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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3857 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

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So, what are you reading?

Still on This Star of England.

Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread starts off as a surprisingly typical communist screed, but it starts distinguishing itself after it denies the labour theory of value, saying that new forms of production must yield new forms of consumption. An interesting discussion of liberty soon follows. He has a keen eye to underappreciated people, which ameliorates his otherwise combative style.

I just recently read Empire of the Vampire which was... mm, decent verging on good. I've found myself drawn to the world-weary adult protagonist recently and this fit the bill. Unfortunately it felt like a rip off of too many things. A rip of Castlevania, a rip of Bloodborne, and a rip of Last of Us, all sandwiched together. I appreciated the French motif, but the back-and-forth storytelling style was jarring at times. The purported reasoning as to why the narrator was explaining certain subjects that would be common knowledge in universe was reasonably well done, but not enforced enough and there were several questions that were only answered in a more traditional storytelling manner. Which is fine, but it was annoying to have on one hand compelled explanations of in-universe commonalities, and then narrative-led discussions of other commonalities, while still trying to maintain a level of "well of course you don't know what that means it's an in-universe term you have to pick up through context clues."

Glad I picked it up on Kindle Unlimited, probably won't pay the $15 for the sequel.

I am still going through my detective novels with female protagonists. Now on my second Carlotta Carlyle novel.

What’s the list so far? Any particular recs?

I haven’t read much detective fiction outside of original Holmes. Finding one of Lindsey Davis’ Marcus Didius Falco novels was good; I understand she went on to write a sequel series with a female protagonist. Then there was Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead. Great, but more of a legal drama than detective work. Plus, you know, necromancy.

Just started Ruocchio’s Empire of Silence.

On one hand, it rubs me the wrong way: it feels like a sausage made of three parts Frank Herbert (brazenly stolen tropes: parallel backstory to the Butlerian Jihad with tech limitations and mentats, a galactic empire with rigid classes, personal shields against high velocity weapons, family atomics) to one part Gene Wolfe (first person with an overload of archaic vocabulary. Too early to tell, but I’m about certain that the narrator will turn out to be unreliable as well), with an epsilon of originality in the casing. Or maybe there’s a third influence I’ve never encountered that I’m mistaking for originality.

On the other hand, it is interesting and more accessible than either influence so far.

Edit: Maybe more Wolfe than I thought. The genetically engineered nobility reflects The Fifth Head of Cerberus and its clones.

I read Empire of Silence and had the same feelings you do. There's an extensive appendix and glossary at the back of the book, and I regret not reading them before I started. They provide a lot of much-needed context that made the book -- for me, when I was about 75% done -- more enjoyable.

For Howling Dark, I read the glossary and appendix, and, boy, I'm glad I did because there's a bit of a time jump with explanations of some major events that are mentioned in passing in the story.

John McPhee’s Basin and Range. First in a series of essays in which the author crosses the country, searching each highway roadcut for evidence of the geologic history of our continent.

He’s an incredible prose stylist, but his options are constrained by the jargon of this particular field. When you’re in the right headspace for the awe of Deep Time, it works: a fantasy doorstopper, citing without irony its Ordovician Period and sending the protagonists after Zeolites or Unconformities. When you aren’t, well, you could probably do some clench racing. (If this describes you, but you’re curious about McPhee, start with Levels of the Game. I don’t even like tennis.) Fortunately, I’ve been in the correct frame of mind, so I’ve really enjoyed it.

Looking forward to the second essay, In Suspect Terrain, where he dives into the controversies of early plate tectonics. That means the mid-20th-century, because apparently what I assumed was settled 1800s science only really got started in the nuclear age. I predict this will be very validating for some of our resident contrarians.

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Picked it up because it is a "classic" and supposedly provides a view to pre-WW1 European civilization (from point of view post-WW1 disillusioned intellectual).

I have troubles reading it, it is superbly boring. Plot-wise, nothing interesting happens. Castorp, nominal protagonist, is both boring and detestable. Reading it has been a depressing affair: perhaps 5 pages at one go and I feel cravings to read anything else. Sometimes boring characters can be salvaged by inspired writing and humor or irony, but alas, I see no such redeeming qualities. Major disappointment after Buddenbrooks, which was quite readable with all the family drama.

I got House of Leaves from the library a couple of weeks ago, which at my current rate I might be done with by Christmas. I can't think of any book that has killed my initial enthusiasm so thoroughly. The premise is quite compelling: our protagonist discovers among the belongings of a recently deceased eccentric man a strange manuscript, about a series of events at a spooky house. The house isn't spooky because there's a ghost in the attic, but because it has non-euclidean properties. The manuscript is the meat novel, with a B-side story running through the extremely lengthy footnotes. The footnotes frequently disrupt the flow whilst being insubstantial. The novel itself digresses with lengthy tangents that at one point the footnotes meta-suggest aren't actually even worth reading. I'm hoping this is just a brief slump, because I am not going to make it otherwise.

I also started reading Etidorhpa. I am a sucker for strange journeys, so despite generally bouncing off this era of proto-scifi I am giving it a shot.

I read House of Leaves during high school. I enjoyed The Navidson Record, but I didn't care for the Truant and Zampanò elements. I ended up skimming the footnotes.

Yeah, I had pretty much the same experience. The footnotes are boring, and Johnny Truant doesn't really have much of a story to him. The meat of the book is in the story of the house.

I also agree with @5434a that the book is kind of overindulgent. The author really wanted to play around with the structure of a book, but I didn't really find it added anything (with some rare exceptions). It's the sort of thing that appeals to college students who are like "this is so deep, maaaaan"*, but outside of that audience I think it falls kind of flat.

*I read the book in college so I'm not just being mean here, lol. I had some peers who were so enchanted by the book's gimmick that they thought we should be reading it for classes rather than classics of literature. It's pretty funny to me in hindsight.

I can see why younger readers might be impressed, it's a moderately clever conceit. It's less impressive if you've experienced any kind of meta-text before. Layering additional meta-texts on top only subtracted from the sum of its parts, which is ironic in the context of writing about a house that is larger than its external dimensions (with the extra irony that the book itself is physically larger than a typical fiction book). Less would have been more.

House of Leaves is a decent enough idea that overindulges itself in itself. If you reach a point where you've had enough then you've probably had all the meat off the bones and won't miss much by carrying on.

That is unfortunate, I'll keep your comment in mind.

Just started Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion. I came for the philosophical musings on pseudo-environments and manufactured consent, but I am staying for the detailed accounts of how the WWI propaganda sausage was made.

Again I was given a book, this one fiction, called Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, or the book the film is based on. I am 4 chapters in and I am already dreading the rest of it. The story, the plot itself, is fine-- interesting even. But the author's writing style sets my teeth on edge.

Example passage:

Ah. Dr. Grace. You look refreshed." She gestured to her left. "There's food on the credenza."

And there was! Rice, steamed buns, deep-fried dough sticks, and an urn of coffee. I rushed over and helped myself. I was hungry as heck."

The "hungry as heck" bug you? It does me. And he does this throughout the 1st person narrative. Now I don't need swear words to feel realism, but if you want to eliminate epithets, just go without. He doesn't. It's like reading a book written by a Sunday school teacher for ten-year olds, which might be fine if it weren't ostensibly a story based in science. The humor is equally twee and grating. I am rarely this annoyed by a writer's style. Ok that's not true I am often annoyed by writers' styles but rarely like this.

There is a maxim for writers: show, don't tell

show: I rushed over and helped myself.

The reader learns from the hurry that the person was hungry, just as though the reader had seen the unseemly haste himself and inferred the hunger.

tell: I was hungry as heck.

Aaargh! Don't "show then tell"

Andy Weir writes like a Redditor, and it shows. Truly a shame.

I think this is more the character he was trying to write, rather than a consistent issue with the author. He wanted to write a goofy two shoes who would rather be a teacher than a top researcher.

While I enjoyed the puzzle in Project Hail Mary, The Martian is a superior book.

Very well could be, I admittedly have not read any other Weir work. It's driving me nuts though.

Using this kind of voice is an iffy proposition. I happen to like Holden Caulfield but I understand now how some people viscerally dislike him and by extension Catcher in the Rye.

The "hungry as heck" bug you? It does me. And he does this throughout the 1st person narrative. Now I don't need swear words to feel realism, but if you want to eliminate epithets, just go without.

To me the use of "heck" rather than a stronger epithet or swear word is indicating that the hunger is significant, but in a safe or comic way rather than a serious one. Similar, I'd view "scary as heck" as describing a safe scare that someone was comfortable with vs "scary as hell/fuck" where I'd be worried that someone was actually seriously scared and possibly in need of support.

I don't disagree. I just find the constant use of these terms unnecessarily childish. Why not say "I was ravenous"? "I was suddenly keenly aware of my own hunger" "I had reached the table and brought a bun to my mouth before I had even thought about it"? Or any of a dozen other ways to write the sentence?

I don't know if you have read Weir, but this book at least is replete with a goofy humor that for me at least falls very flat. He is a bestseller so maybe there's a wide audience for this type of writing. I'm not part of it.

The protagonist a scientist burnout who literally became a children's school teacher. His train of thought is not quite "Sunday School teacher for ten-year olds", because that's the sort of person who may just never start cursing to begin with, but it's pretty solid as "late-career-change teacher for eleven-year olds", because that's the sort of person who may find themselves at work saying "What the he ... ck" so often that the euphemisms replace the original habit.

To each their own, though. I didn't like his second book, Artemis, for what I thought of as an incoherence along those lines; the main plot could have come out of a 1950 Boy's Life sci-fi adventure, while one or two of the side plots were R-rated, so it didn't work for me as adult fiction or young adult.

But in Hail Mary the goofy humor is what keeps the whole thing tonally coherent for me; it bridges the gap between the very dark plot points (where it works as gallows humor) and the very lighthearted plot points (where it works straight).

Dave Rubin's Don't Burn This Book. Mostly a familiar portrait of another "I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me" case, which once again illustrates that just because you've been kicked out for failing to keep up with the perpetual revolution, that doesn't actually make you "right wing." (Rubin drops the classic 'Nazis were actually from the left because socialist' argument, too, and at one point uses the phrase "the left's soft bigotry of low expectations.")

Rubin drops the classic 'Nazis were actually from the left because socialist' argument, too

Is he necessarily wrong?

I don't think there's a coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing. Yes they were the nSdap but the word "socialism" has forever and always held a flexibility which lets anyone and everyone use it as they please. Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist." To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.

Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist."

This is not appreciably different from Stalin's view of "socialism", or Mao's, or Pol Pot's, to my understanding. I've seen no historical examples where theory was actually load-bearing in any sort of grand sense. Like, there's nothing actually in Marx that requires lysenkoism or any other specific evolution. Stalin beats trotsky and bukharin not because he has a better understanding of Marxist theory, but because he's crueler, more paranoid, and more vicious, and these are in actual fact the traits that Marxism rewards. The theory is word-game Calvin-ball; you can get from Das Kapital to whatever arbitrary power-structure you prefer, there are no actual constraints beyond momentary, relative expedience.

To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.

"We know how to solve all our problems. Problems that aren't solved are the fault of specific people with names and addresses." It does not seem to me that "Class Struggle" is appreciably more real in any meaningful sense than "race struggle", and they both boil down to fixing everything by purging the bad people. That's the obvious commonality between the two, and between them and the French Revolution as well.

The NSDAP were a socialist revolutionary vanguard party. To the degree that there is no "coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing" it is even less coherent to pass them of as "right wing". Sure they were vaguely center-right with in the specific context of the Wiemar Rebulic but that's more an indication of how much of a basket-case German interwar period politics were rather than a commentary on the Nazis themselves.

Outside of the Wiemar Republic the various NSDAP-aligned bund groups tended to code as far left and would often caucus with and recruit from thier more explicity socialist/marx-inspired brethren.

Is he necessarily wrong?

Yes, if you have a passing familiarity with Weimar-era politics. The Nazis' allies were right-wingers - primarily Hugenberg's DNVP, but also the right-wing faction of Zentrum that included Bruning and Papen (until he was kicked out for being too right-wing) and various right-coded figures in Hindenberg's inner circle (particularly Schleicher, who favoured a military government once it became clear that a DNVP-led government was never going to win a majority in the Reichstag). The Nazi's sworn enemies were left-wingers (both the SPD and the KPD, although the Nazis occasionally co-operated with the KPD on purely negative projects intended to weaken the Weimar Republic).

Nobody who was around at the time had the slightest shadow of a doubt that Hitler was right-wing. Some of the more perceptive liberals, and even a few perceptive democratic socialists (like Orwell) grokked that the difference between left-wing and right-wing totalitarianism was less important than it looked - but even Orwell writes from the perspective that the right-left and right-wrong axes are separate, and that Nazis were right-wrong and Communists were left-wrong.

although the Nazis occasionally co-operated with the KPD on purely negative projects intended to weaken the Weimar Republic).

The sheer buffoonery of the KPD is a constant source of amazement for me. From labeling every other party in the Weimar Republic fascist - including a multitude of other left-wing socialist parties - to declaring the Social Democrats their primary enemies and "social fascists" while begrudgingly cooperating with the literal fascist NDSAP.

My understanding is that they were acting on orders from Moscow in all those cases. So they only looked like buffoons.

According to Communist doctrine, the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes possible when the capitalist regime is undone by its inherent internal contradictions and can no longer sustain itself. German Communists believed that the NSDAP are simply the goons of the capitalist class and will inexorably contribute to this process with their antics, so temporarily cooperating with them on certain matters* and egging them on in general was seen as acceptable, as it serves the final goal. "The worse, the better."

Again, I'm not making this up. The KPD leadership were actually convinced that the Nazis will be incapable of consolidating their rule once they seize power, because the revolution will certainly follow.

Also, the SocDems were the main political power in the Weimar regime, at least until its final years. Since the Communists wanted to topple this burgeois republic, they saw the SocDems as the main enemy, as they were the main political obstacle. They also, of course, saw them as the dirty traitors of the Revolution of 1918-19. In reality, of course, there was nothing for the SocDems to betray, as they never signed up for a violent revolution to overthrow the capitalist order in the first place.

*I remember finding in an otherwise forgettable history book pictures of a rent strike co-organized by the local NSDAP and KPD party leaders in November 1932 in Berlin, with their respective banners put up next to one another on the forefronts, to just give one example. I couldn't find anything about it online though.

Finished playwright Neil Simon’s two-part autobiography earlier this week (Rewrites and The Play Goes On). I knew he had been prolific and successful, but the scale of his success from 1965-1995 was quite surprising to read about in detail; the reader comes away with the perception that Simon was perhaps the most influential figure in playwriting since Shakespeare… as a cultural icon, at least. Equally surprising is the observation that Simon’s work and influence has almost completely disappeared from the modern zeitgeist, both in the theatre and the culture at large. Contemporary satires with ethnic supporting characters that lampoon the male-female divide were once the default in plot writing (and perhaps made so by Simon’s early work), but now seem so dated that they feel more archaic and emblematic of a bygone age than the comedies that long preceded them (The Importance of Being Earnest, Blithe Spirit, Arsenic and Old Lace, etc.).

Now on to The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II, an intimate personal glimpse into a time when a Republican could be the most beloved figure in the theatre industry. I have a tendency to map my own life progression onto the people I read about (I imagine this is a common habit, foolish as it is), and it’s encouraging that OH2 made his greatest work in his late 40s and early 50s (granted, he’d written about 30 Broadway shows by then, but in this case, ”it was a different time” is the understatement of the century).

Interesting (or maybe expected) that after reading a playwright's autobiography you'd come away with the impression that he was a modern-day Shakespeare. I have seen only film versions of a few of Simon's plays, and Biloxi Blues in particular annoyed me (mostly because no one on the production crew apparently knew how a Mississippian would pronounce "Biloxi.")

(Bih LUX ee, not Buh LOX ee.)

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