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.)

 

Recent Reads 5.14.2023

 A few thoughts on Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet

This is an adaptation (in part) of the Beowulf poem. The art is cute, and the adaptation is adjusted to the battles children fight with themselves and the specter of growing up. (I like the freedom, but who invented work? They need to send that guy to the big rock candy mountain).

It is a quick read and I think it makes me want to go re-read the original (in translation, of course).

 

 

 

A few thoughts on The Heavy Bright

This is a weird book. I couldn’t really grasp what was going on or why. I get the pacifism and feminism and unity of all souls but there was something missing. The world building was such that I would call it dreamlike if I were being charitable but otherwise it was a miss for me.

 

 

A Few Thoughts on Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

 

Shandy is an amazing book. More than anything it made me think of a late 1990s vibe with Seinfeld and David Foster Wallace. I can imagine the discourse that must have grown up around it. It I about memory and storytelling but also about nothing but also childbirth and siege warfare. I’m glad I read it; it was worth it even if it took a while.

 

A few thoughts on Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson.

 

The format of this book is really interesting. There are two essays by Anderson about the structure of the market and then private corporations and their control of their workers. Then there are a few response essays by scholars of various fields and then her response to the respondents. In one way, you can basically make the gist of her argument in the title. The real drawback to the form is that her original essays don’t get into enough depth. I was personally surprised that there were very few references to Marx. The index only has three references, and the next listing is “masterless men” which has even more than Marx. The other thing I don’t like is that that have an economist as one of the respondents – good! But that economist is Tyler Cowen – bad! It would have been better if they had found someone from the academic mainstream because in my opinion, Cowan just kind of sucks.

 

A few thoughts on The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

 

I read this more for historical relevance more than anything else. I do like the thought behind it, finding the individual experience of religious feeling and events. James was trying to bring some empiricism here, and that is good. I kept thinking about how this could be done again with the 20^th century fruitfully to see what has changed and what has stayed the same. My big, big complaint is that the book focused almost entirely on the west, and Christian experiences. There is but passing references to Islam, Hindu, or Buddhist experiences. And with a 500-page book, they could have found some room. A smaller complaint is the formatting of the text in this edition. There’s a lot of references, which makes sense since James is quoting people and getting their experience. But a lot of the quotes aren’t written as well as the main body of the text James writes. And there are in text references and then some that are dropped to the notes which are in like 4-point font and really hard to read.

 

A few thoughts on Prisoners of the American Dream by Mike Davis

 

In this book, Davis reviews a lot of the class struggle in America with amazing granularity of the 20^th century through the early 80s. The big takeaway from this is that the workplace has always been a place of contention and struggle. I think leftists of my generation forget that as we look back to the period that was often seen as a time of relative peace as the economy was growing after the second world war, but there was always a struggle. And there always will be!