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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   3519 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm trying to finish Alan Watt's The Wisdom of Insecurity. I wasn't impressed the first time I tried it, but his work on Zen changed my image of him in a positive way. Still slowly going through my backlog.

Just finished In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz I found this in a Free Little Library in Baltimore where I live and picked it up because I lived in Israel in 2019 and heard good things about the author, Amos Oz who is a famous fiction writer in Israel. This isn't your usual Amos Oz book, or even a work of fiction. Rather, it is a group of roughly transcribed interviews of Jews and Arabs across the territory of Israel, including the occupied West Bank, in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon War, and the phalangist massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut (for more on this war I would recommend the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir: I have never seen an animation style like it, and it also follows a similar interview format to this book).

These interviews serve to highlight the diversity of opinion and culture among the Jews and Arabs of Israel and the occupied territories. The book opens with a description of the ultra-orthodox demographic takeover of the old city of Jerusalem, follows a winding route through the newly occupied West Bank (where Jewish settlements have already sprung up), the Galilee, and endsin the city of Ashdod on the Medditerranean Sea. Oz is an anti-nationalist former Labour Party member who favors a two (and eventually one) state solution, but he honors the opinions of all the people he interviews (even the crazy, unnamed Z who advocates for explicit genocide against all Arabs, not just the ones in Palestine) by transcribing their words truthfully, and not distorting their arguments with his own judgements. Everyone, including the afformentioned Z, came off as rational under the strokes of Oz’s pen, and at least somewhat sympathetic.

This book should shatter your conceptions of the entirety of Israel or the Jewish people as some kind of elite mastermind class controlling global events or a people who want to take over the entire Middle East. There are certainly some Jews who advocate for that: the citizens of the newly minted Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, as well as Z, certainly do so. Others, like the Ultra-Orthdox in Jerusalem have no interest in such worldly things, or frankly anything other than studying Torah. Kibbutzniks, like Oz and the “Cosmic Jew” he interviews in the last chapter of the book, are more distraught about the influence of American money and weapons on destroying the original agrarian character of the Zionist movement, while still others, many who live in Tel Aviv, basically just want to party and be secular Westerners.

In the 40 years since this book was written, many things have changed. There is now a wall between Israel and the West Bank, settlements have sprung up all over Judea and Samaria, and slowly but surely all the people of Gaza are all being killed. Yet the same divisions exist in Israeli society (or did in 2019 when I was there), and none of these fundamental problems are any closer to being solved. This, I think would sadden Oz. It certainly saddens me: Israel is a beautiful country, and its seems like the biggest threat to its continued existence is not Hamas or other Arab countries, but civil war.

Now I'm reading Solaris (or really listening to it) by Stanislaw Lem. One of the most genuinly creepy science fictions stories I've read. It's about a research station on a sentient planet where the planet communicates with the researchers by reflecting their worst memories back at them in a manner that's impossible to avoid. In Spanish I'm reading Las Palabras Rotas by Luis Garcia Montero. It's a mixture of poetry and prose that's reflecting on how certain words have become corrupted by our politics and needed to be reclaimed personally, if not on a societal level.

Now I'm reading Solaris (or really listening to it) by Stanislaw Lem. One of the most genuinly creepy science fictions stories I've read.

Have you read the other three "foreign intelligence" novels of his?

No this is the first Lem book I've read. Would you recommend?

Return from the Stars was my favourite, though it has been a decade.

This sounds like Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora which I have been meaning to read for a while.

Well, Eden, The Invincible and Fiasco to complete the quadrilogy.

Robots Trurl and Klapaucius and Ijon Tichy are fan favorites.

But Pirx the Pilot is my personal favourite.

slowly but surely all the people of Gaza are all being killed

Ahem.

I have never seen an animation style like it

You may like Waking Life by Richard Linklater. He used a similar style for his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly, but Waking Life is vastly superior.

Finished Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Curiously, it did actually end only a few dozen pages after I was like, wait, where is this book going for the next half. I guess it does actually have a massive amount of footnotes and citations etc.

Now reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. This one focuses more on the internal workings of the British Army and how they (mis)handled the situation. It calls out more directly how they failed to respond to Loyalist terrorism.

