Monthly Bookpost, July 2016
Going Overbard: Fool, by Christopher Moore
"It's true, you git! Your mother was a poxy whore!"
"Beggin' your pardon, sir, but poxiness isn't so bad", said Shanker Mary, shining a ray of optimism on these dark ages. "Unfairly maligned, the poxy are. Methinks a spot o' the pox implies experience. Worldliness, if you will."
"The tart makes an excellent point, Edmund. But for the slow descent into madness and death with your bits dropping off along the way, the pox is a veritable blessing," I said as I skipped just out of blade's reach from the bastard, who stalked me around the great cauldron. "Take Mary here. In fact, there's an idea! Take Mary. Why spend your energy after a long journey murdering a speck of a fool when you can enjoy the pleasures of a lusty wench who is not only ready, but willing and smelling pleasantly of soap?"
"Aye," said Drool, expelling froth as he spoke. "She's a bloody vision of loveliness."
Edmund let his sword point drop and looked at Drool. "Are you eating soap?"
"Just a wee sliver. They weren't saving it."
I can't say enough good things about Christopher Moore. I dream of being as good as he is. Lamb (the gospel according to Biff) neared the top of my 100 Books That Rocked My World list, and a couple others have made it into songs.
Fool is one of his best. Narrated by the title character (whose name is Pocket), it rewrites Shakespeare's greatest tragedy as a bawdy comedy complete with lusty serving wenches, MacBeth's witches, and a thoroughly badass Cordelia who, thrown out of Lear's Britain by her senile father, conquers Europe offstage while Pocket engineers a variation of Lear's story like a chaotic-neutral schemer playing the other characters like chess pieces.
There is much backstory that provides or changes motives for some of the odd character choices in Lear. Edmund and the elder daughters, while treacherous, come across as somewhat less evil than in Shakespeare; Lear himself is the remnant of a horrible man, and Pocket's story weaves in and out of pathos, tragicomedy, and the supernatural. the overall effect is---magnificent. Very highest recommendations.
And I, Milords, Embody the Law: Commentaries on the Laws of England, by William Blackstone
The doctrine of the law is this: that precedents and rules must be followed, unless flatly absurd or unjust, for though their reason be not obvious at first view, yet we owe such a deference to former times as not to suppose they acted wholly without consideration. To illustrate this doctrine by examples. It has been determined, time out of mind, that a brother of the half blood (i.e., where they have only one parent the same, and the other different) shall never succeed as heir to the estate of his half brother, but it shall rather escheat to the king, or other superior lord. Now this is a positive law, fixed and established by custom, which custom is evidenced by judicial decisions, and therefore can never be departed from by any modern judge without a breach of his oath and the law. For herein there is nothing repugnant to natural justice, though the reason of it drawn from the feudal law may not be quite obvious to every body. And therefore, on account of a supposed hardship upon the half brother, a modern judge might wish it had been otherwise settled, yet it is not in his power to alter it. but if any court were to now determine that an elder brother of the half blood might enter upon and seize any lands that were purchased by his younger half brother, no subsequent judges would scruple to declare that such prior determination was unjust, was unreasonable, and therefore was not law.
Blackstone is maybe the legal equivalent of the scientific treatises (Ptolemy, Newton, Fourier) that I have bemoaned in recent years as being supposedly accessible to layreaders, except that they aren't. Blackstone was supposed to explain law to people who had no legal education; however, I doubt that those who have not gone to law school would make head nor tail of it. At least it isn't in Latin. And it may have been the first attempt to do anything like it. In a world where peasants could not even read and yet "ignorance of the law is no excuse", actually trying to tell people what they were required or forbidden to do and why was a worthy undertaking.
Blackstone's four large tomes have helped to keep the dull times off me for the first six months of the year. They are divided into "Rights of persons" (which is an odd way to say, defining the structure of the government), "Rights of things" (meaning property law), "wrongs against persons" (meaning circumstances in which you could sue the bum), and "public wrongs" (meaning the criminal law).
Buried in the thick, thick pile of sawdust without butter are principles long outdated ("the king can do no wrong") and still revered today ("Better that ten guilty people go free than that one innocent suffer"--the opposite of how 18th century criminal law in England actually worked, where callous magistrates executed clusters of accused thieves on the overwhelming evidence that they were accused and therefore guilty--but quoting pious principles of justice that one never even thinks about following is possibly the most revered legal tradition of them all).
The 18th Century Murders: A Breath of Snow and Ashes, by Diana Gabaldon; Perfume, by Patrick Suskind; Resurrectionist, by James McGee; The Kingsbridge Plot, by Maan Meyers
He was not particular about it. He did not differentiate between what is commonly considered a good and a bad smell, not yet. He was greedy. The goal of a hunt was simply to possess everything the world could offer in the way of odors, and his only condition was that the odors be new ones. The smell of a sweating horse meant just as much to him as the tender green bouquet of a bursting rosebud; the acrid stench of a bug was no less worthy than the aroma arising from a larded veal roast in an aristocrat's kitchen. He devoured everything, everything, sucking it up into him. But there were no aesthetic principles governing the olfactory kitchen of his imagination, where he was forever synthesizing and concocting new aromatic combinations. He fashioned grotesqueries, only to destroy them again immediately, like a child playing with blocks--inventive and destructive, with no apparent norms for his creativity.
--from Perfume
"YOU know what's going on--the war and all. I didn't know it would be this way. Swear to God, half the people I meet don't know which way is up any more. I thought it'd be like, you know, redcoats and all, and you just keep away from anybody in a uniform, keep away from the battles, and it'd be fine. But I haven't seen a redcoat anywhere, and people, you know--plain old people--they're shooting each other and running around burning up each other's houses."
--from A Breath of Snow and Ashes
In Philadelphia, the heat was broken by a violent thunderstorm, and the Declaration over which they had debated bitterly for more than three long weeks was agreed to. Twelve ayes. One abstention. The sole abstainer was New York.
--from The Kingsbridge Plot
"Indeed, officer Hawkwood, the smell. This place reeks. It reeks of four centuries of human excreta. Bethlem is a midden; it's where London discharges its waste matter. This is the city's dung heap, and it has become my onerous duty to ensure that the reek is contained."
--from Ressurectionist
Perfume, set in 18th Century France is a magic realism story about a grotesque--a man with hyperosmia powers that enable him to recreate complex perfumes without measuring implements, and to detect such things as moral essences from the way things smell. The murders are because the protagonist himself was born with an evil "moral odor" too subtle to be consciously detected, such that everyone in decent society shuns and bullies him from birth (beginning with his mother, who is executed soon after his birth, for being caught hiding the newborn infant in a heap of offal to die) without articulating why, and so he spends his life murdering and collecting the essence of virgin girls on the cusp of womanhood, hoping to cover his scent with theirs and pass for a good person. The story itself manages to evoke feelings of appalled revulsion and tender sympathy about the protagonist, sometimes at the same time.
The Outlander books get offensively long for their quality, and the characters aretwo dimensional. But I read them anyway--just two more to go, plus some of the shorter Lord John novels--because OCD. In A Breath of Snow and Ashes, Claire and Jamie and their family are still in the Colonial North Carolina frontier, and the main suspense comes from time traveller Claire knowing from an old news clipping that their home and everyone in it is to be burned to the ground in January 1976, and omigosh how will they ever manage to live. I figured about six ways in which the old news article could be written without any Frasers actually getting burned to death, and Gabaldon chose the lamest way out. But whatever.
The Kingsbridge Plot is a continuation of the series I started early in the year about Colonial Manhattan, this time beginning in late 1775 and climaxing as war is breaking out. It involves descendants of the detective in The Dutchman trying to foil a plot to poison (a historically true) General Washington and stop a serial killer. It's meh.
Finally, i find myself REALLY liking James McGee's Hawkwood series, but it's not for everybody. Resurrectionist, the second in the series, has Hawkwood assigned to a series of grave robberies and a gruesome murder in Bethlem (Bedlam) asylum, the POV shifting from Hawlkwood to the villains such that whodunnit is not an issue so much as what they're up to. It is exciting and a good read, but requires trigger warnings for the nasty (and historically accurate) depictions of conditions in the asylum, the conditions of decayed corpses, conditions in London's slums, and conditions on the battlefield. Human bodies are not treated kindly. Murders and rapes are given more graphic detail than necessary, and casually dismissed by characters to show how insensitive and/or evil they are. Hawkwood himself is constantly doing slow burns at the viciousness of it all, but he is a stoic manly man and can handle it. some readers, maybe not so much.
The Rent Is Too Damn High: Evicted, by Matthew Desmond
When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond by neglecting repairs. Or as sherrena put it to tenants, "If I give you a break, you give me a break." Tenants could trade their dignity and their children's health for a roof over their head. Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem. More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window, a busted appliance, or mice, cockroaches and rats for more than three days. One third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems, as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or not.
Possibly the most gut-wrenching book I've read this year, in large part because it is new, and non-fiction, and provides a look at the lives of the down and out that the privileged American bourgeoisie never ever see unless they go out of their way to look for it. And usually not even then.
Commas are important. The title of the review that got me interested was "Evicted by Matthew Desmond", as if Desmond was out there evicting tenants. in fact, Desmond was out there incognito, living in one of North Milwaukee's filthiest trailer parks and slowly getting people to trust him so that he could tell their stories. Women who get evicted fpr calling 911 on an abusive spouse because the landlord doesn't like having the cops show up, or because her child is noisy or defaces a wall or something. Tenants who pay in cash and then the landlord pretends not to have been paid. Landlords who retaliate by shutting off the utilities or failing to perform needed repairs. Tenants who complain to the housing board about substandard housing and then the remedy is, the place is deemed uninhabitable and all tenants are thrown out. Vermin-infested tenements. Slob-shaming tenants for dirty dishes when they have no running water. Tenants who buy a trailer and are then unable to move it, and so they abandon it for the landlord to sell to the next sucker. Crime. Drugs. Violence. Arbitrary and capricious public housing policies.
The part that surprised me a little was the news that, this low on the food chain, the landlords are often not wealthy slumlords, but are one step above the tenants. Sometimes they went in debt to get a cheap building to rent, and learned that the only people willing to live in such a place can't afford the rent. Sometimes, they forgive rent for months and months before finally starting the eviction process. sometimes tenants get revenge by trashing the place on the way out and stealing everything from light bulbs and smoke alarms to floorboards. And then the landlord, not getting any rent, can't afford to fix the place.
Sometimes people just seem to be scumbuckets. Sometimes, extreme poverty drives them to reckless, desperate behavior. Desmond points out that state and Federal governments could easily provide most or all of the needed housing, but choose instead to reduce rich peoples' taxes or divert money to political favoritist boondoggles. This book covers a period BEFORE the election of Scott Walker as Governor of Wisconsin and his Make Milwaukee Miserable policy, so you know it's only gotten much worse since then.
Read it. Do something about it.
Steampunk Tropes: The Aeronaut's Windlass, by Jim Butcher
"To this day, no one is sure what happened on PERILOUS", she told Grimm. "But she came home with heavy losses--and when the dust cleared, Lieutenants Rook and Bayard had been promoted to lieutenant-commander, while Lieutenant Grimm was summarily drummed out of the service for cowardice in the face of the enemy."
Grimm's voice turned dry. "I am somewhat familiar with the tale, miss.
"It gives me serious concerns," Gwen said. "Are you a coward, captain?"
The man stared at her with those shadowed eyes for several moments before he said, his voice very soft, "When needed, miss. When needed."
Meh. Whatever.
This is Jim Butcher without the appeal of the Dresden files, a hodgepodge of brooding manly men with tarnished pasts who give no fucks and live on by golly their own terms, with no use for you or anyone else. Also features telepathic cats, royal girls who hit people, steampunk airships that run on technical jargon, magic crystalline macguffins, and a bunch of evil spider thingies that can't decide whether to individually be too deadly for any human to handle or be collectively more doomed than a fleet of Star Trek extras at a Westeros wedding. I read it because it was on the Hugo ballot and found it as dull as nonstop action can get. Your mileage may vary.
Philosophy of The Feels: Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, very strongly express his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could perhaps be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effect which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been fully expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened.
The key thing dividing Smith's book from the ethical treatises of Hume or Kant is the "sentiments" part. It's not about how people behave so much as about how they feel and seem to feel in front of others. as such, it seems to me more concerned with manners than with right and wrong. It's central judgment is that "right" in this context means conformance with what is generally expected in society.
As someone who occasionally gets completely verklempt over small things, or has to fight to keep my temper over other small things, and who is also sometimes too emotionally tired to even react to something very exciting or moving, I have a problem with being morally condemned for feelings that don't conform.
For one thing, it's ethnocentric, assuming that reserved middle class Edinburgh manners are "the way people act and feel" whereas the possibly different displays of emotion and potential for culture shock in, say, a Mediterranean state, or even in the Highlands, or...anywhere else...is not discussed. For another, it's hard for me to get around the idea of scolding people for their thoughts.
Smith presupposes that most or all people want, not just to be approved by society, but to be genuinely worthy of approval. I know many for whom faking it is just fine, and have found myself that acting "as if" I was a certain kind of person can in fact be a precursor to actually being that kind of person. "Posing" and "playing" can be relative.
Don't Be That Guy: Men Explain Things To Me, by Rebecca Solnit
Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just beginning to get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was telling-as though it were a light and amusing subject-how a neighbor’s wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know that he wasn’t trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for her fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand….
FOR MEN: This book is about Things Not To Do that aggravate women, from interrupting and condescending to...you know, killing them. Yes, because of That Guy, we really do need to tell you that. Don't kill women. Because according to Solnit, there are over a thousand murders of female intimate partners by men every year, a death toll that surpasses 9/11 every three years. And a reported rape every 6.2 minutes in the USA alone. Pretty much all the mass shootings we read about are committed by men.
Mind you, that one is just the most serious problem addressed in this book of seven essays. The most popular one is the title piece, which went viral on the Internet and may have birthed the word "mansplaining"--in which some dude managed to blow his 15 minutes trying to tell Solnit all about a book, not knowing that she had written the book, thereby causing Solnit--and later, women around the globe--to rant about dudes who insist on explaining things to women that the women know about and the men don't.
FOR WOMEN: This book is about----tell you what; why don't you comment and I'll pay attention, ok?
The Emo Letters: Julie, or the New Heloise, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
So you are no longer my Julie? Ah! Say not so, worthy and respecatable woman! You are more than ever. You are she who deserves the tribute of all creation. You are she whom i worshipped when I was beginning to perceive genuine beauty; you are she whom I will not cease to worship, even after my death, if my soul retains some recollection of the truly heavenly charms that enchanted it when I lived. That feat of courage that restores you to the fullness of your virtue only makes you more like yourself.
You will need a shot of insulin before reading this.
Diderot (see Bookposts from March through May of this year) was a philosopher who wrote a trashy novel to prove that he could; it made more money than his important works. Rousseau apparently did the same more famously with Julie, a series of letters between lovers that apparently made people all over Europe squee, caused Rousseau to become one of the first celebrity novel writers ever, and that made some philosophers praise it as a Great Work. I could barely finish it.
There's an unnamed protagonist who may be a stand-in for Rousseau himself, a poor man hired to be teacher (apparently in an age when teachers were second only to actors in being despised and spat on by wealthy society, unlike today when celebrity actors have more status than those who teach our children), who ends up falling in love with her, and in which comic hijinks ensue. The flowery, hand-pressed-to-forehead "romance", complete with offers to leave the country, commit suicide, etc., is insufferable, and the "philosophical" digressions full of contempt for society, advice on rearing children (lifted from Emile, see April's BookPost), and other more meaty matters one would not expect to find in lovers' correspondence, are more interesting, but incongruous. Possibly the best drawn character is the older gentleman, Wolmar, to whom Julie is married by a father enraged at having his daughter "seduced" by a mere teacher; Wolmar seems content to have an arranged marriage of convenience, and doesn't seem to mind at all being cuckolded. Of course, Julie dies of a fever over several pages, but not before leaving a long final letter professing the teacher to be her always and forever lover, where Wolmar will be the one to find it. At least it wasn't quite as long or preachy as Clarissa (Bookpost, June 2008, the month in which that long horror was pretty much the only thing I had time to read).
Antimony, Arsenic, Aluminum, Selenium....Elements of Chemistry, by Antoine Lavoisier
All that can be said upon the number and nature of elements is, in my opinion, confined to discussions entirely of a metaphysical nature. The subject only furnishes us with indefinite problems, which may be solved in a thousand different ways, not one of which, in all probability, is consistent with nature. I shall therefore only add upon this subject, that if, by the term elements, we mean to express those simple and indivisible atoms of which matter is composed, it is extremely probable we know nothing at all about them; but, if we apply the term elements, or principles of bodies, to express our idea of the last point which analysis is capable of reaching, we must admit, as elements, all the substances into which we are capable, by any means, to reduce bodies by decomposition. Not that we are entitled to affirm, that these substances we consider as simple may not be compounded of two, or even of a greater number of principles; but, since these principles cannot be separated, or rather since we have not hitherto discovered the means of separating them, they act with regard to us as simple substances, and we ought never to suppose them compounded until experiment and observation has proved them to be so.
See earlier bookposts for my furstrations with trying to learn science from Galileo, Newton and Fourier, all of whom are in the Great Books set. Lavoisier's Elements, on the other hand, is quite brief and readable, and while not an all-encompassing work in chemistry, is an interesting milestone in the transition from "alchemy" to the science as we know it.
The book is in three parts: The first, and most important, details several experiments in oxygenation and combustion. The second consists mostly of lists of various elements or substances that Lavoisier believed could not be broken down into component substances; and the third describes a multitude of scientific apparatuses of the day, which are illustrated with elaborate woodcuts. I felt like I actually got some knowledge out of it, which sets it apart from most of the other treatises on "great science though history." Highly recommended.
Introduction to Kant: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysick of Morals, and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, by Immanuel Kant
That an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard to any object of desire. It is clear from what precedes that the purposes which we may have in view in our actions, or their effects regarded as ends and springs of the will, cannot give to actions any unconditional or moral worth. In what, then, can their worth lie, if it is not to consist in the will and in reference to its expected effect? It cannot lie anywhere but in the principle of the will without regard to the ends which can be attained by the action. For the will stands between its à priori principle, which is formal, and its à posteriori spring, which is material, as between two roads, and as it must be determined by something, it follows that it must be determined by the formal principle of volition when an action is done from duty, in which case every material principle has been withdrawn from it.
The year being half over, I could no longer procrastinate delving into the third and most intimidating of the three established philosophical giants of the 18th Century. Kant is frequently listed as history's most important philosopher since the ancient Greeks, and one of the densest. I was glad to have spent a year and a half digging through the rationalists and empiricists who preceded him, the better to know what all the fuss has been about.
I began with the shorter works they gave me in Freshman Humanities. The three Critiques are the major works, but if you read the Fundamentals and the Prolegomena then for the sake of philosophical generalism and conversation with educated hipsters, you will have read Kant and learned what his buzzwords like "a priori" and "categorical imperative" mean.
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysick of Morals is basic Kantian ethics: Act as if you want it to be a universal law that all people in your situation will always act as you do; all moral actions must be taken with absolutely no regard to self interest (by which he means, even feeling good because you did the right thing negates any moral value to your behavior, which seems not only a bit harsh to me but also counterproductive, as it removes every possible incentive to behave oneself); and further, a demonstration that "little white lies", such as telling someone it's not so bad as it really is, in order to give comfort, are always immoral. In other words, an ethical guide that is absolute, easy to understand, and that no one will live by.
The Prolegomena is a summary of the major ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason, which puts together the best parts of the "empirical' and "rational" theories of epistemology--how we can be certain that what we know is the truth. Metaphysics tends to debate propositions that no one has yet proved for sure, due to paradoxes (such as whether the Universe is finite or infinite, or whether it had an origin), and therefore metaphysics may not be possible at all---which is fine by most people who are not philosophers, and who get by on life just fine without asking these questions. Things are learned, neither purely from experience nor purely from innate ideas, but from a combination of the two, such that, through experience, one comes to understand what the innate ideas are. How Descartes, Locke, etc., got through entire systems without getting here is somewhat baffling, but there you are.
There's more to Kant than this, but these two books cover the basics.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts
"It's true, you git! Your mother was a poxy whore!"
"Beggin' your pardon, sir, but poxiness isn't so bad", said Shanker Mary, shining a ray of optimism on these dark ages. "Unfairly maligned, the poxy are. Methinks a spot o' the pox implies experience. Worldliness, if you will."
"The tart makes an excellent point, Edmund. But for the slow descent into madness and death with your bits dropping off along the way, the pox is a veritable blessing," I said as I skipped just out of blade's reach from the bastard, who stalked me around the great cauldron. "Take Mary here. In fact, there's an idea! Take Mary. Why spend your energy after a long journey murdering a speck of a fool when you can enjoy the pleasures of a lusty wench who is not only ready, but willing and smelling pleasantly of soap?"
"Aye," said Drool, expelling froth as he spoke. "She's a bloody vision of loveliness."
Edmund let his sword point drop and looked at Drool. "Are you eating soap?"
"Just a wee sliver. They weren't saving it."
I can't say enough good things about Christopher Moore. I dream of being as good as he is. Lamb (the gospel according to Biff) neared the top of my 100 Books That Rocked My World list, and a couple others have made it into songs.
Fool is one of his best. Narrated by the title character (whose name is Pocket), it rewrites Shakespeare's greatest tragedy as a bawdy comedy complete with lusty serving wenches, MacBeth's witches, and a thoroughly badass Cordelia who, thrown out of Lear's Britain by her senile father, conquers Europe offstage while Pocket engineers a variation of Lear's story like a chaotic-neutral schemer playing the other characters like chess pieces.
There is much backstory that provides or changes motives for some of the odd character choices in Lear. Edmund and the elder daughters, while treacherous, come across as somewhat less evil than in Shakespeare; Lear himself is the remnant of a horrible man, and Pocket's story weaves in and out of pathos, tragicomedy, and the supernatural. the overall effect is---magnificent. Very highest recommendations.
And I, Milords, Embody the Law: Commentaries on the Laws of England, by William Blackstone
The doctrine of the law is this: that precedents and rules must be followed, unless flatly absurd or unjust, for though their reason be not obvious at first view, yet we owe such a deference to former times as not to suppose they acted wholly without consideration. To illustrate this doctrine by examples. It has been determined, time out of mind, that a brother of the half blood (i.e., where they have only one parent the same, and the other different) shall never succeed as heir to the estate of his half brother, but it shall rather escheat to the king, or other superior lord. Now this is a positive law, fixed and established by custom, which custom is evidenced by judicial decisions, and therefore can never be departed from by any modern judge without a breach of his oath and the law. For herein there is nothing repugnant to natural justice, though the reason of it drawn from the feudal law may not be quite obvious to every body. And therefore, on account of a supposed hardship upon the half brother, a modern judge might wish it had been otherwise settled, yet it is not in his power to alter it. but if any court were to now determine that an elder brother of the half blood might enter upon and seize any lands that were purchased by his younger half brother, no subsequent judges would scruple to declare that such prior determination was unjust, was unreasonable, and therefore was not law.
Blackstone is maybe the legal equivalent of the scientific treatises (Ptolemy, Newton, Fourier) that I have bemoaned in recent years as being supposedly accessible to layreaders, except that they aren't. Blackstone was supposed to explain law to people who had no legal education; however, I doubt that those who have not gone to law school would make head nor tail of it. At least it isn't in Latin. And it may have been the first attempt to do anything like it. In a world where peasants could not even read and yet "ignorance of the law is no excuse", actually trying to tell people what they were required or forbidden to do and why was a worthy undertaking.
Blackstone's four large tomes have helped to keep the dull times off me for the first six months of the year. They are divided into "Rights of persons" (which is an odd way to say, defining the structure of the government), "Rights of things" (meaning property law), "wrongs against persons" (meaning circumstances in which you could sue the bum), and "public wrongs" (meaning the criminal law).
Buried in the thick, thick pile of sawdust without butter are principles long outdated ("the king can do no wrong") and still revered today ("Better that ten guilty people go free than that one innocent suffer"--the opposite of how 18th century criminal law in England actually worked, where callous magistrates executed clusters of accused thieves on the overwhelming evidence that they were accused and therefore guilty--but quoting pious principles of justice that one never even thinks about following is possibly the most revered legal tradition of them all).
The 18th Century Murders: A Breath of Snow and Ashes, by Diana Gabaldon; Perfume, by Patrick Suskind; Resurrectionist, by James McGee; The Kingsbridge Plot, by Maan Meyers
He was not particular about it. He did not differentiate between what is commonly considered a good and a bad smell, not yet. He was greedy. The goal of a hunt was simply to possess everything the world could offer in the way of odors, and his only condition was that the odors be new ones. The smell of a sweating horse meant just as much to him as the tender green bouquet of a bursting rosebud; the acrid stench of a bug was no less worthy than the aroma arising from a larded veal roast in an aristocrat's kitchen. He devoured everything, everything, sucking it up into him. But there were no aesthetic principles governing the olfactory kitchen of his imagination, where he was forever synthesizing and concocting new aromatic combinations. He fashioned grotesqueries, only to destroy them again immediately, like a child playing with blocks--inventive and destructive, with no apparent norms for his creativity.
--from Perfume
"YOU know what's going on--the war and all. I didn't know it would be this way. Swear to God, half the people I meet don't know which way is up any more. I thought it'd be like, you know, redcoats and all, and you just keep away from anybody in a uniform, keep away from the battles, and it'd be fine. But I haven't seen a redcoat anywhere, and people, you know--plain old people--they're shooting each other and running around burning up each other's houses."
--from A Breath of Snow and Ashes
In Philadelphia, the heat was broken by a violent thunderstorm, and the Declaration over which they had debated bitterly for more than three long weeks was agreed to. Twelve ayes. One abstention. The sole abstainer was New York.
--from The Kingsbridge Plot
"Indeed, officer Hawkwood, the smell. This place reeks. It reeks of four centuries of human excreta. Bethlem is a midden; it's where London discharges its waste matter. This is the city's dung heap, and it has become my onerous duty to ensure that the reek is contained."
--from Ressurectionist
Perfume, set in 18th Century France is a magic realism story about a grotesque--a man with hyperosmia powers that enable him to recreate complex perfumes without measuring implements, and to detect such things as moral essences from the way things smell. The murders are because the protagonist himself was born with an evil "moral odor" too subtle to be consciously detected, such that everyone in decent society shuns and bullies him from birth (beginning with his mother, who is executed soon after his birth, for being caught hiding the newborn infant in a heap of offal to die) without articulating why, and so he spends his life murdering and collecting the essence of virgin girls on the cusp of womanhood, hoping to cover his scent with theirs and pass for a good person. The story itself manages to evoke feelings of appalled revulsion and tender sympathy about the protagonist, sometimes at the same time.
The Outlander books get offensively long for their quality, and the characters aretwo dimensional. But I read them anyway--just two more to go, plus some of the shorter Lord John novels--because OCD. In A Breath of Snow and Ashes, Claire and Jamie and their family are still in the Colonial North Carolina frontier, and the main suspense comes from time traveller Claire knowing from an old news clipping that their home and everyone in it is to be burned to the ground in January 1976, and omigosh how will they ever manage to live. I figured about six ways in which the old news article could be written without any Frasers actually getting burned to death, and Gabaldon chose the lamest way out. But whatever.
The Kingsbridge Plot is a continuation of the series I started early in the year about Colonial Manhattan, this time beginning in late 1775 and climaxing as war is breaking out. It involves descendants of the detective in The Dutchman trying to foil a plot to poison (a historically true) General Washington and stop a serial killer. It's meh.
Finally, i find myself REALLY liking James McGee's Hawkwood series, but it's not for everybody. Resurrectionist, the second in the series, has Hawkwood assigned to a series of grave robberies and a gruesome murder in Bethlem (Bedlam) asylum, the POV shifting from Hawlkwood to the villains such that whodunnit is not an issue so much as what they're up to. It is exciting and a good read, but requires trigger warnings for the nasty (and historically accurate) depictions of conditions in the asylum, the conditions of decayed corpses, conditions in London's slums, and conditions on the battlefield. Human bodies are not treated kindly. Murders and rapes are given more graphic detail than necessary, and casually dismissed by characters to show how insensitive and/or evil they are. Hawkwood himself is constantly doing slow burns at the viciousness of it all, but he is a stoic manly man and can handle it. some readers, maybe not so much.
The Rent Is Too Damn High: Evicted, by Matthew Desmond
When tenants relinquished protections by falling behind in rent or otherwise breaking their rental agreement, landlords could respond by neglecting repairs. Or as sherrena put it to tenants, "If I give you a break, you give me a break." Tenants could trade their dignity and their children's health for a roof over their head. Between 2009 and 2011, nearly half of all renters in Milwaukee experienced a serious and lasting housing problem. More than 1 in 5 lived with a broken window, a busted appliance, or mice, cockroaches and rats for more than three days. One third experienced clogged plumbing that lasted more than a day. And 1 in 10 spent at least a day without heat. African American households were the most likely to have these problems, as were those where children slept. Yet the average rent was the same, whether an apartment had housing problems or not.
Possibly the most gut-wrenching book I've read this year, in large part because it is new, and non-fiction, and provides a look at the lives of the down and out that the privileged American bourgeoisie never ever see unless they go out of their way to look for it. And usually not even then.
Commas are important. The title of the review that got me interested was "Evicted by Matthew Desmond", as if Desmond was out there evicting tenants. in fact, Desmond was out there incognito, living in one of North Milwaukee's filthiest trailer parks and slowly getting people to trust him so that he could tell their stories. Women who get evicted fpr calling 911 on an abusive spouse because the landlord doesn't like having the cops show up, or because her child is noisy or defaces a wall or something. Tenants who pay in cash and then the landlord pretends not to have been paid. Landlords who retaliate by shutting off the utilities or failing to perform needed repairs. Tenants who complain to the housing board about substandard housing and then the remedy is, the place is deemed uninhabitable and all tenants are thrown out. Vermin-infested tenements. Slob-shaming tenants for dirty dishes when they have no running water. Tenants who buy a trailer and are then unable to move it, and so they abandon it for the landlord to sell to the next sucker. Crime. Drugs. Violence. Arbitrary and capricious public housing policies.
The part that surprised me a little was the news that, this low on the food chain, the landlords are often not wealthy slumlords, but are one step above the tenants. Sometimes they went in debt to get a cheap building to rent, and learned that the only people willing to live in such a place can't afford the rent. Sometimes, they forgive rent for months and months before finally starting the eviction process. sometimes tenants get revenge by trashing the place on the way out and stealing everything from light bulbs and smoke alarms to floorboards. And then the landlord, not getting any rent, can't afford to fix the place.
Sometimes people just seem to be scumbuckets. Sometimes, extreme poverty drives them to reckless, desperate behavior. Desmond points out that state and Federal governments could easily provide most or all of the needed housing, but choose instead to reduce rich peoples' taxes or divert money to political favoritist boondoggles. This book covers a period BEFORE the election of Scott Walker as Governor of Wisconsin and his Make Milwaukee Miserable policy, so you know it's only gotten much worse since then.
Read it. Do something about it.
Steampunk Tropes: The Aeronaut's Windlass, by Jim Butcher
"To this day, no one is sure what happened on PERILOUS", she told Grimm. "But she came home with heavy losses--and when the dust cleared, Lieutenants Rook and Bayard had been promoted to lieutenant-commander, while Lieutenant Grimm was summarily drummed out of the service for cowardice in the face of the enemy."
Grimm's voice turned dry. "I am somewhat familiar with the tale, miss.
"It gives me serious concerns," Gwen said. "Are you a coward, captain?"
The man stared at her with those shadowed eyes for several moments before he said, his voice very soft, "When needed, miss. When needed."
Meh. Whatever.
This is Jim Butcher without the appeal of the Dresden files, a hodgepodge of brooding manly men with tarnished pasts who give no fucks and live on by golly their own terms, with no use for you or anyone else. Also features telepathic cats, royal girls who hit people, steampunk airships that run on technical jargon, magic crystalline macguffins, and a bunch of evil spider thingies that can't decide whether to individually be too deadly for any human to handle or be collectively more doomed than a fleet of Star Trek extras at a Westeros wedding. I read it because it was on the Hugo ballot and found it as dull as nonstop action can get. Your mileage may vary.
Philosophy of The Feels: Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, very strongly express his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could perhaps be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effect which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been fully expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened.
The key thing dividing Smith's book from the ethical treatises of Hume or Kant is the "sentiments" part. It's not about how people behave so much as about how they feel and seem to feel in front of others. as such, it seems to me more concerned with manners than with right and wrong. It's central judgment is that "right" in this context means conformance with what is generally expected in society.
As someone who occasionally gets completely verklempt over small things, or has to fight to keep my temper over other small things, and who is also sometimes too emotionally tired to even react to something very exciting or moving, I have a problem with being morally condemned for feelings that don't conform.
For one thing, it's ethnocentric, assuming that reserved middle class Edinburgh manners are "the way people act and feel" whereas the possibly different displays of emotion and potential for culture shock in, say, a Mediterranean state, or even in the Highlands, or...anywhere else...is not discussed. For another, it's hard for me to get around the idea of scolding people for their thoughts.
Smith presupposes that most or all people want, not just to be approved by society, but to be genuinely worthy of approval. I know many for whom faking it is just fine, and have found myself that acting "as if" I was a certain kind of person can in fact be a precursor to actually being that kind of person. "Posing" and "playing" can be relative.
Don't Be That Guy: Men Explain Things To Me, by Rebecca Solnit
Credibility is a basic survival tool. When I was very young and just beginning to get what feminism was about and why it was necessary, I had a boyfriend whose uncle was a nuclear physicist. One Christmas, he was telling-as though it were a light and amusing subject-how a neighbor’s wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know that he wasn’t trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for her fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand….
FOR MEN: This book is about Things Not To Do that aggravate women, from interrupting and condescending to...you know, killing them. Yes, because of That Guy, we really do need to tell you that. Don't kill women. Because according to Solnit, there are over a thousand murders of female intimate partners by men every year, a death toll that surpasses 9/11 every three years. And a reported rape every 6.2 minutes in the USA alone. Pretty much all the mass shootings we read about are committed by men.
Mind you, that one is just the most serious problem addressed in this book of seven essays. The most popular one is the title piece, which went viral on the Internet and may have birthed the word "mansplaining"--in which some dude managed to blow his 15 minutes trying to tell Solnit all about a book, not knowing that she had written the book, thereby causing Solnit--and later, women around the globe--to rant about dudes who insist on explaining things to women that the women know about and the men don't.
FOR WOMEN: This book is about----tell you what; why don't you comment and I'll pay attention, ok?
The Emo Letters: Julie, or the New Heloise, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
So you are no longer my Julie? Ah! Say not so, worthy and respecatable woman! You are more than ever. You are she who deserves the tribute of all creation. You are she whom i worshipped when I was beginning to perceive genuine beauty; you are she whom I will not cease to worship, even after my death, if my soul retains some recollection of the truly heavenly charms that enchanted it when I lived. That feat of courage that restores you to the fullness of your virtue only makes you more like yourself.
You will need a shot of insulin before reading this.
Diderot (see Bookposts from March through May of this year) was a philosopher who wrote a trashy novel to prove that he could; it made more money than his important works. Rousseau apparently did the same more famously with Julie, a series of letters between lovers that apparently made people all over Europe squee, caused Rousseau to become one of the first celebrity novel writers ever, and that made some philosophers praise it as a Great Work. I could barely finish it.
There's an unnamed protagonist who may be a stand-in for Rousseau himself, a poor man hired to be teacher (apparently in an age when teachers were second only to actors in being despised and spat on by wealthy society, unlike today when celebrity actors have more status than those who teach our children), who ends up falling in love with her, and in which comic hijinks ensue. The flowery, hand-pressed-to-forehead "romance", complete with offers to leave the country, commit suicide, etc., is insufferable, and the "philosophical" digressions full of contempt for society, advice on rearing children (lifted from Emile, see April's BookPost), and other more meaty matters one would not expect to find in lovers' correspondence, are more interesting, but incongruous. Possibly the best drawn character is the older gentleman, Wolmar, to whom Julie is married by a father enraged at having his daughter "seduced" by a mere teacher; Wolmar seems content to have an arranged marriage of convenience, and doesn't seem to mind at all being cuckolded. Of course, Julie dies of a fever over several pages, but not before leaving a long final letter professing the teacher to be her always and forever lover, where Wolmar will be the one to find it. At least it wasn't quite as long or preachy as Clarissa (Bookpost, June 2008, the month in which that long horror was pretty much the only thing I had time to read).
Antimony, Arsenic, Aluminum, Selenium....Elements of Chemistry, by Antoine Lavoisier
All that can be said upon the number and nature of elements is, in my opinion, confined to discussions entirely of a metaphysical nature. The subject only furnishes us with indefinite problems, which may be solved in a thousand different ways, not one of which, in all probability, is consistent with nature. I shall therefore only add upon this subject, that if, by the term elements, we mean to express those simple and indivisible atoms of which matter is composed, it is extremely probable we know nothing at all about them; but, if we apply the term elements, or principles of bodies, to express our idea of the last point which analysis is capable of reaching, we must admit, as elements, all the substances into which we are capable, by any means, to reduce bodies by decomposition. Not that we are entitled to affirm, that these substances we consider as simple may not be compounded of two, or even of a greater number of principles; but, since these principles cannot be separated, or rather since we have not hitherto discovered the means of separating them, they act with regard to us as simple substances, and we ought never to suppose them compounded until experiment and observation has proved them to be so.
See earlier bookposts for my furstrations with trying to learn science from Galileo, Newton and Fourier, all of whom are in the Great Books set. Lavoisier's Elements, on the other hand, is quite brief and readable, and while not an all-encompassing work in chemistry, is an interesting milestone in the transition from "alchemy" to the science as we know it.
The book is in three parts: The first, and most important, details several experiments in oxygenation and combustion. The second consists mostly of lists of various elements or substances that Lavoisier believed could not be broken down into component substances; and the third describes a multitude of scientific apparatuses of the day, which are illustrated with elaborate woodcuts. I felt like I actually got some knowledge out of it, which sets it apart from most of the other treatises on "great science though history." Highly recommended.
Introduction to Kant: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysick of Morals, and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, by Immanuel Kant
That an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard to any object of desire. It is clear from what precedes that the purposes which we may have in view in our actions, or their effects regarded as ends and springs of the will, cannot give to actions any unconditional or moral worth. In what, then, can their worth lie, if it is not to consist in the will and in reference to its expected effect? It cannot lie anywhere but in the principle of the will without regard to the ends which can be attained by the action. For the will stands between its à priori principle, which is formal, and its à posteriori spring, which is material, as between two roads, and as it must be determined by something, it follows that it must be determined by the formal principle of volition when an action is done from duty, in which case every material principle has been withdrawn from it.
The year being half over, I could no longer procrastinate delving into the third and most intimidating of the three established philosophical giants of the 18th Century. Kant is frequently listed as history's most important philosopher since the ancient Greeks, and one of the densest. I was glad to have spent a year and a half digging through the rationalists and empiricists who preceded him, the better to know what all the fuss has been about.
I began with the shorter works they gave me in Freshman Humanities. The three Critiques are the major works, but if you read the Fundamentals and the Prolegomena then for the sake of philosophical generalism and conversation with educated hipsters, you will have read Kant and learned what his buzzwords like "a priori" and "categorical imperative" mean.
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysick of Morals is basic Kantian ethics: Act as if you want it to be a universal law that all people in your situation will always act as you do; all moral actions must be taken with absolutely no regard to self interest (by which he means, even feeling good because you did the right thing negates any moral value to your behavior, which seems not only a bit harsh to me but also counterproductive, as it removes every possible incentive to behave oneself); and further, a demonstration that "little white lies", such as telling someone it's not so bad as it really is, in order to give comfort, are always immoral. In other words, an ethical guide that is absolute, easy to understand, and that no one will live by.
The Prolegomena is a summary of the major ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason, which puts together the best parts of the "empirical' and "rational" theories of epistemology--how we can be certain that what we know is the truth. Metaphysics tends to debate propositions that no one has yet proved for sure, due to paradoxes (such as whether the Universe is finite or infinite, or whether it had an origin), and therefore metaphysics may not be possible at all---which is fine by most people who are not philosophers, and who get by on life just fine without asking these questions. Things are learned, neither purely from experience nor purely from innate ideas, but from a combination of the two, such that, through experience, one comes to understand what the innate ideas are. How Descartes, Locke, etc., got through entire systems without getting here is somewhat baffling, but there you are.
There's more to Kant than this, but these two books cover the basics.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/tag/bookposts