Reading Log 1.3--Can Xue, The Last Lover

I tend to try and finish every book I've started, even if I'm not into it. I admire those who only read books that they are really into, setting them aside when they are not. I started reading The Last Lover, my first book by the Hunanese author Can Xue this week. I've known about her for over a year and have read scores of interviews with her. In fact, Ive never been so moved by and taken up with a writer I'd not yet read. I've also heard that all translations of her work have been problematic (she's had at least three seperate translators). So, I'm not giving up on her just yet, but why push on when I'm just not connecting with her work? She has several short story collections already translated, so I'll probably try one of those next.

Screed

I made the following post a few days ago on FB:

I don't hear this commented on too often. The real reason Trump is so popular isn't because he's racist or sexist, let alone a "job creator," it's because he pisses off the left. I am continually seeing his supporters say, "he must be doing something right, look how hysterical the left is."
At least this is what they tell themselves, because it is still uncomfortable for all but the worst of his supporters to admit that if you like a guy like this then you are to varying degrees racist and sexist.
EDIT--I want to emphasize I'm not calling everyone who voted for Trump racist and sexist, especially those who hate him but like hid policies. I am referring to those who love the guy and everything about him.

I want to retract this now. I am not comfortable with it for two reasons. First, because I don't feel there is any intellectual or moral integrity to casting broad judgements across a large group of people. Second, because while I believe there is a place for loud and confrontational debate (sometimes a shout or cry is the only rational response), that has never been my default style. I prefer to treat another person as, to use Martin Buber's famous phrase, another "Thou" to confront rather than an "it" to label. This is how I've read William Blake's line, "The greatest act is to put another before you." Blake does not mean to put another's needs ahead of our own, rather, to place a person in front of you, confronting them face to face in an I/Thou relationship.

That said, I would like to say something about what angers me most about the current president and the Republican party, why I think they are so harmful, and what my own position is (surprise, surprise it is not the Democrats).

1. DT's rhetoric and communication style. He regularly uses incendiary language, language that invites aggression, division, partisanship, and suspicion. He feeds on and amplifies the fears of the populace.

2. But DT, it seems likely, only intended to use the presidential race as a publicity stunt. His rhetoric may very well be hollow, an opportune ploy to get attention in the hopes of revitalizing his brand. To put all of our anger on his shallow (albeit extremely reckless) rhetoric is to miss the real harm being done (harm that would most likely been more efficiently carried out under a seemingly more normal candidate) by the Republican party.

3. This harm includes:
a. accelerating inequality by reducing funding for public support programs, suppressing political activism, and providing tax cuts to the rich.
b. deregulating businesses and so harming our natural habitats and resources as well as local cultures and populations.
c. continuing to place vastly disproportionate attention on the needs and wants of corporations. Alongside this is the American corporations tendency to focus only on short term (quarterly) goals. There are too few long term plans, plans that not only look to the next 5-10 years, but generations in advance. We do not have anything like China's Belt and Road Project.
d. ignoring the suffering of the most vulnerable by maintaining a culture of silence. This includes sexual harassment, racial profiling, and the systems of power that prevent victims of these crimes from receiving justice.

I realize all of these points need considerable fleshing out, just think of these points of departure for a longer essay down the road.

Regarding my hope for the future. I think there are several things we need to do to not only preserve what vitality America still has, but to preserve the vitality of our planet, which is rapidly becoming unsuitable for life for many living beings.

1. Develop long term plans for providing food, energy, and materials.
2. Develop unifying purposes that provide not only jobs, but also a common bond amongst disparate peoples. My personal favorite is develop a Mars Colonization mission. Such a mission would require countless projects (countless jobs), enough jobs for several large countries (including our own).
3. In order to achieve these goals, we must invest heavily in education, innovation, and technology.
4. There also needs to be continued investment in literature and culture to ensure that the population is able to think deeply and humanely over the very important questions we will be faced with in the future.
5. In order for this to be worth doing we have to preserve our democracy. We can do this by strengthening the political activism of the populace. Government programs will free up the time and resources of more individuals so they are able to participate in the polls. There should also be a complete overhaul on how money plays a role in politics. We need ideas to take center stage. Perhaps have information sessions on diverse opinions and then have randomized selections of voters (like a jury) make their decision.

All these ideas are in the easiest stages, although all point to bidding interests of mine. Perhaps I should close with a short vision of what a future utopia might look like, a utopia I find very hopeful and possible:

The one scenario not conceived of as remotely likely by any faction of futurians—the reverse really of all their competing auguries—is the possibility, and then the final achievement, of a generous and benevolent One World government, solving humankind’s problems and adjudicating its disputes through the consent of the governed. The end of capitalism and its plutocrats and bought politicians. An antique among futures, that one, and impossible to envision on any grounds: political, economic, sociological, or simply the ground of basic human nature.
So that will be it. The future will consist of a new kind of universal anarcho-totalitarian system which is, on the whole, pretty successful at fostering human happiness and diversity as well as ensuring social justice and welfare. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs: Karl Marx’s formulation has always applied very well to individual families—it’s how the best-run families function—but in the future it will define the Family of Man. Immanuel Kant’s distinction between public and private, which is exactly opposite to the one in common use today, will then be universal: the private is the particular ethnic, religious, political, clan, or company loyalties we own; when we are public we engage the world and one another with the tools of a plain reasoning that belongs to us all and commands the assent of all.
A command economy, of course: that idea failed in the past because of lack of timely information and a disregard of personal desires, but the Internet 4.0, born out of the primitive workings of Google and Amazon, will fix that, and what you want—within reason—you can get. It seems impossible to us that, absent the Invisible Hand, entrepreneurial innovation can flourish, wants be met, and well-being increase—so it’s clear that’s what is to come.
Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them; it is destiny which makes them prudent.
—Voltaire, 1764

This may sound like the commonest hopes (and doubts) we have had for technology, particularly information technology, for a century and more. But such hopes and doubts always foresee plenty as a consequence of the right worldwide deployment of powerful means, rapidity and noise as a function of interconnectedness, manipulation of fickle desires and dreads by Hidden Persuaders. No. The future will show simplicity, asceticism (possibly as a result of scarcity: there may be enough for all, but not a lot more) and taking care, maybe too much care. Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without. Certainly a democracy with as many parties as there are citizens, a parliament of all persons governing through a sort of fractal consensus which I cannot specify in detail, will spend a lot of time pondering. In fact it will be amazing (only to us imagining it now) how quiet a world it will be. A woman awakes in her house in Sitka, Alaska, to make tea, wake her family, and walk the beach (it runs differently from where it runs today). After meditation she enters into communication with the other syndics of a worldwide revolving presidium, awake early or up late in city communes or new desert oases. Nightlong the avatars have clustered, the informations have been threshed: the continuous town meeting of the global village. There is much to do. 

from John Crowley's essay, "Totalitopia."

Reading Log 1.2--Thomas M. Disch, The Businessman

The second book I read for January was Thomas M. Disch's "The Businessman." It is the first in a series of four books referred to as "Supernatural Minnesota." The book is composed of a series of mostly short chapters, it begins rapidly and only gets more charged as it progresses. It was not only a fascinating book, but a lot of fun. In fact I can confidently rank it with books like "The Man Who was Thursday," "The Crying of Lot 49," and other books that seemed crammed with invention, page after page. It is a tribute to the book, that even at a superficial level it can still generate exciting suggestions. One being the recurring parallels I noted between it and David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks. These were a few similarities I noticed:

1. Both have a red room.

2. Both have (emerald?) rings.

3. The chief villain in both is named Bob.

4. Both center around a murder.

5. Both have spiritual beings center stage (demons and tulpas).

6. Casinos play a significant thematic role in both.

7. Both juxtapose a joyful innocence with terror.

8. Both juxtapose disparate emotions (humor, terror, pathos, the surreal, etc).

The writing is very strong as well. There were many passages of great power, I'd like to quote to that affected me most.

The Red Room

There was another world off at an angle from the world she'd known till now, that world six feet above her full of its cars and houses. Sometimes this other world seemed to be inside her, but when she would reverse her attention inward and try to approach the threshold to that dimly sensed world within, it would go out of focus or fade, though never disappear entirely. It was always there, as real as the furniture one stumbles over in a dark room. 

Her first clear view of it came in a flash. She saw, across the threshold, a field of pure geometry and color, like a painting that was simultaneously flat on the ground and covering every wall. It bore a general resemblance to a red gingham tablecloth, except that it wavered and the bands of red were just as bright, in their way, as the patches of white, which in fact weren't really white but some other indefinable color. It seemed incredibly beautiful and important, but before she could grasp why, it was gone.

The Demon/Halfling

Only ten feet away the heron stopped in its tracks to cock it's head sideways and give Jack a long, level stare. Jack made one last adjustment for focus, then snapped the shutter. At that moment of alignment between the eye of the heron, the lens of the camera, and Jack's perfect and entire concentration, the halfling slipped across the diaphonus psychic barrier between bird and boy and took possession of his physical being.

At first the halfling's control was less than complete. Jack resisted the halfling's will along whatever channels of volition remained to him. He attempted to scream; the halfling constricted the muscles of his throat, and the scream became a dry little cough. He fought the halfling for control of his legs and fell sideways on the dewy grass, alarming the heron, which, regaining its autonomy in the instant Jack lost his, took to the air with a yawp of fear.

The heron's flight was the last image to reach Jack through his own eyes. One by one the halfling sealed off the avenues of sense. Jack felt himself plunged into the black well of his unconscious. Struggle was useless. The waters closed over him, and his mind drifted in a confusion amounting to terror, in a featureless void, a mote of uncomprehending consciousness in an ocean without surface or shore.