This book raises one other point so far that I found very interesting and hadn't actually read anywhere else. They claim that the early Provisional IRA, prior to Bloody Sunday, the Falls Road Curfew and other notable incidents, when the membership was still very low and public support in the Catholic community for them much more slim, did actually undertake operations to deliberately provoke the British Army into more heavy-handed responses in the hopes of creating those sorts of incidents in order to increase public support for their tactics and goals and grow their own membership. That's not exactly something you read much about in accounts more sympathetic to the PIRA, and I'm curious to see what if any evidence they have for this.

This isn't direct evidence but the IRA were definitely aware of the propaganda potential of reprisals from government forces. From the Handbook for Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army - Notes on Guerrilla Warfare 1956 version:

The strategy of guerrilla warfare is to build up resistance centres throughout the occupied area and confine the enemy to the larger towns by restricting his movements and communications. In time the resistance centres are knitted together into one liberated area. After that the job is to drive him out of his supposedly safe base: and thus out of the country.
The essence of all strategy is to bring, by the use of surprise and mobility-or a combination of both-the greatest possible strength to bear at a chosen time and place. It must be ensured that the enemy does not-or is not able to-assemble Mi* strength at that point. This holds true also of guerrilla warfare. But it involves clever manoeuvre and here the skill of the commander, the organisation of his forces and his mobility, play an important role.
The guerrilla attempts to do three things:

(1) Drain the enemy's manpower and resources.
(2) Lead the resistance of the people to enemy occupation.
(3) Break down the enemy's administration.

He achieves the first by the very fact of his existence and his constant harassment of the enemy. He remembers that his own task is not to hold ground but to ensure that in time the enemy will not hold any either.
He achieves the second by remembering that the people will bear the brunt of the enemy's reprisal tactics and by inspiring them with aims of the movement. In this way they will be made tenacious and strong for in the long run it is the people who can stop the enemy: by their backing of the national movement.
And he achieves three when the enemy imposes martial law and thus recognises he can no longer rule that area in the old way. In effect he is recognising that the people no longer want him.

*Typo in the original PDF document.

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker (1998). The main premise is that if you have a negative gut feeling about a person or situation, go ahead and follow it out of the situation, don't try to come up with a bunch of justifications for why things are actually alright, there's no reason to worry. There probably is a reason to worry, you're picking up on something, even when you aren't able to articulate what or why in the moment. He says he's spent a lot of time interviewing victims, or close misses after violent incidents, and they usually eventually tell him details that explain some of the signals that made them nervous after the fact, and sometimes do manage to get out before the going gets bad -- for instance a man who asked into a convenience store, and then immediately out again shortly before a shooting.

It seems plausible enough. I've never been in a really bad situation, but every time I haven't liked someone immediately, tried to make up excuses for them in my head, thought and thought about it, tried to like them, it turned out that, no, we actually could not live or work together. Probably most people, most of the time, do really have reasonable instinctive boundaries.

Read it, enjoyed it, bought a copy for the daughter of a friend of mine who was leaving Japan for university on the east coast of the US. She left it on the shelf. But apparently her uncle in the US also got her a copy. No idea if she ever read it.

Notably for those responding doubtfully, de Becker by no means limits his focus to females. I found it a good read, and its basic message of "be aware of your surroundings/trust your instincts" invaluable.

I wasn't very far in and probably haven't described it very well. Maybe I'll try again next week when I've read more of it.

There's a risk of conflating serious danger with personal discomfort and using the first to justify the second, and also a parallel risk of using the second to dismiss the first.

In the first case you end up avoiding everything that isn't immediately pleasant and personally gratifying, and in the second case you fail to avoid a dangerous situation because you haven't given it the chance to prove your intuitions wrong right.

It's not without merit but I think the advice to "trust your fear instinct" is another one of those messages that is more likely to appeal to and reach the wrong audience and reinforce their fearfulness rather than attenuating their fearlessness.

I really liked Scott's Different Worlds post, and wish that he (or someone) would investigate that further.

De Becker seems to think there are people who are always being stalked, and have to be super cautious all the time, and may often be in dangerous situations. He worked with celebrities and abuse victims, so maybe that's true for them.

I'm not that far in, but de Becker just mentioned that if someone is jogging in the park and gets an uncomfortable feeling, they shouldn't try to use peripheral vision, they should take their headphones off, stop for a second, turn, and make eye contact with anyone looking at them. I'm not subtle at all, and probably give off that vibe anyway.

every time I haven't liked someone immediately, tried to make up excuses for them in my head, thought and thought about it, tried to like them, it turned out that, no, we actually could not live or work together.

I would encourage you to decouple "person I dislike" from "person who could pose a threat to me personally", for the reasons I outlined here. I agree with you that when you take an instinctive snap dislike to someone, no amount of "evidence" is likely to dissuade you from said judgement. But I don't think that instinctive snap judgement offers much useful guidance on whether they're likely to pose a threat to you or bring you harm. There are people I consider morally upstanding individuals who I happen to personally dislike for reasons that have nothing to do with their moral character. Conversely, there is no shortage of people who are likeable on an interpersonal level but completely lacking in moral fibre (e.g. charming con artists who'll butter you up before absconding with your life savings).

I'm reminded of an article I read on Cracked years ago, in which one of their staff writers made a list of five concepts for which no word currently exists in the English language, but for which a word is required. He describes a scenario in which you meet someone and take an instant dislike to them for some trivial reason (annoying laugh, inability to correctly pronounce the word "specifically"), but you're aware that this is kind of silly. But then some time later, you learn something about them that proves they're a shitty person (cheated on his wife, assaulted someone), and you feel vindicated that your instinctive snap judgement of them steered you so well.

I must stress that I don't often find myself in a situation in which I would have a need for this word: to reiterate, there are plenty of people to whom I took an immediate dislike who have yet to give any indication of being anything other than honest, decent people. I think decoupling "I like him" and "he's a good guy" (and by extension, "he poses no threat to my wellbeing") is a sorely underpractised skill, and one which just about everyone would do well to better interrogate.

I'm reminded of an article I read on Cracked years ago, in which one of their staff writers made a list of five concepts for which no word currently exists in the English language, but for which a word is required.

You should read The Meaning of Liff. It's the oldest exercise of this kind that I know of.

I've never heard of this before and I like Douglas Adams, thanks for the recommendation.

There are definitely people that I don't particularly like or get along with, who seem to be doing the best they can, and them and I clashing is not due to anything nefarious on their part. I might use words like annoyed, irritated, clashing, or something but not afraid, apprehensive, or nervous.

Conversely, there is no shortage of people who are likable on an interpersonal level but completely lacking in moral fibre (e.g. charming con artists who'll butter you up before absconding with your life savings).

I think de Becker agrees with this, to some extent. He talks about people who are trying to get something their mark doesn't want to give, and describes various strategies of being extra nice, offering unsolicited help, using "we" a lot, and being generally nice and charming. The main difference is that he says that people feel apprehensive anyway, but try to explain it away because "he's so nice and helpful." I'm not sure how to evaluate that claim, he seems to be mostly be making it based on his own experience and interviews.

The main difference is that he says that people feel apprehensive anyway, but try to explain it away because "he's so nice and helpful." I'm not sure how to evaluate that claim, he seems to be mostly be making it based on his own experience and interviews.

Yeah, this is a difficult one to square. I definitely think the basic thesis (that people should be more willing to trust their gut and not "rationally" explain away their instinctive discomfort or apprehension) is sound. But I also suspect that if I surveyed a bunch of people who'd been scammed by a con artist (or whose romantic partners were unfaithful to them or otherwise suffered some kind of betrayal), there would be a significant number of people who insisted that they never suspected a thing, that they trusted the person in question completely and were wholly blindsided by their betrayal.

He says he's spent a lot of time interviewing victims, or close misses after violent incidents, and they usually eventually tell him details that explain some of the signals that made them nervous after the fact,

That seems...very prone to hindsight bias. Obviously after a terrible thing happens, you're going to sort through events and find a bunch of things that seem like potential red flags in full context. But that's very different from saying that every time you have a negative feeling about someone or something, you should believe it. It may well be true, at least for well-calibrated people. But I think you would need more complex experimental techniques to be sure: perhaps you could mix in fictional testimonies with the real ones and see whether third parties can pick out the real from the fake, or something.

every time I haven't liked someone immediately, tried to make up excuses for them in my head, thought and thought about it, tried to like them, it turned out that, no, we actually could not live or work together

Mostly, if I don't like someone fairly quickly I'll stay not liking them. But there are definitely people I've disliked and then got closer to as I got to know them better, or people who improved over time.

I would guess that some people have very different baseline tendencies to be generous to strangers; some people are far too prone to ignoring danger signals and need to be more careful and listen to their gut. But 'when you're nervous about somebody, probably there's something wrong with them' sounds very close to other causes of misery in the past like 'if you have a bad relationship with your father, probably he raped you and you suppressed the memory' or 'any young man who expresses interest in you and doesn't pick up the subtle signs that you're not interested is a potential stalker or rapist'.

Obviously I have a dog in this fight: as a young and well-mannered but unfortunately incel-ish man, female paranoia (I can't think of a less charged term, sorry) is something I'm nervous about encouraging.

I'm probably misrepresenting him somewhat, since I had read less than a quarter of the book at that point (and still less than half). Not dealing with fake "repressed" memories does seem like a weakness -- what if they just made some of the details up subconsciously? I haven't read far enough to know if he deals with this.

He says things like: if you are a woman putting groceries in your car or something, and a man comes up to help you, and you feel even a little bit uncomfortable about it, stand up, face him, and say "no" definitively and forcefully. If he's a decent guy, his feelings will be a bit hurt, and you will get no help. If he isn't, he'll keep testing your boundaries, be very firm about them, insisting and not just going away is a sign that he's up to no good. There's probably someone who needs to hear that? I don't really have opinions about it, but am a bit curious to see where he's going.

I think all this is fair. Scott’s essay on how some people need to hear diametrically opposite advice always struck me as one of his more insightful essays.

I finished Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. When starting it I wrote:

The title is hilariously "standard" for a history book, but I'm very into it so far. At one time as a child, I had an abject fascination with the California gold rush after getting a basic book about it from my San Franciscan cousins. Anyone living in the Bay Area probably considers it played out, but for a guy in the Southeast, it was exciting stuff. Reading about it with the level of fidelity a book like this provides (just in the first 25 superdense pages) is a treat. I'll wait to recommend it, but so far, it's been good.

The middle of the book slumped a little bit for me. At the end of the day, this is still a modern history book. There are land acknowledgments at the beginning. There's definitely a major tendency to minimize native-on-white violence. The language shifts are subtler than your average twitter thread, but it's all still there and super annoying.

Another disappointment is that because it is such a rigorously researched book, 100 pages are eaten by citations and footnotes. It's a dense typeface but I bought a physical copy, and so there was a bit of a let down when a big fraction of the pages were not pure content. (The footnotes were still entertaining).

Probably the worst sin is that the last chapter read like a high school essay - a summarization of the sections before it. Unskippable because there were also great vignettes interspersed throughout that were one of the strengths of the book.

The bottom line is that it is still well-researched book, and entertaining for many reasons. The author does an extremely effective job of using facts and figures to underscore how the age of expansion/the gilded age was. I find the 19th century fascinating across the board, and the effects of the telegram, rail, steam power, and cheap firearm rifling on the world are a hell of a combination. I'd give the book a 4/5.

For those who want to get to some of the meat without reading (Spoiler tags do not work I believe):

  • One thing the author underscored convincingly is that the West was devoid of slaves not because they wouldn't be useful but because of the social movement of "Free labor." This same philosophy factored into why the Chinese or factory workers on the east coast were hated so broadly. I find it fascinating that the Chinese effectively came to the country, sending almost exclusively men and a couple of prostitutes, panned for gold, built a railroad, and then left, all without meaningfully assimilating at all.
  • The amount of violence in the West was staggering. The author seemed to take the approach of giving simple numbers for violence and alcoholism to let you draw your conclusions, so it's pretty easy to conjure up how unbelievably rough it would be as an individual.
  • The final non-summary chapter digs extensively (heh) into the physical and financial technology required to support mining, and effectively describes the magnitude of environmental damage that happened as a result. A great example is the pumps required to pull water out of the Comstock Lode - One of the most powerful had a flywheel that was a quarter million pounds.
  • It does take the opportunity to show nuance where appropriate. The killers of buffalo were rightfully scorned as opportunistic monsters (demand for their hides surged after production of hides from Argentina slowed, and hunters would typically target pregnant cows), many aspects of Indian policy were at least compassionate in intent, and defenders of the West's natural beauty were not a put-upon minority.

In any case, it made me more eager to take on The GDMBR at some point before I die, or at least get out west again. I've gotten to visit CA, CO, and NM quite a bit and still find most of the region very romantic.

I'm about to dig into Different Seasons, four novellas by Stephen King. I'm not a fan of the person he's become, but I've typically very much enjoyed his writing. A friend got me a used physical copy, which I thought was a remarkable gesture. I hate the waste of buying new-print books since I saw thousands constantly being destroyed after not selling while working at a bookstore chain. It's just too durable of a good to throw away. I'll admit I'm dreading having to keep my bedside light on while my wife tries to sleep a little bit. I'm used to the convenience of a Kindle and the ability to read any book (regardless of size) anywhere without disturbing anyone else.

The Shawshank Redemption, one of the novellas in Different Seasons, is one of the rare cases in which I think the film adaptation of a book is vastly superior to the source material. It's remarkable how the two works use almost all of the same raw materials, but the effects produced could hardly be more different: the book is a disposable, vaguely trashy potboiler, while the film is justly acclaimed as one of the most powerful and moving dramas ever to come out of Hollywood.

King's prose was always wasted on me. The Stand, for all its admittedly gripping story and plotting, was unnecessarily vulgar in parts. Not even the story, just the metaphors. That probably sounds prissy of me but I remember thinking damn dude, did you have to use that image there? Exceptions for me are his early story collections, and maybe Salem's Lot. He's a great yarn-spinner though, and certainly prolific.

I feel the same way. One of the many ways the film adaptation of Shawshank improved on its source material was omitting the novella's repeated descriptions of inmates smuggling things in or out of prison by inserting them into their rectums. Some things are better left to the imagination. Early on in IT (which I never finished and don't intend to), the narrator recites an anecdote about a man whose car was washed away in a flood, and when they recovered his corpse his penis had been bitten off by fish. Even as a child I was just like, why did you have to specify that? Just being gross for the sake of being gross.

Earlier this week I finished Tony Tulathimutte's second book Rejection. I have thoughts on it, and this seems like as good a place as any for a "review".

I first became aware of Tulathimutte when someone on the Motte (back in the Reddit era) shared his short story "The Feminist", which I loved and shared with everyone I knew. My sister bought me his first novel Private Citizens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Citizens_(novel)) for my birthday that year, which I adored, tearing through it in two days (unusually fast for me) and have repeatedly recommended. Naturally I was very excited for his second book, which is a collection of seven loosely connected short stories/novellas, of which (to bring it full circle) "The Feminist" is the first.

When I started reading it, I was glad that my eager anticipation wasn't misplaced: "The Feminist" was just as good on a second (or fourth or fifth, most likely) read, although it's been lightly edited from its original publication, namely by extending out the description of the protagonist's Tinder bio. This felt a bit like over-egging the pudding a smidge, but hardly a fatal misstep. The second story is even better, a masterpiece of cringe comedy drama which I found almost physically painful to read as its hapless protagonist digs herself into ever deeper holes, and was by far the strongest in the collection. It was the third story where I started to have some doubts. Its opening is very strong, with a sympathetic portrayal of the kind of private hell experienced by a man whose fetishes are so warped that they are not merely difficult but physically impossible to accomplish (I've never felt more grateful to be so vanilla in my appetites) and a description of the difference between embarrassment and shame that stopped me in my tracks. Unfortunately, it concludes with an extended sequence of gross-out humour which is, without exaggeration, the most disgusted I've felt reading a work of fiction since either American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis or (a much less flattering comparison) Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. There were a few gross bits in Private Citizens, but they were used in moderation for context and flavour in a largely funny, perceptive and empathetic novel, and didn't outstay their welcome (such that I didn't feel uncomfortable lending the book to my mum). But this sequence goes on far longer than needed for the joke to land, and just felt like Tulathimutte trying to be shocking and puerile for no good reason. It could have been half as long (or one quarter) and lost nothing.

