Review- Zebrowski, “The Omega Point”

January 28, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

George Zebrowski, “The Omega Point” (1972) – This is a quick scifi read about Gorgias, close-to-the-last of his race of human-descended inhabitants of the Herculean cluster, who fought humanity and lost big time. The Herculeans are drawn roughly like standard fantasy elves- smaller, more elegant, more sophisticated than humans, but frailer and fewer. Gorgias has the best spaceship around and uses it to zoom around and do terrorist strikes- taking out a composer who wrote a suite about the Earth-Herculean war, zapping warp drive beacons, and so on. He’s being hunted by Kurbi, a sensitive earthling who wants to take his man alive, so as to reproduce the Herculeans. This is both as reparations for Earth genociding them and due to some theory that humans need a rival or other in order to grow, etc. Ultimately, this sort of philosophizing takes over the book. After Gorgias does his last stand, he’s absorbed into the collective unconscious or noosphere or whatever you want to call it, which is very seventies-trippy and, naturally, stored in the mind of an attractive alien lady. It feels both like Zebrowski, an old scifi (and Star Trek!) hand, both ran out of ideas and followed his vision i.e. whatever he was reading about at the time. For better and for worse, the sort of book published used to insert cigarette ads into, like my copy. ***’

Review- Reed, “The Free-Lance Pallbearers”

January 23, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Ishmael Reed, “The Free-Lance Pallbearers” (1967) – Ishmael Reed is a fascinating and frustrating figure, who’s in the news again at the moment, having written a play critical of musical sensation “Hamilton” and its creator. At one point considered to be something like the future of American literature, between changes in fashion and his own pugnacious relationship with other writers, the years since the early 70s have seen his star wane, though never extinguish completely. I don’t have the space to do a full examination of Reed’s career, though I plan on writing about him extensively in my next birthday lecture. What I feel confident in saying is that Reed worked to build a first, countercultural, and rough (in multiple senses of the word) draft of multiculturalism- and doesn’t play well with the other versions.

Most of that was in the future when Reed published “The Free-Lance Pallbearers,” his first novel. Set in the city state of HARRY SAM, named after its dictator HARRY SAM (both always in all caps), it’s the tale of naive young theologian Bukka Doopeyduk. He encounters various types- surreal satirical versions of black radicals, black and white liberals, nosy neighbors, mean in-laws, etc. One of those in-laws hits him with a “hoodoo” that gives him horns and generally collapses his life. He gets cured, finds his way to the (toilet) seat of power, uncovers its dreadful secrets, leads a mob against it and is turned against by the mob. All in just over 150 pages!

In my experience, Reed isn’t read for plot. He came to describe his novels as “conjurings,” using language to summon up alternate states of being, visions of a different world, that he walks characters through, rather than undertaking plot and character development in the traditional sense. It’s experimental, but in a way that’s both intelligent and pleasingly non-highbrow, borrowing from history, pop culture, jazz, and the long history of black art on both sides of the Atlantic. You don’t always get what’s going on but it’s generally an interesting ride, and very self-assured for a first novel. Some of what would characterize Reed’s later difficult turns — issues with women, contrariness for its own sake, a sort of spiritually-elitist disdain — is there in seed form here. But the sting is part of the experience of this particular part of American literature. ****

Review- Farmer, “To Your Scattered Bodies Go”

January 22, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Philip José Farmer, “To Your Scattered Bodies Go” (1971) – My first go at one of the grand masters of scifi and the beginning of the “Riverworld” series. It was… fine. Certainly the concept is arresting. Someone took the whole population of humanity and reincarnated them into new, young, naked bodies along the course of an endless river. Everyone who ever lived is there, scattered in quasi-random linguistic/temporal groupings. They get food (and booze, and weed) from magic lunchpails someone issued them, and other than bamboo and stone, there’s not much to make stuff with.

I emphasize that last bit because Farmer emphasizes it, a lot. Way more of this book than I would have figured is about the quotidian act of survival in this comparatively-easy-to-survive world. You’d figure given the sheer scope of the setup, Farmer would have jumped to the implications of their situation a little more quickly… but instead we get a lot of speculation about how much you can do with bamboo, rocks, and fish (and human!) parts.

Either way, we get our narrative viewpoint from the newly-reincarnated Richard Francis Burton, the Victorian traveler, linguist (he could supposedly speak twenty or thirty languages or something like that) and writer with many a legendary exploit under his name. Naturally, he takes charge of the surviving-and-organizing business of his little band, that includes the grown-up inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice (for whom Burton obviously gets horny), a Holocaust survivor, an alien, a caveman, some Italians, a know-it-all who provides periodic infodumps on Burton or assorted others, etc.

Burton had had a vision where he met with the organizers of the Riverworld, and is determined to find them again. He and his band make a raft and head upriver. Because this is midcentury scifi, naturally everyone has set to warring with one another, even though (because?) their material needs are basically met. One set of slaver warlords led by Hermann Goering capture Burton and his band. They escape, but it sets up a dynamic wherein Burton and Goering get killed and reincarnated time and again, generally in close proximity to each other. Burton is doing it because he thinks being randomly distributed somewhere on the river is a more efficient means of travel than trying to sail through the rival factions, so he kills himself over and over again, getting newly reincarnated each time. Goering does it because he’s addicted to both heroin and a special “dreamgum” issued in their rations and tries killing himself when he can’t kick successfully, even when he’s otherwise turned a new leaf.

Once it gets going the action is commendably out there, though with enough of that midcentury scifi flavor — the omni-competent ubermensch protagonist, the women and their hangups (Farmer was something of a pioneer in bringing explicit sex into science fiction), the faceless hordes fighting for no reason, etc. — to dampen the originality some. In all, good enough to have a look at the sequels. ***’

Review- Chatterjee, “The Black Hole of Empire”

January 20, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Partha Chatterjee, “The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power” (2012) – There’s a few layers of surprise here for me. First, I knew Partha Chatterjee because one of the professors I TAed for, a younger guy, decided it would be a good idea to lead with theory in his 100 level core history course for non-major randos. So he’s throwing Fanon and Said and Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee at these finance and communications students and they’re getting all mixed up. I had one midterm tell me Benedict Anderson tried to make colonized Indians create newspapers but Chatterjee led the resistance against it, etc etc. In general, the impression I got from Chatterjee was that of the kind of thing a white writer would rightly be called racist for arguing: that India was too spiritually pure for western-style modernity and concepts like the nation-state, no matter how many people on the subcontinent willingly died for some variation on that concept. Not as much of an obvious snow job as indecipherable postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha but not much good outside of its cul de sac of theory-wrangling.

“The Black Hole of Empire” wasn’t really like that. It does very little theoretical hedging despite advancing relatively modest claims about how Bengali nationalism suffered from European nationalisms. Chatterjee clearly did a lot of archival research in underused Indian sources, especially early modern Indian theorizing about politics and history, that was quite interesting. The other surprise came when I expected this book to be about how the British used the example of the Black Hole of Calcutta — an incident in 1756 where a Bengali king killed a hundred or so British by cramming them in a tiny prison — as colonial propaganda. The Brits were always masters of squeezing pathos out of a few dozen dead Brits — mostly adventurers — while killing thousands or millions, mostly villagers and children. A good cultural history of that kind of propaganda would be well worth reading.

You got a little bit of that in the book — for instance, few people bothered using the Black Hole incident as propaganda until after the Indian mutiny a century later — but more you get stuff about the history of Calcutta and Bengali nationalism. It was interesting — contacts between early Indian nationalists and British liberals, stuff on the development of a secular Bengali theater — but not exactly what I signed up for. I’m not one of those YouTube-style reviewers who whine endlessly about bait-and-switches as though the whole culture owes me a refund, so I can’t complain too much, especially as I learned a fair amount about the stuff that is there. ****

Review- Carreyrou, “Bad Blood”

January 15, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

John Carreyrou, “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” (2018) – This is a story of the way greed and stupidity engender each other. Everyone involved should have been able to see that Theranos — a medtech startup that was the toast of Silicon Valley in the early 2010s — was not what it claimed to be. But between the amounts of idle cash that have been shoved into venture capital and the Steve-Jobsian hype at high tide at the time, Theranos went far enough to make its leader, Elizabeth Holmes, the world’s youngest “self-made” (i.e. not inherited) female billionaire and to gain the imprimatur of many institutions and people who should have known better. From Barack Obama to the Wall Street Journal to Henry Kissinger to Jim Mattis to pretty much the entire venture capital establishment, Holmes and Theranos had them all fooled.

To be honest, this in and of itself isn’t that much of a distinction. Silicon Valley in general is a massive bubble scam. A few things distinguished Theranos from every other non-revenue-generating unicorn out there. One is just a matter of degree- there are a lot of culty corporations out there, but Theranos was deeply culty. Holmes claimed to be starting a new religion (she made everyone read “The Alchemist,” which elicited a chuckle from me) and upper management was profoundly abusive towards anyone displaying “cynicism” i.e. critical thought. They were utterly shameless in throwing themselves in to the hype machine, with Holmes literally cosplaying as Steve Jobs and claiming that she was creating the most important technology the world has ever seen. Another distinction that’s more about scale than essence is that Theranos had no product, as opposed to simply an overvalued one, and blatantly lied to cover it up.

What really distinguished Theranos, though, was that it got into a business where people could die if people tried to use its product. It seems that Holmes came up with a concept — blood testing via patch, instead of needles, that would automatically beam its results to you — like a Star Trek communicator thingy before actually learning more about what’s involved than any Stanford sophomore might. But unlike the Star Trek communicator, which eventually became the cell phone, the patch-blood-test thing is physically impossible, not just a matter of refining technology we already have to be smaller and more convenient. Blood from a thumb prick is not the same for testing purposes as blood from a vein.

The Theranos team found this out, at length, and Carreyrou takes us through all the ins and outs and permutations of efforts they made to hammer reality into a shape resembling the great founder’s vision. By the time they were caught and closed up shop, they had abandoned the idea of a patch beaming results out and made a box that could, notionally, take your blood and give you results without a phlebotomist. The box didn’t work and the Theranos people pretended it did, often, amusingly enough, by testing blood samples sent to them using commercially available machines of the kind they have in clinics. And they screwed that up, too, through trying to use too little blood, cutting corners in staffing, etc. It was an increasingly elaborate (and threadbare) web of lies. Holmes was caught by a combination of vengeful patent trolls, internet medtech blog pedants, alienated employees who once believed in her, and, eventually, John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal. The rest is history, albeit history laden with threats from Theranos’s high end legal muscle until the whole house of cards fell apart.

The challenge with any story like this is to make book-length corporate intrigue interesting. Carreyrou does an admirable job with the scum and suckers that bubble economies produce. The bloodless no-places of Northern Virginia and the Bay Area bring forth all manner of pallid bottomfeeders, the best of which is the patent troll pseudo-uncle of Holmes who messes with her basically out of spite, but proves important to bringing her case to light. Many moments in the story were both horrifying and funny. Carreyrou winds up blaming hubris and bubble psychology where capitalism is the actual culprit here, but there’s only so much you can expect. Similarly, there’s only so many ways to parse legal threats and biotech mechanical failure before it starts to run dry. Still, an admirable stab at a “Helter Skelter” for Silicon Valley. ***’

Review- Brin, “Startide Rising”

January 12, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

David Brin, “Startide Rising” (1983) – This was some pretty fun scifi about a sticky situation in which some slick critters find themselves. The first starship commanded by dolphins — well, genetically enhanced neo-dolphins, anyway — stumbles upon some ancient artifacts for which numerous powerful galactic civilizations will gladly kill. They hide out on a water planet and try to figure shit out while the various intergalactic factions — spider people, lizard people, bug people, etc — kill each other in orbit over the planet.

In this particular universe, humans play the role they often do of cocky new kids on the galactic block. Every other spacefaring civilization, it seems, were “uplifted” into tool use and other advances by a patron species, going all the way back to the Progenitors billions of years ago. The humans can’t trace back a patron, which makes them out of place in a universe defined by lineages and attachment to ancient knowledge. That doesn’t stop plucky humanity from uplifting chimpanzees and dolphins, though, and all three species are present in the ship. Can humanity and our mammal bros make it in a cold, hierarchical universe? Brin’s philosophical about it but not too much. In the classic scifi fashion, pluck and ingenuity find a way.

This is an enjoyably overstuffed scifi read, with a half dozen primary viewpoint characters, numerous places where they’re all at that get hard to keep track of, plots and subplots, efforts at fleshing out dolphin culture (kind of hippie-ish but very eager), so on and so forth. The final plan to get out of the trap the aliens have them in is pretty cool, and fails (and is fixed) in some fun ways. All in all, good clean scifi fun. ****’

Review- Rossliński-Liebe, “Stepan Bandera”

January 9, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist” (2014) – Ukraine! Tough country. Learning history seriously put a crimp in my desire to live in other time periods/places. Even leaving aside the toilet arrangements, in so many times and places there are just no good choices. Ukraine is one such place that finds itself in that position time and again, including right now. In this book, German historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe takes us back to an even harsher time, which has all too many echoes of contemporary Ukraine.

How to even describe Ukraine’s situation in the early twentieth century? Well, for one thing, there was a lot of disagreement about where it began and ended, who was a Ukrainian, and what being Ukrainian meant. After WWI, there were major Ukrainian populations in three or four countries and in none of them were they well-treated, between the famine and the terror in the USSR and minority status in Czechoslovakia (where they were at least left alone) and Poland (where they weren’t). Eastern Ukrainians were more culturally Russian where western Ukrainians were in uneasy proximity to Central Europe and especially the Poles.

Ukrainian nationalism was profoundly frustrated, especially in the west where, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was no major power for them to look to the way Eastern Ukrainians looked (and look) to Russia. Frustrated nationalism in the early twentieth century was dynamite, dynamite sweating out little beads of nitroglycerin and waiting to blow. One of the men who slammed down the plunger on that little bundle of explosive joy was Stepan Bandera.

The son of a Greek Catholic priest (don’t ask me how Greek Catholicism came to be the national church of western Ukraine, I do not understand it) and raised in the Ukrainian part of postwar Poland, Bandera was the right (or, really, exactly wrong) kind of crazy for his time and place. A nationalist extremist from the beginning, he made his name by taking an already angry nationalism and bringing it to a higher boil, ever to the right, ever more purist, ever more violent. Schoolmates report the young Bandera as sticking pins under his fingernails and whipping himself with his belt in order to prepare for the tortures he expected from the Polish secret police. He was a real character.

He joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) as a youth and proceeded to help take the group in an ever more violent, fascist, and antisemitic direction. He built a following with younger, mostly Poland-based members. Like Hitler, he was one of those guys where people argue over whether he was truly charismatic or not — he was a dweeby little twerp who looks for all the world like Stephen Miller — but clearly had something that got him over with angry young Ukrainians. One thing that probably helped was the stark simplicity of his answers to the complex questions of Ukrainian nationality. Ukraine has a unique destiny, it’s defined by Ukrainian blood, and anyone foreign and anyone who stands in the way — Poles, Russians, Jews, democrats, communists, anyone who questions the Provydnik (leader) — need to be exterminated. This message proved popular and soon Bandera’s branch of the OUN has outstripped more moderate Ukrainian nationalists and began undertaking terror campaigns.

Bandera was in Polish jail for conspiracy to kill the interior minister when the Nazis invaded. From the beginning, Bandera and the OUN hailed the Germans as liberators (note- these were not Ukrainians who suffered from the famine in the USSR, this was Ukrainians who were somewhat discriminated against in Poland) and as the people who could help bring about an independent Ukraine. As these groups do, OUN had split, there was an OUN-B (for Bandera) and an OUN-M (for Melnyk, another fascist chieftain). When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and quickly rolled over much of Ukraine, these two competed to become the puppet government of Ukraine. Bandera had more popular appeal but Melnyk appealed more to the Germans, in large part because he was less egotistical and more pliable.

The early parts of the Nazi war against the Soviet Union saw massive atrocities carried out by both Axis soldiers and local civilians against Jews and other minorities. The book has numerous sickening depictions of Ukrainian nationalists teaming up with the Nazis to beat, humiliate, and kill Jews. Both OUN factions saw this as a positive thing at the time, the beginning of the great cleansing that would lead to a Ukrainian national rebirth. In some cases, the Germans even intervened to slow the Ukrainians down- they were getting too messy, too disorderly.

Of course, in the end, the Nazis did not want to see an independent Ukraine, even as a loyal puppet state. They wanted a slave colony. They were happy to use Ukrainians as muscle (like in the SS-Galizien division) but had no intention of making Bandera, Melnyk, or anyone else leader of a Ukrainian state. The Nazis wound up arresting Bandera, keeping him in a special division of one of the camps, a nice sort of place for high-end political prisoners like the last of the Hapsburgs and Otto von Bismarck’s grandson.

This turned out to be important, because both Bandera and the OUN (and it’s tedious subfactions and minor rivals) survived the war. While not giving up their fascist ideas, they pivoted towards the west and sought to aid in the American side of the Cold War. The CIA, as well as British and West German intelligence, made cat’s paws of numerous Ukrainians (and many others) with dubious war records, allowing thousands to slip into new lives in the west. They didn’t turn out to be that useful — there would be no “rollback” in Eastern Europe — but it allowed them to hold on. Moreover, they could enlist the Cold War propaganda establishment, including academic historians, to whitewash their crimes, defining away their fascism and turning a blind eye to the atrocities.

Bandera got got by the KGB in Munich in 1959 (the KGB tried to frame a Nazi war criminal in the West German government- too bad that didn’t work, would’ve been a two for one). This was probably a convenient time for him to die, from a Ukrainian nationalist perspective. He wasn’t too much use — the Americans thought he was too egotistical to work much with — and the promised Third World War that would allow the Ukrainians their next bite at the apple likely wasn’t going to materialize by then.

Instead, Bandera became a martyr, and more than that, a synecdoche for right-wing Ukrainian nationalism more generally. Diaspora Ukrainians carefully tended to his cult for decades. Soviet propaganda helped, too, by insisting any Ukrainian they didn’t like, even if it was just for speaking Ukrainian where they weren’t supposed to, was a Banderist. This made him a symbol for resistance even among Ukrainians who didn’t share his violent ultranationalism. Bandera managed to outlive a Melnyk, Bulba, and the other little fascist chieftains of the area to become this symbolic figure in time for Ukraine’s independence in 1991. While a many Ukrainians, especially in the more russified east, don’t really care about Bandera or his cause, a critical mass (especially in the west) see him as a key symbol for what the Ukraine should be. This is, to say the least, unsettling. In nearly the same breath, Ukrainian nationalists will uphold Bandera, insist that Bandera did nothing wrong and was a democrat (he hated democracy), and say anyway, it’s all the fault of those nasty Jews like Soros. If it’s for a western audience, they’ll throw in Putin too.

I, for one, love big fat serious books about the ideological madness of the twentieth century, and this fits the bill. It was Rossoliński-Liebe’s dissertation, and he’s very careful with his historiography (which always takes me back to my early grad school days, all that wrangling over defining fascism- good times) and evidence. If there’s one thing he didn’t address enough, I’d say it was “why Bandera” — why he got to be the symbol instead of his rivals. Was it just the martyrdom? The extremity? I don’t know. I do know this book got Rossoliński-Liebe in some trouble- between his claims about national hero Bandera and the gauntlet he throws at nationalist (and Cold War) historiography, when he came to Ukraine the only place he could do a reading was, ironically, the German embassy. Everywhere else was threatened to the point where they cancelled (and one gets the idea the Ukrainian academic establishment wasn’t thrilled to help out either). Bandera, who wasn’t above petty shit like that — no fascist, no matter how bloodied, is ever anything other than petty — would have been proud. *****

Review- Mahfouz, “Palace Walk”

January 7, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Naguib Mahfouz, “Palace Walk” (1956) (translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins and Olive Kenny) – The first Arab winner of the Nobel prize in literature brings us to WWI-era Cairo in this, the beginning of the Cairo trilogy, which is the main work of his you can find in English. The al-Jawads, a respectable middle-class Shiite family (at least I assume Shiite by the way they constantly refer to the martyr Husayn), undergoes trials and tribulations.

At the center is Ahmad al-Jawad, family patriarch. He’s a man of contradictions, not to mention a hypocrite. Tyrannically traditional at home, glad handing with friends, and compulsively lascivious behind closed doors, Ahmad is set up for numerous falls in this book and probably more in the latter two. He has managed to cow his wife and five children but not truly shape them, except by accident, as various of his children inherit parts of his personality but inevitably take them in directions he dislikes. This ranges from lasciviousness with lower-class women to involvement in the Egyptian national struggle that heats up after the war ends. Moreover, he’s an emperor with no clothes to his family — sometimes almost literally — but as yet, they are in a stalemate between his hypocrisy and the terror he’s instilled in them through decades of harsh treatment.

Mahfouz has been compared to Dickens and I can see it, certainly Cairo is a living character for him the same way London was for Dickens. But it’s also a response-to-modernity novel of the kind you get from a lot of colonized places around this time. It’s interesting to watch the clash between Fahmy, the representative of 20th century style nationalism, and his parents Ahmad and Amina, both of whom want the British gone from Egypt… but the older generation regards any action towards that end as overly risky and vaguely impious, almost a non sequitur. Especially interesting in light of Mahfouz’s own relationship with Egyptian nationalism, as a latter day convert to Nasserism and a man stabbed almost to death for his support of Sadat and the Camp David accord. In general, a pretty good literary novel if you like that kind of thing. ****

Basinger, “The Star Machine”

January 3, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Jeanine Basinger, “The Star Machine” (2007) – A tome both weighty and flighty… like an airbus? One of the doyennes of American film studies talks about stars at the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, from the 1930s to the late 1950s. A big book, it attempts to tackle the concept of stardom from both a systemic and an individual approach. The beginning and end describe the titular Star Machine — how the studios made stars and built their profit engine around them — while the middle looks at individual stars and how they fit, or didn’t, into the system.

Me being me I preferred the systemic look. That’s why I picked up this book- Hollywood glamour leaves me indifferent but I am interested in systems of sorting and developing the human subject. The case study of early Hollywood, where shrewd but uneducated men developed such a system catch as catch can under massive fiscal pressure, strikes me as one well worth studying. Basinger delivers the goods in her early chapters, going in to how the studios used a sort of vulgar empiricism to work out successful formulae for developing and maintaining stars. That’s where fanzines came from, for instance- a feedback mechanism for the studios to figure out what was working and what wasn’t. Ultimately, the studios needed to do that most difficult polisci task- they needed to routinize charisma. Basinger depicts them as knowing they couldn’t do that all of the way, and that frustrations developed by this neurotic process helped create some of the bizarre dictatorial behaviors for which studio bosses were known.

I learned a lot in this book but was thrown too many facts about the lives of Tyrone Power, Irene Dunne, and dozens of other old Hollywood types — many of whom I had never heard of before — than I could possibly take on board. Basinger is clearly a great enthusiast for this period of Hollywood history. That enthusiasm, expressed in amusing asides to the reader and buckets of information drawn from her seemingly limitless well of Hollywood lore — is infectious- up to a point. The enthusiasm is great, I enjoyed the learned but conversational tone of a great scholar allowed to cut loose. But it was a lot, and it wasn’t always clear what point she was making. This was compounded by the ways in which the stars she profiled stand out from the other stars mainly due to nebulous subjective qualities of being apart from the studio system (which still defined their lives). Mostly, I think Basinger wanted to write about some stars. That’s cool, and she carries it off with enough brio to make it worthwhile even to a stodgy old materialist like me, but I’m more in it for the systems than the stars, alas. ****’

Too Much Berard

Month: January 2019