Monthly Bookpost, June 2016
Geek SuperGoddess: You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), by Felicia Day
I started throwing in other characters from other books into my headspace, and pretty soon I'd built an imaginary town filled with stolen IP. Perry Mason was there (of course), the whole crew from the Trixie Belden children's mystery series (Anne loved to steal Trixie's boyfriend away), Lancelot and Guinivere owned the local garden store, even anthropomorphic pigs and spiders from Charlotte's Web were full residents with voting rights. It got so complicated I had to start tracking my world in an accounting ledger with everyone's names, addresses and personality traits in neat little rows ("Friendly!" "Secret lovers!" "Murderer!") My town had it all!
There's an online poll making the rounds asking people what four faces they would choose for a "geek Mount Rushmore"--the giants of fandom. Patrick Stewart? George R. R. Marin? Sir Terry Pratchett? JK Rowling? Joss Whedon? Nathan Filion?
Felicia Day is consistently in the top ten. And this is her memoir.
We learn that she was homeschooled in the deep south and still ended up getting a 4.0 in college, double-majoring in mathematics and violin (actually, we are merely reminded of this, because in the subculture that admires Felicia Day, we get told this at least once a month in internet memes. It is the personal factoid people are told about her, like the one about Kant being so regular in his walks that the local merchants set their watches when they saw him coming, or that Ayn Rand was once forced to share her toys and never got over it. Got it? Felicia = 4.0 math geek. Go Felicia! Sapiosexuals everywhere swoon over you.
We learn other things we may not have known, such as her odd combination of shy, awkward kindness and utter, utter badassdom. The way she more or less invented the webseries with The Guild, which might well have been produced traditionally, had Day put up with the mind-boggling (to men, anyway, who never believe it until they see it firsthand) condescenscion, misogyny and greed inherent in Hollywood producers. There is a chapter about her experiences among HER PEOPLE (that's us) at conventions, where her fans run the gamut from totally awesome and rocking the way they dress like her, to sad and in need of an egolift--which she provides--to frighteningly creepy.
There is a chapter on gamergate that will turn your stomach (again), and which will be surprising only to male readers who have not listened to women (again). Good God, what is WRONG with these guys? They collectively suck as human beings. They long for these smart, quirky, wonderful women to keep company with them, and when one comes along, they offer an experience slightly less enjoyable than rolling around naked in a cactus field infested with fire ants and scorpions. Say it with me: "We are GEEKS. We Don Not do this. We Do Not allow it to happen around us. We respect and honor and nurture women as we respect and honor all of our fellow nerds, introverts, geeks, misfits and oddballs. It's a geek thing. It's what we do."
And then there is a chapter--I suspect one that took the most courage to write--about a period of crippling depression and anxiety she went through that might have ended her Felicia, if you're online reading my bookpost, thank you for that chapter. It made me feel like I was neither alone nor a specially contemptible excuse for a human being, to have had such episodes myself. Why, if even Felicia Day, Badass, has been knocked down by emotional demons, then I certainly have nothing to be ashamed of. And if she can get up again more times than Chumbawamba, then I owe it to the path we walk in fandom, to get up again after just a few smashings. And I'm pretty damn sure I'm not the only one for whom that chapter did that.
Finally, we --by which I mean, I--learn that, apart from having "made it", and aside from her particular set of quirky traits, Felicia Day is not all that different from thousands of geek and gamer girls--and guys--out there. We are all weird individually and together. This is important because I get a little wistful sometimes knowing that (as happened with George R. R. Martin at the last WorldCon), if she and I are ever at the same con, I would have to stand in lines and jostle many many other fans who want it more, for a bit of attention, when what I'd really like is half an hour of coffee and conversation. And that isn't likely to happen with most geek celebrities. And really, I needn't be wistful about that. Because there are dozens--hundreds--of geeks I know personally who, not yet having "made it", are quite accessible indeed for a bit of conversation over coffee.
As for Felicia Day---We will always have You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost),
Beasts, Human and Otherwise: The Complete Short Stories of Saki, by H.H. Munro
“Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it.” Here the child’s voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. “Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing ‘Bertie, why do you bound?’ as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window - ”
People who learn that my first alphabet book was The Gashlycrumb Tinies often ostentatiously laugh and say, "Ah, NOW I understand", by which they mean, "I've always thought you were a little crazy, and I see now that you must have had your mind warped by being exposed too early to a grim black-and-white illustrated recounting of 26 small children getting deaded."
These people know less than Jon Snow. Edward Gorey is nothing. If there's a book I was traumatized by reading too young, it was a collection of Saki tales. These are disturbing.
Saki's Edwardian era world is one in which manners are a thin veneer masking cruel, savage impulses in people, and civilization is an equally thin veneer covering natural and supernatural nastiness from our primitive heritage.
The complete set of stories starts out with a limp appetizer of "Reginald" stories that mostly involve an upper class-born brat sitting in a chair, cleverly sneering at hypocrisy and convention while shocking poor old Mrs. Piddle-Widdle or whoever with his offensive frankness. Eventually, Reginald is replaced with Clovis, who is more likely to be either on the sidelines commenting sardonically or playing a cruel practical joke. They're what Bertie Wooster would have been if he had more brains and a mean streak.
The better-known stories are stand-alones. They have twist-endings reminiscent of O. Henry, usually involving a protagonist being made into a fool, or being squashed like a bug for a small amount of hubris. Boys at a house party politely ask to be excused to the library, where they beat up the smaller boy. A hobo is mistaken for a returning prodigal son and welcomed in and fed, but is later also mistaken for the son by a deadly enemy.
And then there are the traumatic ones. The ones like "Gabriel Ernest", "Sredni Vashtar" and "The Music on the Hill", that involve vengeful primitive gods. Some hapless city person in the country laughs off an old crone's warning not to meddle in something, and ends up being nastily dealt with in the forest. A boy in the care of a cruel cousin prays for her to be killed by a wild polecat he keeps as a secret pet. Feuding neighbors are trapped under a tree and make peace with one another just in time to be eaten by wolves.
Read singly, a Saki story can make one think a little. Taken too many at once, as I did at an impressionable age, they can make one huddle in a corner and whimper.
Wax Fruit for a Starving World: Freedom of the Will, by Jonathan Edwards
We need not be afraid to affirm that if a wise and good man knew with absolute certainty, it would be best, all things considered, that there should be such a thing as moral evil in the world, it would not be contrary to his wisdom and goodness to choose that it should be so.
I am embarrassed for my country that a Massachusetts neo-Calvinist apparently has the claim to be America's first philosopher. the introduction says nothing about Edwards participating in witch-burnings, but I'm pretty sure he approved of them.
Freedom of the Will is about what you'd expect it to be about. being a Calvinist, Edwards is against free will and for strict determinism of our lives, before we are born, by a cruel god. America being on the cusp of a cry for freedom to be heard 'round the world, he felt the need to make it palatable by explaining that freedom is slavery (and ignorance strength. Orwell would smile knowingly, and Trump eagerly).
Edwards defines freedom as the ability to do what one pleases, but adds that "the will" is a fiction, not a real thing like a person, but an attribute, a capacity for making choices. And that the choices we do make are....wait for it...DETERMINED by our considerations at the time. I see what he did there! Our ability to do as we please can be limited by physical (like being in jail and unable to go someplace) or moral (like being unwilling to enter a brothel that stands before you) considerations...and it is the same thing.
I am the 99%: Discourse on Political Economy, by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Another point is that the losses of the poor are far less reparable than those of the rich, and that the difficulty of acquiring always increases in proportion to need. Money breeds money, and the first gold pistole is sometimes harder to earn than the second million. But it goes even further. All that the poor man pays is forever lost to him, and remains in or returns to the hands of the rich, and since the proceeds of taxes go sooner or later only to those men who take part in the government or are close to it, they have--even in paying their share--a tangible interest in increasing taxes.
Let us summarize in a few words the social compact of the two estates: "You need me, for I am rich and you are poor, so let us come to an agreement between ourselves. I shall permit you to have the honor of serving me on condition that you give me what little you have for the trouble i shall take to command you.
If you ask me, this short tract is the most fascinating, and the truest, thing Rousseau ever wrote, in part because it is almost the opposite of the "noble savage" claptrap from the First and Second Discourses reviewed in last month's Bookpost. Here, Rousseau forsees the modern libertarian movement and attacks it as a gang of wolves advising the sheep to get rid of those repressive old big gummint sheepdogs that prevent them from playing with wolves as equals. Rousseau says that for a state to be economically responsible, it must first obey its own laws, second persuade the people that obedience to said laws is synonymous with virtue (and the best way to do this is to have only laws that make moral sense), and third feed the people and prevent the oligarchic class from concentrating too much wealth into their own hands, for they will then threaten to replace the government while the poor will threaten revolution.
Does that sound like advice that might be as pertinent today as it was in Rousseau's time?
Incidentally, it seems that this, and not The Wealth of Nations (coming to my bookpost some time this year) was the first tract on economics. At least according to Rousseau, who claims to invent the term "political economy" to mean the economic life of commerce among businesses; between nations; and as planned by statesmen, as opposed to regular "economy" which had previously meant only the running of a household.
The 18th Century Murders: The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector, by Lillian de la Torre; Hawkwood, by James McGee; The Fiery Cross, by Diana Gabaldon
After an interminable minute, the lock turned, and we heard someone wrenching at the bolt. It stuck, and with a shriek it grated grudgingly back, and the heavy door swung slowly in.
On the threshold stood Mrs. Oliver, rigid and staring. Her lips moved, but no sound came.
"In God's name, what is it?" cried mrs. Taffety in alarm.
Mrs. Oliver found a hoarse whisper.
"Murder!" she gasped. "Murder lock'd in!"
--from The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector
St. Giles' Rookery had been Christened the Holy Land by its inhabitants, Irish Catholic immigrants for the most part, though over the years outcasts of a different kind had found sanctuary within its stinking slums. Murderers, deserters, beggars and whores, along with the poor and the hungry, had all sought to establish some kind of haven for themselves away from the prying eyes and unwelcome attention of the Parish Officers and the police. Free fom the constraints of conventional society, the inhabitants of the Holy Land had set up their own kingdom, their own laws, their own courts, their own form of justice and punishment. Any representatives of officialdom who chose to venture into St Giles Rookery did so at their peril.
--from Hawkwood
"Jamie Roy told him serious like that it was surely luck for the thief-taker that we had done come upon y'all when we did. he give him to understand that if we hadn't, then this lady here would likely have taken him hiome in her wagon, and slaughtered him like a hog, safe out of sight. Boble said as how he didn't believe it, he thought she was only a-tryin' to scare him with that knife. Bur then Jamie Roy leaned down close, confidential like, and said he mighta thought the same--only that he'd heard so much about Frau McGillivray's reputation as a famous sausage maker, and had had the privilege of bein' served some of it to his breakfast this morning. Right about then, Boble started to lose the color in his face, and when Jamie Roy pulled out a bit of sausage to show him..."
