Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Just finished: The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez. It's not even halfway through the year but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is going to be at or near the top of my list of best books I've read in 2023. Every aspect of this book is transcendent. The prose alone sucked me in, but I stayed for the structural experimentation, the fever-dream-made-flesh worldbuilding, the compelling characters, the slow-burn joy of a love story set against the emotional devastation of war and oppression, the deconstruction of how history and stories are made and unmade. It's luminous. I need everyone to go read it so I'm not alone. This is what high fantasy can do, is always capable of doing though it seldom reaches heights like this, this is why I fell in love with the genre. It's pure poetry. Just incredible.

Desert by Anonymous. This is a tract from 2011 that has been making the rounds in online anarchist circles as of late. I think 2011 was still during my breakup with anarchism and also I had more urgent matters than being online at the time, which might explain why I hadn't heard of it lately. But I listened to a podcast on it and downloaded it out of curiosity. I meant to read something else on the train back this weekend but the other thing was very long and wouldn't load, so I flipped through my many downloaded books to see what else there was to read that was short. And there was this.

I am always on the lookout for books that are about how we live in the ruins that previous generations have left us, and this book, I thought, was that. Which it's not. It's not even that doomer, as it's often described. It's bog-standard anti-civ fantasizing, which is only rendered slightly understandable due to the book's timing, when its author was no doubt as disillusioned by Occupy's failures as I was at the time. But besides that it's really nothing you haven't seen before if you've read Future Primitive or had a crust punk crash on your couch until they'd stained the whole thing brown. 

The thing is, it's not all garbage or no one would talk about it. The introductory assaults on optimism are a good reality check! The ending isn't bad. Unfortunately there's a lot of Malthusian junk in the middle that borders on eco-fascism, with the author falling victim to the same Millenarianism that they accuse the anarchist movement of having in the first chapter. The tantalizing appeal of anarcho-primitivism is that, of course, you, the anarcho-primitivist, don't actually have to do anything. Civilization will fall on its own. 90% of humanity will die on its own, allowing you, the intrepid vagabond gatherer-hunter, to live in its ruins. Anonymous is slightly more nuanced than that in that they posit that civilization will carry on in temperate zones in a sort of walled-off state, which is more likely to be true given the patterns we're seeing, but they still fall victim to the same sense of historic inevitability that also annoys me when Marxists do it.

(I say they, but definitely a cis dude wrote this. You can tell, reading it, that this person has never had to deal with menstruation, pregnancy, hormone therapy, or disability. This is nearly always a demographic certainty with anti-civ types.)

There's interesting stuff in here, particularly about African rural anarchist-adjacent tendencies, but given their cursory understanding of agriculture, cities, and food production and given that they're British, I don't know how accurate it is. And it is, in places, beautifully written, especially the passages on weeds and the wilderness.

The thing is, the political tendency best poised to ascend during and after climate collapse is eco-fascism, not anti-civ/anarcho-primitivism, despite both being relatively small movements now and the latter likely being slightly larger than the former. Anarcho-primitivism is an ideological dead end. Maybe everything else is too but at least we should put some effort in.

You can make an interesting comparison to Malm's How To Blow Up a Pipeline, in that they both begin from a similar premise (in Elizabeth Sandifer's immortal words, "Let us assume that we are fucked."). But I am certain that Malm actually has grounding in science, theory, and praxis—in fact, he confesses to several actions in that book that are definitely crimes—and it's a vastly better book. Not because it's more optimistic, but because it doesn't presume inevitability and because its hope is grounded in realism rather than fantasy.

Currently reading: Maej by Dale Stromberg. This was the book I meant to start on the train! It's in ARC form so you can't read it, even though I am fairly certain I'll love it and you'll love it. It's a big doorstopper high fantasy with gorgeous writing. I'm only a chapter in.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Whale Weekly folks feasted well yesterday—three chapters! We begin with Queequeg and Ishmael being cute and domestic together, weaving mats, when there is a WHALE SIGHTING. Yeah we're at chapter 47 in a book about whales and whaling before there are actual whales. I love this book, wtf.

Anyway it turns out that Ahab has smuggled aboard a secret group of racial stereotypes that no one else knew about, and the crew gives chase. They fail to kill any whales (good) and Ishmael and the others almost drown. Also Moby Dick is not among the whales. Ishmael, despite having a lot to say about whaling in earlier chapters, in fact reveals that he does not know fuck all about shit and asks some other folks whether this is normal. They reply that it is. He then goes and writes his will, leaving everything to his husband Queequeg, and feels better about life.

Comments

[nyctanthes]

Have put a hold on The Spear Cuts Through Water. I am intrigued!

