Book Review: Inga Clendinnen - Aztecs: An Interpretation

The pre-Columbian Aztecs are a tough people to really know, not only given their own tendencies towards self-glorification, but also because the systematic Spanish attempt to eliminate the existing structure and memory of Aztec society in order to replace it with something more palatable and familiar was successful, and therefore scattered records and summarized codices are in large part all we have. Clendinnen has written a very sympathetic, very detailed attempt to capture what Aztec society felt like for the average person - warriors, priests, merchants, women - and to recreate as much as possible of the world that was lost. This means that her interpretive efforts are therefore more than a little speculative in many parts, yet she does a magnificent job of conveying the appeal of the culture while not downplaying the miserable relationship the Aztecs had with their neighbors, in particular the grim horrors of their most infamous ritual practice.

One of the interesting things about the Aztecs is how different their attitude towards empire was than that of natural comparisons like the Romans. From their founding as the "Triple Alliance" union of the city-states Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlateloco in 1428, they fought nearly continuous wars against nearby cities until the Spanish conquest in 1521, but instead of aggressive expansion and incorporation of subject peoples in order to increase their strength for the next war, they preferred to merely acquire fealty from the enemy nobility and exact regular tribute. There might be several reasons why the Aztecs did not have the same urge to imperiogenesis as other civilizations: James Scott's book Against the Grain argues in part that grain cultivation is uniquely well-suited to despotism, and perhaps corn is less so; or perhaps the mountainous terrain in central Mexico is more similar to Greece, which also remained hard to consolidate for a long time, than the easy plains of Italy, making lasting conquest more difficult (though compare against the Incas to the south). There was a good chapter in Peter Turchin's Ultrasociety that explored how the nearly impassable mountains of Papua New Guinea allowed just enough contact between tribes to permit warfare, but not enough to make lasting conquest feasible. This did not encourage peaceful coexistence: the near-constant low-level warfare was less deadly in any given clash than in, say, a typical Roman battle, but there were far more of them, and so overall mortality in war was higher in a society of small-scale villages then in large-scale complex societies. Clendinnen emphasizes the almost nonexistent unifying forces at work in the imperial hierarchy:

It is worth taking time over this oddly based polity, crucial as it is for an understanding of the city's workings, as for the process of its final destruction. Tenochtitlan was no Rome, despite the magnificence of its monuments, the steady inflow of tribute goods, and their spectacular consumption in a state-financed theatre. Subjugation did not mean incorporation. There was no significant bureaucracy in the Mexica 'empire', and few garrisons either. Marriage alliances linked the leading dynasties, while lesser local rulers were typically left in place and effectively autonomous, at least for as long as their towns delivered the agreed tribute to the imperial city. Even in those rare cases when the defeated ruler was killed, the dynasty was usually allowed to survive. But if local rulers spent months in the Mexica capital, they did not thereby become Mexica, and when their military contingents were called on to fight for the Triple Alliance they did so under their own leaders and banners. The 'empire' was an acrobats' pyramid, a precarious structure of the more privileged lording it over the less, with those poised on the highest level triumphant, but nervously attentive to any premonitory shift or shuffle from below.

The human sacrifice is of course the most famous form of tribute the Aztecs demanded, like Theseus and the Minotaur on a much larger scale. Sacrifices were done as triumphs after a successful military campaign, as commemorations of important events like the ascension of a new ruler or the completion of a major temple, or to propitiate the rain god Tlaloc as part of the regular rotation of harvest festivals like Tlacaxipeualiztli, Etzalqualiztli, Ochpaniztli, and Panquetzaliztli. About this practice of human sacrifice, which is rightly the become the main thing people know about Aztec culture, perhaps the only thing that can be said is that those unhappy victims had plenty of company, as Aztec culture was pretty brutal even for Aztecs:

When the spoils of war and the tribute from other towns subject to the conquered overlord city came into the hands of the Mexica ruler, he chose to distribute them not to the collectivities of the calpullis, but to specially distinguished warriors in the form of offices and titles, with attendant privileges and worked lands, so, it is said, creating a nobility and a bureaucracy at a blow.
Warrior arrogance always commanded a wide social space in the city. Given their reward-by-privilege expectations and their systematic elevation over lesser men, extortion was always a tempting possibility. From time to time it was discovered that warriors had levied an unofficial tribute on the town, 'perchance of chocolate (cacao), or food'. Such gross invasion of the prerogative of the state invoked the punitive violence of the state, and Mexica state justice was summary, brutal, public, and often enough lethal. Most offenders against Moctezoma's laws died most publicly, with the marketplace the favoured venue, where adulterers were stoned or strangled and habitual drunkards had their heads beaten in by Moctezoma's executioners.