---from The Fiery Cross
The concept of Boswell playing Watson to Dr. Johnson's Holmes a century before Conan Doyle is appealing. the "mysteries" are clumsy and ham-fisted, and several of them are not really mysteries so much as problem-solving (how to arrange the escape of a chained slave, or a sane person locked up wrongfully in Bedlam by a greedy heir). On the other hand, Boswell and Johnson fairly romp through the seven short tales here, with Johnson constantly stepping from the shadows to bellow "Ho, miscreant, halt and go no further! You are detected, and must give account of yourself!"
Jolly good murderous fun, should you chance to be in the proper frame of mind.
Hawkwood, titled after the main character, is the first in a new series by James McGee that gets the atmosphere of Regency London so vivid that you can just about see and hear it. Hawkwood is a Bow Street runner with a past (as all the brooding, dark detectives are wont to have) whose investigations take him from balls at the mansions of lords who challenge him to duels, to docked ships and slums full of lowlife and stenches, to the halls of government. There's a highway robbery murder, a disappeared clockmaker, a murdered officer and a plot against the state, all of which wrap together in a combination of thinking and action sequences handled masterfully. Very high recommendations.
The Fiery Cross is the fifth Outlander novel, and marks the point at which the squick factor seriously begins to outweigh the excitement and romance. At this point in the series, the scene has long since moved away from romantic Scotland and into frontier North Carolina, a not very nice place at all. The Fiery Cross is a "signs and portents" episode in which what has gone before slumbers while the heroine Claire gets to fuss and fret, in 1770 about the coming revolution brewing unseen in Boston and Philadelphia. There is an "accepted way of doing things" and happy, well-cared-for slaves that make me vomit in my mouth.
Most troubling, perhaps, is the "fiery cross" of the title, which refers to a burning cross that Scottish clans used to carry as a firebrand and signal to summon the clans to war. The Frasiers and McKenzies use it in an innocent way, but in the South USA, where clans eventually came to be spelled with a K and burning crosses came to have quite a different meaning, the knowledge that my own people had something to do with the origin of such horrors is terrible to contemplate.
Run-On Dreamscape: Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald
This is one of a very few books I can't find a representative quote for without making the post too long to read. It's like reading the final (Molly Bloom) section of Ulysses. The sentences go on for several pages, each. And they're surreal.
The general story is a man, transported as an infant to safety out of Holocaust-era Axis lands, telling an unnamed narrator (as in, "Austerlitz told me that...") about his attempts after the war to find evidence of who he and his parents were.
His journey takes him to several buildings and landmarks, the photographs of which (interspersed with the text) remind me of the star pattern recognized by the adult Rapunzel in the Disney Tangled movie. Austerlitz has several Proust moments looking at such things as distinctively forged stair guardrails.
Eating People is Wrong: On Fiji Islands, by Ronald Wright
In the fiji Museum there is a curious wooden artifact with a carved handle and four sharp prongs. Beneath it is the short but eloquent inscription: FORK USED IN EATING REVEREND BAKER.
The display also contains dishes used for serving the Wesleyan's cooked flesh, and informs the reader that Mr. Baker was the only missionary eaten in Fiji, and that he passed away (if that's the right expression) in 1867).
Sarah Vowell has spoiled me for historical travel writing. See her book Unfamiliar Fishes for her account of a trip to Hawaii which, like On Fiji Islands, devotes a lot of energy to the conflict between tribal civilization and the expansion of Europe into the whole world, with much hand-wringing over the damage done by white people and much juxtaposition of historical events with sights and conversations actually experienced by the writer. Unlike Vowell, Wright's trip to Fiji is written with detached, academic bemusement and deadly earnestness.
Vowell would have thrown in a reference to episodes of Gilligan's Island involving a tribe from a neighboring island that wants to eat the Skipper. The best Wright can do is point out that Captain Bligh passed through Fiji while getting the officers of the Bounty across the ocean in an open boat, and did not stop there because of reports of cannibals. As it turns out, the natives would probably have helped him, and the unfortunate Rev. Baker may have been a zealot seeking martyrdom, who angered the Fijian chief on purpose.
Fijians are depicted as a friendly people who believe that the purpose of life is to be happy, and who have kept their civilization largely intact and independent compared to other island civilizations. Fijians are about half the population of the islands and still own over 80% of the land. Go Fiji.
Dark Voyage: The Adventures of Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett
As the commanding officer had not humanity to order my wounds to be dressed, and I could not use my own hands, I desired one of my fellow-captives who was unfettered, to take a handkerchief out of my pocket and tie it round my head to stop the bleeding. He pulled out my handkerchief ('tis true), but instead of applying it to the use for which I had designed it, went to the grating of the hatchway, and with astonishing composure, sold it before my face to a bum-boatwoman then on board, for a quart of gin, with which he treated his companions, regardless of my circumstances and entreaties.
Coming right on the heels of my re-reading of Tom Jones (see last month's bookpost), this second tier 18th century novel is instructive as to what separates a great work from a merely adequate work. Roderick Random and Tom Jones have a lot in common, and work with the tropes of the then-new art of writing a novel: There is a protagonist born to misfortune who loses an inheritance and sets off wandering, accompanied by a philosophical comic sidekick (I'm not sure where the rule came from that all pre-Victorian protagonists' sidekicks must be amateur barbers of intermittent courage who encounter several surly donkeys, but the resemblances between Sancho Panza, Partridge, and Strap are striking). There are stories within stories told by strangers who appear in the work only long enough to tell them; roadside inns with many doors and saucy wenches; and there is one mischance after another before the hero's eventual supreme happiness and the confusion of his enemies. In Smollett's case, there are also several shipboard adventures. But the styles are as different as can be.
Smollett is not life-affirming. And therein lies all the difference.
Even when Tom Jones is at his most miserable, there is a light touch, a turn of phrase, and a two-dimensional insert at just the right moment, such as when the brutal schoolmaster is named "Thwackum, whose thoughts are full of birch" and who turns beet red and jumps up and down. There is a brutal schoolmaster for Roderick Random too, but he is simply vicious. We feel Random's suffering to excess; the mean-spiritedness of the majority of the characters is overwhelming, and the final happiness consists of too few pages. If the book had been called a tragedy, I would have been prepared, but the setup for a jolly roistering tale followed by a payoff that includes floggings, cheating the innocent, brutal people having authority over the helpless, cold-hearted moralizing old misers, and unrepentant criminal behavior--false advertising.
Memoirs of a Douche-Tweazle: The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Roussseau
I had my childish faults: I prattled, I was greedy, I sometimes told lies. No doubt I stole fruit, sweets, things to eat; but I never, just for the fun of it, did any harm or damage, got others into trouble, or teased dumb animals. I remember on one occasion, however, peeing into the kettle belonging to one of our neighbors, Mme. Clot, while she was at church. I must confess, too, that this memory still makes me laugh, for Mme. Clot, although otherwise a thoroughly good person, was the grumpiest old woman I ever knew in my life. Such is the true but brief history of my childhood misdemeanors.
Rousseau, for all his moments of genius and thought-provoking writing, was capable of being a real bag of dicks when he put his mind to it.
In snooty, aristocratic 18th century France, where apparently the only thing the privileged classes enjoy more than scandalous behavior is gossiping and shunning others for scandalous behavior, Rousseau seems born to simultaneously fit right in and be cast right out. He begins by getting apprenticed to a tradesman who fails to appreciate his genius, running away to the city, and writing tracts against the tyranny of private property while living off the charity of others. He has a series of thoughtless, dickheaded romances in which he is so head-over-heels in love that he almost considers the feelings of his partner from time to time. Later on, he meets, befriends and quarrels with literary and musical figures from Diderot to Rameau to Voltaire to David Hume. Apparently everyone involved in these quarrels wrote volumes about them at the time, explaining that they were all the other party's fault. Rousseau does a passable impression of being amazingly misunderstood, set up and betrayed by those he trusted; however, Rousseau's dramatic flouncing and the sheer number of opponents he has leads me to suspect that he's not as right and innocent as he thinks he is. for that matter, he might not be as horrible as he pretends to be.
The biographies of the great have much to teach us, either as examples or as warnings. For all my admiration of some of Rousseau's other writings, there's no denying that his biography serves as a warning, and that he made himself and most people around him unnecessarily miserable at a time when his class of people, at least, enjoyed some of the greatest opportunities mankind had ever hoped for at the time. Fascinating and readable, but ultimately depressing.
Good Bye to Hume: The History of England, by David Hume
But the English carried farther their ill-judged tyranny. Instead of inviting the Irish to adopt the more civilized customs of their conquerors, they even refused, though earnestly solicited, to communicate to them the privilege of their laws, and every where marked them out as aliens and enemies. Thrown out of the protection of justice, the natives could find no security but in force; and flying the neighborhood of cities, which they could not approach with safety, they sheltered themselves in their marshes and forests from the insolence of their inhuman masters. Being treated like wild beasts, they became such; and joining the ardor of revenge to their yet untamed barbarity, they grew every day more intractable and more dangerous.
Here, I end six months of David Hume, intelligent but dry as sawdust and inclined to hedge his prognostications so as not to offend. I read a couple of short essays ("On Taste" and "On The Original Contract"), and the final (out of one a month for six months) volume of a thick, wordy, epic history of England that the Durants (but not I) put in the same category as Gibbon and Rome.
Nope. Sorry.
Gibbon is fascinating because everything he says seems to have implications, not just for Gibbon's day, but for our own, about how a mighty culture can make a wrong step and inevitably lose it all, and that maybe the mighty culture of the day is doing just that. Hume, in contrast, recites fact after fact after fact, making even the wars a little dull.
If you're thinking of tackling Hume's history, I suggest skipping the first four books entirely. It seems to me, he wrote those out of a sense of duty to completeness and that his heart wasn't in it. What he really wanted to write about, it seems to me, was the period in the 17th Century from the rise of James I through two Charleses, two Jameses, two revolutions, one Commonwealth, and a nasty bag of dicks named Oliver Cromwell.
Oh yes. And the Scots are the heroes of the entire history.
Once again, we see the same conflict that spans civilizations from Athens v. Sparta to Rome v. Gaul, Pope v. LutherLouis v. Robespierre, Confederate v. Union, Eloi v. Morlock, Centauri v. Narn. One side cultured and elegant but decadent, claiming superior civilization and rank, creating innovative art and books, and living the good life--for those at the top, anyhow. The other side strong, disciplined, unadorned, dour, relatively egalitarian, religious and intensely judgmental, leaving little cultural legacy but many military victories and usually overthrowing the decadent civilization. The period of Cromwell's Commonwealth was a cultural sinkhole flanked by two fairly magnificent periods, especially where the theater is concerned.
Note also that in America, the "Cavaliers" settled in the South, intending to make a perfect paradise for themselves, where they could live in luxurious leisure while claiming the right to own other people who didn't count and who would do all the hard work, while the "Roundheads" settled in the North and founded stark Puritan communities full of churches and blue laws and witch trials. Today, things are more mixed up, with the Southerners still decadent and an innovative source of music, cuisine and literature while claiming not only elite status privilege but religious moralism and populism, while the Northerners are more laid back and committed to egalitarian reform while claiming culture/civilization privilege. Which side is better? Depends on whether you're rich, and if not, whether you'd rather be crushed by unequal treatment under normally lenient laws, or by across the board oppression under zealously enforced harsh laws.
This is why I support reform from within the system, not revolution. Revolution tends to result in a zealous Cromwell-type taking the place of the decadent oppressor class.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts
I started throwing in other characters from other books into my headspace, and pretty soon I'd built an imaginary town filled with stolen IP. Perry Mason was there (of course), the whole crew from the Trixie Belden children's mystery series (Anne loved to steal Trixie's boyfriend away), Lancelot and Guinivere owned the local garden store, even anthropomorphic pigs and spiders from Charlotte's Web were full residents with voting rights. It got so complicated I had to start tracking my world in an accounting ledger with everyone's names, addresses and personality traits in neat little rows ("Friendly!" "Secret lovers!" "Murderer!") My town had it all!
There's an online poll making the rounds asking people what four faces they would choose for a "geek Mount Rushmore"--the giants of fandom. Patrick Stewart? George R. R. Marin? Sir Terry Pratchett? JK Rowling? Joss Whedon? Nathan Filion?
Felicia Day is consistently in the top ten. And this is her memoir.
We learn that she was homeschooled in the deep south and still ended up getting a 4.0 in college, double-majoring in mathematics and violin (actually, we are merely reminded of this, because in the subculture that admires Felicia Day, we get told this at least once a month in internet memes. It is the personal factoid people are told about her, like the one about Kant being so regular in his walks that the local merchants set their watches when they saw him coming, or that Ayn Rand was once forced to share her toys and never got over it. Got it? Felicia = 4.0 math geek. Go Felicia! Sapiosexuals everywhere swoon over you.
We learn other things we may not have known, such as her odd combination of shy, awkward kindness and utter, utter badassdom. The way she more or less invented the webseries with The Guild, which might well have been produced traditionally, had Day put up with the mind-boggling (to men, anyway, who never believe it until they see it firsthand) condescenscion, misogyny and greed inherent in Hollywood producers. There is a chapter about her experiences among HER PEOPLE (that's us) at conventions, where her fans run the gamut from totally awesome and rocking the way they dress like her, to sad and in need of an egolift--which she provides--to frighteningly creepy.
There is a chapter on gamergate that will turn your stomach (again), and which will be surprising only to male readers who have not listened to women (again). Good God, what is WRONG with these guys? They collectively suck as human beings. They long for these smart, quirky, wonderful women to keep company with them, and when one comes along, they offer an experience slightly less enjoyable than rolling around naked in a cactus field infested with fire ants and scorpions. Say it with me: "We are GEEKS. We Don Not do this. We Do Not allow it to happen around us. We respect and honor and nurture women as we respect and honor all of our fellow nerds, introverts, geeks, misfits and oddballs. It's a geek thing. It's what we do."
And then there is a chapter--I suspect one that took the most courage to write--about a period of crippling depression and anxiety she went through that might have ended her Felicia, if you're online reading my bookpost, thank you for that chapter. It made me feel like I was neither alone nor a specially contemptible excuse for a human being, to have had such episodes myself. Why, if even Felicia Day, Badass, has been knocked down by emotional demons, then I certainly have nothing to be ashamed of. And if she can get up again more times than Chumbawamba, then I owe it to the path we walk in fandom, to get up again after just a few smashings. And I'm pretty damn sure I'm not the only one for whom that chapter did that.
Finally, we --by which I mean, I--learn that, apart from having "made it", and aside from her particular set of quirky traits, Felicia Day is not all that different from thousands of geek and gamer girls--and guys--out there. We are all weird individually and together. This is important because I get a little wistful sometimes knowing that (as happened with George R. R. Martin at the last WorldCon), if she and I are ever at the same con, I would have to stand in lines and jostle many many other fans who want it more, for a bit of attention, when what I'd really like is half an hour of coffee and conversation. And that isn't likely to happen with most geek celebrities. And really, I needn't be wistful about that. Because there are dozens--hundreds--of geeks I know personally who, not yet having "made it", are quite accessible indeed for a bit of conversation over coffee.
As for Felicia Day---We will always have You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost),
Beasts, Human and Otherwise: The Complete Short Stories of Saki, by H.H. Munro
“Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it.” Here the child’s voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. “Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing ‘Bertie, why do you bound?’ as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window - ”
People who learn that my first alphabet book was The Gashlycrumb Tinies often ostentatiously laugh and say, "Ah, NOW I understand", by which they mean, "I've always thought you were a little crazy, and I see now that you must have had your mind warped by being exposed too early to a grim black-and-white illustrated recounting of 26 small children getting deaded."
These people know less than Jon Snow. Edward Gorey is nothing. If there's a book I was traumatized by reading too young, it was a collection of Saki tales. These are disturbing.
Saki's Edwardian era world is one in which manners are a thin veneer masking cruel, savage impulses in people, and civilization is an equally thin veneer covering natural and supernatural nastiness from our primitive heritage.
The complete set of stories starts out with a limp appetizer of "Reginald" stories that mostly involve an upper class-born brat sitting in a chair, cleverly sneering at hypocrisy and convention while shocking poor old Mrs. Piddle-Widdle or whoever with his offensive frankness. Eventually, Reginald is replaced with Clovis, who is more likely to be either on the sidelines commenting sardonically or playing a cruel practical joke. They're what Bertie Wooster would have been if he had more brains and a mean streak.
The better-known stories are stand-alones. They have twist-endings reminiscent of O. Henry, usually involving a protagonist being made into a fool, or being squashed like a bug for a small amount of hubris. Boys at a house party politely ask to be excused to the library, where they beat up the smaller boy. A hobo is mistaken for a returning prodigal son and welcomed in and fed, but is later also mistaken for the son by a deadly enemy.
And then there are the traumatic ones. The ones like "Gabriel Ernest", "Sredni Vashtar" and "The Music on the Hill", that involve vengeful primitive gods. Some hapless city person in the country laughs off an old crone's warning not to meddle in something, and ends up being nastily dealt with in the forest. A boy in the care of a cruel cousin prays for her to be killed by a wild polecat he keeps as a secret pet. Feuding neighbors are trapped under a tree and make peace with one another just in time to be eaten by wolves.
Read singly, a Saki story can make one think a little. Taken too many at once, as I did at an impressionable age, they can make one huddle in a corner and whimper.
Wax Fruit for a Starving World: Freedom of the Will, by Jonathan Edwards
We need not be afraid to affirm that if a wise and good man knew with absolute certainty, it would be best, all things considered, that there should be such a thing as moral evil in the world, it would not be contrary to his wisdom and goodness to choose that it should be so.
I am embarrassed for my country that a Massachusetts neo-Calvinist apparently has the claim to be America's first philosopher. the introduction says nothing about Edwards participating in witch-burnings, but I'm pretty sure he approved of them.
Freedom of the Will is about what you'd expect it to be about. being a Calvinist, Edwards is against free will and for strict determinism of our lives, before we are born, by a cruel god. America being on the cusp of a cry for freedom to be heard 'round the world, he felt the need to make it palatable by explaining that freedom is slavery (and ignorance strength. Orwell would smile knowingly, and Trump eagerly).
Edwards defines freedom as the ability to do what one pleases, but adds that "the will" is a fiction, not a real thing like a person, but an attribute, a capacity for making choices. And that the choices we do make are....wait for it...DETERMINED by our considerations at the time. I see what he did there! Our ability to do as we please can be limited by physical (like being in jail and unable to go someplace) or moral (like being unwilling to enter a brothel that stands before you) considerations...and it is the same thing.
I am the 99%: Discourse on Political Economy, by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Another point is that the losses of the poor are far less reparable than those of the rich, and that the difficulty of acquiring always increases in proportion to need. Money breeds money, and the first gold pistole is sometimes harder to earn than the second million. But it goes even further. All that the poor man pays is forever lost to him, and remains in or returns to the hands of the rich, and since the proceeds of taxes go sooner or later only to those men who take part in the government or are close to it, they have--even in paying their share--a tangible interest in increasing taxes.
Let us summarize in a few words the social compact of the two estates: "You need me, for I am rich and you are poor, so let us come to an agreement between ourselves. I shall permit you to have the honor of serving me on condition that you give me what little you have for the trouble i shall take to command you.
If you ask me, this short tract is the most fascinating, and the truest, thing Rousseau ever wrote, in part because it is almost the opposite of the "noble savage" claptrap from the First and Second Discourses reviewed in last month's Bookpost. Here, Rousseau forsees the modern libertarian movement and attacks it as a gang of wolves advising the sheep to get rid of those repressive old big gummint sheepdogs that prevent them from playing with wolves as equals. Rousseau says that for a state to be economically responsible, it must first obey its own laws, second persuade the people that obedience to said laws is synonymous with virtue (and the best way to do this is to have only laws that make moral sense), and third feed the people and prevent the oligarchic class from concentrating too much wealth into their own hands, for they will then threaten to replace the government while the poor will threaten revolution.
Does that sound like advice that might be as pertinent today as it was in Rousseau's time?
Incidentally, it seems that this, and not The Wealth of Nations (coming to my bookpost some time this year) was the first tract on economics. At least according to Rousseau, who claims to invent the term "political economy" to mean the economic life of commerce among businesses; between nations; and as planned by statesmen, as opposed to regular "economy" which had previously meant only the running of a household.
The 18th Century Murders: The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector, by Lillian de la Torre; Hawkwood, by James McGee; The Fiery Cross, by Diana Gabaldon
After an interminable minute, the lock turned, and we heard someone wrenching at the bolt. It stuck, and with a shriek it grated grudgingly back, and the heavy door swung slowly in.
On the threshold stood Mrs. Oliver, rigid and staring. Her lips moved, but no sound came.
"In God's name, what is it?" cried mrs. Taffety in alarm.
Mrs. Oliver found a hoarse whisper.
"Murder!" she gasped. "Murder lock'd in!"
--from The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector
St. Giles' Rookery had been Christened the Holy Land by its inhabitants, Irish Catholic immigrants for the most part, though over the years outcasts of a different kind had found sanctuary within its stinking slums. Murderers, deserters, beggars and whores, along with the poor and the hungry, had all sought to establish some kind of haven for themselves away from the prying eyes and unwelcome attention of the Parish Officers and the police. Free fom the constraints of conventional society, the inhabitants of the Holy Land had set up their own kingdom, their own laws, their own courts, their own form of justice and punishment. Any representatives of officialdom who chose to venture into St Giles Rookery did so at their peril.
--from Hawkwood
"Jamie Roy told him serious like that it was surely luck for the thief-taker that we had done come upon y'all when we did. he give him to understand that if we hadn't, then this lady here would likely have taken him hiome in her wagon, and slaughtered him like a hog, safe out of sight. Boble said as how he didn't believe it, he thought she was only a-tryin' to scare him with that knife. Bur then Jamie Roy leaned down close, confidential like, and said he mighta thought the same--only that he'd heard so much about Frau McGillivray's reputation as a famous sausage maker, and had had the privilege of bein' served some of it to his breakfast this morning. Right about then, Boble started to lose the color in his face, and when Jamie Roy pulled out a bit of sausage to show him..."
---from The Fiery Cross
The concept of Boswell playing Watson to Dr. Johnson's Holmes a century before Conan Doyle is appealing. the "mysteries" are clumsy and ham-fisted, and several of them are not really mysteries so much as problem-solving (how to arrange the escape of a chained slave, or a sane person locked up wrongfully in Bedlam by a greedy heir). On the other hand, Boswell and Johnson fairly romp through the seven short tales here, with Johnson constantly stepping from the shadows to bellow "Ho, miscreant, halt and go no further! You are detected, and must give account of yourself!"
Jolly good murderous fun, should you chance to be in the proper frame of mind.
Hawkwood, titled after the main character, is the first in a new series by James McGee that gets the atmosphere of Regency London so vivid that you can just about see and hear it. Hawkwood is a Bow Street runner with a past (as all the brooding, dark detectives are wont to have) whose investigations take him from balls at the mansions of lords who challenge him to duels, to docked ships and slums full of lowlife and stenches, to the halls of government. There's a highway robbery murder, a disappeared clockmaker, a murdered officer and a plot against the state, all of which wrap together in a combination of thinking and action sequences handled masterfully. Very high recommendations.
The Fiery Cross is the fifth Outlander novel, and marks the point at which the squick factor seriously begins to outweigh the excitement and romance. At this point in the series, the scene has long since moved away from romantic Scotland and into frontier North Carolina, a not very nice place at all. The Fiery Cross is a "signs and portents" episode in which what has gone before slumbers while the heroine Claire gets to fuss and fret, in 1770 about the coming revolution brewing unseen in Boston and Philadelphia. There is an "accepted way of doing things" and happy, well-cared-for slaves that make me vomit in my mouth.
Most troubling, perhaps, is the "fiery cross" of the title, which refers to a burning cross that Scottish clans used to carry as a firebrand and signal to summon the clans to war. The Frasiers and McKenzies use it in an innocent way, but in the South USA, where clans eventually came to be spelled with a K and burning crosses came to have quite a different meaning, the knowledge that my own people had something to do with the origin of such horrors is terrible to contemplate.
Run-On Dreamscape: Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald
This is one of a very few books I can't find a representative quote for without making the post too long to read. It's like reading the final (Molly Bloom) section of Ulysses. The sentences go on for several pages, each. And they're surreal.
The general story is a man, transported as an infant to safety out of Holocaust-era Axis lands, telling an unnamed narrator (as in, "Austerlitz told me that...") about his attempts after the war to find evidence of who he and his parents were.
His journey takes him to several buildings and landmarks, the photographs of which (interspersed with the text) remind me of the star pattern recognized by the adult Rapunzel in the Disney Tangled movie. Austerlitz has several Proust moments looking at such things as distinctively forged stair guardrails.
Eating People is Wrong: On Fiji Islands, by Ronald Wright
In the fiji Museum there is a curious wooden artifact with a carved handle and four sharp prongs. Beneath it is the short but eloquent inscription: FORK USED IN EATING REVEREND BAKER.
The display also contains dishes used for serving the Wesleyan's cooked flesh, and informs the reader that Mr. Baker was the only missionary eaten in Fiji, and that he passed away (if that's the right expression) in 1867).
Sarah Vowell has spoiled me for historical travel writing. See her book Unfamiliar Fishes for her account of a trip to Hawaii which, like On Fiji Islands, devotes a lot of energy to the conflict between tribal civilization and the expansion of Europe into the whole world, with much hand-wringing over the damage done by white people and much juxtaposition of historical events with sights and conversations actually experienced by the writer. Unlike Vowell, Wright's trip to Fiji is written with detached, academic bemusement and deadly earnestness.
Vowell would have thrown in a reference to episodes of Gilligan's Island involving a tribe from a neighboring island that wants to eat the Skipper. The best Wright can do is point out that Captain Bligh passed through Fiji while getting the officers of the Bounty across the ocean in an open boat, and did not stop there because of reports of cannibals. As it turns out, the natives would probably have helped him, and the unfortunate Rev. Baker may have been a zealot seeking martyrdom, who angered the Fijian chief on purpose.
Fijians are depicted as a friendly people who believe that the purpose of life is to be happy, and who have kept their civilization largely intact and independent compared to other island civilizations. Fijians are about half the population of the islands and still own over 80% of the land. Go Fiji.
Dark Voyage: The Adventures of Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett
As the commanding officer had not humanity to order my wounds to be dressed, and I could not use my own hands, I desired one of my fellow-captives who was unfettered, to take a handkerchief out of my pocket and tie it round my head to stop the bleeding. He pulled out my handkerchief ('tis true), but instead of applying it to the use for which I had designed it, went to the grating of the hatchway, and with astonishing composure, sold it before my face to a bum-boatwoman then on board, for a quart of gin, with which he treated his companions, regardless of my circumstances and entreaties.
Coming right on the heels of my re-reading of Tom Jones (see last month's bookpost), this second tier 18th century novel is instructive as to what separates a great work from a merely adequate work. Roderick Random and Tom Jones have a lot in common, and work with the tropes of the then-new art of writing a novel: There is a protagonist born to misfortune who loses an inheritance and sets off wandering, accompanied by a philosophical comic sidekick (I'm not sure where the rule came from that all pre-Victorian protagonists' sidekicks must be amateur barbers of intermittent courage who encounter several surly donkeys, but the resemblances between Sancho Panza, Partridge, and Strap are striking). There are stories within stories told by strangers who appear in the work only long enough to tell them; roadside inns with many doors and saucy wenches; and there is one mischance after another before the hero's eventual supreme happiness and the confusion of his enemies. In Smollett's case, there are also several shipboard adventures. But the styles are as different as can be.
Smollett is not life-affirming. And therein lies all the difference.
Even when Tom Jones is at his most miserable, there is a light touch, a turn of phrase, and a two-dimensional insert at just the right moment, such as when the brutal schoolmaster is named "Thwackum, whose thoughts are full of birch" and who turns beet red and jumps up and down. There is a brutal schoolmaster for Roderick Random too, but he is simply vicious. We feel Random's suffering to excess; the mean-spiritedness of the majority of the characters is overwhelming, and the final happiness consists of too few pages. If the book had been called a tragedy, I would have been prepared, but the setup for a jolly roistering tale followed by a payoff that includes floggings, cheating the innocent, brutal people having authority over the helpless, cold-hearted moralizing old misers, and unrepentant criminal behavior--false advertising.
Memoirs of a Douche-Tweazle: The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Roussseau
I had my childish faults: I prattled, I was greedy, I sometimes told lies. No doubt I stole fruit, sweets, things to eat; but I never, just for the fun of it, did any harm or damage, got others into trouble, or teased dumb animals. I remember on one occasion, however, peeing into the kettle belonging to one of our neighbors, Mme. Clot, while she was at church. I must confess, too, that this memory still makes me laugh, for Mme. Clot, although otherwise a thoroughly good person, was the grumpiest old woman I ever knew in my life. Such is the true but brief history of my childhood misdemeanors.
Rousseau, for all his moments of genius and thought-provoking writing, was capable of being a real bag of dicks when he put his mind to it.
In snooty, aristocratic 18th century France, where apparently the only thing the privileged classes enjoy more than scandalous behavior is gossiping and shunning others for scandalous behavior, Rousseau seems born to simultaneously fit right in and be cast right out. He begins by getting apprenticed to a tradesman who fails to appreciate his genius, running away to the city, and writing tracts against the tyranny of private property while living off the charity of others. He has a series of thoughtless, dickheaded romances in which he is so head-over-heels in love that he almost considers the feelings of his partner from time to time. Later on, he meets, befriends and quarrels with literary and musical figures from Diderot to Rameau to Voltaire to David Hume. Apparently everyone involved in these quarrels wrote volumes about them at the time, explaining that they were all the other party's fault. Rousseau does a passable impression of being amazingly misunderstood, set up and betrayed by those he trusted; however, Rousseau's dramatic flouncing and the sheer number of opponents he has leads me to suspect that he's not as right and innocent as he thinks he is. for that matter, he might not be as horrible as he pretends to be.
The biographies of the great have much to teach us, either as examples or as warnings. For all my admiration of some of Rousseau's other writings, there's no denying that his biography serves as a warning, and that he made himself and most people around him unnecessarily miserable at a time when his class of people, at least, enjoyed some of the greatest opportunities mankind had ever hoped for at the time. Fascinating and readable, but ultimately depressing.
Good Bye to Hume: The History of England, by David Hume
But the English carried farther their ill-judged tyranny. Instead of inviting the Irish to adopt the more civilized customs of their conquerors, they even refused, though earnestly solicited, to communicate to them the privilege of their laws, and every where marked them out as aliens and enemies. Thrown out of the protection of justice, the natives could find no security but in force; and flying the neighborhood of cities, which they could not approach with safety, they sheltered themselves in their marshes and forests from the insolence of their inhuman masters. Being treated like wild beasts, they became such; and joining the ardor of revenge to their yet untamed barbarity, they grew every day more intractable and more dangerous.
Here, I end six months of David Hume, intelligent but dry as sawdust and inclined to hedge his prognostications so as not to offend. I read a couple of short essays ("On Taste" and "On The Original Contract"), and the final (out of one a month for six months) volume of a thick, wordy, epic history of England that the Durants (but not I) put in the same category as Gibbon and Rome.
Nope. Sorry.
Gibbon is fascinating because everything he says seems to have implications, not just for Gibbon's day, but for our own, about how a mighty culture can make a wrong step and inevitably lose it all, and that maybe the mighty culture of the day is doing just that. Hume, in contrast, recites fact after fact after fact, making even the wars a little dull.
If you're thinking of tackling Hume's history, I suggest skipping the first four books entirely. It seems to me, he wrote those out of a sense of duty to completeness and that his heart wasn't in it. What he really wanted to write about, it seems to me, was the period in the 17th Century from the rise of James I through two Charleses, two Jameses, two revolutions, one Commonwealth, and a nasty bag of dicks named Oliver Cromwell.
Oh yes. And the Scots are the heroes of the entire history.
Once again, we see the same conflict that spans civilizations from Athens v. Sparta to Rome v. Gaul, Pope v. LutherLouis v. Robespierre, Confederate v. Union, Eloi v. Morlock, Centauri v. Narn. One side cultured and elegant but decadent, claiming superior civilization and rank, creating innovative art and books, and living the good life--for those at the top, anyhow. The other side strong, disciplined, unadorned, dour, relatively egalitarian, religious and intensely judgmental, leaving little cultural legacy but many military victories and usually overthrowing the decadent civilization. The period of Cromwell's Commonwealth was a cultural sinkhole flanked by two fairly magnificent periods, especially where the theater is concerned.
Note also that in America, the "Cavaliers" settled in the South, intending to make a perfect paradise for themselves, where they could live in luxurious leisure while claiming the right to own other people who didn't count and who would do all the hard work, while the "Roundheads" settled in the North and founded stark Puritan communities full of churches and blue laws and witch trials. Today, things are more mixed up, with the Southerners still decadent and an innovative source of music, cuisine and literature while claiming not only elite status privilege but religious moralism and populism, while the Northerners are more laid back and committed to egalitarian reform while claiming culture/civilization privilege. Which side is better? Depends on whether you're rich, and if not, whether you'd rather be crushed by unequal treatment under normally lenient laws, or by across the board oppression under zealously enforced harsh laws.
This is why I support reform from within the system, not revolution. Revolution tends to result in a zealous Cromwell-type taking the place of the decadent oppressor class.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts