Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

It's been a while since I've had a book post here. Unless I'm forgetting something, all of the books that I'd read since Reamde were either left unfinished (I had multiple library books that I checked out, but ran out of time on) or just bad. So now it happens that the next book I post about is another Neal Stephenson novel. This was a coincidence, I think. I'm not on a Neal Stephenson kick. Today I'll be returning to Glen Cook's Garrett P.I. series, which I'll probably write about here eventually. I bought this book at the grocery store on a kind of whim while I was looking for something else. That being said, I am impressed. When I read Reamde I thought it was the best Neal Stephenson book I'd come across. Seveneves is better.

To put it simply, I love this book and think it's amazing. Others have had different reactions and if you want a more balanced point of view, I'm sure you can find one. I can do little more than heap praise on this one. It's an exquisitely detailed, carefully crafted examination of the end of the world as we know it and the aftermath of that. It conveys a compelling mixture of human bravery, ingenuity, and dedication, counterbalanced by cowardice, ignorance, and corruption. It's the best novel in recent years that I know of and one of my favorite books ever. My one qualm is that it should probably have been split into two books. It still works the way it's written and there's nothing itself wrong with the last portion of Seveneves in a way that ruins the book, but the sudden change of setting and the novella-like length of a story that comes immediately following the larger, earlier portion of the book gives the reader a weird feeling about the whole thing. I like all three sections, and the last one is, in many ways, the most interesting. But when we'd had continuity of characters and plot for over 500 pages, even when most of those characters are dead and the narrative arc for the remainder has reached a conclusive point, it's unsettling to jump to a new cast of characters in a new setting, knowing that they won't be around for much longer as there just isn't enough book left. Stephenson makes it work by tying it to the earlier parts of the book in a few different ways. Still feels a little weird.

Anyway, this book is great and you should read it now.

Crap from Facebook: November 22nd, 2015

Dammit.

That's not how sweat works. That's not how addiction works. That's not how "toxins" work. Dammit.

Crap from Facebook: November 17th, 2015

Holy shit. We're not at war with them, that's not how war works, and this is the most reprehensible drivel I've seen in a while. You bigoted fucks.

I was going to compare this to WWII internment camps, but someone in the comments of this crap already did as a justification of this position. Wow. Yeah, I'm done.

Crap from Facebook: September 7th, 2015

This strikes me as projection. If you pride yourself on being offended when you deem it proper to be offended, you'll be prone to interpreting others as being proud of not being properly offended, which itself offends you, which you're proud of, and so on. I don't care who you are; you do not have the right to have others take offense on your behalf.

But what motivates me to respond to this tripe at all is that it impels in me a phenomenon that I find fascinating. Reading the "Privilege is a concept so simple and obvious that most social scientists take it as axiomatic" bit, I have two immediate reactions...

1. No, they don't.

and

2. Why would I give a fuck what most social scientists think?

Now, my disregard (to some extent, anyway) for the work of social scientists is a bit nuanced and I don't want to go on a tangent to explain my position there, but it's not important for the sake of this point, so I'll skip it. What I find interesting here is that I have those two responses and that they don't support each other. They aren't mutually exclusive, but they are mutually irrelevant. If #1 is true, then I don't need to appeal to any position I might have on social scientists, because the initial statement was factually inaccurate anyway. And if #2 is true, then I don't need to bother with #1.

Anyway, this was still a piece of crap, but I wanted to use it because of that concept.

Crap from Facebook: June 24th, 2015

Mostly, I just find things like this depressing. Too many Americans seem to think, "Hey, other countries don't allow freedom of speech, so why can't we get in on that sweet deal?"

I'll just leave this here.

Also, that is not, strictly speaking, true. About Germany, I mean. I'm more concerned about the sentiment than the example, but the example isn't quite right either.

