[Book Review] How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell

Hardcover, 240 pagesPublished April 9th 2019 by Melville House

This book started out strong, then sagged in the middle, but it was alright in the end.

As someone who has recently gotten off Facebook (hopefully forever), I identified strongly with the author's thesis that there are many pressures in our hyperconnected modern lives which conspire to rob us of the ability to think before we act (or speak, or post). Social media hijacks our brains by showering us with dopamine when we churn out timely, pithy one-liners that get tons of 'likes' at the cost of ignoring nuance, paradox, and respect for those with whom we are debating. As each individual is rewarded for chipping away at the ties which bind our society together, it should surprise no one that our society feels more divided than ever.

Unfortunately, I think the average American reader will have a lot of difficulty identifying with the middle portion of How to Do Nothing, especially as Odell trots out the works of various poets, painters, photographers, and performance artists to make her point. I expect that one long passage where she analyzes the philosophy of the Greek philosopher Diogenes through the lens of performance art will be an exit-point for many readers. The overall effect is one of pretentiousness and self-indulgence; readers from non-coastal or blue collar backgrounds will have a hard time caring about the civil disobedience (read: shiftless, lazy entitlement) of Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener". I could almost *hear* the audience laughing at the author's oblivious, tone-deaf attempts to explain to readers why they should attend live performances of John Cage's 4'33", or watch bizarre and plotless foreign art-films like 2011's The Exchange.

But towards the end, the book regained some of its earlier lost momentum. Once Odell gets off her high horse and starts talking about practical stuff that the average American can relate to (meeting your neighbors, understanding your bioregion and your place within it, replacing the endlessly-scrolling newsfeed with a focus on personal relationships and context), the book became a lot more interesting. I honestly think it contains a lot of good ideas, and it could deliver a lot of benefit to anyone who is uncomfortable with their own relationship to technology and social media.

How to Do Nothing is not so much a how-to guide as a philosophical treatise; which I suppose is important after all, and increasingly rare in this constantly-accelerating and increasingly-optimized world of ours. Sometimes it's important to be bored, to sit with that feeling, and to ask yourself why you're in so much of a damn hurry anyway.

[Book Review] Grimm's Fairy Tales

Grimm's Fairy Tales Illustrated Collection: Edited by Frances Jenkins Olcott with Illustrations by Rie Cramer, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm 

1922, The Hampton Publishing Company, New York

It's interesting to come back to these old familiar tales, half-remembered from childhood, and approach them with the life-experiences and critical reading skills of an adult. Stories which once seemed nonsensical, even frustrating, now yield positive messages of loyalty, perseverance, charity, and hope... when approached with an open mind and a willingness to think deeply.

Like a puzzling koan, these folktales are an open invitation for the reader to ask oneself "What can I learn from this? What life-lesson is the storyteller trying to pass on?" Instead of getting bogged down in the sexism, materialism, and gruesome violence (of which there is no shortage), I found that I was able to see a deeper meaning, a message which whispers fear not, it will all work out in the end somehow.

Tolkien writes of the "eucatastrophe", the opposite of a catastrophe, the happy ending where everything turns out alright: despite their evil magic and malicious lies, somehow the schemes of the wicked come to naught and the True Bride unveils herself to her true love the Prince; despite being cruelly killed by his elder brothers, our hero is brought back to life by his friends and rides to the rescue on a white steed; the tale which began with poverty and abuse ends in wealth and love and happiness. Sometimes, yes, happy endings can seem contrived, even saccharine or schmaltzy. But there are times when we really, desperately need to hear someone tell us that happy endings are possible, even in the grimmest of circumstances. And the Brothers Grimm deliver these eucatastrophes in abundance.

However, there are a few tales in the mix that simply don't stand the test of time. "King Thrushbeard" gaslights his new bride in order to "break her" of her haughtiness and rude behavior towards her many suitors. "Clever Hans" is annoyingly repetitive, incongruously violent, and somehow Hans is rewarded in the end with marriage to his sweetheart despite showering her in the freshly gouged-out eyes of livestock (yes, really). "Little Brother and Little Sister", in addition to having a very uncreative title, seems like one long shaggy dog story that, despite featuring animal transformations, a murder, and a resurrection, meanders without direction and only produces a happy ending as the result of (if you'll pardon the technical term) a complete ass-pull. Even several of the really excellent stories — "The Nixie of the Mill-Pond", "The Six Swans", "Mother Holle", "The Two Travelers" — could benefit from a good editor.

Overall, Grimm's Fairy Tales might be better-suited to an adult audience than a young one; young children may find the archaic language difficult to follow, and adults will be hard-pressed to answer their inevitable questions about why certain characters choose to be so mindlessly cruel, so naively trusting, or to do the thing that they've been explicitly warned not to do on two previous occasions. Still, if approached with an open mind and a childlike sense of wonder, these classic tales do have deep, mythic lessons to teach us... lessons that can still resonate in the hearts modern readers of all ages.

[Book Review] Wings of a Flying Tiger, by Iris Yang

Title: Wings of a Flying Tiger
Author: Iris Yang (Qing Yang)
Publisher: Open Books
Publication Date: 06 September 2018

Even though it's fiction, this book is brutal. Many first-time authors tend to mollycoddle their characters; although it's clear she loves her characters dearly, Iris Yang is not one of those authors. It's rare to find a writer who intersperses moments of loving tenderness and peaceful village life with horrific scenes of bloody warfare, mass execution, and rape, and does it in a way that makes narrative sense and feels believable. But somehow, Iris Yang makes the whole story come together in a tapestry of war, heroism, violence, love, life, and death.

Very early on, it becomes clear that this story will be less about narrow escapes and more about how humans carry on even after the worst has happened. Plans go wrong, hopes are dashed, and minor characters die by the truckload. But through it all, there is a spirit of perseverance, a sense of the importance of holding onto life and hope despite overwhelming odds, if only to make oneself that much harder for the enemy to kill. This nameless characteristic seems uniquely Chinese to me; it's probably what allowed them to survive the war and the Japanese occupation, and all that came after it.

