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In August I went to the National DSA Convention in Chicago, where several radical bookstores and small presses were tabling. At the table for Pilsen Community Books I picked up a cute sticker that says “Always Carry A Book” and a copy of Nick Montgomery and carla bergman’s Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. I successfully talked the book group into reading it with me, and am very excited to discuss it this weekend because it definitely seems like the kind of book that should be read in a group and not just off on one’s own.

Joyful Militancy takes as its subject the problem of “rigid radicalism,” a phenomenon that anyone who has spent a lot of time in organizing spaces or social-justice/leftish-flavored non-organizing spaces with pretensions of activism (such as: certain parts of the internet) will instantly recognize, even if you are the person doing it (because other people are probably doing rigid radicalism for flavors other than yours, and it’s easier to see when it’s not you). Due to the instant recognizability it is possibly not necessary to actually define rigid radicalism, but Montgomery and bergman aren’t going to fall into any dumb “vampire’s castle” type traps of just assuming you’ve got the exact same experiences and take they do on how The Vibes Are Bad, Man. Instead, they give a whole intellectual and philosophical history of the concept, tracing it to earlier lines of thinking about the problem of bad vibes in leftist/left-ish spaces, including Spinoza’s writings about “sad militancy” and Eve Sedgwick’s writings about paranoid readings.

As a paranoid reader of writings about social justice in a way that I wasn’t eight years ago, I particularly appreciated how self-aware this book was about the possible pitfalls of critiquing rigid radicalism and exploring the book’s positive concept of joyful militancy (which is also defined and contextualized in a philosophical and historical tradition, all very interesting stuff, lots of Spinoza). The authors are careful to stress that they don’t want joyful militancy to turn into another duty or demand, which I appreciate. I have a distinct memory of planning an action and a comrade made a perfectly good point about adding a fun element to it since, he said, we didn’t often really make a point of showing our joy in antifascist work, and I remember having an instant negative reaction, like “We’ve got enough shit to do to pull this action off and now we have to add ‘show our joy’ to the to-do list?” This was deeply unfair to the comrade, who was actually making a good suggestion. But you see how the psychological trap works–the authors of the book have a good long section trying to separate out joy from happiness, the thing we are constitutionally mandated to continually be in pursuit of, and that companies try to take away from us for the purpose of selling it back for money. At the end of the day the terminology used to differentiate things into two separate concepts is less important than understanding the process by which supposedly freeing concepts become tiresome when they become duties or expectations. (See also: my experiences of people being “supportive” of me exploring “my” sexuality and being confused and hurt when I experienced this “support” as pressuring and invasive.)

I said in my review of Emergent Strategy that I have a hard time trusting any writing about proper leftist behavior that isn’t 90% caveats and doesn’t treat its readers like they’re stupid. I’m pleased to report that this book does seem to hit the “90% caveats” benchmark, which diffused my incipient panic attack well enough that I didn’t even mind that they treated the audience like it was intelligent enough to understand philosophy. I found some of the book a little vague but I found myself forgiving that when they discussed how they were anticipating various critiques of the book, including that it might be too vague or theoretical. I think the point they were making was that all this internalized critique and the endless ways in which leftists critique everything was generally kind of overkill, but it made me trust that they knew what they were talking about and they weren’t so naive as to think that their writing was so special and correct that it would magically get exempted from the bad leftist dynamics.

That said! This book does have some meat to it, especially in the back half. I really enjoyed their interviews with people who admitted to having gotten sucked into rigid radicalism, and why engaging in it is attractive to some people, and the very real places of hurt and trauma that can cause people to use it as a protection mechanism. The authors are good at hitting the balance of explaining the sympathetic origins of the behavior without then concluding that it isn’t a problem and actually the problem is people thinking it's a problem. They are also very clear about stressing that this isn’t an issue of one tendency or another; tendencies have their own ways of having it manifest but it’s basically the same shit every time, whether it manifests as liberal moralism or anti-liberal moralism, a totalizing demand for organizational discipline or a totalizing demand for individual autonomy (there’s an interesting snippet of an interview with a recovered “manarchist” about his realization that all his high theory bullshit about not being controlled by the state just looked to a lot of people like another angry white guy doing whatever the fuck he wanted). Interviewees talk about the important of celebrating the small wins and the partial wins, and the deadening effect of the reflexive leftist habit to always stop to remind people that whatever today’s win is Isn’t Good Enough because it has not fully dismantled all oppression and brought us to anarchocommunist utopia (looking at you, all the people who rushed to publish relentlessly correct takes about how Zohran Mamdani’s primary win isn’t the revolution. WE KNOW, aren’t you exhausted with yourself yet?).

This book is part of a series called “anarchist interventions” and as such it pretty clearly is intended for anarchists, but I know plenty of non-anarchist socialists who have gotten value from this book and as a non-anarchist socialist I also think it’s a really worthwhile read. I think Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You still has my top spot for Most Important Reading About Not Being That Person In Meetings but this is still a really valuable addition to the conversation about how to do leftism that doesn’t suck. Now I’ve just got to come up with some really good discussion questions for Sunday.
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September’s installment of the Vorkosigan Saga, Diplomatic Immunity, brings us back to our titular Vorkosigans, and specifically to Miles and Ekaterin. The two are on their way back to Barrayar after their honeymoon, scheduled to get back just in time for the birth of their first two children, who have been incubating in uterine replicators at Vorkosigan House. The last leg of their trip is unfortunately interrupted by a request from Emperor Gregor that Miles use his Auditor powers to investigate and de-escalate a situation in Quaddiespace that involves an impounded Komarran cargo ship, its Barrayaran military escort, and vague rumblings of discontent from the Cetagandans.

This book is a little on the shorter end compared to some of the other Miles adventures, but about middling for the series overall, clocking in at about 300 pages and change. It fits in an enormous amount of intrigue, though. Bujold doesn’t insult our intelligence at this point by dicking around pretending that the various crises that Miles is dropped into–the mysterious disappearance of Lieutenant Solian, the bigoted busting-up of Ensign Corbeau’s romance with the quaddie dancer Garnet Five, the upset Komarrans, the rumors of upset Cetagandans–are all going to be separate crises. I’m pretty sure Miles says something along the lines of “If these aren’t connected, I’ll eat my Auditor’s chain” sometime around his first round of interviews at Graf Station. The question was always going to be how they were connected, and the structure here is competence porn at its most engaging–Miles finds answers thick and fast, because he is good at his job, and many of the people around him are also good at their jobs, but the real story is sufficiently weird that the first several rounds of finding clues and answers and reliable witnesses and all that good stuff just makes things more confusing, and by the time the key real story is unearthed from under several layers of other seemingly contradictory stories, everyone is in deep enough shit that it will take all of Miles’ already-taxed cleverness to dig them back out again–and to do it fast enough to fend off war breaking out in an entirely other area of space.

We also get a nicely balanced blend of interesting new characters and cameos from old favorites–Bel Thorne pops back up as a fairly major character, and its quaddie girlfriend Nicol also cameos a few times. We also have an interesting reunion with the Cetagandan lady the haut Pel, although to even mention that she turns up again already feels like a massive spoiler. The best new character also doesn’t really turn up until the end, so I also feel like I shouldn’t talk about him much, but I will say that after his ordeals I hope Guppy gets everything in life that he wants and possibly even things it had never occurred to him to want (like maybe some peace and quiet).

Anyway, this is just a really good solid murder mystery in space, and I’m once again very glad that I’m doing this reading project. It’s consistently the highlight of my month.
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The last Eric Jay Dolin installment in my Year of Erics was A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes. The continent of North America has of course been dealing with hurricanes for a hell of a lot longer than that, but there appears to be little written history about hurricanes before the arrival of the Spanish, so the stories about individual storms start there.

Dolin takes us through the advancement of our understanding of what hurricanes are and how to survive them, starting with Native knowledge of the signs of impending hurricanes, and moving through the alternating periods of advancement and stagnation in meteorology over the past few centuries. We learn about which of the Founding Fathers were into meteorology (mainly Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson) and what features of hurricanes they noticed. We learn about an absolutely epic ego fight between two meteorologists with different theories of the shape and direction of hurricane winds, which was very funny to read about as the guy with the losing theory got increasingly unhinged about it (we now know that they were each right about different things, but one guy was still obviously right-er than the other about the shape the winds made). We get to learn about how the development of communications technology helped move meteorology along, as weather observers could share notes from different locations in real-time, and the establishment of the earliest version of the National Weather Service–which began its tenure somewhat ignominiously as the Signal Service within the Department of War, on the faulty reasoning that military people would just always do stuff better and sharper, before it got moved to Agriculture as the civilian Weather Bureau.

From there we trace the further establishment of hurricane forecasting infrastructure, from computer models to Hurricane Hunter planes. It’s all very cool, except for that period when American meteorologists were too stuck-up to listen to the Cuban weather forecasters, even though Cuba was way ahead of the US on that kind of thing, and were punished for their racist hubris in ways that actually mostly just punished a bunch of regular people living in the path of the next big hurricane. But the advancements, when people deigned to make use of them, were pretty interesting.

When we get into the modern era we get a lot more info on each individual hurricane, like their exact paths and strength, how much damage they caused, how many people they killed directly and indirectly, and the disaster response afterwards. We learn about the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, the big hurricane that wiped out Galveston, Texas in 1900. We also learn about the most expensive hurricane in U.S. history, Hurricane Katrina. We also learn about the rather bizarre process by which we stopped naming hurricanes things like “The Great Hurricane of [Year]” and started naming them shit like “Andrew.” The final chapter of the book is the “Rogue’s Gallery,” which is basically just a highlight reel of all the worst hurricanes that have hit the U.S. since we started giving them people names.

If this sounds like a real grab bag of stuff… it actually holds together fairly well, I think! It’s pretty chronological so you really get to see how the forecasting and disaster response capabilities build over time. I recommend reading it when it’s raining out (but not too stormy).
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The politics book club decided our August read was going to be Peter Bienart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, a short little book that nevertheless took me the better part of an entire week to read. (I’ve been real busy.)

A pretty significant chunk of the regular members of the book club are Jewish, but I am not. As such, I was definitely not the primary target audience for this book. That’s OK; I enjoy reading books where I am not the target audience sometimes. I think it’s good for people to do that now and again. Also, Beinart explains most things well enough that as an outsider I can follow along (or at least the things about Israel and Palestine; there are a number of references to things in Jewish religious culture that I wasn’t always familiar with, but I don’t think that hindered my understanding of the arguments in the book).

I learned quite a bit from this book, not just in terms of things that have actually happened in historic Palestine but also about things that did not happen that I didn’t realize people were being told they did, like that it was totally somebody else that ran three-quarters of a million Palestinians out of their homes at gunpoint when the State of Israel was established.

Beinart’s perspective is also heavily shaped by the fact that he grew up in apartheid South Africa, where white people were absolutely certain that if they gave the Black population an ounce of freedom, they’d all get murdered, and what actually happened was that once the Black population got moderately less crushed under oppression they largely disbanded the guerilla armies because, contrary to popular opinion, people don’t go to all the trouble and danger and expense of forming guerrilla armies just for kicks, they do it because they don’t believe they’ll ever be able to do get anything better until the oppressors are overthrown, and they don’t believe the oppressors will be overthrown in any way except physical force. This is one of those very obvious things that oppressors throughout history have been very averse to learning. This is, also very obviously, because nobody wants to think of themselves as oppressors, and that’s what ends up being the main argument in Beinart’s book: Essentially, that narratives of Jewish victimhood–narratives that have sprung up due to several centuries of actual victimhood, to be clear–are being used to deny Israel’s capacity as a moral agent (and a heavily armed, nuclear state with wealthy Western benefactors) and avoid looking at the stuff it’s actually doing to other people. This argument seems fairly convincing to me, at least from my view in what must admittedly be the cheap seats, which is basically that I’m friends with a lot of left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews and they sometimes tell me what their less left-wing friends and relatives say about stuff, and it seems to correlate.

I figure I will be doing a lot more listening than talking during this book club, and that should hopefully be much less awkward than trying to write a review, where there is no one but me to do the talking.
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When I first started taking Irish nearly ten years ago, the textbook we used in our beginner’s class was Éamonn Ó Dónaill’s Gaeilge Gan Stró! Beginners Level: A Multimedia Irish Course for Adults. I can’t entirely remember how far we got into this book in the various semesters I took in the beginner’s course, but we got a decent way in some semesters and we never entirely finished it.

This summer, some of mo chairde from my current Irish course, who also had this book from previous beginner courses, suggested that we work our way through it over the summer when we didn’t have class. I suggested we do two chapters a week for the first 8 chapters, which for most of us were review, and then 1 chapter a week for the rest of it. Voila, over the course of 11 weeks of summer, I have now done all 15 chapters, and for the first time in 10 years have actually finished the textbook!

As far as textbooks go, it is very usable. It comes with 4 CDs (dated!) that allow it to include listening and speaking exercises, in addition to the reading and writing ones. The structure is geared toward conversational usage, with chapters arranged by theme (introducing yourself and saying social niceties, clothes and shopping, work, making plans), lots of role-playing sample conversations, and only a few bite-size grammar concepts per chapter. It’s a very different approach than “Irish Grammar You Really Need to Know,” which is by the same author, but I think that’s very valuable because it’s important to tackle a language from a variety of angles. The book also contains tips on studying and on finding other sources that students can use to build their Irish.

Overall I think it’s a very practical and accessible resource, and I’m glad I finally worked my way through all of it.
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I have had adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy sitting on The Big Shelf of Unread Leftist Literature for a few years, although not nearly as embarrassingly long as some other items on that shelf. I brought it with me to the DSA Convention in Chicago and read it mostly in O’Hare airport and on the plane back.

I admit I had very mixed feelings about this book, coming to it through almost a decade of socialist organizing and having developed a number of my own suspicions, cynicisms, and general discourse allergies (and also coming immediately out of convention). The bits I liked best were the parts where brown was being either a) concrete or b) gently mean. Frankly, this meant that for me, 80% of the value of the book came in the final 20%, where we get actual tools for facilitation, like agenda templates, sample community agreements, assessment checklists, further reading recommendations, and–my favorite–a list of People Not To Be In A Meeting. (My favorite “don’t be that person in meetings” piece is Mao’s On Practice, but trying to get other people to read Mao can be iffy, so I’m frankly pretty stoked to have a similar list from someone with anarchist credentials.)

The first part of the book has some interesting ideas and anecdotes and was frankly fun to read in a “I would like to hang out in a coffeeshop with adrienne maree brown and shoot the shit about sci-fi” kind of way, but I found it a bit vague and touchy-feely for my liking. I am a deeply vagueness-averse person to start with, and extra suspicious of vagueness in activist spaces. “Emergent strategy” as a concept is based on Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, which is in fact great and brown is right that you should in fact drop whatever you’re doing and go read it immediately, and seems to be kind of like a variation on dialectics except it’s about the synthesis of more than two sides rather than two opposing sides. This is more reflective of real life but also, apparently, harder to pin down into real concrete case studies that the reader can follow in detail, so instead we get a lot of short anecdotes, references out to other resources, and metaphors about nature. I don’t think the book is entirely intended to be a how-to manual so it seems vaguely unfair to judge it as a how-to manual, but frankly, I want a how-to manual. I just don’t want, need, or trust any more poetical-sounding frameworks. (Activist poetics is one of the things I’ve developed a discourse allergy to over the years.)

The main thing that tends to ruin any sort of even slightly abstract or poetical activist writing for me is I absolutely cannot turn off the little voice in my head reading everything through the lens of “How does this sound once you run it through the ‘self-absorbed straw-leftist I used to think were figments of New York Times opinion writers’ imaginations’ filter?”, or what Eve Sedgwick calls a paranoid reading. I am in theory anti-paranoid-readings because frequently it seeps into fiction that is trying to be high-minded and political and then you end up with a futuristic space opera that clearly is afraid it’s going to be yelled at on 2018 Twitter. But while I get annoyed at novels that are afraid of being yelled at on Twitter, I give a semi-defeated laugh of solidarity at activist writings that are 90% caveats, clearly trying to gentle-parent people with determinedly minimal reading comprehension and maximum defensiveness through basic ideas like “An event planning meeting isn’t therapy.” I understand why they have to do this, and I get nervous when I read stuff that doesn’t seem to be correcting for it. Brown has, in the years since Emergent Strategy was published, written a bunch of stuff specifically about the self-righteous bad habits of many social justice organizing spaces, but when she wrote this in 2017 it seems like she might have been in a more innocent place (although still clearly familiar with many of the ways people can derail meetings, waste time, and seed conflict) and the book is well short of 90% caveats. Also, some of the material seems written under an assumption of at least somewhat more definitively bounded community than the one I organize in, like a nonprofit that has staff that you can hire on purpose, rather than all-volunteer spaces with low barriers to entry and public meetings.

This filter even kind of ruined the stuff I like, because my brain couldn’t stop running through “social justice buzzword word salad” objections I have seen in the wild to things like writing proposals, starting and ending meetings on time, and not taking everything personally. And I hate that I found myself, like, slotting things I already knew away in my head for the purpose of having a properly demographically credentialed source for basic shit, because I know that if you say “decorum” that sounds conservative and fussy but if you say “community agreements” that has sufficient radical cred and is OK.

As a result I am very hesitant to say that the book is actually failing in any way; it is just clear to me that I have sustained far too much psychological damage to be a good reader for it. I get leery any time the writer assumes the reader isn’t stupid. That is unequivocally bad on my end. I need to like, meditate and then go through the book again and mark out the bits that are useful so I can refer back to them without being sent into a total mental spiral by metaphors about mushrooms or any use whatsoever of the word “sacred.”
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August’s entry into the project of reading the entire Vorkosigan Saga was Ethan of Athos, which I read partly on the plane and partly in the hotel at a conference center approximately the size of Kline Station.

Ethan of Athos is about a doctor named Ethan Urquhart who comes from the planet Athos, which is basically what would happen if MGTOW guys were ever really serious about GTOW and also had access to terraforming and uterine replicators.

After a couple of generations, Athosian misogyny has morphed from like “normal” misogyny to a sort of superstitious belief in aliens with mind control powers, and the men of Athos have all turned real gay. Never having seen any women in real life, they imagine all sorts of weird things about them, but they do not consider them objects of attraction nor as sources of unpaid domestic or reproductive labor. The reproductive doctors on Athos, such as Ethan, know that the ovarian cultures they use for growing babies in the replicators came from women at some point, but they are expected not to think about it too hard.

Athos’ little all-male domestic utopia has a problem, however, which is that after 200 years, several of its ovarian cultures are failing. They order a bunch more from House Bharaputra on Jackson’s Whole, but the box that shows up is full of garbage–dead cancerous whole ovaries from hysterectomies, that sort of thing. Athos’ ruling committee of cranky old men then send Ethan, who is both knowledgeable about what they need and generally considered to be a scientific and level-headed character, to go out into the big bad scary outside universe and try to source some new genetic material.

Ethan’s journey to Kline Station is, for a sheltered–practically cloistered–guy from a completely fringe society with deeply bigoted religious and cultural beliefs, deeply harrowing. First, he keeps encountering women. (He at first finds this deeply unsettling but eventually gets used to it as the women in question turn out to be more or less normal people.) Second, nobody is receptive to his earnest pitches to join the all-male utopia of Athos, because, in a turn of events very surprising to him but probably surprising to nobody else, all the Kline Station misogynists are also homophobes, with no interest in going to the Planet of Fags where there are no women to subjugate. And third, Ethan almost immediately finds himself mixed up in some arcane plot involving a brutal Cetagandan counterintelligence agent, the Dendarii Mercenaries’ Ellie Quinn, a genetically engineered telepath named Terrence, House Bharaputra again, and several different departments of Kline Station bureaucracy. The plot seems to revolve around the shipment of ovarian cultures that Athos was supposed to get, as compared to the one they actually got, and it takes a lot of trickery and shenanigans before anyone even begins to figure out what might have actually happened. These shenanigans almost get Ethan killed several times for reasons that have nothing to do with him being a rank misogynist and are an effective way of building sympathy for a character with an essentially decent moral core that has been warped by an absolutely garbage fucking belief system (you can tell the moral core is decent because the garbage belief system doesn’t survive contact with the outside world). Ethan manages to not die and, despite having learned that many things about the way he was raised are false and stupid, does end up going home where he is not shot at nearly as often.

This was an interesting inversion of the “planet of women” sci-fi trope and provided an interesting deconstruction of oppositional sexism and the role of unpaid “women’s work” in “normal” patriarchal societies. It was also a very fun space opera mystery, with amusing fish-out-of-water dynamics and lots of cloak-and-dagger (or cloak-and-stunner) stuff getting tangled up with other cloak-and-dagger stuff. It was also fun to spend time with Elli Quinn absent the overpowering presence of Miles, although occasionally his presence can still be felt in absentia because he is this series’ most special crazy intel boy. Overall I enjoyed it very much, although after this and Falling Free I am excited to hopefully get back to the crew of main characters next month.
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The July entry in my Year of Erics was Eric Jay Dolin’s Brilliant Beacons: A History of the American Lighthouse, which I finished reading on August 7, National Lighthouse Day. This was a delightful tour through the history of American lighthouses, from the first plan to build a lighthouse in Boston in the colonial era up through our modern era of lighthouse museums and restoration/conservation projects. We go through the establishment of the Lighthouse Board, its reorganization into the Lighthouse Service, and its eventual absorption into the Coast Guard. I learned a lot about all the different types of lighthouses, and the increasingly impressive engineering feats that lighthouse builders engaged in as the easy places to build them filled up and only the most treacherous and unforgiving terrain remained (and it turns out treacherous and unforgiving terrain was often in particular need of lighthouses for the safety of mariners). I probably will not remember all of it, but it was great to read about. The book also tells a lot of fun swashbuckling stories about the lives and adventures of individual lighthouse keepers and their families, giving a very humanizing look into a job that has tended to be quite romanticized, when it is thought about at all. (This book was published before that movie with Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, which I have yet to watch.)

There were some moments in the book that felt like easter eggs from the Eric Jay Dolin Expanded Universe, which is entirely because sometimes stuff in early American maritime history overlaps with other stuff in early American maritime history, but I still found it fun to be like “failed fur trade colony Astoria mentioned woooo.” Anyway I am getting really well educated on early American maritime history this year and I think this book was a very solid and enjoyable part of that project.
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The Beasties liftcord is doing a successive run of Jane Austen readalongs, so I skipped ahead in my plan to reread them all in publication order to participate in the one for my favorite Austen, the niche and generally least-loved Northanger Abbey.

Northanger Abbey is about a nice but fairly ordinary young girl named Catherine Morland, who is neither particularly smart, pretty, nor industrious, but is very sweet and a bit naive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the story ends up destroying some of that naivete via having a plot happen to Catherine, and put her general integrity and good-naturedness to the test. Appropriately for a heroine she does find a moral spine re: treating people nicely, thus establishing it as an actual principle and character trait. The book starts off with a whole chapter about how un-heroinely she is compared to the elegant flowers that populate popular novels of the time, really getting in on the sort of hashtag-relatable thing that would eventually become more popular. It’s not as concise as the opening line of P&P but it’s still one of my favorite book opening chapters.

Naive, good-natured Catherine’s coming-of-age plotline kicks off when she accompanies a kindhearted but shallow family friend to Bath, thus leaving her large boisterous family for the first time. After an isolated beginning, Catherine makes some friends in Bath–a vivacious young woman named Isabella, whose brother is friends with Catherine’s older brother, which they find out when both young men also appear in Bath; and Eleanor and Henry Tilney, a brother-and-sister pair whose father is a general. Henry is a clergyman with a good-naturedly teasing sense of humor and no fear of reading “girly” novels; Eleanor is a quiet, sweet type who isn’t ordinarily that shy but goes back into her shell whenever her overbearing father is around.

The first sign of trouble in paradise (i.e. Bath, which Austen apparently hated) is when some scheduling conflicts break out between these two groups of friends, by which we mean every time Catherine makes plans with the Tilneys, the Thorpes show up at Catherine’s house to be like “get in loser we’re going shopping” and simply do not accept “I already have plans with other people and it’d be rude AF for them to show up and I’ve just fucked off somewhere else” as a sufficient excuse. This, tragically for Catherine, turns out to be just the earliest signs of something dreadfully morally deficient in the Thorpe family’s character, although not in any sort of dark and murdery way like happens in the kind of novels Catherine and Isabella like to read, and which Jim Thorpe also likes to read but pretends he doesn’t because he’s a sexist boor.

Even more tragically for Catherine, the drama with the Thorpes is basically the subplot, or at least the starter plot that foreshadows the main plot. For there is also drama with the Tilneys! And Catherine would rather die than have drama with the Tilneys. At first, Catherine is over the moon when she is invited to visit Eleanor and stay at their home in Northanger Abbey, which is, as you can probably guess from the name, a former abbey. As a gothic novel girlie, Catherine loves this, but also ends up letting her imagination run away with her a bit, which is very funny for the reader and occasionally mortifying to Catherine. Similarly to the first plot, the Tilney’s overbearing father is eventually revealed to be a huge dick, but in a much more prosaic way than happens in the types of books Catherine reads. Henry Tilney, as befits a romantic hero, ultimately defies his father and travels all the way to Shropshire to propose to Catherine, and the story ends on a happy note with Catherine, who has by now had her fill of abbeys, settling into the modern but charming parsonage with her nice, normal, supportive, funny guy who is not at all broody or tormented.

As befits a Jane Austen novel, the social commentary on this one is biting, focusing mainly on how being money-grubbing gossips causes people to mistreat each other, with a couple of digs on letting your imagination run away with you and the perils of only being able to talk about fashion. Also, while I’m more familiar with bad nineteenth-century fiction, I’ve read a couple of the kinds of eighteenth-century gothics Austen is sending up here–particularly The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk, which are name-dropped–to appreciate many, if not all, of the jokes she’s making.

At any rate, I think this book is an underrated classic and I love it to bits and I wish all overly excitable horror girlies an equally happy ending (even if it looks very different; I know British male clergymen are not for everybody, especially not me).
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It’s almost the end of July and I just got around to reading this month’s Vorkosigan Saga book, which somewhat unusually does not involve any Vorkosigans. Falling Free takes place 200 years before the events of Shards of Honor, which I think was still during the Time of Isolation on Barrayar. It was, however, a generative time for hot new Galactic technology in the rest of the known universe, including the recent development of the still hideously expensive uterine replicator, which enabled the development of the secretive human genetic engineering experiment that was the creation of quaddies.

Our protagonist and pleasingly-somewhat-unlikely hero in this one is Leo Graf, an engineer, and specifically a welding instructor with a specialization in safety inspections. He is sort of like an earlier version of the auditor who is a systems failure analyst whose name escapes me at the moment. He is brought in to train some of the oldest quaddies—who are now barely twenty—and while he is deeply uneasy at the entire labor arrangement going on here (i.e. “it’s not slavery because they’re totally a different species”), especially given that the asshole boss is one of his former asshole students, at first he keeps his opinions to himself and resolves to just teach the quaddies about welding safety as best he can. This becomes increasingly impossible as the corporate fuckery intensifies, with asshole boss unwittingly instigating all sorts of interpersonal drama (over the objections of the well-intentioned but useless psychological specialist, whose only move appears to be begging other people to be reasonable), looming financial problems for the company, and the prospect of artificial gravity tech that could make the quaddies obsolete before they were even launched. Graf, a longtime company man, has to make a decision about how much good he can do from inside the system and when it’s time to go rogue and get the quaddies out from under their corporate masters’ thumbs—and by the time Graf and the quaddies swing into action, so does everyone else.

This was overall a very satisfying story about a bunch of nice, obedient, well-trained specialist workers rising up against their corporate overlords and putting their douchebag boss in his place. Some of it was a little unrealistic—like when the psychologist finally does something other than talk—but it’s a nice fantasy certainly to have a character like that eventually do the right thing. The degree to which Van Atta’s absolute interpersonal assholery and lack of managerial skills, emotional regulation, or other remotely redeeming qualities ends up turning the other corporate functionaries against him, to the point where they all end up sandbagging him and therefore their mission just so he can look like an even bigger failure and they’ll never have to deal with him again, is also satisfying narratively if apparently unrealistic—in the real world, even men as wildly unlikeable as Ted Cruz and JD Vance can obtain lackeys and allies on the promise of enacting cruelty upon lesser beings. One could say that was Van Atta’s mistake—he was instead surrounded by paternalistic types who couldn’t deal with the mask-off version of the slavery they were enabling—but it also appears to be squarely a pleasing but unrealistic fantasy that they’d ever find their limits and bother to even use the bureaucracy against him. At any rate, it’s fucking delightful to read.

Though Graf is our main viewpoint character, we also spend some time in the heads of some of the quaddies themselves—mainly Claire and Tony, who are one of the first sets of quaddie parents, and Silver, a bold and strategically minded young quaddie woman who isn’t afraid to do what she has to do to get what she wants, even if it would scandalize the behavioral psychologist. This is sometimes humorous, as when the twenty-year-old quaddies have to deal with gravity for the first time and they do not like it, but it also goes a long way toward establishing that the quaddies are basically regular people, just ones that have been raised in very irregular circumstances. Overall I think this is a strong addition to the Vorkosigan Saga universe even if it doesn’t have any of our faves in it.
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As the follow-up to Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America, we read American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804.

This is basically a textbook, which means its purpose is to educate more than to entertain. And on that note, I think it did good–it’s a pretty hefty book that goes into a lot of the cultural context and surrounding politics of the leadup to the Revolutionary War, the War itself, and its aftermath, and I learned a lot. But I’m also going to rate it on the reading experience, which I must admit was often fun. Taylor seems to subscribe to the same idea I do that you can tell you are reading history and not mythology if basically everybody sucks at least a little, and Taylor seems to take positive glee in laying out a real No Heroes approach to the factions and personalities involved. He is occasionally allows a little humor to sneak in, whether it’s by his choice of epigraphs for each chapter or dry observations like that renaming part of East Florida from “Mosquito Inlet” to “East Smyrna” did not trick the mosquitoes into not biting the colonists. In the acknowledgements, he dunks on his editor for not allowing him to name the book “American Revolutions: Colonize Harder.”

Jokes notwithstanding, this is not otherwise a feel-good book. Taylor gets into the nasty racial politics, classist sneering, financial shenanigans, riots, famine, terrorism, dispossession, disease, and general awfulness that characterized late-colonial and revolutionary-era American life, and the experience of war specifically. He gives a fairer shake to the Loyalists than you usually see in lay history by and for Americans, discussing their suspicions of the Patriot movement and also baldly laying out what actually happened to them during and after the Revolution (how many grade-school accounts of the Revolution teach you that it generated thousands of dispossessed refugees that fled to Canada?). This is not to say that he has convinced me that the British were the good guys or that Loyalists weren’t ultimately a bunch of bootlickers, but I think I have a less cartoonish view of what would cause people to have doubts about the Revolution, especially when it hadn’t won yet. He also gives plenty of page space to various parties outside the borders of the thirteen colonies–particularly Native politics, but also the territories that whites were expanding into, the British possessions that weren’t rebelling in Canada and the West Indies, and the French and Spanish colonies on the North American continent.

Overall I found this to be a very expansive, multi-faceted exploration of the Revolution and I really liked that about it.
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For professional development this year I decided to read the books I got from our EAP last year, one of which was the management “classic” The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Now, to be clear, corporate self-help literature is not exactly my favorite genre, but like every other modern adult I have been on my fair share of dysfunctional teams, so I figured I might as well read it.

It was not bad! The book is framed as a “fable,” a somewhat melodramatic but not entirely unbelievable story of a small tech company with everything going for it on paper but which is for some reason not performing well. A new CEO is brought in and identifies the main problem as being that the executive team is not actually functioning as a team, and has a series of controversial off-site leadership retreats where she tries to teach them how to work together in a way that’s actually productive. There are breakthroughs and there are also various cliffhangers and setbacks and backsliding but eventually the team shapes up.

The framework itself–what the five dysfunctions are, what the symptoms of them are, and what the not-dysfunctional thing you should be striving for instead are–seems fairly sensible, and are common enough failings, so I figure on that note it’s probably a fine framework as long as you don’t get too religious about the idea that there’s no possible sixth dysfunction lurking out there that could ever afflict a team. Probably most team fuckery could be more or less slotted into one of these five things, at which point you have now named it explicitly and can start trying to do something about it. The book is also honest enough to try not to come off like it’s promising you One Weird Trick about team-building; these things are simple enough to diagnose but difficult to eradicate (the foundational one is “lack of trust,” and obviously you can’t just order people to trust each other). So overall I don’t think this book was life-changing but it certainly leaped over the very low bar I have for this type of writing, and I think it could prove a useful enough diagnostic tool when I am trying to figure out what the hell is going on with a team that seems to be stalling out.
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The most recent book club book we picked was Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. This had been on my to-read list for a while as I’d heard good, if rather vague, things about it.

The book is split, roughly, into three parts. The first is the history of places that eventually became states, but with a focus on their history in the period before they were granted statehood; much of this focuses on the ever-shrinking “Indian Country” and the undignified specifics of white settlement. The second part is the history of US territorial acquisitions that haven’t become states, such as our half-century of rule over the Philippines, the history of Puerto Rico, and the brief but intense scramble for the guano islands. The third part is about post-World War II American hegemony, and the way the U.S. has been able to use things like army bases, technological standards, and even the English language to maintain its interests all over the world without having to formally conquer large swaths of territory.

This means that the book covers a lot of ground; at 400 pages excluding notes, it still feels like a super fast-paced, whirlwind tour through the times and places it covers. As an American whose American history background, unsurprisingly, gave very short shrift to places like Puerto Rico, the Phillippines, and even Hawaii and Alaska (they’re states now so we’ve got a nice round number of states that looks good on the flag, moving on), I did feel like I was learning quite a lot, even as I could realize that any one of these places clearly deserves a much more in-depth look at its history on its own terms than this one book could give it. I also learned a lot about subjects like architecture and plastics, which I fancied I already knew at least a little about, but had rarely thought about their relationship to colonialism. A real strength of this book, I think, is that while not explicitly Marxist in outlook–no theory words here–it understands colonialism pretty plainly in material terms, pointing out how technological advancement and the changing relationships to raw materials affected the way the US approached exerting influence at different points in its history.

I have to come up with some decent discussion questions first, but I’m very much looking forward to digging into this with company. It’s a really rich book with quite a lot going on.
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So, Winterfair Gifts was actually not my July installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga–that’s going to be Falling Free, which I haven’t gotten to yet–but I had basically forgotten to put Winterfair Gifts in the lineup as I had been unclear if it constituted a book or not. It’s a novella, hardly more than a short story, and doesn’t seem to have a standalone print publication, but I got the ebook and read it that way. It took me about an hour and a half to read the whole thing, which was a nice way to cap off a night where I’d finally finished a lengthy nonfiction book that it’d taken me upwards of 10 days to read.

Winterfair Gifts is a charming little story from the point of view of Armsman Roic, last seen at the end of A Civil Campaign wearing briefs, boots, his gun holster on the wrong way, a lot of bug butter, and nothing else. Roic is Miles’ most junior armsman, and until this point has mostly been a rather one-dimensional comic relief himbo sort of character, so it was fun to get a little bit of his background and see how things look from his point of view. Roic comes from a fairly provincial Barrayaran background and is somewhat in awe of all the galactic experiences and high-ranking shenanigans of his new employers, but he is doing his best to learn and expand his mind and lives in fear that Miles, Armsman Pym, and the other bigshots whose company he must now keep think he’s an idiot.

Roic’s horizons are abruptly expanded when two of Miles’ colleagues from his old life show up to Barrayar as wedding guests–the jumpship pilot Arde Mayhew, and the bioengineered werewolf-esque Sergeant Taura. Once his initial shock wears off, Roic finds himself very attracted to Taura, but unsure how to navigate picking up an eight-foot-tall galactic mercenary while constantly on duty.

Plot stuff happens when Ekaterin, who is already under some degree of emotional stress about the wedding, falls ill, and Sergeant Taura develops an unorthodox theory about one of the wedding gifts, which she attempts to investigate on her own. This doesn’t get very far, and instead, Taura and Armsman Roic find themselves trying to keep their cool while bringing in all sorts of very important ImpSec people that they’re not used to talking to. Fortunately, because this is a cute short short, the threat is eventually neutralized and the mystery solved, Ekaterin gets better and the wedding goes off beautifully, and Armsman Roic both proves himself Not An Idiot to his superiors and gets to snog Taura.

This story was overall pretty cute and fluffy (minus Ekaterin almost dying) in a way that wouldn’t at all have worked for me as an independent story with characters I didn’t know, but as a Vorkosigan Saga book it was a delightful little romp full of all our Fan Favorites and worked perfectly as an escapist palate cleaner from the day I’d been having. I’m looking forward to tackling Falling Free later this week.
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Despite my best intentions to keep my book-buying under control, I bought a lot of books at used bookstores when Sam and I went to Philly in May. One of the books I bought was a battered mass-market paperback copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners, because I’ve heard that’s a good place to start before tackling Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.

In a departure from my usual mania for place- and time-appropriate thematic reading, I read Dubliners on two beautiful sunny days by the lakeside in rural New Hampshire, about as far from the gray, rainy, poverty-stricken Dublin of Joyce’s stories as you can get. But I was in the mood for something sort of depressing and literary so I think it was a good choice anyway.

Dubliners is a series of short stories set, unsurprisingly, in Dublin, in the pre-revolutionary period in which Joyce grew up. The book was first published two years before the Easter Rising, when Ireland appeared to be quite firmly under British control, although the Celtic Revival was going on in some quarters. None of the people depicted are particularly wealthy, though some seem fairly comfortable. Others are less so. Some are young, and some are old; some male and some female; some deeply pious and others irreligious. Many of them are very indecisive–the general tone here is not that of a city full of people who are good at protagonist-ing. Given how little action there is, it seems like it ought to be bad, and certainly there is a reason that young writers attempting to be inspired by James Joyce turn out such pretentious unreadable slop compared to young writers who are at least attempting to rip off more action-oriented writers. But Joyce’s eye for the subtleties of human psychology, especially very repressed human psychology, and his careful choices in language–deeply Irish and never florid–make it all work. All in all it is very specific; Joyce is not here going for “relatable” or “universal”/“timeless” themes–the sense of place is very strong. Even The Dead, which is a great deal about the way those who have passed on continue to influence the living–certainly a universal and timeless enough theme–is so tied in with the specifics of the Celtic Revival, the relationship between Dublin and the West of Ireland, the specific cultural changes going on in the early 20th century in Irish society, and weird Catholic stuff that Protestants apparently Just Don’t Get, that a fair amount of it would probably be utterly incomprehensible to anyone not at least a little bit familiar with early 20th century Ireland (I keep finding myself having to look stuff up every time I read Irish literature and I have been doing this for a while now).

On some level it almost feels disrespectful to try to review Joyce. This man was doing Literature. I have always had trouble with the Modernists and that’s on me, so what could I have to say about Joyce that hasn’t already been said by a million people, many of whom are probably a lot better with Modernism than I am? Nevertheless, I review every book I read, and I certainly had thoughts and feelings while reading this one, which I should attempt to pin down. Most of the feelings were sad, because this is largely a book about people with very constrained lives. Some of the stories are about people with remarkably constrained lives even within the bounds of middle-class respectability in early 20th century Dublin, and that’s saying something. But the sadness was good; it wasn’t sentimental and exquisitely drawn.
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In an attempt to keep myself learned while my Irish classes are off for the summer, I decided to start working my way through some of the grammar textbooks I’ve had optimistically sitting around for years. I started with Éamonn Ó Dónaill’s Irish Grammar Your Really Need to Know: A Practical Course, on the basis that I hoped I would then learn all the Irish grammar I really need to know. I aimed to do one unit a day most days, including doing all the exercises.

The pros: This was in many ways exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, an old-fashioned grammar tutorial, organized by grammatical concept, that used the proper names for things (and defined them for you) and laid out what it was talking about in lots of tables and lists and with loads of examples, followed by exercises. Very traditional, very formal. The exercises helped a lot. If I couldn’t remember something by the time I did the exercises, the book was navigable enough that I could go back and look it up. I think even when I had to look up every answer, it was valuable and important for me to take the time to physically write them all down, even unintelligibly on scrap paper that I then threw out.

The cons: For some reason, while most of the answer exercises were in the back, each unit’ “Test Yourself” exercises ended with an exercise “In Context” which did not have answers in the back, but just had the instructions repeated in the answer key. Was this done on purpose or was it some sort of printing mistake? I would have really liked to have been able to check my work after I’d put all this time rewriting paragraphs in different tenses and stuff, since these were usually the hardest exercises and therefore I was the least confident I did them right. Knowing I’d not be able to check my work also made it a little too easy to skive off some of them, doing the answers just in my head and not writing them down. (This was also a lack of discipline on my part, and someday I should probably revisit this book and just do all the In Contexts again in a row, and possibly see if I can press-gang some kind of human into checking it.)

The verdict: Definitely not a read-once-and-be-done-with-it book, and certainly I will keep it around as a reference, but it was quite worth working my way all the way through it and familiarizing myself with what’s in it. Probably I forgot a lot of the finer points of grammar as soon as I was done with the chapter but they’ll be less foreign next time I run into them, or maybe I’ll at least remember that Hey I Read Something About That Once and go look it up. It definitely disambiguated some stuff I’d memorized but not understood via other more “naturalistic” learning methods like Duolingo or listening to dialogues.

I don’t know how the hell Yu Ming learned fluent Irish in six months no matter how bored the wee fella was stocking groceries. This shit is difficult. There are nine units here just on verbs. There are five declensions of nouns. And three separate systems for counting. I gotta step it up if I ever want to get a handle on this.
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Though Sad Irish Literature Month for me is traditionally March, I make an exception for Walter Macken’s Irish Trilogy. I read the first two at my dad’s cabin in Maine and I was going to read the third one there, too. The copies I have are ancient 1970’s editions from when my dad was living in London before I was born and as such I consider them to be Family Heirlooms and I will read them properly.

The first book in this trilogy, Seek the Fair Land, takes place during the Cromwellian ravages and I read it several years ago. Last year I determined to make some progress and read the second book, The Silent People, which is about the years leading up to and during the Great Famine. This one, The Scorching Wind, takes place in the 1910s and ‘20s, during the war for independence and the civil war that immediately followed.

Before I get into the book properly I must point out the things that this book has in common with Ken Loach’s movie The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Loach is an Englishman but The Wind that Shakes the Barley, featuring a not-yet-Oscar-winning young Corkman named Cillian Murphy, is nevertheless one of the most tear-jerkingly powerful movies about Irish history I’ve seen, with bonus socialism and extra bonus Cork accents so thick you could cut them with a butter knife and put them on toast. So. In addition to the general time period, both works feature a protagonist who is initially reluctant to join in revolutionary activity, because he is a medical student who is therefore a) very busy studying to be a doctor and b) more about putting people back together than blowing them apart. In the movie our half-doctor revolutionary is named Damian and in the book he is named Dominic. (One major difference: Damian, being played by Cillian Murphy, is very handsome, and Dominic is frequently implied to be not so handsome–certainly not as handsome as young Cillian Murphy, anyway.) Both protagonists have brothers who, at the beginning, are more militant than they are, joining the IRA first, while our black-haired heroes are still reluctant. By the end, though, it is our younger brothers who have become more militant and take the anti-Treaty side in the war, while the older brothers become Free State officials, pitting brother against brother in a way that makes an extremely heart-wrenching and dramatic ending to a drama about war. Also both stories take place largely in the Western part of Ireland, far from the drama in Dublin–Loach’s movie was filmed largely on location in Cork, and Macken’s story takes place in and around his native Galway.

From thence the similarities end, but it’s enough that I tried to look up if Loach had ever mentioned the book in an interview or anything. I can find some webpages that claim the film was influenced by the book but I can’t find any primary sources where they are getting that claim from on a quick search. Ah well.

Anyway. The prose style is trademark Macken, with a lot of very simple descriptive sentences interspersed by the characters’ unpretentious thoughts and bits of Hiberno-English that someone unfamiliar with the area could spend years looking up. Many of the characters speak in Irish but the book doesn’t generally include it; it translates it to English When an Irish word is used because there’s no real English translation or it’s just one word, Macken doesn’t italicize; it just blends in seamlessly the way Irish words are normally incorporated into Hiberno-English. As far as I’m concerned, a real strength is the way the characters talk about politics, especially as people who have a lot of history but not necessarily a lot of theory–it sounds believable to the way real people at the time would talk about politics, and not like the author is performing educational dialogues for the benefit of the audience. The fights Dominic and Dualta have at the end might not be blindingly original but they sound like real fights people on the opposite side of an issue have.

Another interesting approach here is that Macken doesn’t spend a lot of time on the high-level news–other than everybody getting the news of the Easter Rising in Dublin, the book focuses on the individual experiences of the characters involved, with little in the way of dates, cameos by famous people (except one brief one from John Redmond), or the characters conveniently turning up at high-profile historical events. They ping back and forth between various IRA operations and trying to go back to regular life for various stretches of time. The characters only ever seem to know the bits of things they’re involved in, and sometimes not even that–Dominic ends up on multiple jobs where his acquaintances basically just scoop him up and tell him to do something and he’s not really sure what it is that’s in the bag, or where they are going, or some other type of information that you’d think would be fairly critical to being involved in a guerrilla military operation. But no, everything’s done on such a tight NTK information ecosystem that I sometimes worried it’d actually be a security hole, making people do things they hadn’t agreed to with only your judgment of their character that they’d go along with it.

Dominic’s journey from a reluctant revolutionary who would rather be left alone to study to a hardened veteran of the flying columns involves a lot of pretty nasty stuff. Macken really excels at foregrounding the humanity of everyone involved–including unprincipled mercenaries like the Tans Mac and Skin–without falling into the common modern trap of being like “Sure, the oppression is bad, but isn’t fighting back against it worse if you find yourself losing even one inch of moral high ground by doing anything even a little bit shitty to anybody.” Dominic doesn’t like everything he has to do as an IRA man, like burning a really big lovely house down in reprisal for another house burning, but his doubt and disgust that this is really necessary–his reluctance to accept it as necessary even as he acknowledges that it worked–doesn’t lead to him quitting or renouncing the IRA or deciding both sides are just as bad or anything. It’s just used to show how having to do all these terrible things sucks, and no cause or tactical justification makes it not suck. The exploration of what having to do awful things, as well as having awful things done to you, changes you, is, I think, the essence of what makes the novel so powerful.

One of the other great features is its incredible use of ambiguity, which I will not elaborate on because it would give away the ending.

Overall, I’m very glad I finally read these and I’m not sure what took me so long.
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The second pirate book of the weekend was Steven Johnson’s Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt.

Several years ago I read Johnson’s book The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–And How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was about a cholera outbreak in London and the scientist who tracked down where it happened, thus proving that cholera was a waterborne disease. I recall it was very fun and informative, although given that I read it 15 years ago I don’t recall as much else as I wish I did.

In this one, we aren’t chasing a disease, we are chasing a man–pirate captain Henry Every (or Avery, in some books), plus his crew.

The short version of Every’s career as a pirate is this: First, he had some sort of regular maritime career, which we don’t know very much about. Then, he signed on as first mate for an ill-fated business proposition called Spanish Expedition Shipping. Spanish Expedition Shipping was an English venture but due to inter-empire trade shenanigans got stuck at port in Spain awaiting some sort of licensing issue to be solved for like, weeks, when it was supposed to have taken only a few days. A bunch of the guys trapped on this fleet of ships going nowhere fast decided to mutiny, and stole the fastest of the ships, sailing out of Spain the dead of night to go “on the account.” Every was the head of these mutineers. Their plan was to become “Red Sea Men,” a term for pirates who skulked around at the mouth of the Red Sea and enacted piracy upon ships of pilgrims going from the Mughal Empire in India to Mecca in Arabia. The ships that transported the pilgrims were also full of trade goods, and many of the pilgrims that could make this pilgrimage in style were quite wealthy. In addition, European pirates had basically no respect for people of any other religion, so they figured that robbing “infidels” didn’t really count as bad behavior.

The Mughals, of course, disagreed, which put groups like the East India Company in an awkward position. At this point in the 1690s, the British East India Company was more like a normal actual trade partner, doing business with the Mughal Empire at the discretion of the Mughal Emperor. It would not take over the subcontinent for another several decades. As such, having other Englishmen pissing off their incredibly wealthy client was bad for business, as the devout Emperor Aurangzeb was too busy being the richest man in the world to draw distinctions between different groups of Englishmen. Bad behavior by Englishmen who were, in their own estimation, following in the grand patriotic tradition of sea dogs like Sir Walter Raleigh, were bad for business. This is where all the fun political dimensions come in.

I had just gotten out of reading a shorter version of this sea change (pun intended) in England’s economic and political relationship to piracy two days earlier when reading Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates. So it was fun to dig into the details, as well as to contrast the two authors’ reads on the political sophistication of pirates (Johnson is a little more bullish on the “radical democratic political theory” element; Dolin just chalks it up to a very basic and practical “not instantly recreating the exact same thing they were trying to escape” impulse). Johnson also ties in the story of the manhunt following Every’s capture and sack of the Ganj-i-sawai–a ship that, unfortunately for Every, belonged to the Grand Mughal personally–with the technological and political advancements of the day, including mass media, the speed of news (or the lack of it), the ambiguous delineations between state and corporate power, and the class splits within English views on pirates, “infidels,” and the importance of trade.

The last third or so of the book is also a frankly hilarious tale of misadventures in English jurisprudence. While Every was never captured, several of his crewmen were, and put on trial–twice, first for piracy, and second for mutiny. The second trial was necessary because the first trial did not go at all the way the English state had choreographed it to go. As a reader I found it very funny to see the East India Company and the English state get embarrassed in the first trial even though it was for such bad reasons that I think the prosecution was actually in the right. This is not really a story with a lot of good guys per se, just people that were victimized in specific instances. It’s especially interesting to see the way the working-class folk hero version of Every’s story glosses over most of what Every and co. actually did.

Anyway, the book packs a lot of food for thought into something that is both reasonably short and also definitely constitutes A Rollicking Adventures On The High Seas, so well done, even if I think the political intention Johnson credits the pirates with is a little overstated.
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At a wedding in January I picked up several books as wedding favors; one of them was a copy of Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers. For plot-related reasons I decided to save reading it for Maine.

The Berry Pickers is not exactly light summer reading. It is sad and heavy and oppressive summer reading, but sometimes that’s what you want. The book concerns a Mik’maq family from Nova Scotia who migrate down to Maine in the summers to pick blueberries. The family has five children–at least, to start. One August, the youngest, Ruthie, is kidnapped off the side of the road by a white lady, who takes her home to their perfectly manicured suburb and raises her as her own child. The story has two viewpoint characters: Norma, formerly Ruthie, recounts her life growing up with her overprotective mother and her journey unraveling the family’s secrets; and Joe, the family’s second-youngest, recounts the fallout from Ruthie’s disappearance on the rest of the family and the trajectory of his own life.

Unsurprisingly, the fallout from the kidnapping is a bad time for everybody. Joe blames himself for being the last person to see Ruthie, no matter how many times people tell him it’s not his fault, and he develops serious anger issues and engages in a lot of self-sabotaging behavior. The death of another sibling compounds the family’s trauma and Joe’s tendency toward self-destructive decisions. Meanwhile, “Norma” is raised with a lot of material privilege and comfort, and is able to go to college, but has to navigate an emotionally oppressive environment, a miscarriage, a lot of walking on eggshells around her mother, and–once she starts figuring out what’s going on–several serious instances of betrayal by her few nearest and dearest. The book ultimately has sort of a happy ending, in that Norma/Ruthie is reconnected with her family of origin, but the road to get there involves five decades of family baggage in two very different families.

While the book is very engrossing and I found it difficult to put down while I was reading it, I’m struggling to discuss it–everything sort of feels like spoilers, since the plot really isn’t the point in the sense it is in a mystery or adventure story; the point is all the stuff that happens, so basically everything except giving away the ending feels like spoilers. Also I don’t read a lot of contemporary non-genre fiction so I’m not sure what sort of things you’re supposed to say about it. But at any rate, I will be sitting with this one for a while.
bloodygranuaile: (surprised skull)
My June read for my Year of Erics was Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates. I have my own copy of this one; I bought it at his Rebels at Sea talk at Hamilton Hall last November and was specifically keeping it til June so I could read it outside by the water, in the heat, which is the correct way to read most books about pirates. I got through this book in a record two days: Day 1 while at Crane Beach with my mother, being vigorously exfoliated by the blowing sand, and Day 2 by the lakeside in Maine with my Dad, testing out the brand-new porch. (Verdict: It’s a good reading porch.) I’m pleased I got in basically the perfect reading experience for this book.

If you’ve read a lot of other pirate books, which I have, some of Black Flags, Blue Waters treads fairly familiar ground. But Dolin does manage to sneak in a reasonably fresh angle, which–unsurprising if you’ve read much other Dolin–is piracy’s relationship to early American history specifically. The book explores not just the economic ties between the traditionally focused Caribbean piracy and early British America, but also how the changes in economic situation, balance of power among England and various other powers, and the targets preferred by the pirates themselves all shifted over time. England went from an enthusiastic sponsor of piracy in its “sea dogs era” through a period of benign neglect about it until, eventually, it became both an economic problem and politically embarrassing. As usual, the Crown decided that it needed to get law-n-order-y about this piracy business a bit before its American colonies did, as the colonies needed illegal trade to get around the onerous mercantile obligations placed upon them by the mother country. But eventually, they, too, turned on the pirates, as the “golden age” turned out scores of feral, unemployed sailors whose depredations sailed a little too close to home. In the interim, Dolan walks us through the sea dog era, the buccaneer era–together, the first big age of Caribbean piracy–the Red Sea Men era, and the final Golden Age (the second big Caribbean era). While the span of nautical hijinks is global, Dolan’s New England roots are visible in the focus on little-known stories out of Marblehead, Salem, Gloucester, and other East Coast seaports who loom far less large in general pirate history than Port Royal, Tortuga, Nassau, and Okracoke Island. I found this all very charming, and also was pleased with myself that I already knew the story of Philip Ashton, the Marblehead fisherman who was kidnapped by Edward Low and lived on an uninhabited island off the coast of South America until he was picked up by another ship from the North Shore. (This story is the subject of At the Point of a Cutlass: The Pirate Capture, Bold Escape, and Lonely Exile of Philip Ashton, which I read in 2020.)

I also had some fun spotting names in the Pirate History Extended Universe–hey, there’s Dave Cordingly! And Colin Woodard! And the guy that wrote The Pirate Hunter!--but I found the book an enjoyable read for plenty of reasons other than personal smugness. The book gets deeper than I was familiar with into the stories of some of the big names in piracy, including the strange relationship between “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (the real history is very different than the playing-with-historical-Barbies romcom version portrayed in Our Flag Means Death, obviously, but Bonnet and Teach did in fact sail together for a while). I also didn’t know very much about the “Red Sea Men” era at all, which this rectified to some degree, which was quite useful stage-setting for the next pirate book I would read this weekend (Steven Johnson’s Enemy of All Mankind; review forthcoming).

Overall I thought this was a really good entry into the literature of Piratical Overviews for Grown-Ups, and I enjoyed it as both part of the Pirate History Extended Universe and the Eric Jay Dolin Extended Universe. I’d highly recommend it in either category.

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