Reading Wednesday
Jan. 19th, 2022 05:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyLots to get through here, so I will just have to overcome the lack of oxygen to my brain.*
Just finished: Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. She probably needs her own rating scale because while I didn't love this as much as Signal to Noise or Mexican Gothic, it's still vastly better than most things. It's got the noir ambiance, the radical politics and state repression of Mexico in the 70s, the flawed characters, the moody rock n' roll soundtrack, so I loved it. Also I have never seen a fairly brutal noir plot triggered by cat-sitting, and that is just a brilliant feat of creativity. I just didn't bond with it as strongly as some of her others. I think it's because the two protagonists are a himbo and a fembo respectively—they're interesting and complex, but I prefer the craftier protagonists of her other books. Overall, though, I deeply enjoyed it and would recommend.
The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer. This one was absolutely devastating. It's about Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, and after. A military officer confesses to torturing prisoners to a magazine, and a filmmaker who grew up amid some of his atrocities tries to reconstruct her memory and the memories of the dead, their families, and the perpetrators. It's poetic and evocative and haunting. And it raises a question, which I don't see examined in literature enough, about what happens after an authoritarian regime. What degree of justice or exhumation can a society bear without collapsing?
I live in a city where we have a large Chilean exile population, a number of whom I'm friends with, and I know people who escaped and one who was tortured under Pinochet's regime. By a weird coincidence, the night before Pinochet's death was announced, I was at a party with a bunch of survivors and their children. So it's something that I know a fair bit about in broad strokes, but Fernández describes it on an intimate level of families and neighbourhoods, and it's intense and visceral.
Currently reading: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Get used to hearing a lot about this because it's a 700-page long tome. But it's a highly readable 700-page long tome so hopefully I'll get through it before it expires.
First of all the fact that we no longer have David Graeber is a massive loss to humanity and I'm having a hard time getting over it. He was truly one of the great minds of our age, and also by all accounts a really nice guy. The first few chapters just drive in how smart he was, and how good at getting really challenging ideas across in an accessible way. He died three weeks after the book was completed and it's just not fair.
This book is a collaboration between Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, to re-evaluate what we think we know about early human history. They are really asking questions that blow your mind the second they're asked. I remember, for example, learning about the progression from hunter-gatherer society to pastoralism to agrarian societies, with the agrarian society being supposedly the origins of the state and hierarchy. Except, as the authors point out, pastoralism wasn't a thing in Europe so how could humans inevitably and naturally progress through these stages? And then they take apart the framing of Rousseau vs. Hobbes on whether said hunter-gatherers were peaceful egalitarians whose utopian society must tragically give way to civilization, or warlike and brutish and saved by order and hierarchy. A more interesting question, to the authors, is how the debate arose in the first place. Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality was a response to an essay contest that asked the question "What is the origin of inequality among people, and is it authorized by natural law?". However, through most of its history, European cultures assumed hierarchy and inequality were natural facts, so what were the circumstances that led up to the sort of cultural shift that had the academy thinking about equality vs. inequality?
(Spoiler: It's the colonization of Turtle Island, and the book has an absolutely fascinating in-depth examination of the influence of Indigenous thought and philosophy on the Enlightenment.)
There's also a lot of really great debunking of the Great Man Theory of History, which has been thoroughly debunked but not as thoroughly as it needs to be, since even Marxists are guilty of that kind of thinking on occasion. By framing intellectual milestones as basically pub talk that someone eventually wrote down, they are able to reevaluate where these ideas come from and what influences them.
It's really interesting. It is making me want to look up my Ancient Civ teacher and talk about it with him. I'm sure he's read it by now.
One caveat is that there have been a lot of attacks on Graeber's research and the sloppiness thereof. I don't have an academic understanding of any of the periods talked about to be able to say how accurate that is, but I do wonder how much of it is because he died so soon after writing it and no one wanted to touch the manuscript. I think in broad strokes though, he tends to be right about most things, but once I'm done I will read the detailed critiques.
Just finished: Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. She probably needs her own rating scale because while I didn't love this as much as Signal to Noise or Mexican Gothic, it's still vastly better than most things. It's got the noir ambiance, the radical politics and state repression of Mexico in the 70s, the flawed characters, the moody rock n' roll soundtrack, so I loved it. Also I have never seen a fairly brutal noir plot triggered by cat-sitting, and that is just a brilliant feat of creativity. I just didn't bond with it as strongly as some of her others. I think it's because the two protagonists are a himbo and a fembo respectively—they're interesting and complex, but I prefer the craftier protagonists of her other books. Overall, though, I deeply enjoyed it and would recommend.
The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer. This one was absolutely devastating. It's about Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, and after. A military officer confesses to torturing prisoners to a magazine, and a filmmaker who grew up amid some of his atrocities tries to reconstruct her memory and the memories of the dead, their families, and the perpetrators. It's poetic and evocative and haunting. And it raises a question, which I don't see examined in literature enough, about what happens after an authoritarian regime. What degree of justice or exhumation can a society bear without collapsing?
I live in a city where we have a large Chilean exile population, a number of whom I'm friends with, and I know people who escaped and one who was tortured under Pinochet's regime. By a weird coincidence, the night before Pinochet's death was announced, I was at a party with a bunch of survivors and their children. So it's something that I know a fair bit about in broad strokes, but Fernández describes it on an intimate level of families and neighbourhoods, and it's intense and visceral.
Currently reading: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Get used to hearing a lot about this because it's a 700-page long tome. But it's a highly readable 700-page long tome so hopefully I'll get through it before it expires.
First of all the fact that we no longer have David Graeber is a massive loss to humanity and I'm having a hard time getting over it. He was truly one of the great minds of our age, and also by all accounts a really nice guy. The first few chapters just drive in how smart he was, and how good at getting really challenging ideas across in an accessible way. He died three weeks after the book was completed and it's just not fair.
This book is a collaboration between Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, to re-evaluate what we think we know about early human history. They are really asking questions that blow your mind the second they're asked. I remember, for example, learning about the progression from hunter-gatherer society to pastoralism to agrarian societies, with the agrarian society being supposedly the origins of the state and hierarchy. Except, as the authors point out, pastoralism wasn't a thing in Europe so how could humans inevitably and naturally progress through these stages? And then they take apart the framing of Rousseau vs. Hobbes on whether said hunter-gatherers were peaceful egalitarians whose utopian society must tragically give way to civilization, or warlike and brutish and saved by order and hierarchy. A more interesting question, to the authors, is how the debate arose in the first place. Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality was a response to an essay contest that asked the question "What is the origin of inequality among people, and is it authorized by natural law?". However, through most of its history, European cultures assumed hierarchy and inequality were natural facts, so what were the circumstances that led up to the sort of cultural shift that had the academy thinking about equality vs. inequality?
(Spoiler: It's the colonization of Turtle Island, and the book has an absolutely fascinating in-depth examination of the influence of Indigenous thought and philosophy on the Enlightenment.)
There's also a lot of really great debunking of the Great Man Theory of History, which has been thoroughly debunked but not as thoroughly as it needs to be, since even Marxists are guilty of that kind of thinking on occasion. By framing intellectual milestones as basically pub talk that someone eventually wrote down, they are able to reevaluate where these ideas come from and what influences them.
It's really interesting. It is making me want to look up my Ancient Civ teacher and talk about it with him. I'm sure he's read it by now.
One caveat is that there have been a lot of attacks on Graeber's research and the sloppiness thereof. I don't have an academic understanding of any of the periods talked about to be able to say how accurate that is, but I do wonder how much of it is because he died so soon after writing it and no one wanted to touch the manuscript. I think in broad strokes though, he tends to be right about most things, but once I'm done I will read the detailed critiques.
* The good news is that we got N95s at work after 3 years of pandemic. The bad news is I can't breathe in them.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 12:34 am (UTC)I'm looking forward to The Dawn of Everything... once I've made it through Debt. :-)
no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 11:43 am (UTC)It's really good so far!
no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 01:14 am (UTC)For The Dawn of Everything - does it have a lot of footnotes and images? I badly want to read it, but am dithering about whether to get the paper book, audio book or ebook.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 11:44 am (UTC)There are tons of footnotes in The Dawn Of Everything and apparently images later on in the book. The footnotes are worth reading.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 03:12 am (UTC)They are jumping enthusiastically all over the toes of established scholars, so I expect the backlash to sting. But I actually think that is their goal: to rile people up and make them look again. It is certainly readably written - and I am enjoying the super-descripto headings of the chapters.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 11:46 am (UTC)The criticism I've seen isn't that they have the broad strokes of history wrong but that they got certain periods wrong. Ehhhh we'll see. I mean, it's a popular history book, not an academic text.
The Dawn of Everything
Date: 2022-01-20 04:34 am (UTC)Re: The Dawn of Everything
Date: 2022-01-20 11:48 am (UTC)Re: The Dawn of Everything
Date: 2022-01-20 03:27 pm (UTC)I liked Diamond, past tense deliberate -- now I really want to read critiques of him that are specific and build up the edifice of knowledge.
Re: The Dawn of Everything
Date: 2022-01-20 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 02:56 pm (UTC)Reminds me of posts I’ve seen on tumblr about how a number of phrases that currently seem on their way to becoming Famous Sayings have their origins in Dril tweets, fanfics, video-game dialogue, or were throwaway lines in an article whose author was slightly startled to find himself quoted so enthusiastically by millennials and gen-z.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-21 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-21 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-03 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-03 09:51 pm (UTC)