The very first character we meet is Danny Hardy, a fighter pilot of the First American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force (nicknamed "the Flying Tigers"), but we don't really get to know him until Act 2. The story mainly follows Jasmine Bai, the educated daughter of two professors at Nanking University, on the eve of the infamous Rape of Nanking by Japanese soldiers. From the moment Jasmine gets off the train, it's clear that China's wartime capitol is in desperate shape: her car is immediately swamped with refugees going the other way, and Jasmine has to crawl through a window to get out. From that moment on, everything that can go wrong, does. Japanese soldiers sack the city, using Chinese POWs for bayonet practice and brutally raping every young Chinese woman or girl they can lay their hands on. The city is a bloodbath, and only through a combination of luck and brave protectors does Jasmine make it out alive. She and her teenage cousin Daisy Bai are sent to a tiny mountain village in southwestern Yunnan Province for their own protection, and it is there that the two young women save the life of the aforementioned pilot Danny Hardy. Their decision to heal his wounds and hide him from Japanese soldiers will have terrible consequences for the young women, and for the villagers who harbor them.

If you're looking for an interesting perspective on an aspect of World War II and Chinese-American relations that is rarely discussed in this era of rising tensions between the two superpowers, then Wings of a Flying Tiger will take you on a wrenching-but-powerful emotional journey. I can't wait to read the sequel!

A Dot Labelled "Peter Pettigrew"

(SPOILER WARNING: Obviously, this post contains spoilers for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and basically all other books/films in the Harry Potter franchise.)

Okay wizards and witches, it's fan-theory time. Today we're addressing that age-old continuity conundrum, "Why didn't Fred and George Weasley notice in their Marauder's Map that there was a little dot labelled 'Peter Pettigrew' following their little brother around and sleeping in his bed?" Fear not, Gentle Readers: I propose a solution which may explain not only this, but other apparent continuity errors as well.

The reason Fred and George never noticed that the little dot labelled "Peter Pettigrew" in Ron's bed is because Peter Pettigrew was not his name at that time.

How did that sleazy little creep get Sorted into Gryffindor, though?

After living as a rat for twelve years, Pettigrew was Scabbers for all intents and purposes. No one had called him anything but Scabbers in more than a decade, and as far as we know he had never, in all that time, broken character . It makes sense that he would have come to inhabit the role completely, thinking of himself as Scabbers (if he thought of himself at all, and didn't simply go on autopilot and let his rat instincts take over). But when news of Sirius' escape from Azkaban reached him, something shifted in his little rodent mind, and he began to remember the reason he had been living as a rat for all those years. The guilt came rushing back, and so perforce did the memories of what he had done, why he had hidden for so long.

According to the Marauder's Map Fact File on Pottermore, the Marauder's Map "[s]hows the location of any person or ghost on Hogwarts' grounds, [and] isn’t fooled by an Animagus or an Invisibility Cloak." It says nothing about animals or non-sentient beings, and given that Harry never specifically mentions seeing anything other then humans and ghosts in the map, it's reasonable to assume that the map only shows sentient beings. This makes sense from a user experience standpoint. Think about it: if the map showed every organism in Hogwarts, the interface would be overloaded with useless information about the position of every mouse, spider, and fruit-fly in the castle, making it much more difficult for the user to filter out the important information.

If the above is true (and I'll admit, that's a big "if"), then that also explains why Fred and George never noticed a long thin shape labelled "Slytherin's Monster" slithering through the walls during Chamber of Secrets. Being a non-sentient creature without a unique name that it was aware of, the basilisk thus did not show up on the Marauder's Map.

This theory also supported by the movie-only scene in Alfonso Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in which Harry sees a dot labelled "Peter Pettigrew" in the Marauder's Map which is moving towards him down a dark and (apparently empty) hallway. Harry never actually sees Pettigrew on the map in the book, but if we take this scene as canon, it suggests that by this point Pettigrew had started to remember who he was, and the map re-labelled him accordingly.

Now don't worry, I can hear your objections already. "But why didn't the map say 'Helena Ravenclaw' instead of 'The Grey Lady'? Why didn't it show Voldemort standing next to Quirrel?" Both excellent questions, Astute Reader. I shall endeavor to answer them as best I can. First, Helena Ravenclaw did not show up on the map for precisely the reasons mentioned in my theory: she had been known as the "Grey Lady" for so long (nearly a thousand years) that she had internalized the name and considered it her own.

As for Voldemort, I can't say for sure. If the map shows ghosts, then one could reasonably assume that the Dark Lord would show up as well, right? Not necessarily. When Voldemort returns to life near the end of Goblet of Fire, he says to his Death Eaters that when the spell he intended to kill Harry with rebounded, "I was ripped from my body, less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost … but still, I was alive. What I was, even I do not know … "

Whatever was left of Voldemort may have been too little for the map to recognize as sentient, or it may have been masked by Quirrel's life-force. Finally, (and this may be a bit of a stretch), Voldemort is often known as "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named", so maybe his name itself was under some sort of concealing enchantment which makes it not show up on all but the most powerful detection systems, sort of like the nominal equivalent of being Unplottable? We know that he has the power to make his name Taboo, so making it Unplottable as well doesn't seem like too much of a stretch.

Though the above theory is obviously not canon, I hope that it can help to clear up any issues you may have had with the illustrious Ms. Rowling's storytelling.

Until next time... mischief managed.

