landingtree

How to be Lyndon Baines Johnson:

1. Treat any older more powerful person as a surrogate parent. Flatter extensively and adaptably. If it turns out a surrogate dad hates suck-ups and is raring for a good argument, give him that instead.

2. Find small informal organisations no one cares about, such as a student political body or congressional secretaries' society. Rig elections to win control of these; then, once you have the power to, use them for a wide range of goals such as meeting and flattering additional powerful surrogate parents.

3. Work your staff hard. Try to praise them enough that they don't have nervous breakdowns,
but it's not essential.

3.1. Don't employ anyone who objects to this.

4. Check and recheck every piece of work yourself. If someone doesn't respond to your telegram, write them another making sure your first got through.

5. If there isn't any work to do then make some. (But self-care is important: if you get appendicitis due to the resulting stress, you are permitted to stop working for several days, perhaps as much as a week.)

6. Avoid principle.

7. Be motivated by a ceaseless inner flame.

8. Have a good politician as your actual father and spend your childhood watching how he does it. Copy the useful bits but not the bits that lead him into penury, i.e. his failure to avoid principle. Never quite forgive him for this last.

9. Don't ever have an affair with the lover of one of your most important allies - but hey, everyone has to break one rule, right?

10. Avoid going on the record with your politics. Let everyone you're talking to think you agree with them, ideally by getting around in front of the conversation and saying the things they're about to say.

11. Find rich people who need entrée to Washington; for example, a construction company in desperate financial difficulties whose gigantic semi-legal hydroelectric dam you can smooth the way for. Up-and-coming millionaires from the new Texas oil field are also a good option. Drink their money in deep, tasty draughts. This is guaranteed never to cause any complications later in your country's history.

12. Decide as early as possible that you are going to be President, and never make a decision that could keep you from that goal.



Other notes: Caro only seems to write books about abusive bosses. The relationship between Johnson and his assistant Latimer was painful to read about. At the point where Latimer is saying, “Well, he'd do anything for you and you'd do anything for him,” having lived a life that makes it very clear only the second of these things is true, I thought, "Huh, Pearl and Rose Quartz from Steven Universe had a comparatively functional relationship, all things considered."

Oh, and speaking of, Johnson also puts the hard sell on his prospective wife to marry him after a ridiculously short acquaintance, partly by lying about his own interests. Charming man.

Where did Johnson get his ceaseless inner flame? At least partly, an upbringing in a very poor place by parents who very much believed they deserved more. The book spends a lot of time in the Texas Hill Country, a classic case of 'This place looked like a fertile paradise but only and specifically because no one had been fool enough to do intensive crop-based agriculture to it.' Incredibly poor scrappy farms, worsening by the year, as the fertility of the soil did an up-and-down dance that let people believe the trend might turn upward, even as it continued steadily down. A whole chapter is about what a farm wife's day looked like without electricity. It did not look good. (One of the really concrete good things Johnson does in this book is use his influence as a congressman to get electrification of the Hill Country going.)

This book spans the period from Johnson's grandparents' births to Johnson's first race for a Senate seat. In some ways, the whole front half of it is set up to explain every factor that makes his extremely implausible run for a seat in Congress possible. The later senatorial race is ridiculously corrupt, in at least three different ways, and Johnson loses it for the kind of reason that history, C.J. Cherryh, and Patrick O'Brian are willing to put in their plots, but few other writers seem to be: protagonist suddenly collided with by the second unrelated novel that has been happening offpage.

Does this book need to be book one of a projected five, each the size of a small dog? Ask me again if I get through the rest of them. I certainly don't think I'd have faulted a Lyndon Johnson biographer who spent merely a hundred pages on the historical context of Johnson's family.

Immediately after The Power Broker I had thought 'I need a break from Caro,' so I started listening to Seeing Like a State by James Scott. Caro had spoiled me for it, I could not get on board its rapid jumping through time and space, nor its degree of abstraction, nor its density of detail. I returned to Caro feeling rather as though I had just been seduced by the great man theory of history.

From Hell, by Alan Moore.

I wonder what this would’ve been like in black and white. This is a book about Jack the Ripper’s killings, and it was interesting to see when this edition’s colourist chose to use black instead of red for blood. I read it because a media podcast I listen to, Shelved by Genre, is doing a run of Alan Moore. I am more interested in the podcast than I was in this book. I want them to tell me about Jack the Ripper scholarship, and British comics takes on Jack the Ripper (supernatural elements thereof) and this book in its context. I think the book is good and I didn’t need to read it, I got to the end and went ‘okay, I could’ve stopped in the middle, but I guess I needed to read to the end to discover that.’

(Also, why would you call this book The Master Edition? Maybe I am too attuned by Le Guin’s thoughts about the word Mastery. Maybe they thought it through, maybe they thought it was apt for this book full of the deliberate symbolic weight of men doing violence against women and Man doing violence against Woman.)

Tripoint, by C J Cherryh.

Which is also among the kinds of violence this book involves. The first of them, anyway: actually the second not so much. I do not recommend this as a place to start Cherryh because the emotional dynamics of the start of it made me put it down and go read various other things I’ve just posted about. It makes me think that I found Merchanter’s Luck so palatable in contrast to other Cherryh because its main characters start out in positions of deep control and competence. Do they stay there? Are the places they start in healthy ones? Not necessarily! But there is a comfort to it. Which this book does not have at all, the protagonist has very little to hold onto in life except a bad relationship with his mother. Also, Cherryh does not miss the opportunity to invent a kind of hyperspace travel that involves physical discomfort and sedative-hazed dreams about incest that might drive you insane. There’s one Diana Wynne Jones story in which a writer uses the sensory experience of being tiredly slumped over a keyboard drinking coffee and trying to finish a draft novel to write umpteen heroic captains at the controls of spaceships battling through physical discomfort, and I want to reread it to see if I think Jones read Cherryh directly before writing it.

Anyway! Do the emotional dynamics of this book get less fucked-up by the end? …arguably they get more so, but in a more bearable-to-me-personally way.

The Cowboy Dog, by Nigel Cox.

This is the second Nigel Cox book I've read, after Tarzan Presley, and it's also about taking American myths and putting them in the middle of New Zealand. The boy Chester, soon to be known as Dog, flees his home in the cattle-ranching lands after his father is shot, and makes his way by rail to the city, Auckland, which doesn't work like places he's used to. There, he's taken in by the owner of a burger joint, who treats him a little bit well and a little bit terribly, a bit like a boy and a bit like a dog. One day he'll go back to the lands and avenge his father. (But New Zealand doesn't really have the kind of cattle-ranching lands he remembers. Are his memories of them real?)

This is an odd book. Partway through I was absolutely convinced that Chester had overwritten most of his childhood memories with cowboy-related radio shows and stories and dreams, and we were going to learn that the place he came from had never existed. This tension keeps being played with through the book, but not in the way I'd have guessed. The style is spare and beautiful and has that feeling of having literary fiction antecedents I haven't read.

If I was summing up the book in a sentence, I'd say it's about the violence of men in Westerns. There's a lot here about Chester's ability to see and diffuse it in the faces and postures of men. It's a very inside-the-male-gaze book, there are two female characters and they are both defined largely by their appearances and by the violence men do them.

One thing about this book is that it was written in very little time, as Nigel was dying. I am impressed by it, knowing that. He was a friend of my dad's, and I met him, though I don't have many memories of him.




The Known World, by Edward P. Jones.

Courtesy of ambyr and coffeeandink. This is a book set at the very end of slavery, before abolition, centered on the plantation of Henry, a Black man born in slavery who is freed and goes on to own slaves himself. I liked it so much that I nearly started it again from the beginning once I'd finished it. I didn't find it hard to read, but various plot-threads did end bleakly enough to dissuade me from this idea. I definitely will read it again, but maybe in a year or two.

The story begins with the day of Henry's death, and then proceeds both backward and forward, with frequent spikes into the far future. (Often you learn how a character is going to die - sometimes violently and soon, sometimes peacefully in seventy years.) It's an extremely digressive book, and despite not being all that long, feels like a vast book, too, in a good way. A new chapter is often telling the story of a character who's been in the background til then, and in some cases, doing a different thing than the rest of the book is. (If anyone has a strong reading of the magic-realist-feeling Job chapter, I would be curious to hear it.)

The title refers to the many small worlds the book's set in. Overseer Moses, who knows the plantation where he's enslaved well enough that he can taste the soil and know what it means for the crops, but is helplessly lost if he goes a mile from its borders. And the social worlds of slavery, which people can't see out of.

The book jumps about in place and time, constantly digressing in small ways, flashing forward to the future lives and deaths of its innumerable characters. This helps make the book bearable, in a way, as it's constantly looking at a world beyond slavery. Its narration is able to cross the border of the various known worlds, and look back on them from other places and from after abolition. That also emphasizes the contingency of everything in the book. Slave-owners could free their slaves; slaves could take the risk of running North. The book is very good on the matter-of-fact reasons why they don't. A good number of the slave-owning characters say things like, "Well, slavery is bad, but I'll do it really well. It will be different. It will be okay owning this person who's basically a best friend/daughter to me." Or they simply find freeing slaves terribly awkward. Or, as Henry himself more or less says at one point, "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

~

And now I am reading Tripoint, only it instantly overwhelmed me with its uncomfortable emotional dynamic so I switched to The Incandescent. And at work I am rereading Hexwood. I am never sure from reread to reread how much I'm going to like Hexwood. I think it has the problem of deferring most of the reasons for caring about what's going on until after the first third, but I just got past the first third and am encountering them again.

It more or less began as an accident that I spent most of my trip to North America reading books set in New York. I was reading Deep Roots before I got to New York, and I bought The Chosen and the Beautiful having forgotten that The Great Gatsby, which it retells, is set around New York. Then I read Trouble the Saints to complete the pattern. No ill will toward Montreal, Washington D.C., or Boston, where I had good times - and in diverse ways actually better times than I did in New York - but I did not read books set in them.

~

Actually, my trip reading began with the first part of The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño. This is a long novel that a friend sent me and I thought I would take ages to get around to it unless I isolated myself with it on a plane. It made me laugh out loud as I read it walking onto the plane, so success there! Part one of the book is a diary written by a hapless young lamb of a poet as he enters into an avant-garde poetry movement called the Visceral Realists (without being quite sure what Visceral Realism is, except that he likes it when he sees it) and having a lot of yearning and sex with various young women connected to the movement. Part Two begins to be written from the perspectives of a whole range of other characters, in a way that seemed interesting and to open up perspectives beyond the yearning of the poet, but then I landed in Montreal and began buying books at a rate of about one per minute and the detectives were left behind. (Not literally. They are still in my house).

~

In Montreal, I reread The Other Side of Silence by Margaret Mahy for the first time in years and years, prior to giving it to the Scintillation convention raffle. (Since returning home, I've met up with a friend who has spent ages attempting to track down Mahy books in second hand shops. He thinks they're getting awfully rare here, and is aghast that I just shipped ten of them out of the country. It only took me two weeks of not-very-dedicated searching to find this stack, so either he is wrong or I'm just very lucky). The Other Side of Silence is one of Mahy's YA books, about a girl in a busy family who has decided to stop talking. The book is divided into sections of real life, which is the time she spends with her family, and true life, which is the time she spends climbing alone in the trees over the high walls of the mysterious old Credence house next door, though it becomes more equivocal and less purely her own as the house draws her into its own story. This is in some ways a fairytale retelling and in some ways Gothic. Most of it I like very much. From memory, this is Elizabeth Knox's favourite of Mahy's books, and I can see individual sentences from which I think she took notes. They share a way of being completely unhesitating in pushing themes and elaborate metaphors to the front of the stage.

I give Mahy some praise for being a white writer portraying rap and hip hop as positive things in the nineties: they are other varieties of the word-magic she loves, feeding into the book's themes of speech and silence. At the same time, she tries to write someone improvising hip-hop and I do not think she knows how.

Mahy wrote so much! I look at her bibliography and much of it I've read, some of it I've heard of, but then there's Ultra-Violet Catastrophe! Or, The Unexpected Walk with Great-Uncle Magnus Pringle. As far as I recall I have never seen this book.

~

Deep Roots, by Ruthanna Emrys.

This I bought at Scintillation. It's the sequel to Winter Tide, which I liked fine. At some point I must go back and see if her writing changed or if I did, because I loved both this book and her subsequent one, A Half-built Garden. This series takes Lovecraft and says 'What if he was just as bigoted against his invented monsters as he was about everyone else who was in any way different from him?' It continues the story of Aphra Marsh, survivor of the concentration camps in which the American government killed most of the rest of the land-dwelling branch of her people. She begins the book going with her brother and people they came to trust in the first book to New York, in search of lost members of her blood family. New York is in itself overwhelmingly strange and loud and thronged, but quickly they find that its mundane complexities are not the only ones at play. They encounter people from the wider universe who certainly mean humanity well; the question is whether humanity in general - and Aphra and the agents of the American government she's involved with in particular - will agree on what 'well' means.

This continues to take what's good in Lovecraft - the sense of deep time, overshadowing all-too-mortal humanity; the love of what's comforting and small and known; the difficulties of dealing with what's radically different from you - and reply to it without the horrible racism in really interesting ways. Emrys is very good at writing books about the need to compromise with people whose values you truly don't share. I don't think anyone comes out of this book having got everything they wanted.

~

The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo.

This is one of those 'I am going looking for everything else she's written' kind of reads. It was also an odd experience, because I haven't read The Great Gatsby. Sometimes I can tell things about the original from this retelling - which makes Jordan, not Nick, the narrator; maybe makes the whole thing much queerer and into not so much a love triangle as a love blob (although I am not absolutely sure that doesn't happen in the original); and adds more magic and demons (presumably not quite so directly present in the original or you'd think someone would've told me). I feel like I can guess a lot about the original Gatsby, and something about the original Nick and Tom, and less about the original Daisy, and least of all about the original Jordan because as the narrator the retelling fills her in so thoroughly. The language of this is beautiful, and it fits magic into the world in a way that really works, and I am assuming that about race and sexuality and what it was like to be in New York in its time, it is wider than Gatsby, although I just started reading Gatsby so I get to find out.

...wait, she wrote a sequel? Huh.

~

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson.

This book starts as the story of Phyllis Green, an assassin in New York as the Second World War looms, working for a mob boss who maybe doesn't have a whole heart made out of gold, but at least has some teeth made of silver, and that's something, right? Phyllis is black, but passes for white to gain his acceptance and move through society as she must - and keep her old family safe from any mob-related fallout.

I am told that a lot of people started reading this book for the badass magical assassin, and were therefore not best pleased by the turns it took. Phyllis is a badass magical assassin, whose saints' hands give her astonishing skills with a knife. But the book is much heavier than that description would indicate. It's more about the consequences and weight of violence - both personal and societal - and the degree to which individual moral choice, and individual loves, can and can't stand up to that. What are one assassin's choices in a world of segregation and war? Well, something. But not enough.

~

...and that is all the books I read in America! Is it all the books I acquired in America? ha ha ha no. I had gone to my mother's house, last stop before travel, with a perfectly reasonable size of suitcase. I then realised I could borrow her suitcase if I wanted, which was twice as big. I returned with the suitcase almost literally full of books - I had three pounds spare in my luggage allowance home. The other books are:

Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman. Bought at Scintillation, have been looking forward to this, could just have waited til it came in at the library but oh well.

Ship Without Sails, by Sherwood Smith.
Tone and Opacities, by Sofia Samatar.

Also bought at Scintillation.

Hunger: An Unnatural History
Resurrection Man, by Sean Stewart
The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai.

These are gifts from ambyr. The last two are interventions in me buying a book in a shop, when ambyr said "You know, you could just take mine."

The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison by Jenni Calder
Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, by Genevive Valentine
Kingdoms of Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Tumble Home and The Dog of the Marriage, by Amy Hempel. (This is the favourite writer of someone in my creative writing course a few years ago whose writing I liked.)
Merchanter's Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis

These were from a good D.C. bookstore whose name I forget. [Capitol Hill Books! See comments.]

Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, On Homo Rodans and other writings.

These were from a museum shop. Expensive things look half as expensive in U.S. dollars as I'm used to, and these looked very nice. I had kept on being struck by Varo's art from a distance in the museum and then checking the artist and going, "Oh of course it's another Varo." Richly-textured scenes of magic being done in a somewhat Miyazaki-Howl's-Moving-Castle way. Also I can send one of them to the Australian friends who sent me Savage Detectives.

Warlock, by Oakley Hall.
God Stalk, by P.C. Hodgell

Strand Books.

The Incredible Digging Leviathan, by James P. Blaylock.
The Crane Husband, by Kelly Barnhill.

Behold my incredible restraint in buying only two books in Boston having already decided that I wouldn't have the luggage allowance to buy any more books at all.

The above gloating over my treasures shall inaugurate a time of restraint. I have not actually signed my name to a promise not to buy books for a year - a thing jsthrill once did and that I am considering - but I certainly intend to let the balance between getting and reading swing back to true for a while.

More accounts of my trip to follow, hopefully, unless I get swept away by the present.

The No-show, by Beth O'Leary

Romance novel in which one man stands three women up for dates on the same day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening. And then the book follows these three women in their lives and in their relationships with the man. They are a tree surgeon, a retail worker who left her old life at a law firm for Reasons To Be Explored, and a life coach, each with their own small well-realised cast of side characters. And the man is absolutely sweet, too good to be true - evidently, since he isn't telling the three women about each other. The book presents a tension between the dickishness of his behavior, the non-dickishness of his vibe, and the fact that, well, he's the romantic lead, isn't he? Or is he? But for which romance?

I can see finding the way it all checks out annoying - I did for a bit, but came round on it.


The Rest Of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness.

The chapter titles of this YA novel describe the adventures of teen protagonists that you might find in a Buffy-esque TV show - i.e. Chapter the First, in which the Messenger of the Immortals arrives in a surprising shape, looking for a permanent Vessel; and after being chased by her through the woods, indie kid Finn meets his final fate.

This describes what is happening at the same time as the chapters. What happens in the chapters is mostly something else entirely: the lives of an unrelated group of teenagers living realist-ish teen-novel lives at the same school, having normal, well-rendered problems like OCD and parents. Except that Buffy is happening in the next clique over, and it always has been. Something opened a Hellmouth under the gym when your parents were teens - they don't talk about it much. Who knows what it was. But every so often the big story is a bit too close to your own small story for comfort.

You have to do it well to sell the premise of 'The cool tropes you like to see? This book is about not-those, about the negative space of those,' and this does. Also I just really like the structural conceit, and it plots and characterises economically.


The No-show is in conversation with romance novels - its structure means you know from the start that it can't exactly play the genre straight - while being one. Another book I read slightly longer ago, Kelly Link's The Book of Love, is in conversation with romance novels (and contains a significant romance novelist) while not being one - and The Rest Of Us Just Live Here has a lot of teen romance running through it, but is very specifically not ending on anything like settledness or permanence, while The No-show - well, it has something to say about interpersonal settledness and permanence, anyway. As someone who's read very little in the romance genre, these an interesting three to have in my head at the same time!

Next I'm reading Alexis Hall's Confounding Oaths, a regency romance narrated by Puck.

This is an amnesia story, where the protagonist finds herself in a situation she doesn't understand and has to work out what happened; and where she turns out, along the way, to be a person of remarkable power and importance. As such, it zips along. I find the amnesia both too convenient (it's carefully targeted to avoid causing any problems that aren't useful to the plot) and really effective. Adding to the paciness, the protagonist (who doesn't initially know her own name) shares with other Butler protagonists I've read a clarity and force of mind and motive: around her, things will get done, and they'll get done well.

It's fun to start amnesia stories not knowing any more than the character does, but also in this case maybe not. Plot description commences here: it's vampires. Or something like them. The protagonist quickly finds that she wants to drink human blood, and that when she does so, the person she drinks from becomes emotionally bound to her, extremely interested in her welfare, and extremely suggestible. Being fed upon is a sexually charged pleasure. This starts out uncomfortable because the protagonist appears to be about eleven years old, but quickly does a partial flip and becomes uncomfortable in the opposite direction as well: the protagonist has to reckon with the control she's achieved before even knowing what kind of being she is, and with the circumstances that deprived her of that knowledge.

( Late-book spoilers on how this power dynamic shakes out )

Regions of impossible physics have occurred on Earth, full of alien detritus that's deadly or valuable by turns. In daylight, government officials enter to brave the deadly and retrieve the valuable; at night, it's the turn of the stalkers, a new professional group of smuggler-ranger. The book's protagonist works both sides.

It's always interesting to see if the source material survives its offspring. I've met two things inspired by this book, M. John Harrison's Nova Swing and the Tarkovsky film of it. They're both to some degree faithful adaptations, and did they exhaust this book? Not at all! It's one of those novels I get to the end of and go, "How was there this much novel in only that many pages?"

The answer-

(structural spoilers commence)

-is that it moves through time at a much quicker clip than those other two works. The Tarkovsky film moves with the patience stalkers themselves require; the book doesn't. It knocks scenes, places, and characters into existence with one or two blows of the hammer each, fully confident in the integrity of the structure it's building.

One of the things that makes the Zones interesting is that it's so unclear whether they'll change everything or nothing. An opportunity appears and humans exploit it, do crimes with it, make it into batteries and maybe weapons too: close enough to what we were doing before that at times the job of stalker seems only a metaphor for any other kind of precarious getting-through-the-day. Also they're an existential threat of a never-before-seen kind that might change or obliterate the world in another half-hour.

The hypersignificance of each small detail in the Zone-navigating passages reminds me - and maybe it's just because a scene in the Tarkovsky film, which is working from further outside the characters' heads than the book is, had made me think this first - of a children's game. A small stretch of ground is doing a huge amount of work. Pebbles become threats to life and limb, and a twig becomes a road to safety. There's nothing really there, and what you're witnessing is a person moving very slowly, full of tension and patience, over a small, normal-looking stretch of ground. How often did I cross a stony creek as a child, pretending that my choice of stone was vitally important? That's part of the satisfaction of the Zone story for me: the skill-set of knowing a place's hidden rules. The book gives another, adult example of place-knowledge working: at one point the stalker protagonist escapes from police by applying his skills to a perfectly ordinary neighborhood he knows equally well.

There's an offhand misogyny to this book - the Zone itself is at one point described as a bitch - which I think is part of what Nova Swing is written about and against.

This book starts with three giants on a spaceship. They've grown so much since getting on board that they can't move, but are compressed into the spaceship's rooms like people trapped in tiny cupboards. And they have to keep talking to each other, because the spaceship, Audition, is powered by the sound of their voices.

There is room to doubt what I've just said, because the whole first part of the book consists of dialogue. I wondered sometimes if there was really a spaceship, or if these people were talking for some other reason. It's interesting that the book begins this way, since the two other Pip Adam novels I've read begin in mundane life, and only gradually reveal how speculative they are. This book moves the other way to those ones, beginning with a surreal s.f. premise that's mostly explained by the end of page one, and then offering the possibility that some other account of things will undo it: a different dialogue with the mundanity or weirdness of what's going on.

Like the other books, this takes something that's absolutely a metaphor, and treats it literally beyond the metaphor's requirements: in this case, the experience of being a giant stuck in a spaceship.

Pip Adam's books have been ones I fall under the influence of. After reading The New Animals I went walking in a strangely altered state. I couldn't tell you what exactly had just happened, but I'd been submerged in that book. This one, to go with the water metaphor, feels like it's full of little rips and currents and shallows. Now and again it pulls me under, or pulls me along quick, and then I'm viewing another bit of it from a distance while I crawl over a sandbar. I really like some things it does, and may read it again to see if they all cohere next time, but at the moment I don't feel that they do.

Some possible reasons for this: it's a more complicated book. It's a book which puts the giants in a spaceship ahead of the apple cart, in a way that removes the particular satisfaction I took from the other two: difficult daily life, matter-of-factly described, with some estranging mysterious factor that points beyond it. All that's here, but shuffled. Like the other two, this is a book in dialogue with the question, 'Is this plausible?' and more than the other two I kept on having the reaction, 'No it isn't.' And: this book is didactic. At a talk last year (which I may be misremembering) Pip Adam has talked about her increasing comfort with didacticism, with just taking the point you want to make and putting it in there. I like some extremely didactic books, but in this one I experienced a scattering of lines that landed 'bonk' on my head instead of feeling braided into it. The metaphors are rising close enough to the surface that maybe I like the interviews and articles that go alongside this book better than the book itself. (Also it's the first of the three books that seems to me to contain, and to be partly about, hope of systemic change - I remember my reaction to Everything For Everyone was partly 'Oh how nice a book about systemic change' because I read it after Pip Adam's Nothing To See, which is so much not that).

Under the cut I'll say what some of the metaphors are metaphors for, though don't read the book's jacket copy either if you don't want to know that.


( Read more... )

A Haunting on the Hill, by Elizabeth Hand.

This authorised sequel to The Haunting of Hill House was taking on a difficult task. I don't think it manages to live up to the earlier book, but it does get some good mileage out of bringing the earlier book to dwell unsettlingly inside itself. And this is one of those books where I so much wanted to know what happened next that I stayed up far too late reading it and finished it tired, which in itself recommends it even if I wasn't satisfied with where it got to.

The outline of the story is similar to the original: a group of people come to spend a few weeks in Hill House, and it Does Not Go Well. Where the original group were trying to study the house itself, and therefore treated its early manifestations merrily, this book has a group of people putting on a play, with their various degrees of investment in it.

I really like the whole opening sequence, sliding toward Hill House down a gentle greased slope. I like all the real estate details. Later on, what I said to myself was 'The special effects don't work': I'm neither as interested in what lies between these people, nor as frightened of how Hill House reaches out to exploit it, as I wanted to be.

Hand knows her folklore. This may be more effective for people who knows exactly what she's bringing in, or who know the original better than I do?




Fire & Decay - The Destruction of the Large New Zealand House, by Terence E.R. Hodgson.

This is an odd, not very good book: slender, illustrated with black and white with photos of houses which have since burned down or been demolished. You'd think from the title that it was about a systematic phenomenon, but it isn't really – except, I guess, for ‘Big houses were often made of wood here’ and ‘Rich people often stopped maintaining their houses because they lost their money or moved elsewhere’.

The book is made up of accounts of the houses and pocket biographies of their owners, but neither the houses' architectural points of interest, nor the stories of their collapse, nor the lives of their owners, are really dwelt on, and the photos often aren't great, leaving me unsure what the author's motivation was in putting the book together – except, perhaps, to gently compliment rich people. His view, coming across in offhand comments, is that society has forgotten what diligence it took to be an early settler with masses of family money. The introduction says the author will scrupulously avoid the term 'mansion' not only because most of the houses aren't big enough, (which seems true in many cases), but because "The term also reflects a style of wealthy ostentation which was actually repugnant to the early prosperous New Zealander." I feel that once he's talking about homeowners importing white swans to populate their artificial lakes, this claim begins to need some defending. (There's also a line praising the good work Edward Gibbon Wakefield did planning Wellington from a jail cell; the fact that he's in the cell for abducting a fifteen year old in order to marry her for her wealth is mentioned only so it can be minimized.)

The houses in this book I found fun to read about were The Wattles*, because it has trellises on it and plants growing all up to the second floor balconies, and its owner was a taxidermist and keen gardener; and Alexander Bickerton's Wainoni. Bickerton was a scientist with a passionately wrong theory about star formation: he thought new stars appearing in our sky were caused by two existing stars banging into each other and chunks breaking off them. In 1896, he turned his house into the Wainoni Federative Home, where thirty people shared out chores between them, some being employed elsewhere and some running the house’s firework factory. Sadly, all this was a complete economic failure, and the house, meant to house a hundred, soon dispersed. Bickerton disapproved publicly of marriage, so of course The Federative Home was in often in the papers of Canterbury as a hotbed of immoral sex as well as socialism. The essay I went off and read about him doesn't corroborate this book's assertion that his disapproval of marriage was based on his observation, as a government analyst, of many conjugal poisonings; what it does say is that he believed unwanted marriages were bad for women (true) and were also causing genetic deterioration of the species (false). This book doesn’t mention that he himself was married until two pages after stating his disapproval of marriage, and then only in the context of Mrs Bickerton becoming the house's sole resident after Mr Bickerton had moved back to England. The book doesn't mention that this took place after the house had been converted into an amusement park, which then also failed financially. I want to know more about all of this!

So yes, not a good book for general interest, and totally useless as research into Hamilton, which is the city I wanted to know about and which is skipped entirely. But a spur to further reading.




*all the house names in the book are italicised.

This year I'm doing the Writing for the Page masters course at the Institute of Modern Letters; basically, it's a course in which ten people end up with a draft novel each by November. More on this later! But I keep not getting around to writing about the course, so here are some excerpts from the reading diary it asks students to keep. It's a rainy, windy day, thirteen degrees out, i.e. cold enough for my liking, and I just cycled home exuberantly, singing in the Mt Vic Tunnel (all the cars honk and I have to join in somehow).

~

08/03/2023

...and I've started Everything For Everyone – an oral history of the New York Commune 2052-2072, a structurally fascinating utopia. It makes the conclusion of Nothing To See jump out at me as especially pessimistic – presenting, instead of [spoilers], a period in the near future when communal action overthrows the flailing Capitalist nation-states and fixes the world. The book's authors project themselves into the future: this is a project that will be undertaken by these real people, M.E. O'Brien and Eman Ahdelhadi, in another fifty years' time. Politically the book's focus on mutual aid networks and social reproduction theory* appeals to me, though my pessimism warns that nothing will ever go this well; narratively, the conceit of the book as a scholarly introduction followed by a collection of interviews allows a beautiful collection of voices and perspectives. We'll see how this one sticks the landing, and what my Trotskyist family members think about it. (Prose-wise, in the wake of Barzun it is again the case that I want to nitpick individual words).

12/03/2023

Another chapter of Everything For Everyone today, and a really interesting conversation with my activist sister about it. She says the revolution it's depicting strikes her as plausible, for the most part: people have been saying 'One day capitalism will finally eat itself' for a while, and it hasn't happened yet, but it's still a coherent thing to imagine happening. Meanwhile, I enjoy the quality this book shares with Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, a favourite work of mine: the future arises from the present in really weird ways. Today's trivial-seeming social club is tomorrow's only source of intercontinental communication. Also, I have heard from a lot of people,** Americans and other, who are sick of the centrality of New York in the discourse; this book is very deliberately global in scope. New York's in the title, but chapter two is about Palestine and that social club I mentioned arises from ships that circle the Indian Ocean. (I'm interested to see how this would chime with Robinson's New York 2140, which I suspect of being an active counter-inspiration, though on very little evidence).


13/03/2023

Today I read Leese Webster, by Ursula Le Guin and James Brunsman. It is a picture book about a spider living in an abandoned palace who begins to make her webs into art. I suspect it of also being about writing, but what's that Le Guin said about message versus applicability? A good fable is a multi-purpose tool like a bowl, you can put a lot of different things in it and it's still the same bowl, ready to be re-used. I read this book while looking for Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, a book whose applicability to my novel project I understood; still haven't found that book, but I went home from Victoria Library with six unrelated things none of which I'd been looking for, and having read a Le Guin story I'd never heard of. Serendipity is one of the things this course is for.






*[note: I have not actually read any social reproduction theory, but it came up in the conversation which recommended me the book, so: based on what I deduce social reproduction theory to be from the first third of this book alone, it appeals to me!]

**[note: two people. Guess I like to sound confident in this diary, huh.]