Abandoned Books: A History of Love & Hate in 21 Statues by Peter Hughes

It's been a few years, but I had to punt on a book again. I don't have to love a book to finish it, but I think if I find myself talking to the author, in my head: "Jesus Christ, Hughes, read the fucking room," then the book has lost an essential connection to me as a reader and I shouldn't try to make larger statements about it.

A History of Love & Hate in 21 Statues has a neat idea, and a strong pedigree. Peter Hughes is, his biography in this book tells us, both a philosopher and a psychologist with a PhD in the former and a membership in the British Psychological Society. He seems to be less of an academic and more of a talking head (which reinforces some feelings I have about this book) - I did a quick search now and found his site.

The book has, as you might guess, twenty-one chapters, each telling the story of one statue, which was created by someone at one point and destroyed by someone else at a later date. It is, I think, roughly organized by the date of the creation of the statues, though does not tightly fit that timeline.

I read about half of it. I was getting an impression in my head over the first half of the book, and I wanted to make it to the chapter on The Confederate Monument of Portsmouth, Virginia - eleventh, right at the mid-point - to see if my concerns continued to be borne out.

In the middle of the chapter on the Confederate Monument - one of the hundreds put up, mostly in the American South, around the turn of the 20th century to reinforce white supremacy and uphold the ahistorical "lost cause" myth - Hughes mentions another statue, which is like his chapter's subject but even more so. Called "The Good Darky," it was erected in 1927 in Natchitoches, seems to be just as horrible as you might be imagining, and was damaged and then removed in 1968.

Hughes chooses not to focus on that statue because, I think, it doesn't fit the overall point he's trying to make. And that overall point is what I was objecting to in the first half of this book. I don't want to mischaracterize his argument, but I will note this book was published in 2021, seems to have been written in 2020, and has many references to BLM protests as (roughly his repeated language) "protests after the death of George Floyd that led to calls to tear down statues."

Now, Hughes is writing a book about statues, so I don't mind him for focusing on his topic. But I found his framing more and more disingenuous as I went along, and I finally couldn't keep going. As far as I read, Hughes seemed to be saying that the biggest threat to civil society in the modern world are "fanatics," whom he tends to characterize in terms leaning to the left (authoritarians, references to communism, and so forth).

There's a version of this argument in many of the chapters; this one is from early in the book, about a head of Athena:

To be merciful and forgiving requires us to see the world from the point of view of another person. This leads to understanding and when we understand other people, we humanize them, we look for common ground and a way to build bridges. When, on the other hand, we need to be absolutely certain we are right, that our beliefs are the only true ones, then it becomes impossible to fins a common humanity with people who do not share our beliefs. As our world-view narrows and our frame of reference shrinks, we become desperate to justify our increasingly fragile identity. The result is violence and bloodshed.

That argument superficially seems even-handed and unobjectionable. But Hughes drops into these arguments at specific times, and with reference to particular actions - and not to others. Also note the word "identity," which I detect Hughes using repeatedly in a left-coded way. He isn't quite all the way to "abolish DEI," but he seems to be somewhere on that spectrum.

In particular, the Confederate Monument chapter does mention that it was put up in an era of repression and even gets a bit into how common lynching was in the era. But he uses the word "Black" never, "Negro" once, and never gets anywhere near "white supremacy." The generous view is that Hughes wants to avoid writing about specific ideologies, and keep his focus on being open and loving and merciful and forgiving.

The less generous view is that one side gets the benefit of that doubt over and over and over again, while the other other side is the reference for all of the aspersions and fear-mongering. In particular, Hughes, I am morally certain, is quite familiar with Popper's Paradox of Tolerance - he has a Philosophy PhD, let us remember - but he neglects to mention it at any point, even when it would be massively relevant.

Again, I only read half the book. Hughes may have turned the whole thing around in the back end and explicitly called out rising fascism worldwide. But I really doubt it. So I stopped reading.

Abandoned Books: The Humbling by Philip Roth

I haven't done an "Abandoned Book" post in eight years: that's longer than I thought. I'm sure I gave up on books in the meantime, but maybe I didn't have anything to say about them.

Philip Roth's The Humbling is a short novel, maybe actually a novella, published in 2008 when its author was seventy-five. He only wrote one more book, which came out the next year, but lived for another decade. And I've never read any Roth before, despite having a number of his books lying around for years and year.