[Book Review] The Year of Less, by Cait Flanders

The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store
Author: Cait Flanders
Recording Artist: Cait Flanders
Publisher: Tantor Media
Year: 2017

I think it's fair to say that, for most people living in the so-called First World, the idea of going an entire year without purchasing anything but food and essentials is a pretty terrifying prospect. You're probably already tensed up just thinking about it. Not buying anything? No lattes to-go, no new video games or DVDs, no new outfits or tickets to movies or anything at all?! How would we live? What would we do? How could we survive the howling maelstrom of sensation that is the Internet Age without the ability to spend our hard-earned cash on the things that matter most to us, the things which give our lives so much fulfillment?

Well, that's just the issue, isn't it? What does matter most to us? Do our possessions bring us fulfillment? Do we even remember all the junk we've spent that hard-earned cash on? Lots of people run themselves ragged working jobs they hate so they can pay their bills every month, but are we paying for things that make us truly happy and secure? Or are we just flinging dollars away to keep the twin specters of Boredom and Silence at bay, like a cornered man hurling sausage-links at an approaching pack of wild dogs?

By her early twenties, Cait Flanders was (like many Americans and Canadians), up to her eyeballs in debt. More than $30,000 of debt, and almost all of it racked up to pay for things, possessions, physical objects which brought her no joy but she couldn't bear to get part with because she had spent so much on them already, and besides, someday she might use them! Add to this her binge-eating and compulsive blackout drinking (which started at age 12), and you've got one very unlikely candidate for future financial- and lifestyle-guru. But become a guru she did! This book chronicles how that came about.

Cait started blogging about her efforts to pay off her consumer debt as a way to keep herself accountable. Publicly sharing her budget and what she spent her money on forced her to stick to her principles and continually reach for her goals, or else face the unpleasant task of explaining to her readers why she had fallen short that month. Slowly, over the course of two years, she paid off her debt and built up a sizable online following. But she discovered that as soon as the debt was gone, the old habits came roaring back. She began to ask herself:

"If I was only saving up to 10 percent of my income, where was the rest of my money going? Why was I continually making excuses for my spending? Did I really need 90 percent of my income or could I live on less?"

Cait decided to find out, in the only way she knew how: by leaping in with both feet. She decided to challenge herself to give up shopping for an entire year, only allowing herself to buy the essentials: food, toiletries, gasoline, electricity, and other essential consumables. Among other things, she had a rule that she could only replace things that wore out or broke if both of the following applied: A) the item was absolutely essential and caused her a daily inconvenience to go without it, and B) she threw out, donated, or otherwise got rid of the original item she was replacing. Armed with a sense of purpose and spurred on by the fear of public shaming (she had told everyone she knew about her plan, so she wouldn't chicken out), Cait launched into a yearlong Shopping Ban.

Not only did Cait swear to go a year without shopping, she also decided to take stock of every item she owned and publish the inventory on her blog. Years before Marie Kondo was a phenomenon, Cait decided she'd had enough and ultimately gave away more than half of her possessions, on top of her Shopping Ban!

As the year wore on, Cait began to notice disturbing similarities in the way she related to her three vices: food, alcohol, and shopping. Although I've never had a serious problem with alcohol, shopping, or overeating, I still found that much of what she was saying resonated with me. For much of our twenties, my wife and I spent everything we earned on fancy dinners out, having adventures with friends, sweet treats and cups of overpriced coffee, and purchasing whatever passing fancy caught our attention for more than a moment. We were having fun, sure, but spending all that money was really just keeping us from achieving our goals, like owning a house or traveling.

Although we had already paid off the all of our remaining debt more than a year before encountering Ms. Flanders' book, The Year of Less has helped to reinforce and galvanize us in our decision to live frugally, to save as much as possible, and to not waste our money on anything that isn't getting us closer to checking items off our bucket-list. It's a difficult decision to make in a world where anything you want can be yours in seconds (and with free shipping if you spend just a few dollars more), but as Cait Flanders proves, it can be done.

And who knows? Maybe, like her, you'll find that you're happier with less than you ever were with more.

[Book Review] The Arsonist

The Arsonist, by Stephanie Oakes

© 2017 Penguin Random House

This one sat on our bookshelf for almost a year before my wife read it, but as soon as she finished she got me to read it, and now I'm kicking myself for not reading it sooner. More than once I live-texted my wife as I read, keeping her up-to-date on which jaw-dropping reversal of fortune I had just witnessed. The Arsonist has twists and turns, game-changing revelations and appalling betrayals, each one following close on the heels of another. At first, the bizarre cover art turned me off (though full disclosure: I read an advance copy, so the cover art and text of your version might be different), but once I started reading I quickly found the main characters engrossing. The Arsonist has three protagonists, all teenagers: epic-level weirdo and social pariah Molly Mavity, seizure-prone Kuwaiti immigrant Ibrahim "Pepper" Al-Yusef, and . . . well, the third protagonist is complicated.

The third protagonist is Ava Dreyman, and we mostly learn about her through her posthumously-published 1989 diary, which details her escape from East Germany in the mid-80s, followed by her return to rescue her mother, and her (apparent?) death at the hands of a high-ranking Stasi officer. But as Molly and Pepper delve deeper into the mystery of Ava's death—which intertwines with the secrets kept from both of them by their respective parents—they are forced to question not only Ava's story, but the narratives which they've both built up to define their own lives and identities.

Fernsehturm, Berlin

The Arsonist is marketed in the "Teen & Young Adult Mystery & Suspense" category (among others), but I feel that this sells the story somewhat short. While aimed at teenagers, this novel could easily find a welcome audience among adults. Arguably, adults who remember the Cold War might actually get more out of this story than its intended audience can. It's one thing to learn about the Cold War in history class, but it's very different if you actually lived through it. Personally, I was old enough to be vaguely familiar with the word "NATO" and know that it was on the news a lot, but since Berlin Wall came down when I had barely entered preschool, the Iron Curtain always seemed to me more like an artifact of the past than something that was briefly my contemporary. So for me, I feel I came away with a greater appreciation for events which took place during my own lifetime.

