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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2808 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Future Shock, The Cheese and the Worms and Scaramouche.

Lethal Injection by Jim Nesbit. After the monster tome that was The Goldfinch I wanted something accessible and short, and hardboiled/noir fiction is my preferred wheelhouse for that sort of thing. One of the blurbs was from James Ellroy (<3) and another said it was like "Kafka meets Jim Thompson", which sold me.

I'm a few chapters in. It's from the perspective of doctor supervising a Texas execution by (you guessed it) lethal injection. The execution is complete, but the doctor is starting to worry that the condemned might have been innocent. Comparisons with Jim Thompson are apt, Nesbit is eloquent and it's darkly humorous: "Royce had prescribed Mencken enough Valium to tranquilize ten out-of-work actresses."

Adding a second reply here, because I had an interesting CW-ish experience over the weekend.

One of my church's book clubs read Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman this month, and yesterday we had the discussion at the church. As you can probably imagine, apart from me - a 35-year-old man - the book clubs consists exclusively of women aged 50 to 90.

Anyway, I enjoyed that book immensely. It is the autobiography of a white woman called Mary Hamilton, who lived in the Mississippi Delta around the turn of the 20th century; she married a timber man named Frank, and worked ridiculously hard her whole life to keep her family alive and fed, surviving natural disasters and the early deaths of four children. They lived on the very edge of civilization, mostly in wild country, far even from any neighbors. I absolutely couldn't put the book down. Every page brought either a new threat to life, or the practice of a cultural custom that has now just about faded out of memory. I would recommend it unreservedly to anyone with an interest in the real business of how the American continent was settled, or in how ordinary people lived outside of cities, just over 100 years ago.

Now, Mary Hamilton does relate a number of encounters with black people. The descendants of slaves, freed some 50 years prior to the story, were building up their own lives in Mississippi and Arkansas, where Mary spends much of the book. She honestly describes black criminals and black nurses, neighbors and scoundrels, men, women and children, young and elderly; she relates good ones and evil ones, she talks about racial conflicts that occasionally would spring up, and she transcibes their patterns of speech as she heard them. She does use the N-word and many variants thereof, but in an entirely natural way that reflects how they were referred to at that time, in that place As far as I could see, Mary Hamilton had no special racial prejudice, but neither was she a particular supporter of black improvement or uplifting. She was simply focused on keeping her family alive.

In the book club, we were asked to give a 1-10 rating of the book. I gave it an honest 10 - too generous perhaps, I admit it's not an utter classic of all-time, but that's how much I enjoyed reading it, definitely. But the woman next to me would go no higher than 6. She said, "Every time [Hamilton] started talking about black people, I cringed. There was an incident where there was a black convict who escaped from the prison, and the police chased him down and beat on him, and I just couldn't stand that. I don't like to think about that. I loved the hard-working pioneer spirit stuff, but I kept cringing and cringing when she would use the N-word, or write the way they talked where they sound all ignorant."

I said, "I wouldn't say that I found that completely enjoyable, but I felt like reading it enhanced my understanding of life in those days. I wouldn't want those parts to be cut out." She responded that she wouldn't want to recommend the book to black people she knew because of those passages; and that furthermore, she didn't watch the news because she didn't want to know about bad things that are happening.

A lively discussion ensued on this topic generally, and to my surprise I think more of the women had my view, than that of my interlocutor. But still, I had never heard someone express that so directly before: that if it's bad, they don't want to be aware of it; and if it portrays black people badly, they don't want to read it. I have a little bit of sympathy for the first point - the world can produce negativity longer than you can remain sane if you have unlimited empathy, and maybe it's healthier not to dwell on that stuff. For the second, though, I got the sense that she felt it was "punching down" to portray poor blacks as they really lived around 1900; and I just find that nuts. I believe there is a strain in our culture that want to see all minorities as wise and saintly people we should look up to, instead of being complex people, some of whom are smart, some stupid, some evil, some virtuous. It results in a highly inaccurate understanding of the world.

There was an incident where there was a black convict who escaped from the prison, and the police chased him down and beat on him, and I just couldn't stand that.

I'm not a sociologist but I'm sure it's almost a small miracle that police were even available then and there to chase him town, instead of an armed group of vigilante citizens who'd have hanged him on the first tree after one or two rounds of torture, which I'm also sure was a completely normal course of events. I wonder how many suburban middle-class normies are even aware that poor and remote communities had little to no police force throughout history.

It's interesting to me that even here, we self censor around the use mention distinction.

On this forum, I'm less concerned about giving offense, and more concerned that spelling out the N-word will make readers think I'm trying to be "edgy" on purpose; which reduces the odds of their being willing to have a serious discussion with me.

For better or worse, I can't write anything without imagining what it will make the reader think.

Yes, you're right, but I find that depressing, that we aren't beyond the use-mention distinction, or that we (collectively) have not done enough to convince you that we are.

It's amazing to me the way that being offended by words, by profanity, was understood broadly as a sign of small-mindedness when I was growing up among the right-thinking progressives, who have no turned around and imposed a new sense of closed mindedness on us, a confusing and race-caste based system to close thought.

So, what are you reading?

Finished The Diamond Age: some interesting thoughts on child rearing, nanotechnology, and AI. A bit ironic to be reading it on a Kindle, although not one equipped with an LLM to tell me a custom story — give it a few years. The neo-Victorian aesthetic was an interesting touch (modern culture comparisons to Victorianism are a bit en vogue these days). I see how that was supposed to contrast with the orgies of the Drummers, even though, to me, the latter felt pretty out of place in the novel otherwise.

Started A Fire Upon the Deep. Not far enough to have an opinion.

I did finish Surface Detail, which I mentioned a bit ago.

The book picked up a bit in the middle for me. I still considered it enjoyable. Maybe a 3/5?

One thing that really hit me after the completion is one thing that attracts me to this series overall though and I think will get me through Hydrogen Sonata, is that there's a comfort in knowing that The Culture will always win. Always. Yes a main character (or two, or three...) will die at the end, but the Minds and the Ships will triumph in the end. A story has a catch-22 where the consequences have to seem real and significant, but if the book ends with the bad guy getting off scott free then I'm left unfulfilled, or at least a little twinge in my adolescent morality tummy.

Even with that attitude, I found the end of the novel cloying and the characters more obviously good and evil than before. It was published in 10, so of course, it was tainted by the CW. The main antagonist is a super rich asshole who, despite having access to unlimited top tier sex with polymorphic hookers also happens to be a rapist. A ship also tortures and rapes a man continuously, but then is given a clean bill of moral health by wiping his memory. Another primary antagonist is literally a conservative elephant who wants to maintain virtual hell.

Then, to top it all off, the book ends in a way I would supposedly enjoy, but is too much even for me. The Culture decides, after the antagonist decides to end the eternal suffering of trillions in Hell, that they still should go ahead and let the woman he had enslaved kill him. A commenter mentioned previously how bad each of the epilogues are in these books, but wow this one was even more of a doozy than usual.

In any case, I probably have another 6 hours of reading to at least knock out the complete series. I think that's worth the investment before I pivot back to the Goodreads list full of great suggestions from here and a stint of "good for me" nonfiction.

I pivot back to the Goodreads list full of great suggestions from here

Do you have a link to the list? Somehow I've never come across it.

Sorry - this is my personal list of what I've curated from random threads about books over the years. A suggested reading list would be interesting, but I can't help but think it would be sprawling.

I'm still reading And The Band Played On. Probably want to hold more extended commentary until after I finish it, but I am pleasantly surprised so far that it's not at all a dunk against Reaganist budget thriftiness specifically. Nobody looks particularly good in this story, and it seems that the gay community itself and the Federal administrators behaved far more irresponsibly. It's definitely interesting to compare the reaction to the rabid panic associated with Covid-19.

Reading it recently I was struck by the extent to which the reaction to COVID (lockdown places where it might be transmitted over the objections of libertarians until money shoveled towards vaccination pays off) were what should have been done during AIDS but wasn't.

Or more recently, monkeypox. Temporarily shut down gay bars and clubs to stop the spread of an infectious disease which disproportionately impacts gay men? No way, not a chance. Temporarily shut all bars and clubs (including gay cars bars) to stop the spread of an infectious disease? A-OK.

Edit: it was an autocorrect, but dogging is a thing guys!

gay cars

I dunno about that one; EVs and Priuses were still relatively common on the road coincident with the uncommon cold.

Currently reading Germinal by Emile Zola.

I love it. I love the subject matter - any story about miners, factory workers, farmers etc. gets me going. And Zola has a great, engaging writing style, full of rich images and sharp emotion.

I watched the movie version of this in high school, and have a scene burned in my brain where a baker (?) Falls off a roof and has his genitals cut off and stuffed in his mouth. Is that in the book?

Ahahaha I'm not there yet if it is. Can't wait lmao.

Oh uh....spoilers, I'm sorry

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