Recent Reads 7.30.2023

 On the Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures

 

I got this because I have vague positive memories of the movie, especially the gritty steam punk art deco vibe they had going on. I barely remember the plot except for the rocket pack and German bad guys. I have to say in reading it, it makes sense that the style is what I remember since neither of the two main plot lines make a lot of sense and are full of holes and coincidences. What’s more interesting to me is that the art is more cartoonish than I would have thought based on the movie. The one thing of note is that the artist really likes drawing the female form in sheer fabrics – that’s where he goes for the “realism.” It’s an adventure comic studded with pinup girls.

 

 

On The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze.

 

Years ago, I read Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed. Afte reading that, I was interested in finding a good English language biography of Hjalmar Schacht because I was interested in seeing how the German War Machine ticked at a financial level. I didn’t find it then, but I came across this, and it was better than what I thought I wanted. Tooze goes into great detail about the war and how much the need for materials and food and hard currency really shaped the decisions the Nazi leadership were making about the war effort.

 

On a side note, reading this made me realize why reading about WWII or the Civil War is so appealing. You already know the outlines, but different histories just focus on different details. You know how it ends though. The bad guys lost. It’s a great feeling and not something you can guarantee with anything more contemporary.

 

On The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre.

 

This is one of those books that I normally wouldn’t have picked up, but I got it as a gift. I’m glad I read it though, as it was an intriguing look at the cold war and the espionage on both sides. It’s mainly the story of a KGB officer who moved up the ranks and spied for British intelligence. There’s also a bit about Aldrich Ames, but that part is not as developed and he’s not as interesting a character in the text. It’s a fast-paced read I couldn’t put down and it was enjoyable.

 

Structurally, there are a couple of places in the book that sort of give away the ending, which isn’t great since it is a thriller and if you don’t know the case, you don’t know how it’s going to end. Weirdly, though you’re in the spy world, there was something about it that felt both high and low stakes to me. It was like everyone involved was children playing high stakes games. The other thing is that the whole thing is biased to a western reader – with Gordievsky being on the side of the good (327) – when things really feel more ambiguous than that black and white reading.

 

Chantal Mouffe: Towards a Green Democratic Revolution

 

Verso has been putting out some of these thin books that are essays, and they are nice because they are a quick read in the afternoon. The problem is that they have to really grab you to be memorable, and Mouffe’s text did not do that for me.

 

Nature’s Metropolis

 

Look. There’s a lot of ways to do economic history. A lot of them are bad. Many are good. But there’s only one Nature’s Metropolis. It’s the story of Chicago. But it is more than that, it is the tale of the growth of the Republic in the nineteenth century. You will learn more about grain and trees and railroads than you thought you wanted to know and be thirsting for more.

 

On Managing & Using Information Systems: Pearlson et al.

 

This was the textbook for an entry-level MIS class in my data analytics course progression. Overall, I liked the text. The chapters were well laid out with well developed examples of the chapters’ main ideas that carried though the whole chapter. Each of the thirteen chapters could easily be a course in itself, but in paring down each topic to the most pertinent details, not much is lost in the legibility of the topic. The only thing I didn’t like was partially structural with my course. There are case studies at the end and the answers are hosted in various places online. My instructor used these as discussion prompts and it was clear a quarter of my peers just copied the answers and ran them through a remix software. 

Read some comics 7.23.2023

 On The Plunge by Joe Hill et al

 

Do you like the Thing? If you do, then you will like this book. It owes a lot to John Carpenter’s The Thing. We have an isolated, cold setting, and weird things happening in a way that’s claustrophobic and isolated. It’s spooky And scary.

 

On Night Fever by Brubaker and Philips

This is an interesting story about identity and growing up and trying to be someone you’re not. Or is it trying to be the person you really are? The main character is on a business trip and assumes a new identity, and it takes him to places he never know existed. There’s one element in the story that is somewhat supernatural and I wanted to see it more developed but it isn’t. So it’s the one weird thing that makes me wonder if the story isn’t 100% self contained to the volume or may be the seed for something more.

 

Nailbiter is developing (By Willimanson et al)

The general premise of this story is that there is a town that spawns serial killers. It feels a little goofy, but the first volume of the series was enough for me to go get the next three volumes in the series and read them in an afternoon. The titular character is a serial killer that bites the nails off of his victims.

Volume two deepens the mystery and is a little more cinematic than the previous volume. It starts to flesh out the story and develops characters in the town.

Volume three is where we start to see hints at something that is behind all the serial killers. Is it something supernatural or more mundane? I don’t know yet.

Recent Reads 7.9.2023

 Thoughts on Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper’s “The War on Neighborhoods”

 

This is a Chicago based book, so I am a little biased in that the streets and neighborhoods the authors cover are familiar streets. Chicago is one of the nation’s most segregated cities, and some of the neighborhoods, like Lawndale featured here, have vast disparities in all sorts of resident outcomes compared to other neighborhoods. If you look at a map showing cancer rates or a map showing shootings, you’ll see the same things. There are bad outcomes in the south and west sides and comparably better outcomes in the north and a lot of the southwest sides. This is largely racially coded as the only public investment that goes into the neighborhoods are in policing and incarceration. It’s a problem that has all sorts of policy decisions at its root and has continued through to today.

 

Thoughts on Malm’s “Fighting in a World on Fire.”

This is an interesting text because it is a children’s adaptation of Malm’s book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” which is not something you see every day. It’s a manifesto for ecoterrorism for kids. I know there’s a severe problem with climate change, but I’m afraid this is a wrong path. It puts people at great personal danger both in terms of in the act but also through the incredibly overzealous charging from governments which exist to protect capital and the status quo. You can try to be a Ghandhi or King, but you know what happened to both of those men? The same thing that happened to numbers of others who have names we don’t remember. However, I am torn because we do have these problems and it doesn’t seem as if the current regime in power or the protest movements that exist will move the needle before it is too late (is it already too late?). The whole thing made me think of the Children of Kali, from Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. There they seemed like a necessary evil – but that was fiction. I often feel like the agglomeration of evidence for climate change will make its existence and the need to do something quite obvious, but then I read the comments and there are so many willfully disengaging with the truth or making excuses for inaction. We do need large governmental and corporate action at the global level, and any one individual feels powerless in the face of the existing half measures. Malm and company understand that urgency, but ultimately, I don’t know where best to channel that energy.

 

Thoughts on Fredrick Harry Pitts’ “Value.”

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting with this text. I think I wanted a more cut and dried history of value from labor theory of value to the marginalists. That is more or less in here, but it felt like it got more esoteric to me, and less grounded in exchange. I mean, there’s not a single equation in the text, not a one. It’s a short text and was worthwhile but didn’t resolve anything for me. Instead of a brief survey it is more a starting point of an argument. Heck, the last paragraph begins with the idea that value is still up for grabs (134), so there’s always something more to learn.

 

Thoughts om Nancy Fraser’s “Cannibal Capitalism”

This is the first book I’ve read by Fraser, and I think I read it at the right time. I had just read Delong’s “Slouching Towards Utopia,” which was a decent history of the past 150 years but was too optimistic about the future – especially in ignoring climate change. Fraser’s text was a good counterpoint to that, in showing the challenges we face, and that the current political and economic system that we have, and which delivered it, is not up to the task of solving the problems it created. Will we be able to deliver on the promise of reorganization before it is too late though? I am skeptical but would like to be surprised.

 

On Robert Bevan’s “Monumental Lies”

This is a good examination of the controversy about statues and what they mean and how we should deal with them. The problem is that there is a huge chunk in the middle that is more about architecture. This large section felt like it should be part of a related but separate project – or maybe that’ more my USA-centric parochialism showing in that I am less concerned about the legacy of fascist architecture in Italy than I am about the Confederate statues in the US or the honoring of people who held other people as property (and got rich from that trade).

 

Recent Reads 7.3.2023

 Thoughts on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers

 

I read Hard to be a God last year, and really liked it. I read this one as a follow up and since it is more famous. The difference is that Roadside Picnic is less plot driven. This one feels more like a making of atmosphere as the reader gets deeper into understanding the Zone but never really understanding it. In this it feels a lot like Lem’s Eden, where the exploration is the point. It’s a work from a different tradition of science fiction and it is incredibly interesting but a slower read.

 

 

Thoughts on Kerouac’s Desolation Angels

 

Jack Kerouac climbed up a hill and then down it eighty pages later. Then he spent time together with his friends and got drunk. There was a time when this would have been more compelling to me, but there were too many writing classes where I read so many things that were derivative of this sort of thing that going back to the source doesn’t work for me. It reminded me that when I read On the Road two decades ago, it didn’t really work for me then. Like I need more work in the structure. At the very least this is the most genuine realization of the exhortation to write what you know.

 

 

Thoughts on Mumbo Jumbo

Man, I was about eighty pages of this one before I picked up any sort of plot. It was interesting but I kept waiting for the thing to cohere, but it never did for me. It was more like watching a slow strobe where you would only get brief glimpses of the plot and try to figure out what was going on in the periods of darkness.

 

 

Thoughts on Jean Toomer’s Cane.

 

This book came out in 1922, which would have been the same year as the Wasteland and Ulysses and the author should be on the same tongues as those that speak the names of Joyce and Eliot. But Toomer isn’t a forgotten name from a hundred years ago.

The individual stories are well structured and beautifully rendered, the problem with the text is that it jumps around a good bit and there’s an issue with some thematic flow. It takes the reader from the Midwest to the south and to DC and back. The whole thing shows just such incredible skill and promise, and if you look at the publication cadence of the stories and poems it shows just such an incredible output in the one year of 1922. And it was the only book he published. What a loss for the culture.

 

 

Thoughts on A Culture of Growth by Joel Mokyr

First off, whoever designed this book needed to increase the font size a point or two. I’m getting older, but not that much older. In terms of the book, Mokyr does string a nice thread from Bacon to the Enlightenment as the source of the eternal question of why the industrial revolution happened when and where it happened. Not 100% sure why solely in England and not the rest of Europe, but the continent and the intellectual environment of the Republic of Letters seems to have a good connection. I have not read any criticism of the text, so I imagine that this is accepted as gospel truth in the economic history community since the publication of the text. One thing that I find really interesting is that at the end of the text he looks at China in the same period and examines some factors that might have inhibited the industrial revolution there, even though they had a technological lead. The most crucial point is not that China (Or elsewhere in Asia or Africa) failed by not grabbing onto the rocket of the industrial revolution, but that it was a unique set of intellectual institutions that really helped grow the economy as we know it. As a side note, it’s probably time to read McCloskey on similar issues.

 

 

On Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

 

I don’t think I’m the right audience for this book. I’ve long been skeptical of any sort of Freudian-based psychological framework (and I do accept that the text is going on a hundred years old at this point). However, Reich does seem to be convincing that there is a psychological basis for fascism in all populations. I just don’t think there’s a good explanation for why it rose up in Italy and Germany but didn’t really anywhere else embedded in the text. So, there’s a few places you could find some good pull quotes, but it doesn’t really work as a coherent whole for me.

 

And then there’s the whole thing with Orgone energy in the background of the whole thing. The edition I have is a third edition and he says that this edit is after the discovery of this phenomenon, and it was incorporated into the text. I am really curious about what the first or second edition was like when it was more based on the psychological / class-based approach. I have some friends who get a lot of Reich, but this just didn’t do it for me.

 

 

Thoughts on Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky

 

There are a lot of books like this coming out now. There is the protagonist who is going through a gender transition. There is a set of friends meeting for a bachelor party. There is a near future sea-steading utopia where laws don’t exist. There’s a cult recruiting at a conference in the hotel where the characters are staying who might be working to unleash horrors unknown that come from out of time and space. And it’s up to the protagonist to bring all these threads together to a resolution.

 

Like I said, we all know the story. The thing is here that Lubchansky (a well-known, national treasure) does it better than anyone else. I don’t want to get too deep into spoilers, but there is a scene where the protagonist hunts their own clone that is worth the price of admission. (Why Lubchansky here is giving their approval to clone is beyond me, but I’m quite sure it’s a direct endorsement of the sport.)