So I read almost half of this - 60 of 138 pages - and decided I didn't want to go on any further. It was meandering to that point, in a way I was worried indicated an old writer losing control of his powers, but that wasn't the problem. It was very talky, the opposite of "show, don't tell," but I'd generally enjoyed that voice for the first fifty pages or so.

No, there was a sexual-politics element starting up, which I suspect may be the central element of this short book, and I was arguing with it strongly in my head. I had the feeling I was deeply out of sympathy with what Roth was doing, and that gap was only going to get wider as the novel went on. (To state one piece of it: trans people are not rejecting their current partners in their quest to become their true selves. I suspect it's more often absolutely the opposite of that. Roth, I'm afraid, bluntly stated that a lesbian woman committed the worst treason possible to her partner by transitioning to male.)

So I was the wrong reader, or it was the wrong time, and I noped out. No insult to the book, which I didn't quite read half of. I still plan to try Roth again, though I think I'll go earlier in his career for the next attempt - maybe I'll just hit Portnoy's Complaint to be obvious.

Abandoned Books: 50 Popular Beliefs People Think Are True by Guy P. Harrison

I'm a skeptic of long-standing -- I read a pile of James Randi in my mis-spent youth, and had a subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer for at least fifteen years. (I think I finally let it lapse in my personal magazine-pocalypse of the late '90s, when I realized I had more than a year's worth of about five magazines sitting unread and decided I wasn't as much of a magazine reader as I'd thought I was.) So I thought I was exactly the right audience for Harrison's 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True, a recent publication from Prometheus Books, part of that same upstate New York skeptical nexus with SI and the organization I still think of as CSICOP (though now just CSI for almost a decade).

Harrison's book runs through a whole bunch of popular paranormal, pseudo-scientific, and other beliefs not overly burdened with proof, from Nostradamus and psychics to flying saucers and astrology, from homeopathy and anti-vaccination theories to creationism and the power of prayer, from ghosts and Bigfoot to Atlantis and end-of-the-world prophecies. He gives each theory five or eight pages, in a breezy, journalistic style, and explains why each of them is not, strictly speaking, true.

I read about half of it before I stopped, and I stopped only because Harrison was telling me things I already knew, and telling me them in less detail than I already knew. If Harrison was a flashier writer, or more  aggressive in his investigations, I would have read further, but it's a good basic book by someone trying hard not to alienate an audience of believers in the irrational. I am happy to see that therapeutic touch and "memory water" have been debunked enough that they don't need to be included here, though disappointed that ancient astronauts and the Bermuda Triangle are still going strong in the public mind.

This is an excellent introduction to the skeptical literature, with extensive lists of resources in each chapter and a tone that verges on the conciliatory at times; Harrison bends over backward to be fair to people who believe in stupid, irrational things for no good reason. Even the title bends in that direction: it implies but does not actually say that these beliefs are of note because they're not true.

I didn't need to finish 50 Popular Beliefs myself, but I was thrilled to see that my local library had it, and I hope it circulates widely. It's an excellent handbook of the current catalog of popular irrational beliefs, and, I hope, a signpost on the road to knowledge to many people who ignorantly believe one or more of those things. It's probably a rude gift to give to that astrology-loving friend -- and he might not read it anyway -- but it should do some good in the world, and I'm very happy to see it exists.

Abandonded Books: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

It is, of course, a cheat to review a book one hasn't read, or hasn't finished. So then this, by definition, is not a review. It's a notice, or a series of thoughts, or an admission of defeat. It's many things, potentially. In practice, it's likely to be a very short post on a book that I just wasn't in the right mood for.

Swamplandia! is Karen Russell's first novel; she'd previously published a book of stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which I read and reviewed back in 2007. Swamplandia! is the story of a quirky family, running a slowly failing alligator-themed amusement park, somewhere off the Gulf coast of Florida, sometime in the last few decades. There's the gruff-but-loving father, the seemingly-perfect-because-she-just-died mother, and three adolescent children, each with their own problems.

That's not nearly enough people to run even a small amusement park -- it's barely enough people to run a single amusement -- and that was only the first of my problems with Swamplandia! This is a very literary novel, full of conceits that Russell carefully crafted to tell her quirky, oddball story. And I soon came to realize that, for whatever reason, I couldn't believe in any of them -- not the park Swamplandia! itself, not the fake-Indian background of the family, not the rotting library on a sinking boat, not the rival World of Darkness theme park, not even the narrative voice of precocious teenager Ava Bigtree. And, if you can't manage to suspend your disbelief for a book, that book is just not for you.

I'm disappointed; Swamplandia! has gotten excellent reviews, and it sounded like the kind of book I would like. It may be the kind of book you'd like, so don't take this is a dis-recommendation. But I've moved on, not without sadness, and I'm now in the middle of another book I can't believe a word of, which I'm afraid I will finish, for an external reason.

Addendum: That unnamed book in the last paragraph was Mira Grant's Feed, which I was somewhat more vituperative about not enjoying.

Abandoned Books: Elsewhere, U.S.A. by Dalton Conley

It's been a while since I had to punt on a book, but it's that time again. I got almost a quarter of the way [1] into this look at the changes in private life over the past few decades, but I finally couldn't stand:

• Conley's relentless flood of tone-deaf neologisms, from intravidualism to weisure to convestment
• His insistence of making sweeping judgements about how vast swaths of the American public lives, based on the lives of himself and his fellow top 1/10th of 1%-ers
• A related misunderstanding that his hyper-scheduled, jet-setting New York elite life is not widely shared by more than a few thousand people
• A vast disinterest in talking honestly about class -- in the cultural, socio-economic sense -- signposted by a quick family history through his small-town lower-upper class grandparents, his bohemian upper-middle parents, and his own urban, supposedly meritocratic position in what I'm sure he'd call the upper middle class, at no point of which does he mention or even clearly think of class.
  

Elsewhere, U.S.A. may settle down to talking about issues of wider applicability, but, at the point at which I bailed out, it had a laser-like focus on the ennui and disappointment of a tiny sliver of vastly underprivileged whiners, and of trying to determine why they have all of the money in the USA and still aren't that happy. When my fingers started itching for a torch or pitchfork -- instead of finding myself sympathizing with these cretins, as Conley clearly intended -- it was time to go.

If you find that newspaper trend articles perfectly encapsulate your life, if you're affluent and urban and over-scheduled and a parent, if you're a "knowledge worker" who often doubts your own knowledge...then Elsewhere, U.S.A. will be right up your alley. If not, I'd go elsewhere.

[1] That sounds much more impressive than it is; it's not even 200 pages long.

Abandoned Books: The Extra by Michael Shea

It's a dangerous, and usually futile, thing to try to work out a writer's politics from his books. So I can't say whether The Extra features a background out of a right-winger's fever dream on purpose, or if it's merely the background that enabled the story Michael Shea wanted to tell, or even if this grungy dystopia is just another off-the-rack Nasty Future, something stuck in the back of a high shelf somewhere around 1971 and only lightly dusted off for modern consumption.

The world of The Extra -- at least as far as I could figure it out from the first third -- is less a near-future than an alternate present, a 2010 where all of the worst fears of the '60s and '70s came true, a belated companion piece to Stand on Zanzibar and Night of Power and Make Room! Make Room! The closest I found to an explanation of how this world came to be was on p.69:

Once the Corps got full globalization, had bought all the governments and staffed them with Corps, what had to happen? So many poor in the world, all wages sank. That Zoo was a Malthus zone now. It had to be a place many died every day, just like the Ag-worker Zone, miles and miles of it to the east and south. Because to run the world smoothly, the Corps only needed enough people to buy their products, and enough of the desperate to fill their hard and high-risk jobs. Just enough to nourish a seed crop of the poor.

Note well the sinister forces of globalization, and the teeming (dark-skinned) hordes tearing down the comfortable lives of we sad Westerners. Note, also, that the shadowy organization behind this -- not explained as far as I got into The Extra -- is "the Corps." In American culture, that brings to mind two things: the Marines and the Peace Corps...and I don't think these are the Marines. Note, thirdly, the inevitable Hobbesian war of all against all, which means that The Extra is full of people whom government has failed, who have to fight for themselves, start their own capitalistic schemes to make money, and who band together in heavily armed community associations to guard their meager wealth from the vast slavering hordes of proles. And economic activity means that a few very rich people make things that a few very rich people buy, and somehow they all stay very rich, and are protected from the ravening hordes by the requisite army of goons.

(This also is a world in which corporations don't understand simple economic laws, such as the fact that you won't have many customers if no one has any money, and that chaos is universally bad for business. It also runs counter to the actual history of the last four decades, but let that pass for now; I've already called it an alternate present, so it has an excuse.)

But, wait, there's more. Where do these downtrodden deserving poor dream of fleeing to? Why, the golden land of self-sufficiency, of subsistence farming and small-town America:

Inland lay the west foothills of the Sierra, and upland, the Trinities...broad stretches of Oregon and Washington. There were a lot of vital little towns, whole counties of working towns out there. A quarter mil in the municipal account made you a taxpayer in good standing with five years' credit and bought you some decent fire and law enforcement protection; another quarter mil bought you up to twenty acres of plantable soul, water. A hundred grand more would buy your vehicle, tools, and building materials besides whatever stone and lumber you harvested on your acres. (p.56)

Remember, cities are hives of evil and villainy, where no economic activity can take place and violence runs riot. The countryside is the home of upright, libertarian men and women, who will graciously let you buy your way in. (I'm honestly surprised Shea doesn't require gold ingots to do that buying; it otherwise sounds like a goldbug's paradise.)

Along the same lines, note here that, somehow, "vehicle, tools, and building materials" spring from small towns rather than from any industrial activity. Perhaps they grow on that plantable soil?

As usual in a dystopia, there's a huge underclass -- mostly violent and lawless, with a few Good Eggs thrown in for contrast -- a very thin middle class, mostly being shoved into poverty and from whose ranks come our heroes, and the few decadent, nasty, cruel rich (here seen, so far, just in the person of Val Margolian, a James Cameron-esque director of "vids").

So: violence is everywhere. Fleeing to somewhere safer requires great wealth. And the only way to get that wealth is by doing dangerous things -- either the usual illegal ones, or...signing on as an "extra" in "live-action" disaster spectaculars, which have been the dominant genre of audiovisual entertainment for twenty years. In those vids, plot is subordinated to spectacle, and the vids themselves seem to be very little more than a documentary of the violent deaths of those "extras," with the director's job primarily to create a scenario (and the various nasty mechanical killing machines that go with it) and then, afterward, to cut footage from a million cameras together into the most aesthetically pleasing episode of Faces of Death possible.

Shea's first big mistake here is in conflating the appeal of slasher and disaster movies -- the former is far less popular, generally being loved only by the young, while the point of the latter is that the audience identifies with a handful of people who, despite all the odds, survive. His second mistake is in discounting the interest that audiences have in even the vaguest storyline, which these "live-action vids" would seem to disallow -- unless the giant scenes of carnage are cut together with more conventional footage of actual actors involved in something like a plot.

(For a smarter take on very much the same trope, see Matthew Woodring Stover's "Caine" novels -- Stover realizes that audiences are more interested in cheering on the killers than in counting the killed.)

As I was trying to make sense of all of this, I found my interest ebbing lower by the page, and my eyes darting away, desperate to look at anything but more words about how grimy and nasty this society was. I didn't believe a moment of it, and I found myself hoping that Shea didn't believe it. (He lives in San Francisco, after all!) I'm sure The Extra has its virtues, but its shabby, second-hand dystopian setting soured me for whatever those virtues might be. (I haven't even gotten into the fact that The Extra's downtrodden main characters -- the plucky deserving poor -- seem to all be minorities, the few good folks of their color trying to rise through society due to their own pluck and determination, without any government help.)

I was hoping to like The Extras, since I've enjoyed a lot of Shea's previous work. But, in the end, I had to punt. Oh, well -- there are always other books.
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Listening to: Beautiful Supermachines - The War Against Cliche
via FoxyTunes

Abandoned Books: And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer

It would be unfair, and arguably wrong, to say that Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series went straight downhill from the beginning. Even the most crazed fan has to admit that the records were just as good as the original radio show, and that the Infocom game is possibly even better. But, if the conversation is restricted to the books, then there would be much less argument. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the funniest and best of the lot, both The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, the Universe, and Everything have real strengths, and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is only faintly embarrassing. (We don't talk about Mostly Harmless, the book reportedly finished on a flight into Los Angeles for a major book trade show, because it's not nice to speak ill of the dead.)

There is no sign at all that And Another Thing..., the unnecessary but inevitable continuation of Adams's series by Eoin Colfer, is anywhere near as bad as Mostly Harmless. In fact, it's probably, by all objective standards, a better book than So Long. But it's not by Douglas Adams, and that becomes apparent in a thousand small ways as the book goes on -- the characters speak in un-Adamsly ways, are overly emotional (and the wrong kind of emotional), and the plot shows suspicious signs of actually having been thought through and kept organized. Another Thing is at least a half-decent humorous SF novel featuring characters named "Arthur Dent" and "Ford Prefect," but it doesn't succeed at raising the ghost of Douglas Adams. It couldn't have done that, of course. But all those of us who try to read it are hoping for that. Another Thing also has the usual fault of a continuation by other hands: it relies too heavily on the reader's memory of the original Douglas Adams jokes (lots of bits supposedly from the Guide itself, the return of Vogons, the Heart of Gold, and so on -- I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that Marvin shows up before the end, too) instead of doing the same sort of thing in a new way.

So I gave up on Another Thing about ninety pages in, roughly a third of the way through. It's not Adams, and I'm no longer the ten-year-old who first read Hitchhiker. You can't go home again, death is final, but commerce is eternal.

But I just might try one of Colfer's own novels; he's funny pretty consistently here, though the Adams-isms are sometimes too florid and overworked. (Not to say that Adams didn't get that way himself, because he did. Again, this is better than about half of the writing Adams did in this milieu.) I wish this book didn't exist, but the world doesn't exist to please me. I can only hope that most readers of Another Thing are happier with the beating-So Long part of it than they are disappointed with the Colfer-isn't-Adams part. Don't let me stop you from reading Another Thing -- but go into it with reasonable expectations, please.

Abandoned Books: The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens

This is not a review; I only read the first 79 pages of The Sheriff of Yrnameer, and I can't speak at all to the remaining 190 pages. It may become the greatest novel in the history of the universe in that space, for all I know. But I didn't expect it would, so I put it down quietly, and I don't expect to pick it back up again. We all make our choices in life.

Sheriff of Yrnameer is the first novel by a TV writer/producer, and I have to admit that I assumed it would be lousy as soon as I saw that. It's petty and reductive of me, and I regret it, but it's true. It's supposedly satirical as well -- Yrnameer is a corruption of "Your Name Here," and the planet of that name is the fabled Last Unbranded Outpost of Freedom in a Corporately Controlled Galaxy.

I was hoping that Rubens would show some small sign that he'd ever read Fredric Brown, or Bob Sheckley, or Fred Pohl -- any of the mid-'50s Galaxy stable, to which Yrnameer owes everything -- or even Douglas Adams. (I was beyond hoping for a reference to John Sladek; that would have been too much hope.) I didn't get any of those...in the first 79 pages, of course.

The pages I read of Yrnameer are set in that terribly familiar circa-1960 default future Milky Way -- full of planets that it's easy to get to, and alien races that are physically bizarre but psychologically just like the carpenters of Levittown. Ron Goulart did versions of that setting -- but he did them funnier than this, he did them three times a year or so, and he did them in paperback about forty years ago.

I have the terrible feeling that Yrnameer is supposed to be funny, as well. Now, humor is famously relative, so you shouldn't necessarily take my word for it, but...it isn't funny. Not a bit. (Well, not at all in those 79 pages. Perhaps the other 190 are sparkling with Coward-ian wit.)

I could go on, but why? Yrnameer has taken the most basic and degraded furniture of SF from fifty years ago and found new bland things to do with it. That's an achievement of a sort, I suppose.

When books like this get published I shudder for humanity. Or at least the part of humanity that toils in publishing companies, as I do. If you want to read a SF novel this year, please at least read one by someone whose read a SF novel from the last four decades? Please?

Abandoned Books: Jetpack Dreams by Mac Montandon

I've just made a new rule for myself, though I'll have to see how long it lasts: if I think about dropping a book in the middle more than twice, I'll just do it, and move on to something else. (If I find myself reading two chapters and then dropping everything, I'll have to reconsider the rule -- or my criteria for picking a book up in the first place.)

I obviously can't review Mac Montandon's Jetpack Dreams; I've only read about half of it. And I was mostly enjoying it as I was reading it, too.

But I came to think that Montandon was far, far more interested in jetpacks than I ever would be, and that I was becoming less interested as the book went on. (Obviously Montandon liked jetpacks -- he wrote a whole book about them! -- but I thought I did, too. It's weird to discover that some geeky thing that you assumed you liked is actually not all that compelling, once you get down to it.)

Jetpack Dreams was an interesting read as far as I went; Montandon has done both his historical research and his contemporary legwork. And I doubt there will be a better book about jetpacks in my lifetime -- there may never be another book about jetpacks in my lifetime.

If you like jetpacks as much as I thought I did -- or if you are just somewhat interested and less ambivalent than I seem to be this week -- you might well find a lot to like in Jetpack Dreams. But I'm going to pick something else up, and see if I can finish that.