stuff i read 9 february 2020
I actually watched Marriage Story this week and I'm confused about why it's so ~controversial when it's straight-up anti-divorce-lawyer propaganda?? If there is one thing we as a society can agree on it's our hatred of divorce lawyers.
Also watched the Taylor Swift documentary and I gotta say my problem with it was not that it was performative and fake, it was that it was boring and basic and I guess if I wanted to actually learns something about how female artists navigate the shark-infested waters of the music industry I'd just rewatch Nashville lol
don't think i mentioned this on here buti saw Knives Out and it was, as advertised, fucking brilliant. sometimes good movies are good because they activate some emotion or thought process you’d never have imagined on your own; THIS movie though? i wanted an “eat the rich” movie that was also mega hella entertaining and Rian Johnson delivered it to me in SPADES
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944) Historically the market has been subordinate to, or an appendage of, society. Along came the 19th century to upset that applecart. You can’t substitute “pecuniary gain” for “social relationships” as the organizing principle of human activity without causing strife, dislocation, and suffering on a planetary scale-Polanyi calls it a “cataclysm.” Karl Polanyi is a thinker of titanic stature and his ideas have dribbled down to me via so many other thinkers that by the time I encountered the source they were well chewed over. I also think the level of granular detail we got about, say, parliamentary machinations in Prussia was of limited utility to the average lay reader. However, as far as the big picture goes, Polanyi’s work holds up. He’s so prescient that his entire final chapter is “the center cannot hold, it’s either socialism or fascism.” Another way of putting it is that, contra Econ 101, “society” is metaphysically upstream of “the individual.” It’s nonsensical to speak of “the government” meddling in “the market”: There is no market without society. It is because the market is embedded in society that we had to totally overhaul our social relations just so that market values could reign supreme. Sidenote: it’s fascinating that during the apocalyptic (in terms of how it decimated communities) transition to a market-based society you saw a lot of strange bedfellows-for instance, landlords and peasants arrayed against industrialists.
Seanan McGuire, The Unkindest Tide (2019) (October Daye #13) It’s the selkie book! Following on the heels of the Tam Lin book. It’s another Luidaeg-centric one. No lie this book is 35% Luidaeg and I’m digging it bc I relate to her sense of humor. It’s not that I don’t think Seaman McGuire’s funny; but she’s not as funny as she thinks she is, and wow does Quentin get more than his fair share of zingers. This book carries over many of the thematic concerns of the previous book, only with less “healing from trauma” and more “this is a how-not-to-parent manual.” The cruelest line was when tertiary character Liz Ryan spat at Toby, “You’re lucky one of us knows how to be a mother.” I mean OUCH. There’s a moment when Toby registers her own culpability in this clusterfuck-that she’s repeated her own mother’s mistakes by raising her own daughter to expect one set of rules where an entirely different set actually applies. Sometimes I think about that tumblr shitpost about how Frodo had to leave for the Grey Havens bc they don’t have therapists on Middle Earth …but surely they have therapists in San Francisco??? Why don’t Toby, Tybalt et al take advantage of said therapists??? What I liked: that in a world of unequal bargains and unpayable debts volition still matters; that humans understand change less well than the fae because they’re born & die in the same bodies-it’s axiomatic that mortality=change so this role-reversal felt very fresh, and seems to constitute an anti-Cartesian argument for an embodied existence (it’s literally a book about selkies). What I disliked: When the character beats hit in this series, they REALLY hit (I’m still recovering from the Simon book). Otoh everything in between is kind of wobbly. You notice it more in minor books like this precisely because there aren’t as many major beats to anchor it.
Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings (2015) (Dandelion Dynasty #1) Less than the sum of its parts. I’m circulating a petition to make Ken Liu write fairy tale retellings and only fairy tale retellings, who’s with me. The man is so good at this one thing that you wonder why he bothers doing anything else (I jest, I jest; I do not at all wonder that he tried his hand at epic fantasy rather than spend the rest of his life regretting the missed opportunity). It wasn’t that I didn’t get attached to the characters, but they’d get their heads lopped off as soon as I learned their names (or self-immolate in some other messy fashion). In theory I’m receptive to the idea of vignettes featuring one-off POVs building toward a larger story-I have, in fact, read Water Margin which is one of the ur-texts this novel is in conversation with, since it’s about BANDITS and OUTLAWS resisting an empire-but for pete’s sake there needs to be more connective tissue than this. I found our main Guile Hero, Kuni Garu, to be irresistible but by himself he was not up to the task of making the whole book hang together. Ken Liu excels at the kind of cruel reversals and bittersweet triumphs that epitomize fairy tales; even his politicking reads like parables (the antelope/horse episode!!!). But short stories are like carving a miniature figurine of fixed dimensions-you have to fit the story to the container. Novels give you a lot more latitude in designing the shape of the container but the tradeoff is you may suffer decision fatigue from having to make all these CHOICES about what to put in it. I know Ken Liu is aware of this because he’s talked about it in a blog post. Quite a gap between theory and praxis, there. I DNF’d it at 50%, life is too short and this book is too long.
Steven Brust, Teckla (1987) (Vlad Taltos #3) 3 books into a series about internecine elf mafia wars I was not expecting to be crying about a fight I had with my husband; Vlad and Cawti fight the way married people fight. I wasn’t expecting to be singing “Solidarity Forever” either. Teckla is the book where assimilationist Vlad’s revolutionary wife joins an anarchist cell, puts her body in the gears of the machine and Vlad loses half his hair from stress. I kept waiting for Brust to commit to one side or the other-can violent insurrection ever change an oppressive status quo? Does class struggle get the goods or not? Is Cawti right that strength lies in numbers & organizing the masses, or is Vlad right to be apprehensive of a paramilitary crackdown (it is after all what they did to Occupy Wall Street)? I had written Cawti off in the previous books as merely a useful sounding board for Vlad to bounce ideas off (to say Brust has a heavy hand with romance is perhaps to understate the case). Imagine my surprise when in this book she has sincere ideological commitments where Vlad has only a very Slytherin commitment to protecting the people who belong to him. The contrast does Vlad no favors. He was ready to blow up dozens of innocent people to “save” her, until he met Frantz the Ghost (which btw raises interesting worldbuilding questions about reincarnation & souls). This supposed contradiction he touts between putting abstract ideals first and putting actual people first majorly annoyed me until someone (Kelly) finally called Vlad out on it. Honestly if anybody is devaluing human lives here it is Vlad, who was about to assassinate a house full of people who have done him no harm. Kelly points out, quite rightly, “for Easterners and Teckla in this world, these aren’t problems an individual can solve” and Vlad “Bootstraps” Taltos shoots back “I’m an individual. I solved them. I got out of there and made something of myself.” Ok buddy way to miss the point. This is a world where ten-year-olds (Natalia) are reduced to pickpocketing to survive. I don’t think the narrative comes down as strongly on the revolutionaries’ side as I would, but it sure doesn’t permit Vlad to persist in the delusion that he can refuse to pick a side. I’m dying to know what happened in the decades-ago uprising that took Vlad’s grandma’s life, and apparently turned Vlad’s dad into a reactionary, and why Vlad’s grandpa thinks that conflict was unavoidable but this one is ill-advised? I loved seeing Vlad’s Ravenclaw Secondary side which caused him physical pain when he had to change a plan at the last minute lmao. I missed Morrolan and Aliera, if only for the group dynamic born of long association-in the last book I remember Aliera threatening to do something stupid and/or wave a big stick around, and Vlad and Morrolan being entirely unmoved by her theatrics, and Vlad assuring newcomer Cawti it was fine, just Aliera being Aliera. I think Kragar is the real MVP and deserves a big fat raise & some stock options for working what sounds like 80 hour weeks at a critical time for the organization. I’m starting to get a better handle on Loiash, too-seeing a cross-section of Dragaeran society brings it home to me how lonely Vlad the Perpetual Outsider must’ve been all these years, and as a support system Loiash isn’t perfect but he’s a sight better than nothing. In conclusion SOLIDARITY FOREVER (for the union makes us strong).