2023 Notes
Boneland
Notes:
An homage to classic mid-century detective noir, but with a setting that is fundamentally injected with unknowable weirdness. The basic premise is that extra-dimensional entities invade our world sometime in the early 20th century. They cannot enter our world’s physics, but manipulate it by mutating insects into everyday objects (especially cameras and televisions) which they force humans to use intimately or violently for their amusement. The main character is a crime scene photographer who uses these mutated bugs as cameras and gets embroiled in a series of murders that overlap with the development of the Hollywood system.
The book is written in a workman-like manner that befits the noir setting, but didn’t provide a lot of pay-off plot-wise, to my satisfaction. It was entertaining enough, but a key part of noir is the propulsive and domino-like plot, and this book just felt kind of meandering. Entertaining in its own way, but nothing that wowed me.
Her Body and Other Parties
Notes:
A rich and menacing collection of short weird fiction that interrogates and defends female desire.
My wife got me this collection a few years ago, but I’d held off on reading it until now. I shouldn’t have waited so long. This is an astonishing collection, and Machado’s lush prose made me linger and relish over passages and paragraphs.
These stories sit within the uncomfortable boundaries of weird fiction; not quite horror, not quite fantasy, but all uneasy. The ghost haunting the whole book is female desire, hidden from (or hiding from) the blunt and brutal gaze of patriarchy. The women in these stories seek pleasure, satisfaction, success, self-assurance, or just some goddamn peace and quiet, and their search is halted or hobbled by men or the world that men have made. Machado’s electric and sensual prose traces the outlines of these women whose frustrations make them angry, ambivalent, exhausted, driven, or stunned.
I loved all of the stories, but I was especially taken with:
- The opening story “The Husband Stitch”, which takes the old story “The Green Ribbon” and roots it in a living breathing woman who wants a sensual, fulfilling life, and whose husband cannot let go of taking her most intimate secret to give it to her. Like the story it’s based on, “Husband Stitch” is almost structured like a joke, and the ending is funny and horrifying.
- “Especially Heinous”, a lengthy, warped alternate version of “Law and Order: SVU”, structured as episode recaps.
- “Real Women Have Bodies” brings together the pretence of mass consumer fashion with a plague that renders women into increasingly intangible spectres. Dark and desperate.
100% recommended
The Books of Earthsea
Notes:
A justifiably legendary series which was revelatory enough on its own, and even more so to read in sequence.
I had never read the Earthsea books as a kid. I had made my way through Tolkien and CS Lewis and a few others of variable quality. I came to Leguin much later, after having read The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, and of course, the Dispossessed, which remains one of my favorite novels. When I saw that this collection was published a few years back, with illustrations by Charles Vess (whose work had so captivated me in the pages of Sandman) I picked it up with the intention of rectifying this long oversight.
I’m so glad I did. I’ve likened reading these books to eating a comforting, familiar meal. They’re sumptuous and enjoyable, even if they don’t necessarily feel wildly different or surprising from genre conventions. And yet, in many ways, they do push against convention, as Leguin notes in the accompanying (and entirely essential) essays that frame and comment on each of the individual books. Ged is quietly but clearly dark-skinned, as are all of the main characters of the first book. Initially, there is no big bad villain, except for ones that the hero creates of his own selfishness and pride. And over the course of the series, the books examine, critique, and fragment power in profound and insightful ways. Tehanu (the fourth book) does this in a devastating and magnificent fashion, revealing the earlier books' interest in magic as an easy trap for a certain kind of fragile and violent masculinity. indeed, Leguin’s really revolutionary work in these books is her slow interrogation of gender and the worlds and actions of men and women in a society that holds those as inviolable and eternal categories.
I loved these books so much that I immediately started reading them with my ten year old. We’ve made our way through Tombs of Atuan, and are now about halfway through “The Farthest Shore” as I write these lines. He loves them and their playful alternatives to the standard genre tropes of the powerful hero and the scheming villain (not to mention the damsel who is both project and prize) have made him thoughtful and ask interesting questions. Thanks UKL and CV for giving me and my son much to ponder and enjoy.