I love Moby Dick (and your read has been fun to follow). I want to re-read it this summer.

[sabotabby]

I hope you love it!

Moby Dick is so much more fun than I thought it would be.

[marlowe1]

I think everyone claiming that it was a boring book about plankton really helped to sell it once I read it. Like holy shit, this is amazing and while there's a bit of an obsessive quality (like you are trapped in a room with a guy who has one topic that he REALLY loves - so it's like a science fiction convention) that's part of the charm.

In the Extraordinary Attorney Woo she's obsessed with whales. Now she has "cute autism" meaning that her autism makes her into a manic pixie dream girl most of the time and it really exaggerates bits like not wanting to make eye contact (like she looks at the wall so the person she is talking to is looking at her ear) but the whole Moby Dick is a book for people on the spectrum part is rather brilliant.

[sabotabby]

I made a Predator meme where the hands are Woo and Ishmael shaking on "whale facts no one asked for."

But yes. That is absolutely part of the charm of both.

[grimjim]

It is curious (and speaks to motivated cognition) how many "historic inevitability" types are blind to the probable scenario where anarcho-primitivists will lose out in tribal competition just like early farmers were eventually forced to become serfs at proverbial swordpoint to warlords who positioned themselves as royalty.

[sabotabby]

I think some comparisons can be drawn to Cory Doctorow’s “Walkaway,” which posits a high-tech nomadism. Which, though sci-fi, still posits a more realistic “well we’d just move somewhere else” strategy than “Desert” does. Either way primitive accumulation is gonna accumulate.

[dewline]

To Hell with inevitability.

[sabotabby]

My opposition to the idea of historical inevitability is not just ideological but is twofold. For one, no one can agree what this inevitability looks like, which means there’s a good chance anyone talking about it is wrong. But secondly and related it’s a matter of how you behave if you believe in inevitability. Both Anonymous and Malm articulate similar visions of the probable future and what activists can do, but following on Anonymous’ logic, there is no urgent need to do anything. If you’re in the first world, which is the majority of his readership, you can be a nomadic weed and resist or you can sit back and relax while someone else polices the borders, and it doesn’t make a difference one way or the other. But Malm’s structure requires responsibility, both individual and collective, from everyone, even if the fight does turn out to be hopeless. And the latter may not make for a better future but it sure as fuck makes for a better present.

[marlowe1]

Before Taleb went insane, he had one good argument (which he made over and over again - don't think he needed two books to make it) which is that Black Swans happen all the time. No matter how much we think that we know what is going to happen, something always comes along to disrupt the markets and disrupt the history. Whether it's 9/11 or the rise of social media, there's always something that is going to shock people. Hell, just think of all those poor bastards in Constantinople who had won a few victories and thought they could bring back the glory of Rome only to suddenly have to deal with Islam.

From that I'm very annoyed with any news story about "study says that if things stay as they are there would be more old people in China than young people" or the like. Things never stay as they are especially not over the course of 50 years.

[sabotabby]

1000%.

There are a bunch of factors that Anonymous just glosses over because they don't fit with his thesis.

[blogcutter]

Moby Dick is one of those books I always felt I ought to read but had zero inclination to do so. I still may not get to it in my lifetime but your comments along with those of Sarah Hart in Once Upon a Prime may prompt me to at least chapter-surf it. The Sarah Hart book is subtitled "The wondrous connections between mathematics and literature" and Chapter 6, Ahab's Arithmetic, delves into Melville's mathematical preoccupations in his works, with an emphasis on Moby Dick.

[sabotabby]

Huh, I hadn’t noticed the math. But it seriously is a great read. Whatever people have said about being forced to read it, it’s genuinely good and weird.

[dissectionist]

Upon reading that chapter, I realized that I need to make friends with someone who throws bukkake kink events, solely so I can hang a banner at one of them that says, “There’s hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm’s the play!”

[sabotabby]

Omfg.

I mean Melville was gay, he definitely knew what he was doing with those lines.

[marlowe1]

I think I told you this already, but I looked up "dick" as a euphemism for penis. It totally meant penis when Moby Dick was published.

[minoanmiss]

*reads and continues reading*

[sabotabby]

:D

[dagibbs]

I've added _The Spear Cuts Through Water_ to my to-buy list.

[sabotabby]

Yay! I think you'll love it.

[greylock]

I will never read Moby Dick, but I am very much enjoying your retelling.

[sabotabby]

You are missing out on hilarious whale bullshit.

[greylock]

I may be, but I am much preferring readings books I want, and enjoying your distillation.

And if I want to suffer literary huff, I have that too. It may involve ghosts!