you die is not even a death (which is an inferior phenomenon at the best) only an insanitary abstraction in the backyard, a piece of negative nullity neutralised and rendered void by asphyxiation and the fracture of the spinal string. If it is not a lie to say that you have been given the final hammer behind the barrack, equally is it true to say that nothing has happened to you.
"You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"
"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.
If Simplicius Simplicissicum was typical "German" surrealism, then The Third Policeman is typical Irish surrealism, reminiscent of Beckett and Joyce, with a touch of whimsy, a lot of philosophical musings that read better through a whiskey bottle, and a groaner of a plot device that has been way overused since O'Brien's day, but which might not have been all that predictable then.
The unreliable narrator is a rural Irishman who obsessively studies the fictional philosopher De Selby, with existential quotes and commentary upon the meaning of existence pepper the book and slow it down considerably. He participates in a murder, loses his ill-gotten gains, and after an encounter with the ghost of his victim, decides to enlist the help of the police to get the money back.
By this time, things have slipped into the Irish Twilight Zone. The station and the officers within, and their dialogue, are straight out of Beckett and Joyce, and maybe Kafka. They quote De Selby at him, decide to hang him for something they don't care whether he did or not, but don't want to lock him in a cell in the meantime because that's where they keep their bicycle (remember the bicycle. It's at least as important as the red suspenders in the Kipling story. In fact, you won't be able to forget the bicycle. The policemen won't stop talking about it). Their station is full of magical crazy places and objects. Weird things happen with time. You can decide for yourself whether the narrator is on drugs, insane, dead and in existential Hell, or just putting the reader on.
It's a better read than I've found in Beckett, Joyce and Kafka (your mileage may vary), but you have to at least admire their styles to like O'Brien.
A Letter Concerning Toleration, by John Locke
Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides, also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.
John Locke is the last of the "Great" writers for me to study this year, and I've begun with a short essay that serves mainly to illustrate what a horrible time the 17th Century was, even given that most of European history predating it was even worse, that such a nasty piece of writing is held up as a landmark of advocacy for freedom from oppression. I mean, he only declares open season on atheists, who don't really count. For the REST of the world (by which he means Christendom. Of course), he offers an impassioned plea that it makes no sense for Church "law" to be enforceable by civil magistrates. Why, that would be thoughtcrime! Church authority should be limited to giving sanctions against those who are members of the church and will accept them voluntarily, while those who refuse to abide by that church's law may be excluded from said church.
What an imposition it would be on decent society, were a magistrate to impose his private religious doctrine on the civil law as applied to the general public--except for atheists; all magistrates should condemn them out of hand for their sincerely held beliefs or lack thereof.
The fact that Locke wants *other* kinds of people to have certain freedoms as a matter of natural law serves only to make his bigotry--again, considered a major step UP in thought compared to what most others of the day were saying--all the more pronounced. What would we say to a "wonderful" Prince of Peace advocate who urged ALL people, regardless of their religion--Catholics, Evangelicals, Muslims, Hindus, Shintoists--to put aside their differences and live as one in perfect peace, hating the Jews TOGETHER? What would you expect a Jew, in particular, to think of such an approach to holistic, one-world tolerance of everybody but themselves? Such is my reaction to Locke and his so-called "toleration" that insists that only people who are restrained from evil solely by the belief that they are being watched by someone bigger than them are worthy of trust in anything at all.
Fuck you, Locke. Fuck you very much.
The Body in the Thames, by Susanna Gregory; The Snow Empress, by Laura Joh Rowland; The Malevolent comedy; The Princess of Denmark, by Edward Marston
The riders were youths in their late teens, led by one who wore deer antlera on his helmet. Sano supposed they were Matsumae soldiers, they'd found the wrecked ship on the beach, and they'd come looking for survivors. The riders steered their sleds up to Sano's party and reined in their dogs, who halted and panted, muzzles dripping icicles, teeth sharp.
"There's too many of them to take back to the castle and execute," Deer Antlers said as he and his comrades jumped off their sleds. "Let's kill them here."
--from The Snow Empress
"What a revolting creature!" she declared. "He has no place in a genteel gathering like this."
"The King likes him and it is unwise to make an enemy of such a man. You should not have--"
"He was my enemy long before I put him in his place. First, because he was nasty to you. And second because he is a lecher. No decent woman should give him the time of day, and I am not having MY reputation sullied by simpering at him."
Chaloner experienced a surge of affection as he looked down at her determinedly jutting chin and flashing eyes. Her fierce opinions were one of the reasons why he had married her.
--from The Body in the Thames
Bridger was supposed to sway for a few moments before falling gently to the floor. Instead, he let out a cry of agony, flung away the cup, and grasped at his stomach with both hands. When he keeled over, he went into a violent paroxysm, arching and kicking with such uncontrollable force that he knocked over the table, spilling its contents across the stage. The audience roared with mirth, thinking it was part of the play that had been carefully rehearsed.
Nicholas Bracewell was not fooled. Watching with dismay from behind the scenes, he knew that Hal Bridger was in real pain. No compassion was shown by the throng. The greater his convulsions, the more the spectators laughed. When he kicked over a chair and sent it cartwheeling from the stage, there was a round of applause for him. But the hapless servant was no longer playing a part. He was, literally, dying before their eyes.
---from The Malevolent Comedy
"Read out the list, George," said the bookholder, handing him a scroll. "I'll try to find the things we need."
Dart unrolled the paper. "Item: one pope's miter, one imperial crown, one throne."
"The throne is far too heavy. If we play in a castle, I'm sure that we can borrow a high-backed chair that will serve our purposes."
"They may also furnish us with a crown."
"That would be too much to ask. It would be impertinent of us to ask King Christian to abdicate for a couple of hours so that we could make use of his crown."