The fourth story is framed as an Am I the Asshole? post on Reddit and is narrated by a tech bro protagonist who, like Tulathimutte, spends far too much time online, communicating entirely through a dizzying range of Internet slang - not for nothing does the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_(short_story_collection)) refer to it as a "terminally online... brainrot" novel (although people in glass houses: the fact that I was able to understand the entire thing without once consulting Urban Dictionary is probably a red flag that I need to cut down on my social media consumption). It's an amusing once-off gag, but I couldn't help but feel that it disrupted the verisimilitude: the protagonist just feels like too broad a parody to exist in the same universe as the other more grounded characters, and the story's dénouement too overtly farcical. (As Chris Jesu Lee pointed out, in 2024, a satirical joke story taking aim at tech bros for being cod-visionary and obliviously sociopathic seems a bit behind the times - by this stage we're practically drowning in arrogant, deluded Elon Musk expies.) The rest of the book consists largely of meta postmodern navel-gazing, culminating in a final chapter which is framed as an excessively detailed rejection (ha ha) letter from a publisher for the book you are currently reading. Here, the fictional publisher deconstructs the creepy subtext for all of the preceding stories, bluntly asserting that Tulathimutte's attempts to mask his own neuroses, paraphilias and worldview by putting them in the mouths of fictional characters who are unlike him on one or more identity axes is blindingly transparent and fooling no one. This chapter essentially comes off as Tulathimutte attempting to head off criticism about the book, to which the reader might reasonably ask - if you know it's bad, why are you doing it?

It's still a good book, primarily on the strength of the first two-and-a-half stories, and like Private Citizens I read the whole thing in two days, but I do think it's a step down from the debut. One thing I found particularly disconcerting about the book was its Bukowski-esque disgust for human bodies and the corporeal form, its "relaxed contempt for the flesh" (to quote Gibson). Offhand I can think of only one actual character in the whole book who isn't described as being in some way physically repulsive, unclean or similar - so of course she's a superficial airheaded bimbo who comes in for ire for misspelling and misusing the word "négligée". It doesn't surprise me at all that Tulathimutte is an outspoken advocate for trans rights - he doesn't merely believe that some people are born in the wrong bodies, but that everyone is born in the wrong body: the wrong body is any human body which actually exists, and the Internet, porn and video games are wonderful inventions in large part because they enable us to distract ourselves from the horrific reality of being embodied within these nauseating mechanistic flesh prisons. This is one of the most Gnostic books I've ever read without even trying to be.

Hand in hand with this is the book's profound, omnidirectional misanthropy. I don't believe that every novel needs to have likeable and/or morally upstanding characters: there have been good books in which every character was amoral, unlikeable or both. But the sheer visceral contempt for everyone evinced by Rejection is quite unsettling, leaving an acrid taste in one's mouth, and it's conspicuous by its novelty relative to Private Citizens. No matter how scathing, satirical and acerbic that book was, Tulathimutte's affection for his characters was palpable on every page, and we shared in it even when they made mistakes or behaved shittily - and some of those characters weren't just likeable jerks, but actually did come off as well-meaning people sincerely trying to do their best. Meanwhile, Rejection is not a book about misanthropy, but a misanthropic book - essentially every character is a shitty, unlikeable, narcissistic, pretentious, emotionally manipulative asshole. (Offhand I can only think of one major character who seems even a little bit likeable and basically decent, and they aren't the protagonist of any of the stories.) Given that most of them are so similar along other axes too (generally lonely, too online, never exercise, physically unattractive and know it), the colour and variety from Private Citizens is also rather lacking. It's not a monotonous read, but pentatonic where Private Citizens was chromatic and modal.

Here's what I took from it. However he might try to ironize and joke about his lifestyle and shortcomings, I sincerely believe the following:

  1. Tulathimutte agrees with every word The Feminist says, although he'd never admit it. When The Feminist went on a rant about how women have stolen incels' lives by selfishly defecting from the social contract, Tulathimutte was not bravely delving into the psychology of a character with whom he disagreed, attempting to express what that character thinks in such a way that it would pass the intellectual Turing test: he was simply using a fictional character as a mouthpiece for his own opinions. The event which concludes "The Feminist" is intended as plausible deniability for Tulathimutte by having his unsettlingly reasonable-seeming character jump off the slippery slope.
  2. Repeated romantic rejection has hardened Tulathimutte's spirit, filling him with rage and bitterness towards anyone and everyone, but especially the happily coupled. This misanthropic streak was detectable as subtext in Private Citizens but kept somewhat in check (there's nothing particularly unusual about being unmarried in your early thirties, as he was at the time of publication); but having entered his fourth decade still going stag, Tulathimutte has essentially gone mad from the isolation, and lonely people are the bitterest of all (to quote Nick Hornby).
  3. Asian women who date white men fill Tulathimutte with murderous rage, which he knows is wrong and yet cannot even begin to suppress or talk himself out of: there's a near-constant subtext that said women are contemptible, duplicitous and lacking in self-respect for some reason that Tulathimutte refuses to explicitly articulate, not even by using one of his numerous unsympathetic characters as a mouthpiece for it. (The closest we get is a white character who, after being rejected by a white man in favour of an Asian woman, cattily accuses him of racial fetishism, for which she is widely criticised; the fact that she gets so much pushback struck me as a bit of a fig leaf.) I've read two reviews of this book by Asian-American men who barely touched on this aspect of the book, and I strongly suspect it's because they feel the same way but, like Tulathimutte, are perceptive enough to realise it's not polite to just come out and say so. If I was an Asian woman who'd dated one or more white men, I imagine I'd find this already intentionally discomfiting book even more uncomfortable than the average reader would - but then Jia Tolentino loved it, so what do I know.
  4. Many years of excessive porn consumption have imbued Tulathimutte with unrealistic expectations about sex (to put it mildly): a set of fetishes no human woman could ever hope to meet. His ideal woman has a neotonous face, impossibly large breasts, impossibly smooth skin, not a single follicle of hair below the eyelashes, never talks back, is always on hand to fulfil any sexual demand he might make of her (without being too slutty about things), and never farts, belches, menstruates, pees or poos. He's spent so long in the virtual world of Bang Bros that even perfectly normal women (even women who are above average in attractiveness) probably fill him with disgust and loathing.

If you liked Private Citizens, pick it up. If you haven't read anything by him, please read Private Citizens first, as it's superior in every way that matters.

With all that off my chest, to directly answer the original question - I'm currently about a third of the way through Magda Szabo's novel Katalin Street, which I went into more or less blind. For some reason I'm having far more difficulty keeping track of which character is which than any other novel I've read in the past few years. Seems decent so far.

I do agree that story #2 was an achievement. The entire bit with the raven filled me with such dread that it took me 3 attempts to get through those last pages. I disagree on #3, the escalation of depravity was funny throughout for me. The juxtaposition between the fictional protagonist dominating the porn star and the obsequious caveats about managing said porn shoot was perfect. And that it expressed a new angle on the themes of identity-as-prison... Also, you can’t tell me you didn’t chuckle at the global warming solution.

I like these longer book reviews that turn into a kind of discussion about the meta-themes and the authors themselves. Thank you.

Transgressive and satirical fiction is always a double mind fuck - even moreso if its good. I read American Psycho and was blown away by how perceptive Ellis was as an author. Then, I looked up his bio and had an "oh shit, is this dude ok?" moment.

According to my quick search on Tulathimutte, he has a double Stanford degree in something called symbolic systems. He appears to have been a tech bro who became disillusioned with tech bro'ing and so started writing. That you tell us a lot of his writing is about misanthropic tech bro stuff (and, you know, porn) makes so much sense as to be a second-hand "oh shit, is this dude ok?" moment for me.

EDIT: Further research has revealed that a lot of the most loathsome Haute Literarti magazines really like this guy Tulathimutte. My concern for him has waned considerably.

Then, I looked up his bio and had an "oh shit, is this dude ok?" moment.

What specifically about Ellis's background?

Further research has revealed that a lot of the most loathsome Haute Literarti magazines really like this guy Tulathimutte.

It amazes me that he hasn't been declared persona non grata over his opinions. Sure, he's trying to hide his power level, but I don't think he's doing that good a job, and the last chapter seems to be him coming as close as he's going to get to laying his cards on the table and admitting that he's exactly as Problematic as you probably suspect. I follow him on Instagram and his Instagram stories are pretty much a nonstop stream of "man, Israel is just the worst huh?" (with an occasional "trans rights are human rights", for flavour), which maybe helps him to blend in.

Thank you, just downloaded Private Citizens to check out!

Imperial Wizard 4: The Southern Alliance by J. Parsons. The premise of the series is that an ancient wizard emerges from a long (I think over a millenium long) time in stasis to discover a greatly changed world that has forgotten his craft. I've found that I'm a sucker for "setting things right" types of novels and series, and this series is one of those. Thanks, Nathan Lowell!

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