Cameron's Book Round-Up: The End of 2022

The semester is coming to an end, and I’ve spent a lot of time going to and from campuses — which gives me a lot of time to listen to audio. A lot of these were audio books, but there are a few print novels as well.

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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott.

(Previously referenced here.) An absolute banger, a barn-burner, of a book. James C. Scott is an anthropologist and political scientist who specializes in South East Asia, and for a time worked for anti-communist organizations in Burma and Paris (as part of the National Student Association, an organization that took CIA money.) Later in his career, Scott’s anti-communism turned into a more generalized anti-authoritarianism, and he took aim at both Soviet and Western projects of state control. Given his background, I can understand why a number of people may be skeptical of me assessing this work so highly.

Seeing Like a State makes the argument that much of what centralized leadership does is supported by a project of making the governed territory “legible” to the metropole: such as imposing standardized units of measurement, standardized naming conventions, and a national language. While much of Scott’s own academic work focused on South East Asia, his examples here are largely drawn from late medieval and early modern Europe – discussing the efforts of French Kings and Italian Doges to make the countryside legible to them in an attempt to extract usable labor from them, and accrue power.

All of this is filtered through the metaphor that he uses to open the book – the difference between early attempts at bureaucratic forest management producing brittle, ecologically unstable forests that were supposedly maximized to produce lumber which would fail quickly due to their uniformity. Scott argues that the tendency towards uniform, legible systems of management – what our old friends Deleuze and Guattari would call “striated spaces” – consistently fail to out-perform unmanaged, heterogenous non-systems – what they would call “smooth spaces”.

A lot of this boils down, in Scott’s analysis, to the difference between Techne (standardized, super-rational, bureaucratic knowledge – Royal Science in D&G’s framework), and Metis (situational, local, intuitive and traditional cunning – Nomad Science in D&G’s framework.) He makes the point that a synthesis between the two, Techne harnessed and leaving space for Metis to work, Metis pulling apart and digesting the usable bits of Techne, almost always outperforms either on its own, which I think is a useful point.

I’m probably going to read more of Scott’s work. I’ve been looking for more leftist anthropology from which to draw. Still, I do think it best to take what he says with a grain of salt, given his history: he is an expert, but none of us are free of our biases, and sometimes that can work its way into even unconnected work.

Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots by James Suzman

Speaking of…

I wanted to keep the anthropology thing going, and I had neither more Scott nor any unread Graeber to dig into, so I gambled on Suzman. This book spends a great deal of time discussing what work actually is, starting with thermodynamics, and carrying it through evolutionary biology, an ethnography of hunter gatherers, and ends up with a discussion of us, today, as we predict that automation might put a fair number of us out of a job.

A lot of the book is taken up with an ethnography of the Ju/’hoansi (ibid.; closest English approximately pronounced Ju-twan-see) bushmen of Namibia, one of the surviving hunter-gatherer peoples, but who have been dispossessed of their land by white Namibian settlers. It’s clear enough why Suzman deals with the Ju/’hoansi – he spent fifteen years living among them and studying them. He saw firsthand that the dispossession is so great that they cannot even reliably get informal work – partly driven by the white Namibian reluctance to pay day laborers a living wage.

Suzman uses the Ju/’hoansi as a window into the deep past (a move argued by Davids Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything to be somewhat dodgy,) and makes the claim that – before settlement – they only had to spend 17 hours a week attempting to feed themselves and another 20 on sundry other chores. In short, due to living in a settled, technological society, we all are putting in far more labor than our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, some 600 generations back at the longest.

The book was reasonably solid, and brought some new insights to the argument, but I feel that he started from axioms a bit far away from where he was trying to end up, which isn’t a terribly good position to be in – it’s a fairly short book that makes a long argument when it should have made a thick or deep argument.

At various points he also engages in what I’m going to call the “Turing Fallacy”, which is the fallacy of assuming that the action of a living being and the action of a machine are necessarily interchangeable. Personally, I would maintain that they are not, even when they are roughly analogous. I’m grateful to this book for helping me begin to articulate that better, but it still bugs me.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

A book I’ve been meaning to read for a while, and which I didn’t really like quite as much as I thought I would. I had expected that this work would be more accessible and less jargon-heavy than it turned out to be, which is on me more than anything else.

I’m an adjunct professor, and over the past few months I’ve been getting more serious about doing that in greater depth. As such, I have begun to read more pedagogic texts and ask myself to examine things in greater detail than I have previously. The first complete book – as opposed to essay or chapter – on this, was Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

It was...fine? I’ve heard Freirean principles repeated quite often, and I definitely feel that what he describes in here – of the teacher and students being co-creators of knowledge – is true. However, I consistently feel myself slipping back into the traditional, “banking”, model of education. The few times I have attempted to step out of it, I feel push back, as if I’m being told: this is a gen ed course, these kids want to get through your class and then to their major courses that will contribute to their future employability in their chosen professions, don’t rock the boat.

What Pedagogy of the Oppressed does here is discuss this same phenomenon, to a certain extent, in a different context, that Freire noted with his Brazilian students. This, he termed, a “fear of freedom”.

Of course, I also must ask myself, when looking at things in this way, whether using this framework is self-serving. Not for Freire, but for myself – am I misreading the situation (and, frankly, the book) in a way to make myself feel promethean and clever, when in actuality, the problem is not pushback from the students but the cop in my own head?

I mean, I have at times been promethean and clever, but it’s probably self-serving. I should take the time to reexamine my approach to managing the classroom and the topics of study within it. Which would be a lot easier if adjuncts were paid better; of course, no one who can both influence the pay-scale of contingent faculty and would be moved by the offhanded nature of that statement reads this blog, if such a person exists.

Sundial by Catriona Ward

Previously reviewed by Edgar here, and recommended to me after we watched the episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities directed by Panos Cosmatos, “the Viewing”. The term Edgar used to describe it – and also in the linked review – is a kind of “psychedelic realism”.

The book largely concerns Rob, a suburban housewife married to a professor who is trying to escape from her cult-like upbringing, going back to the house in the desert that she inherited years and years ago upon the death of her father, with her daughter, a child who she suspects is beginning to show signs of serial killer-like behavior. The perspective flips back and forth between the mother and daughter, and plumbs deep into Rob’s past and her relationship with her now-dead twin sister.

All of these characters, especially Rob’s husband, are profoundly unlikable. After a period of adjustment, this became a strength. These people are not here to be likable or sympathetic for an audience, they are all profoundly damaged, and this Psychedelic Mojave-Gothic novel is an archaeology of that trauma. If they were likable, then it would be impossible to approach things with a clinical detachment, and that detachment is thematically important.

This was my first encounter with Ward, and I have trouble really putting my finger on what’s going on with her in terms of style and world-building (Sundial takes place in a contemporary setting, but there is a great deal of world-building going on.) I get the sense that Ward handles the 20th century the way that a mid-tier fantasy writer without a history background handles the Middle Ages – as if it’s all sort of an undifferentiated block that’s roughly the same all the way through. Which is a deficit for the fantasy writer, but is a hell of a choice when writing about the modern world: it’s somehow both the 1970s and now, but twenty years ago was the 1990s and the 1930s and I hope this clarifies things for you but it doesn’t for me, it’s all just time-fog that I can’t find my way through, but I’m into it, so I’ll just vibe.

In all honesty, Sundial feels like it’s operating on the same wavelength as Paul Tremblay’s books (reviewed by me here and Edgar here) but leave the door more open to things like weird science, cults, and ghosts. To a certain extent this is good, but there’s also a little nugget of bad philosophy in there that I can’t really get into without spoiling the plot.

There might also be a parallel between it and Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial, but I haven’t read that yet and so I can’t really comment.

Quantum of Nightmares (New Management, #2) by Charles Stross

This is the last of the currently-out Laundry Files books. Stross has talked about doing two more – one more New Management book, detailing the dystopian post-Lovecraftian nightmare that is Britain under the rule of Prime Minister Fabian Everyman (read: Nyarlathotep), which was set up by the ostensible heroes in one of the previous novels because it was less terrible than the alternatives.

I’ll be honest, while the New Management books are fun – this one features a fairly horrific take on industrialized meat production – they feel less substantial than the earlier main-line books. I don’t mean this as a “they changed it, now it sucks” sort of thing, but I simply feel that what I’m looking for out of these books is different than what Stross is going for. He’s an excellent writer, but it feels like these books are not occupying his attention in the same way as his standalone works tend to; and it makes sense. There’s only so far you can carry the original premise, but he’s done so for more than a decade, and the writing is great on a sentence-by-sentence level, and the plots are very fun, but it just hasn’t been scratching the same itch for me.

So, read it if you’re a fan of the series, if you got on the ride a long time back like me and you want to see where it’s going, but don’t pick it up on its own and dive in if Post-Lovecraftian Dystopia [British] isn’t where you’re looking to go.

A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1) by Arkady Martine.

Reviewed alongside its followup, A Desolation Called Peace, below.

A Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy.

(Reviewed by Edgar here.)

I’ve been enjoying Killjoy’s podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff for a few months now, and I figured I’d check out her fiction. We already had a copy of Country of Ghosts, so I sat down to read it, expecting something roughly like associated act Robert Evans’s book After the Revolution. It was not. It was still a great read.

The basic plot is that a journalist (Dimos Horacki) from not-Victorian England gets embedded with an army unit to do a profile of its commanding officer (Dolan Wilder, whose signature look is “has a top hat”) and ends up first captured by, and then fighting alongside, the enemy: the Free Company of the Mountain Heather. Killjoy, a committed anarchist herself, sought to portray the sort of world she would like to live in, and came up with Hron – the eponymous Country of Ghosts.

Hron, despite being what Killjoy wants to point towards as her desired world, is portrayed warts-and-all, and shows her long commitment to leftist organizing. She describes decision-making by consensus warts and all, and doesn’t shy away from the question of what to do with those who break the social contract the characters live under. Despite the notes of aspiration, the utopian elements of the story, Killjoy doesn’t write a utopia, not in a traditional sense, at least.

The end result is a solid little book, only a couple hundred pages long, that really makes one think. Killjoy’s writing is simple without being basic, achieving a kind of earnest, unadorned beauty that doesn’t choke you on sentiment. A very solid book.

The Night Will Find Us by Matthew Lyons.

I’ve seen Matthew Lyons’s name on a number of year-end lists of cosmic horror – largely for hisg newest novel A Black And Endless Sky. I was unable to find that one, but his earlier foray into the genre, The Night Will Find Us. Six friends – a veritable breakfast club of newly-minted high school seniors – go for a camping trip in the New Jersey Pine Barrens on the first day of summer after the end of Junior Year. The whole thing is orchestrated by one of their number, Parker, who is going into the woods hoping to slip away from the group and search for his ex-Marine father, who disappeared at the start of the school year.

What seems like a fairly traditional setup quickly swerves when one of their number ends up dead. This much, as we know from the fact that it’s a horror story that borrows heavily from slasher movies, was to be expected. What isn’t expected is the fact that the murder is purely within the group and witnessed by everyone. After a brief schism, things begin to take off – and the group slowly learns that everything happening to them is connected to a gruesome spree killing from the colonial period.

After everything is unseated from there, the story comes less to resemble Friday the 13th and more takes on the character of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, filtered not through the Florida Everglades but through the million-acre primeval forest nestled into southern New Jersey.

It’s a solid book, but I must admit that I’m not sure whether the absence of treatment of Native Americans and how they interact – or purposefully avoid interacting – with the horror Lyons created for his story is a strength or a weakness. It would be easy to label it as a Manitou or some other native spirit, but that would be disrespectful and cheapen the whole experience: it’s good that he didn’t do that. However, there’s the intimation that the entity in question has been present in those woods for eons, and it feels somewhat odd to deal with the American colonial period and give absolutely no attention to the interaction between the indigenous people and the European settlers, even if it was limited to one of the characters in the flashback portions that took place in the colonial period expressing anxiety or enmity towards them. Engaging in the magical native American or the evil savage trope would have been a problem, but it seems necessary to mention them – a single throwaway line about how the colonists settled in this portion of the pine barrens because the natives don’t go here, expressing that they purposefully avoid interacting with the evil, would have been enough.

In short, a solid book, and very engaging – I’ll certainly read more of Lyons’s work – but possibly engaging only shallowly with necessary background details.

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend.

Read, at least in part, to give myself some context for the Teixcalaan books, and also because finding a copy of Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World In Motion continues to elude me. Townsend is very much a historian interested in telling stories, and focuses on one of the pre-contact cultures that had developed a literary tradition beforehand, and managed to preserve part of it until after.

Townsend treats not just the conquest of the Aztecs – who she refers to by their own name, Mexica, – but also the aftermath, clearly and evenly. Though she has a storyteller’s appreciation for particular events, she is also a responsible historian and seeks to draw on both Spanish and indigenous sources in constructing her sequence of events. She does an excellent job of acknowledging the agency of all parties involved and, while she speculates about motivations and reasoning when she has evidence to go off of, she will purposefully acknowledge in places when she has no information to go off of that it is beyond us why certain things happen without somehow uncovering more evidence.

She first examines life for the Mexica and their history before conquest. Their interactions as nomads from the north settling among other (primarily Nahuatl-speaking) peoples form the bulk of the early part, as does the emergence of Tenochtitlan as a regional power and short sections on private life for those who live in the city (or, as it is consistently referred to in the book “Altapetl”, the Nahuatl word that signifies a similar concept.)

A full two chapters are dedicated to the story of Hernán Cortés landing in Mexico, recruiting the woman who would be called alternatively Marina, Malintzin, and Malinche to serve as translator and advisor on his conquest, and his eventual botched first attempt at conquering the Altapetl of Tenochtitlan, as well as his successful second attempt.

The remainder of the book was taken up by attempts over the following 40 – 70 years of the Mexica to attempt to preserve their culture through Spanish occupation. They were ultimately somewhat successful, creating a hybrid culture that still has a marked indigenous presence in contemporary Mexico, but they were obviously not as successful as they had hoped.

One of the best things about this book – which I listened to in audio format, largely while walking to and from class – was that it allowed you to hear the Nahuatl. Certainly, the reader pausing to spell out unfamiliar names and words in Latin characters was somewhat grating in places, but too often when one sees a Nahuatl (or other Native American word) in print, it simply seems like an unmanageable configuration of signs, with no clear way to translate the familiar letters and unfamiliar diacritics into a sound we can parse. It’s not that we’re uninterested in pronouncing it, it’s that there’s a mismatch between the letters, originally used for Latin, and these completely unrelated languages. Learning, as the book makes clear, that one should look for recurring pairs of letters – “tl” and “hu” being the ones I recall off the top of my head – and understanding that they’re meant to signify particular things not present in the language that brought the alphabet to the table, but which were chosen (in many cases) by speakers of that language to represent a sound. For example, Spanish doesn’t use “w” in the same way that English does, so the Aztecs represented their sound that would have been best represented by that letter with “hu”, and there was no way to differentiate a hard and soft t, which have significant differences in meaning in Nahuatl, so they represent the soft “t” noise with the addition of an “l”.

As such, the name of the language should be pronounced as something along the lines of “Nawa(t)”, where the “t” gets something like the same treatment the French give to the ends of almost all of their words – it’s not fully spoken, but you think really hard about it at the end.

A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2) by Arkady Martine.

A space opera of sorts. Or, at least, taking place in a universe that could, very easily be used as the setting for a space opera. There is the sense that this story takes place uncounted years in the future, after humanity has spread across the Universe and undergone an apocalypse or eight that wiped out history a few times (or it’s just working on Star Wars rules, but there’s nothing in Star Wars that says differently, other than the audience’s insistence that “a long time ago” is written by someone in the same time-frame as the audience.)

The first book, A Memory Called Empire follows Mahit Dzmare, an ambassador from a backwater mining station called “Lsel”, to the most powerful political entity in the known universe, Teixcalaan – a human empire that has a very idiosyncratic and poetic language, exemplified by the occasionally-repeated fact that they use the same word for “City”, “Empire”, “World”, and “Universe”. So, to the Teixcalaanli, to be “in the Empire” is to be “in the universe”, i.e., “real”, and to be in the Empire is to be in the Capital City, with everything else – including far-flung colony worlds – being treated as suburbs.

Mahit arrives at the request of the Teixcalaanli, who imply that they need a replacement for the former ambassador, Yskandr Aghavn. Mahit quickly learns why – he’s dead. No one’s willing to say it was murder, but there are good odds that it is.

Complicating things is that Mahit has a secret of her own: she has a copy of Yskander’s memory, called an “imago”, implanted in a small machine near the base of her brain, as is standard for all professionals from Lsel. Unfortunately, upon seeing his own body, fifteen years older than the copy, dead on the table, the machine shorts out, leaving Mahit on her own to figure out how to navigate a strange and bloodthirsty political envirornment.

The second book, A Desolation Called Peace, picks up a few months after the prior book, and largely concerns external politics. I can’t summarize too much without giving away the ending of the first, so I won’t. However, I will state that it did feature something of an inversion of the relationship between Mahit and her Teixcalaanli attache, Three Seagrass, as they attempt to work their way through first contact with only the second (apparently) truly inhuman species that has ever been encountered.

The books are very well-constructed, pacy, and are enjoyable on a line-by-line level as well. It’s very easy to look at things like political intrigue and imagine that it will be completely opaque without prior knowledge of the situation. This is helped by Martine being an academic that has clearly thought about how to communicate the realities of life in medieval Byzantium to the American public.

Despite the strange and unfamiliar background, the invented culture that feels like the Mexica with bits of Imperial China and the later Roman Empire bolted on, Martine never falls into complete incomprehensibility, and the character relationships – the core of the books – remain strong and engaging 0throughout. The theme – if such a thing can really be said to be important – seems to be that people are always going to remain people, and political concerns are going to resemble one another regardless of the setting you are working in. It is simply the trappings that change: people will remain people.

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