--from The Princess of Denmark
Rowland's The Snow Empress brings Laura Joh Rowland's husband and wife team of Sano and Reiko to the north island of Japan, where the local lord is being haunted by the ghost of his murdered concubine. The story illustrates mystical kung fu powers, the culture clash between the Japanese and the indigenous people of the island; and the principle that one is safer taunting a cobra than threatening a mother's child.
Gregory's The Body in the Thames is yet another complicated Restoration piece with a 15-corpse body count and many characters who really existed. The scene is the (doomed to be unsuccessful) Dutch peace treaty negotiations of 1664, and involves a mix of blackmail, stolen documents, espionage (with Chaloner unfairly accused of spying for both the Dutch and the English), a plot to steal the Crown Jewels, a dark curse, and of course, murder and more murder, and so many plots to kill Chaloner that I imagine him sighing and rolling his eyes as he prepares to once again flee down seedy alleys and over walls, pursued by the usual dozen ugly hirelings.
Finally, I say goodbye this month to Lord Westfield's Men--the larger-than-life actor manager Laurence Firethorne; the pedophilic asshole who somehow becomes a comic delight on stage Barnaby Gill; the perpetually lovelorn playwright Edmund Hoode; the stouthearted Welshman Owen Elias; the always-trembling low player George Dart; and the glue that holds them all together--stage-manager/bookholder Nicholas Bracewell. They've grown on me over the course of the year--even Gill, and even their recurring foils Marwood the mean innkeeper and Randolph the unscrupulous head of the rival theater company. Edward Marston is still alive and writing, and there may be more Westfield's Men stories later on, but The Malevolent Comedy--which tells of a play beset with more disasters than "that Scottish play", and which demonstrates that new playwrights are Westfield's Men's equivalent of Defense Against the Dark Arts masters at Hogwarts--and The Princess of Denmark, where anti-Dutch hostilities, a theater patron burned to death in a fire, a sea attack by pirates and political intrigue in Denmark all combine into an intricate plot, are the last for now, and both highly recommended.
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolome de las Casas
TRIGGER WARNINGS for horrific genocidal slaughter, baby-killing, etc.
The Christians would smite them with their hands and strike them with their fists and beat them with sticks and cudgels, until they finally laid hands upon the lords of the villages. And this practice came to such temerity and shamelessness that a Christian captain did violate the wife of the greatest king, lord of all the island, and at that, the Christians with their horses and swords and pikes and lances began to wreak slaughters and singular cruelties upon them...they would enter into the villages and spare not children, or old people, or pregnant women, or women with suckling babes, but would open the woman's belly and hack the babe to pieces, as though they were butchering lambs shut up in the pen. They would lay wagers who might slice open the belly of a man with one stroke of the blade, or cut off a man's head with one swift blow of the pike, or spill out his entrails. They would snatch babes from their mothers' breasts and take them by their feet and dash their heads against the rocks. Others would fling them over their shoulders into the rivers, laughing and jeering, and as they fell into the water, they would call out, "Thrash, you little bugger!" Other babes, they would run their swords through mother and child at once, and all that they came across. They would erect long gibbets, but no higher than that a man's feet might dangle just above the ground, and bind thirteen of the Indians at one time, in honour and reverence, they said, of Our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, and put firewood around it and burn the Indians alive.
De las Casas wrote what may be the first book to come out of the Americas by someone whose people came there from Europe, and it is a short but thoroughly nasty chronicle of Spanish cruelty to the indigenous rivaling the Inquisition, the Killing Fields, the gulag, and even the Nazi Holocaust.
U.S. Slavery? Amateurs. Heck, the reason Europeans had to go to the trouble and expense of transporting Africans all across the ocean to be slaves in the first place, is because the Spanish Christians had pretty much WIPED OUT most or all of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean in just a few generations after Columbus. According to de las Casas, they just put the Injuns into the fields and made them work without food or sleep, getting maybe 36 straight hours of labor out of a body before it keeled over and died and was composted and they brought in the next one. The English younger sons who set up their Privileged Mens' Paradises in the Carolinas and Georgia only *aspired* to that kind of wholesale cruelty and genocide.
De las Casas was a different kind of Christian, a bishop who evidently thought Christ's message of humility and kindness was to be taken seriously, and wrote The Destruction of the Indies apparently in the hopes of telling the Pope what was being done in His name. Various appendixes include Codes of Law for the assorted islands, all claiming to take indigenous lives very seriously (as seriously as customer service repeatedly assures you they consider your call while you're on hold) and declaring it illegal to do the things they were massively doing. There is no indication of any response from Rome, and so I can only surmise that His Holiness was assured by the existence of the legal codes that such atrocities could not possibly be committed by Christians, or that the Pope just ordered de las Casas to shut up and not rock the boat.
discounting introductions and appendices, the actual text is thankfully under 100 pages, but every page is as gruesome as any of Elie Wiesel's memoirs, and is necessary reading as a reminder of the horrors ordinary people are capable of when told that God is on their side and that their victims aren't really people who count.
Chaffs, by Douglas P. Lathrop
We filled the AV room, hooting and hollering and throwing garbage at the screen--at old footage from before the Awakening, of those parades the homosexuals used to have. Ugly, buzz-cut women on motorcycles, wearing filthy leather jackets that hung open to show off their saggy and wrinkled boobs. Goblinlike man-creatures in feathers and glitter and make-up, humping and tongue-kissing in the middle of the street.
Pride Parades, they were called. Pride in what? Being freaks of nature?
