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jjupille's reviews
473 reviews
Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Very hard for me to evaluate this very odd book.
In my simpleton's view of the world, this slots in to "the shattering of the modern mind" that occurred in the first two decades of the 20th century, involving Freud, Einstein, etc.etc., but most importantly World War I, when any worldview premised on the idea that the world made sense no longer made any sense. Cendrars lost an arm in WWI, and the whole book is really just a way to engage madness without getting too worked up about it.
The title character is famously misogynistic, and the title of course can be read that way. I read it as "death by vagina", the idea that as soon as we are born this crazy world starts killing us with its craziness. I'd need to read around the book a lot more and porobably read it again more knowledgeably to really get into other takeaways, but to me it expresses the kind of nihilism that the avant-garde in every field was expressing.
Some philosophizing on pp. 102-103 of my edition, starting with the theme of the uselessness of all action. This sets the only real task as annihilation. "In the last analysis, scientific knowledge is negative. The latest discoveries of science as well as its most stable and thoroughly proven laws, are just sufficient to allw us to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to explain the universe rationally, and the basic folly of all abstract notions. We can now put our metaphysics away in the musuem of international folklore, we can confound all a priori ideas. How and why have become idle, idiotic questions. All that we can admit or affirm, the only synthesis, is the absurdity of being, of the universe, of life. If one wants to live one is better to incline towards imbecility than intelligence, and live only in the absurd. Intelligence consists of eating stars and turning them into dung. And the universe, at the most optimistic estimate, is nothing but God's digestive system" (p. 103).
And,
"Haven't you gotten it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past ...? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it's just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral, and animal, all disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions and systems. It's always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There's no truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust, stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. What can you do about it, my poor friend?" (pp. 181-182).
In my simpleton's view of the world, this slots in to "the shattering of the modern mind" that occurred in the first two decades of the 20th century, involving Freud, Einstein, etc.etc., but most importantly World War I, when any worldview premised on the idea that the world made sense no longer made any sense. Cendrars lost an arm in WWI, and the whole book is really just a way to engage madness without getting too worked up about it.
The title character is famously misogynistic, and the title of course can be read that way. I read it as "death by vagina", the idea that as soon as we are born this crazy world starts killing us with its craziness. I'd need to read around the book a lot more and porobably read it again more knowledgeably to really get into other takeaways, but to me it expresses the kind of nihilism that the avant-garde in every field was expressing.
Some philosophizing on pp. 102-103 of my edition, starting with the theme of the uselessness of all action. This sets the only real task as annihilation. "In the last analysis, scientific knowledge is negative. The latest discoveries of science as well as its most stable and thoroughly proven laws, are just sufficient to allw us to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to explain the universe rationally, and the basic folly of all abstract notions. We can now put our metaphysics away in the musuem of international folklore, we can confound all a priori ideas. How and why have become idle, idiotic questions. All that we can admit or affirm, the only synthesis, is the absurdity of being, of the universe, of life. If one wants to live one is better to incline towards imbecility than intelligence, and live only in the absurd. Intelligence consists of eating stars and turning them into dung. And the universe, at the most optimistic estimate, is nothing but God's digestive system" (p. 103).
And,
"Haven't you gotten it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past ...? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it's just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral, and animal, all disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions and systems. It's always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There's no truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust, stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. What can you do about it, my poor friend?" (pp. 181-182).
This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan
hopeful
informative
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
If you like Pollan, you will like it. It's a little breezier than how to change your mind, but it's really good.
East West Street by Philippe Sands
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Sands is a legendary international lawyer and here he weaves the threads of his grandfather Leon and celebrated international lawyers Raphael Lemkin (who originated the legal concept of genocide) and Hersch Lauterpacht (who originaed the legal concept of crimes against humanity). All three of these Jewish men have early-to-mid 20th century connections to Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv in what is now Ukraine and its environs, and had personal / family experience of the horrors that people can inflict on each other on ground bringing so many different folks into proximity. A fourth protagonist is the Nazi governor of the region around Lemberg during WWII, who implemented the Final Solution there - Treblinka was in his territory.
Lemkin and Lauterpacht articulated alternative frameworks for thinking about The Final Solution and the rest of the Nazi atrocities. Lemkin favored the notion of genocide, the systematic extermination of a group of people. Lauterpact favored an individual conception of human rights. So the group vs. the individual conceptions were contending. Ironically, given that this is in Sands's professional wheelhouse, I found his elucidation of these rival concepts to be somewhat weak, betrayed in part by the author's apparent preference for Lauterpacht's conception. He just never really does justice to the idea of genocide, and the critique of the concept - that it would reify the very collective identities that it was trying to defang - didn't persuade me. Lemkin is kind of desperate and nutty and workmanlike, while Lauterpacht is plugged in, refined, brilliantly original. With one pillar so robust and the other so withered, this basic dichotomy doesn't entirely suffice to hold up the intellectual edifice.
Still - Sands writes wonderfully, he narrates the research process with glee and enthusiasm, he grapples with the personal and the abstract, and he offers a wonderfully rich window onto the historical forces radiating around and through Lemberg. Especially as the city (now Lviv, Ukraine) is again the site of man's inhumanity to man, the timeless themes at play feel especially timely. I recommend this highly.
Lemkin and Lauterpacht articulated alternative frameworks for thinking about The Final Solution and the rest of the Nazi atrocities. Lemkin favored the notion of genocide, the systematic extermination of a group of people. Lauterpact favored an individual conception of human rights. So the group vs. the individual conceptions were contending. Ironically, given that this is in Sands's professional wheelhouse, I found his elucidation of these rival concepts to be somewhat weak, betrayed in part by the author's apparent preference for Lauterpacht's conception. He just never really does justice to the idea of genocide, and the critique of the concept - that it would reify the very collective identities that it was trying to defang - didn't persuade me. Lemkin is kind of desperate and nutty and workmanlike, while Lauterpacht is plugged in, refined, brilliantly original. With one pillar so robust and the other so withered, this basic dichotomy doesn't entirely suffice to hold up the intellectual edifice.
Still - Sands writes wonderfully, he narrates the research process with glee and enthusiasm, he grapples with the personal and the abstract, and he offers a wonderfully rich window onto the historical forces radiating around and through Lemberg. Especially as the city (now Lviv, Ukraine) is again the site of man's inhumanity to man, the timeless themes at play feel especially timely. I recommend this highly.
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow
medium-paced
4.0
Graeber and Wengrow's _The Dawn of Everything_ got lots of play in various high-falutin' review venues late last year, and being a sucker for big history I checked it out. I have to say it was pretty amazing, though I think they lay out far more threads than they can manage to weave together. The key takeways for me, off the top of my head, are the following: 1) agriculture is not an absorbing state, where once you discover it, you get stuck with it; 2) having agriculture does not condemn you to social inequality and a coercive state; 3) not unrelated, the deep historical record shows lots more variability, lots less linearity, and TONS more creative agency in shaping how we live than the conventional narrative allows for.
I found the "indigenous critique" fascinating and it really made me think. Schismogenesis seems likely and I accept what they have to say about it. The whole thread of how "caring work" translated into the bigger picture kind of lost me. I leave the book still somewhat uncertain as to how we landed on a world of social inequality and coercive states, given that none of it was inevitable. There are probably lots of other things I might want to say, but feel free to weigh in. If you liked Diamond's _Guns, Germs and Steel_, Harari's _Sapiens_, or Scott's work on "grain states", I do highly recommend this.
The Prophet with The Forerunner and The Madman by Kahlil Gibran
inspiring
medium-paced
4.0
Delightful
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
dark
lighthearted
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Great read. I was amazed at how light and airy the prose was, given how dark the subject matter is. A pretty fantastic contrast there.
The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East by Timur Kuran
medium-paced
4.0
I liked this a lot. There's a lot going on, and I would have liked some more distillation (like a causal diagram), but it's smart and quite persuasive.
The Iron Heel by Jack London
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
London is no great prose stylist. I have him in my head next to Steinbeck, because of geographical, historical, and political proximity, but their writing occupies separate universes. The windup was too long. Ernest Everhard was a cardboard cutout of lefty manliness, a rather self-congratulatory "idealized self" of London. Avis was not a cardboard cutout because she had ideas of her own, was just a little bit bohemian, was ready to fight to the death, but she was pretty thinly characterized, and mostly lacked big-picture agency. She followed the man over whom she swooned rather dissatisfyingly. She is no feminist hero. And that's fine, but it's the flatness of the characters, partly driven by the flatness of the prose in the early going, that I found limiting.
The prose got better as there was more action.
The sociology was a little didactic whenever Ernest was delivering his lessons on socialism, certainly too pat and smugly self-assured in the way that committed Marxists have been for 150 years. Some of the social categories, such as labor castes, and certainly the people of the abyss, didn't seem quite so textbook, though I am no expert in that stuff.
The book (published 1907) is credited with being wildly prescient, e.g., with respect to the rise of fascism, but I don't see it that way. Its materialism is just too strong, and pretty much leaves out all cultural and other immaterial social factors. Its determinism also leads it astray, as history is quite a bit less linear than a simple Marxist teleology --which is what is on offer here-- can handle.
So, anyway, I am glad I read it, and it's holds a good bit of interest, but it's pretty limited.
The prose got better as there was more action.
The sociology was a little didactic whenever Ernest was delivering his lessons on socialism, certainly too pat and smugly self-assured in the way that committed Marxists have been for 150 years. Some of the social categories, such as labor castes, and certainly the people of the abyss, didn't seem quite so textbook, though I am no expert in that stuff.
The book (published 1907) is credited with being wildly prescient, e.g., with respect to the rise of fascism, but I don't see it that way. Its materialism is just too strong, and pretty much leaves out all cultural and other immaterial social factors. Its determinism also leads it astray, as history is quite a bit less linear than a simple Marxist teleology --which is what is on offer here-- can handle.
So, anyway, I am glad I read it, and it's holds a good bit of interest, but it's pretty limited.