Frequently Wrong, But Never in Doubt (December Reading)
All of these feel incomplete, and the nonfiction should probably get strong "bias! Read carefully" disclaimers, but this entry is long enough already. As usual, my opinions are mine, and are based on my experience: my flaming hatred of the Republican party should not be confused with an inversely high opinion of any other political party. (I have high hopes for the incoming administration because I expect them to be competent, not because I expect them to do what I'd like all the time.) I'm a fiscal conservative with a socially liberal bent: I disagree with everyone some of the time.
So, books!
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (Randy Shilts): Nonficton. Title doubles as description. The human disregard for an infection ravaging a disliked minority group is the real story of AIDS in the '80s. (Or the story that Shilts and others shaped from the raw events of the time. The digression into nonfiction as narrative extracted from reality can wait.) I found a quote from Shilts that he didn't want to know the results of his HIV test until he'd finished writing AtBPO, because he was a journalist Before and After would be a victim. Shilts had covered the gay news scene and HIV for several years, and knew firsthand the power AIDS poster kids like Bobbi Campbell had - and the attention they weren't getting from the National Institutes of Health, congressional Center for Disease Control budget-writers, and the powerfully conservative executive branch. If you weren't gay, you weren't paying attention to the victims. HIV has a variable-to-longish incubation period, and a constellation of early symptoms to mask the onset of full-blown AIDS, but if a group of people less despised had started to suddenly drop dead, would more money have been found for research and treatment?
Shilts does an excellent job of drawing readers into the events of 1982-1987, chronicling the lives and deaths of many excellent people, and the efforts of a small number of underfunded public health workers to combat the epidemic, and the US Department of Health's failure to make a cost-cutting Republican administration deliver on its "number one health priority".
I'm blackly amused to note that national concerns about the US's science program have been ongoing for 20 years; and that these are completely justified by French scientists beating Americans to HIV's discovery by a full year.
AIDS remains "the gay disease" 20 years after Shilts' book, but that's image and not a true reflection of the state of the disease. Human beings may discriminate, but viruses don't give a damn: man, old, young, woman, "wrong" - whatever. "Virus seeks homo sapiens for relationship 'til death do us apart. Threesomes, moresomes likely." Isaac Asimov died from AIDS-related complications in 1992. This wasn't publicly announced until 2002, because - basically - HIV remains stigmatized. So who else do I know - should I know - has this disease? I'm still so blindingly pissed that my community of science fiction fans, the people who claim to be looking to the future, didn't step up and help people have a future, that my brain shuts down and I should probably step away from the keyboard.
Shilts rocks for capturing the helplessness and agonizing deaths of the '80s, and for getting me mad about it 20 years later. Rock on, Randy Shilts, and rest in peace: you did good work on Earth.
Jade Tiger (Jenn Reese): Martial artist Shan Westfall reunites five ancient jade artifacts lost when the all-female Jade Circle was destroyed during her childhood. This would make a rocking awesome wuxia movie! Shen's martial arts skills, the CGI-enhanced "jade animal" fight, the dramatic soundtrack as the action moves across three continents and through multiple wardrobes of high-class awesome - this would be amazing.
As a book, I was entertained for an afternoon on the metro. The romance is as subtle as a gold brick applied between the eyes, but Shen's angst about not living up to her beloved dead mom's perfect example was enjoyably angsty. Sidekick Lydia's fluttery personality is disappointing - I want awesome women, all the time! - but internally consistent. Ian the archaeologist - whose name I had to look up - is cute, in a bland "moneyed, sweet guy who follows you around" way.
The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkein): Reread. I can say nothing that hasn't already been said. I find bits of the movie intruding at times, but that's the consequence of putting a book on screen.
The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle): Fantasy novel. A nameless unicorn leaves her forest when she realizes the other unicorns have vanished from the world. I am missing the bandwagon of book love on this one, possibly because I'm being distracted by insane feminism.
At the feet of the Red Bull there lay a young girl, spilling into a very small heap of light and shadow. She was naked, and her skin was the color of snow by moonlight. Fine tangled hair, white as a waterfall, came down almost to the small of her back. Her face was hidden in her arms.