Later on, in Race Hygiene class and at Rooster and Dawn Patrol meetings, there were more videos, lectures, more horror stories from the old days. About the smut shops, the man-boy sex clubs, the perverts hunting kids in public parks, the bars with torture chambers in the basement, the drugs, the diseases--and then, at last, the quarantines, the lockdowns that Our Commander In Chief ordered on whole cities when he took power fifteen years ago, shutting down the bars, cleaning up whole neighborhoods, shipping the homosexuals where they could no longer infect us.
Nowadays we caught them much earlier. If we got to them while they were still young, some of them could even be welcomed back into the embrace of the Nation. That was what the Reorientation Centers were for.
Still, not all of them could be reoriented. And then there were those who slipped the net, who went underground. Them, we dealt with ruthlessly. Because sometimes an infection grew so severe that you couldn't just treat it--you had to cut it out.
Doug Lathrop's last novel looks like a typical dystopian future YA book, the kind that is showing up in droves these days. So how come I found Chaffs to be so much scarier, gripping, and compelling than the others?
Maybe because it's a lot closer to the here and now, and seems a lot closer to something that could really happen here, in a world where--as I am reading the book-- Donald Trump is a major contender for President of the United States. Instead of fantasy names like Oceania and Panem and The Glade, we have the United States of America. Instead of Divergence factions and maze running and hunger game ceremonies, we're 15 years after a nuclear strike on New York propels a Tea Party President into office who establishes the standard dictatorial powers, secret police, jack-booted thugs, mass arrests and disappearings, militaristic youth groups, and agendas emphasizing racial purity, xenophobia and eugenics. The gays, political dissidents, Jews and Mexicans are sent to "reorientation camps" (presumably to teach them the error of their ways so they will stop being so gay, dissident, Jewish, or Mexican), while they just outright killed all the African-Americans and told everyone (no one dares contradict them) that they got sent back to luxurious Africa with your tax dollars).
There is also a whole new category of bare-belly Sneetches to oppress. A "Chaff" is someone whose parents were BOTH disappeared in the initial purgings. A chaff is brought up in a foster orphanage, is marked for bullying by other students in school, and is usually disappeared at the age of 18. Chaffs tend to be nihilistic punky kids on skateboards who give no fucks because what's the point.
Lathrop could have made this the story of a chaff-warrior. Instead, the narration is given to the most alpha of the alpha students: A big, handsome, popular superstar jock and member of the "Dawn Patrol" (paramilitary hall monitors) with rich alpha parents and a rich, racially pure alpha girlfriend... and none of his privileges will save him if the school "morality officer" takes an arbitrary dislike to him....or if they realize he's becoming interested in boys. Once the New Order declares you impure, EVERYBODY will turn on you, and if you disappear, pretend you never existed. Because it could be them next.
Very high recommendations.
Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany
"That one on the left is more subtle. It explodes with enough force to demolish a good sized building, but the bomb casing itself is hidden and unhurt under the rubble. Six hours later it explodes again and does the damage of a fair sized atomic bomb. This leaves the victims enough time to concentrate their reclamation forces, all sorts of reconstruction workers, Red Cross nurses or whatever the invaders call them, lots of experts determining the size of the damage. Then, poof. A delayed hydrogen explosion, and a good thirty or forty mile crater. It doesn't do as much physical damage as even the smallest of these others, but it gets rid of a lot of equipment and busybody do-gooders. Still, a schoolboy's weapon. I keep them in my own personal collection just to show them we have standard fare."
This is another selection from the TK Bradford "Other than white male hetero authors" list, and one of the best things I've read from it so far. Because of the plot twists, I can't say all that much about it without risking spoilers, so I'll just summarize it as a space adventure with alien invaders, military and political intrigue, and at the same time a profound philosophical statement about language and how we communicate and the effect that the language itself may have on the way we think. Highest recommendations.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts
What stopped Obama from seizing his historical moment to stabilize the economy and the climate at the same time was not lack of resources, or a lack of power. He had plenty of both. What stopped him was the invisible confinement of a powerful ideology that had convinced him--as it has convinced virtually all of his political counterparts--that there is something wrong with telling large corporations how to run their businesses even when they are running them into the ground, and that there is something sinister, even vaguely communist, about having a plan to build the kind of economy we need, even in the face of an existential crisis.
This is the single most depressing book I've read all year, but I finished it because it's stuff we can't just turn away from.
The thumbnail summary is: Climate change is worse than we thought, and becoming irreversible faster, and the only way anything is going to change is if fossil fuel extractors and other polluting industries decide that they're not interested in profits any more, or if the government and/or the public makes them stop.
We are SOOOO fucked. Industry won't stop because they're run by sociopaths who are old enough that they can expect to die before shit gets so real that they can't hide from it. Government won't do anything, because they are bought and paid for by industry (which is why, e.g., Rep. Joe Barton, elected from a state whose coast was hit by the BP oil spill, decided to use his committee hearing time to offer grief counseling to the poor unlucky BP executive who had lost so much profitable oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and apologized because ThoseDamnEnvironmentalists were giving him a hard time in his hour of grief). The public doesn't want to believe it because they believe they can't do anything about it, or they don't want to give up their consumerism while watching the rich bear no sacrifice at all, or because climate change is a partisan issue and the marching morons feel it their patriotic duty to vehemently oppose anything environmental, even as their own children have birth defects and their own habitat is infested with new storms, new drought, new fracking, new fires and new spills.
In fact, as the crisis increasingly requires desperate change, industry is doubling down on even worse extraction operations involving tar sands and fracking; Government is busily making it HARDER for any country's government to act--for example, by trade agreements allowing countries to sue to prevent environmental regulation or subsidies to green industry. And the public is punching scientists and paying extra to make their pickup trucks "roll coal" just to piss off the environmentalists.
Environmental advocate groups are failing to do their job; they act like pathetic little Neville Chamberlains who take donations and then lobby for cap-and-trade emissions laws and other insufficient economic incentives and attempts at compromise that industry just laughs at. The "green billionaires" focus on public relations stunts and act on the Panglossian assumptions that technology will find a way to rescue us because it will be necessary.
