Hello all and welcome! I’ve got three tasty reviews and a cute cat pic for you! I’ve got more reviews coming up and maybe the long-awaited return of video content, given that it’ll soon be time to discuss best abd worst books of the year (I like to do it at the real years end, not early December, because unlike the Times I am not an adjunct of the advertising industry trying to goose Christmas sales). Keep warm and toasty (unless you’re in the antipodes, in which case, keep cool), and enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun
Carter, The Price of Peace
Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: The Reason for the Season
REVIEWS
Gene Wolfe, “The Urth of the New Sun” (1987) - Gene Wolfe wrote “The Book of the New Sun,” a quartet of novels (that can — I would say should — be read as one) that ranks among my favorite works, and probably the hardest to describe among literary favorites of mine. It is the story of Severian, an orphan raised by a guild of torturers and executioners in some far future Urth (the spelling turns out to have more meaning than flavor- maybe? See below) where the sun is guttering out. Severian has a perfect memory, clinical depression, a way with the ladies, a destiny, and arguably the greatest prose stylist in scifi/fantasy history behind him. The story is told in past tense- Severian is using his perfect memory to recall his youth, his adventures, and his ascension to the role of “Autarch,” emperor/representative of Urth, and due to scifi shenanigans he has more than one consciousness in him. The story goes back and forth across space and time, and if you get lost, it’s in the best possible way.
Wolfe — an unassuming man, for all of his talents, who died a few years back, not a strutting fool and/or a gormless nerd like so many big name scifi/fantasy writers — decided his follow-up would be… a follow-up. “The Urth of the New Sun” follows Severian in his ascendance past the Earth (or Urth?). This is an interesting decision for Wolfe to make. We leave the New Sun books as Severian the Autarch learns that being Autarch is basically about answering for Urth at some sort of divine/alien space/time tribunal. He gets on a spaceship and goes, the end, more or less. Do we really need a tale of Severian on the spaceship?
Well, having read it, I’d now say “no,” we don’t need as, it turns out, the world needed (but probably doesn’t deserve) The Book of the New Sun. Among other things, Wolfe can’t quite manage the creative farrago he did in the original series, strategically revealing what was going on behind all the weirdness, keeping other things concealed, switching out truths for lies and vice-versa until you barely cared anymore and just went with the story. This one does something like that but less so- the flipped cards stay flipped (“floop the pig!” as they’d say on a show that I think might have drawn some inspiration from Wolfe), confusing aspects stay confused, it is less elegant.
But it’s still pretty good. Wolfe’s prose style — dense and allusive but always flowing and alluring, not unlike a lava flow, how beautiful and crushing it is — carries the reader along. It might have helped had I read this closer to when I read the New Sun books, as there’s a lot of call-backs, but it’s hard to forget Thecla, Jonah, the Green Man, and the rest (some of Severian’s lovers — Severian being a lady’s man on top of everything else isn't as cheesy as it sounds but is the closest to cheesy Wolfe gets here — are a bit interchangeable, tragic women of power usually)… Just sometimes hard to forget where Wolfe left off with them.
Especially because his spaceship, in keeping with relativity (or some other science stuff, who’s to say really), is also a timeship! And kind of a… temporal realm ship? There’s some Kabalistic metaphors here, where Severian and company, after some spaceship stuff, wind up higher up the Sepiroth, the Tree of Existence, snd then have to go back home. Among other things, this probably confirms what some of the old Wolfe-heads say- Urth ain’t Earth, but it’s close (and possibly upside-down- there’s reasonably good hints that the city where Severian is born is meant to be alternate dimension far future Buenos Aires, but the Plata/Gyoll flows the wrong ways, the jungles and mountains are on the “wrong” direction, etc).
In the end, Severian does the thing. You kind of know he will. The suspense of that was never the point, though seeing what Wolfe could yank out of his bag of tricks to complicate matters is part of what you’re plonking down time and money to see. There’s some time travel (including retconning/retroactively-establishing stuff in the prior books), some Christian symbolism (Wolfe was a devout Catholic, but I question how the claims made that his works are directly devotional), and then Severian finally gets to get a rest. Wolfe wrote two more series, the Book of the Long Sun and the Book of the Short Sun, in the same, err, multiverse? I’ll get to those, at some point, but I think this is a good, if perhaps more protracted than necessary, stopping point for Severian’s story. ****
Zachary Carter, “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes” (2020) (read by Robert Petkoff) - I’ll admit: I’m behind on reviews. I listened to this a little while ago. And all I want to type is the name “KEYNES!” to the same cadence as the word “SHOTS!” in that one tens song where they just shout the word “SHOTS!” a lot. Admittedly, if one major economist of the twentieth century could be said to have engaged in “party rocking” it would probably be John Maynard Keynes. As journalist Zach Carter, author of this highly-regarded new book on the man and his ideas tells us, Keynes was a social butterfly who hung out with people thought of as cool, in his day, and got laid a lot with men and married one of the great ballerinas of his time. But, still, you all probably expect more content from me, and I hate to let people down.
Among other interesting innovations, Carter eschews the standard biography format. You don’t get a long section about Keynes’s childhood or education, or other bits of “setup” like you see in a lot of big, whang-dang-doodle biogs. Instead, we start with Keynes “folding his long legs” into a friend’s motorcycle’s sidecar and toodling off for London, leaving placid academic Cambridge for the hurly burly of WWI London. Someone needed to manage the empire’s economic situation in it’s time of need, and that would be a six foot seven queer math major, our Maynard. Also, the last third or so of the book takes place after Keynes died, in 1946 (at a relatively young 62). It discusses the future of Keynes’s ideas, their ascendancy, their modification — Carter would insist their corruption — their fall, their possible resurrection.
This is a rich and very well-written work aimed towards an educated general audience (I think of it as the NPR/Twitter demographic). We get into the ins and outs of Keynes’s career, which took him to the Versailles Conference, attempts to work at the Exchequer and manage the Depression, further work during the war, the Bretton Woods conference which laid the groundwork for the postwar global economic order, his personal life, encounters with figures as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill, on and on. Keynes had a really interesting life, on top of whatever else can be said about him. It’s hard to imagine contemporary big time academics matching it… if nothing else, they’re expected to work a lot harder at much dumber tasks than Keynes or academics of his generation (and Keynes was a hard worker) were…
Insofar as there’s a takeaway point beyond “this guy had a cool life,” it’s one I actually agree with, and which has been a minor hobby horse of mine for some time, even if I disagree with some of the valuations Carter has put on the point. Keynes, Carter argues, updated liberalism for the twentieth century. This is relevant in large part because Keynes’s opponents, led by Friedrich von Hayek (a contemporary of Keynes, whose attacks against his work Keynes treated with a patronizing — and often hilarious — encouragement, real “A for effort, Freddie” stuff), have tried to seize the mantle of “classical liberalism” against anything that smacked of Keynes. Anything that expands “government” can’t be liberalism because (insert what’s often a misreading of Mill, Locke, Adam Smith, whoever here), the “classical liberal” argument goes. This was always a stupid argument. In many respects, it reflects the Marx-envy of free market fanatics. They always wanted a Marx for their side, and have enlisted a roll call of figures, each less fitting or just more pathetic than the last — Smith, von Mises, von Hayek, Ayn Rand — to be that figure. But there just isn’t a prophet figure like that for them, and there isn’t a central set of canonical texts like there is in Marxism (you’d figure they’d appreciate that, “free thinkers” that they’re supposed to be!).
In fact, the closest to a Marx figure in liberalism is… John Maynard Keynes! This gets to the dumber, more relevant part of why the idea that “classical liberalism” really exists in a different ideological formation than postwar liberalism was always a sham. The point of liberalism was never small government or big government. It was always about eliding the basic, elemental conflict between redistributing power down the social scale towards the people who make society work, or keeping it where it is/retrenching it in the hands of ever smaller and more arbitrary elites. Law, markets, education, culture, numerous mixes and combinations of these and other things, liberals have proposed all of these as alternate axes and bases of politics than the basic struggle for power. Keynes, and his equivalents in liberal politics such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson, thought that you could elide the power struggle through, basically, beating socialism at its own mass-appeal game. Keynes saw that the productive capacities of capitalism could make a decent life for everyone, and thought that fiscal policy could guarantee that life, thereby defusing social conflict and finally short-circuiting the struggle for power.
I’m a socialist and a Marxist. I believe that the history of humanity is the history of class struggle (some other stuff, too), and I want the working class to win, and I work towards that in my way. So it’s with that in mind when I say that the Keynesian vision is a tempting one… but maybe not as tempting as some would make out. Maybe it’s just the fighter in me, but I have noticed the political deactivation that the Keynesian future promises. We’ll all have so much leisure and time for art (Keynes was a great art lover, and envisioned everyone doing community theater, which is cute) we’ll just let the experts carry on with things! I don’t like that. Carter makes clear that Keynes saw most form of political agitation — from the October Revolution to his friend, writer Lytton Strachey, handing him a letter protesting Keynes’s involvement in WWI and stalking out of a dinner date — as essentially tragic, to say nothing of low-class. I will never believe that political struggle will ever stop, as long as we’re recognizably human (zap me up into the post-human energy hive mind, if it comes to that!), and wouldn’t want it to. “It’s all in the game,” as a beloved figure of early twenty-first century fiction put it.
Carter also makes clear that Keynes’s ideas never had a golden age. There was never a point where governments used countercyclical fiscal policy via investment in public goods to create a stable economic system for the benefit of a broad public. There was never enough money put into the New Deal or the Great Society for it to do that. The massive amounts of money poured into WWII sparked the recovery from the Depression and proved Keynes’s point about deficit spending. But that out terrible ideas into the heads of the politicians around, and we can call that “military Keynesianism.” Pour money into the military and boost employment and public purchasing power that way! No empowering the working class (even by accident, by giving them more leisure time by, say, cutting work time), less vulnerable to red-baiting (the American Keynesians were mercilessly hounded by McCarthyites until nerds like Paul Samuelson promised they’d be apolitical good boys), lots of shiny guns. This was a parody of what Keynes, a man who hated war, had in mind. But with its cowed working class, crucial role for (similarly cowed, but in a different way) experts, and attempt to evade, rather than crush, entrenched powers of wealth and bigotry, it was a parody as faithful to the spirit of the original as anything Weird Al ever produced.
Keynes supposedly “came back” in 2008 after the financial crisis but we all, Carter included, knew what that meant in that soppy cardboard political context- giveaways for the rich. The world might have, sort of, gotten one of Keynes’s basic points — “the market isn’t self-regulating any more than ‘nature’ is, stupid!” — but the political power to do something useful about that observation wasn’t there. It’s not just a matter of Keynes’s old enemies, the Austrian school types who insist on the self-regulation of markets, having seized much of the intellectual high ground. It’s that Keynesianism was always ambivalent about the forces — including a real, fighting left — that made it possible to even get a sham version of it like military Keynesianism going in the first place.
Basically, if you want to get what Keynes promised, you need to fight for what Marx wanted, and if you’re doing that, why not just take the whole fucking pie? Especially when you know, now, given the history (they should have known in the twentieth century, too- they were powerful but often foolish, where we’re all too wise and weak), that the right will wait as long as they have to to take the power back if you don’t break the base of their power, no matter what concessions you make to their little fee-fees? I think Carter would answer “so you don’t get mass atrocities ala Stalin,” more or less, and also a more robust idea of freedom and possibility than obtained in places like the USSR, even post-Stalin. I hear that, though it’s not like followers of Keynes-era liberalism, like LBJ or Richard “we are all Keynesians now” Nixon were strangers to mass death… well, that’s not the “real” Keynesianism, but the military mutation, Carter might say in an unguarded moment (he strikes me as much too slick to write something so gormless if he had time to think)… but then what’s the “real” socialism, etc etc.
Anyway! This was a pretty good book. Sometimes it rubbed me the wrong way in terms of petting expertise-driven liberalism and pooh-poohing radical politics, but I guess I’m sensitive. “The price of peace” is an interesting title, especially given how so many, especially but not exclusively on the right, think “paying for peace” equals appeasement equals Nazis equals bad. It could very well be even if leftists wanted to pay “the price of peace” (and it looks like we are more willing to play these games, and basically have been since the seventies or earlier), the right may very well not let us. Who’s to say? Along with whatever else it is, this book, like the tv show “Mad Men,” is also an elegy for a lost moment of mid-century ambition and cool, warts and all (Keynes had plenty, including that non-obsessive, partial, but nasty strain of upper class British antisemitism). Just how lost is it? I tend to think deeply lost, but who does that stop? *****
Jean Rhys, “Good Morning, Midnight” (1939) - There were a lot of ways for your twentieth century to suck. While lacking a certain “genocide” quality, one pretty bad one was to be a talented woman in one of the roughly umpteen “epoch-making” art/culture scenes of the century of my birth. Seemingly all of them, whatever their political pretenses, were real boys clubs, and the only women they wanted around weren’t there for their direct artistic contributions. These scenes tended to be both profoundly socially incestuous while also full of strangers whose best motives were gawking and whose worst were bad indeed Throw pretense, money, drugs, and other twentieth century party favors like intense ideological posturing into the mix along with the misogyny and fame, and it’s not a fun scene.
Jean Rhys did not have a fun twentieth century. She came from a white creole family on the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, and crossed the Atlantic for education, socializing, and art. Her father died when she was young and she may have made her living as essentially a high class escort — the lines could be blurry (still can, I imagine) — until she had a stroke of luck, of sorts. She started writing and her stories started garnering praise from big shots like Ford Maddox Ford. This was at the height of the Jazz Age, and she lived it up while she could in London and Paris. But she was always a little too stringent for the fizzy/tragic Fitzgerald-esque party, it seems. She didn’t do gazing out at the lights, she did gazing into the black. Her characters didn’t lose themselves- they knew just where they were, and it sucked. She never pretended that money, status, and pain weren’t basic realities of life as she knew it.
This did not endear her or ensure her popularity with readers looking for the usual Jazz Age tropes. She was managing a living with her second husband, looking back at the bad (or anyway, worse- I get she wasn’t happily married exactly) old days when the money started to run out, when she was writing “Good Morning, Midnight” - and, in a struck of bad geopolitical luck, the war hit and no one wanted to read about sad decaying women in a Paris that would soon have bigger problems.
That sucks, because it, and everything I’ve read of her describing life in London and Paris in the interwar period, is great. It’s raw and affecting. The narrator is stuck, stuck by her failed marriages, her inability to do much, the positions both mainstream society and the bohemian fringe assign to women. One of the worst places to be, as far as relatively lucky nationalities like Anglos (not poor inhabitants of the real killing fields in Eurasia, say) at that time was in the declining middle class. You didn’t have any real ability to work for money — you often effectively couldn’t — but you didn’t have enough money to go on, especially if you were on the outs with family.
The narrator has burned every bridge, or someone burned it for her. Every cheap boarding house or dress shop in Paris reminds her of another failure. She meets people, including men who at least pretend to want to help her, but can never know their real motives, and worst of all, she’s starting not to care. She mulls over drinking herself to death, or just making life as tiny as possible — stay in her room, live off of coffee, bread, and regret — not so much as an economizing measure as just to live in accordance with her inner self. It’s a brutal read, but I love it because it seems real in ways that flashier depictions of inner failing and falling don’t. Rhys eventually won international recognition when she was in her sixties for “Wide Sargasso Sea,” a retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic (another white creole from the Caribbean who had a miserable time in England). When interviewed about her newfound success, she dismissed it as too little, too late. Ouch. *****
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: The Reason for the Season
Mithra looks how I feel- ready to lay down nice and cozy for a long winters nap!
Wow, three excellent reviews!