Second Shooter
Notes:
A taught conspiracy thriller and an almost hallucinogenic tour through the violence and dislocation of 21st century America.
Michael Karras is a roving writer of conspiracies. He’s under contract with a small leftist press to write a book documenting a phenomenon where surviving victims of mass shootings frequently describe a non-existent second shooter and travels the country interviewing witnesses. He’s also the frequent verbal sparring partner of a popular right-wing conspiracy radio jock who denies the existence of mass shootings altogether. But as more mass shootings and violent events stack up around him, all the notes he’s taking and contacts he’s making keep mysteriously disappearing. As word begins to spread of a coordinated, nationwide mass shooting event, Karras and the allies who’ve agreed to help him find that the forces at work are much grander and more fantastical than even the biggest conspiracists would believe.
This book is ultimately a kind of travelogue through America in the age of mass media, gun violence, and neoliberal dislocation. Karras encounters a wide array of eccentric characters including the unhoused, right-wing talk-radio grifters, deeply religious immigrants, youth activists, and what remains of America’s white working class. Mamatas doesn’t resort to sterotypes for any of these people, giving them all a richness and humanity that lesser authors would smooth over with pithy sketches. His prose is economical but not simple, though he does take some moments to have his characters discuss the finer points of 20th century Marxist and post-marxist philosophies.
Despite the violence of the subject matter, this is a really fun book, funny and full of a wild electricity. I really enjoyed it!
Dawn of Everything
Notes:
I keep meaning to write a review of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything” which I finished some weeks ago, but for a whole host of reasons, I just can’t bring myself to sit down and write something systematic. So what follows here is some scattered notes:
What I liked about it:
- It’s a “big” history, with a broad and synthetic reach, and for a wide variety of reasons, people don’t write those much anymore. I like big histories (e.g. this), even as I recognize that such a broad treatment of any subject can be fraught with ethical perils. I’m sympathetic to critics who make such a case about DOE as marginalizing and provincializing already marginalized people by speaking for them and abstracting the particulars of their historical circumstances into a broad global schema. At the same time, it is delightful and unusual to see a big, global, historical book that presents an emancipatory and interconnected vision of humanity and freedom, as opposed to the usual treatments that see us as hopefully mired in either technological or behavioral fatalism.
- It really does a wonderful job of provincializing capitalism and our current historical moment of “modernity” as actually somewhat aberrant and unusual forms of social organization. The way we live right now is not only kind of unusual, but actually somewhat weird and stiff compared to the vibrant, dynamic, and mobile forms of sociality that most people of the world would find familiar even a few hundred years ago.
- I learned a lot about new research in archaeology, particularly regarding the frankly wild and unruly worlds of paleolithic peoples, usually portrayed as rather simple and sophisticated in their lifeways.
What I didn’t like about it: - The tone of the book is both arrogant and narrow. Repeatedly, the Davids write about how they are turning our ideas upside down or requiring us to completely rethink our priors. That’s a rhetorical position, and certainly they have the expertise on anthropology and archaeology to write from a place of authority. But their audience seems to be middle-class liberals who are already conversant with the ideas they’re challenging, and this is pretty small window of people. It’s not clear to me just how widespread the commonsense framework of human history and possibility at which they take aim actually is. Do the ancient aliens fans really think of themselves as somewhere on a dialectical continuum between Hobbes and Rousseau? Do followers of QANON or other anti-semitic conspiracy theories relate their historical understanding to innate visions of human behavior and social life? It feels a little like they’re tilting at windmills while the hurricane sweeps in on the horizon.
- This is a bit pithy and personal for me, but I think their discussion of the problem of “modes of production” in chapter 5 mischaracterizes the concept and mixes an analytical category with a descriptive one. I’ve made good use of the concept of the mode of production in my own scholarship, and have found it to be a useful framework for thinking about the complicated ways that social surplus circulates through different historical and cultural moments. The Davids rightly criticize categorizing societies typologically based solely on how they grow food–it’s silly and kind of meaningless to say that societies as wildly different as the Onondaga of the 14th century CE and the Egyptians of the 2nd millennium BCE are somehow “the same” because they both rely on cereal crops. At the same time, the whole point of a mode-of-production analysis is separates work (the individual and historical process of wresting energy from the environment) from labour (the social organization by which surplus is extracted, circulated, and consumed) and allows you to think through the relations between surplus, power, and social organization. And this gets me to another issue with the book…
- The Davids replace the question of equality and inequality with a question of freedom, which they argue is a better framework for evaluating and understanding human history. They identify three basic freedoms that have been truisms for much of human history: the freedom of movement, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to change and transform social organization. But I think that side-lining questions of equality (who has what) in favor of questions of freedom (who can do what) risks marginalizing the ways in which freedom and equality are ultimately intertwined. I don’t have a clear critique (the Davids hedge their rhetoric enough that it’s not a clear-cut disavowal of questions of equality), but it strikes me that the three freedoms they identify could easily be re-grafted onto hierarchical or oppressive projects. “Freedom” in the United States has a particularly White, patriarchal and capitalist valance. Abstracted from their historical analysis, the three freedoms would be easily cognizant as inherent rights to most American White middle class men. Absent an analysis that identifies equality and inequality and explores how such rights were grafted onto power and surplus distribution (something a mode of production analysis ironically does), such freedoms can be grafted just as easily onto emancipatory or oppressive visions of projects.
Piranesi
Notes:
A beautiful and haunting book about the immanence of the world, trauma, and patriarchal arrogance.
The titular ““Piranesi”” lives in a house that consists of endless rooms, lined with statues of which no two are alike. There is also an ocean in the house, which periodically (and regularly) floods some of the rooms. There are also some rooms open to the sky, with clouds gently floating by. ““Piranesi”” knows themself to be part of the house, whose ““beauty…. is immeasurable; it’s kindness infinite.”” They spend their days wandering the rooms and cataloguing the unique statues, only occasionally interrupted by the presence of ““The Other”” who takes regular meetings with them and asks (or maybe orders?) them to undertake specific tasks or experiments on the contents of the House, in pursuit of ““The Great and Secret Knowledge.”” The book itself is written as the diary entries of this ““Piranesi”” (a name given them by the Other) as they gradually uncover more about themself and their presence in this labyrinthine house.
This is a book about time, and memory, and what time gives and takes away. Piranesi presents a past (materialized in the House) which is almost literally a foreign country, filled with strange and wild magic that is unknowable to anyone in the present. It is also a book about the frailty and unreliability of memory, for the narrator and for others who find themselves enthralled by the House and what it represents. But undergirding this ambiguous investigation of memory is very real and metaphorical violence, undertaken in the pursuit of recovering what was lost and taking power from that pursuit. Ultimately, Piranesi frames the attempt to recover the lost past as a kind of violent act, while also emphasizing that the past can and will fight back.
The novel is beautifully written, and though it’s almost completely different from Clarke’s ““Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell””, it shares with that book a mood of staid formality, underlain by a wild darkness."
A Collapse of Horses
Notes:
What is a horror story if most of its primary reference points are scratched out or moved off-scene?
Brian Evenson plays with this question in these stories. In almost every case, monsters, ghosts or alien forces sit offstage or unstated. When horror does rear itself it’s either a deeply human horror of broken people or bad choices, or it’s ambiguous, unclear horror that may be dismissable.
All the stories are good, but ones I particularly liked included:
- Black Bark, where two men who are on the run from some unstated violence (in the old west?) take shelter in a cave legendary for the folk horror stories told about it, only for one of them to begin to change.
- A Collapse of Horses, a story about a man who, after an accident, sees his house, his family, and his community subtly changing when he’s not looking.
- Cult, where a rather insufferable man meets up with an ex who proudly tells him of a cult that she joined during their breakup, and gradually pushes him to return there with her. The characters in this story feel the most human, the most flawed and complex, of any of the stories.
- The Dust, a terse piece of science fiction where a mining outpost on some distant planet is gradually colonized by violence both human and alien.
- The Blood Drip, about two men who are trying to find sanctuary from some unstated calamity, and up overlapping or even becoming the men described in Black Bark.
Evenson’s characters are mostly workmanlike; there isn’t a lot of emotional meat on the bones. In this sense, he differs from someone like M. John Harrison who is engaged in a similar project of scraping away the trappings of genre, but who invests his characters with a more thoughtful demeanor. Evenson is more focused on playing with plot and mood, and these stories are fantastic, filled with imaginative dread. Recommended!
Back to ‘2023’
The City in the Middle of the Night
Notes:
A rich and thoughtful book about memory and friendship, and what it means to adapt one’s past and present into a thriving future.
The book takes place on a tidal-locked planet, where half the planet is under scorching sun and the other half is in frozen darkness. Humans long-ago arrived on the planet after fleeing earth, and have made settlements right along the meridian line in the only liveable space between darkness and light. Anders suffuses the world with a rich and messy history of environmental problems, political strife, and a variety of new cultural and technological forms that emerged to deal with both. But the primary story is about the lives of Sophie, a student in the city of Xiosphant, and Mouth, a rough and bitter trader who is the last member of a band of exterminated nomads called the Citizens. The book begins with Sophie being arrested for seditious activity and exiled into the Night where she is saved from freezing to death by a race of creatures called Crocodiles or the Gelet, who have made their homes their for millennia. Likewise, Mouth’s story begins with a trade deal gone bad, and getting caught up in the political rumbling that had initially ensnared Sophie. Both stories come together around a young woman named Bianca, an aristocrat turned rebel who Sophie loves and Mouth believes is the key to recovering an important artifact that preserves her people’s culture.
Anders' prose is beautiful and impressionistic, and her characters are alive, complicated, and deeply human. The trauma of Sophie’s initial near-death experience haunts her throughout the book, and colors her interactions with everyone she knows, especially her continuous devotion to Bianca. Likewise, Mouth’s gruff and violent demeanor unfolds from her being set adrift as a child from her family and community. Even Bianca’s naive radicalism is rich and familiar, making her neither hero nor villain, but some gray idealist in between.
The Daylight Gate
Notes:
A harsh book that simultaneously fictionalizes and humanizes one of the most well-documented witch trials in England.
The Pendle witch hunt of 1612 was documented by one of the lawyers who participated in it, in a book published that same year. Winterson takes this account, as well as other historical evidence, and uses it to sketch a vision of the violence, political intrigue, religious conflict and supernatural worldview of Lancashire in the 17th century. The characters are all drawn from life, including the wealthy and worldly Alice Nutter, the poor, mad, and backstabbing Demdike/Device family who live on her lands and have her sympathy, and the various officials, lawyers, and thugs who try (and ultimately succeed) in executing them all for witchcraft.
The world Winterson paints is violent and cruel, and there are elaborate and visceral descriptions of torture and brutality throughout. The book is filled with cruel men, particularly the vicious pedophile Tom Peeper and the zealous anti-catholic lawyer Thomas Potts. At the same time, what ultimately pulls the story together is love, especially the love between Alice Nutter and Elizabeth Southern, and between the revolutionary Jesuit Priest Christopher Southworth and his sister who is imprisoned, as well as for Alice herself. Alice also has a clear eyed understanding that power has been concentrated and violently defended by men, and she sympathizes with the poor women who seek supernatural power as a route around the worldly power that oppresses them. The reality of magic in the book also gives it something more sinister than a straightforward historical epic would suggest.
This was a short but entertaining read that depicts the necessity of love and care, especially in the face of brutality, and the power of women in the face of patriarchal violence.
Crooked
Notes: “A fun strange book about the secret supernatural life of President Richard Nixon that has the same problems that many alternate histories do, namely that in constructing a story about real people, it leaves aside or ignores fundamental historical forces in favor of fantastical ones.
This book is written as the hidden memoirs of Richard Nixon, telling the story of his early life, his career in politics, and his eventual fall into ignominy. In its characterization, it treats Nixon as a bitter, humorless man who is plagued by self-doubt and petty grievance, and that these forces spur a tireless ambition for power over those who have wronged him. From what we know about Nixon, both from his own words and the analysis of others, this is not far from the truth.
But the book plays out Nixon’s personal contradictions on a vast cosmic scale, positing a United States that is caught up in a magical war between rival nations vying for control of horrific supernatural forces. This fanciful history is the most entertaining part of the book, which suggests that the Covenant of the pilgrims was a mystical document as much as a political one, giving them power to forge a nation that could rival and even surpass the old magical forces of the kings and nations of Europe. Grossman’s strength is scattering crumbs and small details of this history throughout the novel, and part of what makes Nixon so appealing as a protagonist is that he’s as much at a loss for understanding this history as we are; the book suggests that the Civil War broke the traditions passed on from President to President about the nature of their powers, and that 20th century America has been run by people who were either ignorant of the magical nature of their office and their nation or only able to dimly access it through diligent research of decaying materials and dangerous rituals. And all of this is taking place in the context of the Cold War, which Grossman frames as being between the failing magic of the United States and the ascendant magical-military research of the USSR. The arms race is as much about what can be summoned as what can be launched.
Its this tension between the vast history and scope of the action and Nixon’s narrow and faint window onto it that makes the book a compelling read and drives the narrative. Significant figures of 20th century history like Dwight Eisenhower and Henry Kissinger (and even Nixon’s wife Pat) are posited as having mystical powers and acting in ways that Nixon never gets to see. There are also other characters, spies who are playing multiple sides of a complex political and supernatural game, and who drag Nixon along with them despite his fear and self-doubt. Despite him being the protagonist, the book definitely doesn’t lionize Nixon, who is written as simultaneously ambitious and cowardly, full of both grievance and a desire for anonymity. Ultimately most of the supernatural action happens offstage, with Nixon only hearing about it secondhand from others. His final downfall in the Watergate affairs is suggested to have been a planned diversion from a much more significant supernatural conflict that has profound implications for the United States but also gives him the freedom to lay down the burdens put on him by the power he ultimately didn’t want.
The biggest problem I had with this book is that, in the service of writing an alternate story of Nixon, it leaves aside one of the most significant forces acting on and around Nixon’s presidency: race. It’s pretty hard to tell the story of Nixon without referencing the Civil Rights movement against which he positioned himself, and the ways in which Nixon cynically deployed race in the Southern Strategy to tap into White grievance to get elected. One book can’t be everything, and I’m now doing that thing where I’m saying the author should have written a different book instead of reviewing the one he did write. Still, moments kept coming up where I would say ““wait a minute, what about race?””
An example: the book references the idea that Presidents before the Civil War had passed down the knowledge of the magical powers inherent in the office of the Presidency, but the Civil War broke that line, hence Nixon’s fumbling in the cosmic darkness. Okay, but what was the Civil War about? It was about slavery and the place of black people in the nation. Another example: there’s reference to the idea that the Pilgrim’s stole magical knowledge from Native Pequot and Wampanoag people. Okay, what’s that about? The book doesn’t elaborate. I think it’s interesting question actually, because race and colonization are contradictions in a country founded on equality and freedom and I could imagine an interesting cosmic or magical story about how those contradictions manifest. Maybe that’s just another book to be written.
Still, for its faults, the book is genuinely entertaining and exciting, and despite giving him the primary narrative, doesn’t put Nixon, genuinely understood to have been an awful President, on a pedastal, but treats him as the small and bitter man that he likely was.
Settling the World
Notes:
A new retrospective collection that includes many of the stories from the now-out-of-print “Things that Never Happen” as well as a few stories from other sources and a couple new pieces.
It was a great delight to revisit stories I had read previously and the whole collections makes clear what a thoughtful, incisive, and imaginative writer Harrison has always been. Even early stories like “Settling the World” and “The Machine in Shaft Ten” brim with a genuinely complex and emotionally rich humanity. Later stories are equally vast in scope and human in detail; the astonishing “The Ice Monkey” with its grim evocations of Thatcherite destruction and unknowable dark magic, or even “The Crisis” which treats an alien invasion as a backdrop for explorations of poverty, gentrification, and class violence. All of Harrison’s stories wax and wane the extent to which the fantastic is front-and-center, but they all share a deep sensitivity to what living in a world of impersonal and powerful forces requires of us, and a grim exploration of the frail and tentative nature of genuine human connection in such a world.
