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Wed, Dec. 22nd, 2021, 05:01 pm
nonfiction
Lacey Lamar & Amber Ruffin, You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: ( it was racismCollapse )Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City: ( you can't save a child and not a communityCollapse )Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Third Edition: ( intro textCollapse )Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World: ( ok, boomerCollapse )Joshua D. Rothman, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America: ( they helped make slavery profitable for lots of whitesCollapse )Jon Grinspan, The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915: ( super interesting, very worrisomeCollapse )Grinspan doesn’t make causal claims about what might have been possible instead, but he does suggest that participation and violence might be linked in the American tradition, which is very worrisome for today. E.g., “[t]here was, by one account, gunfire at every Philadelphia election between 1870 and 1900.” Tattooed thugs showed up at the Pennsylvania statehouse, “arms menacingly folded across their chests, exposing their number 27 tattoos, standing as silent threats to any Pennsylvania Democrats who might vote wrong.”In response to the disruptions of the 19th century, he suggests, “[s]ome sought protection in political parties. Others looked for easy scapegoats, blaming corrupt politicians or Black Reconstruction. They created a cycle of rage, a self-perpetuating bad mood that simultaneously pushed citizens farther into partisanship while undermining their faith in democracy.” Parties offered the only apparent refuge from “an age of ruthless individualism”; with political parties the only source of a sense of community, Americans “abandoned the political fluidity that proponents of pure democracy had hoped the war might bring.” The loss of Black political rights post-Reconstruction was part of a larger battle over democracy: whether participation was actually desirable. Class conflict made more wealthy and middle-class whites answer “no.” Reconstruction wasn’t destroyed by an elite bargain; it was “killed by political violence in the South and by the millions of White voters nationwide who gave up on it.” The larger context was one in which government seemed to stop working while also being the focus of attention. Reformist politics tried to reduce the temperature of politics, but in exclusionary ways. For example, focusing politics on the written word instead of rallies “made politics less accessible to those who were illiterate, non-English speakers, or simply reluctant to study the issues closely,” and also shifted power to people who could deal with printers, more often professional politicians in big cities. Campaign materials shifted from torches, uniforms and hats—participatory tools that made the bodies of supporters themselves into the campaign—to signs and pins showing candidates’ faces, focusing attention on the executive instead of the people. “By beginning the switch from participatory objects to consumable trinkets, the 1896 election further increased campaigns’ reliance on money.” The increased costs of running a campaign reliant on literature decreased voluntary participation in rallies etc., which had previously been rewarded with patronage jobs. The secret ballot with candidate lists provided by the government, instead of preprinted ballots handed out by the parties for party-line votes, were also harder for illiterate and immigrant voters to use, by design. Torn between the corruption of machine politicians and the condescension of reformers, millions of Americans chose corruption, then as now, “not because they were fools, but because they got something material or psychological from their participation.” This diagnosis by muckrackers made clear to reformers that it was the masses who needed to change, not just the politicians. Prohibition was part of it: closing saloons closed places where working-class men had organized politically and enjoyed the vibrant, violent process of politics. “Rather than a newly mobilized anti-alcohol vote, what was really happening was the suppression of the votes of saloon supporters.” The collapse in participation from the resulting reforms was huge. In Mississippi, for example, the number of registered African American voters fell from 147,000 to 9,000 after a new state constitution. Presidential election turnout crashed from 79.3% of eligible voters in 1896 to 48.8% in 1924. Turnout “fell twice as much in states that introduced secret ballots which required voters to select individual candidates, rather than voting a straight party ticket.” Southern turnout dropped by half after 1900. “Just 17.5 percent of eligible South Carolinians voted in 1916. In the 1920 election, Jones County, Georgia, registered the lowest turnout in any U.S. county: 2.8 percent.” Nationwide, poor and immigrant voters disappeared, and “young first-time voters stopped turning out in high numbers to cast their ‘virgin votes.’” Indeed, even children of immigrants stopped voting: “in 1916, just one in five New Jerseyites with foreign-born parents voted.” Instead of politics, many people turned to religious or other social organizations to find meaning and change. In these very same years, many major civic institutions were founded, including the Rotary Club (1905), the National Audubon Society (1905), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), the Boy Scouts of America and Girl Scouts (1910, 1912), Kiwanis Clubs (1915), the American Civil Liberties Union (1920), and the revived KKK (1915). Even women’s suffrage was part of these reforms: For decades women’s suffrage activists had to counter claims that women voting would ruin the hypermasculine culture of election day. But in a new political world where the well-to-do were looking for ways to extinguish that old political culture, “doubling the respectable vote” became one of its greatest selling points. The irony of women’s suffrage was that the movement finally won the right to vote at the precise moment in American history when voting was coming to matter less. All of this seems pretty awful, but Grinspan takes pains to remind us of one thing: “Americans became less likely to hurt each other over electoral politics.” Can we get participation back without the associated violence? It’s hard to be optimistic.</div>
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Tue, Dec. 21st, 2021, 03:23 pm
fiction
Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant: Second volume in the series featuring Baru Cormorant, taken from her home to serve the empire that conquered it and that despises her for her racial inferiority and her tribadism. I found it violent and confusing and more interested in jerking Baru and others around than I was in following the twists of the story. Ilona Andrews, Blood Heir: Kate’s adopted daughter, much changed by her encounter with Moloch, returns to Atlanta to save Kate’s life, followed by a prophecy that if Kate sees her then Kate will definitely die. Lots of politics and magic ensue, and a bit of romantic longing. It’s what I wanted without requiring things in Kate’s life to get undone, which was nice. Tobias Buckell, Shoggoths in Traffic: Short stories; the zombie pandemic one where we all die because racism was a little on the nose for me, though the fact that it was written in 2018 suggests that I need to keep reading. I preferred the retelling of The Emperor’s New Clothes where the news reports on the controversy and doesn’t judge. Buckell’s interest in complicity, including complicity with destroying the world as well as in smaller crimes, shows in various ways. James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Falls: Final novel, they say, in the Expanse series. The core characters are older and changed, especially Amos, except in the ways he’s exactly the same (he’s not very communicative on the matter). Holden and Nagata do what they do—him rigid insistence and her subtle politics—and they try to deal with the fact that old gods are trying to kill them. Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow: Zetian volunteers as a concubine for the kaiju-fighting mechs that keep her country safe; concubines are routinely killed by the male pilots who consume their minds as part of piloting the mechs. But Zetian plans to kill the man who killed her beloved older sister. Among other things, she discovers that, in a mech, her bound feet don’t make it all but impossible for her to walk. But her plans are disrupted when she’s assigned to an equally disliked male pilot—a murderer who is allowed to pilot only because he’s stronger by a lot than anyone else. When he can’t kill her either, they become central to a planned attack—but still despised. I saw someone say that this seemed very second-wave feminist, in that the bad guys are just outright willing to harm women, and the society of which they are a part, because of misogyny, and that seems correct. Enough interesting threads were left hanging that I’d pick up the sequel. C.M. Waggoner, The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry: Fantasy starring a gutter firewitch who’s a bit too fond of gin. In an attempt to make the rent, she joins a crew of witches protecting a fine young lady before her marriage, one of whom is a respectable clanner who might be a great meal ticket for her. But things get complicated, both murderously and romantically, and she has to somehow infiltrate a drugmaking operation and make the very stuff that her mother is addicted to, in hopes of being able to save those she loves (and some she’s not so fond of). It’s a lot of fun, and includes a skeletal mouse named Buttons who is both cuter and more horrifying than he sounds like. Songs of Love and Death: All-Original Tales of Star-Crossed Love, ed. George R.R. Martin: Contributions from big names including Peter Beagle, Jim Butcher, Marjorie Liu, Diana Gabaldon (different time traveler than Outlander, same idea), Robin Hobb, and Neil Gaiman, but I didn’t feel most of them. The Gaiman story was a nice chilly reversal of the imaginary girlfriend trope—a man’s high school imaginary girlfriend starts trying to reconnect with him. Jacqueline Carey, Miranda and Caliban: A retelling from the perspective of the two titular characters. I found I didn’t like it as much as her LoTR retelling; patriarchy/colonialism has and keeps the upper hand throughout the novel, so be prepared. Charles Stross, The Traders’ War: Second book in the Merchant Princes revised series; Miriam aka Helge is not settling well into her medieval princess role, instead getting into various trouble that leaves her much more powerless than a standard protagonist. But lots of politics are happening in all three worlds and she gets caught up in all of them. Also, various wars break out and there is a forced pregnancy (via reproductive technology). It is interesting but tends in the direction of “humans inevitably screw things up one way or another.” Hark! The Herald Angels Scream, ed. Christopher Golden: Really more winter-themed horror than entirely Christmas-themed; a number of stories using the short story format effectively to end just as or before the really awful thing happens, like Scott Smith’s Christmas in Barcelona (child death). I disliked the last story by Sarah Pinborough, The Hangman’s Bride—it’s about the ghost of a murdered Japanese woman who ends up saving a white woman to be the new bride of her widower in Victorian England, so the function of the nonwhite horror trope is to give the surviving white people a happily ever after. Nancy Kress, The Eleventh Gate: In the distant future, humanity is scattered across a few different planets, none of them Earth; some are run by libertarians (controlled by a single family because that’s how power works) and others are run by a corporate nanny state, with only Polyglot having something like democracy. When the discovery of a new gate between worlds, promising access to a new planet, destabilizes things, war breaks out and internal dissent threatens to take down both non-Polyglot regimes. It’s got Kress’s standard pessimism about governance as well as a lot of palace intrigue and some sf on the nature of consciousness. Eliot Schrefer, The Darkness Outside Us: Two teens on a mission to Titan to save one’s sister start to wonder if something else is going on, since the ship’s AI won’t tell them certain things and there are certain oddities in the setup. What is actually happening is disclosed midway through and the rest is working out what to do with it—this is a book largely about how to accept unmoveable constraints and plainly-seen-in-front-of-you losses. Also a teen romance, though how romantic it is to connect with the only other person in your world is perhaps debatable; the protagonists are from two contending cultures and have both mistrust and a bit of misperception to get past. Steven Brust, The Baron of Magister Valley: On further thought, I still find the mocking-old-fashioned style of “I want to know X,” “Oh, you want to know X?” “I have hardly wanted anything else for a week now” more unpleasant to read than not. The basic story is of a young man betrayed and imprisoned in a secret jail for hundreds of years, while he learns all the skills and his fiancee and her brother, orphaned in the same course of shenanigans, struggle to survive. You may recognize the outlines from the Count of Monte Cristo, but it is very integrated into Dragaeran lingo. Charles Stross, Halting State: In a sort-of-independent Scotland, a bank robbery in a gameworld draws the police into something far stranger, with spies, people pretending to be spies in a game, and the occasional murder. Packed with Stross’s love of tech and bureaucracy, but not really him at his best. The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea ed. Ellen Datlow, authors include Michael Marshall Smith (zombie-ish horror), Seanan McGuire (not super interesting family revenge story), and Stephen Graham Jones (deserted island variant). Alyssa Wong’s What My Mother Left Me is a great variation on an old story, and Bradley Denton’s A Ship of the South Wind seems a bit of a stretch—there’s no sea, only a former sailor on the plains—but it’s a pretty good horror story nonetheless.
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Fri, Nov. 19th, 2021, 12:32 pm
Nonfiction
Milena Popova, Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent: ( Omegaverse, RPF and moreCollapse )Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs: ( EgyptologyCollapse )Angie Maxwell, The Indicted South: ( Why did white Southerners get so angry?Collapse )Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America: ( Amazon as bad guyCollapse )
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