McTeague by Frank Norris

Frank Norris died a young man, 32 if I remember correctly, but he left behind some memorable works, McTeague included.  Working in the tradition of American Naturalism, Norris created a work that was meant to reflect true aspects of the world and human nature, to be more real than realism.  This usually meant highlighting darker aspects of human nature and the social constraints that influence behavior.  The character McTeague is a hulking idiot-man who practices unlicensed dentistry in turn-of-the-century California.  His life and the lives of all around him are taken over with greed and envy.  Although there are a lot of poorly drawn characters and stereotypes in the novel, Norris does get to something fundamental about poverty in America.  His characters struggle to get by but are constantly thwarted.
Like others writing in the naturalistic vein, Norris wants to reveal more than just the pettiness of humanity, but to show the deterministic systems that work behind human desire and shape action.  The apartment flat where the primary characters live is a microcosm of this system.  Each character has his or her own defined desires and tendencies.  Even though each of them wants to act according to his or her own desires, sense of duty, etc., each of them is bound by their relationships to one another, their current positions in life, and their own limitations.  This is all meant to reflect the idea that, while we may have freedom of movement and individual agency, we are still hemmed in by the systems that are around us.  The strength of McTeague lies in Norris showing us that we are bound into these systems even when we work to create them.  McTeague's wife Trina wins a lottery for $5,000 which should set the two of them up in the early years of their marriage and provide them an ample buffer against the troubles they will face.  But winning the lottery propels Trina into a spiral of avarice in which she would prefer to live in penury and try to live on her meager earnings rather than shrink the windfall.  Prior to winning the lottery, Trina had not been avaricious because riches were abstract and money meant less.  McTeague likewise becomes obsessed with the winnings as Trina holds out on him, forcing them to live in ever-worse conditions until he eventually beats her to death to steal the money.
By the end of the novel the money is lost in Death Valley through a series of mis-adventures and all of the principal characters are dead.  To Norris, the steady unraveling of the good before death is all but inevitable.  McTeague, Trina, and the other characters find themselves within a socio-political web that existed before them but which they participate in and help to shape.  Norris and other naturalists do not write this way to blame the characters for their own suffering, but to show what they see as the inevitability of defeat and suffering.
McTeague appeals to the pessimist and cynic in me.  It appeals to the part of me that believes that it is possible to either succeed or fail through sheer luck rather than through any personal efforts.

True Crime

I have recently begun reading Michelle McNamara's true crime book I'll be Gone in the Dark.  The book so far is pretty good.  Part of the challenge of reading a posthumous work like this is realizing that the authority is not completely hers.  Editors worked to complete the book that she was writing, so this might not be the completed project that she had envisioned.  I have not read a lot of true crime in the past, so I was not sure what to expect coming into this.  I was interested in this because I have always liked her husband Patton Oswalt, and I found his open letter to her and his earnest way of speaking about the devastation he endured losing her deeply touching.  I had heard that the book was good and I figured this would be a good way to break into a new genre.  I have read and taught smatterings of true crime here and there (this means that I forced college freshman to watch and write about In Cold Blood).
I included the opening caveat because I don't know how much of what I have read is in line with other true crime writing or how much of it was influenced by either McNamara's own style or the editorial contribution of others.  What strikes me about the book so far is that way that McNamara personalizes the story.  Her discussion of the crimes include passages describing her efforts to uncover truth and a chapter about her own family.  This helps to develop context for her interest in cold cases and in this case in particular.  To extend this, it provides a sort of rationale for all of our interests in this macabre topic.  Many are ashamed of their interest in true crime or serial killers, but this book and popular podcasts such as My Favorite Murder reveal the truth about this: it fascinates a lot of us.  When McNamara explains the connection between her youth and the unsolved murder in her neighborhood, she awakens the connections we may feel.  She may even embolden more of us to own our interests.
I haven't gotten terribly far into McNamara's book, but I can see why so many like.  I am going to leave this incomplete for now, and maybe forever because I can't think of a way to end this post.

Bertrand Russell and the Conquest of Happiness

Just recently I began re-reading Russell's collection of essays The Conquest of Happiness.  I read this the first time a number of years ago when I was in graduate school.  I read a bunch of Russell at one time for reasons that are not particularly clear to me now.  I got a lot out reading his A History of Western Philosophy, which is more of a greatest hits of Euro-centric philosophy than it is an actual book of philosophy.  Much of my reading in philosophy has been piece-meal, as I would read whatever seemed interesting to me in the moment and I took few actual philosophy classes or studied it in any major way.  I once took a graduate seminar in Descartes' work from one of the big names in the field, but otherwise most of my study in this area has been self-directed.
In any case, as I have been reading through The Conquest of Happiness again, I am getting more of a sense of the arrogance that others find distasteful about Russell's perspective.  The essays are not, properly speaking, philosophical but fall into his popular work.  He strains to apply religious concepts to his atheistic worldview as a way of explaining unhappiness, or lack of contentment in modern life. There is some home-spun wisdom gussied up as insight, such as the suggestion to work toward goals and to avoid gossip and enviousness.
At the time I read this initially, I was struggling with a failing marriage and trying to get a dissertation written.  Russell's soporifics didn't always strike a chord with me then, but provided enough for me to remember it fondly.  I am currently about halfway through the book and intend to finish it.  I remember that being an essay that was a bit more analytical that attempted to break down varieties of happiness and their sources that I found informative and I have some hope of regaining some of that enjoyment I got out of it before.

Reading this book has been a part of a broader re-reading of many books that I have been doing over the last couple of years.  I have always enjoyed re-reading books to re-experience ideas and narratives.  I subscribe to the notion that the reader brings a lot of him/herself to the experience of reading and that our acts of interpretation depend upon our personal and cultural history as well as our prior reading experience.  When I re-read books, I see new things or I see the same things differently.  I likely will have more to say about the processes of reading and re-reading and I certainly will continue to revisit books the have made an impact on me in the future.  At some point I plan on digging back into Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but don't anticipate having the time to dedicate to it before the end of the year.

As one example of the necessity of re-reading, I draw from my own experience.  Years ago a friend of mine recommended David Foster Wallace to me.  This was in the early 2000s and I had heard the name but not read anything.  Eventually I picked up Infinite Jest and struggled through the thing for about a year.  I hated everything about the novel.  But as I began at a new school, I found that I could not stop thinking about it.  I kept thinking about how it pieced together and the significance of certain portions of it.  In the ten years since then, I have re-read that novel another half dozen times and written extensively about it.  It became one of the major novels of my dissertation and I presented on the topic from a variety of directions.  I am particularly proud of the work that I have done regarding the novel and the state of irony in contemporary America.  For whatever reason, I was not in a place to enjoy the novel on a conscious level the first time I read it but it stuck with me.  I kept working over it until I could put it in a new context and find its value.  Northrop Frye once remarked that whether or not we enjoy a piece of literature has no bearing on our jobs as critics.  This is a nice idea in general and I tend to think that we can gain a lot from works we do not like or enjoy reading.  Although, admittedly, I can't always follow this idea and am often happy to dismiss books I don't care for.

The Three-Body Problem

I learned about Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy only recently in the sci-fi book club that I help run at the BottleHouse in Cleveland.  To be honest, I didn't know anything about either this author or about Chinese sci-fi before picking up this book.  Although I have been trying to expand my boundaries in this genre, most of my readings still tend to be pretty American, if not pretty white and male.  That may be a topic I can return to later because I want to focus on this first.  Just today I finished The Dark Forest, the second novel in this series, translated into English.  The first book, The Three-Body Problem, begins in Soviet China during the cultural revolution.  The characters in the novel struggle with the oppressive political constraints placed on them from the Communist party while trying to develop their state technology and stay current with the west.  The scientist characters of the novel must constantly temper the direction of their progress to fit with the dominant political ideology.  This is a powerful observation because our conception of an objective science is so pervasive in the United States but we ignore the fact that it is deeply political and politicized, similarly to the way that it is presented in the novel.  While scientific developments in the west are rarely  overtly compared to the tenets of dialectical materialism or some other meta-narrative, scientific avenues are subject to political bias and are subject to falling into and out of mainstream fashion.  There is an illusion of science as a monolith separate from culture that a lot of good science fiction tries to dispel.
In the first novel, scientists in China are able to make contact with a civilization in a nearby solar system.  When the characters learn that the inhabitants of this planet intend on using their superior technology to block further scientific progress on Earth so that they can colonize it, the narrative turns into a mediation on the strategy to overcome the aliens.  This strategy is a part of a long game, though, as the people of Earth learn that it will take the Trisolarans (as they are called) 450 years to reach Earth.
The second novel opens at the close of the modern era at a time when secret strategists are about to hibernate to become "reinforcements" for future generations.  I was worried that this would devolve into a weird time travel narrative, but Liu maintains his focus and reawakens several main characters from the first novel to continue their missions.  They learn, however, that the people of Earth have made some great strides in their technology within the limits still available to them. They have grown confident in their ability to defeat the Trisolarans based on the speed of their ships and the size of the fleets that have been able to build.
While I admit that there are parts of this trilogy-so-far that seem a bit trite or predictable in the world of sci-fi the novels do offer some genuine surprises in their inventiveness.  The first-contact narrative does not go according to the old tropes and there are some interesting turns in the second novel.  It gets bleak at times, but this is part of the enjoyment.  As I mentioned at the top, I just finished the second novel in the trilogy, and I am completely uncertain where the final one will go.  These books have surprised me and they turn on the expected sci-fi tropes.

I used to live in an apartment building where I would find old pulp sci-fi books in the laundry room.  Many of these I would read and then return to the shelving in the basement, but I collected and kept a number of them when I moved out so that I could continue to read them.  I left behind a number of my own books to pay back the small library.  I read a number of novels that I enjoyed: Joe Haldeman's Forever War, a couple by Mack Reynolds (After Utopia and  Satellite City), Out of Time by James P. Hogan, and Level 9 by Mordecai Roshwald.  All of them are pulpy but have interesting ideas, and some are better written than others.  I read a few that I didn't care for -- Them   by Robert French topping the list --  and Philip Wylie's The End of the Dream was one of them.
The novel's concept is to present a collection of evidence from a future world that reflects poorly on the environmental policies of the current day.  The novel came out in 1972 and posits the year 1975 -- a long-past date in the present time of the novel -- as the point of no return for humanity before crisis.  There isn't much of a plot or any kind of character development.  Wylie tries to humanize it a bit by including two characters who head up a sort of futuristic conservation league, but the confines of the epistolary format keep them uninteresting and undeveloped.  They are only names at the bottom of blocks of text.
The novel is a sledge-hammer and it is worse for it.  I am all for sci-fi novels that use the future as a means of critiquing the present, I think sci-fi at its best always does this, but this is just too far.  There are burning rivers and plagues.  It might line up with biblical plagues of Egypt but I didn't end up caring enough to find the parallels.
The opening pages of the book contain blurbs about Wylie's greatness.  I know that all books have these, but I am curious about the author's other work.  He seems to have a good grasp of the science of the day and has some imagination.  One of the more vivid reports is the narrative of a fisherman who witnesses hyper-evolved salt water leeches that can travel onto land and attack humans and other land mammals.  This is actually one of the more developed scenes and characters in the novel and it makes me hope that Wylie can do this on a sustained level when on less of a mission than he was with this book.
Most of the book leads from the darkness of 1975 when things can no longer be fixed to some point in the 21st century that is the narrative present.  At that future point, things are looking up and the remainder of human society that has not been killed off in some horrific way have recreated civilization and want to move forward.  It all ends with some shocking news I can't quite recall and refuse to look up even though the book is within easy reach that all of their efforts were for nothing and the world is actually going to end again, probably for real this time.
This book was not really enjoyable and I glossed over large portions of it because they were the kind of faux-technical writing that is extremely boring and not at all informative.  The cover, I think, is more interesting than the book.

Beginning anew

I have tried to start this blog several times.  Initially, I had conceived it as a series about punk music and punk aesthetics.  I have always been interested in punk music and culture and it is something that I have also written about from an academic perspective.  But I found this to be too confining and so I thought that I would expand this to also be about movies and books.  Then, when I tried to write about these topics, I kept floundering.  I would begin posts or jot down ideas and never finish them.  I had tried to draft posts offline so that I could have some in reserve and "bank" them for upcoming release.  This, too, I found to be too confining.  

So here is my newest start.  I am going to write this and post it without fanfare: this is my shameless attempt to jump-start my writing process again.  This new start has no rules.  I don't want to have anything like a posting schedule to bind me or a broad subject to confine.  Put simply, this is a place where I will post what I want when I want.  I have the feeling that a broad subject matter will become evident, but that will be left to determine itself.