Time to be great again

Feisal: In the Arab city of Cordova, there were two miles of public lighting in the streets when London was a village...
Lawrence: Yes, you were great.
Feisal: ...nine centuries ago...
Lawrence: Time to be great again, my Lord.
Feisal: ...which is why my father made this war upon the Turks. My father, Mr. Lawrence, not the English. Now my father is old. And I, I long for the vanished gardens of Cordova. However, before the gardens must come fighting.

Then, in order to be truly wealthy, a man should collect souls?

I was born on this planet, long ago. Once I was a common man, nor have I lost all human attributes in the numberless eons of my adeptship. A human steeped in the dark arts is greater than a devil. I am of human origin, but I rule demons. You have seen the Lords of the Black Circle—it would blast your soul to hear from what far realm I summoned them and from what doom I guard them with ensorcelled crystal and golden serpents.

And if you help everyone else in your worlds to do that, by helping them to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious...

 It is good to be reminded of what you really are. It is peculiar how such a small thing, something otherwise so unremarkable, can catch, can serve as that reminder.

I have not yet begun to fight.

Honing the craft

After I wrote the previous post in this blog, I pondered it and the one before it. The subject matter of the posts were distinct, but for one common element. Neal Stephenson and Lindy West are both individuals who are paid some amount of money to write, and I'd thought about their writing in comparison to my own. My line of thinking was completely different between the two cases. As I said before, reading Neal Stephenson's book, I was painfully aware of how far beyond my own capabilities such a thing is. On the other hand, I believe I could write circles around Lindy West. These aren't some intrusive revelations for me: I've had similar reactions to many things that I've read. The only real development here was that I bothered to state as much in writing and that the two instances happened close together. That's why I don't want to emphasize Neal Stephenson in this post (I'll talk about him some other day) and it's why I hesitate to even mention Lindy West (she's not even remarkable as a bad writer, let alone a bad writer who is successful despite everything). This isn't about any individual works or their authors. This isn't about other people at all. This is about a question that's been burning in my mind. Am I a writer?

I don't know.

That's not a satisfying response, hence the burning. Still, I have nothing better. Am I a writer? Well, am I? There's a history to this line of inquiry, and actually, this very blog is part of that. I've virtually abandoned it. Oh, by "it" I mean this blog. Sorry, that was vague. See? This is part of the problem. I've read enough to be able to spot the flaws in a piece of writing, even my own. Actually putting in the time two produce writing in the first place, and then following that up by putting in the time to fix the flaws? Maybe I'm not cut out for it. I thought I wanted to be. I thought that I was sufficiently motivated. And yet, here we are. This isn't about knowledge and it isn't about style. This is about output. And that's another non-revelation. I've known this shit for years and years. I've known it for so long that it's become a part of me, that I feel as though I've always known these things, although that's probably untrue.

For some reason, when I'm pondering this subject, the year 2010 looms over me, occupying my thoughts. I don't know what to say about 2010. I don't know if I can even put what I think about 2010 into words without crying. Yeah, it's pathetic, but hey, that's my life, apparently.

I'd spent all of the previous year and half of the one before that out of school, working a job that I loved and trying to get into the University of Washington, discovering that I still needed credits I didn't have. I'd just gotten a new computer after using the same old one for about a decade. 2010 started with me going back to Green River Community College, still working the job I loved, taking easy classes, and generally having a great time. I put in an effort to write more, following through on that. I ended my old LiveJournal and replaced it with this blog, writing an epic final LiveJournal entry that was so full of joy that I concluded by implying that I was content with the life I'd had, that everything to follow after January of 2010 would just be a bonus to what was already a fulfilled life. And I really meant it. That was just January! And things kept on getting better. I kept up my aspiration to write more, working on a chemistry blog among other things. I got back into Magic. I read amazing books. I aced my classes, which meant learning a little German. I got to play computer games way too much. And with all of that, I was still able to spend time with friends. I went on an amazing trip to Island County that summer, and then that autumn I finally used my vacation time at my job and went on an even more amazing trip to Europe, something that blew away all notions of a bonus I'd had in mind when I wrote that last LiveJournal entry 10 months earlier. I was accepted into the University of Washington, so I started getting ready for that. I participated in NaNoWriMo and wrote my first novel, then closed the year out moving to Seattle and playing more computer games, anticipating that school would have me busier than ever and that my life was about to get a lot more stressful, but I was thrilled to have such wondrous experiences and to be living in Seattle with my best friend. Having a great year isn't enough to make me cry. What makes me cry is knowing that I put into writing, practically at the beginning of the year, how fulfilled I felt and how I could say that life had given me enough, and that I then went on to have a great year after that, only to look back, a few years later and think that my life kind of sucks.

And then I couldn't write anything substantial because I had school as an excuse. So I didn't. Once I graduated, I wanted to write a post about my experience at the University of Washington. It didn't happen, and it changed to a plan to write a retrospective at the end of the year. Then that didn't happen. I wanted to write about so many topics, but I put them off. I got a job and wanted to write about that, but then I ended up not doing it. I started a weekly series of articles about Magic at the Casual Players Alliance, and then I started missing weeks, then months. Now the whole thing is on hiatus. And at some point, around the same time that I reached the one-year mark with my job, I started questioning idea that I should even be spending my time writing at all. It's not that I became unhappy with my writing. Actually, my views on my own work are pretty much what they've always been: a lot of what I've written is flawed in retrospect, but there are some gems in there too. No, I don't question myself on this because of a lack of quality. And it's not entirely about the lack of quantity either, as that is something I can, in principle, address. It goes deeper.

Something about my brain is fucked up. I find myself daydreaming that I make some wonderful scientific discovery and that I found my own company. Or I become super-rich somehow, buy Wizards of the Coast, and get Magic onto what I deem to be the right track for the future of the game. Or I spontaneously spend an afternoon meditating and awaken amazing untapped potential and become some hero who fixes all the problems in the world. Mainly, I daydream that I'm financially secure and can support everyone in my family for the rest of their lives. Sometimes it even takes the form of traveling back in time, like I'll magically be a decade or more younger and also an accomplished musician, or I'll go back to when I was a kid, knowing everything I know now, and have a second chance at all the crap I didn't handle properly because I was young and inexperienced. These daydreams take all sorts of forms, but they sometimes last a long time and occupy my thoughts even while I'm performing fairly complex tasks. And then at some point, I inevitably realize that none of it is real and that I'm being silly, but it doesn't change the perverse fact that having these experiences makes me happier. And maybe I've forgotten something, but I don't think this happened in 2010, or if it did, it was comparatively rare. At some point in the past five years, I went from feeling fulfilled to wanting to trade the life I have for a different one. And it seems that writing, as something I do (or don't), and as a skill, has become entangled in this psychological struggle. Because writing is something I that I'm actually good at, or something that I convince myself I'm good at, it seems like an escape that is different from the other daydreams. It seems plausible. Realistic. And I wonder if that's healthy. So I oscillate between resolving to write on a regular basis and resolving to give up on a useless fantasy.

I started an entry. I called it "Honing the craft." I was going to lay out my plan to write something every day. That was over a week ago. I didn't actually write the damn thing, then I deleted it and made a new version today. So now what? I don't know. It's not satisfying, but it's my response right now.

For the moment, the question still burns.

Crap from Facebook: June 11th, 2015

I feel kind of bad about writing this one, not because of its content, which should be impeccable. Rather, I've neglected to take the time to keep up my "Crap from Facebook" posts, and the material that has finally motivated a revival is from the same friend who I already milked for material a couple of times in the past. I'm not doing these to single people out. This isn't meant to be a space for me to chastise my friends! And in fact, I've seen more egregious bullshit from other friends, but I didn't remember that I might want to do one of these posts until now. So I'm going to endeavor to amend the deficiency. Hopefully, this post will soon be followed by some obnoxious reposts from March on Monsanto or some political nonsense. I see that sort of thing all the time. I just need to remember...

Anyway, the piece that drew my ire is this one: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/09/politically-correct-jerry-seinfeld-comedy-marginalised-voices

I have another misgiving about this topic, which is that the author is one Lindy West. Through some circumstances, I've run into her writing several times, and I know by now that I've never found her to say a single thing that is insightful, profound, intelligent, or impressive in any way. She spouts utter drivel. Usually, when I encounter a thinker of this caliber, the writing is so incoherent that I am mercifully spared from actually attempting to read crap all the way through. But Lindy West is a bit different: she can use words to form sentences. Damn, when I put it that way, it seems like a compliment. That was not my intention. There's some old saying in grammar that a sentence expresses a complete thought. So yeah, Lindy West can do that. She can express a complete thought. Fine. Not every thought is a good thought, and when it comes to good thoughts, I doubt that she's ever had one. It may seem that I'm just baselessly deriding this person, but that's a step up from the treatment she gives people: I haven't mined a quote from her and mocked her in a rampant display of shrillness and dubious imagery, I haven't strawmanned her, and I haven't used her position as a foil to peddle some petty agenda of mine. I've spend this entire paragraph deriding her, but, unlike her, I am not just making shit up. I'm not that stupid. And speaking of this paragraph, I am not actually a good writer, so I diverged from the original point of the paragraph, which was that I have misgivings about devoting my attention to the work of someone I've already recognized as producing content with no redeeming value. Yeah, I'm here to waste my own time blathering over crap I saw through links on Facebook, but I want to hold myself to some sort of standard. And yet, at least a couple of my friends are actually enamored of Lindy West. So maybe this is kind of worth doing? Whatever, let's just get on with it.

The bit she's critiquing is a radio interview with Jerry Seinfeld. Now, in the interview, Jerry Seinfeld does gripe about college campuses, specifically with regard to how comedy is treated, but he also talks about his 14-year-old daughter and implies that the issue is something to do with young people in general. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's not conflating the two, but his rhetoric does suffer from some imprecision. While there's definitely overlap between colleges and young people, not all young people go to college and not all people in colleges are young, and those young people who are in college tend toward some general commonalities that might not hold for the broader population of young people. Blah, blah, blah no big deal. Also, because Jerry Seinfeld doesn't elaborate on some of what he says, I'm sure a lot of listeners are prone to miss the point. While I won't bother to do all of his elaboration for him, there's something to be made clear in the part where he talks about his daughter. She responds to her mother commenting that she'll want to see boys by saying, "That's sexist." And that response doesn't really make sense. Granted, not all teenage girls are interested in seeing boys, but the parents of the ones who aren't would naturally want to know if that's the case, and there's no implication that this is what's going on here, no suggestion that the conversation was anything like, "No mom, I'm gay." Rather, the implication is that the girl just blurted out, "That's sexist" because she's young, has acquainted herself with the term "sexism," has learned that it's bad, has enough understanding to know that it deals with taking an attitude toward others based on sex, and has become flustered or annoyed with something someone said toward her that is based on sex. I can guess that the mental process was something like that because I can vaguely remember making similar statements myself when I was around the same age. And yet, the fact is, what the girl's mother said is not actually sexist. So, she demonstrates a poor understanding of the concept of sexism, and wants to use the word anyway, which leads to some frustration for her parents. I've seen the same sort of thing with kids and racism. They'll assert, "That's racist" about something that isn't actually racist and I'll think, "Uh, wow, racism is pretty serious business and you should probably just shut the fuck up until you appreciate more about how things actually work and what racism really means." It happens. Such are the follies of youth. By the time people are in college, most of those problems are hopefully worked out, but I can see how, for someone in an older generation, seeing younger people grow up with terms like racism and sexism being thrown around a lot, and seeing that continue as they move into colleges could be a source of some consternation.

The title of Lindy West's article is: "What do the politically correct brain police have against venerable man comedians like Jerry Seinfeld?" And then, before the body of the article, there's this sub-header: "The vintage observational jokester says killjoys are ruining comedy. But where he sees a threat, I see marginalised voices finally being allowed into the club." Well, I'm sensing a theme here...

Beloved funnyman of yesteryear Jerry Seinfeld (ask your parents!) took to the airwaves this week to offer his hoary wisdom on the state of modern comedy.

Congratulations, we're one sentence into the article and you've found five different ways to call Jerry Seinfeld old. Ha ha ha, oh yes, he is indeed 61 years of age after all. I'm delighted that Lindy West knows what a thesaurus is, but this is all very silly and pointless.

A plague is upon us, he warns. Harmless jokesters and joy-bringers are literally being figuratively strangled by the long, thin goblin-fingers of “political correctness” (which is a fancy term for “not treating people who are already treated like garbage like garbage”), even though all they were trying to do was just say anything they want to, the way they always have, without ever being questioned or criticised by known killjoys such as “people of colour” and “women”, and with zero regard for the institutionally oppressed groups upon whose backs their industry has been stepping for generations in the service of shallow, straight white dude “catharsis”.

I know that I said she could form sentences, but I forgot to mention that she can also form run-on sentences. This is a mess, and "literally being figuratively strangled" is so distracting that I have to suppress my gag reflex and move on to parse the rest of this crap. So, we have "harmless jokesters" "long, thin goblin fingers of political correctness," "without ever being questioned," "killjoys such as people of colour and women," "zero regard for institutionally oppressed groups," and, "shallow, straight white dude catharsis." All of those things are attributed by Lindy West to Jerry Seinfeld and he didn't say a single one of them, nor say a single thing that implied one of them. Lindy West pulled those accusations out of her ass.

Is that so wrong? Jerry Seinfeld, hero, is here to say “yes”; yes, that is so wrong.

He didn't call himself a hero, either. I remember reading about how it used to be common in some media to pay writers by the word. Now I'm left wondering if Lindy West is being paid by the misrepresentation. She throws enough of them out there for that to be plausible.

“They just want to use these words,” he explained, weeping probably, but in a brave way.

I've seen this before. It's kind of Lindy West's shtick. She likes to pretend that other people are crying. I'd have thought that most people would see right through this tactic, would be put off that she's trying to disparage others by baselessly connecting them to behavior associated with weakness. She not only made up fake tears and attributed them to Jerry Seinfeld, but then went on to sarcastically explain them away. And this is someone who is supposed to be, according to discussion on the Facebook link where I saw this, "a vocal champion for and activist pushing for greater inclusivity in traditionally male dominated media spaces." Really, guys?

“‘That’s racist. That’s sexist. That’s prejudiced.’ They don’t even know what they’re talking about ... I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot people tell me: ‘Don’t go near colleges.’ They’re so PC.” Yeah! Take that, words! No PC college phony is going to convince me that words have meanings.

Words, sure do have meanings. And since that was Jerry Seinfeld's point, Lindy West is agreeing with him while making a show of disagreeing with him. Apparently people fall for this?

Why, back in Seinfeld’s time, you could run a sitcom set in New York City for nine entire seasons and only feature 19 black people ever (18 of whom were one-off background characters such as “the waiter” and “the guy who parks cars”) – and if anyone tried to do words at you, you could just pretend they didn’t exist.

This is an abrupt transition into a hit piece. I'm not going to go back and watch the entire run of Seinfeld to ascertain whether I agree or disagree with this complaint, and I'm also not going to go back and dredge up old Lindy West articles so that I can complain about how those ones were shitty too. This blog post will run long enough as it is without pondering the details of the Seinfeld sitcom.

Nowadays, because of Twitter and electric mail, you get the brain gestapo completely up your underpants if you so much as publicly fantasise about making a black media personality your erotic slave. Or if you produce an innocent web series with an almost-entirely white, male cast, only 20 years after you were criticised for doing the exact same thing with your sitcom. The PC police might not know what “racism” is, but Seinfeld does, and it certainly isn’t either of those things. And yet the PC death-grip on comedy is so fierce that Seinfeld has only managed to accrue $820m so far. The horror.

Note: that first comment isn't about Jerry Seinfeld at all, but is instead about some other, different person. I've never watched the show about comedians, cars, and coffee, so I'll not comment on that complaint, although it just looks like more hit piece fodder at this point. Also, he didn't complain about not making enough money, so there's another misrepresentation.

This unfairness, as you can see, is bad for fairness; it is bad for the constitution in some way, I’m sure; and it is bad for college students who are probably really clamouring for the vintage observational stylings of Jerry.

He didn't say that, he didn't invoke the constitution. Lindy West is making shit up again, of course. And while she can keep on poking at his age to see if something will happen, I'd bet that more college students would find Jerry Seinfeld funny than would find Lindy West funny.

OK, look: our divergent political priorities aside, I actually don’t mind Jerry Seinfeld. I liked Seinfeld the programme. If I was a person who got stoned, I would enjoy watching Bee Movie while stoned (a bee is a lawyer and has implied sex with a human woman!!!). But his past work does not entitle Seinfeld to our eternal adoration or unconditional support. In fact, he isn’t even entitled to be a defining, authoritative voice in 21st-century comedy – particularly when his response to the broadening scope of his art form is one of mistrust, defensiveness and gloomy prognostication.

 He didn't say a single thing against younger comedians!

Even the old guard forfeit their clout once they start to reject innovation and challenge. (I’d much rather hear Cameron Esposito’s perspective on the state of comedy in 2015 than, say, the ghost of Buster Keaton’s – the prospect of a talking comedy-ghost notwithstanding – not because he’s irrelevant, but because she is of this moment.)

Well, here are some complete sentences, but I'm not sure what the point is.

What Seinfeld is reacting to is not the shrinking, ossifying death of comedy, as he seems to believe; it is the vibrant, expansive unfurling of comedy, and the multitude of growing pains that come along with it.

He didn't talk about either of those things!

It’s absolutely true that some individuals use political correctness to disguise what is, in reality, a regressive devotion to propriety. There are people who simply have no sense of humour. It’s possible that a small few just relish the takedown but don’t care about the politics.

How remarkably self-aware of you, Lindy West.

But none of that has anything to do with whether or not it is correct to treat people with dignity and care; to call them by the names they’ve taught you; and to remain open, elastic and humble enough to catch up when you’re behind and apologise when you’re in error. No one is required to do any of these things, but that doesn’t mean they’re not good things to do.

 And?

I used to think it was a given that, at any comedy gig I attended, I’d have to grin through a number of brutal jokes about my gender: about beating us, about raping us, about ranking us, about reducing our already dehumanised existence to a handful of insulting stereotypes. And I went ahead and grinned – because, I thought, that’s just how we joke.

Yes, yes. We live in different worlds and consequently I have no idea what the fuck you're going on about. But that doesn't excuse you being a wretch.

We must have agreed. Someone must have signed a contract. This is the price if I want to be in the club. (And that’s not even touching on the way female comics are treated offstage.)

Again, different worlds. I'm not even criticizing here, just expressing that I can't relate. It's like those stories I hear about women who were raped, and then about some awkward conversation they had afterward with their rapist. I just can't picture being in that situation. I've always thought that if someone actually succeeded in raping me, that there'd be no way for a conversation to take place between the two of us because a rapist cannot do much conversing while buried in the cold, cold ground. And hey, it's never happened and never come close to happening, so I have the privilege of not needing to actually go down that road. It's all hypothetical to me and perhaps I'm completely wrong. But still, this sort of thing is completely outside my experience.

But, of course, there is no contract, and I’ll never fully be allowed in the club no matter how obedient I am. As long as sexism goes unchallenged, I’ll always be “just a girl”. But because I’m a girl, my complaints about sexism are dismissed. It’s a loop. And that devaluation is vastly compounded for people of colour, trans people, gay people, disabled people – anyone who has spent the past few decades as a stock “edgy” punchline.

Jerry Seinfeld didn't say anything sexist. Or rather, he didn't say anything sexist in the clip Lindy West referred to. Perhaps he's said something sexist at some point—I don't know. She's not challenging sexism here, though. All she seems to care to challenge with this piece are Jerry Seinfeld's age and his wealth. And now she wants to complain about sexism going unchallenged. What?

It’s so-called political correctness that gave me the courage and the vocabulary to demand better than that from the community I love. Yes, this cultural evolution is bumpy, but what Seinfeld and some other comedians see as a threat, I see as doors being thrown open to more and more voices.

We have very different understandings of the word "love." Also, "threat."

Video-game critic Leigh Alexander, who is perpetually besieged by male gamers for daring to critique a pastime that is hers as much as theirs, wrote a beautiful meditation on her weariness: “My partner is in games, and his friends, and my guy friends, and they run like founts of tireless enthusiasm and dry humour. I know sometimes my ready temper and my cynicism and the stupid social media rants I can’t always manage to stuff down are tiring for them. I want to tell them: It will never be for me like it is for you. This will only ever be joy, for you.”
Joy isn’t finite. Share. Just share.

Actually, it is finite. Not sure how we went from coming up with different ways to call Jerry Seinfeld old to quoting Leigh Alexander. Nothing really ties those two together. This is just sloppy writing. What do people see in this person?

Oh hey, I'm not done yet. This post is uncharacteristically long for me, but I want one more tangent, since the subject has sort of come up. The title of this article is different from the title that I see on the Facebook link, so I'm assuming that the title was changed at some point. On the Facebook link, what I see is: "What do the politically correct brain police have against straight white dudes like Jerry Seinfeld?" I don't really know why the title was changed, but the original title and the references to whiteness remind me of something...

In the past, I've argued against the utility of the concept of "white privilege" but this has usually been on account of the "privilege" component, the notion of privilege as monolithic: privilege is a countless mass of myriad, hidden advantages, and all white people have all of this white privilege, but no one who isn't white, who is "PoC" gets those advantages. The real world doesn't work in that way. People know it, but they ignore it. And anyway, I don't think that "privilege" is a workable concept. Or, to be more terse, I reject the existence of "privilege" (and when I say that, I people don't react well to it, but whatever). However, there's the other component of white privilege: whiteness. I don't care for it. "White" doesn't hold any significance for me. There's a database at my job in which someone else, not me, put "white" for my ethnicity. That's not even a real ethnicity! My sister has actually gone so far as to make people change it. If she's labeled "white" on a document, she protests and insists that the document is changed to undisclosed or something. I don't go that far, on the principle that if people want to call me things, they're free to do so. But still, I don't really think of myself as white. And of course, that itself is a sort of privilege. I can walk around where I live and just think of myself as a man, not as a white man, but a dark-skinned man is socially compelled to dwell in the designation of "black man." Blackness is inextricably part of of his identity, and the costs for disregarding that are almost certain to be much more inconvenient than any costs I would face for doing the same. So I'm privileged in that way. In a white way. White privilege.

There's this comedy rap group called The Retar Crew, and one of their members, Gregory Qaiyum, wrote a song, "White Nigga From Drumline" that is mostly about black men recognizing him in a sort of inversion of the token black guy trope, as being "that white motherfuckin' nigga from Drumline." He is annoyed about this circumstance, or at least his characterization of himself for the purpose of the song is (I suspect that the performer himself takes it in stride and is playing the whole thing up for comedic value), but also remarks on being singled out as Pakistani at the airport (which then sets up a scenario of a black TSA officer asking him what movie he was in, for yet another instance of a black man recognizing him as "that white motherfuckin' nigga from Drumline"). So when he's around black people, he's seen as white, but when he goes to the airport, he is pegged as Middle Eastern and racially profiled. And then there's Jerry Seinfeld, an iconic, stereotypical Jewish comedian. Among the people who really make a big deal about whiteness, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Seinfeld wouldn't just be excluded, he'd be vilified (white supremacists tend to really have a thing against Jews, due to a whole mess of historical details). Silly examples, but they're the ones I thought of, and I think that, as examples, they make the point well enough.

My qualm with the "white" part of white privilege isn't so much that I don't care for "white"  as a label or that I don't label myself as white (although that is a factor). I am, after all, of primarily Western European descent. Most of my more recent ancestors moved to the Midwestern United States several generations ago, and finally some of my most recent ancestors migrated to the West Coast. Those people were generally thought of as white, maybe even what would be categorized as WASP. One could say that my people have, more often than not, been whitebread. But that's not how it works for everyone. Some people who are not included as "white" and who miss out on perceived benefits of that will still, when an asshole like Lindy West comes along, be marked as "white dudes" and dismissed as oafish on account of their privilege. Fuck that shit.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Around the end of last year, I checked out a long novel by Neal Stephenson, got a late start on it, and had to turn it back in at the library before I could finish it. Several months later, I returned to the same shelf at the library, but Anathem wasn't there. So, for good measure, I checked out another, even longer Neal Stephenson novel, then waited. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you fool me, you can't get fooled again. Whatever. The point is, I had to binge-read a lot to actually finish this one before it was due, but I made it. And I really liked it!

So now I want to read more books by Neal Stephenson (I think I've read three of his books so far). This was definitely not my usual fare, but I enjoyed it and have no major qualms. It's in its own weird little genre really, although it is generally regarded as a techno-thriller. While reading the story was enjoyable, I was frustrated as I became increasingly aware of how I couldn't possibly write a story like this. My delusions of being a competent writer were thoroughly destroyed in some manner that I'd make up a metaphor for if I were a competent writer.

Well, I guess if my dreams of being a writer at an end, I'll just have to settle for the next best thing. Whatever that is. Hazardous materials?

Space Cadet by Robert Heinlein and Maske: Thaery by Jack Vance

I've been thinking about these two science fiction classics, individually and in relation to each other, just because they're the two books I read most recently. While they're not really that similar, I just keep thinking of them as a pair. Both are science fiction classics by well-known authors. Both involve space travel. Both are emblematic of certain styles I was already familiar with (Heinlein's "juvenile" works and Vance's whatever you call it). They're paragons of the style they represent, although I'd say that Between Planets is better than Space Cadet and Alastor is better than Maske: Thaery.

Yeah, I have prior examples of the styles employed in these novels (prior in the sense that I'd read them already—Space Cadet is from 1948 and is the oldest of the "Heinlein juveniles" I've read). And I even think my prior examples surpass these two. But they're still great books. A little short though. Speaking of which, I'm cutting this post short too. Bye.

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

For me, Philip K. Dick's writing has a strange distinction in science fiction. I used to be enthusiastic about his novels, but they haven't aged well in my memory, while I've found his short stories to have a rather hit-or-miss quality to them. And yet, his work seems to be generally regarded as transcendental. Maybe it's something about me or maybe it's just coincidence, but I keep running into people who seem to hold Dick's writing in high regard. I don't know if that should be surprising. It's just that I don't know whether or not I agree.

I checked this out at the library while looking for a book to read, as I had no holds on anything. I almost passed it by, since I was apprehensive about reading something by Philip K. Dick, but my curiosity won over my reluctance, and I'm glad. I still don't know, on the whole, whether I consider Philip K. Dick to be the great writer that I usually hear he was, but in this  particular case, the book was well worth it. I'm supposed to say more, but I'm still not bothering to really review books, so this is all you get.

Lord Valentine's Castle by Robert Silverberg

It's been a long time since I've written a post about books I've been reading, but that's not because I haven't been reading. I spent most of last year reading Terry Goodkind's books, and I wanted to post about them, but never got around to it. There are other posts I wanted to write, but didn't, as I am lazy. Oops. Anyway, lately I did check out Neal Stephenson's Anathem and some short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, but I didn't actually finish any books there, so I don't know what to say about that. Anyway, I did finish reading a book. That book is Lord Valentine's Castle.

Not sure what to think. I don't really want to review it. But I did read it. I'm not sure whether I'll read more books in the series. I have no immediate plans to do so. Yeah, this post isn't really going anywhere...