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Book Notes- Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Parable of the Sower

by Octavia Butler

Finished 8/6/2019

A shockingly prescient novel about the survivors of the end of the world, and the necessary costs of survival.

Lauren Olamina is 17 and lives in a walled community near Los Angeles, sometime in the 2020s. The world in which she lives has been ravaged by climate catastrophe, wealth and political inequality, and widespread violence. In her journals (which form the text of the novel), she documents her life, and her growing belief in a philosophy/religion that she develops called Earthseed, that sees change as the most powerful force in the Universe. Due to her mother’s drug addiction, she is hyperempathic, which means that she feels the intense sensations (pain or pleasure) of other people in her proximity. Eventually, her community is overrun by invaders and she is forced to flee and build a new community with the other refugees she meets, and using some of her Earthseed insights as a guide.

Reading this book today, in our world, was really hard, but perhaps that’s because its so easy to look away from the overwhelming and seemingly insurmountable overlapping catastrophes we face. The fact that Butler wrote this book in 1993 reveals both her genius and foresight and our collective lack thereof.

But this is an Octavia Butler book, which means it is masterfully paced, and the characters she creates are both lived in and real, and also serve as thoughtful interlocuters of the complicated philosophical and ethical issues she lays out. One of the most salient of these is how to cope with change, a visceral and frightful question given the world she has laid out. And yet her ultimate answer is that we must survive however we can, and with as much kindness as possible to those around us, even if that kindness requires violence or danger. Such survival requires a recognition of the power of diversity in the communities that it births, and that we should welcome difference as a means of adapting to new challenges. This ethic permeates the entirety of Lauren’s journey.

My reading life is limited to a few minutes before collapsing into sleep each night, which meant that I spent a lot of time moving slowly through the frightening and horrific world that Butler prophecied. But ultimately, the book was hopeful, in its insistence that we can survive with kindness, and that this will create and re-create a community around us. This puts it at odds with other seemingly emancipatory dystopian fiction that either assumes a savior/hero, or sees a communities of resistence as a kind of autonomic response to oppression, without saying much about how such communities will cohere and evolve. The Subprimes, which I read earlier this year is funny and smart, but suffers from both of these problems.

I am in awe of Octavia Butler, as an author, a philosopher, and a social analyzer. Onward!

Quentin's (bi)Weeknotes 7/13/19-7/26/19

Missed my post last week, so here’s what I did over the last two:

• I read this strange and foggy short story “The Crisis” by M. John Harrison. I read Viroconium earlier this year, and am still lingering over and attempting to reverse engineer Harrison’s lyrical/anxious/morose prose. As with Viriconium, and other of Harrison’s work (see both contributions to the Vandermeer’s “The Weird” Anthology), this story uses a speculative skeleton, namely an invasion from outside, to explore very human states–pessimism, anxiety, inequality, and displacement.
• I finished Southern Gods by John Horner Jacobs. It was good, especially the moody and swampy first half, though it got a little too formulaic for me by the end.
• We had a yard sale with our neighbors. I love yard/garage sales, as a way of de-cluttering, a way of building community, and as a window into the lives of people by what they discard. We had a great old time, got rid of some stuff, and made a little pocket money.
• I saw The Secret Life of Pets 2. There are fewer joys I have in life than hearing my son laugh out loud.
• I was saddened to hear of the death of Rutger Hauer. Like every nerd, I know him most prominently as the poetic and murderous android/freedom fighter Roy Batty from Blade Runner. But the movie of his that I return to over and over again is Ladyhawke, a gorgeous and extremely entertaining Richard Donner Fantasy epic. Hauer is a force of nature in it, and the entire lead cast, including Matthew Broderick, Michelle Pfeiffer, Leo McKern, and John Wood are all astonishingly great in their respective roles. I can think of no better recommendation than the finale sword fight between Hauer’s Navarre and Ken Hutchinson’s Captain Marquet.  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIl9IFcIXlg&w=560&h=315]
• It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No, not Christmas–The Verso E-book sale is upon us. This year I grabbed books by Mike Davis, Valerie Solanas, John Berger, Angela Davis, and Theodor Adorno.

Quentin's Weeknotes 6/29/19-7/05/19

This Week:

• I watched “Bone Tomahawk” and I have mixed feelings about it. It was gorgeously shot, cleverly written and featured some masterful acting by Kurt Russell, Richard Jenkins, and Matthew Fox (really!).At the same time, it’s a grotesque film, revelling in scenes of violence and sadism. It’s also not clear to me that the movie has moved beyond the common trope of Native people as Savages in Westerns.  There are some nods that villains are not Native, but it’s hard not to see this as a horror movie where the good guys are cowboys and monsters are (not really, but actually they kind of are) Indians, and that doesn’t strike me as very politically mature in the 21st century. And the fact that Matthew Fox’s character, an unrepentant racist and Indian killer, ends up being heroic, makes me feel like the Writer/Director wasn’t able to see himself as an Indigenous Person (to paraphrase Ta Nehisi Coates), despite his clear ability to write rich, interesting, and complicated characters.
• I finsihed reading Zora Neale Hurston’s early masterpiece “Barracoon”. It was stunning.
• Reading up on Hurston led me to “Real Gods Require Blood”, a creepy short horror and ambiguous horror film set in impoverished northern England. Definitely NSFW but absolutely interesting:[vimeo 209083540 w=640 h=480] Real Gods Require Blood from Moin Hussain on Vimeo.
• I read the short, fun, and entertaining Artificial Condition, the second novella in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. The premise of the series is that a cyborg killing machine gets freed from its controlled programming and has to learn how to live among humans in a non-lethal way. The protagonist is funny and acerbic, but also anxious and nervous about trying to fit in with normal humans. This series explores the character’s mysterious backstory a bit, while also adding some new meat. My favorite bit is a new character called ART, a cheerfully annoying but good-hearted sentient space-ship, but the whole of the technocratic, libertarian world that the characters inhabit is so richly realized that it’s hard to pick just one thing about it. It’s a great series and I’m excited to read more!

Book Notes- Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

Oluale Kossola

“Barracoon” by Zora Neale Hurston

Finished 6/29/2019

Zora Neale Hurston has followed me through the entirety of my adult life. I was assigned to read “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in high school and was entranced by the astonishing poetry of her language

Reflecting back, it’s possible that this was the first book by an African-American that I read cover to cover. My High School English teacher gave us some historical context on the Harlem Renaissance and her prominent place therein. Beyond that, like most White Americans, I was pathetically ignorant about the rich Blackness that undergirds American Culture. This book was part of the start of my education.

When I got to graduate school, I was delighted and surprised to discover that she played an integral role in the history of American Anthropology. She studied with Franz Boas and conducted prominent fieldwork in the rural south and Jamaica, collecting folklore, stories, and other aspects of what we might now call Expressive Culture. or even autoethnography. She wrote two books on the subject:  “Mules and Men” and “Tell My Horse." Though not highly regarded in her lifetime, her folklore and ethnographic work is seeing a critical resurgence for its intellectual reach and deep humanism.

A few years ago, I had heard that an unpublished manuscript of hers, which involved an interview with Cudjo Lewis, the last African kidnapped in the Transatlantic Slave Trade was going to finally receive publication. I finished it a few days ago, and have a few scattered thoughts. The take-away is that it was riveting and wonderful.

1. Kossula Oluale (also known as Cudjo Lewis) was clearly an astonishing storyteller–Deborah Plant, who edits the book, locates Kossula in the Griot tradition. The narrative is peppered with small details that make it more than just a recounting of memory. I was particularly struck by his evocative descriptions of his first arrival at Dahomey after being taken prisoner, and his horror at the use of ornamental skulls to display the power and violence of the Dahomean dynasties. But he also recounted the early days of Africatown, the community he and others founded after emancipation, telling amazing and dramatic stories about the lives and deaths of his family members and the ways in which they tried to survive in a land to which they were brought in chains. There is also an appendix in which Kossula recounts various fables he knew from his youth which are fantastical and delightful. Africa and the American Flag, by FOOTE (1854)
2. Hurston’s decision to write the book preserving Kossula’s dialect was both a way to honor his cadence and storytelling, as well as a rhetorical masterstroke. Many times, I found myself saying sentences aloud to try and divine their meaning, and the delight that I got in evoking Kossula’s words made for a richer reading of the text.
3. I don’t have a lot of experience reading the genre of Slave narratives, but found it interesting that Kossula talks very little about his experiences being forced to work on the plantation of James Meaher–a few paragraphs at most. The majority of the book details his shockingly rich memory of his first twenty years in West Africa and his later life in Africatown. His time enslaved takes up maybe two paragraphs. Whether this is from his lack of interest in discussing this horrific period, or Hurston’s lack of interest in asking questions about, or just it not being particularly memorable beyond the drudgery and suffering of incessant menial work, I don’t know.
4. The accompanying historical and contextual essays by  Deborah G. Plant are really rich and insightful, describing both the problems that Thurston had in getting the book published, and the controversies which have emerged around it. There is some fairly clear evidence that she plagiarized some of the initial writing she did about Cudjo Lewis from a local Alabama historian named Emma Langdon Roche. But what is also clear is that Hurston’s insistence on writing the manuscript in dialect, along with the uncomfortable history of Africans selling Africans made the book seem unpalatable to publishers in the 1930s and 40s.

So for me, this book is a rich and insightful bookend to a much longer engagement with Zora Neale Hurston, a fascinating and unique piece of historiography, and a gripping tale of a survivor of the violence and horror of American Slavery.

Quentin's Weeknotes 6/22/19-6/28/19

This Week:

• I read the mighty Sarah Jaffe’s profile of the closure of the GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Contrary to the standard image of blue-collar workers embracing the President over a putative ‘economic anxiety’, Jaffe finds an engaged Union that has tangible memories of successes against management, and is trying to be strategic about how to preserve their jobs, and by extension, the whole community.

Quentin's Weeknotes 6/15/19-6/21/19

This Week:

• I read/played “My Father’s Long Long Legs” an incredibly creepy piece of Interactive Fiction. I don’t want to spoil it, but if you’re a fan of atmospheric, ambiguous horror (think Junji Ito, Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, or Jeff Vandermeer), it is absolutely worth 10 or 15 minutes of your time.
• I finished Karl Tarlo Greenfield’s “The Subprimes." Despite being a piece of satire, it was a hard read, both for its frightening evocation of our current politics, and an ending that largely ignored the hard work it will take to undo such politics.
• I discovered this delightful piece of ancient history that I didn’t know before. Apparently there was a genre of writing in ancient Mesopotamia where animals, forces of nature, or plants would debate each other. There’s Bird versus Fish, Summer Versus Winter, Cattle Versus Grain, etc… Quite apart from how astonishingly contemporary this feels, I am here for the body-blows that Bird lands on Fish:

You are bereft of hips, as also of arms, hands and feet – try bending your neck to your feet! Your smell is awful; you make people throw-up

Book Notes: The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfield

The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfield

A dystopian satire, written a few years ago, whose closeness to (as well as divergence from) the world we are currently in makes it even more unsettling.

The Subprimes of the title are people whose credit scores are sub-prime (and folks with not that long memories will recall the use of this term in the finance market to describe the volatile loans that led us to the 2008 crash). In 21st century America, they are social pariahs, as every aspect of citizenship and daily life are governed by credit scores (housing, employment, education). Those whose scores are too low are forced into vagrancy, setting up temporary camps called Ryanvilles (named after former House Speaker, weightlifting enthusiast, and champion of government deregulation Paul Ryan). The book intertwines a number of storylines, including several Subprime families, a washed-up reporter whose son is enrolled in an increasingly regimented and privatized school system, the wife of a energy stock trader under inditement for securities fraud, and a mysterious woman of color who tries to build political and social alternatives to all of this.

Along the way there are hard-right evangelical megachurch pastor/politicians, ultra-wealthy energy families manipulating politics towards their own ends, environmental castastrophe (the book opens with Whales beaching themselves en masse, and periodically references unending prairie wildfires), double-speak regressive politics (e.g. “the Clear Skies Act” which mandates environmental deregulation), economic exploitation of marginalized people, and the militarization of everyday life.

The Subprimes highlights the danger and disorientation of our world with both incisive humor and abject terror. The book opens with a depressing depiction of a Ryanville that is later destroyed by a police raid, in a passage both horrifying and enraging. There are also some wonderful puns and wordplay to be found throughout–the wealthy sisters who own most of America’s energy concerns are named the “Peppers”, presumably in references to the Koch (Coke) brothers.

This is a satire, which means its about ideas and abstractions, not characters and emotions. Most of the characters are pretty one-dimensional–the philandering stock-trader husband is astonishingly simple-minded for someone who scammed hundreds of people. Likewise, the mysterious revolutionary Sargham is almost literally divine, and the ending of the book casts a miraculous shadow over her political beliefs and hard organizing work. There were passages and sections that I found to be pretty abyssmally written, and that let go of subtlety in favor of a rhetorical beating.

And the end of the book is somewhat upbeat, but in a way that felt literally miraculous and belies the complicated ecological, economic, and political problems that it outlined. It initially feels good to see powerless people stand up to the powerful, but offered little beyond that good feeling as to whether such a stand would be ultimately succesful in any other narrative or historical moment.

All together, this was a harrowing read, given our current circumstances. It was definitely entertaining, especially in the “spot the pseudonym” sort of way, and it tells a story of triumph over evil. But I’m not sure that I actually enjoyed it, given how woodenly it was written, and given that the problems it sketches are all around us, frighteningly visible and visceral, I found its magical ending even more despairing.

Quentin's Weeknotes 6/8/19-6/14/19

This week:

• I listened to this two part interview with Steve Albini and Ian Mackaye. It was a phenomenally rich conversation, with the first part being basically historical, about their respective histories in punk rock and independent music, and the second part being more philosophical, with their thoughts about the internet, criticism, and community. What came through for me is that they are great friends, mutually admiring, and that part of what brings them together is their fierce commitment to humanistic and ethical art-making. What was also neat was to hear their points of difference, with Albini being more analytical and empiricist and Mackaye being more direct and rationalist.
• I finished reading Grady Hendrix' Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror fiction. It was a fun, easy read, and made so by the amazing covers of these novels, reprinted theiein, and by Hendrix’s humorous ironic prose, filled both with genuine love and snark for the outrageous books that made up the horror boom of the late 20th century.

Quentin's Weeknotes 6/1/19-6/7/19

This Week:

• I listened to a new podcast, entitled This Land. Hosted by Indigenous (Cherokee) Activist and author Rebecca Nagle, it chronicles the background of an upcoming supreme court case that will determine whether half of Oklahoma is Tribal land. The basis is a murder and the question of federal jurisdiction, but the heart of the issue is treaty law, and the extent to which Indigenous groups are sovereign nations whose rights under treaty must be acknowledged. Check it out!
• I helped my folks get the website of their antique shop looking shipshape. Czech Village Antiques is a great, multi-dealer store in the heart of Czech Village in Cedar Rapids Iowa. Stop by if you’re in town.
• I finished reading the third volume of Nnedi Okorofor’s Binti trilogy. The easiest (but sort of misleading) tagline would be “African Harry Potter in Space”, but it’s really a thoughtful meditation on tradition and change, intercultural agreement and strife, and building community. Also, there are Jellyfish Aliens and flying interplanetary fish.
• I attended the New York Archives Conference and gave a co-authored paper (with Shelley Wallace) on archives and archaeology. I wish I coud’ve stayed longer as it was quite an interesting group of folks.

Quentin's Weeknotes 5/25/19-5/31/19

This Week:

• For some reason I kept thinking about Joshua Casteel. I have a copy of Letters from Abu Ghraib, which he wrote during his time as an interrogator (after the torture scandal broke). I wound myself wishing someone had written out his full story, and then lo, and behold, discovered that someone had. The Priest of Abu Ghraib is absolutely worth your time, as is “Letters from Abu Ghraib,” which I was delighted to learn is out in a second edition.
• I watched the Perfection. I wanted to like it. There’s a really excellent feminist revenge movie lurking inside this poorly written and incoherently goofy film (Alison Williams is attacked multiple times in the movie and nobody notices she was wearing a wig the whole time?).
• My family spent a bunch of time getting our yard and garden shipshape. We are doing some major replanting and re-organizing this year, and it was quite a chore. I used a stump-grinder for the first time, which was one of the most simultaneously tiring and satisfying experiences I’ve ever had with machinery.