Fun stuff. Clendinnen is careful to note that, as with all societies, vicious cruelty lived alongside warmth and humanity, and she works as hard as she can to convey the magnificent grandeur of the Aztecs. The reader can judge for themselves which aspects of Aztec culture were most affecting, but by the end of the book, as the Aztec's neighbors and subjects joined with the Spanish to destroy their vampiric clench, I still felt for them, though not too much. The Spanish had plenty of admiration for the Aztecs as builders and administrators, and indeed as Clendinnen points out, it is telling that one of the laments written after the Spanish conquest is really mourning for the city more than it is for the people:

Broken spears lie in the roads;
we have torn our hair in our grief.
The houses are roofless now, and their walls
are red with blood.
Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas,
and the walls are splattered with gore.
the water has turned red, as if it were dyed,
and when we drink it,
it has the taste of brine.
We have pounded our hands in despair
against the adobe walls,
for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.
The shields of our warriors were its defence,
but they could not save it.

Best albums I listened to: 2019

1. Moving Panoramas - In Two

2. The Highwomen - The Highwomen

3. Titus Andronicus - An Obelisk

4. Lizzo - Cuz I Love You

5. Jenny Lewis - On the Line

6. Jade Bird - Jade Bird

7. Better Oblivion Community Center - s/t

8. Andrew Bird - My Finest Work Yet

9. White Denim - Side Effects

10. Gnash - we

Book Review: Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute

The final entry in Lem's pseudoepigraphy trilogy, One Human Minute collects the title review and two other writings relating to non-existent books together. While it's still no A Perfect Vacuum, this volume has clearer ideas and a more pleasant writing style than Imaginary Magnitude. It's hard to tell how much difference the translation makes; perhaps Catherine Leach was simply working with stronger material than Marc Heine was given for Imaginary Magnitude, while Michael Kandel somehow always gets the good Lem volumes to rework into English. At the very least, there are no drudgerous pieces like "Golem XIV", or much of Summa Technologiae, so even though these essays might seem a bit dry and could benefit from being placed in a narrative, even second-tier Lem is still good stuff.

• "One Human Minute". Imagine the Guinness Book of Records, but the "records" part is literal - the eponymous chronicle is a statistical abstract of various measures of the sum total of the human condition during a single minute of one day. Interestingly, we are not told exactly when the select minute occurred, so presumably it was a representative day in 1988, when the fictitious volume was published. From births to deaths to sexual encounters, the review explores how encountering data presented like changes the experience, as Stalin's line about how "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" is turned on its head. It's like an extended riff on that scene in the movie Amélie when she wonders how many couples in Paris are having an orgasm at that moment, and it's striking how different seeing the full measure of a single life is from seeing a lifespan's worth of minute slices from the equivalent number of different individuals.
• "The Upside-Down Revolution". In the 21st century, advances in military hardware will transform warfare yet again; stockpiles of overwhelming nuclear force have rendered the prospect of great clashes of tanks and planes and warships obsolete, and so the strategic deployment of great swarms of computerized insects, which have far more subtle effects, will be paramount, as will encouraging their evolution to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Lem is really good at working out of the complex game-theoretic logic of war strategy, and this reminded me a lot of his novel Fiasco, so much so that I wish he had turned this book review into a narrative short story. Some ideas work well on the page but don't work in movie form (the philosophical ruminations on the impossibility of truly knowing alien life in Solaris is a great example), but sometimes you see the opposite idea: instead of dryly describing the likely effects of autonomous swarms of nanobots on warfare, why not have Pirx the Pilot try to fight off an attack of one?
• "The World As Cataclysm". Lem argues with our framing of the Fermi Paradox (which he does not explicitly name) for 30 pages, insisting that our understanding of many of the variables involved is so poor that instead of trying to figure out why intelligent life did happen on Earth, it would be more edifying to figure out which disasters caused it to not happen everywhere else we see. Lem is basically arguing that we should import the distinction between risk and uncertainty from finance (the former is quantifiable whereas the latter is not) into models of the probability of intelligent life, so that we don't waste our time searching in parts of the galaxy out in the fringes or too near to the core, or elsewhere afflicted with catastrophe. Lem writes with his typical bubble-bursting remorselessness (again keeping Solaris in mind, I always get the impression that he would really hate optimistic shows like Star Trek that blithely depict humanity palling around with friendly alien life), yet I found myself wishing for the humor of Roger Lowenstein, who memorably summed up the crucial risk vs uncertainty distinction for me in When Genius Failed, his history of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management:

The problem with the math is that it adorned with certitude events that were inherently uncertain. "You take Monica Lewinsky, who walks into Clinton's office with a pizza. You have no idea where that's going to go," Conseco's Max Bublitz, who had declined to invest in Long-Term noted. "Yet if you apply math to it, you come up with a thirty-eight percent chance she's going to go down on him. It looks great, but it's all a guess".

Lem is constantly reminding the reader how much of science fiction is just a guess, and it's a valuable service.

Book Review: Don DeLillo - White Noise

I've had a deep ambivalence towards DeLillo's goofy writing style in the past; his silly dialogue, wacky characters, and shaggy-dog plots work well when they work, but they come off as boring and frustrating when they don't (I liked Mao II but gave up partway through The Names). Fortunately White Noise makes all of those elements work fairly well, and even DeLillo's inexplicable addiction to bizarrely precocious Woke Toddler child characters can't ruin what turns out to be a fairly thoughtful exploration of mortality, family, and consumerism in an unstable modern world. White Noise was tagged with the infamous "postmodern" label when it came out in 1985, but from nearly 35 years later, it doesn't feel nearly as weighty/experimental/metafictional/revelatory as what I usually think of as postmodern novels. Instead it feels more like a humble comic novel with some serious bits rather than as a serious novel with jokes, and consequently it stays on the safe side of the implausible/insufferable chasm that it turns out DeLillo was working in before most other writers. His offhand jokes about doing things purely to be seen doing them are some of the best writing I've seen from him, and it was truly an unhappy realization to see how accurately DeLillo's parody America resembles what's now the real thing.

The premise is pretty funny: protagonist Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler Studies in an invented Midwestern college town along the lines of Ames or Champaign-Urbana. He doesn't even speak German at first, instead concealing his utter academic uselessness behind hilarious pyrotechnic pomposity whenever he's forced to do anything that resembles teaching. This sort of light-hearted sendup of professorship was probably done better by Nabokov in Pale Fire but is still funny here, even if the fact that real-life universities have made amusingly specialized liberal arts positions like this essentially extinct renders this premise a parody from another era. Gladney and his family evacuate their town when a chemical accident, the Airborne Toxic Event, temporarily engulfs the town, and upon their return he has to confront his own changed sense of mortality, as well as that of his family, since he discovers that his wife has begun an affair to gain access to a drug that helps her cope with her fear of death. After an extended walk-and-talk with a colleague about whether he's at heart "a killer or dier", Gladney attempts to murder the other man, but changes his mind at the last minute. The novel ends with an examination of the supermarket and its emotional centrality to the population of the town.

My main complaint about Don DeLillo's writing style was that it seemed like he wrote himself out of anything really affecting. Coming into White Noise, I felt that his characters were so artificial, with such relentlessly absurd dialogue and odd worldviews, that whenever he tried to drop in "profound" observations into their speech or as a description of a character action it mostly comes off as annoying. I was concerned at why what's so clearly supposed to be a lighthearted, easygoing style wasn't working for me, until I realized that he was just ahead of his time. He perfectly predicted that awful snappy banter dialogue pattern like in Marvel movies where what's clearly supposed to be a meaningful moment is immediately drained of all gravity by some stupid snarky quip and you're onto the next scene before there's a risk of anything actually mattering to the characters. It's aggravating, but it's supposed to be that way.

That said, I still had to actually read this stuff, and it's inarguable that DeLillo isn't the prose stylist that other comic authors are, and often seems to genuinely be trying too hard to be funny when a more naturalistic approach might have worked out better. Sometimes he will have good lines like "Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level" or that "The twentieth century is all about people going into hiding even when no one is looking for them", but you have to work through a lot of zany chaff to get there. Luckily not all of White Noise is afflicted in this way, and the meandering puffery that Gladney spouts off is funny when he does it, it's just when it's in the mouth of his son Heinrich that it's not so charming. Thomas Pynchon, who DeLillo is often compared to, had a thoughtful take on this exact thing in the Introduction to Slow Learner, his collection of early short stories:

At the heart of the story, most crucial and worrisome, is the defective way in which my narrator, almost but not quite me, deals with the subject of death. When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death - how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate.

I think this is true, and seen in that light, the adamantine goofiness every character has is not so bad, in fact it's almost endearing, as they infodump, dodge, and avoid real matters when speaking to each other in just the way that every character in most mass-market entertainment does these days. Likewise, one thing I will give DeLillo is that his depictions of celebrity/voyeur/parasocial culture are not just vivid but incredibly prescient. "The most photographed barn in America" that people drive out of their way simply to photograph and never actually see is a brilliant representation of the increasingly engineered tendency to perform activities just for the sake of being seen. It wasn't new even in the 80s to ponder how many people (yourself included) have documented something without ever actually looking at or enjoying the ostensible subject, which is not even the "real" subject anyway, but rarely have I seen it captured so pithily as DeLillo does here.

There's a little riff on California and natural disasters that I swear must be exactly how Donald Trump watched their recent wildfires:

"We're suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information."
"It's obvious," Lasher said. A slight man with a taut face and slicked-back hair.
"The flow is constant," Alfonse said. "Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."
Cotsakis crushed a can of Diet Pepsi and threw it at a garbage pail.
"Japan is pretty good for disaster footage," Alfonse said. "India remains largely untapped. They have tremendous potential with their famines, monsoons, religious strife, train wrecks, boat sinkings, et cetera. But their disasters tend to go unrecorded. Three lines in the newspaper. No film footage, no satellite hookup. This is why California is so important. We not only enjoy seeing them punished for their relaxed life-style and progressive social ideas but we know we're not missing anything. The cameras are right there. They're standing by. Nothing terrible escapes their scrutiny."

It's really disturbing to recognize the President of the United States in a discussion where one of the characters is a Professor of Hitler Studies, and even more dispiriting to remember that Trump's victory depended on winning the votes of exactly the Midwestern consumerism-addled dimwits that populate this novel, but somehow it seems fitting that reality has only recently caught up to the absurd, too-stupid-to-be-real comedy of the past. Oh boy.

Best books I read: 2019

What's interesting about 2019, looking back on it, is how I managed to improve on last year's numbers even though I felt I was being lazy the whole time. It seemed like there were a lot of days where I just didn't feel like reading; maybe all those theories about social media and attention span are true. As always I feel like I've signed myself up for more reading to do than I will ever have time for, but isn't that a much better problem than the alternative?

I'm going to start posting all of my reviews to my blog, since I can do more links (and I don't have a word limit), but I'll still be posting to Goodreads. I read even more great fiction, and especially non-fiction, than appears here (see here for the full details), but such is the tyranny of Top X lists. If you only want 1 recommendation for a work of fiction, read Romance of the Three Kingdoms. If you only want 1 recommendation for a work of non-fiction, read Ages of Discord.

Fiction:

John Campbell - Frozen Hell. I vividly remember reading "Who Goes There?" as a child, in a sci-fi short story compilation I checked out from the library whose name I can't recall. I've completely forgotten the other stories, which were of the kind that fellow sci-fi veteran Robert Silverberg fondly but firmly sums up in the Introduction here as "wordy epics in which grim, methodical supermen repeatedly saved the world from menacing aliens by mastering, with the greatest of ease, such things as faster-than-light travel, the fabrication of matter-destroying rays, the release of atomic energy, and the penetration of hyperspace." Campbell's story about an Antarctic expedition's struggle against a shapeshifting alien was incredibly different - intensely-paced, relentless, eerie, and genuinely frightening to young me. It was a great bridge for me between more "literary" short stories like Jack London's "To Build a Fire" and other fantasy horror like H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which coincidentally was also published in serial form in the same Astounding magazine about 2 years before "Who Goes There?", which Campbell of course went on to become the phenomenal editor of.

Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 1. I'm not sure if the term "epic fantasy" applies to this work, since the standard line is that it's "70% history, 30% fiction", but whether it's shelved in "epic fantasy", "historical fiction", or even "magical realism", it's undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of literature. It's almost overwhelming in how full of everything it is: the whirlwind of characters, the unyielding pace of the action, and the seamless integration of so many little human details and emotions that give the many side-plots and minor characters a resonance far out of proportion to their brief page time. Like with all great literature, even those diversions are pure pleasure thanks to clever storytelling. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, each analeptic or proleptic excursion adds valuable depth and context to the main narrative, and the consistent treatment of the ways that individual honor, personal loyalty, and political duty overlap and conflict continuously give each and every decision by the main characters a real weight. Luo's account of the struggle to build a new world out of the decay of the old is as powerful as any modern work I can think of.


Sally Rooney - Normal People. What a thoughtful, infuriating, nuanced little novel. Even though I'm not predisposed to read a lot of stories about on-again, off-again teenage romances, the spectacle of these sympathetic, all-too-relatable characters making important life decisions based on poorly-understood or half-admitted emotional impulses really hit home. In a plain, unadorned language Rooney portrays many indelible moments of two young people struggling desperately to communicate something important to each other, failing because of the wrong phrasing, or an ill-timed silence, leading to them making seemingly irrevocable choices for reasons as unnecessary as they were inevitable. I couldn't count the number of times I wanted to shake some sense into both of them, yet Rooney so skillfully conveys how their presence in each other's lives is simultaneously irreplacable and unsustainable that each stage in their relationship had its own irrefutable logic. The way that crucial events were often conveyed through gaps and absences as much as by visible action made the open ending fully appropriate if not completely satisfying. Even if you thought these characters should have broken up with each other by the end of the first chapter, you're still pulling for them, in a way, all through to the end.

Upton Sinclair - Oil! The Jungle will always be Sinclair's most acclaimed work, and rightly so given its impact, but I believe that Oil! has just as much relevance to contemporary life, if not more so, and deserves to be as well-known as its more venerable sibling even if it did not spur the same reforms of the oil industry that The Jungle did for food preparation and handling. I was spurred to read it after a rewatch of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, and the novel is so different from, and more complex than, the film adaptation that they probably should not be considered strictly related. Anderson's film is a small, close study, with Daniel Day-Lewis' oil tycoon patriarch a cryptic, amoral madman, whereas Sinclair's sprawling epic of ambition and capitalism has the son as its vastly subtler and more complex protagonist, arguing for and against several political philosophies against the backdrop of World War 1, the Teapot Dome scandal, evangelical religious revivalism, the film industry, and the generally explosive growth of Southern California. As always with books vs movie questions, one should decide how much the snappier running time and enhanced aesthetic experience of a film outweighs the greater richness and depth of a novel, but there is so much great stuff in Oil! that isn't the film that it deserves to be experienced as its own masterwork, particularly its exploration of how internal leftist debates interact with public opinion and the forces of big business.

Jin Yong - Legends of the Condor Heroes Vol. 1. This is the first volume of one of the most popular Chinese martial arts novel series ever written, and it reads like an excellent novelization of a kung fu film, although of course it's really the other way around given how influential this series has been on depictions of martial arts in all forms of media ever since it was first published in the 50s. If you've ever seen a kung fu movie, chances are it borrows heavily from Yong's work in tone, setting, or spirit. Naturally wuxia/martial arts novels have had a long tradition dating back centuries before these books were written (in a pleasing fan-fiction-y touch it's revealed that the protagonist Guo Jing is a distant descendant of one of the characters in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Novels), but Yong's work is fully its own despite inhabiting the well-trodden, familiar universe of medieval China. Yong evidently didn't set out to reinvent the wheel in terms of wuxia tropes, but in much the same way that a genre classic like Harry Potter outshone a whole host of similar young wizard adventure novels by being the best version of that genre, Yong's work hits the optimal sweet spot of family drama, political turmoil, patriotism, and of course plenty of incredibly-named kung fu action.

Non-Fiction:

Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski - Markets Without Limits. I had an extremely polarized reaction to this book. Its central question - how exactly does money relate to morality? - is incredibly important, and its answer - if you may do something for free, then you may do it for money - is elucidated in a clear, convincing manner I've never seen anywhere else. I can't say that I fully agree with all of Brennan and Jaworski's arguments, but the main idea itself, that it's not immoral to buy or sell something for money unless it's also immoral to get or give it away for free, is worthy of a long ponder. Indeed, even though this book is clearly written from a libertarian perspective, you often encounter its central argument coming from "the left" in a surprising number of areas, even from those who don't subscribe to the infamous label "neoliberal", so it probably isn't all wrong. The notion that commodification introduces ethical problems is nearly universal, but lots of things are or were universal without being correct, and I think the logic here is strong enough that it's worthy of being promoted to the default view, in a John Stuart Mill sense, where the burden of proof should generally be on the side of market opposition and that we shouldn't restrict markets unless they can be shown to cause harm. However, the authors fail to convince in several specific areas where they don't engage with empirical evidence, such as when they try to argue that it should be legal to buy and sell votes, and their disengagement with many obvious real-world counter-examples means that even though I find the basic idea extremely compelling, much of the book falls into "nice in theory but maybe not in practice" territory.

Donald Palumbo - Chaos Theory, Asimov's Foundations and Robots, and Herbert's Dune. Probably the best close reading of these two titanic series you could ask for, Palumbo's thesis here is that in addition to being entertaining reads, one of the reasons that the Foundation and Dune series have endured for so long is due to their fractal nature: the structures of the novels recapitulate their main plots, which are themselves illustrations of their main themes. The nuances of psychohistory in Foundation and ecology in Dune are demonstrated not just by the characters talking about them, and not just by the actions they take, but also how the books in the series relate to each other, since each novel is a mostly self-contained story but each series builds and expands on the main themes in subtly brilliant fractal patterns. Even better, Palumbo made my own vague notions of how the two series' overlapping but distinct and even opposed ways of viewing the universe relate to each other much more clear - can the future be known, planned for, and managed, or will there always be elements of chance, volition, and surprise? Asimov's careful unification of short stories, novellas, novels, and entire trilogies into the Foundation "metaseries" (i.e. the initially separate Robot, Empire, and Foundation series) is itself an example of the psychohistorical vision of finding order in chaos, whereas Herbert's more shambling efforts in the Dune novels to set up and then knock down successively grander iterations of monomythical hero archetypes are themselves demonstrations of inescapable disorder in a seemingly perfectly ordered society and natural world. Debates over whether genre fiction can be as good as "real literature" are invariably as tedious as they are pointless, and as this literary analysis of two of the greatest science fiction series of all time shows, utterly wrongheaded.

Susan Scafidi - Who Owns Culture?. "Cultural appropriation" is a hot topic these days, a great example of how frustrating debate in the 21st century can be. An emotionally-charged subject with unclear boundaries and varying definitions that has deep implications for capital-letter topics like Authenticity, Identity, Ownership, and Power is an ideal engine for producing negative-sum arguments that leave everyone more angry and less enlightened than they were before. For my own edification I thought it would be helpful to read something about cultural appropriation that fit the concept into a more analytical framework. Scafidi's central ideas - group cultural property as an analogue of individual intellectual property, and cultural appropriation as an analogue of copyright infringement - are a much more useful way of thinking about the latest controversies over food, fashions, music, and so on than what you usually read. In addition to providing lots of interesting examples of cultural exchange, both good and bad, and across many types of cultures, Scafidi offers proposals to both protect sensitive aspects of culture as well as promote cultural innovation, which is an exceptionally difficult balance to strike even within a single culture. Like with many things in life, familiar concepts like respect, openness, and dignity are perhaps more important tools for this debate than any particular abstract theory of property rights, but I wish everyone who's tempted to write or read yet another clickbait article about cultural appropriation in the era of ubiquitous memes, remixes, and adaptations would read this immediately.

Peter Turchin - Ages of Discord. If anyone can claim to be making Isaac Asimov's dream of psychohistory manifest it's Turchin, who has done more work to create a truly scientific and predictive theory of macrohistorical patterns than probably anyone else. While this is of course impossible in the strictly Asimovian sense of being able to tell exactly when major crises will arise - and unlike Asimov, Turchin does not even pretend to then be able to present timely solutions via hologram - this book makes a convincing argument that we can discern real lessons about general trends in societal upheaval, while still humbly emphasizing how difficult it is to make even modest predictions about the future. Unfortunately, as the title unhappily alludes to, Turchin's prediction is that the 2020s will be even more unpleasant than today, an era of strife that echoes previous periods in history where the existing social order proved unable to accommodate internal divisions, and the political system could not easily resolve these tensions due to elite greed and status-hoarding. While not Marxist in analysis or conclusion, Turchin's Structural-Demographic Theory broadly aligns with the notion that the rich and powerful have diverted too much of society's wealth and privilege towards themselves, and general wage stagnation combined with class immobility is already having dangerously destabilizing effects on our cultural norms. Even though the book's prognosis is negative, it's just as high-quality as Turchin's other recent works, which collectively form one of the most impressive oeuvres in contemporary social science.

Carl Zimmer - She Has Her Mother's Laugh. The most important decision you can make in your life is who to have children with. This is understood more or less unconsciously by practically everyone, but the true nature of heredity - precisely what traits we inherit from our parents, and how we bequeath them in turn to our own children - is far more complex and subtle than we give it credit for. Zimmer traces our conception of heredity from one kind of ignorance to another, from our historical innocence of its genetic basis to our current incomprehension of what the ultimate consequences of our newfound power over it will be now that we have powerful tools like CRISPR. He does a great job balancing the pop sci elements of genetics 101 with the more complex cultural consequences at each stage of our understanding, so as concepts like X-inactivation, mosaicism, or epigenetics get discovered, you get crucial context as to how people used that new knowledge for both good and ill. The word "eugenics" casts a long shadow over our current attempts to consciously affect how our own heredity works, as it should, but the incandescence of real scientific knowledge is enough, or should be, to give us confidence that as we begin to use genetic engineering to deliberately reshape our genes that we don't have to simply repeat the old bigoted mistakes of the past. Our DNA might blindly attempt to replicate itself, but we don't have to, and a clear-eyed assessment of the possibilities in front of us should give us a great deal of optimism for our descendants.

Book Review: Upton Sinclair - Oil!

The Jungle will always be Sinclair's most acclaimed work, and rightly so given its impact, but I believe that Oil! has just as much relevance to contemporary life, if not more so, and deserves to be as well-known as its more venerable sibling even if it did not spur the same reforms of the oil industry that The Jungle did for food preparation and handling. I was spurred to read it after a rewatch of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, and the novel is so different from, and more complex than, the film adaptation that they probably should not be considered strictly related. Anderson's film is a small, close study, with Daniel Day-Lewis' oil tycoon patriarch a cryptic, amoral madman, whereas Sinclair's sprawling epic of ambition and capitalism has the son as its vastly subtler and more complex protagonist, arguing for and against several political philosophies against the backdrop of World War 1, the Teapot Dome scandal, evangelical religious revivalism, the film industry, and the generally explosive growth of Southern California. As always with books vs movie questions, one should decide how much the snappier running time and enhanced aesthetic experience of a film outweighs the greater richness and depth of a novel, but there is so much great stuff in Oil! that isn't the film that it deserves to be experienced as its own masterwork, particularly its exploration of how internal leftist debates interact with public opinion and the forces of big business.

In fairness to Anderson, ones of Sinclair's weaknesses as an author is that it can be difficult to tell his digressions from his details, which is probably why the movie really only uses the plot from about the first 100 pages and then does its own thing. The very first chapter is a lengthy, floridly overwritten dramatization of J. Arnold Ross Sr. and Jr. driving into California to investigate some oil leases, but the story picks up rapidly and Senior, a small-time oilman, begins gradually making it big through smart investments and some cunning. He's a tough negotiator, and not averse to greasing the palms of public officials when necessary, but he's not at all like his movie depiction; he's always fair to his workers and generally supportive though skeptical of his son's ideological meanderings. His son, nicknamed Bunny, is the real main character, and over the course of the book he loyally defends his father's line of work to the various leftists and socialists he encounters as he gets continually more and more involved in the world of radical politics, especially after he meets Paul Watkins, a tough-minded worker, and his brother Eli, a religious charlatan (both played by Paul Dano in the movie). Like any good class traitor, Bunny feels guilty about the increasing wealth and privilege he accumulates as his father's business continues to expand, but that doesn't stop him from dating actresses and "reluctantly" enjoying the F. Scott Fitzgerald high society lifestyle while at the same time attempting to use his wealth for good. Eventually the brutal repression of socialists and anarchists after World War 1 in the Palmer Raids leads to Paul's being beaten to death at the hands of the authorities, and the novel ends with a solemn resignation at the unstoppable power of the impersonal capitalist juggernaut.

What's interesting is that the novel is for the most part quite nuanced and almost sympathetic in its explorations of industry and power. The Jungle, written 20 years before, was much more stridently anti-capitalist, but Oil! portrays the the struggle between large businesses and small for market share with real enthusiasm, and Sinclair openly admires the mix of guile, dedication, and vision it takes for an entrepreneur to grow from a small operator to a major political player. Ross and his operation in "Beach City" is an only barely fictionalized depiction of the real-life Edward Doheny's development of Huntington Beach in Orange County, and Sinclair's melancholy illustration of all levels of government as corrupt, feckless, and reactionary fits into a long tradition of California-as-American-microcosm, like in Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, etc. At various points Bunny attempts to stand up to Vernon Roscoe, his father's much more ruthless business partner and the bad cop of capitalism to his father's good cop, and Roscoe's powerful defenses of the inexorable logic of capitalism are right in line with the famous monologues in Wall Street, Other People's Money, etc. By the end of the book the triumph of capitalism is taken as practically unavoidable, but at many points the characters are given room to portray this as an actual good thing, which Sinclair did not do in The Jungle. The oil industry has many casualties over the course of the novel, but Sinclair leaves it up to the reader to picture what if anything would change under a socialist system. With the hindsight of a hundred years, we can see that real-life socialist countries don't seem to have discovered a clearly superior method for resource extraction, but that doesn't make the imperial cruelty of the oil barons at the incredibly modest demands of the workers for simple wage increases any easier to swallow.

It's notable that all of the radicals Bunny encounters are well-meaning but ultimately doomed, whether by pointless factionalism, naivete, or government hostility via strike-breaking and state-sanctioned brutality. Sinclair spends a good deal of time on how the cannibalistic disputes between the various flavors of socialists, communists, anarchists, and leftists were unavoidable but ultimately meaningless, as the real powers operated with impunity on a plane far above them, and one does not have to think very hard to see how the equivalent forces of oligarchy ensure that the same system operates today. I was reminded of Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, set a decade later, and how how liberal reformers in the FDR administration defused much of this kind of radical pressure with pro-union policy as part of the New Deal, but Sinclair can't bring himself to write anything close to the redemptive ending that Steinbeck was so fond of, and Paul's ultimate death at the hands of an anti-union goon squad is nothing but a fatalistic reminder of the power of unchecked greed. Even worse, Eli is able to cynically use his brother's death to advance his immense evangelist movement, making one long for the violent comeuppance Anderson gave him in the film. And even though Bunny and his new wife Rachel dedicate his inheritance to establishing institutions of reform, Sinclair doesn't have any illusions that they will matter greatly; all of the antagonists (and even Bunny's father) not only escape any consequences for their corruption in the Teapot Dome scandal, they successfully install Coolidge as president in a landslide.

Since this is historical fiction, it's easy to take the gloomy irrelevance of the American socialist movement as inevitable (though it is curious that Eugene Debs' surprisingly successful campaigns for president go unmentioned during the discussions about the viability of electoralism), I think the book raises a lot of excellent questions about how leftists should proceed when history is in motion. It goes without saying that none of the warmongering, nativist, plutocratic, petroleum-obsessed, reactionary impulses on display in the novel have left the American political landscape, yet it remains to be seen whether the current resurgence of socialism in the US is authentic or permanent. Oil! vastly improves on There Will Be Blood in its understand of how systems are far more powerful than individual men and women, and though Sinclair's own experience with electoral politics - he ran for governor of California less than a decade after Oil! was published and was crushed - does not provide a particularly inspiring example of how to challenge entrenched interests, perhaps now that even greater challenges like climate change are no longer quite so ignorable, a politics of kindness will be more successful now than it was back in his era.

Book Review: Yasmine Seale - Aladdin

Aladdin was perhaps one of the very first genuinely international cross-cultural fairytales, a collaboration between the Syrian Hanna Diyab and the Frenchman Antoine Galland, who tucked it as well as the similarly new stories of Ali Baba and Sinbad into his translation of the Thousand and One Nights, which introduced that famous collection of tales to the western world. There's some dispute over exactly how much each contributed to the final product, but it seems reasonable to infer that Diyab provided the basic narrative and Galland polished it up somewhat for his European readers. Until I read this new translation of the original French text, I'd only known Aladdin via the 1992 Disney children's movie, so the differences were eye-opening. I've been as critical as anyone of "Disneyification", a vague yet useful term that I think we all understand generally means a smoothing, sugaring, simplifying approach to the often-grim fairytales of the past, yet I have to say that, much as I hate to admit it, I honestly believe that Disney improved somewhat on the source material, though I immediately saw why it's endured for so long.

The main adventure narrative of the original is still flawless and vivid, but enough of the details are off to make the original fall a bit flat to the modern reader:

• It claims to be set in China although there is absolutely nothing Chinese about the setting, it's clearly an Arabic Middle Eastern milieu
• There's both the familiar magic lamp and a magic ring, which feels narratively redundant, magic item-wise
• The genie can grant unlimited wishes, which lacks the creative tension of the "3 wishes" constraint
• The princess Badroulbadour is generally a more boring and limited character than Jasmine is, as was the fashion at the time, although she does eventually poison the evil magician to death, which is cool
• The main character is kind of an unlikable dolt, whose only redeeming quality is that he gives away a ton of money once he finds the lamp, although there's predictably no exploration of if he considered actually permanently curing poverty, or if unlimited magic money would eventually turn the kingdom into a proto-petrostate via the Dutch disease
• The grand vizier is a much more sympathetic character, as he's understandably upset at how Aladdin has destroyed his son's seemingly perfectly happy betrothal to the princess out of nowhere
• The magician (who is combined in Disney's version with the grand vizier to form the Jafar character) has a brother for some reason, who attempts to take his revenge after the princess' murder via the classic ruse of cross-dressing as an old woman, a plot device I truly hope never vanishes from literature

I also unexpectedly found myself missing the perhaps naive but generally palatable Disney morals, because as written, the story is like an inferior Charles Dickens or Horatio Alger novel: after having spent his youth failing to learn a useful trade or developing any admirable character traits at all, Aladdin uses his newfound magic to frighten off the grand vizier's seemingly normal son, and the narrative assumes that this shortcut is fine and that the princess will be happy with him instead when he simply buys his way into her heart with copious amounts of genie-delivered treasures. How romantic! It's thus a bit harder to empathize with him or the princess than, say, with Odysseus, who at least has some entertaining personal qualities to go along with his roguishness. Aladdin is of course much shorter than the Odyssey and therefore more limited in how sympathetic its characters can become over just a few brief chapters, but as weird as it might seem, it's possible that modern fairytales might actually have improved somewhat on their predecessors, at least in terms of delivering morals more complex than "don't trust mysterious strangers bearing bargains that seem too good to be true" or other Brothers Grimm-type warnings. Disney does generally know what they're doing.

That being said, if we take it for granted that this is before anti-heroes gained real popularity, and that we are therefore supposed to closely relate to an oafish peasant enjoying a windfall he doesn't deserve, Aladdin's lack of a distinct personality might thus make him easier for 18th century European readers to project themselves onto him, and therefore enjoy his rags to riches victory. It's entirely possible that the Disney version would have been received very poorly back then; perhaps contemporary audiences would have revolted at an unrealistically liberated Jasmine, or been baffled by an Aladdin who voluntarily embraced his street rat upbringing rather than transform into a zillionaire prince as quickly as humanly possible (and to be fair, many modern readers might have this attitude as well). Seale's decision to stick closely to a distinctive "fairytale-ish" tone throughout is therefore quite useful in providing some distance to the story, and serves as a good reminder that truly great stories often find themselves adapting in the telling to their time and place, revealing different facets according to the needs of the audience. I still read the whole thing in one sitting.