What I'm Reading Now

Deborah Solomon, American Mirror: The Life and Times of Normal Rockwell

I liked this a lot, although I was made a little uneasy by Solomon's heavy hinting that Rockwell was sexually attracted to his teenage male models. (She carefully insists he never acted on this attraction.) If you can wince your past that, this is an interesting look at Rockwell's artistic growth, as he moved from an apolitical creator of funny paintings to a left-leaning artist who created what are probably the two most famous visual works of the Civil Rights era:

It's also a good look at the history of popular art in American through the 20th century. Very readable, and except for the bit mentioned above, I enjoyed it immensely.


Frank Conroy, Body and Soul

This is re-read of one of my favorite books. It's the story of a musician from his early childhood (about four years old) through his young adulthood (about 25 years old). The musician, Claude, is a prodigy, and the book suffers just a little because everything comes to the kid so easily -- he finds the perfect teacher when he needs one, he inherits a fortune just when he needs one, everyone is always in awe of how wonderfully he plays, so on and so forth.

It's basically the Brave Little Tailor plot -- watch this wonderful guy succeed -- but it's well written and immensely readable. This is my fourth or fifth re-read, and I enjoy it every time.

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

This is the first bookI've read by McEwan, who is apparently a big deal. (He won the Booker Prize in 1988, among other prizes.) I picked up this one because I thought it was science fiction -- it's set in 2120, and deals with a world affected by climate change. Well, sort of deals with it. It's mostly about an academic who is studying a dinner party given by the wife of a famous poet in the early 21st century.

McEwan himself has said that this novel is "science fiction without the science," which, dude.

Half of the book is set in 2120, in England, which is now an archipelago, and told from the point of view of a scholar who is writing about a lost poem, written in 2014. It is a corona, which is a series of linked sonnets, and has an enormous reputation despite the fact that no copies exist and no one has ever read it. This part of the book is interesting: the hunt for the poem, and the look at England in the future caused by climate change: metal is scarce, major cities have been lost due to global floods, thousands of species have been wiped out. The university system continues, but students are bored and don't do any of the work required in the humanities classes. They don't care about history or the past, and don't want to learn about it. This is all interesting reading, and McEwan writes well.

The second half is a journal (found by the scholar while he is looking for the poem) about the wife of the poet who wrote the lost poem. It's less interesting, honestly, though it reveals the answers to all the secrets we're teased with in the first half of the book.

I mostly enjoyed this, though I don't know if I'll read anything else by McEwan. Dr Skull has a copy of Atonement, another of his books, and I read the first several pages of it, but didn't like it well enough to go on.

Thursday Links

This post by Fraser Sherman makes good points.

What's the Insurrection Act?

Not Nazis but slave catchers.

Trump regime wants a list of Jewish students and faculty, which isn't disturbing at all.

Can ICE shoot anyone they like and suffer no consequences? (Last night they shot another person, this one in the leg. They also threw a flash bomb into a car full of children, all of whom are now hospitalized.)

More on the flashbomb attack.

Hank Green on why they're lying and why it matters:

Two Cartoons and a Note

 

That last one is from Alas A Blog, where Barry appends this commentary: 

"I went back and forth on how malicious and evil to make the ICE agent in the final panel. Then I read about the ICE shooting of Marimar Martinez, just two months before Good’s death. Martinez, like Good, was accused by an ICE agent of trying to kill him with her car. Martinez, despite being shot five times, survived, and the case against her was so weak the government quietly dropped all charges.

"The agent who shot Martinez, Charles Exum, sent texts to his fellow ICE agents gloating about the shooting. His texts included: “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” “I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out’” and “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.”

Conservative Lies

When the National Guard killed those four students in Ohio in May, 1970 -- because some students were protesting the Vietnam War -- conservatives spread endless lies.

Their main lie was the the National Guard members had fired on the crowds of students because they were in "fear for their lives," and that the students had been throwing stones at them, attacking them, mobbing them. None of that is true. 

Conservatives also claimed the dead and wounded students "brought it on themselves," because they shouldn't have been there. (Why weren't they in class?) Others claimed "most" of the protestors were paid agitators. Some said more students should have been shot. Others claimed the dead students were so filthy the undertakers wouldn't touch them, that they were "crawling with lice."

There were endless claims about that, how dirty the students were. Also about how dangerous and destructive they were -- that they had been throwing trash all over the campus. That they were burning the campus down. Nixon claimed they were burning books, and said they were bums. (Some windows were broken in the protest, and one building did burn down, though who knows if it was related to the protests.)

But Nixon did appoint a commission to investigate the deaths, and that commission found that the shootings were not justified. I don't expect to see the same thing done by our current regime.

No, they'll just keep lying about what happened, because it's okay if you bear false witness against those people. That's what Jesus and Socrates both said, isn't it? Love your neighbor as yourself, but slander, shoot, and spit on those people.

USA Fascist State

Honestly, if you're saying the mother of three who was murdered in broad daylight by an untrained ICE agent deserved to die because she

• didn't comply with the police
• tried to escape
• shouldn't have been there anyway, why wasn't she at work
• is an outside agitator
• is acting how women do when they're not controlled properly
• was 'driving erratically' and probably high
• or any variation of those

you deserve what's coming to you. Because if you think Trump's Gestapo will stop before they're stopped, if you think they will stop before they get to someone you care about, if you think they'll stop before they destroy this country, you haven't been paying attention.

ETA: PZ Myers on the killing

What I'm Reading Now

A bunch of books by white straight guys. How did that happen?

Queen Esther, by John Irving

I saw this in the bookstore last time I was there, but I knew I could get it at the library so I didn't buy it. I'm glad I didn't. I'm afraid John Irving wrote one kind of interesting book (The World According to Garp) and since then has just been writing it over and over. This is just Garp one more time. A fatherless boy raised by feminists who wrestles in high school at a New England prep school wants to be a writer, goes to Vienna, encounters a German shepherd dog and some LGBT people, meets women with huge breasts, so on and so on. This one includes Jews and Israel and some indirect commentary on the situation in Gaza, but other than that, nothing here is new.

Content Warning: Irving's weirdness surrounding sexuality and people's genitals is very much present in this one. At least this time no one has sex with the dog.

Garp was formative to me as a writer and John Irving is always readable, but get this from your library if you're going to read it at all.

Spark, John Twelve Hawks

To be fair, I don't know if Twelve Hawks is a white straight guy. He's said he's not Native American, though, despite the name, which is a pseudonym. He could be a brown guy who isn't Native American. He writes under the pen name and claims no one in his family or community knows he publishes these books, which strikes me as unlikely -- what do they think he's doing, all those hours locked up with his computer? -- but I don't know his circumstances, so maybe.

Anyway! I did enjoy this one, mainly because of the voice of the main character (it's told from his point of view). Jake had a major head injury some time before the book opens, and suffers from Cotard's Syndrome. That is, he believes that he is dead. He is, he tells us in the book, a "spark" living in a "shell." 

Because of the syndrome, he feels no emotions about anything -- his mother, as he explains, and a empty soda can in the gutter are equal in his mind. This is not entirely true, as we learn, progressing through the novel. Jake does care about dogs. But otherwise -- 

Also because of this syndrome, he makes an excellent contract killer, and is earning a great deal of money, as the novel opens, doing this -- enough to pay his rent and his hospital bills, and to have plenty left over. He's not afraid of death (fear being an emotion) but it is convenient not to be homeless, and murdering strangers in order to pay for things is preferable to working a nine to five job.

The strange worldview of Jake is the best part of the novel, but as it is set in the near future, there's also a science fictional element, with a great deal to say about surveillance culture and the on-going stripping away of legal rights from members of the general population. Worth reading, and less depressing than you might expect. Warning: there are some scenes of animal abuse and human torture.

QNTM, There is No Antimemetics Division

I know QNTM is a white guy (his picture is in the back of the book) and that QNTM is a pseudonym for Sam Hughes (via Wikipedia.) I don't know much else about him, so I suppose he could be some flavor of LGBTQ. He's also the guy who invented Absurdle , a spinoff of Wordle in which the word changes with every guess you make, while "still remaining true to previous hints."

Anyway! I'm not sure I exactly liked this book, which is very disturbing, but I read it straight through. It's about "antimemes." Memes are cultural ideas, symbols, things you remember, possibly even against your will. They're like religions and cults (but I repeat myself), earworms, gestures, even phrases. Memetics is the study of memes. Antimemetics are things you can't remember. Like, literally can't. In QNTM's book, some of these are predators on humans, but since we can't remember them -- or anything they do -- they're difficult to fight.

The Antimemetics division fights the antimemes, except without certain specific drugs they can't remember the antimemes either. Sometimes even with the drugs, they can't remember them. Some antimemes can eat the memory of everything you know, your whole life, the languages you learned, your family, your skills, yourself. This is a bit like Alzheimers, I guess, which might be why it disturbed me so much.

We follow the chief of the Antimemetics division and her husband through a world-ending antimemetic attack, with a number of flashbacks and side quests. I'm not sure the ending is happy. I guess it's sort of happy.

Anyway, a very readable but not a comfortable read.

Trump is America

I am not surprised that Trump has invaded Venezuela without authorization from Congress, kidnapped its head of state, and killed some of its citizens -- probably to obtain their oil, despite his claim that it's about narcotics. I mean, this is what America does.

If you think the Iraqi war was about "weapons of mass destruction," all I can say is you haven't been paying attention. 

Never mind all the heads of state America covertly took down from 1950 through the 1980s, under various pretexts -- stopping communism, or whatever -- when we wanted their oil sold to us how and at the prices we would dictate.

Some have argued that that oil and those actions are why Americans and their children can live in what is essentially paradise. It's the child in the Omelas story! I'd add that the reason we are dragging our feet on climate change is because we are living on all that stolen oil. When it's so cheap to burn oil and coal, green energy sources end up looking too expensive. (Or at least according to oil-company propaganda, they are.)

In any case, no one should be shocked that Trump is doing exactly what America has always done. Good Christians, slaughtering their neighbors to maintain their wealth.

ETA: Scalzi says it better than I do.

ETA: Not just in South America, of course:

Thinking About Conservatives and Omelas

This fanfic about Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is great. One of the comments asks the author to do "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" next.

This got me thinking, not so much about fiction that responds to the original Le Guin story (there are endless stories that respond to the Le Guin story) as the conservative response to that story.

About ten years ago, during the Puppy Wars, conservative SF writers and readers got very upset about the Le Guin story. Partly this is due by their inability to understand the story, I think, which is not meant to be read literally -- that is, Le Guin does not want you to suspend your disbelief and think there is an actual Utopian city which depends on keep an actual child locked up in misery in an actual basement broom closet, and then decide what you should do about that. It's a metaphor, a way of thinking. 

(What's the story mean then? Well, like any good metaphor, it is over-determined. It means many things: that we can't image a Utopian space; that stories can't be about Utopia because we have been taught by our culture that happiness is boring; that every single healthy child in our current world is predicated on the suffering of children in other places; that our happiness depends on the suffering and the exploitation of other living beings; and that most of us learn to live with that.) 

In the story, most people in Omelas come to accept the necessity of keeping a single child in misery. Their beautiful city and their beautiful lives and their beautiful happy children depend on it, and it is not, after all, such a high price to pay -- one suffering child, who isn't even their child. 

A few people, though, walk away from the Utopia, refusing to accept that price. Le Guin admits (this is the line that saves the story) that she doesn't know where they are going:

The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. 

Conservatives are not furious about what the metaphor in the story implies. 

No, they're furious that the adolescent kids in the story walk away from the city.

The most common response I saw from the Puppies was that if they were in Omelas they would take their guns and slaughter everyone in their path, mounting a rescue of that child. That's what they would do in Omelas. No child suffering on their watch!

(Yes, these are the same Conservatives that approve of child labor which gives them cheap teeshirts and are fine with the situation in Gaza and love the idea of stealing children from immigrants and minorities so that good white Christian parents can raise those children in the Lord and accept homeless children and impoverished children as the price of a capitalist society and are just fine with factory farming and global climate destruction which is wiping out untold species and causing the suffering of millions, and do I need to go on?)

As I saw once on a Buddhist blog, "Everyone wants to save the world but no one wants to help Mom do the dishes." 

Which is to say, if you want to rescue that child, no one is stopping you. But you're going to have to walk away from Omelas. You're going to have to, somehow, find a new way to structure the world. Like Le Guin, I don't know how you do that. 

I know you won't do it by shooting people, though.

ETA: Here's a response I hadn't seen before!

Goodbye 2025

May you be the worst year of our future lives.

As I predicted back in January, this year was not terrible for me personally. It's amazing how difference having enough money makes. We own like 26% of a house, we have a reliable car, we can buy whatever we want to eat and if our shoes wear out we can buy new shoes and if we're sick or injured or need new glasses, we can just see a doctor or even go to the hospital without facing financial ruin.

On the other hand: Dr Skull's health has been bad (though he's doing much better now and seems to be heading for total wellness).

On the other hand: Thanks to trans people being the new favorite scapegoat of MAGA and the GOP, my kid and his husband are losing rights one after the next. They have an escape plan, if necessary, but they really want to stay here in Fayetteville if they can. Our governor and our senators and our federal government are doing their best to make that impossible. 

(Side note: I can't believe people are still buying the "ooo those immigrants are destroying the country / ooo those trans people are destroying the country" con-job, but from what I have seen on "conservative" blogs and sites, they either actually are, or are pretending to be, buying it.)

On the other hand: Trump's circus of a government seems bent on destroying any progress the country made toward fixing global climate change.

On the other hand: GOP state governments seem determined to destroy the American education system. Ignorant people make good conservatives, after all.

On the other hand: GOP state governments and the federal government alike are stripping as many rights as they can from American citizens, including the right of due process and the right to control our own bodies, with more scheduled to be removed soon if they hold power.

On the other hand: Trump's circus of a government and the rest of the GOP are grifting every nickel they can to bribe billionaires and give tax breaks to the 1% and leave the rest of the country sick and poor and desperate. And the cost of living continues to increase.

Right now we seem on track to take back the government in 2026. May things get better after that. Please.  

Still Cold

It was nineteen degrees here when I took the dog to the dog park at dawn. There were ducks on the duck pond and the dog, despite the literally freezing temperature leapt into the pond after them. (They flapped away honking in a very satisfactory manner.)

Brrr!

Yesterday the temperature dropped from 72 degrees at 10:00 a.m. to 29 degrees at six p.m. This morning when I took the dog for his walk it was 16 degrees.

Brr!

It's so cold the dog doesn't even want to sit on the back deck and guard the yard, which is his usual occupation at this time of day.

White Men Are Being Excluded from Publishing O No

This is suddenly a new talking point on the MAGA Right:

 

The premise is that all of a sudden white men cannot get publishing contracts. All the books being published are by trans people, or brown people, or gay people or, you know, girls.

Is this true? (Spoiler: No.)

(It's interesting, also, that they don't count gay men as men. Or brown men as men. Only cisgendered white guys are actual men in this view of the world.)

The author of this opinion piece tries hard to make it seem true by setting her terms very carefully: white men who were born after 1984 (Why 1984? You got me). Her "evidence" is other opinion pieces which make exactly the same argument. She also notes that people's lists of favorite books have fewer white men on them than previously.

(Since I follow several threads about books on Reddit, where very nearly no one except white men ever gets recommended, I suspect she is setting her terms carefully here as well.)

Does she give evidence? Does she look at who is actually being published, who is actually being reviewed, who is actually winning awards? Don't be silly. She feels like white men can't get published, and her feelings are what count.

A. R. Moxon takes a deeper look here. As she notes at one point, the only actual primary source cited in any of these opinion pieces notes that while women are published more now than men, white men are publishing more ever, and clearly more than they did in the past.

Having to share space in the publishing world is, for the reactionary MAGA and for (some) white men apparently, the exact same thing as being discriminated against.

Since we're going to talk about feelings and anecdote instead of evidence, I'll retell a story I have told here before. When I was in graduate school, where white men were all we read and all we ever heard about, I did deliberately start reading more women writers. My (right-wing) brother came to visit, glanced at my bookshelves, and said, "I see you just read women now."

I was pretty sure that wasn't true, so I insisted we do a count. No shock, given the reading requirements of my classes, I had about twice as many male writers on my shelf as women. My brother saw a couple of titles by women, and he felt that meant I was only reading women.

Another anecdote: I was in an actual bookstore yesterday, the local Barnes & Noble, looking at the new publications. There were indeed a lot by women and brown people and brown women and LGBTQ people. There were also a lot by white men. I picked up one, which had an interesting title. The author's photo showed a serious young white man looking serious. The book was about some other young white man's feelings. I read the first page and was so bored I could not go on.

There were also tons of book by other white men there, including a new one by John Irving, who I was sure had to be dead by now, and about six by James Patterson (surely he is dead by now?) and some by white guys I feel must be dead by now. But our MAGA opinion holders are insisting we only count men born since 1984, so I guess those guys don't count.

Anyway. White conservatives sure like to pretend they're being discriminated against. It's pretty hilarious.

Chinese TakeOut for Christmas Dinner

We fulfill the obligation:

 

Christmas Day

It's very un-Christmasy weather here -- highs in the high 70s all week, with equally high humidity. When I walk the dog at dawn though, it is very pleasant, except for the damp. Today he chased two squirrels up a tree and then refused to leave the tree, circling it endlessly, sure they were about to come down again.

We're having a traditional Jewish Christmas day, with take-out Chinese. There's supposed to be a movie afterwards, but honestly nothing is playing here that we could stand to watch. Maybe we'll take the dog to the dog park instead.

Happy holidays to all y'all, however you celebrate!

My Reviews are Up at Asimov's

They'll be available for a few weeks, so read'em while they're hot.

Featured in this column:

Mary Soon Lee, The Sign of the Dragon

Emily Yu-Xuan Quin, Aunt Tigress

Chuck Tingle, Lucky Day

Ray Nayler, Where the Axe Is Buried

Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

Beth Revis, Last Chance to Save the World