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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2777 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025

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

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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.

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