Monthly Bookpost, August 2016
Run, Forest, Run! Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
Our dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travellers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he a real dragon. Of course that's not true. He may be a wizard and immortal, but he's still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we're grateful, but not that grateful...He doesn't devour them really; it only feels that way.
Oh, man. There are so many things I want to say about this wonderful book but will not because it's new, and because the plot goes to unexpected places (unexpected by me, anyhow) so early that talking about what it all means risks spoilers for those lucky people who have yet to read it for the first time.
I will say this much: Of the four Hugo-nominated novels I have read as of now (Seveneves still to come), this is easily my favorite of the four. it woke up an appetite deep in my psyche, that I didn't know was hungry; an appetite for fairy tales that went in a certain direction. And it bears a second reading in hindsight, after it's washed over you the first time. Very highest recommendations.
Sweet, Nourishing Mantears: The Women's History of the World, by Rosalind Miles
"The Age of Queens"--what is the historical truth behind the persistent myths of women holding power over men? Approaches to this question have been dogged by historians' search for societies where women had total control, and where men were downgraded and oppressed as an inevitable consequence--for a mirror image of every patriarchy, in fact. Not surprisingly, this process of going backwards through the looking glass has failed to produce any concrete results. Another will o' the wisp was the conviction of nineteenth century scholars that matriarchy had once been a universal stage in world culture, when, the argument ran, as human society emerged from animal promiscuity, women succeeded in bringing about matriarchy through the defeat of their lustful males. In the social order thus created, women held primacy at every level from human to divine, and the excluded males, uncivilized and violent, lurked about on the fringes of each individual gynocracy plotting furious revenge. For matriarchy was only a stage of the human ascent towards civilization. Ultimately (and quite logically, to the mind of the male historian) the males contrived to overthrow matriarchy and institute patriarchy, the ultimate stage of civilization and its finest flower.
An excellent feminist summary of the War On Women through history. It's brief for a world history--about half of it is pre-Biblical--but then it's filling in cracks, attempting to tell the stories that haven't been told.
As with most books of this kind, Miles harks back to a golden pre-patriarchal time, largely unrecorded, when men and women were equal, or when women were even honored--not put on a pedestal, but given recognition for their life-giving powers and listened to--which, of course, will come across as "misandrist" by some. Miles makes no attempt to be "fair"--here; she is responding to entire libraries of misogyny through the ages, books that take it for granted that women are inferior, that giving them rights will disturb their pretty little heads, or unsex them, threatening survival of the species. You know. Bullshit. And so she goes a bit in the other direction, making the case for Y chromosomes as a genetic aberration and males not being capable of shouldering the enormous burden put on women from the very first day. Above all, it highlights the strength women have had to collectively develop over the course of centuries--physical, emotional, spiritual--to the extent that one wonders how on earth men ever managed to subdue them in the first place.
The last of the book's four sections covers advances women have made in the modern era--the right to vote, control over their sexuality, owning their own property--and how much more (as of the 1980s) still needed to be done. I can't help thinking of the new generation of women today, and how Millennial women seem to be collectively thriving compared to men--how much smarter, more athletic, more organized they are, filling the Universities and the high ends of class rankings. I think that, if the reaper stays her hand for a few more decades, I will live to see women in charge of the western world--achieving legislative majorities and writing new laws; running businesses on a better model than the crap being done in today's Fortune 500 companies, and obtaining the majority of the country's wealth; thriving in households that are not dominated by a paterfamilias, and that often don't even have a man at all. I see this day coming, and I feel like passing the torch instead of fighting it, since it seems to me that women may well rescue civilization. I just hope that men collectively get around to genuine loving before women get around to serious hatred.
Seems to me, The women's History of the World is a book, everyone, especially men, should read.
Village of the Dead: Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo
"This is nothing," my companion replied. "Try to take it easy. You'll feel it even more when we get to Comala. That town sits on the coals of the earth, at the very mouth of hell. They say that when people from there die and go to hell, they come back for a blanket."
This very short (120 pages) novel is maybe one of the first examples of Latin American magic realism. At least, it has the kind of style i associate with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who may have been influenced by Rulfo.
I'm going to be a little plot-spoilery here, since the book is more about theme and atmosphere than about action. It has to do with a young man whose mother urges him on her deathbed to seek out his estranged father, Pedro Paramo, in the village of Comala, where Paramo had been a big fish in a small pond. Comala has become a ghost town--literally--and as the young man comes to understand that the inhabitants are dead, the narrative changes from his perspective to include various deceased characters and the stories of what happened to them during Paramo's life.
By the end of the story, the original narrator has joined the ghosts, leaving a sense that he was always destined to be a part of this place where he had never before been. Like Jack Torrance in The Shining, he is with his people.
Very Rarely Stable: Ethical writings, by Immanuel Kant
I cannot call a Wife, a Child, a Domestic, or, generally, any other Person ‘mine’ merely because I command them at present as belonging to my household, or because I have them under control, and in my power and possession. But I can call them mine, if, although they may have withdrawn themselves from my control and I do not therefore possess them empirically, I can still say ‘I possess them by my mere Will, provided they exist anywhere in space or time; and, consequently, my possession of them is purely juridical.’ They belong, in fact, to my possessions, only when and so far as I can assert this as a matter of Right.
This month's Kant reading consisted of three short works that were included in the Great Books of the Western World volume on Kant: Preface to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, with a note on conscience; Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals; and Science of Right. (don't you love the catchy, succinct titles?). The first two are very brief, and puzzle me as to why they were included in the set at all instead of, say, the Prolegomena. The only thing they add to Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysick of Morals (see last month's Bookpost) is the assertion that the ultimate moral ends/duties are perfection of the self and the happiness of others, and that the morality of an action is judged by whether it promotes these ends. I can work with that definition.
Science of Right is a law tract concerning the rights and responsibilities of the individual in society, and of the state in relation to the people and other states. Much of it reads like a law school primer on contracts, property and legislative procedure. with several pages winding up to definitions of what constitutes an "action" or appropriation of a thing, as if Kant has more than the usual struggle to get from the astral plane into the real world where interactions with persons and society can affect the rights of others. Unlike other tracts where, for example, Kant takes absolute literal meanings of words in order to demonstrate that no person can ever wish it right for people to tell a lie in any circumstance, Kant is troublingly different and discursive in his approach as to whether it is appropriate that the government punish citizens--because when willing it, people are really not willing punishment, so much as willing that all people shall be subject to the laws. That may be so, but then it seems to me that persons should have similar leeway in considering their own motives for actions.