Klein's proposed solution--the thing standing between us and death--is direct action. Earth First! and indigenous nations and publicity stunts and lawsuits to force the government, kicking and screaming, to enforce its own laws. Which worked so well in the late 80s that of course we should have faith in it now.
Part of my soul died reading this book. It brought me back to the days in high school when many of my generation, me included, descended into nihilism and religion because what was the use? Everyone knew that we had no future, because Reagan and the Soviets were certain to have a world-ending nuclear war long before we ever had years beginning with a two. I vividly remember the end of the cold war and the wonderful, beautiful feeling that my terminal cancer diagnosis had been wrong! How wonderful, how alive I felt, how full of hope for a rich and full life after all.
Now, it's like having cancer all over again.
And that's my reaction, as an environmentalist. I just shut down in the face of so much gloom and doom. Now imagine the reaction of some average reader who doesn't accept the premises right away, and who is in fact looking for excuses to dispute and deny it.
We're fucked. All of us.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Hither comes Major Tolhurst, one of my old acquaintances in Cromwell's time and sometimes of our club, to see me, and I could do no less than carry him to the Miter; and thither having sent for Mr. Beane, a merchant, a neighbour of mine, we sat and talk--Tolhurst telling me the manner of their Collierys in the North. We broke up, and I home to dinner.
And to see my folly, as discontented as I am, when my wife came I could not forbear smiling all dinner, till she began to speak bad words again; and then I begun to be angry again. I went to my wife and agreed upon matters, and at last for my honour am forced to make her presently a new Moyre gown to be seen by Mrs. Clerke; which troubles me to part with so much money, but however it sets my wife and I to friends again, though I and she never were so heartily angry in our lives as today almost, and I doubt the heart-burning will not soon over. And the truth is, I am sorry for the tearing of so many poor loving letters of mine from Sea and elsewhere to her.
So to my office again, and there the Scrivener brought me the end of the Manuscript which I am going to get together of things of the Navy--which pleases me much. So home--mighty friends with my wife again, and so to bed.
Thus ends yet another mighty literary undertaking of mine for the year. Ever since they rang in the new year, I've read a couple of months from the ten-volume diary every weekend, one of the ten years covered in it each month.
Pepys was a minor official in the part of the British Naval Office in charge of victualling warships at the time of the diary--becoming much more politically important in the years after the diary. He was also something of an asshole who brown-nosed like Uriah Heep, committed domestic violence against his wife, beat the servants, and committed adultery in his own home, and whose primary virtue, as far as the diary goes, was to paint himself honestly, "warts and all", without excuses (except that he encodes in Latin terms the physical details of his sexual exploits) in his private journal. He is also cultured, and has plenty of what might otherwise be delightful conversational insights about plays, books, food and drink, current events, and the navy--but when a man is abusing his privilege and his family, a part of me stops giving a ripe turd what he has to say about Webster's revenge tragedies or the need for better sewage along the Fleet.
The best part of the diary--the part that kept me going--is the rich and vivid panorama of life in 17th Century London--at least, for the economically privileged. The streets, the buildings, the coaches, the river, the docks, the ships, Whitehall, the playhouses and taverns and wenches and bookdealers, and a few great moments in history. The diary encompasses the end of the Commonwealth and the coronation of Charles II--with all of the attendant reversals of fortune and revivals of strife between Anglicans, Puritans and Catholics. There is war with the Dutch, including a famous incident when the Dutch fleet sailed right up the Thames and torched a sizeable part of the English fleet at dockside--one of the last serious plague outbreaks in London; and the Great Fire.
It's easy to read, if you can stand the stench of corruption wafting from the river, the King's court, the Naval office, and Pepys. I learned that there is a "Samuel Pepys Society" similar to the clubs obsessed with Jeremy Bentham and the Sherlock Holmes canon, that apparently loves Pepys and his world enough to play dress-up and have banquets and offer money prizes for contributions to Pepys scholarship, PR and cultural enrichment. Different roasts for different hosts.
Samuel Pepys, a Life, by Stephen Coote
As an expression of Pepys' mind the library is also the image of the man. Naturally its contents are as comprehensive as its owner's interests while its rigorous cataloguing shows that love of order so wholly characteristic of Pepys. One particular detail demonstrates this especially---the books, which are catalogued by number rather than by subject, are ranged in the lovely presses by size, little leather covered blocks raising slightly smaller ones to the height of their neighbours. Those on the highest levels, Pepys had to reach down with the help of a stool.
This one happened to be in my local library next to the multiple volumes of the diary, and I read it to see what happened after 1669. The diary itself took up only a decade, and predated the most influential part of his career at the Admiralty.
Most of the book is about the Diary years, since it is from the diary that the bulk of his biography can be found. Interestingly, either Pepys changed markedly once he stopped writing, or he put up such a good front that no one suspected what a douchetweazle he was. Could be the first--not only did Pepys believe he was going blind, but his wife died within months of the diary's end, leaving him devastated at the loss of someone he had treated so poorly, but whom he ultimately loved. Either life-change can alter a person's personality. Pepys attended fewer plays and had less of a home life, and thrust himself completely into the Naval Office, becoming a member of Parliament and making and confounding enemies all over Whitehall, becoming known for thoroughness, loyalty and dignity, and the most knowledgeable person in Britain about the navy.
Pepys' new sense of loyalty took him down. He set aside his dislike of Catholicism and James II in particular to stand by the unpopular king until the bitter end, solely out of a sense of duty to the crown, retiring from public life rather than continue under William III. The moral of the story is that people can change.
Monadology, by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Every present state of a simple substance (or, monad) is a natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future. Therefore, since on awakening after a period of unconsciousness we become conscious of our perceptions, we must, without having been conscious of them, have had perceptions immediately before; for one perception can come in a natural way only from another perception, just as a motion can come in a natural way only from a motion.
This one is probably Leibniz's most famous work, probably because it is the shortest, at just 25 pages. Good thing, too. I read the whole word salad three times, trying to figure it out, and probably failed.
Maybe it's the translation.
Monads are defined as "simple substances", which seem to alternately mean "atoms", because they're the smallest possible things, or "something that is similar throughout itself", like a large mass of clay or identical grains of sand, because every monad is a unique and beautiful snowflake that is different from all other monads and has the ability to change (which the smallest possible thing would not). As usual, Leibniz begins by defining as axiomatic the perfection of all things, because God, and passing from that to assertions that logically follow if all things are perfect, but which are pointless if you do not grant the axioms in the first place.
And then Leibniz pretty much stops talking about monads altogether, and instead spews more word salad about the capacity of man to know anything, thereby raising the question why he bothered with the monads in the first place.
Seems to me the main attraction of a philosophical system is that it might be true (see, e.g., Plato and Aristotle from my 2011 Bookposts, or Montaigne from 2014), followed by entertainment value, even if you don't believe it (say, Berkley or Nietzche), followed by the challenge of disproving someone you dislike who seems convincing (Machiavelli, Hobbes). Leibniz seems to offer NONE of these attractions, and you have to hunker down and strain just to figure out what he's trying to say in the first place. But at least this one is short.
Ethics, by Benedict De Spinoza
I f a man sees that he is too keen in the pursuit of honour, let him think over its right use, the end for which it should be pursued, and the means whereby he may attain it. Let him not think of its misuse, and its emptiness, and the fickleness of mankind, and the like, whereof no man thinks except through a morbidness of disposition; with thoughts like these do the most ambitious most torment themselves, when they despair of gaining the distinctions they hanker after, and in thus giving vent to their anger would fain appear wise. Wherefore it is certain that those, who cry out the loudest against the misuse of honour and the vanity of the world, are those who most greedily covet it. This is not peculiar to the ambitious, but is common to all who are ill-used by fortune, and who are infirm in spirit. For a poor man also, who is miserly, will talk incessantly of the misuse of wealth and of the vices of the rich; whereby he merely torments himself, and shows the world that he is intolerant, not only of his own poverty, but also of other people's riches. So, again, those who have been ill received by a woman they love think of nothing but the inconstancy, treachery, and other stock faults of the fair sex; all of which they consign to oblivion, directly they are again taken into favour by their sweetheart. Thus he who would govern his emotions and appetite solely by the love of freedom strives, as far as he can, to gain a knowledge of the virtues and their causes, and to fill his spirit with the joy which arises from the true knowledge of them: he will in no wise desire to dwell on men's faults, or to carp at his fellows, or to revel in a false show of freedom. Whosoever will diligently observe and practice these precepts (which indeed are not difficult) will verily, in a short space of time, be able, for the most part, to direct his actions according to the commandments of reason.
Spinioza's most famous work is nominally short, but requires some pretty deep study to understand. I've been poring slowly through the Ethics since the beginning of July. Spinoza writes, at least at first, in the style of Euclid, starting with axioms and attempting to prove theorems therefrom by logical analysis. Unfortunately, since one o his first axioms is assuming the existence of God (defined initially as a nonsectarian synthesis of everything that exists in the cosmos, but soon shifted to at least imply a higher consciousness), I did not find the proofs exactly geometrically unassailable. Further, because of this approach, Spinoza's first three sections consist of pretty dense forays into metaphysics, epistemology and psychology, before he actually gets into the good stuff about ethics and right behavior. These things are necessary to reach the conclusion that Spinoza's philosophy is completely proven to be true, but if you don't start with his axioms accepted as given, it does not work regardless.
The ultimate conclusion is a pretty simple one that humans are enslaved to emotional passions and that ethics consists in learning to subdue one's passions. I'll go with that. Seems to me, the main difference between the mature and the immature soul is the ability to (1) recognize one's emotions--such as feelings of sexual attraction to an unsuitable person, and to (2) put those emotions to one side when appropriate, as in making the choice not to act on one's inappropriate sexual feelings.
The Durants have made the interesting observation that ethical philosophy is divided into seemingly incompatible camps---there are those (Christ, Gandhi) who teach that LOVE is the highest good, and urge meek submission to evil; those (Machiavelli, Nietzche) who teach that POWER is the highest good, and urge macho domination; and those (Socrates, Aristotle) who teach that WISDOM is the highest good, and urge reasoned discourse and understanding--and that only Spinoza seems to have found a way to unite them. Instead of dominating others, the will to power is satisfied by dominating one's passions and developing a healthy strength of purpose that cannot be shaken by emotional turbulence, and without which happiness and love of self and others cannot be fully developed. Again, I can go with this.
I tend to go with the "I know it when I see it" theory of human goodness. There's about half a dozen people I've been favored to know who consistently impress me with what I call "strength of soul", and if you're one of them reading this, I have told you who you are, frequently. Seems to me, I may have been calling Spinozean ethics "strength of soul" the whole time. Mastery over emotion so as to be able to act with integrity (faithfulness to the ideals one has claimed for oneself) in moments of decision. Could we do this at all times, would we not be the strongest people there are?
Spinoza was considered a living saint by many while he lived, and was of course therefore persecuted mercilessly by Christians and Jews alike. I think i would have liked to know him.
Simplicius Simplicissimus, by Hans Jacob Christoph Von Grimmelshausen
Now as I entered the stricken field at my appointed end with my match alight at both ends, and saw my adversary before my eyes, I made as if I shook out the old priming as I walked. Yet I did not so, but spread priming powder only on the cover of the pan, blew up my match, and passed my two fingers over the pan, as is the custom, and before I could see the white of the eye of my opponent, who kept me well in sight, I took aim and set fire to the false priming powder in the cover of the pan. Then the enemy, believing that my musket had missed fire and that the touch-hole was stopped, rode straight down upon me, pistol in hand, and all too anxious to pay me there and then for my presumption, but before he was aware I had the pan open and shut again, and gave him such a welcome that ball and fall came together.
I added this one to my 17th century reading list for completeness: You may have noticed I've been real short on prose fiction, and on anything that wasn't French or English. The Durants praised the Simplicissimus as "the most famous book to come out of Germany between Luther and Lessing" (they apparently count Leibniz as French, since he did most of his writing after relocating to Paris; if so, that makes Simplicissimus the only German work of the century that I read.
Which makes it worthwhile, even for the flaws. The book reminded me of Rabelais, if instead of having been translated by the wonderful Jacques LeClercq, it had been translated by a heavy-handed Teutonic scholar whose sense of "humor" ran to the didactic.
It's really one long folktale with a peasant everyman narrator, torn from his family by war, who becomes in turn, a forest hermit, a huntsman, a philosopher, a conscripted soldier, a court fool, a thief, a woman, a ghost, a rich merchant, and back to being a peasant and hermit. He has encounters with everyone from big fat mean overlords to the Devil to people in all walks of life who make detached conversation about life with him.
See various 20th century books (The Good Soldier Schweik comes to mind, as does most of Brecht) written among the world wars for more of the stoic central European approach to coping in war time. This was written about and during the Thirty Years War, and it shows. When the guns are going off, you take an air of detached bemusement, and/or probably get killed.
The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien
"It is true," he said, "that you cannot commit a crime and that the right arm of the law cannot lay its finger on you irrespective of the degree of your criminality. Anything you do is a lie and nothing that happens to you is true."
I nodded my agreement comfortably.
"For that reason alone," said the Sergeant, "we can take you and hang the life out of you and you are not hanged at all and there is no entry to be made in the death papers. The particular death you die is not even a death (which is an inferior phenomenon at the best) only an insanitary abstraction in the backyard, a piece of negative nullity neutralised and rendered void by asphyxiation and the fracture of the spinal string. If it is not a lie to say that you have been given the final hammer behind the barrack, equally is it true to say that nothing has happened to you.
"You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"
"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.
If Simplicius Simplicissicum was typical "German" surrealism, then The Third Policeman is typical Irish surrealism, reminiscent of Beckett and Joyce, with a touch of whimsy, a lot of philosophical musings that read better through a whiskey bottle, and a groaner of a plot device that has been way overused since O'Brien's day, but which might not have been all that predictable then.
The unreliable narrator is a rural Irishman who obsessively studies the fictional philosopher De Selby, with existential quotes and commentary upon the meaning of existence pepper the book and slow it down considerably. He participates in a murder, loses his ill-gotten gains, and after an encounter with the ghost of his victim, decides to enlist the help of the police to get the money back.
By this time, things have slipped into the Irish Twilight Zone. The station and the officers within, and their dialogue, are straight out of Beckett and Joyce, and maybe Kafka. They quote De Selby at him, decide to hang him for something they don't care whether he did or not, but don't want to lock him in a cell in the meantime because that's where they keep their bicycle (remember the bicycle. It's at least as important as the red suspenders in the Kipling story. In fact, you won't be able to forget the bicycle. The policemen won't stop talking about it). Their station is full of magical crazy places and objects. Weird things happen with time. You can decide for yourself whether the narrator is on drugs, insane, dead and in existential Hell, or just putting the reader on.
It's a better read than I've found in Beckett, Joyce and Kafka (your mileage may vary), but you have to at least admire their styles to like O'Brien.
A Letter Concerning Toleration, by John Locke
Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides, also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.
John Locke is the last of the "Great" writers for me to study this year, and I've begun with a short essay that serves mainly to illustrate what a horrible time the 17th Century was, even given that most of European history predating it was even worse, that such a nasty piece of writing is held up as a landmark of advocacy for freedom from oppression. I mean, he only declares open season on atheists, who don't really count. For the REST of the world (by which he means Christendom. Of course), he offers an impassioned plea that it makes no sense for Church "law" to be enforceable by civil magistrates. Why, that would be thoughtcrime! Church authority should be limited to giving sanctions against those who are members of the church and will accept them voluntarily, while those who refuse to abide by that church's law may be excluded from said church.
What an imposition it would be on decent society, were a magistrate to impose his private religious doctrine on the civil law as applied to the general public--except for atheists; all magistrates should condemn them out of hand for their sincerely held beliefs or lack thereof.
The fact that Locke wants *other* kinds of people to have certain freedoms as a matter of natural law serves only to make his bigotry--again, considered a major step UP in thought compared to what most others of the day were saying--all the more pronounced. What would we say to a "wonderful" Prince of Peace advocate who urged ALL people, regardless of their religion--Catholics, Evangelicals, Muslims, Hindus, Shintoists--to put aside their differences and live as one in perfect peace, hating the Jews TOGETHER? What would you expect a Jew, in particular, to think of such an approach to holistic, one-world tolerance of everybody but themselves? Such is my reaction to Locke and his so-called "toleration" that insists that only people who are restrained from evil solely by the belief that they are being watched by someone bigger than them are worthy of trust in anything at all.
Fuck you, Locke. Fuck you very much.
The Body in the Thames, by Susanna Gregory; The Snow Empress, by Laura Joh Rowland; The Malevolent comedy; The Princess of Denmark, by Edward Marston
The riders were youths in their late teens, led by one who wore deer antlera on his helmet. Sano supposed they were Matsumae soldiers, they'd found the wrecked ship on the beach, and they'd come looking for survivors. The riders steered their sleds up to Sano's party and reined in their dogs, who halted and panted, muzzles dripping icicles, teeth sharp.
"There's too many of them to take back to the castle and execute," Deer Antlers said as he and his comrades jumped off their sleds. "Let's kill them here."
--from The Snow Empress
"What a revolting creature!" she declared. "He has no place in a genteel gathering like this."
"The King likes him and it is unwise to make an enemy of such a man. You should not have--"
"He was my enemy long before I put him in his place. First, because he was nasty to you. And second because he is a lecher. No decent woman should give him the time of day, and I am not having MY reputation sullied by simpering at him."
Chaloner experienced a surge of affection as he looked down at her determinedly jutting chin and flashing eyes. Her fierce opinions were one of the reasons why he had married her.
--from The Body in the Thames
Bridger was supposed to sway for a few moments before falling gently to the floor. Instead, he let out a cry of agony, flung away the cup, and grasped at his stomach with both hands. When he keeled over, he went into a violent paroxysm, arching and kicking with such uncontrollable force that he knocked over the table, spilling its contents across the stage. The audience roared with mirth, thinking it was part of the play that had been carefully rehearsed.
Nicholas Bracewell was not fooled. Watching with dismay from behind the scenes, he knew that Hal Bridger was in real pain. No compassion was shown by the throng. The greater his convulsions, the more the spectators laughed. When he kicked over a chair and sent it cartwheeling from the stage, there was a round of applause for him. But the hapless servant was no longer playing a part. He was, literally, dying before their eyes.
---from The Malevolent Comedy
"Read out the list, George," said the bookholder, handing him a scroll. "I'll try to find the things we need."
Dart unrolled the paper. "Item: one pope's miter, one imperial crown, one throne."
"The throne is far too heavy. If we play in a castle, I'm sure that we can borrow a high-backed chair that will serve our purposes."
"They may also furnish us with a crown."
"That would be too much to ask. It would be impertinent of us to ask King Christian to abdicate for a couple of hours so that we could make use of his crown."
--from The Princess of Denmark
Rowland's The Snow Empress brings Laura Joh Rowland's husband and wife team of Sano and Reiko to the north island of Japan, where the local lord is being haunted by the ghost of his murdered concubine. The story illustrates mystical kung fu powers, the culture clash between the Japanese and the indigenous people of the island; and the principle that one is safer taunting a cobra than threatening a mother's child.
Gregory's The Body in the Thames is yet another complicated Restoration piece with a 15-corpse body count and many characters who really existed. The scene is the (doomed to be unsuccessful) Dutch peace treaty negotiations of 1664, and involves a mix of blackmail, stolen documents, espionage (with Chaloner unfairly accused of spying for both the Dutch and the English), a plot to steal the Crown Jewels, a dark curse, and of course, murder and more murder, and so many plots to kill Chaloner that I imagine him sighing and rolling his eyes as he prepares to once again flee down seedy alleys and over walls, pursued by the usual dozen ugly hirelings.
Finally, I say goodbye this month to Lord Westfield's Men--the larger-than-life actor manager Laurence Firethorne; the pedophilic asshole who somehow becomes a comic delight on stage Barnaby Gill; the perpetually lovelorn playwright Edmund Hoode; the stouthearted Welshman Owen Elias; the always-trembling low player George Dart; and the glue that holds them all together--stage-manager/bookholder Nicholas Bracewell. They've grown on me over the course of the year--even Gill, and even their recurring foils Marwood the mean innkeeper and Randolph the unscrupulous head of the rival theater company. Edward Marston is still alive and writing, and there may be more Westfield's Men stories later on, but The Malevolent Comedy--which tells of a play beset with more disasters than "that Scottish play", and which demonstrates that new playwrights are Westfield's Men's equivalent of Defense Against the Dark Arts masters at Hogwarts--and The Princess of Denmark, where anti-Dutch hostilities, a theater patron burned to death in a fire, a sea attack by pirates and political intrigue in Denmark all combine into an intricate plot, are the last for now, and both highly recommended.
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolome de las Casas
TRIGGER WARNINGS for horrific genocidal slaughter, baby-killing, etc.
The Christians would smite them with their hands and strike them with their fists and beat them with sticks and cudgels, until they finally laid hands upon the lords of the villages. And this practice came to such temerity and shamelessness that a Christian captain did violate the wife of the greatest king, lord of all the island, and at that, the Christians with their horses and swords and pikes and lances began to wreak slaughters and singular cruelties upon them...they would enter into the villages and spare not children, or old people, or pregnant women, or women with suckling babes, but would open the woman's belly and hack the babe to pieces, as though they were butchering lambs shut up in the pen. They would lay wagers who might slice open the belly of a man with one stroke of the blade, or cut off a man's head with one swift blow of the pike, or spill out his entrails. They would snatch babes from their mothers' breasts and take them by their feet and dash their heads against the rocks. Others would fling them over their shoulders into the rivers, laughing and jeering, and as they fell into the water, they would call out, "Thrash, you little bugger!" Other babes, they would run their swords through mother and child at once, and all that they came across. They would erect long gibbets, but no higher than that a man's feet might dangle just above the ground, and bind thirteen of the Indians at one time, in honour and reverence, they said, of Our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, and put firewood around it and burn the Indians alive.
De las Casas wrote what may be the first book to come out of the Americas by someone whose people came there from Europe, and it is a short but thoroughly nasty chronicle of Spanish cruelty to the indigenous rivaling the Inquisition, the Killing Fields, the gulag, and even the Nazi Holocaust.
U.S. Slavery? Amateurs. Heck, the reason Europeans had to go to the trouble and expense of transporting Africans all across the ocean to be slaves in the first place, is because the Spanish Christians had pretty much WIPED OUT most or all of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean in just a few generations after Columbus. According to de las Casas, they just put the Injuns into the fields and made them work without food or sleep, getting maybe 36 straight hours of labor out of a body before it keeled over and died and was composted and they brought in the next one. The English younger sons who set up their Privileged Mens' Paradises in the Carolinas and Georgia only *aspired* to that kind of wholesale cruelty and genocide.
De las Casas was a different kind of Christian, a bishop who evidently thought Christ's message of humility and kindness was to be taken seriously, and wrote The Destruction of the Indies apparently in the hopes of telling the Pope what was being done in His name. Various appendixes include Codes of Law for the assorted islands, all claiming to take indigenous lives very seriously (as seriously as customer service repeatedly assures you they consider your call while you're on hold) and declaring it illegal to do the things they were massively doing. There is no indication of any response from Rome, and so I can only surmise that His Holiness was assured by the existence of the legal codes that such atrocities could not possibly be committed by Christians, or that the Pope just ordered de las Casas to shut up and not rock the boat.
discounting introductions and appendices, the actual text is thankfully under 100 pages, but every page is as gruesome as any of Elie Wiesel's memoirs, and is necessary reading as a reminder of the horrors ordinary people are capable of when told that God is on their side and that their victims aren't really people who count.
Chaffs, by Douglas P. Lathrop
We filled the AV room, hooting and hollering and throwing garbage at the screen--at old footage from before the Awakening, of those parades the homosexuals used to have. Ugly, buzz-cut women on motorcycles, wearing filthy leather jackets that hung open to show off their saggy and wrinkled boobs. Goblinlike man-creatures in feathers and glitter and make-up, humping and tongue-kissing in the middle of the street.
Pride Parades, they were called. Pride in what? Being freaks of nature?
Later on, in Race Hygiene class and at Rooster and Dawn Patrol meetings, there were more videos, lectures, more horror stories from the old days. About the smut shops, the man-boy sex clubs, the perverts hunting kids in public parks, the bars with torture chambers in the basement, the drugs, the diseases--and then, at last, the quarantines, the lockdowns that Our Commander In Chief ordered on whole cities when he took power fifteen years ago, shutting down the bars, cleaning up whole neighborhoods, shipping the homosexuals where they could no longer infect us.
Nowadays we caught them much earlier. If we got to them while they were still young, some of them could even be welcomed back into the embrace of the Nation. That was what the Reorientation Centers were for.
Still, not all of them could be reoriented. And then there were those who slipped the net, who went underground. Them, we dealt with ruthlessly. Because sometimes an infection grew so severe that you couldn't just treat it--you had to cut it out.
Doug Lathrop's last novel looks like a typical dystopian future YA book, the kind that is showing up in droves these days. So how come I found Chaffs to be so much scarier, gripping, and compelling than the others?
Maybe because it's a lot closer to the here and now, and seems a lot closer to something that could really happen here, in a world where--as I am reading the book-- Donald Trump is a major contender for President of the United States. Instead of fantasy names like Oceania and Panem and The Glade, we have the United States of America. Instead of Divergence factions and maze running and hunger game ceremonies, we're 15 years after a nuclear strike on New York propels a Tea Party President into office who establishes the standard dictatorial powers, secret police, jack-booted thugs, mass arrests and disappearings, militaristic youth groups, and agendas emphasizing racial purity, xenophobia and eugenics. The gays, political dissidents, Jews and Mexicans are sent to "reorientation camps" (presumably to teach them the error of their ways so they will stop being so gay, dissident, Jewish, or Mexican), while they just outright killed all the African-Americans and told everyone (no one dares contradict them) that they got sent back to luxurious Africa with your tax dollars).
There is also a whole new category of bare-belly Sneetches to oppress. A "Chaff" is someone whose parents were BOTH disappeared in the initial purgings. A chaff is brought up in a foster orphanage, is marked for bullying by other students in school, and is usually disappeared at the age of 18. Chaffs tend to be nihilistic punky kids on skateboards who give no fucks because what's the point.
Lathrop could have made this the story of a chaff-warrior. Instead, the narration is given to the most alpha of the alpha students: A big, handsome, popular superstar jock and member of the "Dawn Patrol" (paramilitary hall monitors) with rich alpha parents and a rich, racially pure alpha girlfriend... and none of his privileges will save him if the school "morality officer" takes an arbitrary dislike to him....or if they realize he's becoming interested in boys. Once the New Order declares you impure, EVERYBODY will turn on you, and if you disappear, pretend you never existed. Because it could be them next.
Very high recommendations.
Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany
"That one on the left is more subtle. It explodes with enough force to demolish a good sized building, but the bomb casing itself is hidden and unhurt under the rubble. Six hours later it explodes again and does the damage of a fair sized atomic bomb. This leaves the victims enough time to concentrate their reclamation forces, all sorts of reconstruction workers, Red Cross nurses or whatever the invaders call them, lots of experts determining the size of the damage. Then, poof. A delayed hydrogen explosion, and a good thirty or forty mile crater. It doesn't do as much physical damage as even the smallest of these others, but it gets rid of a lot of equipment and busybody do-gooders. Still, a schoolboy's weapon. I keep them in my own personal collection just to show them we have standard fare."
This is another selection from the TK Bradford "Other than white male hetero authors" list, and one of the best things I've read from it so far. Because of the plot twists, I can't say all that much about it without risking spoilers, so I'll just summarize it as a space adventure with alien invaders, military and political intrigue, and at the same time a profound philosophical statement about language and how we communicate and the effect that the language itself may have on the way we think. Highest recommendations.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts