The Dubious Monk
chinese curses since twenty aught twoArchive for books
book review: slackonomics
Lisa Chamberlain’s Slackonomics is a book about Generation X and how they live differently than the boomers before them. The thing that makes it different from all the books on the subject from 10-15 years ago is that this one is looking at these GenXers all grown up and in charge of things instead of being the youngsters whose apathy would prove to be the death of civilization.
The subtitle of the book is “Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction,” referring to the economic bubble collapses we’ve been undergoing in the last ten years (dotcom, subprime mortgages). These collapses are different from previous downturns because they aren’t cyclical but systemic. Or something. The thesis is that though Gen X grew up with the greed motivation of the 80s they also saw how the 90s recession could fuck that all up. They’ve seen terrifying highs and dizzying lows and now they’re 40 and are the people who’ll get us through, past the boomers’ “me me me” motivations.
It was an interesting book, especially when Sean’s been talking about his Helmet Generation stuff recently. As I see it, my immediate cohort we’re sort of the cusp between the Gen Xers and the Helmeteers, and I think I feel more affinity for the Xes.
book review: radical simplicity
Dan Price wrote this book about living in a meadow. The book is called Radical Simplicity: Creating an Authentic Life and it was probably the wrong thing for me to be reading while packing up my apartment to move. I would like to live in a meadow, in a kind of hobbit house like Price has done.
The most interesting part of his experiments in housing (he had a tipi and a shack and a dugout cave with a skylight at various times) for me is how he wasn’t cut off from everyone. He had the place wired for electricity. Not gobs of outlets or anything but he had a line built in so he could run his photocopier which he used to make his zines. I like the idea of not being completely isolated from the world. His wife and kids lived in town and would come visit him and he would visit them. He said that when the kids were little he would keep on hoping they’d want to stay in the meadow. They didn’t. He and his wife were separated.
So yeah, I’m looking forward to living in a room in Reyn’s house for a few months. Just to get rid of the extra crap. I’m not going to be thinking about the condo corp and can just get things done. One of those things will be a paring down of the extra books in storage and the other cruft I’ve been accumulating. I hope that doesn’t sound like dipshit new-age hippie horsewank. I just feel like making some choices, for good or ill.
book review: china mountain zhang
I think I learned about China Mountain Zhang (by Maureen F. McHugh) from Jo Walton’s Tor.com book reviews. I can’t remember what the review said, only that it sounded like something I would like. I finally got a copy last week, and man was that impression ever right.
The main story is about a gay construction worker named after Sun Yat-Sen (or in putonghua: Zhong Shan) in the future. This is a future where America had its proletariat revolution to try and follow China’s example after the early 21st Century Second Depression. Zhang’s story alternates with stories from other perspectives, including a goat farmer on Mars, a New York kite racer, and a girl with a rebuilt face. Zhang’s story takes him from Brooklyn to Baffin Island to Nanjing and back. There’s interconnection with the other perspectives but not so much it feels like a puzzlebox story. The whole book is the kind of thing science fiction should hope to be.
I had quibbles with the number of typos in the pinyin, but no qualms with the story. My favourite chapter was about the frustrations of Daoist Engineering. I’m sending a copy to Holly next week.
book review: desolation road
Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road is so goddamned good. It’s the story of a town on Mars (though it’s not called Mars but Ares) out in the middle of the desert. We read about the town being formed by one person stumbling upon an oasis and then welcoming the stragglers who show up on the train. It’s sort of like a western, with that whole trains to the frontier aspect.
The thing about the book that makes it so great is how it feels more like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie book than Kim Stanley Robinson. The characters have that kind of magicalness to them, that storybooklandish kind of feel. One of the town’s early residents is Persis Tatterdemalion who crashes her plane there and won’t leave unless she can fly out. There are angels and intelligent trains and a ghost that unravels a murder and identical triplets who love the same woman and war and saints and robots and strikes and the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe has Ever Known and a man who makes people bleed with his sarcasm.