Food for thought, as always, anyhow.
The 18th century Murders: An Echo in the Bone, by Diana Gabaldon; Rapscallion, by James McGee
She looked at him, not saying anything. i know what it's like to kill a man, she thought. I know just how easy it is. and you don't. She was not aware of having changed expression, but Campbell lost a bit of his high color and looked away. she wondered for a second whether Roger would look away, if he saw that knowledge in her eyes. But this was no time to think of things like that.
--from An Echo in the Bone
Hawkwood didn't answer. In his mind's eye he saw again the mob of prisoners rising out of the hatches and the mayhem they had created. Lasseur had referred to the hulk as a version of Hell. From what Hawkwood had witnessed so far, the privateer's description had been horribly accurate. In his time as a runner, Hawkwood had visited a good number of London's gaols: Newgate, Bridewell and the Fleet among them. They were, without exception terrible places. But this black, heartless hulk was something different. There was true horror at work here, Hawkwood sensed. He wasn't sure what form it took or if he would be controlled by it, but he knew instinctively that it would be like nothing he'd encountered before.
--from Rapscallion
An Echo in the Bone is a turning point at which Gabaldon's Outlander books, which were starting to bore me, pick up again and go from the middle of nowhere, NC, to the Revolutionary War. Various characters split up the narrative and view famous events from New York, the high seas, and Fort Ticonderoga, interacting with the likes of Benedict Arnold, General Burgoyne, and Ben Franklin. Even better, Roger, Brianne and their children are back in 20th Century Scotland, keeping track of Claire and Jamie via their Letters To the Future, and giving and receiving culture shock between the centuries, having experienced frontier life and now interacting with people who only think they're tough.
Rapscallion is a variant on the trope where the detective goes undercover into prison disguised as an inmate and is surprised to find that some of the guards are evil and some of the prisoners are good. Here the prison is "the hulks"--disused colonial era naval ships moored in marshlands and packed with prisoners. There have been some escapes, and previous investigators who showed up aboveboard have been killed, and so Hawkwood is given an inmate identity and packed onboard to find out about the escapes and deaths before dying of disease, inmate violence, or the myriad petty hanging offenses used as an excuse to make room for more. Highly recommended for nonstop suspense, and for vivid, possibly triggering descriptions of horrible conditions that really existed at one point.
YES, WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS (I'm not!): The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
THE strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest, which, though to all seeming meant ironically, is really laid down as a fundamental principle. But are we never to have an explanation of this phrase? Force is a physical power, and I fail to see what moral effect it can have. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will - at the most, an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?
Suppose for a moment that this so-called "right" exists. I maintain that the sole result is a mass of inexplicable nonsense. For, if force creates right, the effect changes with the cause: every force that is greater than the first succeeds to its right. As soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate; and, the strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act so as to become the strongest. But what kind of right is that which perishes when force fails? If we must obey perforce, there is no need to obey because we ought; and if we are not forced to obey, we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word "right" adds nothing to force: in this connection, it means absolutely nothing.
Rousseau's most influential philosophical work completely contradicts his first and second discourses (See Bookpost, May 2016), where his emo gushing over the state of nature prompted Voltaire to accuse him of wantin mankind to go around on all fours. Rousseau's call for an organized society where we give up liberties to a sovereign calls up images of Hobbes' Leviathan.
In fact, one of the most enduring images from Hobbes is a famous illustration of a gigantic king towering over a city, the king's body being composed of thousands of tiny persons, signifying that the right and power of the sovereign comes from all of the people united. Where Hobbes asserted the social contract as one in which people surrendered every bit of their autonomy to an all-powerful despot (the only kind of ruler thought to be strong enough to resist the natural will of the individual to oppress and fight all neighbors, all of the time) Rousseau speaks of the "leviathan" as consisting of the general, combined will of the people together, united out of a state of nature that seeks cooperation for mutual survival instead of conquest. You surrender all your rights to the general good, but most of them are given right back to you because we all agree that a certain amounto f autonomy and private property are good.
Seems to me, The Social Contract has endured better than Rousseau's other works because, unlike them, it makes sense. Not sure how naturally cooperative people are, but at least when born into a society, most of us seem to have some sense of civic duty.
Infinite Catharsis: Poets Are Not useful, by Gwyndyn T. Alexander
Once when I was a child
I pricked my finger
on that mythical spinning wheel.
That's the story I told myself,
that I was just sleeping here,
and someday a prince would come
and kiss me awake.
I knew better, of course.
That shape bending over my bed
was no prince.
I was pricked, all right,
by there was no fairty godmother
to save me from that curse.
No christening banquet.
No gifts.
That secret kiss in the night
was not my savior.
Now, long years later,
here I am in my armor of thorns.
I can't bear the smell of roses
of honeysuckle
sweet and rancid like my father's breath,
the reek of the satisfied monster.
I live awake, now,
dreading night,
dreading sleep,
that kiss in the darkness,
that prick,
that wound.
My blood on the sheets
red
as a briar rose.
--"Poet as Briar Rose"
My policy is that, if someone cares enough to send me a book, then I care enough to read and review it for my Monthly Bookpost, though I do not promise to say only nice things. Sometimes, I have known to be merciless to a love offering.
This small volume, by a poet who informs me she won accolades when she was published as "G.T. Alexander" but scorned and abandoned by (male) publishers when she insisted on her full name and her own pronouns, is a love offering that was merciless to me. Every page is autobiographical. Every page is filled with strength and rage and pain and abuse survival and overcoming. It reveals heavy scar tissue over heavily developed muscle tissue, and says to the reader, "This happened.'
To some, it says, "You are not alone." "To some, it says, You live in a world where this happens. Is this what you're willing to settle for?" To some few, it says, "I can survive what you do to me, and then grow."
Alexander was asked whether poets were even useful, and this collection is her answer ("We are not useful. We are essential".) Poetry like this taps into something bigger than ourselves, reveals meaning behind the mundane, allows healing by via the balm of words, or cleansing via the fire of words.
Very high recommendations.
A Romp Through the Country: Humphrey Clinker, by Tobias Smollett
The lieutenant told her that while he resided among them, two French missionaries arrived, in order to convert them to the Catholic religion; but when they talked of mysteries and revelations, which they could neither explain nor authenticate, and called in the evidence of miracles which they believed upon hearsay; when they taught that the Supreme Creator of Heaven and Earth had allowed his only son, his own equal in power and glory, to enter the bowels of a woman, to be born as a human creature, to be insulted, flagellated and even executed as a malefactor; when they pretended to create God himself, to swallow, digest, revive and multiply him ad infinitum, by the help of a little flour and water, the Indians were shocked at the impiety of their presumption--They were examined by the assembly of the sachems, who desired them to prove the divinity of their mission by some miracle--They answered that it was not in their power. "If you really were sent by Heaven for our conversion (said one of the sachems), you would certainly have some supernatural endowments, at least you would have the gift of tongues, in order to explain your doctrine to the different nations among which you are employed; but you are so ignorant of our language that you cannot express yourselves even on the most trifling subjects."
In a word, the assembly was convinced of their being cheats, and even suspected them of being spies. They ordered them a bag of Indian corn apiece, and appointed a guide to conduct them to the frontiers; but the missionaries having more zeal than discretion, refused to quit the vineyard. They persisted in saying mass, in preaching, baptizing and squabbling with theconjurers, or priests of the country, till they had thrown the whole community into confusion. Then the assembly proceeded to try them as impious imposters, who represented the Almighty as a trifling, weak, capricious being, and pretended to make, unmake, and reproduce him at pleasure; they were therefore convicted of blasphemy and sedition, and condemned to the stake, where they died singing Salve Regina in a rapture of joy, for the crown of martyrdom which they had thus obtained.
In May, I complained that Smollett's lesser novel Roderick Random was cruel and not life-affirming. Humphrey Clinker, while not great, is a giant leap in the right direction. although the jokes are often slapstick at the expense of someone more sinned against than sinning, the main characters are basically wholesome, and the comic situations and caricatures are harbingers of Dickens's Pickwick society.
Although the book is titled after the wily, capable manservant Humphrey Clinker, clinker doesn't appear until well into the novel. The main characters are Matthew Bramble, a surly hypochondriac Moliere father; his shrewish sister, a niece with a secret lover (naturally disapproved of by Uncle Bramble), and a collegiate nephew with more culture than sense, eager to defend his sister's honor. The group sets out to Gloucester, Bath and Scotland from their country estate, and comic hijinks ensue.
The story is told in the form of letters between various characters, and some of the best humor results from different people writing about the same event from wildly different and often inaccurate perspectives. highbrow people write with great affectation and their servants write coarsely, with crude spelling errors and malapropisms. readers will recognize the story as having been imitated in dozens of English farces that came before and after Humphrey Clinker, but that is seldom told as well as this, right down to the constructed "surprise" happy ending that surprises no one today. High recommendations.
WYSIWYG: Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, by Thomas Reid
It appears, I think, from what has been said that there is no more reason to account our senses fallacious than our reason, our memory, or any other faculty of judging which nature hath given us. They are all limited and imperfect, but wisely suited to the present condition of man. We are liable to error and wrong judgment in the use of them all, but as little in the information of sense as in the deductions of reasoning. And the errors we fall into with regard to objects of sense are not corrected by reason, but by more accurate attention to the information we may receive from our senses themselves.
Perhaps the pride of philosophers may have given occasion to this error. Reason is the faculty wherein they assume a superiority to the unlearned. The informations of sense are common to the philosopher and to the most illiterate; they put all men upon a level, and are therefore apt to be undervalued. We must, however, be beholden to the informations of sense for the greatest and most interesting parts of our knowledge. The wisdom of nature has made the most useful things the most common, and they ought not to be despised on that account. Nature likewise forces our belief in those informations, and all the attempts of philosophy to weaken it are fruitless and vain.
This is the kind of philosophy I might have attempted to write myself, had I lived in the era and had the inclination. Whereas Berkley and Hume (Bookposts, January through April 2016) ran with Locke's empirical epistemology and "proved' that nothing existed, Reid ran the other way and said that, yes, stuff does exist, and that the fact that our perception is sometimes faulty means that one should be mindful of the possibility of error, not that one should assume that All The Things are unknowable. Reid and I call this common sense. Berkley and Hume made it into the great books of the western canon. Reid's philosophy is sneered at by philosophers as "naive realism". This is why farmers and mechanics think philosophy is goddam fucking stupid.
There are eight Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man: one each on sense perception, memory, conception, abstraction, judgment, reasoning, and taste. As you might expect, each one builds on the previous ones to form the way we think and know what we know. It seems good enough to me, but evidently not to serious intellectuals who think too much.
Quaker Against the Slavers: The Journal of John Woolman
From my early acquaintance with truth I have often felt an inward distress, occasioned by the striving of a spirit in me against the operation of the heavenly principle; and in this state I have been affected with a sense of my own wretchedness, and in a mourning condition have felt earnest longings for that Divine help which brings the soul into true liberty. Sometimes, on retiring into private places, the spirit of supplication hath been given me, and under a heavenly covering I have asked my gracious Father to give me a heart in all things resigned to the direction of his wisdom; in uttering language like this, the thought of my wearing hats and garments dyed with a dye hurtful to them, has made lasting impression on me.
Outside of the Harvard Classics set, which gives him a place of honor in the first volume next to Ben Franklin, I have never heard of John Woolman. He wasn't taught in any American history course I took, nor mentioned in a history book so's I remembered. He was a Quaker who lived in and around New Jersey in the 18th century, and who worked for the abolition of slavery.
His journal, which was published posthumously, does not seem particularly notable. Dr. Elliott assures us in an introduction that "his extreme humility prevents him from making clear the importance of the part he played in the movement against slaveholding among the Quakers.", which would explain the absence of a lot of great-seeming events. Woolman plods and ponders, recording a moment, for example, when he was asked to make a bill of sale for a slave, and slowly concluded that....his moral scruples...would...not...let him...no...couldn't go through with the....transaction. Which seems a little odd to me, as the official Quaker position had been against slavery for close to 100 years at that point.
From then on, the journal consists of Woolman painstakingly traveling the northern colonies and attending Quaker meetings at which he speaks earnestly against slavery (his remarks are rarely quoted; it is just recorded that he spoke against it), and quakers hem and haw and not about it, and eventually Woolman moves to England and dies, and that, yea verily, is how his story ends.
It is good that Woolman had a role in persuading a part of America against one of its most dishonorable and cruel practices. I do not mean to make fun of or discount his essential goodness. It does seem hard, however, for me to feel excited about a "great book" that says so little with such little style.
Ship from Shinola: Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie
I knew that Ship cared for me. It couldn't help caring for any captain, to some degree. But I knew, from when I had been a ship, that there was a difference between a captain you cared for just because she was your captain, and a favorite. And thinking that, alone here, outside the ship, in utter emptiness, I saw that I had relied on the ship's support and obedience--and yes, its affection--without ever asking what IT wanted. I had presumed farther than any human captain would have, or could have, unthinkingly demanded to be shown the crew's most intimate moments. I had behaved, in some ways, as though I were in fact a part of Ship, but had also demanded--expected, it seemed--a level of devotion that I had no right to expect, and that likely Ship could not give me. And I hadn't realized it until Ship had asked Seivarden to speak for it, and tell me that it liked the idea of being someone who could be a captain, and I had been dismayed to hear it.
The third installment of a trilogy that began with the Hugo-winning Ancillary Justice, told from the point of view of an AI that had once been both a ship and the army on it, now reduced to a single (highly effective) soldier with more of a conscience than those like her are supposed to have.
I rank it third out of the four Hugo-nominated novels I've read this year. It seems to me that the series dropped off markedly after the excellent first volume, which was so great that, even while paling in comparison, Ancillary Mercy is a heck of a good story that gives new meaning to the phrase "a world at war with itself", and that finds time to say a great deal about interpersonal relationship dynamics and a government's duties to the least of its people in a story with cold equations of war. Well worth the read.
Women Level Up: The Geek Feminist Revolution, by Kameron Hurley
What the organized haters never anticipated was that their abuse would also inspire its own resistance. I was raised on stories of a grandmother who lived in Nazi-occupied France. My great-grandfather was part of the resistance. I studied resistance movements in Southern Africa as part of my master's degree. When somebody pushes back, I know how to push harder. I have a lot of perspective on what real state terror looks like, and online abuse pales in comparison.
This book was not what I expected. I thought it would be about women's increased presence in fandom and their struggles against Gamergaters, Sad Puppies, Berniebros, Ruined Childhoods, Tomato Crushers and other misogynist movements (probably mostly the same network of assholes) that stink up fandom's Internets. While there are chapters about Gamergate and the Puppies, mostly the book is about writing.
It's about writing the stories that usually aren't told, from the perspectives of people usually not heard, and what a fascinating tool for social change it can be to control or contribute to the cultural narrative that literate people draw on for reference. The narrative that has made household stories out of Achilles, Falstaff, Faust, and Lazarus Long, and that now include Damaya, Furiosa, Rey, and Jessica Jones. Creating worlds in which white dudes are not the center of the Universe, and in which toxic racial and gender assumptions are not just in the subtext as a given, but are replaced with entirely different given values.
This is how the cultural narrative changes, one story at a time. This is how ideas about who women naturally are transform from accepted dogma to discredited stereotype to idiotic superstition. "Let's be real," says Hurley, "If women were 'naturally' anything, societies wouldn't spend so much time trying to police every aspect of their lives."
One of my favorite parts involved Hurley's dissatisfaction with a character she created by taking all the 80s action hero tropes and putting them on a cussing, brooding, self-medicating, solitary warrior woman who lived by her own code...and how her analysis of why it wasn't working raised questions about the social/emotional health, or lack thereof, of those character tropes. "I realized that Conan would never have a happy ending", nor would Mad Max, Rambo, or John McClane.
The Geek Feminist Revolution tells women and other less-privileged people that they are not alone, and that they have a voice. It also tells the kind of white guy who has been told from birth that he is the center of the narrative that there are other narratives that he ought to pay some attention to in order to get along in the world. That Guy may see a lot of anger in Hurley's writing, but if he looks a little deeper, he will see kindness. The kindness of someone who has been ignored or shouted down, over and over again, but who is still willing to make yet one more attempt to get through. Very high recommendations.
Little Dickens: Amelia, by Henry Fielding
In fact, if we regard this World only, it is the Interest of every Man to be either completely good, or completely bad. He had better destroy his Conscience, than gently wound it. The many bitter Reflections which every bad Action costs a Mind in which there are any Remains of Goodness, are not to be compensated by the highest Pleasures which such an Action can produce.
Henry Fielding's last novel is not his most popular. It still counts as "life-affirming" to my mind; however it lacks the satire and playfulness of Tom Jones (one of my lifelong favorite novels ever) and Joseph Andrews. Fielding, who was also a London magistrate, was interested in judicial reform, and Amelia is designed to get 18th century people all fired up about injustice.
It begins with a scene in the court of the corrupt "Mr. Justice Thrasher", one of the more vividly drawn characters who, after an orgy of jailing the innocent and releasing the bribe-offering guilty, is never seen again in the book. instead, we follow one of the jailed innocents and his virtuous wife Amelia, through a series of misadventures inviting calls for legal reform, complete with jails, debtor jails, forged wills, poorly written or applied laws, wealthy people getting away with things, poor people hanged for trifles, and so on., before finally sorting out their troubles and living happily ever after.
Along the way are several 20-to-50 page digressions in which characters they meet, who may or may not figure in the actual plot, tell their own backstories at great length, and briefer digressions in which characters discuss moral examples set in the works of Homer, Virgil and other ancients, and give alternate interpretations to the (offensive to Fielding) usual conclusions that were drawn back in the day. It's distracting. It's as if, in the middle of a modern novel, a liberal writer had a chapter where a couple of characters discussed and refuted the part of the Bible that supposedly forbids same-sex relationships, although no such relationship appeared in the book.
Modest recommendations, especially for fans of Fielding's better known books.
Wit as Thick as Tewksbury Mustard: An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff., by Maurice Morgann
We see him, after he had expended his ragamuffins, with sword and target in the midst of battle, in perfect possession of himself, and replete with humor and jocularity. He was, I presume, in some immediate personal danger, in danger also of a general defeat; too corpulent for flight; and to be led a prisoner was probably to be led to execution--yet we see him laughing and easy, offering a bottle of sack to the Prince instead of a pistol, punning, and telling him, "There was that which would sack a city." "What, is it a time" (says the Prince) "to jest and dally now?" No, a sober character would not jest on such an occasion, but a coward could not; he would neither have the inclination nor the power.
I found this out of curiosity, having been referenced in Boswells autobiography of Samuel Johnson and also in Harold Bloom's list of the western canon. It's brief, and argues that Falstaff is not a coward, referencing several characters who mention acts of courage in his youth, before the plays begin, and putting a spin on his actions at Gads Hill and Shrewsbury. As an essay, it's fairly rambling and discursive, and I wouldn't mind seeing a representation of Falstaff portrayed that way. It's certainly consistent with the text, at least.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts
Our dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travellers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he a real dragon. Of course that's not true. He may be a wizard and immortal, but he's still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we're grateful, but not that grateful...He doesn't devour them really; it only feels that way.
Oh, man. There are so many things I want to say about this wonderful book but will not because it's new, and because the plot goes to unexpected places (unexpected by me, anyhow) so early that talking about what it all means risks spoilers for those lucky people who have yet to read it for the first time.
I will say this much: Of the four Hugo-nominated novels I have read as of now (Seveneves still to come), this is easily my favorite of the four. it woke up an appetite deep in my psyche, that I didn't know was hungry; an appetite for fairy tales that went in a certain direction. And it bears a second reading in hindsight, after it's washed over you the first time. Very highest recommendations.
Sweet, Nourishing Mantears: The Women's History of the World, by Rosalind Miles
"The Age of Queens"--what is the historical truth behind the persistent myths of women holding power over men? Approaches to this question have been dogged by historians' search for societies where women had total control, and where men were downgraded and oppressed as an inevitable consequence--for a mirror image of every patriarchy, in fact. Not surprisingly, this process of going backwards through the looking glass has failed to produce any concrete results. Another will o' the wisp was the conviction of nineteenth century scholars that matriarchy had once been a universal stage in world culture, when, the argument ran, as human society emerged from animal promiscuity, women succeeded in bringing about matriarchy through the defeat of their lustful males. In the social order thus created, women held primacy at every level from human to divine, and the excluded males, uncivilized and violent, lurked about on the fringes of each individual gynocracy plotting furious revenge. For matriarchy was only a stage of the human ascent towards civilization. Ultimately (and quite logically, to the mind of the male historian) the males contrived to overthrow matriarchy and institute patriarchy, the ultimate stage of civilization and its finest flower.
An excellent feminist summary of the War On Women through history. It's brief for a world history--about half of it is pre-Biblical--but then it's filling in cracks, attempting to tell the stories that haven't been told.
As with most books of this kind, Miles harks back to a golden pre-patriarchal time, largely unrecorded, when men and women were equal, or when women were even honored--not put on a pedestal, but given recognition for their life-giving powers and listened to--which, of course, will come across as "misandrist" by some. Miles makes no attempt to be "fair"--here; she is responding to entire libraries of misogyny through the ages, books that take it for granted that women are inferior, that giving them rights will disturb their pretty little heads, or unsex them, threatening survival of the species. You know. Bullshit. And so she goes a bit in the other direction, making the case for Y chromosomes as a genetic aberration and males not being capable of shouldering the enormous burden put on women from the very first day. Above all, it highlights the strength women have had to collectively develop over the course of centuries--physical, emotional, spiritual--to the extent that one wonders how on earth men ever managed to subdue them in the first place.
The last of the book's four sections covers advances women have made in the modern era--the right to vote, control over their sexuality, owning their own property--and how much more (as of the 1980s) still needed to be done. I can't help thinking of the new generation of women today, and how Millennial women seem to be collectively thriving compared to men--how much smarter, more athletic, more organized they are, filling the Universities and the high ends of class rankings. I think that, if the reaper stays her hand for a few more decades, I will live to see women in charge of the western world--achieving legislative majorities and writing new laws; running businesses on a better model than the crap being done in today's Fortune 500 companies, and obtaining the majority of the country's wealth; thriving in households that are not dominated by a paterfamilias, and that often don't even have a man at all. I see this day coming, and I feel like passing the torch instead of fighting it, since it seems to me that women may well rescue civilization. I just hope that men collectively get around to genuine loving before women get around to serious hatred.
Seems to me, The women's History of the World is a book, everyone, especially men, should read.
Village of the Dead: Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo
"This is nothing," my companion replied. "Try to take it easy. You'll feel it even more when we get to Comala. That town sits on the coals of the earth, at the very mouth of hell. They say that when people from there die and go to hell, they come back for a blanket."
This very short (120 pages) novel is maybe one of the first examples of Latin American magic realism. At least, it has the kind of style i associate with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who may have been influenced by Rulfo.
I'm going to be a little plot-spoilery here, since the book is more about theme and atmosphere than about action. It has to do with a young man whose mother urges him on her deathbed to seek out his estranged father, Pedro Paramo, in the village of Comala, where Paramo had been a big fish in a small pond. Comala has become a ghost town--literally--and as the young man comes to understand that the inhabitants are dead, the narrative changes from his perspective to include various deceased characters and the stories of what happened to them during Paramo's life.
By the end of the story, the original narrator has joined the ghosts, leaving a sense that he was always destined to be a part of this place where he had never before been. Like Jack Torrance in The Shining, he is with his people.
Very Rarely Stable: Ethical writings, by Immanuel Kant
I cannot call a Wife, a Child, a Domestic, or, generally, any other Person ‘mine’ merely because I command them at present as belonging to my household, or because I have them under control, and in my power and possession. But I can call them mine, if, although they may have withdrawn themselves from my control and I do not therefore possess them empirically, I can still say ‘I possess them by my mere Will, provided they exist anywhere in space or time; and, consequently, my possession of them is purely juridical.’ They belong, in fact, to my possessions, only when and so far as I can assert this as a matter of Right.
This month's Kant reading consisted of three short works that were included in the Great Books of the Western World volume on Kant: Preface to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, with a note on conscience; Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals; and Science of Right. (don't you love the catchy, succinct titles?). The first two are very brief, and puzzle me as to why they were included in the set at all instead of, say, the Prolegomena. The only thing they add to Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysick of Morals (see last month's Bookpost) is the assertion that the ultimate moral ends/duties are perfection of the self and the happiness of others, and that the morality of an action is judged by whether it promotes these ends. I can work with that definition.
Science of Right is a law tract concerning the rights and responsibilities of the individual in society, and of the state in relation to the people and other states. Much of it reads like a law school primer on contracts, property and legislative procedure. with several pages winding up to definitions of what constitutes an "action" or appropriation of a thing, as if Kant has more than the usual struggle to get from the astral plane into the real world where interactions with persons and society can affect the rights of others. Unlike other tracts where, for example, Kant takes absolute literal meanings of words in order to demonstrate that no person can ever wish it right for people to tell a lie in any circumstance, Kant is troublingly different and discursive in his approach as to whether it is appropriate that the government punish citizens--because when willing it, people are really not willing punishment, so much as willing that all people shall be subject to the laws. That may be so, but then it seems to me that persons should have similar leeway in considering their own motives for actions.
Food for thought, as always, anyhow.
The 18th century Murders: An Echo in the Bone, by Diana Gabaldon; Rapscallion, by James McGee
She looked at him, not saying anything. i know what it's like to kill a man, she thought. I know just how easy it is. and you don't. She was not aware of having changed expression, but Campbell lost a bit of his high color and looked away. she wondered for a second whether Roger would look away, if he saw that knowledge in her eyes. But this was no time to think of things like that.
--from An Echo in the Bone
Hawkwood didn't answer. In his mind's eye he saw again the mob of prisoners rising out of the hatches and the mayhem they had created. Lasseur had referred to the hulk as a version of Hell. From what Hawkwood had witnessed so far, the privateer's description had been horribly accurate. In his time as a runner, Hawkwood had visited a good number of London's gaols: Newgate, Bridewell and the Fleet among them. They were, without exception terrible places. But this black, heartless hulk was something different. There was true horror at work here, Hawkwood sensed. He wasn't sure what form it took or if he would be controlled by it, but he knew instinctively that it would be like nothing he'd encountered before.
--from Rapscallion
An Echo in the Bone is a turning point at which Gabaldon's Outlander books, which were starting to bore me, pick up again and go from the middle of nowhere, NC, to the Revolutionary War. Various characters split up the narrative and view famous events from New York, the high seas, and Fort Ticonderoga, interacting with the likes of Benedict Arnold, General Burgoyne, and Ben Franklin. Even better, Roger, Brianne and their children are back in 20th Century Scotland, keeping track of Claire and Jamie via their Letters To the Future, and giving and receiving culture shock between the centuries, having experienced frontier life and now interacting with people who only think they're tough.
Rapscallion is a variant on the trope where the detective goes undercover into prison disguised as an inmate and is surprised to find that some of the guards are evil and some of the prisoners are good. Here the prison is "the hulks"--disused colonial era naval ships moored in marshlands and packed with prisoners. There have been some escapes, and previous investigators who showed up aboveboard have been killed, and so Hawkwood is given an inmate identity and packed onboard to find out about the escapes and deaths before dying of disease, inmate violence, or the myriad petty hanging offenses used as an excuse to make room for more. Highly recommended for nonstop suspense, and for vivid, possibly triggering descriptions of horrible conditions that really existed at one point.
YES, WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS (I'm not!): The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
THE strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest, which, though to all seeming meant ironically, is really laid down as a fundamental principle. But are we never to have an explanation of this phrase? Force is a physical power, and I fail to see what moral effect it can have. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will - at the most, an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?
Suppose for a moment that this so-called "right" exists. I maintain that the sole result is a mass of inexplicable nonsense. For, if force creates right, the effect changes with the cause: every force that is greater than the first succeeds to its right. As soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate; and, the strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act so as to become the strongest. But what kind of right is that which perishes when force fails? If we must obey perforce, there is no need to obey because we ought; and if we are not forced to obey, we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word "right" adds nothing to force: in this connection, it means absolutely nothing.
Rousseau's most influential philosophical work completely contradicts his first and second discourses (See Bookpost, May 2016), where his emo gushing over the state of nature prompted Voltaire to accuse him of wantin mankind to go around on all fours. Rousseau's call for an organized society where we give up liberties to a sovereign calls up images of Hobbes' Leviathan.
In fact, one of the most enduring images from Hobbes is a famous illustration of a gigantic king towering over a city, the king's body being composed of thousands of tiny persons, signifying that the right and power of the sovereign comes from all of the people united. Where Hobbes asserted the social contract as one in which people surrendered every bit of their autonomy to an all-powerful despot (the only kind of ruler thought to be strong enough to resist the natural will of the individual to oppress and fight all neighbors, all of the time) Rousseau speaks of the "leviathan" as consisting of the general, combined will of the people together, united out of a state of nature that seeks cooperation for mutual survival instead of conquest. You surrender all your rights to the general good, but most of them are given right back to you because we all agree that a certain amounto f autonomy and private property are good.
Seems to me, The Social Contract has endured better than Rousseau's other works because, unlike them, it makes sense. Not sure how naturally cooperative people are, but at least when born into a society, most of us seem to have some sense of civic duty.
Infinite Catharsis: Poets Are Not useful, by Gwyndyn T. Alexander
Once when I was a child
I pricked my finger
on that mythical spinning wheel.
That's the story I told myself,
that I was just sleeping here,
and someday a prince would come
and kiss me awake.
I knew better, of course.
That shape bending over my bed
was no prince.
I was pricked, all right,
by there was no fairty godmother
to save me from that curse.
No christening banquet.
No gifts.
That secret kiss in the night
was not my savior.
Now, long years later,
here I am in my armor of thorns.
I can't bear the smell of roses
of honeysuckle
sweet and rancid like my father's breath,
the reek of the satisfied monster.
I live awake, now,
dreading night,
dreading sleep,
that kiss in the darkness,
that prick,
that wound.
My blood on the sheets
red
as a briar rose.
--"Poet as Briar Rose"
My policy is that, if someone cares enough to send me a book, then I care enough to read and review it for my Monthly Bookpost, though I do not promise to say only nice things. Sometimes, I have known to be merciless to a love offering.
This small volume, by a poet who informs me she won accolades when she was published as "G.T. Alexander" but scorned and abandoned by (male) publishers when she insisted on her full name and her own pronouns, is a love offering that was merciless to me. Every page is autobiographical. Every page is filled with strength and rage and pain and abuse survival and overcoming. It reveals heavy scar tissue over heavily developed muscle tissue, and says to the reader, "This happened.'
To some, it says, "You are not alone." "To some, it says, You live in a world where this happens. Is this what you're willing to settle for?" To some few, it says, "I can survive what you do to me, and then grow."
Alexander was asked whether poets were even useful, and this collection is her answer ("We are not useful. We are essential".) Poetry like this taps into something bigger than ourselves, reveals meaning behind the mundane, allows healing by via the balm of words, or cleansing via the fire of words.
Very high recommendations.
