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Recent reading
Feb. 11th, 2024 01:02 pmFinite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse.
I read about half of this. Based on that, it seems to be one of those accounts of good living that can't solve problems, though it offers a way of thinking that might sometimes successfully recategorise a problem as a non-problem. I found this annoying enough that I tried to take it back to the library partway through chapter two; beautiful enough that I read a few lines by the library drop-off slot, wandered away reading it, and wasn't annoyed again til I was two blocks away.
The book distinguishes between finite games, which always have beginnings, endings, and winners, and can't alter their own rules; and infinite games, which may begin but do not end, and have only the goal of extending play. This is metaphorically powerful, though in terms of pure thinking about games, it's pretty easy to come up with finite games that violate Carse's definition of 'finite game'.
The beautiful bit is about a love for play, a love for the finite; entering into the drama without reserve, and valuing its continuance more than one's own life or circumstances. I think of the heroes in Book of the Three Dragons praying for their enemies to be made strong so they can have more joy in defeating them.
But if that sounds like it could have limits as a way of understanding the entire world: the first thing in the book that annoyed me is the claim that both sides in a war have to sign up to the role of 'participant in a war' before the war can happen. It is true that all citizens of an invaded country could, in theory, ignore the invaders and keep having tea while the tanks rolled in; I don't think it's relevantly true. I don't actually want to handcuff the author to a lamp-post and then observe his attempts to exercise radical freedom, but it's the kind of thought experiment that comes to my mind. (There may be no rules, but I think this book undersells principles and natural laws).
Wish I Was Here, by M. John Harrison
I have notes on this somewhere in a notebook at home, but since I'm away from home: this is called an anti-memoir on its cover. It is partly a statement of Harrison's antagonism toward the concept of story, as applied to life as much as anything else.
Harrison is tacking toward a realer, more complicated destination than actually exists. All the contradictions of 'realer than the actual' are implied. Every gain is undercut automatically; every self-account gets co-opted.
There are beautiful bits of matter-of-fact daily life in this book, un- and half-stated things moving about under them; bits of talking about writing that click perfectly into place perfectly with my feelings, such as the suggestion: write nothing that isn't metaphor, and if that overloads a piece of the story with meaning then let it fall over and keep doing stuff with the wreckage.
It is also the kind of book that sometimes seems to be leaning off the page and saying, "You! Hey, you! You're an idiot!" I mostly do not experience this feeling, but I mention it because I think I would if I hadn't built up a tolerance. This book leans hard into 'Your problems cannot ultimately be solved, certainly not by methods you're conscious of.' As a prescription, this feels half true and half like giving up too soon. (I think I stole this phrase from Harrison).
Example: Harrison talks about loving climbing, but calls that love too simple, too obviously "an addiction to body-chemicals." I don't believe in the account of value this implies. There's more to the climbing story, of course: an inner-ear disorder, recovery to find old habits lost, a sense of emerging into a newly non-obsessive self which only seems to have lost something in retrospect. Given all those later reasons, it's striking that the insufficiency of "addiction to body chemicals" needs to be invoked too.
As a description of society: Harrison thinks we're in the Age of Fantasy, of a pervasive delusion seeping out of spectacle and genre. I do not agree that there exists such a seeping delusion, or that, if it existed, it would determine very much. I noticed his mention of Antonia Forest's Peter's Room as a book fundamentally about how a fantasy life is unsustainable. As someone who made up lots of stories with his sister while we bounced about on a trampoline for whole childhood afternoons, I'm not super sympathetic to this reading; I think the good thing about Peter's Room is that the game the children play is neither condemned nor praised, but is rather double-edged.
As a self-description: the book leaves me with great affection for Harrison as someone temperamentally and philosophically unable to stop besieging any house in which he lives.
Based on the recommendation of my creative writing supervisor last year, who says it's at the least good to argue with, I've just got Robert Mckee's screenwriting book, Story, out of the library. I'm not likely to get through it, but reading a single page of it has me putting it in the category of Thing Harrison Is Arguing Against. Story as the unlocatable soul of text and life, the metaphor that animates. I hear Harrison's teeth grinding.
The Grand Domestic Revolution, by Dolores Hayden.
Book club book. Read two thirds of this, then ran out of time. Optimism says I'll read the rest this week, book club history indicates that I have never yet done this.
The book is an account of what it terms material feminism: a line of feminist thought starting in America in the 1860s, that focused neither on suffrage nor on class struggle - both of which also had movements underway at the time - but on the kinds of unpaid work society required of women, and the houses and facilities designed to rely on that work. This is a history of experimental socialist housing arrangements; attempts to get co-operative laundries and cooking facilities off the ground; attempts to get husbands to pay collectives of their wives to work; the rise of home economics, which tried to put housework on a scientific foundation, and ended up tactically disparaging the existing practices of housewives in a way that was ultimately double-edged; and numerous popular utopian fictions. Of the movement's thinkers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, great speaker and populariser, was remembered, and the activists she was responding to and arguing with tended to drop out of memory.
A few notes I made along the way or that came up in book group: free love turns up a lot, with people both for and against it, but notably in the 1800s it's turning up as 'freedom to abstain' just as much as 'freedom to have lots of': complete chastity or monogamy outside marriage are equally falling under its heading.
Appliances were invented at industrial scale and only later miniaturised, so it was natural to imagine the centralisation of housework, before capitalism and convenience caught up and the labor-saving devices started to save more and more labor.
This book is fairly old and says nothing about developments since the 80s.
It's interesting to look back and forth from the ideas in this book to the things we do and don't have - laundromats pretty pervasive, but shrinking; houses still pretty much always having private kitchens; ready-meals far more available than they were; food delivery services useful, exploitative, and expensive. (Speaking of this, our next book is about the success of Uber in dealing with local government regulations).
On the book club call we spent a while talking about our different housing arrangements - me in a group of four friends, someone living alone, someone in the orbit of a large community house, someone in a household tied together by romantic relationships that spans two houses and at least three people. It's lovely to be in a space where none of these arrangements are controversial, though even now the space isn't big enough.
I read about half of this. Based on that, it seems to be one of those accounts of good living that can't solve problems, though it offers a way of thinking that might sometimes successfully recategorise a problem as a non-problem. I found this annoying enough that I tried to take it back to the library partway through chapter two; beautiful enough that I read a few lines by the library drop-off slot, wandered away reading it, and wasn't annoyed again til I was two blocks away.
The book distinguishes between finite games, which always have beginnings, endings, and winners, and can't alter their own rules; and infinite games, which may begin but do not end, and have only the goal of extending play. This is metaphorically powerful, though in terms of pure thinking about games, it's pretty easy to come up with finite games that violate Carse's definition of 'finite game'.
The beautiful bit is about a love for play, a love for the finite; entering into the drama without reserve, and valuing its continuance more than one's own life or circumstances. I think of the heroes in Book of the Three Dragons praying for their enemies to be made strong so they can have more joy in defeating them.
But if that sounds like it could have limits as a way of understanding the entire world: the first thing in the book that annoyed me is the claim that both sides in a war have to sign up to the role of 'participant in a war' before the war can happen. It is true that all citizens of an invaded country could, in theory, ignore the invaders and keep having tea while the tanks rolled in; I don't think it's relevantly true. I don't actually want to handcuff the author to a lamp-post and then observe his attempts to exercise radical freedom, but it's the kind of thought experiment that comes to my mind. (There may be no rules, but I think this book undersells principles and natural laws).
Wish I Was Here, by M. John Harrison
I have notes on this somewhere in a notebook at home, but since I'm away from home: this is called an anti-memoir on its cover. It is partly a statement of Harrison's antagonism toward the concept of story, as applied to life as much as anything else.
Harrison is tacking toward a realer, more complicated destination than actually exists. All the contradictions of 'realer than the actual' are implied. Every gain is undercut automatically; every self-account gets co-opted.
There are beautiful bits of matter-of-fact daily life in this book, un- and half-stated things moving about under them; bits of talking about writing that click perfectly into place perfectly with my feelings, such as the suggestion: write nothing that isn't metaphor, and if that overloads a piece of the story with meaning then let it fall over and keep doing stuff with the wreckage.
It is also the kind of book that sometimes seems to be leaning off the page and saying, "You! Hey, you! You're an idiot!" I mostly do not experience this feeling, but I mention it because I think I would if I hadn't built up a tolerance. This book leans hard into 'Your problems cannot ultimately be solved, certainly not by methods you're conscious of.' As a prescription, this feels half true and half like giving up too soon. (I think I stole this phrase from Harrison).
Example: Harrison talks about loving climbing, but calls that love too simple, too obviously "an addiction to body-chemicals." I don't believe in the account of value this implies. There's more to the climbing story, of course: an inner-ear disorder, recovery to find old habits lost, a sense of emerging into a newly non-obsessive self which only seems to have lost something in retrospect. Given all those later reasons, it's striking that the insufficiency of "addiction to body chemicals" needs to be invoked too.
As a description of society: Harrison thinks we're in the Age of Fantasy, of a pervasive delusion seeping out of spectacle and genre. I do not agree that there exists such a seeping delusion, or that, if it existed, it would determine very much. I noticed his mention of Antonia Forest's Peter's Room as a book fundamentally about how a fantasy life is unsustainable. As someone who made up lots of stories with his sister while we bounced about on a trampoline for whole childhood afternoons, I'm not super sympathetic to this reading; I think the good thing about Peter's Room is that the game the children play is neither condemned nor praised, but is rather double-edged.
As a self-description: the book leaves me with great affection for Harrison as someone temperamentally and philosophically unable to stop besieging any house in which he lives.
Based on the recommendation of my creative writing supervisor last year, who says it's at the least good to argue with, I've just got Robert Mckee's screenwriting book, Story, out of the library. I'm not likely to get through it, but reading a single page of it has me putting it in the category of Thing Harrison Is Arguing Against. Story as the unlocatable soul of text and life, the metaphor that animates. I hear Harrison's teeth grinding.
The Grand Domestic Revolution, by Dolores Hayden.
Book club book. Read two thirds of this, then ran out of time. Optimism says I'll read the rest this week, book club history indicates that I have never yet done this.
The book is an account of what it terms material feminism: a line of feminist thought starting in America in the 1860s, that focused neither on suffrage nor on class struggle - both of which also had movements underway at the time - but on the kinds of unpaid work society required of women, and the houses and facilities designed to rely on that work. This is a history of experimental socialist housing arrangements; attempts to get co-operative laundries and cooking facilities off the ground; attempts to get husbands to pay collectives of their wives to work; the rise of home economics, which tried to put housework on a scientific foundation, and ended up tactically disparaging the existing practices of housewives in a way that was ultimately double-edged; and numerous popular utopian fictions. Of the movement's thinkers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, great speaker and populariser, was remembered, and the activists she was responding to and arguing with tended to drop out of memory.
A few notes I made along the way or that came up in book group: free love turns up a lot, with people both for and against it, but notably in the 1800s it's turning up as 'freedom to abstain' just as much as 'freedom to have lots of': complete chastity or monogamy outside marriage are equally falling under its heading.
Appliances were invented at industrial scale and only later miniaturised, so it was natural to imagine the centralisation of housework, before capitalism and convenience caught up and the labor-saving devices started to save more and more labor.
This book is fairly old and says nothing about developments since the 80s.
It's interesting to look back and forth from the ideas in this book to the things we do and don't have - laundromats pretty pervasive, but shrinking; houses still pretty much always having private kitchens; ready-meals far more available than they were; food delivery services useful, exploitative, and expensive. (Speaking of this, our next book is about the success of Uber in dealing with local government regulations).
On the book club call we spent a while talking about our different housing arrangements - me in a group of four friends, someone living alone, someone in the orbit of a large community house, someone in a household tied together by romantic relationships that spans two houses and at least three people. It's lovely to be in a space where none of these arrangements are controversial, though even now the space isn't big enough.
