Book Report May 2023
Blighted Lands
Hey really quick, if you haven’t read it yet, check out the interview I did last week with Luke O’Neil. It seems like you guys really liked it so I’ll try to keep doing interviews when I can going forward.
Well well, it feels like yesterday I was apologizing in this space for only having four or so books in an issue and here I am with just three. Oops! But in my defense I have both a 9-month old to take care of and a new Zelda game to play. Long story short on the latter: it’s amazing and I don’t even like the vehicle construction, which is the core mechanic of the whole game. I’m just happy to run around Hyrule and wave my sword again.
What else? Oh, last month I challenged you to Guess the Book, but I think I made it too hard. The answer was The Golden Bough by James Frazer, his study of comparative religion and magic. Priestly trial by combat, spirits of vegetation, sacred prostitution, killing gods, things of that nature. I think it’s super fun even though I’m obviously taking everything he says with quite a few grains of salt. I’m still only halfway through it lol, but look forward to a full write-up here in probably, let’s say, September. Hey is this book canceled? I don’t care but probably!
And in a Drew Magary Fire This Asshole update, two months ago I related the story of Liz’s Bartleby of a coworker who was spreading chaos by refusing to do any of his accounting responsibilities. Great news guys, he finally got fired! Less great news: they failed their annual audit and are now in danger of losing their non-profit status. What a perfect ending to this story. I’m not mad, I’m actually laughing. Maybe Bartleby’s boss was right after all.
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City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis, 1990
Like David Graeber, Mike Davis was another towering figure of the Left who should have been a living idol of mine. Unlike Graeber, whom I heard of for the first time when people were mourning him, I at least heard of Davis when he was merely terminal (he died in October). Defector ran a wonderful tribute, which does a good job sketching what an invigorating and prescient thinker he was.
City of Quartz is his book about Los Angeles. He charts its history, from desert plain filled with nothing but Joshua trees to smog-choked megacity, several times over as he refracts it through different formative factors and institutions. The second chapter is a dynastic history of the cliques that wielded power over the century from 1890 to 1990. It’s a dismal account of shortsighted profiteering focused exclusively on juicing real estate values. These banal machinations sent my mind wandering but that’s the intention. Though Davis writes the book as a conventional history—restricting himself to what did happen—it’s also very much a history of what did not happen and the work that was not done to make the city livable for anyone besides its landed gentry.
The book comes alive in the third and fourth chapters, which focus on the loss of public space through hostile, poor- and minority-excluding urban design choices and the LAPD, which arrived at its recognizable, brutal form in the 50s under a chief dedicated to curtailing race-mixing. Davis is fiery and outraged here. It’s edifying to read someone so clear-eyed about the everyday horrors of living under this sort of dehumanizing regime. The book’s subtitle has become dismally accurate. When our ancient leaders can’t imagine a better way for our world to be it becomes understandable, though not excusable of course, when you remember just how long things have been this fucked.
Davis ends up chronicling three cities in City of Quartz. The first is Llano Del Rio, a socialist colony founded in 1914 that lived its utopian principles until it was harassed out of existence by vigilantes and creditors. The last is Fontana, once a citrus community then a steel mill town eventually desolated by deindustrialization and vulture capitalism. In the middle is LA, the boomtown that never stopped booming even as it rotted from within.
Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, 1972
The inspiration for Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker, this classic of Soviet sci-fi is set 15 years or so after an enigmatic alien visit. The specifics of the Visit are parceled out to us sparingly but there isn’t much to tell—the aliens never emerged from their ships or made contact in any way before leaving. Now their landing sites have become known as the Zones, bizarre and lethal areas filled with “hell slime” that will melt your bones and “bug traps,” areas of intensified gravity that will suck you in and crush you, among other horrors. But the Zones are also full of alien artifacts, some of which are poised to propel humanity to technological revolution and others which are so baffling our leading scientists can do nothing but stare and wonder. We see this world through the eyes of Red Schuhart, a rather deranged “stalker,” someone who lives on the outskirts of a Zone and sneaks in to pilfer alien tech for sale on the black market.
Red is an interesting choice of protagonist for this story because he is so unphilosophical. Despite beginning the book with a job at The Institute studying the Zone, he is resolutely focused only on what these marvels can do for his bank account. His work brings him into contact with an array of interesting characters however, including the corrupt government functionary Richard Noonan and Gutalin, a zealot who sees the alien artifacts as toys of the Devil and makes trips into the Zone to return Satan’s handiwork to him.
The effect is a kaleidoscopic search for meaning when it comes up against a mute and incomprehensible reality. I confess to finding myself craving “lore,” in its video gamiest sense, as I was reading—give me the answers, tell me what the deal was with the aliens, explain the principles of the infinite batteries—but there’s no lore to be had. We’re locked into our all-too-human understanding and asked to make sense of it.
The wisest character in the book is the physicist Pillman, who, Socrates-like, espouses a comfortable resignation to what he does not know. His drunken dialogue with Noonan is my favorite scene in the novel, during which they debate what Newton would have made of a microwave and try to supply a satisfactory definition of “intelligence”—one suggestion is the ability to perform pointless or unnatural acts—before Pillman presents his theory of the Visit. Imagine, he says, some young revelers driving through the country and stopping for a roadside picnic; now imagine what the ants and the squirrels find after they leave: oil slicks, a spark plug, cigarette butts. “What,” asks Noonan, “you mean they never even noticed us?”
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, David Grann, 2023
From the New Yorker writer and author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z comes another true story of adventure and extremity. This one concerns a British naval ship, the HMS Wager, sent in 1741 as part of a squadron on a ludicrous and dumb mission around Cape Horn to capture a Spanish treasure galleon. The mission is mismanaged from the start—the ships’ crews are loaded up with elderly and invalid naval veterans carted straight from the hospital to the dockyard, among other egregious decisions—and the ships are ravaged first by typhus and then scurvy, making the voyage an especially lethal one even before they spend more than a month battling the hurricane force winds and 100-foot waves in Drake’s Passage. The Wager becomes separated from the fleet and wrecks on a desolate island off the coast of southern Chile. Eventually just over 30 of them, in two separate parties, manage to survive the ordeal and return to England.
It’s an entertaining read and Grann is a great writer but he seems somewhat hamstrung by the quality of the documents he had to draw from. He essentially has three characters to work with: Captain Cheap, a driven but brittle company man who refuses to give up on the mission long after they’ve been marooned; midshipman John Byron, grandfather of Lord Byron and an ambivalent observer of his crewmates’ descent toward savagery; and gunner John Bulkeley, a charismatic and proactive sailor who emerges as a natural leader after the wreck. Bulkeley maintained a journal during their five months on Wager Island, making him our primary eyes on the scene. Grann doesn’t quote them directly much and when he does you can see why: they all write in that flowery but highly abstracted way typical of the time that drains the life from the proceedings. When Byron records that some of the crew are resorting to eating their already-dead companions, he says simply that they have advanced to the “last extremity.” Grann also notes that the journals from the island degenerate into tedious lists of whatever meager scraps of food they managed to lay their hands on.
Let’s be honest, this book is no Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s a poor critic who simply declares, “Not as good as the last one!”—especially when comparing to something as masterful as Flower Moon—but I think the comparison helps draw out what left me somewhat wanting here. With its nautical setting and Lord of the Flies storyline, The Wager feels like it’s promising a descent into the heart of darkness. But it never attains that fever pitch. Killers of the Flower Moon, with its shocking violence and genuinely sociopathic characters intent on dispossessing the Osage Nation of its oil rights by any and all means, marrying into the family and spending years slowly poisoning relatives, actually achieved this. The Wager’s lessons are more deflationary. When Captain Cheap storms from his tent and shoots an agitated crewmember in the face, we’re not Marlow beholding Kurtz. Cheap is simply a small man out of his depth acting foolishly, hungrier than I could possibly imagine.
This reads rather harsh so let me say clearly that I enjoyed this book a lot. It flies by and there’s a grimly comic element to how everything that possibly could go wrong does go wrong, how mistakes compound mistakes until they’re shipwrecked on the far side of the globe. I also appreciated the interplay of social forces on the island—the tension between holding to the established hierarchy even as new ones emerge and the mens’ true capacities for leadership reveal themselves.