A Romp Through the Country: Humphrey Clinker, by Tobias Smollett
The lieutenant told her that while he resided among them, two French missionaries arrived, in order to convert them to the Catholic religion; but when they talked of mysteries and revelations, which they could neither explain nor authenticate, and called in the evidence of miracles which they believed upon hearsay; when they taught that the Supreme Creator of Heaven and Earth had allowed his only son, his own equal in power and glory, to enter the bowels of a woman, to be born as a human creature, to be insulted, flagellated and even executed as a malefactor; when they pretended to create God himself, to swallow, digest, revive and multiply him ad infinitum, by the help of a little flour and water, the Indians were shocked at the impiety of their presumption--They were examined by the assembly of the sachems, who desired them to prove the divinity of their mission by some miracle--They answered that it was not in their power. "If you really were sent by Heaven for our conversion (said one of the sachems), you would certainly have some supernatural endowments, at least you would have the gift of tongues, in order to explain your doctrine to the different nations among which you are employed; but you are so ignorant of our language that you cannot express yourselves even on the most trifling subjects."
In a word, the assembly was convinced of their being cheats, and even suspected them of being spies. They ordered them a bag of Indian corn apiece, and appointed a guide to conduct them to the frontiers; but the missionaries having more zeal than discretion, refused to quit the vineyard. They persisted in saying mass, in preaching, baptizing and squabbling with theconjurers, or priests of the country, till they had thrown the whole community into confusion. Then the assembly proceeded to try them as impious imposters, who represented the Almighty as a trifling, weak, capricious being, and pretended to make, unmake, and reproduce him at pleasure; they were therefore convicted of blasphemy and sedition, and condemned to the stake, where they died singing Salve Regina in a rapture of joy, for the crown of martyrdom which they had thus obtained.
In May, I complained that Smollett's lesser novel Roderick Random was cruel and not life-affirming. Humphrey Clinker, while not great, is a giant leap in the right direction. although the jokes are often slapstick at the expense of someone more sinned against than sinning, the main characters are basically wholesome, and the comic situations and caricatures are harbingers of Dickens's Pickwick society.
Although the book is titled after the wily, capable manservant Humphrey Clinker, clinker doesn't appear until well into the novel. The main characters are Matthew Bramble, a surly hypochondriac Moliere father; his shrewish sister, a niece with a secret lover (naturally disapproved of by Uncle Bramble), and a collegiate nephew with more culture than sense, eager to defend his sister's honor. The group sets out to Gloucester, Bath and Scotland from their country estate, and comic hijinks ensue.
The story is told in the form of letters between various characters, and some of the best humor results from different people writing about the same event from wildly different and often inaccurate perspectives. highbrow people write with great affectation and their servants write coarsely, with crude spelling errors and malapropisms. readers will recognize the story as having been imitated in dozens of English farces that came before and after Humphrey Clinker, but that is seldom told as well as this, right down to the constructed "surprise" happy ending that surprises no one today. High recommendations.
WYSIWYG: Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, by Thomas Reid
It appears, I think, from what has been said that there is no more reason to account our senses fallacious than our reason, our memory, or any other faculty of judging which nature hath given us. They are all limited and imperfect, but wisely suited to the present condition of man. We are liable to error and wrong judgment in the use of them all, but as little in the information of sense as in the deductions of reasoning. And the errors we fall into with regard to objects of sense are not corrected by reason, but by more accurate attention to the information we may receive from our senses themselves.
Perhaps the pride of philosophers may have given occasion to this error. Reason is the faculty wherein they assume a superiority to the unlearned. The informations of sense are common to the philosopher and to the most illiterate; they put all men upon a level, and are therefore apt to be undervalued. We must, however, be beholden to the informations of sense for the greatest and most interesting parts of our knowledge. The wisdom of nature has made the most useful things the most common, and they ought not to be despised on that account. Nature likewise forces our belief in those informations, and all the attempts of philosophy to weaken it are fruitless and vain.
This is the kind of philosophy I might have attempted to write myself, had I lived in the era and had the inclination. Whereas Berkley and Hume (Bookposts, January through April 2016) ran with Locke's empirical epistemology and "proved' that nothing existed, Reid ran the other way and said that, yes, stuff does exist, and that the fact that our perception is sometimes faulty means that one should be mindful of the possibility of error, not that one should assume that All The Things are unknowable. Reid and I call this common sense. Berkley and Hume made it into the great books of the western canon. Reid's philosophy is sneered at by philosophers as "naive realism". This is why farmers and mechanics think philosophy is goddam fucking stupid.
There are eight Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man: one each on sense perception, memory, conception, abstraction, judgment, reasoning, and taste. As you might expect, each one builds on the previous ones to form the way we think and know what we know. It seems good enough to me, but evidently not to serious intellectuals who think too much.
Quaker Against the Slavers: The Journal of John Woolman
From my early acquaintance with truth I have often felt an inward distress, occasioned by the striving of a spirit in me against the operation of the heavenly principle; and in this state I have been affected with a sense of my own wretchedness, and in a mourning condition have felt earnest longings for that Divine help which brings the soul into true liberty. Sometimes, on retiring into private places, the spirit of supplication hath been given me, and under a heavenly covering I have asked my gracious Father to give me a heart in all things resigned to the direction of his wisdom; in uttering language like this, the thought of my wearing hats and garments dyed with a dye hurtful to them, has made lasting impression on me.
Outside of the Harvard Classics set, which gives him a place of honor in the first volume next to Ben Franklin, I have never heard of John Woolman. He wasn't taught in any American history course I took, nor mentioned in a history book so's I remembered. He was a Quaker who lived in and around New Jersey in the 18th century, and who worked for the abolition of slavery.
His journal, which was published posthumously, does not seem particularly notable. Dr. Elliott assures us in an introduction that "his extreme humility prevents him from making clear the importance of the part he played in the movement against slaveholding among the Quakers.", which would explain the absence of a lot of great-seeming events. Woolman plods and ponders, recording a moment, for example, when he was asked to make a bill of sale for a slave, and slowly concluded that....his moral scruples...would...not...let him...no...couldn't go through with the....transaction. Which seems a little odd to me, as the official Quaker position had been against slavery for close to 100 years at that point.
From then on, the journal consists of Woolman painstakingly traveling the northern colonies and attending Quaker meetings at which he speaks earnestly against slavery (his remarks are rarely quoted; it is just recorded that he spoke against it), and quakers hem and haw and not about it, and eventually Woolman moves to England and dies, and that, yea verily, is how his story ends.
It is good that Woolman had a role in persuading a part of America against one of its most dishonorable and cruel practices. I do not mean to make fun of or discount his essential goodness. It does seem hard, however, for me to feel excited about a "great book" that says so little with such little style.
Ship from Shinola: Ancillary Mercy, by Ann Leckie
I knew that Ship cared for me. It couldn't help caring for any captain, to some degree. But I knew, from when I had been a ship, that there was a difference between a captain you cared for just because she was your captain, and a favorite. And thinking that, alone here, outside the ship, in utter emptiness, I saw that I had relied on the ship's support and obedience--and yes, its affection--without ever asking what IT wanted. I had presumed farther than any human captain would have, or could have, unthinkingly demanded to be shown the crew's most intimate moments. I had behaved, in some ways, as though I were in fact a part of Ship, but had also demanded--expected, it seemed--a level of devotion that I had no right to expect, and that likely Ship could not give me. And I hadn't realized it until Ship had asked Seivarden to speak for it, and tell me that it liked the idea of being someone who could be a captain, and I had been dismayed to hear it.
The third installment of a trilogy that began with the Hugo-winning Ancillary Justice, told from the point of view of an AI that had once been both a ship and the army on it, now reduced to a single (highly effective) soldier with more of a conscience than those like her are supposed to have.
I rank it third out of the four Hugo-nominated novels I've read this year. It seems to me that the series dropped off markedly after the excellent first volume, which was so great that, even while paling in comparison, Ancillary Mercy is a heck of a good story that gives new meaning to the phrase "a world at war with itself", and that finds time to say a great deal about interpersonal relationship dynamics and a government's duties to the least of its people in a story with cold equations of war. Well worth the read.
Women Level Up: The Geek Feminist Revolution, by Kameron Hurley
What the organized haters never anticipated was that their abuse would also inspire its own resistance. I was raised on stories of a grandmother who lived in Nazi-occupied France. My great-grandfather was part of the resistance. I studied resistance movements in Southern Africa as part of my master's degree. When somebody pushes back, I know how to push harder. I have a lot of perspective on what real state terror looks like, and online abuse pales in comparison.
This book was not what I expected. I thought it would be about women's increased presence in fandom and their struggles against Gamergaters, Sad Puppies, Berniebros, Ruined Childhoods, Tomato Crushers and other misogynist movements (probably mostly the same network of assholes) that stink up fandom's Internets. While there are chapters about Gamergate and the Puppies, mostly the book is about writing.
It's about writing the stories that usually aren't told, from the perspectives of people usually not heard, and what a fascinating tool for social change it can be to control or contribute to the cultural narrative that literate people draw on for reference. The narrative that has made household stories out of Achilles, Falstaff, Faust, and Lazarus Long, and that now include Damaya, Furiosa, Rey, and Jessica Jones. Creating worlds in which white dudes are not the center of the Universe, and in which toxic racial and gender assumptions are not just in the subtext as a given, but are replaced with entirely different given values.
This is how the cultural narrative changes, one story at a time. This is how ideas about who women naturally are transform from accepted dogma to discredited stereotype to idiotic superstition. "Let's be real," says Hurley, "If women were 'naturally' anything, societies wouldn't spend so much time trying to police every aspect of their lives."
One of my favorite parts involved Hurley's dissatisfaction with a character she created by taking all the 80s action hero tropes and putting them on a cussing, brooding, self-medicating, solitary warrior woman who lived by her own code...and how her analysis of why it wasn't working raised questions about the social/emotional health, or lack thereof, of those character tropes. "I realized that Conan would never have a happy ending", nor would Mad Max, Rambo, or John McClane.
The Geek Feminist Revolution tells women and other less-privileged people that they are not alone, and that they have a voice. It also tells the kind of white guy who has been told from birth that he is the center of the narrative that there are other narratives that he ought to pay some attention to in order to get along in the world. That Guy may see a lot of anger in Hurley's writing, but if he looks a little deeper, he will see kindness. The kindness of someone who has been ignored or shouted down, over and over again, but who is still willing to make yet one more attempt to get through. Very high recommendations.
Little Dickens: Amelia, by Henry Fielding
In fact, if we regard this World only, it is the Interest of every Man to be either completely good, or completely bad. He had better destroy his Conscience, than gently wound it. The many bitter Reflections which every bad Action costs a Mind in which there are any Remains of Goodness, are not to be compensated by the highest Pleasures which such an Action can produce.
Henry Fielding's last novel is not his most popular. It still counts as "life-affirming" to my mind; however it lacks the satire and playfulness of Tom Jones (one of my lifelong favorite novels ever) and Joseph Andrews. Fielding, who was also a London magistrate, was interested in judicial reform, and Amelia is designed to get 18th century people all fired up about injustice.
It begins with a scene in the court of the corrupt "Mr. Justice Thrasher", one of the more vividly drawn characters who, after an orgy of jailing the innocent and releasing the bribe-offering guilty, is never seen again in the book. instead, we follow one of the jailed innocents and his virtuous wife Amelia, through a series of misadventures inviting calls for legal reform, complete with jails, debtor jails, forged wills, poorly written or applied laws, wealthy people getting away with things, poor people hanged for trifles, and so on., before finally sorting out their troubles and living happily ever after.
Along the way are several 20-to-50 page digressions in which characters they meet, who may or may not figure in the actual plot, tell their own backstories at great length, and briefer digressions in which characters discuss moral examples set in the works of Homer, Virgil and other ancients, and give alternate interpretations to the (offensive to Fielding) usual conclusions that were drawn back in the day. It's distracting. It's as if, in the middle of a modern novel, a liberal writer had a chapter where a couple of characters discussed and refuted the part of the Bible that supposedly forbids same-sex relationships, although no such relationship appeared in the book.
Modest recommendations, especially for fans of Fielding's better known books.
Wit as Thick as Tewksbury Mustard: An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff., by Maurice Morgann
We see him, after he had expended his ragamuffins, with sword and target in the midst of battle, in perfect possession of himself, and replete with humor and jocularity. He was, I presume, in some immediate personal danger, in danger also of a general defeat; too corpulent for flight; and to be led a prisoner was probably to be led to execution--yet we see him laughing and easy, offering a bottle of sack to the Prince instead of a pistol, punning, and telling him, "There was that which would sack a city." "What, is it a time" (says the Prince) "to jest and dally now?" No, a sober character would not jest on such an occasion, but a coward could not; he would neither have the inclination nor the power.
I found this out of curiosity, having been referenced in Boswells autobiography of Samuel Johnson and also in Harold Bloom's list of the western canon. It's brief, and argues that Falstaff is not a coward, referencing several characters who mention acts of courage in his youth, before the plays begin, and putting a spin on his actions at Gads Hill and Shrewsbury. As an essay, it's fairly rambling and discursive, and I wouldn't mind seeing a representation of Falstaff portrayed that way. It's certainly consistent with the text, at least.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts