Kameron Hurley – The Light Brigade

Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade went far beyond what I expected from a genre standpoint. I like lots of the military sci-fi – John Scalzi is a good example, and Robert Heinlein wrote the ur-text – so I assumed that Hurley’s text would be similar: aliens to fight, valorization of the honest grunt who does the killing, etc.

I was wrong. Hurley is in conversation with folks China Mieville (politically) and Joe Haldeman (military weariness, ineffectiveness of military solutions), science fiction writers who look at war from a first principle rather than a just war perspective. She sees the world as one in which we constantly need to fight for our rights, and she also acknowledges how power is stacked against those without wealth.

More thoughts below:

• The novel makes the alternate vision – humans who settled on Mars and have created an egalitarian, holistic, ecologically-sustainable way of life – the Other.
  • Hell, we’re not sure the Martians exist at all…
    

    Picture is from the verge review, available here.

• The theme – corporations will tear our very bodies apart (and hopefully put them back together correctly) in order to assert their power – is genius.
  • What’s also brilliant is how every time our narrator’s body is torn apart and she understands the time line she comes back better prepared to resist.
• The ways that the corporations at the end of the novel start to lose power, despite the promise of citizenship and the threat of constant surveillance, felt honestly hopeful, and not like some sort of tacked-on, yay-the-people-might-win-this-time bromide.
• I’m still in awe of the scenes with the interrogator and the captured revolutionary – Hurley channels Arthur Koestler in some ways, but gives agency to the captive in ways that make me smile.
• I’m looking forward to thinking more about the implications of time travel in here. The novel treats time travel as something fraught with both danger and possibility, and not of the go-back-in-time-and-kill-Hitler variety.
  • It’s also an example of how corporate power cannot control some things – such as the laws of physics.

TLB is a powerful, powerful novel, and Hurley is talented. I’m looking forward to reading more of her work…

Thoughts of good and evil – What Remains of Edith Finch

I am writing an essay on narratives in games and I keep struggling with What Remains of Edith Finch. I have blogged about it before, but I keep getting caught in notions of how I think Edith wants to rewrite her family’s history, making her ancestors as human and complex as possible.  That idea keeps clashing with my own sense of the appropriate ways to talk about cultural artifacts (which these are not), and I in turn return to the house.

The dark grey mist of the Pacific Northwest, gamified

If the game marks the move from analog to digital culture, with the attendant nostalgia and hoopla, then the house helps with that transition.  In some ways it represents the early days of radio, with the impossibly twisty towers reaching to the sky, and lots of flotsam and jetsam surrounding the site itself. In others, the journey we take through it, the way the game leads us (with a couple of stops to repackage the disparate parts of text that have slipped away), feels like the early days of the Internet, as token ring and ethernet compete for primacy, only to give way to the protocols that shape wifi.

Game text as semaphores from lonely digital voices…

With the early days out of the way, though, my main impression is that the way that the house fits neatly into the landscape – not so much organic as it is not engineered, a product of artifice and tinkering more than planning – feels 100 percent digital. Our digital world is laden with self-proclaimed masters of the universe, mostly white straight tech-alpha males who could imagine a thousand TED talks springing from the image I have taken from the game above, and all of whom speak glowingly of the magical intersection of tech and culture. They would see metaphor after metaphor I’m guessing, and they wouldn’t be wrong (just full of themselves) – digital culture seems in many ways to defy its own antecedents, as assholes like Steve Jobs get hagiographies and decent people like Steve Wozniak forgotten.

What Remains of Edith Finch, of course, offers us another way out of this mess, but that other way will need to be the subject of another post…

 

 

 

Omar El Akkad – American War

Omar El Akkad’s American War might be one of the most relentlessly depressing (fiction) books I have ever read.  That doesn’t make it untrue…

• El Akkad uses his experience as a war correspondent to imagine a future in the US in which the South secedes (over a fossil fuel ban fer crissakes), a southerner assassinates the American president, soldiers at an army base open fire on southerners protesting, and five years of war (followed after brief cease-fires by another long period of fighting) result.
  • Hopes of peace are destroyed multiple times by hot heads on both sides. I’m both frightened this would happen and sure that it accurately recreates our ability to be dumb asses.
• The story is told by the nephew of a southern war hero, one who kills a northern general and who unleashes a plague at the reunification ceremony that kills tens of millions, on both sides. He recreates what happens by using his aunt’s diary as a source material, and he intersperses those entries with what are essentially news flashes, all from the northern side.
• Climate change has eliminated eastern cities, all of Florida and New Orleans, and much of the Gulf Coast. The fossil fuel ban was a late, futile response to the loss of land.
  • The heat has driven people from much of the south, and rumors of other changes – the formation of Cascadia, the inability to grow oranges because of their high water requirements, the takeover of southern California and most of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas by Mexico – make clear that these seem to have happened.
• His depictions of the volatility and unprofessionalism of militias was particularly profound.  A northern militia attacks a refugee camp run by the Red Crescent, for instance, and the southern militias are essentially boys who like to play with guns and who do “raids” that a) rarely net anything of military use or have any military value and b) that up the intensity of the war at moments when it might have calmed down.
  • In particular this feature of the story felt like it captured the hopelessness and surrealism of the Afghanistan and Syrian conflicts.  Battle lines seemed to be elastic, and civilians got caught in the fighting all the time.  The plasticity of the front lines is always – from what I gather – far more real than the very clear lines drawn on maps or in historical descriptions of battles, but in this novel they seem both frighteningly real (to civilians caught as they change or come into conflict, or when hidden snipers are rumored to shoot anyone who approaches the northern end of the refugee camp) and nearly non-existent.
• I was particularly struck by just how messed-up both sides are.  The story is not told as a yay-go-team from either side, as both commit atrocities and kindnesses, and neither can lift itself out of the hell they have created and the destruction they have reaped upon the USA.
• Finally, I’m a little surprised by how much of a page-turner I found this to be.  I had to intentionally slow down multiple times.

Annalee Newitz – Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

I recently read Newitz’s Autonomy, and I wondered how she could so accurately describe the paths that our technological development might follow.  Having read Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans will Survive a Mass Extinction, I now understand, because as a science writer and editor of io9, she has been in this conversation for a long time and knows a lot about scientific trends. She extrapolated some fascinating ideas based on that knowledge…

More thoughts below:

• Newitz’s approach is far different from most who write about our future destruction – she thinks humans, as agile, problem-solving, incredibly smart creatures, should survive. She does not ignore the problems we cause – she links us to cyanobacteria as the only organisms to negatively impact the planet enough to bring about a mass extinction – but she thinks that ultimately we are worthy of moving onto the next step in our development.
  • As if any of this is linear, of course…
• In the book she charts both mass extinctions from the planet’s geological history *and* stories of how humans have scattered, adapted, and remembered, and thus survived.
  • Her description of the ways that Jews have survived is particularly interesting, as she talks about the importance of culture, narrative, and story.
• Her view is remarkably non-anthropocentric – by positing humans in what she argues (with help from a bunch of scientists) is the beginning of the next large mass extinction, she identifies our place in the universe as a little smaller and more fitting than how we ordinarily think of ourselves.
• The last section of the book is probably too short, but it was fascinating as she discussed how humans will probably adapt (breathe methane, have skin that can survive acid rains on other planets, and so on) and the immediate technological developments we will pursue (algae-derived energy, space elevators, and so on).
  • She doesn’t simply talk about all this from her own “research” as that is defined now – glorified Google searches.  Instead, she shows us what powerful science writing is by incorporating interviews (that she’s done) and research from the scientific communities involved in this discussion – disaster preparation as well as well energy derivation and space exploration.
• As someone who occasionally thinks that maybe a meteor strike wouldn’t be a bad idea, I appreciate her rational, pragmatic, and organized look at ways that we might actually survive (and heavens forbid learn from) the coming destruction we are doing to the planet…

Price, Utah

I recently returned from a three week trip through the western United States, staying mostly in Utah with a bit of Colorado sprinkled in.  We were there to run whitewater (duh), and my brother and I ran the Colorado through Westwater Canyon and then joined up with a bigger group who had a permit to run the Gates of Ladore section of the Green River in Utah.  I will write more about these later, but suffice it to say that we had a spectacular time.

Indoor pool, Greenwell Inn, Price, Utah

On the way there we stopped in Price, Utah for a night, and the hotel we stayed at – the Greenwell Inn – felt like a slice of life from 1975, complete with rooms we could walk right into (no attempts at controlling access through stairs or interior corridors), an indoor pool (in the middle of the desert, which is pretty 70s in and of itself, but with no attempts to open it up to the outside), and an interior common lobby that was all black marble and highly polished wood.

The Greenwell Inn, Price, Utah

The connected restaurant – the Tangerine Eatery – also speaks to that general retro feel, but with a California flair. The food choices didn’t match the traveler’s stereotype of Utah, and its gun metal steel corrugated walls with photos and paintings from local artists didn’t match stereotypes either. The food was delicious, the hotel clean and comfortable and a nice break from the road, and the vibe I got from the place – a convention center in Price, Utah, miles away from “everything”? – made me recalibrate my expectations.

Print exhibited in the Tangerine Eatery – more about it here

It also made me think of the ways in which travel can sanitize expectations, of culture and history and damn near everything.  I recently read an impassioned plea to make places more than mere synecdoches in Lapham’s Quarterly, and my brief experience with Price (and other Utah towns not named Moab, a form of sprawl that might actually be a mere representation) made me think of the ways that I instill my own shallow vision of local history on the places I travel.

This is all long-established territory for travel writers. In particular, Pico Iyer argued for the need for travel, and for writing about it, building on the work of generations of travel writers, and the standards he establishes felt especially difficult to live up to as I started to write this post. His emphasis on maintaining what feels like to me a precarious balance between opening ourselves up to the world without becoming cultural relativists struck me as a balancing act that I routinely try to perform, with limited success. Acknowledging the degree to which my lived experience makes seeing how a location has opened me to the world requires a degree of stepping away that seems to me to have the potential to nullify the validity of my own travel writing experience. Price is an excellent example – even as a fellow American, how can I understand what living in a place that feels very different from where I grew up means to how one views life? I struggle to write the name of the town without identifying the state it is located in, a difficulty that reifies my own conception of what the USA looks like.

I do not think that my attempt to locate this experience in American history is in and of itself disqualifying of me as a travel writer – my guess is that instead it requires me to not judge but to observe and describe. Therein lies another difficulty, of course – of the millions of possibilities, what do we choose to further expound upon?  Do we acknowledge the sun-dried folks in the beat-up RV, concretizing the view we may have of them from other non-direct sources and furthering stereotypes that may have some grounding in reality?  Do we focus on the kind, funny lumberyard manager who helped us figure out a way to reinforce a critical part of the equipment that we would need on the next stage of our journey?  Do we try to recreate the life of a lone middle-aged woman doing her laundry in the middle of the night, a sight I only saw because of my own insomnia and which may be either completely normal or a one-in-a-time aberration?  All of these stories are equally valuable and part of the greater tapestry, but there is only so much time to pick one to focus on, and the others necessarily get missed…

Don’t get me wrong – travel is a joy, and our trip was life-changing, as are they all. What I’m trying to do in this piece is to not shirk responsibility for seeing the world as it is, for making, in the words of the article I linked to above, a synecdoche of a real, breathing part of the world.  It’s a task I often feel inadequate about, but it’s one that needs doing.

Lucia Berlin – A Manual for Cleaning Women

My quick tour of Lucia Berlin’s prose is complete as I have now finished A Manual for Cleaning Women, and I’m struck (again) by the intense clarity and pain that she invokes solely through language.  My thoughts follow…

• Every single story is amazing, and can stand on its own.  One of the most fascinating parts of her work in my mind though is how seemingly seamlessly (although not unjarringly) she moves through a whole series of approaches that should feel annoyingly crafty and calculated – telling the same story through a different narrative lens, revisiting scenes (a narrative device she will use in Evening in Paradise as well) and adding characters, leading us as readers to believe (against all evidence) that this time the story will end well (only to be gut-punched again at the end).
  • Spoiler – these devices all work. I’m not sure I’ve read fiction that had me verged on the edge of tears so often…
• Part of the way she accomplishes this is through the casual ways she moves through class, ethnic, and gender lines. These stories move from remote mining towns in New Mexico and fishing villages off the coast of Chiapas (I think) to the hoipolloi of Santiago and El Paso to the ghettos of Oakland.
  • Her narrators move with her, along those same usual suspect lines, with gender and class predominating – stories get told from the perspective of a white male civil rights attorney who defends a reasonable facsimile of Berlin as well as a teenage girlfriend of a drug-runner who has snuck across the US border from Mexico, with a whole range of voices in between.
    • The voices form a chorus in the best Greek tradition, even as they speak from their own reality.
  • They also stomp all over the border between classes, as Berlin herself worked in a wide range of jobs and can speak coherently and movingly about a dozen of them.
• I’m not going to try to write about each story – I hope to get thoughts down about them all later – but I can’t help but think about the ways in which her language grounds me in human experience that somehow doesn’t ignore subjectivity. I usually prefer reading prose (I’m better at reading poetry that is unstinting) that while acutely aware of the misery around us is either surreal or farcical enough to feel sort of light (I’m thinking of folks like George Saunders and Karen Russell, both of whom I love as writers as well). Her prose is never light; even when she’s funny the humor is thoroughly entombed in a graveyard.
  • It’s not that her prose can’t be beautiful in any number of ways that we often think of as literary aesthetical gorgeousness – it’s just that she is hyper-empathetic and constantly aware of the sheer fuckery that most people go through as they try to combat what often seem to be intensely difficult mountains to climb.
  • In Berlin’s world the panopticon is as fiercely internal as external – cultural forces and biologies combine to create pressures that crush all of us, albeit sometimes in subtle ways.

Marlon James – A Brief History of Seven Killings

A Brief History of Seven Killings is the first Marlon James novel I’ve read, and it won’t be the last.  It features multiple points of view as it wends its way through the attempt to kill Bob Marley (because he was thought to favor the socialist-leaning PNP in the upcoming election) in 1976 and then revisits the story of the subsequent rise of Jamaican drug lords in the crack days of New York in the 1980s.

More thoughts:

• In the “Acknowledgements” section James identifies both Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Marguerite Duras’s The North China Lover as models for what he essentially thought was a huge mess of “anecdotes” and other “source materials.”  I haven’t read Duras, but the multiple viewpoints of As I Lay Dying (as well as the invocation of different dialects) felt like the perfect starting point for ABHOSK.
• The viewpoint that seems closest to James is Nina Burgess, a Jamaican women who works her way to the States in as honest a fashion as she can.  She has multiple names throughout the novel as she assumes identities, and she gets to finish the novel by getting a call from someone who I think is her mom (although I’m not sure of that by any means).
  • She’s closest, I’m guessing, because she works multiple jobs after becoming the lover of a white American mechanical engineer who worked in Jamaica for a company mining bauxite. She ends up as a nurse, and I’m guessing that James is honoring that work in a fashion.
  • She also has a tremendously complicated relationship with her home country, one which at the end has her being chastised by a young Jamaican woman sitting with her husband (who is in a coma after a gang war), imbibing the food and culture of Jamaica in a restaurant close to her home in Queens, throwing up that food after hearing of Josey Wales’s horrible death, ending with that mysterious phone call.
    • I’m guessing James feels similarly.
• The folks who run Jamaica politically are rarely seen – instead, James presents the viewpoint of those who run sections of the various ghettos. One man, Papa-Lo, gets killed as he tries to bring peace;  another man, Josie Wales, gets killed after his attempts to bring order fall apart when he murders everyone in a crack house.  Both, I think, had gotten tired of the constant ways that their efforts failed.
• There is a lot more to talk about here, of course – a couple of white folks show up, a couple of characters are gay, the weirdness of Lester Bangs and all those Rolling Stone writers also appears as they become entranced by reggae and then find out that the scene that produces it is a brutal one.
  • And the Singer (Marley, in the only way he’s referenced in the novel), gets lionized and idealized in a way that, as the Rolling Stone writer says as he’s being “corrected” about the story he’s publishing in The New Yorker, makes me “think even more highly of the fucker.”
• As we piece together our sense of American identity through the vast, often nearly indecipherable melange of immigrant voices – and their reasons for coming here – novels like this one will help us better understand the promise and perils of moving to the United States and trying to make connections here.
• Although the dialect may be off-putting, this was an amazing read, one that I am guessing will live in my mind for a while.

Randyland Revisited

I’ve waxed sorta rhapsodically about Randyland before, but this time we got to meet the man, along with what felt like a hundred other Pittsburghians or visitors. We were also treated to Randy expounding upon his own world view, and it featured a powerful personal story along with several heartfelt pleas to love both ourselves and others.

His unabashed joy about communicating his own emotional intelligence and love for humanity makes me think a bit about my own privileging of cynicism and detachment. If we could all only be more like Randy…

The man, the myth, the legend, with some pretty geeked-out fans

No wood blocks or lady bugs were harmed in the making of this photo

 

Zeno’s Pub, State College PA

I met with college friends in State College for a weekend dedicated to basketball and, uh, sophisticated adult beverages, and found a new favorite bar:  Zeno’s Pub. It’s not just me who thinks so, either…

The clock reads “Ready for a Reading, the friendly beer for modern people.”  If you know what this means please tell me, because I have no idea.

I got a bit giddy when I heard the music, as the song being played was by the Black Angels. The bartender engaged when I made some weird little noise of recognition, and when I mentioned that I found out about them through Spotify (which isn’t cool I’m guessing), she affirmed my nerdiness by noting that she saw them with the Black Keys.  She had no idea who the Black Keys were.

Are they fascist-lite too?

In case you were wondering, PA has a Pantera tribute band.  I had no idea this was a thing.

Freshies Unite!

Vintage posters speak to a different age, one with fewer mortal sins…

Chuck Pahlaniuk – Fight Club

For a class I’m teaching I re-read Fight Club (for probably the fourth time), and since I have yet to blog about it now seemed like the perfect time. Thoughts…

• The components of masculinity that Pahlaniuk identifies are fascinating.  He is of course satirizing the New Age Men’s movement, but the ways that he pulls this off show a construction of masculine identity that contorts the usual binaries…
  • For instance, lots of this novel focuses on the unnamed narrator trying to understand his own feelings in a world in which he thinks he’s being asked to have them.  The attending support groups, finding jobs that are seemingly intentionally emasculating (mostly because of where he fits on the corporate food chain), and even the selling of human fat-based designer soaps all make us think that this narrator is raging against what many in the old-school masculine camp would call the feminization of the US (which, by the way, is not a thing).  That raging leads to his own destruction, though, and not in a poetic Richard Wright-sort of way.
    • Having set up that binary, Pahlaniuk beautifully yanks the rug out from under oppressed white men everywhere by having them (us) pummel each other in dirty basements and think that that’s a good thing, rather than the product of intense insomnia brought on at least partially by an inability to reconcile oneself to the shit that one must do to earn a living.
      • Which, lest we forget, is in our narrator’s case to be the point person on deciding on just how many people have to die for a manufacturer to admit a mistake in a production process…
  • Another binary that he gleefully pulls apart is the observation/action conundrum. Masculinity equals action, right?  In FC, however, observation and action blend and morph together, as shit happens:
    • the steroids that Big Bob used when he lifted (active) have now caused him to be dying of cancer (the ultimate in passivity);
    • Tyler’s job as a projectionist (passive) becomes active when he inserts scenes from porn films in the kid movies he shows;
    • and many more…
• Of course, this novel is also saturated in identity, but when we start to believe our own bullshit the train runs off its rails, as Project Mayhem becomes a thing that even Tyler (or the unnamed narrator) can’t control.
  • The supposed masculine love of being able to thrive in chaos results in the entire support group coming to rescue our narrator from himself as buildings collapse around them.