landingtree

by Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen.

I was trying to start writing a poem! However I have no idea which notebook the first bits of the poem are in, and instead came upon my notes on this book, so I may as well write them up in passing.

I have discovered that what will cause me to finish an urban planning book club book well in advance, though I suspect it only works with fairly short books, is having promised to lend my kindle to a friend so she can read it afterwards. (I may have another NZ recruit to the book club, or then again she may just want to read this one, we shall see).

I was keen to read about Uber because I haven't been paying a lot of attention to them, so have mainly just received a sense of cartoonish corporate villainy via filter-feeding. This book was neither a revelation to me, nor uninteresting: I read it going 'Yes, of course that's how it works'.

The book is based on repeat interviews with forty-odd D.C.-area Uber drivers and a range of other figures on the scene, with the five central chapters - on regulation, race, data, the ideology of AVs, and the conditions of driving for the platform - being divided up between the different co-writers. Uber came to Washington D.C. early, and worked on what has become its playbook for defeating local regulation: getting its customer base to bombard politicians with emails, presenting itself as a solution to problems of racial discrimination, disability access, and stagnation of transit systems; feeding off, and feeding, a sense that we can't expect too much of our cities and that regulation is terribly old hat. This last is the book's overarching point, and the reason for its title: as a solution to problems, Uber makes sense in context, but the context is bad and ought to be changed.

I'm super interested to know how this reads to residents of Washington D.C.

( Here are my notes on the individual chapters, cut for length and scattershotness, and fairly bleak )

Because it's still Wednesday elsewhere!

Currently reading: Early Japanese Railways, by Dan Free? Maybe? I only got a quarter of the way through this before attending a book club about it, and I haven't decided whether I'm still reading it for its own sake or not. In 1904, Japanese student Kashima Shosuke sent a report to a London railway magazine, hoped to share knowledge about his nation's railways. It was never published. Eighty years later Dan Free bought the sole copy of the report from another railway enthusiast, and was interested enough in it that his poking around for additional information accidentally turned into the decades-long process of writing this book.

The result has the mixture of upsides and downsides you'd expect from that: Free is endearingly passionate and thorough within his ambit, which does not include the Japanese language. All sources here are English-language even in passages which cry out for Japanese accounts, which is lots of them. All the characters the first three chapters imbue with personality are British or American. What was it like to ride the first railway in Japan? Here's what an English tourist thought.

This is in fact the first history of Japan I've read, so it's useful for that; the illustrations are great; I'm prepared to be interested in fine-grained engineering details and the author going on for half a page about how ugly a particular British train is despite it just looking, to me, like a train; but I think I'm probably shelving this and reading a different history of Japan and then coming back to insert the train detail afterwards? As ambyr said in book club, this will be a great resource to help an enthusiastic train historian who reads Japanese come along later and write a better one.

Just finished:

The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville.

1941: something explodes in Paris, and Surrealist art comes to threatening and marvelous life all across the city. It is entirely unsafe for the inhabitants, but opposed and preferable to the occult forces of the Nazi occupation, which crawl right up out of Hell.

I always like Mieville's sentences, and come to this with not much acquaintance with the details of Surrealism but a lot of interest and affection towards its general goals, thanks to rushthatspeaks telling me about them. Really liked this.


Climbers by M. John Harrison.

I think M. John Harrison is the only writer I have an actual love-hate relationship with. Usually if I hate something I don't even finish reading it; the first time I read Light, I hated it, and then a few months later I wanted to read it again. The large brick bus depot near where I live, with the huge windowless wall facing onto the winding path going to the school, got enchanted when I read The Course of the Heart and then went for a walk there, and it's only starting to subside back to normal now. I didn't even think I liked The Course of the Heart all that much.

At first he felt to me like one of those entirely gloomy British writers (I keep this in my head as a reference category from leaflemming, despite having avoided all the writers leaflemming put in it because he warned me that they worked out to polish and nothingness. Who was one, now? Julian Barnes?) It felt to me like for every possible good thing someone could do, he'd be there, saying, "But in the end it doesn't really work out, does it? It isn't that simple, is it? Maybe it doesn't have a point after all?" But he has the most exact turns of phrase, and puts joy in here and there, too much to imagine that he doesn't know it's there or thinks it isn't valid.

Sometimes I find I've arbitrarily paired writers in my head: I have Harrison and John M. Ford together as dark and bright faces. As well as some names, they share extreme intelligence and a tendency to leave a large chunk of the book concealed: they both trust you to work it out. I'm not that intelligent as I go, I have to do it by re-reading and thinking back over things afterwards, which means I read their books and don't initially know what happened. In Climbers, I was following the car motif and the way people kept on being locked out of houses, but then they lost me, so all I really know is that a man went rock-climbing for a while, and it didn't bring him all he wanted it to, but maybe it didn't have to, maybe he's going to be okay anyway. I find this the easiest of Harrison's to read yet, maybe because I've built up a tolerance, maybe because the activity of climbing anchors the book, is a solid real thing the characters are doing, never exposited upon, described just enough for a non-climber to know what it is.

His characters seldom understand what afflicts them or what they want; often, they get it, but don't know how. I've read an interview with him where he says that a good way to write is to look at a genre and do whatever it seems to be afraid of. When I read him there's this sense of letting a workman into my head with a funny smile and a large wrench and a belt full of tiny pliers with different-shaped heads. I'm not quite sure what he's going to do in there, and at any moment I may decide he's a crank and kick him out: after all, the pipes still leak and this is the sixth time I've had him in. But when I brought that up he stared at me for a minute, chewing his lip, and said, "Well what do you want them to do? What do you want them to do?" I couldn't think what to say.

In an episode of Legend of Korra I watched a while back, there's a moment when an old-timey-looking car turns on the flashing red and blue lights which announce it as a police car, about to start chasing criminals. That struck me as strange, when it wouldn't have done usually, because I was one chapter into Policing the Open Road at the time, and had seen on page three an illustration of a similarly old-timey-looking police car, with the canopied carriage and the spoked wheels – a car from the New York Police Department circa 1925 – which was distinguished not by flashing lights, not by a siren, not even by being the same make and model as the other cars on the force at the time, but only by the letters 'PG' written on the side about a handspan high. Sirens and standardisation came later, but they're now an intuitive way of saying 'police': Legend of Korra has police and cars, so why wouldn't it have the siren and lights?

The reason we have ended up with sirens and lights is that without them, bad things happened. In the case described beside the illustration of the inconspicuous police vehicle – a case about events which took place some ten years earlier in Arizona – a couple driving home from a dinner party didn't know that the car chasing wildly after them had police in it, because the road and engine combined to obscure all cries of “Stop police” and the dimness hid the insignia. The police, thinking they were pursuing robbers, shot at their wheels and accidentally killed one of them. All three officers were charged with murder. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that even if the people being pursued had heard the cries of “stop, police,” even if they had identified the police vehicle, the officers' pursuit of them would still have been “more suggestive of a holdup by highwaymen than an arrest by peace officers.” At that time, the right of the police to make a motorist stop their car and get out didn't exist.

This book is a history of the traffic stop in American law, and a book which points out that the solution to the problems in the case above – change the car – has made itself intuitive, and distracts from the other possibility – change the police. The book is also an argument that the existence of police as we know them depends on the car and its unprecedented demands; that part, I do not fully buy, for this is the kind of book which leans into its case, and I have to scrutinize some of its arguments to see which of them are referring to facts and which of them are structured carefully around a place where its author would like a fact to be stronger. But what I'm left with is not 'I think this is wrong', but rather, 'I think it hasn't been demonstrated that this is the story.' This is the first book I've read about either of its topics, so, while I haven't finished feeling as though there might be counterfactuals to sentences like, 'A United States without cars would have been a society without police as a mode of governing everyone', I surely don't know enough to run them.* And there are lots of bits of the argument I'm entirely convinced by. When do you need state police? When people become mobile.

So, excessively long summary: from 1910 to 1925 there was a thirty-fivefold increase in drivership in the United States, from five hundred thousand to eight million registered. “Even drivers seemed surprised by how fast they could go, judging by the number of accidents that occurred from failure to slow down when turning corners,” writes Seo. Perhaps understandably, with this surge of vehicles into cities not designed for them, traffic accidents became a scourge. During America's involvement in World War One, the war itself killed only half as many Americans as traffic did. Although it seems obvious looking back that a large part of the traffic problem was a problem of novelty, infrastructure not fit for purpose, safety systems and procedures not yet in existence, discussion of the problem at the time concerned individual morality, and it was not necessarily obvious that law enforcement was a desirable or good solution. Early American strategies for lowering the road toll involved education, calling upon people's civic-mindedness and courtesy, and in one case, actually putting up a sign saying 'You are on your honour. Fresno County has no speed cops. Drive so they will not be needed.' But traffic laws continued to be broken happily by people who refered to themselves as 'law-abiding'. Exhortations to refrain from speeding on the grounds that it was discourteous and harmful to the community worked – for about half an hour. This during Prohibition, when the problem of how to get people to refrain from acts which are mala prohibita, wrong not innately but because they are illegal, was a hot topic. In the Prohibition case, the eventual solution was to do away with the laws against alcohol; America could not do away with traffic, and the alternative seemed to be to devote considerable resources into enforcement. The central figure in the professionalisation of American police, August Vollmer, described traffic as “the police problem of today.”

In another example of things which, to my surprise, had to be invented, traffic tickets were not widespread before the nineteen thirties. Before that, drivers in violation of the traffic code were arrested and brought before a magistrate, just as though they'd committed another type of crime, and if they didn't plead guilty they had a full trial. Not everyone had to be hauled to court instantly. In New York in 1910, photo I.D.s were issued to “persons of good character”, exempting them from immediate arrest and allowing them to appear in court whenever they wished inside of 48 hours. The first experiments in ticketing, short-circuiting this procedure and allowing fines to be paid at police stations, didn't begin until the 1920s.

The number of traffic violations remained great enough that police found it impractical even to serve tickets in every case. Traffic officers were given an initially-controversial and never well-defined discretionary power to issue warnings instead of tickets when they felt like doing so. The police officer became judge and jury in matters which could not be brought before a real judge and jury because of the inconvenience to all concerned. This in turn required that police be more professional, more consistently-trained – even more attractive-looking, as one of a number of ways to present the police department in a good light and minimize argument on the street. (Prior to this, I was surprised to learn, it was rare for anybody who society held to be respectable to engage with the police at all. It hadn't mattered whether police looked respectable when none of the people they were dealing with did, or rather, when none of them were in a position to complain about it). Blue uniforms resulted from the need to know, at a distance, whether the man loudly hailing you down from the side of the road had a right to do so.

The large new highway patrol, initially given limited powers, tended to be given the authority to arrest, and guns to carry, as a logical approach to the problem of criminals using highways. If you have all these officers just sitting there, wouldn't you use them? If you're stopping a vehicle anyway, why wouldn't you check to see if it was or contained stolen goods, or drugs, or alcohol?

The material above is covered in the book's first two chapters, and this point segues into the next four, which tell the story of the legality of the traffic stop, tracing key cases in the Supreme Court's application of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. The general question of interpretation, at least at first, being: what is a car? Is it private like houses are, able to be invaded only with great apparent need? But cars move. A car acting suspiciously enough to make an officer wish to search it isn't going to hang about waiting for a warrant, it's going to be in the next juristiction by then. This had never been a problem with houses, or with suspects travelling on public vehicles with regular schedules.** Is a car public? They feel private. They're specifically advertised as being like mobile living rooms. Are some bits of a car public, then?

Prohibition -- and, much later, the War on Drugs -- would make search and seizure rights of ongoing relevance: there was a lot to search for. The first main case to take this up was Carroll, in which the car of a probable whisky-smuggler was stopped on an occasion when it was not known to contain whisky. The police searched it and found, indeed, whisky bottles. Could that evidence be used, despite the search's dubious legality? Answer: yes. The court judged that the search could be accepted given “Reasonable and probable cause for believing,” where previously the standard for warrantless search had been knowledge. Previously, questioning and search could only follow arrest; this case defined the traffic stop as a new category.

From Carroll, the book moves to Terry, which essentially does the same thing for non-car-related searches, defining the stop-and-frisk as something other than an arrest. This is the main point where I said, 'Wait a second,' and flicked back and forth determining that, in fact Terry does not refer to Carroll as precedent, but only uses language reminiscent of it in establishing a reasonableness standard. Perhaps to someone who knows more than I do the extent of similarity is enough to make it clear that of course it's fair to write 'Terry cited Carrol', but I think this is mild weaselling, and the fact that a reasonableness standard arose in a non-car-related case weakens the book's story that it was Cars All The Way.

The book moves on through further cases hich I won't summarise, through the Due Process Revolution, in which the definition of 'reasonable and probable cause for believing' was sharply curtailed, and then on through its gradual extention outwards again in dozens of highly specific determinations, substantive rights (you shall never be searched in your house) giving way to procedural rights (if the jacket is on the back seat of your car, it counts as a container and can be searched, but if you're wearing it, it doesn't...) with police growing very well versed in what they needed to say in order to retroactively give themselves reasonable and probable cause, and judges having a problematic tendency to sign off on anything the police did as reasonable because they're, well, the police. Today, minor traffic violations can justify a car stop, which can lead to a full car search, which can lead to arrest for any number of other offences. The requirement that police not bother you unless they have specific reasons for thinking they ought to has been slowly eroded away. This process has been most damaging to members of minority groups facing discrimination, whose versions of 'being arbitrarily stopped by the police' have always been the worst; but even if policing were equal, the book raises a wider question about whether it's desirable, whether, even in an idealised version of the current American compromise between freedom from state intrusion and security, more has been lost than needs to be.





*I'd like to know more about how cars and police developed together in other places, such as Europe. (And New Zealand. 'Nonfiction about the place where I actually live' has been on my list of reading intentions for ages, but my non-fiction reading is slow, and the front of the intention queue has a good rate of turnover, so the back hasn't yet moved forward).

**There is apparently no record of a person on horseback being searched. Whether this means the getaway horse wasn't much made use of, or that it worked really well, this book does not relate.

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson.

I have almost finished this book, which is to say it's been sitting at 'almost finished' for a month now. Once I started writing my essay it wasn't the kind of book I wanted to be reading, and inertia has set in. But it's very good. Nonfiction, about the Great Migration, the decades-long movement of African Americans out of the south into the north over the whole middle of the 20th century. I had never, as far as I know, heard of the Great Migration. I knew quite a bit about Jim Crow racism, enough not to be surprised by its successively-greater outrages. I knew much less about the non-institutional racism of the north, the way it shaped neighbourhoods into black and white, the prophecy 'Letting in black people will cause property values to plummet' fulfilling itself again and again as well-off white residents fled the expected change. Nor had I thought about the long back-and-forth between the two, the fact that one of the people whose story this book tells gets a job on a train which shuttled him between northern and southern laws and expectations again and again, even after he'd left the south. Another, driving from south to north for the first time, simply cannot make predictions about where the first hotel at which he'll be allowed to sleep will be. There's no sharp cutoff, even though there is a latitude at which the law changes.

My quibbles with this book are degree of repetition (much of which is handy for me, since I read the book slowly and it contains three central stories, braided; still, the number of chapters which begin by restating the importance of a line like 'the decades-long movement of African Americans out of the south into the north over the whole middle of the 20th century' became a little frustrating: yes, this book is important, it has an important and fascinating and under-discussed subject, I am still reading, I still know that...) and the chopping-up of various different texts into poems for the chapter-headings, alongside actual poems. I suppose it's meant to provide all the writings with an equal and emphatic dignity, but my response was, "These are still not poems. I recoil from this poeming of non-poems". But I'm glad my quibbles can be as small as those two.


The Dying Earth, by Jack Vance.

Omnibus edition of four books, which I read two and a bit of. They're wildly colourful, and the writing rises from adequate to very good as they go along -- archly polysyllabic. No wizard will say "Who are you and what are you doing in my house?" to the thief trapped in his defensive mazes if he can say, " What have we here? A visitor? And I have been so remiss as to keep you waiting! Still, I see you have amused yourself, and I need feel no mortification" instead.

These books would be worth reading in order to get the references, if nothing else. Dungeons and Dragons takes its wizards straight from here, down to some of the spell names. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (which I've finished and like very much, with caveats) calls Moody's eye the Eye of Vance -- it is a very Vancian item -- and in the game Sunless Sea I've sailed my little ship past Cugel's Bluff any number of times, not knowing that Cugel does, canonically, bluff.

I hadn't really realised until I read George R.R. Martin's Dying Earth story, 'A Night at the Tarn House' -- in which nowhere is safe nor can even convincingly pretend to be, the highest magics are fading into nothing, and children are no longer born -- how little Vance's original feels like it's a dying anything. Yes, the characters move on a background of aeons of human civilisation they no longer understand or really remember, and yes, the sun is going to go out fairly soon, but the first story in the first book involves a wizard acquiring impressive arcane knowledge from beyond the earth with only cursory difficulties, the last story in the first book involves a man gaining access to an archive containing the sum total of human knowledge (with admittedly extreme difficulties), and in the Cugel books, Cugel's nature is such that he seems unlikely to die, fail, succeed, or in fact change his situation one bit. (I've only read two chapters of the second Cugel book, though. He might turn permanently into an owl in chapter three, who knows). I suppose part of it is the D&D thing: the geography of a D&D universe can always expand to include just one more brooding manse containing acquirable artefacts of abstruse function, and the Dying Earth feels very much like that.

So, entertaining, wildly colourful -- but I stopped two chapters into the second Cugel book because it was leaving me an unpleasant aftertaste. I can only enjoy so much at one time of Cugel cheating, betraying, raping, murdering, stealing, and happening upon magic amulets which generations of hard workers have failed to locate only to lose/break/eat them. The fact that the books aren't particularly on his side and don't reward him for any of it, and the fact that he's doing it with considerable sarcastic wit, just make me feel worse after a certain dosage. Also, and feeding into that: background sexism would be very much present even if Cugel wasn't selfishness made manifest. I spent an entertaining evening just before beginning this book making notes on 'The Eye of Argon', one of the best terrible things ever to be sort of published.* There is no such thing as a 'woman' in it, (there are wenches), and 'women' turns up only in the context of 'wine, women, and adventure'. The Dying Earth is a whisker less sexist than that -- in addition to being beautiful and coveted, women occasionally do things, and some of those things aren't evil -- but not a heck of a lot, and the match in basic attitude was dissonant to run into given about the widest gap in competence you could find.


Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon.

This is what I turned to when I needed something as easy to put down as it was to pick up so that I'd write. the. bloody. essay. It didn't work. It turned out to be compelling as well.

I read the start of this book about two years ago and have vaguely meant to finish it ever since. I've never read a book with a larger timescale. It kept on doing some equivalent of tracing the rise and fall of a whole human civilisation in twenty pages, and then saying, "Having been flying fairly low over the landscape of history, we must now rise higher, taking in less detail, since what has just unfolded is like unto the first minute of the human day, complete coverage of which would otherwise take many volumes.' And then the next ten pages cover the rise and fall of two successive human species. It was written in the thirties, which means the emphases, the expectations of what race and species mean, now read very oddly. Not that the wildly-different humans of the aeons-distant future aren't wildly different in this telling, but they are not the wild differences we might imagine now. But the high-swooping nature of it sort of fixes that? since details could always be contrived to make sense of the arc as a whole. And also (this I found very nice) the story is being narrated by a human of the far future, to Stapledon himself in the thirties, (who believes himself to be writing clever fiction), and the future-human complains at one point about the inevitable garbling of the story as it passes from mind to mind. No matter what particular decade of our culture this book had been projected into, the person on the other side of the projector would still be doing some emotionally-unimaginable equivalent of sighing and saying, "Well, someone [untranslatable] couldn't possibly grasp [untranslatable], I suppose."

The experience of reading this book reminds me in a way of Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, in that it's supplying, in vague outlines, a trajectory which the author would have had to have been several generations of intellectuals in order to even begin to trace in detail. And then whenever it seems to be getting too detached for me to care, some small specificity will ground the whole thing again like a pin holding down a great billowing piece of fabric. I care about it less than The Glass Bead Game, which is, after all, a single human life, even if that human is involved in elaborate mental play with the total output of human culture. But there's something amazing about a book which gets to the end of a human history longer than what is currently the history of all life, looks back on it, and goes, "We didn't get very far, did we? Still, I'm glad we made a beginning." It's easy to say "Human life is only a flicker in the great darkness", but this book puts a lot of nevertheless-hopeful weight behind that statement.


Tarzan Presley, by Nigel Cox.

This is what I just finished, and it's what it says on the tin. "Raised by gorillas in the wild jungles of New Zealand, scarred in battles with vicious giant weta, seduced by a beautiful young scientist, discovered by Memphis record producer Sam Phillips and adored by millions - the dirt-to-dreams life story of Tarzan Presley is as legendary as his 30 number one hits." This is one of the odder books to exist, because it isn't a satire at all, it's completely sincere, and it hangs together. Its first part is an attempt to get inside the mind of a human, raised without reference to other humans, who nevertheless has the capacity to be the Tarzan required by his story -- and having done that, it goes on as an explanation of Elvis, from a writer who, I think, really loved Elvis. Why did people care about him, why was he such a big thing, where did the emotion in his songs come from? This version has music as Tarzan's first contact with humanity, Tarzan singing the songs of the thirties before he knows what songs are or where they come from; and that is what he carries to America.

I found the book becoming hard to read in its last third, since the story of Elvis is a story of dissipation, and making him Tarzan gives him so much potential to dissipate that his collapse feels tragic and semi-arbitrary. (There were points when I wanted to shout at him, and points when I simply didn't care about him). But, as we all know, Elvis didn't die when he seemed to: the book does not have two parts corresponding to two identities, but three parts corresponding to three. And in the third part, he makes what he can of himself.

Unfortunately, when the Burroughs estate decides to sit on a book, and that book is produced by a small New Zealand publisher with a good case to make but not a lot of money to make it with, not much can be done. Tarzan was out of copyright in New Zealand, but not in Britain, and the book, as retailed online, could be bought in Britain... I was lucky enough to happen upon a cheap first-printing copy of Tarzan Presley in, of all things, a second hand clothes shop. The book one can currently buy an affordable e-copy of is titled Jungle Rock Blues and its main character is named Caliban. I do not know what that would do to the reading experience. It's so totally different a set of references -- I mean, after reading this book I can certainly imagine a Tempest/Elvis crossover, but it wouldn't be this one.

Slight spoilers (they're on the back cover, and they do make the book more interesting to me):

( Read more... )


* I was trying to come up with a universe in which it would make literal sense. Why would age-worn hoof prints, having been smothered by the sifting sands of time, still gleam dully? What belief system explains the Fleeting Stead of Death? (Does Baba Yaga ride it or something?) What species are the main characters, that their noses are lithe, their mouths are writhing, and their arms can themselves be dismembered? I do not have answers to these questions. I gave up on page two.