The Antisocial Socialist

Just finished: Choices: An Anthology of Reproductive Horror, edited by Dianna Gunn. There are enough good stories in here that I'd recommend it, but the general problems—earnestness, literalness—persist throughout many of the stories. Ah, author-led anthologies.

Neosynthesis, edited by Bryan Chaffin. Speaking of! This almost had the opposite problem, which is a bunch of stories where I actually didn't know what was going on at all and couldn't orient myself. But it's rescued by quite a few standouts—Rohan O'Duill's Cold-verse short stories, especially "The Lore of Seven," "Nova Domus," which is about a spaceship becoming a person, and "The Nexpat," which is about life extension and virtual existence. 

I also flipped through the winter edition of "The Colored Lens," though I ended up just skipping ahead to J.S. Carroll's "Romeo Popinjay vs Iron Hans in the Beauty and the Beast Match You Won't Want To Miss," which was what I bought the anthology for, and which is 1000% worth the cover price. I want an entire novel of this short story. It's about an alternate universe where other hominids survive into more or less the present era, and feature in sideshows and pro-wrestling. Two heels—one human, one a wildman—end up forming a strange and touching friendship and rebel against their promoter. It's so so good.

Currently reading: I think next up is going to either be the rest of the aforementioned anthology or Changelog by Rich Larson, since that's what's sitting on the top of my TBR pile.

Between my regular rotation of Bastards/Cool People/ICHH, I've been slowly making my way through Better Offline's coverage of CES. Technically this is work-related and I should be listening on work time (obviously I'm not) but if you want like 20 hours of coverage about what's new in tech (spoiler: not very much), AI crammed into everything, and robots that still can't fold laundry, it's worth checking out.

It's really interesting from more than just Ed Zitron's usual professional hater perspective—which, to be clear, is something I appreciate as a professional hater myself. Because with something like CES, the questions of "who is this for" and "what is the use case" are actually critical and in your face. It's the Consumer Electronics Show, after all. So while robots in manufacturing are obviously a thing, the use case for household robots is a bit more questionable. The most successful household robot, the Roomba, recently went out of business, because as it turns out, they're not useful for 1) most households, which have things like furniture and sometimes stairs, or 2) the parts of your floor that you really don't want to vacuum, like tricky corners. They are good for scaring cats or if your cat is not scared of them, transportation.

The episodes are full of even more absurd technology to solve problems that aren't real, like fridges that open for you, meant to automate the parts of your life that you actually want to enjoy. We want machines to do menial tasks, leaving creative work for us. As it turns out, they're quite good at menial tasks in a factory, where you're doing the same thing repeatedly, but not in a house, where you have to do a lot of little annoying things.

But what we (normal people) want is very different from what techbros want. Remember, these are people who have not had to experience challenges in real life, so when they think about what a person might need, they come up with things like "what if I didn't want to cook and I got my fridge to open for me and dumped a bunch of ingredients in a pot and it would make food, and also a robot read a bedtime story to my child?" The fantasy, of course, is having a slave. But that is not the fantasy that normal people have, and there's an incredible disconnect between where tech is heading and actual human needs. 

Anyway, I am working through it very slowly because, as I said, 20+ hours, but it's worth a listen. Also if anyone can find pictures of Robert Evans in an exoskeleton I would like to see that for reasons.

Just finished: Mavericks: Life Stories and Lessons of History's Most Extraordinary Misfits by Jenny Draper. I don't have a lot to add since last week. If you read my blog you will like this. It is my jam. It's a rather inspiring read for—look, I haven't written about politics in a public post in awhile but you know. You know. 

Currently reading: Choices: An Anthology of Reproductive Horror, edited by Dianna Gunn. This one I picked up because a lot of the authors in it are my kind of people, and it's a cool concept. There must be a particular subgenre of leftist, author-led anthologies, and like. I want to fix that subgenre. I want it to exist, but I want to push it like, a notch further or two.

Part of my problem here is absolutely personal, which is that I'm intensely phobic of pregnancy and childbirth, and so in order to ping as horror in my brain, a story has to somehow be worse than my own fairly intense reactions to the subject. A few of the pieces are but they're mostly "wow it would be awful to be pregnant in a dystopian regime that viewed women as chattel" well, here we are. I have the same critique of my own writing btw. You simply cannot write bad things fast enough to get your book out before those bad things are just an accepted part of reality. Plus a lot of the stories are earnest, which is one thing that horror can't be. There's one story about an anti-abortion protestor that goes straight for black comedy and it is excellent; so far it's my favourite.

Just finished: Invisible Line by Su J. Sokol. This was quite good. Xe did a good job in not just complicating utopia—I have a minor dislike of "flee to Canada" as a plot point in dystopian fiction, and the portrayal of Montreal as a bureaucracy subject to limits on its ability to do the right thing is very nuanced and well done—but also making the characters messy and traumatized. The big crisis in the last act could have been averted if the parents talked to their damned kids, but of course they are too paranoid and distrustful from years of living under fascism, so they don't. Looking forward to reading the sequel.

Currently reading: Mavericks: Life stories and lessons of history's most extraordinary misfits by Jenny Draper. This is really fun—TikTok-sized portraits of history's interesting (not always good) characters. I knew about a lot of them, like Ellen and William Craft and Noor Inayat Khan, but a lot of the others, like Eleanor Rykener and The Chevalier d'Eon, are new to me. It's very fun and conversational.

 Just finished: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Did you know that the edition I have ends with an afterword from the author asking people to read his 1200-page book twice? Anyway I am very proud of myself as I managed to finish it around 30 minutes before the hold was due back at the library.

So, is it good? Yes. Do I totally get it? Not totally, though yes, more than I would have if I'd read it when I was 16. Definitely the time stuff, the illness stuff, the characters who are thinly veiled stand-ins for pre-WWI European political debates, yes. But of course, it's a very different world now—there is no longer the temptation to embrace illness as freedom, the idea that you can just convalesce for years in what amounts to a different reality, the fairy-tale world of the sanatorium. Which is why the ending hits so brutally hard. Structurally, the first half of the book is Hans Castorp's first three weeks on the mountain, and then it goes blurry, and the next seven years pass in a dreamlike state, with the changing of the seasons and the coming and going (through death and otherwise) of the patients being the only sense that time exists at all. And then there's essentially a massacre of half the cast in various ways, culminating in the arrival of WWI, and Hans disappearing into a viscerally described battlefield; time and history do exist after all, and it collides with the dream.

Reading it in 2026, of course, I am struck by the debates between Settembrini, representing humanism, and Naphta, representing totalitarianism (Catholicism/communism/fascism, but look, Mann was very much working out his political ideas in this book), but something I didn't talk about last week is Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn (yes this is a character name) who pops up late in the book as Clavdia Chauchat's sugar daddy. He's a larger-than-life figure who gets described as kingly and charismatic despite being far too old for her, distracting Hans from the aforementioned philosophical debate with revels, partying, and a hella Freudian love triangle. I'm particularly struck by his speech patterns. Look, the guy is basically Trump; he is charismatic because the other characters (except Settembrini, who winds up being the only character who comes off well by the end) read meaning into his rambling words that isn't there. This book feels so incredibly apropos for our present day despite being over a century old.

Anyway, I finished The Magic Mountain, ask me anything lol.

Currently reading: Invisible Line by Su J. Sokol. You know, something light and fun after reading all that. Ahahaha. This is hopepunk but I'm assuming that the hope part comes in more towards the end. It was first published in 2012 and the first 50 pages were such that I had to text the author and ask if xe had like, rewritten it for the current edition to update it or something? Xe had not. I suppose the direction was obvious in 2012 where the political climate was moving but it's nonetheless one of those unsettling dystopian books, set in a crumbling fascist US rife with surveillance and police brutality.

Laek, a history teacher, Janie, his activist lawyer partner, and their two kids, Siri and Simon, are doing their best to live a normal life in New York, but Laek was a bit more of a spicy activist when he was a teenager, and his fake ID is no longer cutting it. So they make the decision to flee by bike to Montreal, which has declared itself a sanctuary city in tension with the Canadian government. It's basically too relatable, with a bunch of moments where the characters wonder if it's too much, if they should stay and fight the small battles they can or GTFO while it's still a possibility. There's a scene early on of a teachers' union meeting where a new policy means that the teachers must report their children to immigration, and it's the most accurate depiction of this kind of scenario I've run across in fiction, and yeah. If your feelings about living under fascism, or next door to fascism, are escapism, this book is going to be too real; if however, like me, you need to just read more about living under fascism, you'll be into it.

 It being Void Week and NYE, I fully forgot that it was also a Wednesday. Happy Wednesday, my dudes.

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. 700 pages and two years into Hans Castrop's stay at the Berghof, which our guy does not want to leave. And who can blame him? It seems a very chill life. Hans and Joachim (but mainly Hans) take up visiting the people who are bedridden and dying, which results in at least one awkward incident of a teenage girl developing a huge crush on him. Clavdia and Joachim both leave (the latter after a very lengthy conversation in untranslated French, most of which I didn't understand; the former to go into the military even though he is not fully cured). Settembrini also leaves, but not to go very far, instead to move in with his friend/arch-nemesis/wait are these two gay for each other, Leo Naphta. Meanwhile, Hans' uncle/cousin/foster brother James Tienappel comes up for a bit to try to convince Hans to leave, before realizing that all of these people are mental and Hans is mental and then he nopes out without saying goodbye and before he can be diagnosed with tuberculosis, making him the wisest character in the book so far.

As is the style of the era, there's a digression on art and painting styles where the sanatorium's director, Behrens, has been painting Clavdia, and according to Hans is quite bad at it, but he has to compliment the guy's technique anyway, and this is quite good.

The very lengthy dialogue between Settembrini and Naphta, which is a seduction of sorts wherein both weird old guys try to convince Hans (and Joachim, who is there too) of their philosophical points of view. Settembrini is a Renaissance humanist, Naphta is a Jewish convert to Catholicism who really, really likes this newfangled communism thing. Settembrini later pulls Hans aside after Naphta goes on and on about revolution and is like, stay away from that guy unless I'm around. Hans asks why, is it because of the revolution stuff? Settembrini reveals that no, he is secretly A Jesuit, and Hans is like, OMG A Jesuit, which has to be the funniest part of the book so far.

No one believes me that I'm enjoying this.

Anyway, friends, happy New Year! May we all survive.

 This week's podcast is such inside baseball metapodcasting, but it's one where I've literally emailed the podcasters asking for it, and apparently so did many other people. Bad Hasbara has finally, finally covered the fall of Jesse Brown in "A Jesse Brown Christmas ft. Rachel Gilmore." (I've linked to the video here in case you want to see dogs that I assume appear on screen at some point; here is another audio link).

Of all the public figures who got October 7th brain, Jesse was the saddest for me personally. He was someone I respected a lot as a journalist. He broke the Me to We scandal, which I'd been on about for years, he broke the Jian Ghomeshi story, which friends of mine who are in media circles had been whispering about for years without the clout to speak up, and as the show details, he produced "Thunder Bay," which is one of the best journalistic deep dives that this country's media has done in ages. If anyone could be relied on to be sensible and level headed and critical, it was him. Until his brain melted.

I've had personal correspondence with him (to his credit, he does read everything you send to him and responds, in detail) and that just made me sadder, because as they describe here, a younger Jesse would have eviscerated older Jesse for his backwards logic. In fact many of the journalists he helped make prominent do exactly that, including the fantastic Robert Jago, who you hear at the end. He never really struck me as a person who started from a conclusion and worked backwards to find (or fabricate) evidence, so even when he did questionable shit, like interview people who were against safe injection sites or insist that an immediate return to school during a covid spike was a good idea, I at least listened to what he had to say. Unfortunately, his post-Oct. 7 brainworms throw all of his earlier reporting into question.

This podcast, featuring one of his main targets, is over 2.5 hours long and doesn't even get into everything. (The specific incident I wrote to him about isn't mentioned.) It's really good. Mostly it's very cathartic as a story about someone you thought was cool turning out to, in fact, not be very cool at all, and how you cope with that. I seriously hope he's listening and reflecting.

I am drowning in unfinished and partly finished tasks so this will not be as detailed or vivid as my usual solstice descriptions. Also I have very few good photos because my hands were occupied and I didn't have a proper camera, so you'll have to make do with blurry impressions, I'm afraid.

The Longest Night was cold as balls, but tradition is tradition, and actually more of my friends made it out than is usual. We had the lanterns I made and they went over very well, which meant that basically we got drafted into the parade itself. There were new giant puppets (one in particular that I'll comment on in detail) and for the first time in years, the fire sculpture has returned to Alexandra Park. Giant puppets and lanterns are very important to me, but is it really solstice without a big art project that people worked very hard on getting lit on fire? I don't think so, and the fact that this happened again feels hopeful for the year to come.

( pictures but they're not great )

I'm hoping to have better pictures to share that other people took, as it was pretty well photographed. I do have one of me that rdi  took but this is a public post.

You can get a decent idea of the vibe (and how the fish and Mari Lynd looked in action!) in this video, if you have Instagram.


This post has photo and video of the Fire Finale.

As always, it was a beautiful night, and it looks like the sun is up, so we did a good job.

Just finished: Censorship & Information Control: From Printing Press to Internet by Ada Palmer. This was really good. Feels like even though it's pretty recent and deals mostly with history, it could use an update as the technology for censorship has advanced rapidly in the past few years, so I hope she/her students are still doing some work around it.

Currently reading: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Usually in December, after I've hit my Goodreads goal, I read something that's gratuitously long and would otherwise fuck up my goal if it didn't spill over into January (yay for anything and everything in my life being quantified and gamified, love that for me). This year's winner is my high school English teacher's favourite book, which he recommended but said that we wouldn't get until we hit middle age. Well, now I am middle aged so I'm reading it.

It's a curious book. I always hit the literary classics and go like. Oh. Haha. This is stranger and funnier than I imagined.

Me: I guess I will finally read literary classic The Magic Mountain.

 

Thomas Mann: Allow me to introduce my himbo failson, Hans Castorp. He is pure of heart and dumb of ass.

Am I enjoying it? I dunno, as much as you can enjoy a 1000+ page book which goes into detail about the breakfast, second breakfast, rest period, lunch, dinner, second dinner, etc. of the character. Which is the point, really—the mountain in question is a liminal space where in theory, the tuberculous patients can leave, but don't. But it's a slog.

 Just finished: You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson. I never had the privilege of seeing Gibson perform, other than on YouTube, so this is as close as I'm ever going to get. They really were a brilliant poet. Some of the poems lose a bit in print—they tend towards the storytelling and autobiographical, and that reads much less powerfully on the page than in speech—but this is a fairly minor critique. Gibson writes powerfully about queerness, gender, disability, and the climate crisis, and their furious energy is made all the more poignant by their premature death earlier this year.

Currently reading: Censorship & Information Control: From Printing Press to Internet by Ada Palmer. This is an exhibit based on a course that Palmer taught and it just makes me wish I could take the course. I'm screenshotting bits to text to people. Her central argument is that the total state censorship we see depicted in 1984 is the exception rather than the norm; more often censorship is incomplete, self-enforced, or carried out by non-state entities like the church or marketplace. This is obviously important when we talk about issues like free speech, which tends to be very narrowly defined when most of the threats to it have traditionally not come directly from the government (I mean, present-day US excepted, but it took a lot of informal censorship to get to that point).

The bit about fig leafs, complete with illustrations, is particularly good, as is the bit on Pierre Bayle, who hid his radical ideas in the footnotes to his Historical and Critical Dictionary in lengthy footnotes that he knew no one would read.

You can get this for free if you want to read it btw.