Oakes' gripping prose ricochets from viewpoint to viewpoint, rotating with blinding speed between Molly, Pepper, and excerpts from Ava's diary: which, in this fictional universe, is a large part of the reason the Berlin Wall came down in the first place. The shocking tale of Ava's state-sanctioned torture and death galvanized the downtrodden East German public and helped give them the courage to stand up to their monstrous rulers and its vast network of spies and informants; a sort of East German Anne Frank, if you will. But hero-worship makes us blind to realities we would often rather forget, or wish we had never known: as Captain Mal once said, "every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another." Turns out that little chestnut applies to teenage girls, too (though I won't say exactly how).

The Palast der Republik, East Berlin

The Arsonist is also a poignant examination of loss, and the ways in which we heal, sometimes without realizing it, from wounds which we felt sure must kill us. All the characters in this book (and especially the three protagonists) are dealing with loss in one way or another, and the protagonists all have dead parents in their pasts. For Pepper, it's his mother, who died while giving birth to him in the shadow of a burning oil field during Operation Desert Storm. For Molly it's her mother, whom the rest of the world believes committed suicide three years ago, but whom Molly still insists upon believing is alive and in hiding for unknown reasons. And Ava... well, I won't spoil it for you, but let it never be said that writing, printing, and distributing a subversive newsletter and burning down Stasi administration buildings is an occupation that's free from risk.

Overall, I give The Arsonist the very highest marks, even in its unedited pre-publication form. Switching with ease between the hilarious and the horrifying, between snappy dialogue and heart-wrenching examinations of grief, adolescence, parenthood, and trauma and healing (both emotional and physical), The Arsonist is an adrenaline-fueled thrill ride that somehow finds time to sneak in an emotional sucker-punch or two when you're least expecting them.

[Book Review] Children of the Vampire

Children of the Vampire, by Jeanne Kalogridis

(The Diaries of the Family Dracul, Book Two)

© 1995 Delacorte Press

After finishing the the first book in this series, the deliciously-disgusting and deeply disturbing Covenant with the Vampire, I was eager and excited to dive into this sequel, which picks up mere hours after the first entry left off. Unfortunately, despite a very strong opening and a taut overall construction, I found that my eagerness for more information on the origins and nature of the infamous Count Dracula was hampered by lopsided dramatic structure, and the introduction of several new elements which I personally find incongruous with the Dracula mythos, and with vampires in general.

[Obviously, this being the second in a series, reviewing Children of the Vampire will entail spoilers for the ending and major plot developments of the previous book, Covenant with the Vampire. Consider yourself forewarned and forearmed.]

Children begins with an excerpt from Covenant: two diary entries which explain Vlad Dracul's origin as strigoi, the true natures of his no-less-than three secret covenants — one with the townsfolk who provide him with victims, one with the eldest male of his mortal descendants who disposes of his victims' bodies to prevent them from rising as undead, and one with the Devil himself (the details of which are as-yet unknown). As Arkady's (now-undead) sister Zsuzsanna explains, "The soul of the eldest surviving son of each Tsepesh generation: that is the gold with which he purchases his immortality." 

Dun dun DUNNNNN!

As I've stated previously, the opening of Children is highly compelling, beginning with a description of Arkady's first, doomed attempt to slay the monster who made him one of the undead at the end of the previous installment. This is honestly one of the finest bits of exposition I've ever read, and it beautifully illustrates the ungodly strength against which Arkady has arrayed himself. I'm going to quote at length from this passage, because it's just. That. Damn. Good.

          I leapt at him with the stake, aiming to plunge deep it into his chest. As I did so, he stepped aside with supernatural speed and grace—and caught the hand that held the stake, with such might that my arm was pulled from its socket.
          I howled, tried to wrest free, but his strength outmatched mine tenfold; with a brutal yank, he tore the arm from me, leaving my shoulder a stump that spewed my latest victim's blood. As I watched, stunned, he tossed it—the fingers still clutching the stake—with casual grace into the fire.
          But I too was no longer mortal; so, neither, was my wound. The pain blinded for one brief brilliant instant, then transformed into pure energizing rage. Again I charged—this time knocking V. into the flames.
          As he struggled to rise, hair and waistcoat ablaze, I retrieved my severed limb—only to realise, with amazement, that another had instantaneously and completely regrown to take its place. I snatched the charred stake from my erstwhile fingers and, oblivious to its blistering heat, rushed with it at V.
          To my surprise, he spread his arms in welcome, a smouldering, willing target that wore the Devil's own grin. I struck out with every shred of my newfound immortal strength, determined to drive the stake clear through his cold heart; struck out again. Again. Again.
          The stake would not pierce him.
          Like a madman, I flailed at him with it—but it was as though the very air itself formed an impenetrable cushion above his chest. I hammered away until the wood itself began to splinter. All the while, he laughed, soft and low, with the condescension of an adult watching a helplessly furious child; but them his amusement faded and turned to murderous fury.

I know, right?

After his abortive attempt on Vlad's (un)life, Arkady lays low in Vienna for a while, until he gets a visit from his dear old sister Zsuzsanna, who shows up with two drunken victims as a peace-offering. She instructs her brother in the subtle art of seduction, but the scene turns horrific when Arkady realizes that she's used her vampiric mesmerism (and the heady rush from feeding off a pair of wine-sops) to trick him into having drunken sex with her, his own sister! 

EEEEEUUUUUGHHHH!

After this abrupt splash of cold water on what had been an entertaining scene which walked the fine line between horror and voyeurism, we're told that Zsuza transgressed this most ancient of boundaries in the hopes of conceiving a dhampir: apparently in this mythos (and real-world Slavic folklore), vampires retain the ability to reproduce during their first year after being turned. This seems like a big change to the generally-accepted rules of vampirism, but I was willing to let it slide if the author could to something interesting with it. Unfortunately, she never does. That's right, Ms. Kalogridis just blue-balls her readers purely to fuck with us, because nothing ever comes of this development! Zsuza does not conceive, and asides from establishing that she really regrets never having children of her own while she was alive, the whole incest shocker contributes nothing to the overall plot! The author could have just had Zsuzsa say "I really regret not having kids while I was alive", she didn't have to set us up with erotic expectation and then shove a steaming platter of incest in our faces!

