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.)