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Reading Wednesday
Dec. 9th, 2020 04:18 pmJust finished: Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century by Andreas Malm. This was really good and I still forget who recommended it to me. But it's a tightly written, clever look at the connections and parallels between the current emergency and the long emergency. Malm's focus is largely on the environmental causes of COVID, in particular the destruction of bat habitat that makes this and future pandemics inevitable.
As with much Marxist writing, while I agree with the premise and what needs to be done, I tend to frown a bit on the implementation. He makes good arguments but even if more is needed than a pivot to green energy, I don't know if it's socially helpful to demand energy austerity from the working class of the First World. I mean, hell, I agree that the West has been exploiting the Global South and needs to drastically reduce its footprint and compensate those it has so royally fucked over, but also I like to fly, y'know? How is someone invested in the tenuous privileges that Western life affords going to go along with this, even if the end result is "better for everyone?" But he does include a lot of pragmatics, which as a pragmatist myself I appreciate.
I still prefer fully automated luxury space communism, what can I say?
Anyway, this is a concise, smart book that everyone should read.
Currently reading: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente. I'm so late to the party on this. I remember when it came out and I was like, daaaamn this sounds amazing, and then there were a million holds so I waited until the hype died down.
But it is so amazing. I'm going to give Valente the highest praise I can give a writer, which is that she writes like the living reincarnation of Douglas Adams. Her narrative voice is so good that a few pages in I wanted to cry and give up writing forever. It's stylistically wildly different from other other stuff, which is amazing in different directions.
The story follows Decibel Jones, a washed-up former glam rock star in England. He's recruited by an alien civilization to represent humanity in Space Eurovision, which was founded to avoid various intergalactic civilizations from just straight-up murdering each other. The central question to spacefaring civilizations is that with a diversity of life in the universe, who counts as people and who counts as meat? While many creatures have language, or the ability to use tools, or self-awareness, only truly sentient creatures can create a pop song. With the fate of the Earth in the balance (losing the contest means annihilation), Decibel must get his shit together and sing to prove that humanity is worth keeping around.
This is just a delight to read. Every sentence is a sparkling gem of wit and I utterly love her little digressions and descriptions of alien civilizations and alien music, and it's just hilarious and pointedly political. I'm about two-thirds through so hopefully the rest is as much fun.
As with much Marxist writing, while I agree with the premise and what needs to be done, I tend to frown a bit on the implementation. He makes good arguments but even if more is needed than a pivot to green energy, I don't know if it's socially helpful to demand energy austerity from the working class of the First World. I mean, hell, I agree that the West has been exploiting the Global South and needs to drastically reduce its footprint and compensate those it has so royally fucked over, but also I like to fly, y'know? How is someone invested in the tenuous privileges that Western life affords going to go along with this, even if the end result is "better for everyone?" But he does include a lot of pragmatics, which as a pragmatist myself I appreciate.
I still prefer fully automated luxury space communism, what can I say?
Anyway, this is a concise, smart book that everyone should read.
Currently reading: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente. I'm so late to the party on this. I remember when it came out and I was like, daaaamn this sounds amazing, and then there were a million holds so I waited until the hype died down.
But it is so amazing. I'm going to give Valente the highest praise I can give a writer, which is that she writes like the living reincarnation of Douglas Adams. Her narrative voice is so good that a few pages in I wanted to cry and give up writing forever. It's stylistically wildly different from other other stuff, which is amazing in different directions.
The story follows Decibel Jones, a washed-up former glam rock star in England. He's recruited by an alien civilization to represent humanity in Space Eurovision, which was founded to avoid various intergalactic civilizations from just straight-up murdering each other. The central question to spacefaring civilizations is that with a diversity of life in the universe, who counts as people and who counts as meat? While many creatures have language, or the ability to use tools, or self-awareness, only truly sentient creatures can create a pop song. With the fate of the Earth in the balance (losing the contest means annihilation), Decibel must get his shit together and sing to prove that humanity is worth keeping around.
This is just a delight to read. Every sentence is a sparkling gem of wit and I utterly love her little digressions and descriptions of alien civilizations and alien music, and it's just hilarious and pointedly political. I'm about two-thirds through so hopefully the rest is as much fun.