I mean really, who does that to their readers?

Anyway, Zsuzsa tells Arkady he's not strong enough to challenge Vlad (duh), but he can get stronger by training at the Scholomance, a school for the black arts that's hidden somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains. Off he goes into the wild black yonder, and the story jumps ahead twenty-six years to Amsterdam, where Mary Windham Tsepesh (now known as Mary Tsepesh Van Helsing) has just buried her second husband, the kindly doctor who helped the Tsepeshes to spirit away their infant son Stefan from Vlad's clutches at the end of the last book. It kind of bothered me that the good doctor went by the assumed name "Dr Kohl" while travelling to Castle Dracula in the last book, instead of just using his real name. Seems like a cheap way of ramping up tension, by revealing that he was hiding his identity for no discernible reason.

Overall, the novel's dramatic structure feels lopsided. The climax is only two-thirds of the way through the book. Despite its power (and there is a revelation which turns the entire plot of the novel UPSIDE DOWN!), the fact that the denouement is SO LONG makes this climax seem anticlimactic, even though in the strictest sense, it isn't.

I guess I'm feeling a little trepidation that so many seemingly disparate elements have been introduced, but still intrigued enough to see where the final installment takes me. The friend who loaned me the series said she didn't remember much about the second book;; it's the first and the third which stand out in her memory. Home fully that's a sign of good things to come. As always, I'll let you know how it all turns out, Dear Readers.

[Book Review] The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley (HarperCollins, 2010)

Written just after — and published in the midst of the the fallout from — the Great Recession of 2008, Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist is something of an aberration in the world of nonfiction prognostication: a text which, Roddenberry-like, dares to suggest that not only are we probably not headed for disaster, but the future will almost certainly be better than even our wildest dreams; better than we ever dared to hope.

Counter-intuitively, this is not a thought which many people enjoy entertaining. Most people (and I include myself in this statement — or at least, I used to) would like, even need, to believe that the world cannot go on without them, or at least without the particular set of circumstances which created them as individuals. These doomsayers would have us believe that the world was in a constant state of improvement until roughly the time they were born, which just so happened to be the apex of human civilization, and everything after that has been and will continue to be one long defeat.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, © Zach Weinersmith (yes, really)

Though this kind of thinking is understandable (every human being lives at what they perceive as the tail-end of history), Mr. Ridley makes some pretty compelling arguments why this conclusion is fallacious. For one, we can look back on the last 100,000 years of history and see that life has steadily gotten better in every way we can measure. Compared to the first members of Homo sapiens (or heck, even our parents and grandparents) modern humans eat better, live longer, have fewer chronic diseases, are less likely to die from violence, reproduce less, produce more food using less land, extract more energy from less fuel, and generally live better lives than ever before in our species' millennia of existence. Granted, this progress hasn't always been fast, and it never happens evenly across the entire population, but even the poorest human on earth today lives a life which is measurably better than that of the earliest hominids; even pre-contact tribes of the remote Amazon have bows and arrows, stone tools, and fire. It is the height of arrogance, the author asserts, to look back on this steady and ceaseless march of progress and conclude that the future must hold nothing but ruin and degeneracy (and to be honest, despite my natural inclination towards pessimism, I find myself agreeing with him almost against my will).

The Rational Optimist is broken down into eleven chapters, which trace the arc of human history in roughly chronological from our early hominid predecessors (like Homo erectus and neanderthals) all the way to the Singularity of the near-future. The author's main thesis is that all human progress comes from ideas "having sex" with each other: that it the process of exchange and cross-fertilization which gives birth to new ideas and technologies, allowing us to raise our standard of living in ways that other tool-using animals do not. "Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution", Ridley asserts in the prologue.

Ridley also makes the assertion that the dominance of Homo sapiens stems from the fact that we are the only animal which trades, which exchanges like for unlike. Other animals exchange food and grooming and sex in the hopes of reciprocal food, grooming, and/or sex at a later date, but only humans exchange sex for food, or food for tools, or one type of food for a different foodstuff. This tendency toward exchange and specialization allows us to draw on our species' collective brain, instead of being trapped by the endless treadmill of self-reliance. A self-sufficient hunter-gatherer must spend all of his mental energy on filling his head with the million-and-one things he needs to know in order to get enough calories by himself; conversely, a fisherman and a farmer can use trade and specialization so that each of them eats a more varied and healthier diet and has more leisure time (which they can use to consume more and provide employment to yet more people) without either having the faintest how the other plies his trade.

Ridley goes on to point out that despite its Ferengi-esque reputation, commerce has done more good for humanity than almost any other force in history. Slavery was one of our earliest inventions, but it was the steam-engine which abolished the slave trade by making it no longer profitable. Brutal, appalling cruelty towards both humans and animals was a (if not the) major form of entertainment in the pre-industrial world, but once our economic well-being no longer depended on human- and animal-powered labor, bloodsports became unacceptable. Ridley opines that "Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising, and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs."

In the final chapter, Ridley lays out his case for optimism about our future. This is where lots of optimists falter, and their two biggest stumbling-blocks are usually African poverty and global warming. Ridley soberly and realistically assesses both these issues, and not only finds cause for hope, but goes so far as to say that not only should we not despair of these twin terrors of the future, it is our moral duty to continue to believe that things can get better. The moment we stop believing that things can improve is the moment the world's most desperately poor and underprivileged cease being able to claw their way out of poverty. Ridley says "It is precisely because there is still far more suffering and scarcity in the world than I or anybody else with a heart would wish that ambitious optimism is morally mandatory. [...] those who offer counsels of despair or calls to slow down in the face of looming environmental disaster may not only be factually but morally wrong."

Now for the stuff I didn't agree with.

Ridley has a pretty dim view of religion and of the state — to him, priests and politicians are "tiresome fellow[s]" at best, and "parasites" at worst (which I guess they are at the worst of times, but I think it ignores a lot of nuance, and at their best I do believe that they can make tangible improvements to a great many human lives). It worries me that he doesn't hold with the conventional wisdom that global warming will devastate our planet's food supply and economy (though he does admit that resettling all those billions of people who live in future flood-zones will be expensive, and likely contentious), pointing out that just a few decades ago, scientists were sounding the alarms because global cooling, which they said would also devastate our planet's food supply and economy. Also concerning is that he's extremely gung-ho about genetic modification as a future food source, a bandwagon I'm not quite ready to jump on just yet. I fear that he may be overestimating humanity's tolerance for change and improvement, but so far we've done a pretty good job of adapting to some really spectacular levels of change and chaos — after all, we've made it through the Warring States period, the Dark Ages, the Black Death, two World Wars, and the Cold War without blowing it all up, haven't we?

While I might not yet be 100% on board with the optimism bandwagon, The Rational Optimist has achieved something remarkable: it has demolished or damaged most of the arguments I previously used as justification for my pessimistic cynicism. For decades, I've assumed the worst about the future and humanity, but Matt Ridley has pointed out an uncomfortable truth: that my pessimism turns out to be unnecessary and incorrect a lot more often than I'd like to believe. It feels kind of weird to think about the future and experience neither stomach-churning fear nor bitter pessimism, but it's a feeling I could get used to. Pessimism is a habit I've had for a long, long time, and being without it (even though I never enjoyed it) feels kind of strange, like suddenly regrowing a long-lost limb.

I won't say I'm an optimist now, but I can't say I'm a pessimist anymore. And isn't that a reason to be hopeful?

[Book Review] Covenant with the Vampire

Covenant with the Vampire, by Jeanne Kalogridis

(The Diaries of the Family Dracul, Book One)

© 1994 Dell Horror

It's been a long time since I read Bram Stoker's Dracula, but this prequel, set fifty years before the events of that tale, brought back to me with vivid clarity the creeping dread and shocking horror of the Dracula mythos. Part of Dracula's allure is his ambiguity, his inability to be defined, the impossibility of pinning down exactly who -- or even what -- he is. Is the vampiric antagonist of Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel truly the same person as the historical Vlad Tepesh, Vlad the Impaler, or is he just some random undead who's putting on airs? Is he even just a vampire, or does the hair on his palms and his ability to turn into a monstrous wolf make him also a werewolf?

I was a little afraid, at first, that revealing the "origins" of Count Dracula might dampen his mystique. Monsters frighten us because they represent unknown quantities; once you label and categorize them, once you assign them a backstory and a clearly delineated set of powers, they go from terrifying existential horror to monster of the week. Fortunately, revealing some (but not all) of Dracula's origins and motivations does nothing to diminish his power to terrify audiences, at least in this instance.

I was impressed and pleased to discover that Covenant with the Vampire is written, like the original Dracula, as an epistolary novel (or "novel made of letters"), with each chapter taking the form of a diary entry from one of the main characters. This use of multiple viewpoints and voices lends the novel texture, plus credibility as each character's account of events corroborates or expands upon that of the others. It also sets us up for a lot of dramatic irony: being privy to the inner thoughts of each of the main characters, we (the readers) inevitably know more than any one character is ever aware of, which means that we can only watch in mute horror as characters take actions and make decisions which we, knowing better than they, wish desperately to warn them against. The diary-entry format also gives us a sense of immediacy and urgency, as the characters explain to us where and when they are recording their thoughts: on sleepless candlelit nights, on scraps of paper stolen between visits from a nosy sister-in-law, on sunny mornings that make it difficult to trust one's own memories of the night before.

The story begins on "5 April, 1845" as Arkady Tsepesh, last male scion of the family Tsepesh (descendants of the infamous Vlad the Impaler), returns with his heavily-pregnant English wife, Mary Windham Tsepesh, to his ancestral home, Castle Dracula, following news from his deformed elder sister Zsuzsanna Tsepesh that their father has fallen gravely ill. Arkady and Mary arrive mere hours after his father's passing, and it is during the vigil for the deceased that we catch our first glimpse of Great-Uncle Vlad.

As you've probably guessed already, "Great-Uncle" Vlad is really more
of a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle.

Over the course of a mere two weeks in the Transylvanian mountains, Ms. Kalogridis ever-so-slowly peels back the façade of normalcy, revealing a world of incest, torture, mass-murder, and of deals with devils both figurative and literal. As Arkady learns more and more of Great-Uncle Vlad's peculiar behaviors and future goals (e.g., moving to England with its "teeming millions"), and Mary begins to listen with increasing credulity to the whispers of the servants, and Zsuzsanna begins to attract -- and even to invite -- the sexual attentions of her wicked uncle, the net which entraps our characters within Castle Dracula and its estate grows ever-tighter. Mary's complicated pregnancy (to say nothing of the castle's extreme isolation and Vlad's increasingly controlling nature) prevents them from leaving freely, and so husband and wife are forced to bide their time and pay homage to a monster in their midst, a wolf in boyar's clothing.

"You look different, Uncle Vlad: have you done something with your heir?"

As Vlad begins to feed with greater regularity, he transforms from a decrepit relic into a terrifying patriarch; likewise, Castle Dracula itself transforms from Arkady's beloved-though-gloomy childhood home to a macabre prison, filled with and surrounded by secrets and death. As Vlad begins to seduce his many-times-removed grand-niece, we are given a firsthand account of what it actually feels like to become strigoi, in all the sensual and incestuous details -- though on a technical note, does it still count as incest if she's eleven generations removed from you? (Actually, don't answer that.)

As Arkady explores the estate and its grounds in pursuit of fleeting glimpses of his long-dead brother Stefan, he makes a grisly discovery in the woods beside Castle Dracula which results in what the old Ravenloft setting would call "a malign paradigm-shift", in which everything he knew, or thought he knew, about his uncle, his family, and the very nature of reality itself comes crashing down around his head. I can't tell you any more without giving too much away, but suffice it to say that if you're a fan of the creepy, the macabre, and the outright horrifying, Covenant with the Vampire will amply satisfy your disgusting predilections (you nasty little pervert, you).

As readers, our foreknowledge of what ultimately happens in Bram Stoker's Dracula -- that any attempts to kill Dracula are doomed to failure, that he must produce at least three "brides" and turn poor, mad Renfield into his creature, that at some point his mortal servants must abandon him and his castle to fall to ruins -- has the effect of producing great dramatic tension. We know that these things must occur in order for Stoker's narrative to make sense, but knowing that the blows must come but not knowing how or when they will fall, or in which order, may be the cruelest torture of all. 

[Book Review] The Casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling

© 2012 Little, Brown Book Group

I realize I'm a few years late with this review, but for a long time I wasn't sure I'd ever read this book. My wife read it when it came out, and she told me the story was so dark and tragic that it'd probably just depress me. I gave her permission to tell me how it ended, and when she told me, I decided that it did sound a lot darker than Ms. Rowling's previous works. But after becoming familiar with Rowling's Cormoran Strike mystery novels, I figured that whatever was in The Casual Vacancy couldn't be any darker than Career of Evil, so I decided to give Vacancy a try.

A lot of readers were surprised and dismayed to discover how grim and pessimistic this book is, despite the fact that Rowling repeatedly stated that this would emphatically not be a novel for children. Vacancy is an unflattering portrait of humanity at best, and a disturbing tour of human misery at its darkest (it's never lurid, though -- Rowling simply reports on her characters actions without judgment, for the most part).

The novel tells the story of a fictional West Country village named Pagford, which is a satellite of Yarvil, a nearby urban center. The two municipalities are separated by a country estate, a previous owner of which sold some land to Yarvil, which they developed into a housing project called "The Fields". This greatly upset the citizenry of Pagford, since the land on which the Fields were built was part of Pagford Parish, meaning that Pagfordians were on the hook financially for the crime-ridden, ugly, and squalid Fields and the families (including many drug-users and welfare-recipients) who live in its squat, ugly cinderblock houses.

Vacancy opens sixty years after these events, with the sudden death by aneurysm of Pagford Parish Councillor Barry Fairbrother, leader of the small-but-vocal faction of the parish council who are in favor of keeping the Fields as part of Pagford Parish. Having been born in The Fields and bootstrapped himself into a position of respect and power within Pagford, Barry was a living example of the narrative which he hoped to make reality for others from The Fields. Unfortunately, his death leaves an empty seat on the Parish Council, which the anti-Fields faction hopes to fill with one of their own.

The novel's main arc tells the story of the election which is held to fill Barry's empty seat, but it also zooms in on the petty rivalries, domestic unhappiness, infighting, and class-warfare which plague the picturesque Pagford. I won't attempt to explain all the characters and their relationships herein; that task would be better-suited to a spoileriffic character-map like this one. All you need to know going into it is not to worry if you can't keep all the families straight in your head; by the start of Part 2, you'll pretty much know who everyone is and who they're related to.

I was impressed at how scrupulously Rowling avoided making even the most sympathetic characters into paragons of virtue. It would have been easy for the author to (for instance) cast Dr Parminder Jawanda, the discriminated-against Sikh physician, as a poor unfortunate who is unfairly judged by the backwards inhabitants of Pagford -- but Rowling resists such temptation. Parminder is relentlessly critical of her youngest child Sukhvinder, a fact which (combined with her poor academics, obesity, and the relentless teasing she endures at school) drives the poor girl to self-harm, unbeknownst to Parminder.

For that matter, the children of Pagford are hardly paragons of youthful innocence. In fact, you could argue that most (or even all) of the truly tragic stuff that befalls Pagford during and in the wake of the election is their fault). Once one kid gets it into his head to post damaging information about his father on the village council forums under the username The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother, before you know it, practically all the kids are doing it to sabotage their own parents' chances of winning, with predictably damaging results for everyone in Pagford and the Fields.

I was particularly struck by two things in this novel: the shocking pettiness and cruelty of almost everyone from every social station, age bracket, and walk of life; and almost total lack of honest communication in any given interpersonal relationship. On the one hand, this seems fairly realistic to me, even if it doesn't paint a very flattering picture of humanity and left a bad taste in my mouth. On the other hand, it made me very, very glad that I escaped from high school with a shred of my human decency intact.

Overall, The Casual Vacancy is not an easy read, and will likely leave you feeling drained and discouraged about humanity in general. But it's also a novel which taps into the primal tribalism which continues to stifle progress and meaningful debate on both sides of the Atlantic, and as such, is a novel which I strongly recommend to pretty much everyone who has strong opinions, one way or another, on the subjects of drugs, poverty, the welfare state, and man's responsibility (or lack thereof) towards his fellow man.

[Book Review] A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K. LeGuin, 1968)

The first thing I did upon waking this morning was pick up my recently-purchased copy of Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea and eagerly consume the remainder of the book, which I had read last night until I could no longer keep my eyes open.

I was in sixth grade when I first encountered this book in the school library. I changed school districts just after finishing the book, and the new school didn't have the other books in the series, so it gradually fell by the wayside and was forgotten. Until recently, when I saw a copy at the Dawn Treader and remembered really enjoying it the first time around. I'm really glad I bought it when I had the chance, because this book has reminded me of why I fell in love with fantasy in the first place, and its stunning power to enrich our lives with fresh perspective.

I think I may have been too young to really appreciate this book the first time around, because there's a lot going on here that I didn't notice the first time around. I must have completely failed to realize that Ged (a.k.a. Sparrowhawk, the main character) is not a white guy like virtually all fantasy protagonists (his skin tone is described as "red-brown"). I also failed to realize what a big deal that is, especially for a book published in 1968, when (as Le Guin herself said it) "everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill."

Sparrowhawk, by FreShPAiNt

I also feel like I'm finally old enough to really understand and absorb the lessons which the book teaches about patience, self-knowledge, and the responsibility which comes with great power (I just wish I had taken these lessons more to heart as a young man, rather than insisting on learning them for myself, the hard way). As the Archmage says to Ged after the young man's pride and hubris have left him gravely injured and loosed a terrible evil upon the world:

You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do....

I was also captivated by the lovingly-rendered descriptions of sea and surf and sky, of windswept moors and mist-hidden isles, narrow flotsam-choked inlets, great calm bays, and the endless, heaving waterscape of the Open Sea. Le Guin has an anthropologist's eye for culture and and a naturalist's eye for setting, and it makes me appreciate my own landscape (and the lake right behind my new house) all the more fully.

[Book Review] A Detroit Anthology

A Detroit Anthology (2014)
Edited by Anna Clark
Featuring essays, photographs, art, and poetry by Grace Lee Boggs, John Carlisle, Desiree Cooper, dream hampton, Steve Hughes, Jamaal May, Tracie McMillan, Marsha Music, Shaka Senghor, Thomas J. Sugrue, and many others.

Named a Notable Book of 2015 by The Library of Michigan


"I see a bunch of regular-ass people doing regular-ass shit because Detroit is a regular-ass city with regular-ass problems just like everyone else. Which is why I wholeheartedly believe that Detroit will be just fine."

—"We Love Detroit; Even If You Don't," by Aaron Foley

Despite having lived adjacent to the Motor City for virtually all of my formative years, I realized recently that I knew next to nothing about Detroit. Sure, I'd been to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village on field trips, and I had been to Greektown many times with my family, but I was ashamed and a little dismayed to realize that even in my late twenties I still knew almost nothing about the city's history or culture. It never even occurred to me to ask why the city seemed so empty and blighted; as a kid, I just assumed that all major cities consisted of central hubs ringed by miles of empty structures and blight.

So I've taken it upon myself to start learning more about the Motor City and its geography, history, culture, and people. After a quick crash-course in local history (I highly recommend Scott Martelle's Detroit: A Biography for a handy overview of the city's three centuries of colorful existence), I decided to launch right into discovering what it's like to actually live in a city which most Americans view with a complex mixture of disgust, pity, and fear.

Right from the Introduction, the editor remarks that "[e]ven local writers often pen stories that are meant to explain Detroit to those who live elsewhere." This is not one of those books: it's full of art by Detroiters, about Detroit and for Detroit(ers).

Not all of the entries are stories, either. There seems to be a roughly-even split between prose, poetry, and black-and-white photography. I was glad to see, however, that this is not a coffee-table anthology of schadenfreude-laced ruin porn; with the exception of two mandatory shots of the G.A.R. Building and a certain baroque parking garage, there are no images of abandoned structures in this anthology. What the editor chooses to focus on instead is the 713,000 residents who still call Detroit their home, and are living with the fallout from all those highly-photogenic ruins. This is not a rose-colored view of a city on the rebound, but it doesn't wallow in loss either. There are a few shots of the poor and the homeless, yes, but there are a far greater number of shots of everyday Detroiters doing everyday things, like fishing on Belle Isle, tending community gardens, children blowing bubbles at Hart Plaza, people waiting for buses, and one particularly delightful image of a twentysomething electronica fan doing what appears to be the Twist at an outdoor music festival, opposite a small girl in a sundress who is zealously imitating his dance moves. In short: the normality which can still be found in what is arguably one of the least-normal cities in America.

I'll admit I'm not much of a poet, or a critic thereof, and as a result much of the poetry in this anthology left me more confused than moved. I'm willing to chalk this up to unfamiliarity with the form, though quite a few of them left an impression on me. Some of them left me more with a vague sense of emotion formed by a string of seemingly disconnected words (most of them negative), though several (such as "Infernal" by Tyehimba Jess and "what you'd find buried in the dirt under charles f. kettering sr. high school (detroit, michigan)" by francine j. harris [name in lowercase by choice]) were quite profoundly moving.

For me, as a writer who works primarily in prose, the main point of this anthology was the narratives about living in (or surviving) Detroit. Some of these stories are funny. Most are poignant and sad. Many are shocking, or angry and defiant. All of them are true and, by virtue of that truth, incredibly raw. Take for instance "The Imam I Knew", in which Omar Syed Mahmood recounts a side of the now-infamous Imam Luqman which the papers failed to mention: a man who was willing to dig into his own family's winter food-budget so that other families in his flock would not go hungry during Ramadan. In "The Fixer" by John Carlisle, one man runs an unregistered lawnmower-repair business out of a parking lot next to the abandoned shop he hopes to buy someday, waiting patiently for the day when it will go into tax lien and he can snap it up, and watching helplessly as scrappers dismantle the property which he does not yet own.

Reading this anthology will give you a picture of Detroit which is often glossed over in mainstream media, which is replete with head-shaking, finger-wagging sermons about the death of the American Dream, as embodied by the Motor City. A Detroit Anthology reminds us that the city is still very much alive, thank-you-very-much, and to mourn it while it still lives is a disservice to all the human beings who are still trying to make their way in a city which the rest of the world has already written-off. This anthology seeks to un-write, to rewrite that dismissal, and show that the city's motto is just as relevant and necessary and true as it's ever been: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus ("We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes").