First Lines of Ursula LeGuin's "The Name for the World is Forest"

"Two pieces of yesterday were in Captain Davidson's mind when he woke, and he lay looking at them in the darkness for a while."

- Ursula LeGuin, "The Name for the World is Forest"

First Lines of Anthony Doerr's "All the Light We Cannot See"

"At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country."

- Anthony Doerr, from his amazing "All the Light We Cannot See", a book I never wanted to end. Book review coming shortly.

Book Review: Arthur Herman's "1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

I enjoyed having my framing of the modern world reset by Arthur Herman’s1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder. Herman makes a strong case that the common aspects of Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson’s leadership style changed the stage on which modern politics plays out. These two men rejected traditional leadership focused on realpolitik and national interest; instead, they promoted a new world order built on principled visions to which they demanded allegiance. Wilson spearheaded “the emergence of the United States as a global hegemonic power” that he believed was the best source for an “... end to violence in international and human affairs.” Lenin “triggered the emergence of a world revolutionary movement that would be come to be known as communism” (p. 11) They both were driven by “…a sense of the utter rightness of their vision and ideas… [that] made opposition virtually an immoral act of betrayal.” (p. 65) Note "immortal;" this marrying of politics with an almost religious fervor led to both an inability to compromise and a dehumanizing of the opposition. Of course, discounting intellectual diversity leads to blind spots and, for these leaders, ultimately their greatest failures: for Wilson, the US rejection of the League of Nations; in Lenin’s, the disintegration of the Bolshevik revolution into a terror state led by Stalin.

Herman's entertaining narrative is convincing. I appreciated how the story isn't dominated by background but yet provides the information you need to understand the implications of Lenin and Wilson's actions. Chapters alternate between the two leaders so you can see both the similarities of their leadership styles and the differences in their approaches. My biggest takeaway was that the success of their approach, despite their “shared dogmatic belief in the rightness of his own mission, which brooked no opposition or even criticism” (p. 14) became a model that many future visionaries used to impose their principles on people. The power of ideas, regardless of their implications. Herman's easier on Wilson because of his relatively peaceful actions and, honestly, his goal of setting up and sustaining a (white) power structure led by elites. Lenin is savaged for his violent tactics aimed at fostering a revolution to permanently change global power dynamics, noting it's a template used by many modern terrorist organizations. But the similarities outweigh their differences, and Herman concludes that despite their divergent aims, their uncompromising leadership is the genesis of many of our modern global dilemmas.

Book Review: Margaret Atwood's "The Heart Goes Last"

Margaret Atwood has great ideas, including the premise of The Heart Goes Last: people desperately struggle to survive in a depressed society so much that they’ll voluntarily join Positron – a society where they are free to live in luxury. But there’s a catch. You live in comfort for six months of the year, but for the other six months you labor in prison. You share a house with other people you never see but you know are there (their belongings are stored in lockers in the garage). Of course, things get complicated rather quickly - it’s a tale of the dystopia behind a utopia. This being Atwood, we also get these powerful internal monologs that so deftly reveal the dramatic mental narratives and mythologies that we all build up in our heads.

The best part of the book was how she painted the slow evolution of the stories and self-deceptions of Stan and Charmaine, a Positron couple. Atwood shows how they are their own worst enemy. Given a ticket into what they think is a perfect world, Stan and Charmaine immediately start to subvert it, allowing the boredom and lust of their inner narratives to drive them to betray not only their socially confined borders – but also each other. The first half of the book Atwood masterfully shows us the deep power of social norms and how sexual fetishes – fuel for excitingly illicit transgressions – can be used for both freedom and entrapment. (Ying and Yang!) A scarily vivid picture emerges of a totalitarian world where the couple, isolated from each other, become pawns in shadowy conspiracies that are stranger than they ever could have imagined.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t last. About halfway through, the plot devolves into absurdity, with (even more) convoluted conspiracies, brainwashing, and inexplicable coincidences. Once Stan [spoiler alert!] escaped Positron disguised as Elvis, I decided the book had become a parody and blissfully enjoyed it as such. That’s Atwood’s prerogative, although I found myself wanting a more serious engagement with bionic sex fetishes, Pavolian sexual conditioning, and economic desperation used as a profit machine. She started THGL as a short story, and perhaps it should have stayed as such, for while the start of the novel is riveting, and I enjoyed it overall, the entire experience wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been.

Miles Drawing

Check out a few pictures I drew for Miles in the last year or so:

Miles' Xmas Present 2018

Miles at 5 years old

Metablogging: I recently realized that I don't have a place where I can show people my drawings. So i'm created a new tag for when I occasionally get inspired to post something i've done: TGMArt.

“To the Reader: The Language of the Cloud” by Chase Twichell

“To the Reader: The Language of the Cloud” by Chase Twichell

Come with me to a private room.
I have a secret to show you.
Sometimes I like to stand outside it

with a stranger because I haven’t
come at it from that vantage in so long—

see? There I am beside him, still joined,
still kissing. Isn’t it dreamlike,
the way the bed drifts in its dishevelment?

Bereft of their clothes, two humans
lie entangled in its cloud.

Their bodies are saying the after-grace,
still dreaming in the language of the cloud.
Look at them, neither two nor one.

I want them to tell me what they know
before the amnesia takes them.

From Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been (2010)

Book Review: Bob Mehr's Trouble Boys

The Replacements are an odd band. I feel that they're both over and under rated. They created some powerfully melodic rock n' roll that, underpinned by Paul Westerberg’s clever word play, provided a template for many to express sensitivity disguised by loud distortion and bluster. On the other hand, they were sloppy and in desperate need of editing – some of their music and lyrics sound tossed together at the last minute.

Trouble Boys explores this dynamic and much more. Bob Mehr spins a comprehensive (and well documented) look at the band, painting a vivid picture of early 80s Minneapolis, and the often heartbreaking background of the ‘mats – especially Bob Stinton, who had a truly horrific childhood. It’s almost enough to excuse how often the band sabotaged their career by falling (drunk) on the wrong side of the fine line between good ol’ rock n’ roll rebellion and plain old assholery. I knew they behaved badly, but I wasn’t expecting them to be as horrible and offensive as they come off here.

All this lead me to read Trouble Boys as an addiction book. The drinking and drugging stories – and there are a LOT of them – can be amusing, but the more they pile up, the more difficult it is to observe so much self-destruction. They were fucked up drunk addicts and I left the book pondering what their lives would have been like if the band could have coped – even just a little bit! – with their talent and success.

But their myth is all about that they couldn’t: that they felt too much, drowned it in booze, and paid a heavy price. Poor Bob died, Tommy grew up to be a professional musician (and member of Guns n' Roses!), Chris (a strangely vacant presence in the book) faded away into visual art, and Paul never found that illusive balance of improvisation and polish that could endear him to the masses. While Bob’s story is interesting, Paul’s story is riveting, from watching him struggle to come up with his moments of musical genius to the story of him clean and sober (the tale of him coaching little league with a SpongeBob hat is priceless).  I also appreciated Mehr’s insights into the music, which let me hear their albums – especially Tim and their requiem All Shook Down – in a newly revelatory light.

Book Review: China Mieville's Kracken

China Mieville’s Kracken is an odd duck of a book. Quickly summarized, when a giant squid disappears from London’s Natural History museum, curator Billy becomes entrapped into a wild labyrinth of magical forces trying to bring about – or to prevent – the end of the world. Billy takes a classic hero’s journey, but Kracken’s real hero is the world Mieville builds up: a complex web of mythologies, all striving for the mystical powers of the giant squid. It was all very interesting, but I found the novel falling short of excellence. Mieville is too erudite for his own good, with wordplay so obscure that it overshadows the story. And while plotted like a thriller – entertaining and fast-paced – the book felt surprisingly lightweight, with thin characters who never resonated with me. Take Collinsworth – a snappy, punkish cop who I pictured as Amy Winehouse (a perfect comparison I read somewhere). She’s everything that I should like in a character, but she never really fell into place for me.  Likewise Goss and Subby – malevolent agents of mayhem that just seemed silly to me.

So why did I stick with all 529 pages? Because of sections like Chapter 25, where we’re introduced to shabtis - small figures placed inscribed with a task they need to perform for the famous Egyptian mummies with whom they are buried. Mieville’s shabtis decide to strike and demand compensation for their labor, led by "Wati" who changes his inscription to read "I shall NOT do it.” His journey backwards out of the underworld to become a magical organizer in "the new Unionism" is a brilliant and moving mash-up of mythologies. This why you read Mieville, and I longed for more of it. What is the capitalism of this union of magical familiars? What are their politics? Unfortunately, we never get past Wati’s amazing origin story as he becomes just another player in Billy’s journey.

It’s obvious that Mieville had high hopes for this book; he strives to build up a complex London mythology as he combines cultural myths and pulp fiction plotting. But in the end the characters and rapid-fire plotting didn’t speak to me. Regardless, I’m glad I read it - for while this wasn’t Mieville’s best work, I continue to admire how high he aims. Even when he falls short, he still ends up with a high mark.

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