Probably my favourite book I’ve read so far this year.
still existing when the covers are shut
I spent the day packing up all my books in preparation for moving out of my condo. Which I sold. I may not have mentioned that on the blog proper, just on Twitter. Yeah. I sold my condo. Hoofuckingray! And now I’ve got 33 boxes full of books that’ll be following me around the country to wherever I end up going to school. Unless I go to China. I am not taking 33 boxes of books to China.
I suppose it’s natural to think “man, I’ve got too much stuff” when you’re in the middle of packing it up and moving/storing it places. But that doesn’t change the sentiment. In general I feel sort of non-materialistic in my perspective on life or whatever, but that perspective is kind of easy to poke holes in when I have 33 boxes of books alone in my living room.
I kind of feel like I should pare it down, but when I told my mom about that yesterday she seemed shocked. “But your books? That’s you!” Now part of that concern is because she’s purchased a lot of expensive and wonderful books for me over the years and she doesn’t want to see that investment get wasted. But the important and meaningful books aren’t the ones I’d be getting rid of. I have two boxes full of old theology books from my late grandfather. Grandpa was a minister and I rescued a pile of his books so Grandma wouldn’t have to get rid of them. But seriously, my library will work just fine with five theology books instead of two boxes of them. Same thing with my university books. There are some that are great, that even if I’m not using them regularly I want them in my library. The first year intro books are not those ones. I have roleplaying games I’ll never play, paperbacks I’m half-ashamed to own and all these orphaned books from the middles of series I never read any of the other volumes to.
But. If I get rid of any of these things I’m going to miss them. I’m not going to miss the shitty Jysk chair I bought for the cat to sit on, or my glass-brick shelves. Books are the things I’ll miss. Even though I hate the idea of me being so tied to these objects I’ve got sitting in these boxes. I think I’d still be me if I couldn’t reach out and grab a Murakami book to read from. I think so, but I don’t quite know. I’d be different though. At least a little bit.
book review: the battle for china’s past
I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, which apparently makes me an atypical male (seriously: I’ve been reading a bunch of things about making YA libraries guy-friendly and all these books and articles talk about how “guys don’t like fiction” and how “the only people who read fiction are women”). But! I read a nonfiction book. Woo testosterone! The book I read was by Mobo Gao, a professor of Chinese Studies in Australia and it’s called The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution.
Mobo Gao’s thing is to reexamine the Cultural Revolution and see if it was really as bad as we think it was. And when I say “we think it was” I mean, the we in the West, and the we that is the Chinese urban elite. Because the West misunderstands China. We always do. We basically suck at figuring out what’s going on over there. We tend to think that China still venerates Mao just because his picture’s up watching Tian An Men square. But the book points out that official policy over the last thirty years has been to degrade Mao’s actual political message. The CCP says, “The Cultural Revolution was a lost decade. Nothing good came of it.” Because if the CCP doesn’t devalue Mao’s message, all of the capitalism with Chinese characteristics that’s been going on since he died would create so much cognitive dissonance it might be unbearable to anyone paying any political attention at all. It makes way more sense to say “Mao created China, which is great! Then he got crazy, which is bad.”
The books that tend to get translated into English are ones written by the elite. The people who were in college, or whose parents were middle class folk. Mobo Gao devotes a chapter to Jung Chang’s Mao: The Unknown Story and how it is shoddy scholarship bent to a neoconservative worldview. This was at first surprising for me. Neocon? But I really liked that book! It was the Mao Blows Goats book that told us what an incompetent asshole Mao really was. Mobo Gao’s thing is that aside from the lack of scholarly rigour that allowed her to mislead the reader, this is a book from the perspective of one of the elites that Mao was fighting against his whole life.
See, Mobo Gao believes in the communist revolution, that it’s a good thing for the peasants not to be ignored, for the educated elites to go off to the countryside and learn to work with their hands and all that stuff that Jung Chang fucking hated in Wild Swans. He discusses how in the past 25 years since the collective system was disbanded in the countryside life for the rural poor has gone downhill. China is developing, but it is doing it on the backs of the peasants. He talks about the poor farmers and how they look back to the days of Mao as the good old days. He points to how post-Mao history has gone and says this was exactly what the Cultural Revolution was trying to prevent. All of those “Capitalist Roaders” Mao demonized did take over once he was out of the way, and they did take China away from Communist lines.
This is what made the book great. I went in prepared to argue my ass off with the book. I read it with a pencil in hand to write snide remarks in the margins. I did get to write a bunch; Mobo Gao really downplays the Great Leap Forward idiocy, and he engages in a lot more hagiography than I’m really comfortable with. There’s a bit of acknowledgement that “man, those kids went crazy” during the Cultural Revolution, but he says that wasn’t Mao’s fault; it was the people much further down the chain of command than him. I also disapprove of Gao’s belief in the virtue of strict adherence to ideology. But there was a lot of interesting stuff in there that made me think more about my privilege and how that shapes my view of the Cultural Revolution, and my identification with those upper-class victims.
And once again, it looks like Aileen is right: I’m never going to be a true revolutionary.
book review: iron council
One of my favourite things about China Mieville’s New Crobuzon books (of which Iron Council is the third) is how the goals in them shift. The book is never the same thing at the end as it was in the beginning. It’s wonderful. Iron Council takes that a bit further than the previous ones I’ve read, by chopping the story into achronological chunks. It opens with people fleeing the city, then jumps back into it where revolution is fomenting, then back in time to see how the fleeing people’s target got somewhere, then into the city and back and forth and it all worked. The book talks about wanting to do something rather than talk about something, about history having a plan, and about love. There are anarchist artists and a whispersmith cowboy, and handlingers, and golemists who intercede and create things out of earth and air and shadow. There’s a cacotopic stain, and swamps, and grasslands, and smoke that turns to stone, and trains, always the trains.
book review: wicked
Okay, so I’m some years behind the times (when was it that Dave and Andrea wanted to do up their front walk in emerald for Halloween?), but I just read Gregory Maguire’s Wicked. Which is what the musical was based on, not the other way around. There are no songs in the book. But it is about the Wicked Witch of the West and how she got that way.
It was a fairly fun read. There were many different points of view and interesting things happened, but it never really did what it claimed to on the back. There wasn’t any reappraisal of good and evil (I know, that seems like a big topic, but the back of the book claims that’s what this’d do). I mean, Elphaba, the wicked witch is sympathetic because she’s the main character. She’s misunderstood. All the stuff you’d expect her to be in the book about her instead of insipid little Dorothy.
I think there was room for it to be better. The last chunk of the book, which is what happens once Dorothy arrives, is very disappointing. There is no big climax. There’s the recap of a drunken discussion on the nature of evil, not even the actual discussion, just the aftermath of a dinner party in which everyone restates their opinions of what evil is. This was the thing that disappointed me most. It felt like here was the whole reason for writing the book and then it gets elided away. Then the Witch goes home and gets a bucket of water thrown on her. The End.
book review: 2666
I received Roberto Bolano’s posthumous novel 2666 from my mom for Xmas (she would have exploded into a fine mist if she hadn’t bought me anything). And I just finished it this week. It was very good but very dense. I needed to keep on taking breaks to let things seep. Happily, the organization of the book lent itself well to that. There are five parts, each of which could stand alone (though in my opinion each would suffer for it), but which all circle the same area. So, my review.
The Part About The Critics. This section feels like an Umberto Eco novel in some ways. Mostly because it’s about European literary academics who are all specialists on this obscure German writer, Archimboldi. There are four of them, three men and a woman, and it charts how they came to their field and became acquaintances allies and lovers, because of this writer. They decide they have to find him and head to Santa Teresa, Mexico where there are rumours he might be. They go and visit with academics there, do some lectures, but really they’re looking for Archimboldi. In Santa Teresa there have been many murders of women, spoken of like a curse. Supposedly a very tall gringo (Archimboldi was very tall) had been arrested for the crimes. Stuff happens and the story ends with resolution on some fronts but none at all on others. This part was 160ish pages.