"Oh," Molly said. "Oh, what have you done?"
Either I have a worldbuilding problem or an insane feminism problem. The unicorn. The breathtakingly beautiful, nameless unicorn, who is desired, and an object worthy of possession, but until she is a woman, is nameless. The only name she has is given to her by the (male) wizard, and only after the king demands the travellers' names. She can be free in the forest, imprisoned, a wanderer, possessed by her forest - she doesn't have much personality of her own. She's framed in terms of humans' desires, and what she can do for others. You can worship a unicorn, but there is very little engagement with the unicorn as an individual. And this immortal, ancient being, when struck by the transmogrifying magic, turns into a delicate-looking girl? Why? Seriously, why not a gorgeous old woman? Why? How does the story change if you do that? Beagle is writing some sort of delicate unicorn coming-of-age, and I. Don't. Care.
Reading The Last Unicorn as a fairy tale or parable, with odd little touches of '68 culture, it's not bad. However, trying to lit-crit the plot and themes drives my inner feminist nuts. If I had read this when I was 8, and burning through Lang's fairy books, or when I read The Little White Horse, I might have liked it much more. (But then, maybe not. I liked tLWH for its embrace of human flaws; tLU considers flaws something to be mended or erased, ugly things to be drowned in the sea, where tLWH is a little more affectionate on the matter. "Talk about sheep. Sir Benjamin would stand for hours in one position talking about sheep." And that Merryweather temper! tLWH is not real, but it's true; tLU is pretty, but neither real nor true to me.)
I'm glad I've checked off another piece of the Western SF/F canon, but I have no real affection for the The Last Unicorn itself.
Rent (Jonathan Larson): The liberetto, with supporting material. I've been listening to the original cast recording since my sister bought it, but I've never seen the play live, and wanted to see what's cut. So I read all the non-libretto parts first. (Hah.) What's striking is how much the Rent's evolution shows Larson's evolution as a composer/writer, from 1989 to 1996. At 35 he was just learning what he could do; he was barely getting started! What's also striking is how many people it takes to put the 15 actors onstage.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Rajiv Chandrasekaran): Nonfiction. Adventures of the Coalition Provisional Authority, 2003-2004. Now that you've read the title, maybe googled around a bit, and noticed it was written by a non-conservative minority journalist, fill in the book's thesis. Now fill in my blinding rage at the good intentions shot down by extraordinary individual and collective examples of not having a plan, and not paying attention on interpersonal, local, and national-to-Iraq levels (to name a few). It burns.
So that's why I was pissed with Republicans stiffing their "number one priority" at the end of December. Chandresakaran fills the book with anecdotes of good intentions thwarted by inexperience - positions going to people with more connections to DC and the White House than experience - and by high-flying plans that weren't necessary. For example, one man's plan to convert Baghdad's chalk-and-chalkboard stock exchange with new anti-corruption regulations and a fully modern electronic exchange was a great idea on paper. Too bad the rickety and underpowered Iraqi electrical system was subject to rolling blackouts, and the Iraqis really just wanted to get back into trading on their chalkboards now. I could recount the botchery of every sort of subcontractor bidding, news distribution in the Green Zone itself and the flawed setup of al-Iraqiya, the national TV channel (lacking good information from the CPA's chosen network, many Iraqis turned to al-Jazeera), the positively criminal failures of the American team assigned to supervise and reform the Iraqi health care system, and the failure of the American executive branch to understand what a big job they'd bitten off when they declared war on a country with an alien culture and crumbling infrastructure.
On a technical level, Chandresakaran shows how the problems the Coalition Provisional Authority faced (and sometimes inadvertently created) interlocked to frustrate American and Iraqi plans. I'm lousy with tracking people across zig-zagging timelines, especially when they only pop up every 50 or 100 pages, so a cast list and timeline would have been frontispiece gold.
I started and ended the month with federal failures to respond to extraordinary circumstances in any reasonable way, sometimes by actively ignoring the people screaming FIRE!: this has not improved my opinion of the GOP's administrative talents. Your party does not determine your integrity, or worthiness for a national or international position, but the GOP's blatant favoritism that rejected experienced, enthusiastic personnel for people with less (or no) experience but the right party line in Iraq is infuriating to me. I remembered that at the polls in 2008 and I will continue to remember it until the Grand Old Party remembers the American values of courage, integrity and acceptance that made it "grand".
Serendipity: Americans return Green Zone to Iraqi control today. It's about time.
So, books!
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (Randy Shilts): Nonficton. Title doubles as description. The human disregard for an infection ravaging a disliked minority group is the real story of AIDS in the '80s. (Or the story that Shilts and others shaped from the raw events of the time. The digression into nonfiction as narrative extracted from reality can wait.) I found a quote from Shilts that he didn't want to know the results of his HIV test until he'd finished writing AtBPO, because he was a journalist Before and After would be a victim. Shilts had covered the gay news scene and HIV for several years, and knew firsthand the power AIDS poster kids like Bobbi Campbell had - and the attention they weren't getting from the National Institutes of Health, congressional Center for Disease Control budget-writers, and the powerfully conservative executive branch. If you weren't gay, you weren't paying attention to the victims. HIV has a variable-to-longish incubation period, and a constellation of early symptoms to mask the onset of full-blown AIDS, but if a group of people less despised had started to suddenly drop dead, would more money have been found for research and treatment?
Shilts does an excellent job of drawing readers into the events of 1982-1987, chronicling the lives and deaths of many excellent people, and the efforts of a small number of underfunded public health workers to combat the epidemic, and the US Department of Health's failure to make a cost-cutting Republican administration deliver on its "number one health priority".
I'm blackly amused to note that national concerns about the US's science program have been ongoing for 20 years; and that these are completely justified by French scientists beating Americans to HIV's discovery by a full year.
AIDS remains "the gay disease" 20 years after Shilts' book, but that's image and not a true reflection of the state of the disease. Human beings may discriminate, but viruses don't give a damn: man, old, young, woman, "wrong" - whatever. "Virus seeks homo sapiens for relationship 'til death do us apart. Threesomes, moresomes likely." Isaac Asimov died from AIDS-related complications in 1992. This wasn't publicly announced until 2002, because - basically - HIV remains stigmatized. So who else do I know - should I know - has this disease? I'm still so blindingly pissed that my community of science fiction fans, the people who claim to be looking to the future, didn't step up and help people have a future, that my brain shuts down and I should probably step away from the keyboard.
Shilts rocks for capturing the helplessness and agonizing deaths of the '80s, and for getting me mad about it 20 years later. Rock on, Randy Shilts, and rest in peace: you did good work on Earth.
Jade Tiger (Jenn Reese): Martial artist Shan Westfall reunites five ancient jade artifacts lost when the all-female Jade Circle was destroyed during her childhood. This would make a rocking awesome wuxia movie! Shen's martial arts skills, the CGI-enhanced "jade animal" fight, the dramatic soundtrack as the action moves across three continents and through multiple wardrobes of high-class awesome - this would be amazing.
As a book, I was entertained for an afternoon on the metro. The romance is as subtle as a gold brick applied between the eyes, but Shen's angst about not living up to her beloved dead mom's perfect example was enjoyably angsty. Sidekick Lydia's fluttery personality is disappointing - I want awesome women, all the time! - but internally consistent. Ian the archaeologist - whose name I had to look up - is cute, in a bland "moneyed, sweet guy who follows you around" way.
The Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkein): Reread. I can say nothing that hasn't already been said. I find bits of the movie intruding at times, but that's the consequence of putting a book on screen.
The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle): Fantasy novel. A nameless unicorn leaves her forest when she realizes the other unicorns have vanished from the world. I am missing the bandwagon of book love on this one, possibly because I'm being distracted by insane feminism.
At the feet of the Red Bull there lay a young girl, spilling into a very small heap of light and shadow. She was naked, and her skin was the color of snow by moonlight. Fine tangled hair, white as a waterfall, came down almost to the small of her back. Her face was hidden in her arms.
"Oh," Molly said. "Oh, what have you done?"
Either I have a worldbuilding problem or an insane feminism problem. The unicorn. The breathtakingly beautiful, nameless unicorn, who is desired, and an object worthy of possession, but until she is a woman, is nameless. The only name she has is given to her by the (male) wizard, and only after the king demands the travellers' names. She can be free in the forest, imprisoned, a wanderer, possessed by her forest - she doesn't have much personality of her own. She's framed in terms of humans' desires, and what she can do for others. You can worship a unicorn, but there is very little engagement with the unicorn as an individual. And this immortal, ancient being, when struck by the transmogrifying magic, turns into a delicate-looking girl? Why? Seriously, why not a gorgeous old woman? Why? How does the story change if you do that? Beagle is writing some sort of delicate unicorn coming-of-age, and I. Don't. Care.
Reading The Last Unicorn as a fairy tale or parable, with odd little touches of '68 culture, it's not bad. However, trying to lit-crit the plot and themes drives my inner feminist nuts. If I had read this when I was 8, and burning through Lang's fairy books, or when I read The Little White Horse, I might have liked it much more. (But then, maybe not. I liked tLWH for its embrace of human flaws; tLU considers flaws something to be mended or erased, ugly things to be drowned in the sea, where tLWH is a little more affectionate on the matter. "Talk about sheep. Sir Benjamin would stand for hours in one position talking about sheep." And that Merryweather temper! tLWH is not real, but it's true; tLU is pretty, but neither real nor true to me.)
I'm glad I've checked off another piece of the Western SF/F canon, but I have no real affection for the The Last Unicorn itself.
Rent (Jonathan Larson): The liberetto, with supporting material. I've been listening to the original cast recording since my sister bought it, but I've never seen the play live, and wanted to see what's cut. So I read all the non-libretto parts first. (Hah.) What's striking is how much the Rent's evolution shows Larson's evolution as a composer/writer, from 1989 to 1996. At 35 he was just learning what he could do; he was barely getting started! What's also striking is how many people it takes to put the 15 actors onstage.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Rajiv Chandrasekaran): Nonfiction. Adventures of the Coalition Provisional Authority, 2003-2004. Now that you've read the title, maybe googled around a bit, and noticed it was written by a non-conservative minority journalist, fill in the book's thesis. Now fill in my blinding rage at the good intentions shot down by extraordinary individual and collective examples of not having a plan, and not paying attention on interpersonal, local, and national-to-Iraq levels (to name a few). It burns.
So that's why I was pissed with Republicans stiffing their "number one priority" at the end of December. Chandresakaran fills the book with anecdotes of good intentions thwarted by inexperience - positions going to people with more connections to DC and the White House than experience - and by high-flying plans that weren't necessary. For example, one man's plan to convert Baghdad's chalk-and-chalkboard stock exchange with new anti-corruption regulations and a fully modern electronic exchange was a great idea on paper. Too bad the rickety and underpowered Iraqi electrical system was subject to rolling blackouts, and the Iraqis really just wanted to get back into trading on their chalkboards now. I could recount the botchery of every sort of subcontractor bidding, news distribution in the Green Zone itself and the flawed setup of al-Iraqiya, the national TV channel (lacking good information from the CPA's chosen network, many Iraqis turned to al-Jazeera), the positively criminal failures of the American team assigned to supervise and reform the Iraqi health care system, and the failure of the American executive branch to understand what a big job they'd bitten off when they declared war on a country with an alien culture and crumbling infrastructure.
On a technical level, Chandresakaran shows how the problems the Coalition Provisional Authority faced (and sometimes inadvertently created) interlocked to frustrate American and Iraqi plans. I'm lousy with tracking people across zig-zagging timelines, especially when they only pop up every 50 or 100 pages, so a cast list and timeline would have been frontispiece gold.
I started and ended the month with federal failures to respond to extraordinary circumstances in any reasonable way, sometimes by actively ignoring the people screaming FIRE!: this has not improved my opinion of the GOP's administrative talents. Your party does not determine your integrity, or worthiness for a national or international position, but the GOP's blatant favoritism that rejected experienced, enthusiastic personnel for people with less (or no) experience but the right party line in Iraq is infuriating to me. I remembered that at the polls in 2008 and I will continue to remember it until the Grand Old Party remembers the American values of courage, integrity and acceptance that made it "grand".
Serendipity: Americans return Green Zone to Iraqi control today. It's about time.