Ignazio Silone--Bread and Wine (1937)

"A novel of almost straight antifascist propaganda", says the IWE introduction, "Bread and Wine was written while its author was living in exile from Fascist Italy. Silone's preoccupation with his message did not reduce the quality of the novel, which is generally considered a major work and his best. The English title is a literal rendering of the Italian, Pano e Vino."

I have never in my lifetime known anyone to read this book or ever come across an edition of it printed after about 1960, but I thought it was quite good, thoughtful, artfully constructed, dense, and highly atmospheric. The protagonist is an active communist who has secretly returned to Mussolini's Italy to agitate against the Fascists, who in several places openly and unfortunately extols the current state of the Soviet Union at the exact time when it was probably at its most hell-holish, though it is not entirely clear that this represents the author's true sentiment (ed--probably not, since he denounced Stalin in 1930), particularly as the character later undergoes some disillusionment with regard to his political fervor, though he does not become a conservative or even completely break with his prior allegiances. Silone re-wrote portions of the book for an updated edition in the 1950s, to, as he said in a Note on the Revision, remove "secondary elements and affairs of only contemporary concern." I don't know which particular events he was referring to, but I do not recall any such incidents in the book that were so obscure or trivial so as to lack any interest for the reader. Also I have found with almost all the books I have encountered that the author felt the need to revise several decades after the original publication that the later revision was far the inferior version, so I made sure to get a copy of the earlier 1937 version when it was time for me to read it.

p. 21 "My dear Piccrilli, you can teach me many things, for example the art of making a career, but I was your master in philology, your master in the science of words, and I am not afraid of them."

The book opens with a couple of men in their mid-30s going back to visit their old teacher, which is a common theme, but one that I always like. It has an added weight in this instance since the characters in the book graduated around the time of the end of the first world war, and their years of making their way in the world were difficult ones, coinciding with the Fascist takeover of Italy and the choices that that imposed upon everyone in that generation, with an emphasis in this instance on those had been fortunate enough to receive some education. The first pair of characters introduced had chosen to acclimate themselves to the regime in order to get along in life, and thus maintained, with a seeming additional armor of arrogance, comfortable positions in society.

p. 72 "It was a face of ancient race, imbued with subtle despair, conscious of the futility of vulgar things." This is a description of a young woman. Wouldn't you like to meet such a person at some point in your travels through life?

p. 142 "The street names extolled episodes and dates in the history of the government party as though they were momentous events. The heroic slogans of the dominant party were to be seen in large letters on the housefronts, the fountains, the trees, the garden gates." The poor middle class people. Nothing like what is going on now, of course. Those displays are sincere, and necessary (!)

p. 145 "On January 19, 1923, (I do not know why I remember that date, but I can't get it out of my head) a squad of regenerators invaded the house of the man who was then the head of the league at Rivisondali. They bound him, and all twenty-two of them raped his wife. It took from eleven o'clock at night until two o'clock in the morning. An incident." I usually don't quote these kind of gruesome parts, but I think it's important to remind myself, if no one else, that if severe political upheaval of this type starts here, and I increasingly do not like what I am seeing, that it's not all going to be posturing and insulting and fun and games like in college or on the internet. 

The Italian setting provides for a quality of timelessness like nothing else in Western literature (or the other arts), almost regardless of subject matter and milieu.

p. 163 "The bed was teeming with bugs and fleas. They pounced greedily on Spina's flesh, which was fresher than his host's." I thought it was a good line. 

p. 170 "The bell rang and a smart, perfumed young woman came in, with her arms full of marmalade-jars, boxes of biscuits, several bottles, and a large bouquet of red roses. She was a fair and voluptuous Dutch girl...Spina (ed--not the object of the visit) discreetly retired into the tiny bathroom...and settled down to spend the night in it. Suspicious noises soon began coming from the neighboring room, where the bed seemed to be moving backwards and forwards on its rollers as though an earthquake were in progress. Spina did what he could to shut his ears to what was happening, particularly to the whimpering cries of the Dutch girl and Fleet-foot's ferocious roars, which continued, with only brief interruptions, all night long." I put this in to remind myself of the ultimate end and meaning of all this reading, which is nothing.

p. 172 "The peasants accept the dictatorship, not because they are convinced of its propaganda, but because the dictatorship is a fact. As long as the peasants have to choose between facts and words, they will always abide by the facts, even if they are evil facts." 

p. 174 This is Spina's disillusioned fellow communist revolutionary Uliva. Uliva is the man when it comes to jarring and organized thought, though doomed and physically shot as a result of his lifestyle by age 35. I wish I could expostulate like him on Twitter. "Hunger itself has been bureaucratized. There's the official kind that gives you the right to state soup, and the unofficial kind that gives you the right to throw yourself into the Tiber...We shall have a so-called economic revolution, thanks to which we shall have state bread, state boots and shoes, state shirts and pants, state potatoes and state green peas, just as we now have state railways, state quinine, state salt, state matches, and state tobacco. Will that be a technical advance? Certainly it will. But it will be the basis of an official, compulsory doctrine, a totalitarian orthodoxy which will use every means, from the cinema to terrorism, to extirpate heresy and tyrannize over individual thought." 

p. 175 "'Uliva, you're raving,' said Spina." They always say this. 

p. 176 Uliva again like an internet genius. "Thus every new idea ends by becoming invariably fixed, inflexible, parasitical, and reactionary. And if it becomes the official doctrine of the state, no escape is possible. A carpenter or a laborer can perhaps adapt himself even to a regime of totalitarian orthodoxy, and eat, digest, procreate in peace; but for an intellectual there is no escape. He must either bend the knee and enter the ranks of the dominant clerks, or resign himself to hunger and defamation and be killed off at the first favorable opportunity."

I guess this part resonated with me at the time. 

This book is only 319 pages, but the story feels bigger. A lot happens in it.

p. 177-8 Uliva's failure speech. I have to include that. "My father died of drink at the age of forty-nine...A few weeks before he died he sent for me one evening and told me the story of his life, his failure. First he described his father's death--that is, my grandfather's. 'I die a poor and disappointed old man,' my father's father said, 'but I rely on you to realize all my hopes. May you have from life what I have not had.' When my father felt his own death approaching, he repeated my grandfather's words. 'I, too, my son, die a poor and disappointed man, but my hopes live in you. May you have from life what I have not had.' Thus illusions, like debts, are passed on from generation to generation. I am now thirty-five years old, and I am where my father and grandfather were. I, too, a failure, and my wife expecting a child. But I am not stupid enough to believe that my son may get from life what I did not get. I know that he will not be able to escape the same destiny. He will either die of hunger or become a state employee, which is worse." 

p. 198 At the gathering of the populace--mainly peasants--in the central square for the announcement of Mussolini's infamous declaration of war on Ethiopia in 1935. "Each man was ready to come because his neighbor was. Should the war bring misfortune, it would be misfortune for all, and therefore only half misfortune. But should it bring fortune, one would have to secure one's share in it."

p. 203 "In the Land of Propaganda everything is presented as being indisputably self-evident. The poor people in the street were caught in the Land of Propaganda like fishes in a net. There was little to understand." I feel like half of such education as I received was warning us against falling for this kind of manipulation, and now I'm fifty (51 actually) and our entire lives interacting with media and culture and authorities are blatant manipulation that is completely and irrepressibly dominant. I think it is such a humiliation for all of us in my generation, we are failing our test here.

p. 204 "Everyone within the net of Propaganda sought a little security for himself. Everyone sought recommendations, influence, and that was all that mattered. What the Propaganda said was only of secondary importance. It was therefore useless to attempt to refute it; it was useless trying to discuss it." 

p. 208 In the aftermath of the military announcement/rally. "Twice he went back to the Villa delle Stagioni, and on both occasions he could distinguish the underwear of Zabaglione's daughters among the straw and the grass." I had to. I still don't have the time or money to undergo the high end therapy I need to be able to deal with such passages. Zabaglione is a moderately ambitious, pretty well educated middle class man, perhaps a lawyer, I forget, who flirted with communism and opposing the government but after receiving a scare from the authorities has signs with all the approved slogans in his yard and gives speeches enthusiastically supporting the government's policies. His daughters willingly submitting to being ravished by the regime's soldiers is a crude, but for the likes of me anyway, an effective symbol.

Like the 30s novels of George Orwell and the World War II Italy-set novel A Bell For Adano which I wrote about here a few years ago, this book was written almost contemporaneously with the historical events which take place in it, namely the ramping up of the Abyssinian war. The full extent of the calamity that was ever growing during the period that ensued upon this atrocity was as yet unknown at the time this was written, but it is certainly portended.

p. 248 "Intrabit ut vulpis, regnabit ut leo, morietur ut canis. He will come in like a fox, reign like a lion, and die like a dog." This was prescient in the case of Mussolini.

As a teenager the lesson I would have taken away from this book is that being successful in one's career almost inevitable meant compromising with evil, etc. But if you don't have any principles or powers of persuasion, or ideas or force, but are just an ineffective blob, even if you are wary of the official (and presumably false) messages, does it even matter anyway?

p. 285 "As long as the mountain is poor, it is ours," the shepherd explained. "But if it is discovered to be rich, the government will take it. The government has one very long arm and one very short one. The long one is for taking, and reaches everywhere, and the short one is for giving, but it only reaches those who are nearest." 

p. 290 "...in the last resort the relations established among men are dictated by necessity and not by good will or bad. Moral preaching did not suffice to change them. But there came a moment when certain social relations revealed themselves as outworn and harmful. Morality then condemned what had already been condemned by history." 

p. 291 "He showed the sign of love on the nape of the beast's neck, the deep bite of a she-wolf. The love-making of wolves is a serious thing." Wolves and Italy, you know. There's a decent amount of wolf references and symbolism is this which to the casually educated student trying to read it maybe jerks his brain to some alertness and makes him feel that the story has more elements and heft to it that may otherwise have eluded him. 

p. 295 "The church is constipated." Silone, I would presume, suffers from the typical modern dilemma with regard to the church. He can't believe in the religion as one would have to, and he knows that as an institution in the world it has grown hollow and disappointing and decrepit, but that without it there is as yet nothing that comes near to filling the void left in the human soul. But I have to end the post here, or I'll have to hold it over the weekend, and I'm ready to be done with it.    

The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

1. Madeleine Albright--Fascism: A Warning......................................................1,770

2. Paolo Bacigalupi--The Windup Girl................................................................1,256

3. Jonah Goldberg--Liberal Fascism...................................................................1,101

4. Bright & Fredd--The Way Home For Wolf.........................................................728

5. Graham Greene--The Power and the Glory.......................................................608

6. Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.............................................317

7. Paolo Bacigalupi--The Drowned Cities.............................................................300

8. Ahmet Alton--I Will Never See the World Again...............................................240

9. Christine Golden--Warcraft: Lord of the Clans.................................................205

10. Paolo Bacigalupi--Tool of War.........................................................................153

11. Sheila Wray Gregoire--9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage............126

12. Paolo Bacigalupi--The Tangled Lands...............................................................66

13. Francis Bacon--The Essayes, or Counsells, Civill & Morall.............................50

14. Keeling & Andrew--Wine From Another Galaxy..............................................50

15. Courtney Brown--Cosmic Voyage......................................................................50

16. Federico Finchelstein--From Fascism to Populism in History...........................28

Fascism, everybody's favorite political term to hurl at their enemies, it can be seen was a big theme in this edition of the Challenge.

Round of 16

#1 Albright over #16 Finchelstein

This was not a walkover, and indeed I suspect that Finchelstein's is probably the more serious, and certainly the more intense, book, though his biography and scholarly oeuvre indicate that he might be a (very) angry leftist type. Despite being the #1 seed, Albright also came into the tournament with an upset to tip one matchup her way that was close or not in her favor, so that comes into play here.

#15 Brown over #2 Bacigalupi

I wasn't too psyched about either of these books, which are both in the science fiction realm, though Brown's apparently claims to offer proof of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth itself. I'll give Brown the win since he's 300 pages shorter and Bacigalupi is dominating this field with three other entries in the tournament.

#3 Goldberg over #14 Keeling & Andrew

I know this Goldberg book is (probably) stupid but it has some upset tokens and the other book does not. 

#13 Bacon over #4 Bright & Fredd

The Way Home For Wolf is a children's picture book. Francis Bacon is, well, Francis Bacon. My friends, we know Francis Bacon. All my favorite girlfriends know him too. All of them. Maybe this gives a hint into why I was never very successful at dating.

#5 Greene over #12 Bacigalupi

#11 Gregoire over #6 Roget

I believe this is the 2nd or 3rd time Roget has qualified for the tournament. He is eligible, and I can't keep him out, but it's always going to be a longshot for him to win a game. 

#7 Drowned Cities over #10 Tool of War

Bacigalupi does advance one book to the final 8 by beating himself.

#9 Golden over #8 Altan

This is obviously another upset. This Ahmet Altan book is subtitled The Memoir of an Imprisoned Writer, the manuscript being smuggled out of Turkey, where the author, an acclaimed novelist and journalist in that country as well as abroad, is, as far as I can make out, serving a life sentence for opposition to the Erdogan regime. I hadn't quite realized this at the time of his qualifying, I feel rather guilty about not reading his book, since the consensus is that he has done nothing to be imprisoned other than oppose the regime while I suppose wielding a certain amount of influence. We are still against that sort of thing in this country, even with regard to our enemies, I think.

Quarterfinals

#1 Albright over #15 Brown

Both of these are probably kooky in their own ways. There is I suppose somewhat more of a chance of reading something useful or informative in the Albright book.

#3 Goldberg over #13 Bacon

He's got an upset in the hole over the great Bacon, who will no doubt return.

#5 Greene over #11 Gregoire

#7 Bacigalupi over #9 Golden

Based on nothing, except that I have the impression that the Bacigalupi has more of a resemblance to a real book. 

Final Four

#1 Albright over #7 Bacigalupi

After a pretty tough 1st round, Albright has had a waltz into the finals.

#5 Greene over #3 Goldberg

Finally.

Championship

#5 Greene over #1 Albright

A no-brainer. This book is short, a classic, not on any of my current lists, I haven't read it, I like Graham Greene, and I haven't read anything by him in 10-15 years. It's the perfect book for this competition.

California (IWE Tourism)

 All of the California sites are of the natural wonder variety.

1. Lassen Volcanic National Park, in Lassen National Forest, at the northern end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. "It is the area around Lassen Peak, the only active volcano in the United States (sic). It can be reached by State Highways 89 and 44." 

Around 500,000 annual visitors. This place is quite far north in California, away from the great population centers. Mount Lassen had a series of eruptions between 1914 and 1921, but appears to have been quiet since then. Attractions of the park include lava beds, painted dunes, a cinder cone, thermal vents, boiling springs and other volcanic phenomena. 

2. Sequoia and General Grant National Parks, the wildest country on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevadas, about 53 miles east of Fresno. "It was named for the giant sequoia trees found there. It can be reached by state highways 32, 180, and 198."

Sequoia is one of the greatest of all the national parks, famous for its giant trees. It also contains Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states, which I had not known, as well as caves, legendary trails, museums, and all other manner of attractions. It's a legendary tourist destination, and still evokes a part of the classic California experience for those of us of a certain age who have (still) never been there. 

General Grant National Park was originally a separate park, but at some point around 1940 it was absorbed into the adjacent Kings Canyon National Park. General Grant Tree, 1,500 years of age and the third largest tree in the world, as well as the United States's national Christmas tree, still stands in the park's eponymous Grove. This includes the rival Robert E. Lee Tree, which is however merely the eleventh largest in the world. The tree appears for the present to have escaped the notice of activists who would doubtless find it appalling that the once-honored rebel general should be commemorated anywhere under the sun, but especially in a place like this that has so little to do with that sordid episode of American history at least. 

3. Kings Canyon National Park "Directly north of Sequoia National Park, and it can also be reached by State Highway 180." 

 

The least visited of the triumvirate of Sierra parks (with Yosemite and Sequoia), this park features sequoia trees as well as its namesake canyons. Visitation has been declining since peaking at 1.2 million per annum in the mid-1970s, averaging around 560,000 a year since 2000. The park is mostly wilderness with roads only penetrating a little way into the park, so it's a lot of strenuous outdoor effort for the casual tourist. Most people who make it there seem satisfied with their experience.

AOC was a recent visitor. 

4. Muir Woods "is a grove of giant sequoias on the west central edge of Sequoia National Forest, on Route 32."

12 miles north of San Francisco, the woods attracted 17.5 million visitors in 2018. It is nowhere near Sequoia National Forest, and never was as far as I can tell, though such egregious errors are not unusual in this encyclopedia, which at least in the travel suggestions accounts for part of its appeal, as one is often left to wonder what they really meant to recommend. The Woods were in the news this past summer as attention was brought to some of the racist sentiments expressed by the noted naturalist after whom the park is, for the moment, named, though I would think we might expect a name change within the next few years. The park seems popular with cool and educated people in spite of its morally cloudy origins.

5. Lava Beds National Monument, in the Modoc National Forest, north central California, an area of about 80 square miles of strange lava formations. "There are many caves and frozen underground streams in the area, and lava that hardened into unusual shapes, some of which resemble crude animals. It can be reached by U.S. Route 97."

This is way up in northern California near Oregon. Only 135,000 visitors in 2017. Perhaps due to this isolation and sparse traffic, the park does not appear to have undergone the frequent changes with regard to crowd management and change in the availability of attractions as other places on this list, and is largely the same as in the past. I don't get the impression that there is a lot of nightlife to distract one in this area. 

6. Yosemite National Park, 429 lakes inside the park, and numerous rivers. "This national park has accommodations for visitors all year round, and many kinds of sports and entertainment are available at all times. There are hotels, restaurants, cabins, tents, and camping grounds. There is a hospital, and ambulance service. There are even doctors and dentists. Yosemite National Park is so large it is almost like a huge, sprawling, spread-out town."

One of the biggest dogs of all in the American tourism circuit. 4.4 million visitors in 2019. Honestly, everyone I know who has ever been out west has gone there. This doesn't include me, I have never been to California, or further west than New Mexico. To this point. It looks like they still have at least one on-site dentist. Some of the hotels inside the park even have bars, which sounds exciting to me because I haven't gotten out much in the last 20 years. They have museums there as well. Sounds like an amazing place. 

7. Death Valley, in the Colorado Desert, "has been made a national monument. Although the section that is the actual Death Valley of covered wagon days is comparatively small, the general area covers about 1,500 square miles that have been set aside as a national monument. It extends several miles over the Nevada border. A highway travels the full length of the Death Valley National Monument, and passes through the center of Death Valley proper. In addition, the center of the Death Valley National Monument is crossed by State Highway 190." 

1.6 million annual visitors. A unique and highly interesting place, obviously. Extremely hot. I always wondered how tourists could go there and do anything without dying in large numbers, but it looks like it is recommended that you visit between October 15 and May 15. It is not a summer vacation destination. It has traditionally been one of the best locations in the United States for stargazing but in recent years light pollution from the Las Vegas conurbation has started to become an occasional problem. 

These are all the sites that are given for California ca. 1965. There is a brief section afterwards of "Famous people from California" which I don't believe is given for any other state. Perhaps it is worth looking at this to see who was considered worthy of note at the time. Namely writers and other artists, and presidents, in a word the people I took to be the great historical celebrities of my youth.

"Many very famous people have made California their home. Among the famous writers from California are Gertrude Atherton, Jack London, William Saroyan, John  Steinbeck, Kate Douglas Wiggin, and L. Frank Baum.

"In the music field, there is the composer, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Lawrence Tibbett, the singer. (I have to admit, I have never heard of either of these people--ed.)

"The poet Robert Frost also lived in California, and so did the famous publisher, William Randolph Hearst.

"Will Rogers, the humorist, Luther Burbank, the plant wizard, and Vice President Richard Nixon were all residents of California, and the most famous of all was Herbert Hoover, President of the United States."

This is supposed to be a Charles Wakefield Cadman composition. He had an interesting biography. There was a lot for talented people to do in those days. There is a lot for them to do now too, obviously, but the overall impression left by their biographies doesn't seem as interesting. As a composer, he was identified with the Indianist movement, in which some American composers sought to incorporate Native American motifs into their work. 

Lawrence Tibbett was an opera star and sometime movie actor who was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor in 1930 (for the film The Rogue Song). He even appeared on a postage stamp. Yet does anybody remember him now?

 

January 2021

A List: The Venerable Bede--Ecclesiastical History of the English People.............321/360

B List: (Sir) Walter Scott--The Bride of Lammermoor................................................28/334

C List: Carlyle--The French Revolution....................................................................518/727

I am falling somewhat behind again. At least one report, and I really need to get it together and try to blast through the rest of that Carlyle, but between Christmas and now (hopefully only) two weeks of remote school to open January, everyone is home all day again and I am reduced to having to get up super early even to be able to read a little bit. Bede and Carlyle are both worthwhile things to read, especially at my time of life, but the level of interest they hold for me varies wildly from one section to the next. The accounts of Bishop Wilfrid's pilgrimages to Gaul and Rome are able to hold my attention more than the minutiae of Church rules and the various disputes concerning them which take up much of the book. Carlyle has picked up again, when I can get to him, once he got to the tumultuous events of August and September 1792, serious political massacres in Paris, and the invasion of foreign powers on the frontier, the all-consuming intensity and danger of which still represent a point that I don't see our society as having crossed over to yet, though I suppose it could stumble into such a calamity if the current level of foolishness on all sides continues as it is.

Today was the day of the (alleged) coup of the Trump supporters storming the Capitol. I admit, my main impression on seeing the pictures that emerged from the event were "Is this real?" in the sense of "Was there ever any real danger here?" or "Was this allowed to go on for the purpose of further riling up people (especially on the 'left') who are at this point already dangerously borne along by emotions and rage." This insurrection looked pretty cartoonish and without a lot of weight behind it. Most commentators seem to be angry that they weren't shot or dealt with more violently, and I do wonder why they weren't if this was truly any kind of threat to anyone with power. I am usually a waiter and seer in these instances anyway. My instinct is telling me that some important piece of the story is missing. At least any part that would really cause me any sense of alarm.

Lot of pictures this month. My wife lost her phone for a few days over Christmas, so she requisitioned mine, and she takes exponentially more pictures than I do. I have all kinds of trouble uploading from my phone, so these are not in any kind of order.    

Christmas tree farm, Vermont, January 2nd 

This was supposed to be the last picture, for example. 

My Twitter followers will notice that I have changed my profile picture. I had put up a picture of myself because I thought I should be honest about my identity or something, but I think it was discouraging/turning off people from following me. I thought maybe if I had some kind of logo I might come off as more attractive. I have the idea for the time to have rotating vintage book imprints until I can come up with something else.  

Merrimack River, Concord, NH, New Year's Day.

Vermont again, post-New Year's mood.

A moment of play on the old swing. When it's the last child of six it's extra poignant. Those yard toys will probably be gone in a few more years. 

The river during a nighttime walk.

Masking up for Christmas at grandmother's. I am not really persuaded of the efficacy of mask wearing but of course like most other people I am so beaten down and mentally confused that I don't protest against it if people want me to put one on. It's been 12 days and nobody got covid, by the way.

I'm out of time. No more picture commentary. The public can probably figure out what the rest of these are anyway.

 

Aldous Huxley--Brave New World (1932)

As Brave New World is, along with 1984, the most referenced and widely read of the 20th century dystopian novels, and certain of its ideas about the potential for a technocratic, science and pharmaceutical-dominated future society obviously have resonance with regard to contemporary developments, I thought I should make a more elaborate post about it than what I usually do. But after a couple of weeks of trying to come up with some pertinent idea about it, I have to admit that I don't have anything and just leave what I took for notes. While it is a very famous book, and at times an interesting and amusing book, it is not, even compared with the other books on this list, a major book, and never quite feels like it is particularly important even in the way that something like Alice in Wonderland does. Huxley was a genuinely smart man, and one of the more effective critics, not only here but in his other works as well, of science and technology-worship that I have come across, but the impression I get from all his novels (I think I've read three of them anyway) is that of extended thought-exercises which never quite achieve enough of an artistic form to enable them to make a more powerful emotional impact. This novel felt like once he laid out the general premise he floundered a bit narratively, and especially did not have a strong sense of how to end it. The Savage's constant quoting of and reference to Shakespeare is probably a little heavy-handed, but I get that it is trying to get across an effect that is important to such story as there is, and I trust that Huxley really knew his Shakespeare about as well and naturally as anyone in the last 100 years and was saying something legitimate about it so I don't mind it that much.  

As one of the relatively few popular works on the IWE list that is still widely referenced today, it is perhaps worth looking into what their perspective was with regard to it circa 1960. 

"Miranda said it...'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it!' She was speaking ironically, so her words were an apt title for Huxley's satirical Utopia. In a 1946 Foreward (sic) for a new printing, Huxley apologizes for not foreseeing the atomic age (as he might have; Wells did, before the turn of the century). But no one ever said Brave New World is good science fiction. It is enough to be good satire."

Was Miranda speaking ironically? What did Wells foresee? The spectre of atomic destruction seems to loom less in our lives than perhaps it should. People on Twitter are up in arms about many things, but no one ever talks about that. 

So that just leaves my paltry notes.

As far as Huxley's picture of the future goes, even less than 90 years out, there are some notable misses. No computers, no mass immigration (England is still more or less populated exclusively by white English people), men still occupy all positions of authority and administration. There appear to be, relative to the adult population, large numbers of children in this society, managed by the state of course, but earlier generations on the whole did not envision a future with the kind of huge decline in birthrates that we have had for a couple of generations now. 

p.79 "...turning to his secretary, 'I'll leave you to put my things away,' he went on in the same official and impersonal tone; and, ignoring her lustrous smile, got up and walked briskly to the door." My note at the time reads--Of course no one has ever smiled at me lustrously. But I forget I'd be a gamma in this world anyway--This is perhaps overly self-pitying. It is possible that once or twice in my life I may have received a lustrous smile that would actually have been pleasing to me, though I was too obtuse to pick up on it at the time. Also I would probably even in a purely eugenically engineered world such as this have enough brains to make it to a beta level. Gammas don't seem to be smart enough to be self-aware of their intellectual shortcomings, which may be to their advantage in some ways. 

People really could not imagine a future without newspapers (Heinlein always has them in his books too). Also telephones, and going out to public theaters and gatherings for entertainment, which even before the Pandemic had increasingly been becoming something of a niche activity (I capitalize Pandemic because my daughter asked me last week what was the difference between a Pandemic and an Epidemic and while I gave what I think was a plausible answer I had to think it through based on the roots, etc, and I still have been too lazy as yet to look it up).

The elite class in this generation were highly concerned with the need to manage the burgeoning population's day to day life in a technocratic manner to an extent our leaders don't seem to feel much responsibility for doing (other than policing and encouraging consumption, their work/family life/moral development are of little interest).

p.81 "'These women!' And he shook his head, he frowned. 'Too awful,' Bernard hypocritically agreed, wishing, as he spoke the words, that he could have as many girls as Helmholtz did, and with as little trouble." (lol)

Visionaries of the past really thought personal air transport would become much more common than has thus far proven to be the case.

I have to confess, these mandatory community sing-a-longs and meetings with drugged up pneumatic girls is kind of more appealing than whatever social life we have, or are supposed to have, now. (I could have taken part in the election celebrations, I guess, though venerating the likes of Stacey Abrams, etc, though I know it is supposed to be a reward in itself, is not quite the substitute for these evil but somewhat tantalizing orgies one might have hoped for with the new social and technological developments either). 

Where are all of the old women in BNW? Is that part of the utopia? No old men either apart from a few directors and scientists. (It is revealed later on in the book that the physical aging process is slowed and managed until euthanization at around age 60)

p. 267 I thought the Cyprus experiment (clearing out the population of that island and giving it over exclusively to alphas, who proceeded to devote themselves to battling over status and position, ending in a violent civil war) might be akin to much about our present social situation.  

p. 268 "The optimum population," said Mustapha Mond, "is modelled on the iceberg--eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above." It's fashionable in some circles to mock the idea of elite overproduction that I see turning up on the internet quite a bit, but like many ideas that catch on to an extent, there is something in it. It's clear for example, that from the social standpoint, everybody cannot be "educated" even should they advance to some level (i.e. literacy) that would once have qualified them for that designation, hence the fervor verging on desperation in some quarters to castigate entire segments of the population as "uneducated" by association based on political or some other kind of social undesirability. Maybe this is too obvious.

Huxley's society has definitely come to the conclusion that the lower orders need to be kept working, as well as generally managed. Our society seems to be coming around to the second point, but is less invested in the first, perhaps because of the expectation that has been instilled in the population that one should be compensated like a serious adult for anything resembling real work, which notion it is going to take some more time to disabuse the masses of entirely.  

The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge    

An unusually large number of movies in this one.

1. Ghostbusters (movie-1984)..................................................................................9,438

2. Ender's Game (movie-2013)................................................................................8,236

3. The Terminator (movie-1984)..............................................................................6,492

4. Douglas Adams--The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy......................................5,352

5. Her (movie-2013).................................................................................................3,440

6. Gaslight (movie-1944).........................................................................................1,730

7. Mary Jordan--The Art of Her Deal.......................................................................1,457

8. The Expanse (TV-2019), Season 1........................................................................1,266

9. Steven Spangler--10-Minute Science Experiments..................................................765

10. Alexis de Toqueville--Democracy in America......................................................345

11. Christa Parravani--Her...........................................................................................274

12. Dodsworth (movie-1936).......................................................................................260

13. Introduction to Learning and Behavior (multiple authors)....................................148

14. Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia/New Atlantis/The Isle of Pines....................66

15. Kim Stanley Robinson--Mars Trilogy......................................................................45

16. Gregory Floyd--A Grief Unveiled............................................................................24

1st Round

#16 Floyd over #1 Ghostbusters

#15 Robinson over #2 Ender's Game

#14 Modern Utopias over #3 The Terminator

I guess I am going to have to watch these top 3 movies. The rest of them look like they might be all right.

#4 Adams over #13 Introduction to Learning and Behavior

#12 Dodsworth over #5 Her

#11 Parravani over #6 Gaslight

#10 de Toqueville over #7 Jordan

#9 Spangler over #8 The Expanse

I don't think there is anything that controversial here.

Round of 8

#4 Adams over #16 Floyd

#15 Robinson over #9 Spangler

#14 Modern Utopias over #10 de Toqueville

The first real serious matchup of books. One of the three modern utopias (Utopia) is actually on the program anyway. The full de Toqueville is pretty long, and the utopia book has an upset card anyway, so in something of a toss-up it gets the edge.

#11 Parravani over #12 Dodsworth

Final Four

#15 Robinson over #4 Adams

I have heard about and been aware of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy for most of my life, but I never really understood what it was. I thought it was just a book, and it is a book, but it's also a series of books, and a comic book, and a TV show, and a movie, and it originally started as a radio comedy, and I realized as I got into the contest that I don't really know which of those media productions I should be using in the Challenge, since the entry that got this into the competition to begin with was a general listing of characters, who appear across all of them. So I felt that I had to disqualify it against the Mars Trilogy, which was more clearly designated as just being the books.

#11 Parravani over #14 Modern Utopias

The Parravani book is a memoir. I don't know how good it is, but the author seems to have some critical and social respectability, and the multi-book/multi-author aspect of the Modern Utopias was making me uncomfortable.

Championship

#15 Robinson over #11 Parravani

The Mars Trilogy, which I actually had never heard of, won a number of major science fiction awards and seems to be considered a classic in that genre, so maybe I should try to read it, though I have had at best mixed reactions when I've tried to read famous authors of this type (Heinlein, Philip Jose Farmer, even Huxley to some extent) in the past. 

I am very tired this month. My brain seems to be completely shot.

December 2020

A List: The Venerable Bede--Ecclesiastical History of the English People.............132/360

B List: Ignazio Silone--Bread and Wine....................................................................139/319

C List: Carlyle--The French Revolution....................................................................432/727

Another month gone by, and we enter what increasingly feels like treacherous territory, as I have had to go to the hospital in December two of the past three years. So I am trying to pace myself a little more this month. So far, so good. 

My reading pace is not quite where I would like it to be. It isn't bad for a person with as many children, etc, as I have, who is expected to attend to them and do other things, but Other People get a lot more done, I know.

I'm not sure quite what to make of old Venerable Bede so far. He writes from the point of view that the Church is the be all and end all of existence, its officials and leaders the heroes of history, guiding and at times even forcefully admonishing kings and rulers for their reticence in adapting or lapses in demonstrating their devotion to the faith. The churchmen, particularly the successors of the original group behind the evangelization of England, Gregory, Augustine, etc, who did seem rather great-souled, come off as pushy and more interested in furthering a socio-political agenda than questions of spiritual salvation. But as I have read so little about this period of history in England (600-700s A.D.), and have quite a bit of familiarity with the later history and geography of the country both through reading and having done some traveling there, at least in the southern part of England, the book holds some interest for me, whatever its degree of accuracy as a history.

The Carlyle book is worthwhile to me, but it takes a considerable investment of time in a day even to read a few pages, and I have kind of limited myself for the time to reading it in the intervals between B List books. Last month I was reading Brave New World, and I am still working on my report for that. Since it is a book that people have remained somewhat familiar with and has status as a cultural touchstone, I wanted to go into some things in that line a little. Since this was threatening to take weeks, and even the greater part of a month to complete, I decided to go ahead after a week and start the other book to keep the line moving.

 

As usual, my pictures this month tend to be concentrated into a couple of outings. I put pictures from one of my outings on Facebook, and then didn't do it here, though there is no reason why I shouldn't have, since I don't think there is much overlap in readership between the two sites. But I didn't do it.

The outdoor scenes here are mostly from a hill called Table Rock in Walpole, New Hampshire, overlooking the Connecticut River, on which we walked on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I'm not sure if the river is visible in these pictures, but the town you see, apparently at the bottom of the hill, is actually Bellows Falls across the river in Vermont.

Sunday was my anniversary. I am not good at loading pictures from my phone, they load out of order and mess up my planned narrative. Like all people of my type, I like to show off my wife any chance I get (Look, someone loves me!). This is I believe the first ever picture of the two of us together, back in '93, though we had already been going out more or less for three or four months. People didn't take as many pictures in those days.  

After our hike on Thanksgiving weekend we went to a melancholy consignment shop which, especially this time of year, I like to go to as a place to get something of the atmosphere of the 80s pre-internet and other tech influenced New England of my teen aged years. There aren't any screens or beeping things in this store, just racks, shelves, florescent lights and piped in pop songs. I love these kinds of places, though their ranks are dwindling now. The photo above features unsellable drinking vessels commemorating the Duck Dynasty television show. Every pop culture phenomenon has its window of time, but I am hard pressed to remember anything that dropped off the face of the earth like those guys have.  

The old battleax again. This is around the time I first met her. I thought it might have been the very same day, as she was wearing a similar outfit, but according to the inscription on the back of the picture it was a different social event, which I probably attended but did not socialize with her at, which probably explains why she appears to be having such a good time.

We went back to Ogunquit again on one of our 50 degree weekend days in November, and I saw what struck me as this very strange sign outside of a rest area on I-95 in Maine.

Last Tuesday, December 1st, it was 63 degrees in the morning, so I took the opportunity to have breakfast outside. Since I began keeping this record I have never had breakfast outside in December. On the 5th it snowed and it's been cold and icy since then. I meant to take a picture of the icy yard today for this check in, but I forgot. The pictures really have to be somewhat organic with me, I guess. If I am moved to take a picture, I will take a picture.

You should be able to see the river here.

This is on the way up the hill. We had already lost the sun by the time we started down.