The Part About Amalfitano. Now, Amalfitano is an academic who lives in Santa Teresa, and he was the guide for the academics in the first part of the book. This part tells the story of him, his daughter, his wife who abandoned them and a geometry book which he has no recollection of obtaining. The academics don’t show up here, but the whispers of all the murders surround the story. This is a story about sadness, and has a different texture than the part about the academics. While you kind of felt the narrator was treating the academics lightly, as slightly silly people in a world they didn’t really take too seriously, Amalfitano’s part is heavy. Despondent almost. It’s only about 70 pages long, and was my least favourite part of the book.
The Part About Fate. Bolano was clever, because going into this after experiencing the two different approaches of the first two parts, I expected something very abstract about fate and free will. But, Fate is the name of an American reporter who gets assigned to go to Santa Teresa to cover a prizefight between an American and a Mexican. He’s not a sports journalist. He writes stories for a low-circulation black newspaper. The first part of the story is about him going to a church to hear a motivational speaker give his talk about what life is all about. Then he goes to Mexico and tries to learn about the fight. He hangs out with Mexican journalists and cringes at the Americans. It’s interesting because he notes on the race of everyone. He’s the only black reporter covering the fight. There’s a black sparring partner for the Mexican boxer. This section feels Hemingway-ish. Maybe that’s because of the manly subject matter and the journalistic short-sentence style. When he’s in Santa Teresa he hears about the murders and he tries to pitch doing a story on the murders to his editor back in New York, but they don’t care about that. The fight itself lasts three sentences, this tiny little point the rest of the (120 page) section balances on. It was perfect.
The Part About The Crimes. And now we hit the part of the book that made me go wow. This part is 280 pages long (so just short of the length of the three previous parts put together), and it is relentless. There are police officers and narcos and gangsters and crime after crime after crime. Over a four year stretch there are dozens of women who are killed. Most of them are raped. Most of the bodies are found in the desert. There’s also a man pissing in churhces and he has an enormous bladder, but he’s a sideshow. The thing is that these crimes are described in little police-report-esque things. It’s very clinical. Stuff like: “She was found by the side of the road fully dressed. A fractured hyoid bone suggested strangulation but she was also stabbed five times. Swabs showed that she’d been raped vaginally and anally.” And it happens again and again. And again. At first I got sick of reading these paragraphs with all their sordid little details and couldn’t wait to get back to a “story” bit with one of the cops or the reporters who’d been trying to find out what was going on, but as I got further in I realized just how horrible this sheer number of crimes was. Not all of them are connected, but every woman whose murder in Santa Teresa might have been over these years, has their death reported. The relentlessness of the crimes (and the dispassionate recounting) and the inability to put a reason or a person behind them is terrifying. Was there a serial killer? They capture a German-American man and put him in jail, saying he was behind it all, but the crimes keep happening. Things go on and on. In the previous part Fate had met up with a Mexican journalist and they’d gone to the prison where the German-American man was being held to interview him. This was the hardest part of the book to read, the part I was happiest to get through, but also the part that makes the whole thing hang together.
The Part About Archimboldi. The last (260 page) part of the book deals with the life of the German writer those critics from the first part had dedicated their careers to. It’s a story of art and war. Archimboldi had a different name as a young German man, and fought in World War 2 on the German side. This part of the story keeps on digressing into other people’s stories. The story of the Russian science-fiction writer who didn’t write the books that got him purged. The story of Archimboldi’s younger sister. The story of the German who mistakenly received a traincar full of Jews and was told no train would come pick them up so he was to deal with them himself. There are echoes of all the parts of the stories we’ve already heard through the book. The killing of the Jews and the murders of the women and the raping of the Indians by the Spanish all become sort of one in your experience of the book. Archimboldi vanishes from his own story after he starts publishing his books, and we follow his younger sister and her life. In the end, stuff happens, and the whole thing was quite an excellent experience.
So yes, this is a positive review. I approve of it winning awards (even though that doesn’t mean anyone who reads this’ll like it).
