Review of Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

Player Piano rounds out a pair of reviews of books (along with The Space Merchants) that plot out American dystopias from the viewpoint of 1952. They are critiques of the American capitalist myth from square in its heyday, using the time-honored role of science fiction to pick apart the flaws of the present day. In Vonnegut's near future, automation has removed the need for human labor in manufacturing, leaving people at large with nothing much to do, nothing much to be proud of. Vonnegut has claimed that he got the idea from watching, on his return from the war, an automated milling machine at work and extrapolating some logical conclusions. The operator's added value had vanished, he realized, leaving only the management and design as the only useful human elements in the production chain. In a plot outline he says he cribbed from Brave New World, Vonnegut pulls the reader from the upper-eschelon management class to the world of the moron and the savage, where a revolution may be brewing. It's a fun ride, not short on the biting truths and heartbreaking wit you expect from Vonnegut.

And arguably, this is how manufacturing went down in the half century that followed Player Piano. The American shift from an industrial economy rides on the fact that the manufacturing staff could be automated out of existence, leaving behind underemployed engineers and a management in love with its own culture. A competitive skill set that developed overseas also rocked the boat, but the development of better tools has, by and large, obviated the need for bodies for rote machine tasks, and devalued the skilled hands that used to command better pay and more prestige. Vonnegut imagined lengthy and pointless higher education to absorb the non-demand for workers, and a segregated society of haves and have-nots based on incompletely-measured intellectual ability, or on nepotism that's pretending to be merit. Competing with slaves, a character proclaims, makes workers slaves too. He meant machines, and perhaps that's half right.

A lot of the black humor comes out at the expense of managers and engineers. (As an engineer, I'll greedily accept half of this bias, and cautiously consider the other half.) The most amusing part of the story takes the protagonist, one Paul Proteus, upstate to a management retreat, where he's stuffed with corporate platitudes, as vacuous 50 years ago as today, at a summercamp full of grown men, complete with sports, singalongs, and fake Indian legends. (And yeah, that's "grown men." Vonnegut picks up on his country's culture of managerial sexism, which in America may have actually moved past the 1950s vision, but the satire of the unruly boys club is still uncomfortably resonant. Even if they took down the sign, there's still the same treehouse.) Even with all the high-status knowledge workers, the economy still runs itself, and even the gifted just move along with it.

It's not a polemic against progress, more a statement about the inevitability of it. The faux naturalasm of the managers' retreat is perhaps telling, and Vonnegut similarly flirts with a throwback lifestyle--Proteus is charmed with the idea of farm life, of working with his hands--and rejects it. It's not lost on the reader that "we might need the bakery," and the flush toilets (and the medicine, education, wine, public order, roads, and the fresh water system). The Indian theme gets pulled out at the end again, as the revolting holdouts against automation at last get the stage. The rebellion is as doomed, unavoidable, and as pointlessly noble as anything the Native Americans did to turn the tide against the Europeans, and history, it keeps rolling. The knowledge economy is on the brink of the cliff too. So it goes.

Vonnegut's automation is of a quaint, clockwork kind, driven by tape reels and punch cards and vacuum tubes, displayed by blinking lights, a real old-fashioned future, but it's wrong to over-emphasize technical accuracy in a novel like this. The big picture is really the point, and anyway, the details are kind of charming. Unseen data handling is used to predict citizen preference, and to plot a life of moderately satisfying consumption, even as the rage of the unfulfilled boils just under the surface. I wondered about all of this dissatisfaction, and I think it's a spot where Vonnegut fell short in a more substantive way. The proles seemed to be kept in line by some sort of institutional depression, with minor make-work duties, and some dreary social functions (endless parades, sports) as moribund in their way as a summer camp for grownups. I think there needed to be a better mechanism to make them feel indebted to the system, or maybe the psychology needed to be less subtle. With that many people unhappy and, more importantly, bored, the shit would surely have hit the fan years before. There's no equivalent service economy to take a passionate hold, and the street economy is unenthused.

[I spent a few real-life years in "Ilium," NY (and many more years in places like it), during its decidedly post-industrial period. If Vonnegut failed to represent the decay of the non-University sectors, maybe I'm a little more sensitive to it than normal. His city is fictional, and the geography of the region isn't quite right either, but I had a good time mapping real Troy onto pretend Ilium just the same. It helps that I never had a good map in the first place (no car for most of the time), and it amused me to put his landmarks in the circle around the university, ranging from the bar districts near the bridge, to some of the outer residences up on the hill. Good times.]

Reading Kurt Vonnegut is a different experience from remembering him. I always take home the pith, the non-sequiturs, the bitter observations, the concision. Opening a new one, I am surprised to catch him transparently writing, going through the usual efforts of developing character and plot just like any other author, with mere competence. Player Piano is his first full novel, but I think I just tend to forget his humanism is developed by conventional means too. I don't even think this novel was the best social critique of its day, but the tough fatalism and the piercing, honest wit are what make Vonnegut noteworthy, what gives his novels a timelessness that transcends classification.

Merchants to the Left of Me...

Kurt Vonnegut, whose work isn't called science fiction only by whims of marketing, hasn't always had nice things to say about the genre, likening it to a forgotten file drawer or a private lodge in one interview, and in another , takes a perhaps more charitable route, acknowledging that he came to the genre by writing the stories he wanted to write, and not from imitating the pulps. I get where he's coming from but still it looks a little like a bigoted argument, allowing examples that he personally likes to be excepted from the stereotyped canon. But since it's Kurt Vonnegut, I'm willing to cut him some slack. For one thing, I had no experience with sci-fi (pronounced "skiffy," as a distinction) magazines as a kid either, and from what I've read, a lot of at has been forgotten for a reason. (But that was true of all the pulps). For another thing, I agree that you can still spot the cult of the space-hero in some fans and writers, and a lot of serious aficionados positively get an inferiority complex regarding the sf marketing ghetto that has limited some excellent literature to a narrow, badly regarded market. (I hope Kurt Vonnegut is thankful to his publishers.)

I love science fiction, and I prefer a broad definition of it. One of the things about sf, compared to other written genres, is that working your way around real-world constraints is expected, and any events or settings can be reimagined to suit the story, or to suit the point, and the best work in the genre uses speculative situations to pick apart the human animal, to conduct experiments in plot and character under a wider range of conditions than the actual world is known to offer. I don't want to understate the element of pure curiosity that science fiction is also built on, or the enduring lure of the adventure story, but I can still shoehorn those things into my viewpoint of a literary laboratory, the usual hypothesis being, "it would be interesting to live in a world where…" Of course, this sort of freedom seems like it could invite tendentiousness, and sometimes it does. It's easier to "prove" your crackpot philosophy when you can control how the world works, but even there, it can be undertaken more or less honestly, more or less well.

I can also forgive Vonnegut when I read stuff like this 'Political History of SF'*, which asserted that the heart and soul of the genre occupies some libertarian/authoritarian axis, and has in either case a right-wing spirit, a sort of violent American optimism, expecting change yes, but presuming that sticking to the current path is going to end up great. The pulp sensibility is pretty forthright. To get a feel of just why that's obnoxious, it's worthwhile to consider the history of sf, which goes back almost as far as you want it to. When you're speculating, it takes some contemporary points of reference to create a society, and consciously or not, the choice of what aspects to accept and reject, and at what consequence, is a social critique. It's hard to write well if you don't understand what people are like (or are not like) now. Looking back, Mary Shelly and H. G. Wells were working in this style. They were intentionally using technology to demonstrate their philosophical and political points. You could (and I would) go back even further to include the old Utopias (by Swift, Rabelais, More, etc.), and let's not forget, for that matter, the innumerable divine parables that waned and waxed with civilizations and tribes for as long as people have been speaking. You may not want to call those fiction, but the innumerable stories of magic beings were crafted to keep the political order. It's a similar animal: what happens at a higher level that helps us understand who we are today?

In early twentieth-century America, the pulp markets spent a few decades filling the cheap imagination of an increasingly disconnected and industrialized society, and the copy of those days was more interested in the clever, swashbuckling heirs of John Carter and Phileas Fogg than on the aftermath of Hank Morgan's or Henry Jekyll's bitter realizations. If the sf pulps had a political philosophy, it was the sort of stuff that got teenage boys going: can-do pluck, manly resolve, and American cleverness, the exact synthesis of the detective and western crap that was also being published at that time. When John W. Campbell took over Astounding in 1937, he began a campaign to expand both literary and scientific quality, but he didn't leave the adventurer mindset behind. He had a huge influence in his day, and yes, he grabbed up Robert Heinlein, who did, by all means, often write a higher grade of rugged individualism. But the general problem with the libertarian philosophy when it's expressed in the genre is that it overstates the individual's capability, and often overstates his influence over society. The usual problem with the military, or, God forbid, the feudal fantasies in space or time, was that the social utility of command hierarchies was seriously overvalued.

As the 'Political History' article describes, one of the earlier stands against the dictatorial Campbell style, was by a group of fans and writers called the Futurians, which included writers such as Isaac Asimov, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Judith Merril and Frederik Pohl. Mostly they were left-wing, and a few of them (including Pohl and Merril) were declared Communists. (I don't think any of the joiners held the faith through Stalin. Pohl was allegedly excommunicated from the Young Communist League because he failed the ideological purity test--they disapproved of his escapist writing.) Their mission as a literary society was to bring the social experimentation of sf to a higher level of seriousness. Pohl was successful. He was probably Galaxy magazine's most famous editor, and the publication styled itself as a more thoughtful and socially aware brand. The gadgetry and the spirit took second place, or tried to. Vonnegut had at least two stories published in Galaxy. Other writers did fine too.

I picked up The Space Merchants, written by Pohl and Kornbluth, a few weeks ago, following up on my suspicion that the American skill of consuming ourselves to death was spotted much earlier than is normally credited. I stand by it. Mom and Dad are bullshitting you when they tell you that in their day, everybody was debt-conscious and responsible. They spent it all on gewgaws and mortgages too. They were the first generation that could.

The Space Merchants is a monumental piss-take on American consumer culture, and the authors get some major props for writing it in 1952. Half of what was meant as outrageous satire in that year looks like documentary today, and what remains still looks like an all-too probable future. The plot follows the fall and the redemption of advertising executive Mitch Courtenay, who trips through a future culture of overwhelming pollution, depleted resources, and overpopulation. Pohl and Kornbluth get beaucoups bonus points for all the stuff they got right, including addictive products (and obsfuscatory marketing), the "philosophical problem" of political representation by voting per person vs. per dollar, marketing to neuroses (and creating them), outsourcing actual production to India and leaving the American export product as superior marketing (and the bottomless consumption), government services made inefficient through privatization, smearing political opponents as hippies and conservationists, horrifying synthetic food, paid insurance that doesn't insure, a government run by lobbyists, and, of course, reverence for the power of the CEO. In one of the funnier bits, Courtenay is thrust into a revolting job in food production--the life of a typical consumer--and his servitude is ensured as he trades off debt for a slightly less indecent life, and to satisfy his corporate-ensured cravings. There's also an element of contention between Mitch and his wife, who are both serious professionals (a physician and an advertiser), as they balance their lives as domestic partners and as successful individuals, which is probably it's least controversial prophesy (really, would this have happened to my grandparents?). The Space Merchants does what satire does best: it spots the bullshit with laser accuracy, and makes fun of it. It's a great book.

It's a horrible title, though ("Merchant of Venus," at least?). It comes out of Courtenay's big sell--a hard sell to consumers to convince them to relieve overpopulation by colonizing an unlivable hell-hole one planet closer to the sun--the obvious science fictional element. The style doesn't come off adventure-tale, but it's still a booze-and-cigarettes vintage of prose that I associate with short stories from those days. The plot zips along pretty well, a couple nights of enjoyable bedtime reading, and while I don't like to put too undue merit on self-described serious literature, if Pohl's and Kornbluth's prose were a little more timeless (and if not for the vagaries of marketing), The Space Merchants would be put up on the shelves and discussed by students along with Orwell and Huxley. Maybe it will be yet.

Brave New World (1932) was written in the worst of science fiction's pulp phase, and though it's been presented otherwise, it's sf by any reasonable definition. When science fiction is doing a good job at social experimentation, it chips away at the assumptions underlying the public truths, and if it's manipulating them, it does so consciously. Mainstream stuff evolved out of the right wing models soon enough (and Vonnegut was right--it was just a function of time). As for that 'Political History' dude, it takes some balls to rank Greg Bear and David Brin (two authors I could never get into--loved Greg Benford's Cosm though) as more "pure" than Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. LeGuin. (And for that matter, The Space Merchants is about as Marxist as Animal Farm is capitalist--don't confuse a critique with a prescription.) Much like in the nineteenth century, there's a lot today that could be labeled science fiction, and doesn't end up on the shelves. Claiming the mantle of the right wing is absurd. In my paltry library, I have Ken MacLeod making a case for Socialism by taking production--and capital--out of the equation entirely. Ursula LeGuin has sucked gender conflict out of a society, and examined the results under a sensitive microscope, and Stanislaw Lem has imagined an advanced space age under a moribund eastern European bureaucracy, a dated sort of realism. It turns out I've read most of the dreaded selections on the Socialist sf list and often preferred them. SF as a social critique hasn't gone away. Even as ole Kurt was bitching about it in the sixties and seventies, science fiction was breaking out in depth and style (and if it was still busy congratulating itself, well then). These days you can throw a dart at the bookshelves, and find brilliant stuff of any political orientation. Thank God.

 
*That link via this place. Read my retarded comment.

Book Review: Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird (A)

When I read Sirens of Titan several years ago, I likened Vonnegut's phrasing to the dropping singular bricks of prose from great height. Such were the little texticules, delivered concisely and distantly for maximum effect. Later, when I read Cat's Cradle, I remarked that he'd moved up to whole paragraphs and pages, each section mounted like an absurdist gem for optimal appreciation, and as the reader strolls though the museum, a floor plan gradually gets revealed. By the time he wrote Jailbird, he moved up to the level of entire story.

There's something about Vonnegut's structure that really grabbed me here, and more completely than before. There is a plot progression in the book but the conclusion is telegraphed early and foregone. The interest arises as the details and the backstory get revealed as the plot slowly gets along. This in itself isn't unusual--lots of authors work in the gradually-filled-in-outline mode--but Vonnegut has transcended the form. He's written a novel that is completely self-similar in form. Each of the large parts of the heirarchy has the same shape as the smaller parts below it. The absurdist style helps. The whole story is a finely crafted irony of a man who drifts from power to contempt with no special skills or culpability or qualifications. The subplots of individual characters are fine synecdoches of this larger arc, the ironies that a friendless old man manages to collect reflect it, and even on the word and sentence level, through clever repetition and juxtaposition, Vonnegut loses none of this punch. He manages to place the whole scope of the book in periodic triple claps that break unwanted into quiet meditations. On top of all this, he manages to deliver the thing in an even comfortable tone of a genial old fart unwinding a long anecdote. I'd never quite grasped Vonnegut's ability as pure storyteller, but it was relentless here. Peace.

I suppose it also helped that he's not, in Jailbird taking on life, the universe, and everything. It's both easier and more ambitious to poke at god, or at the futility of it all. Here he instead takes on the corporate world, painting the proles as sympathetic buffoons, and the managers likewise, just buffoons who've wandered into power. He drops in plenty of references that were probably hard-hitting in 1979, when Watergate was fresh enough, but as I live through the most absurd time in my memory, I can't help but wish he'd written it in 2006.

Keifus

(Next is cynical blasphemy week, I'm just in that sort of mood. I've got Towing Jehovah on deck, in which the corpse of God must be disposed. I plan to follow up with Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth which I've never gotten around to finishing. Other suggestions are welcome.)

I'll go to hell, then

On one hand, I scored way better (over 20%) than usual for this sort of thing, but I'll be damned if I ever get so bored as to read Tom-not-Thomas Wolfe, or, god forbid, Ayn friggin' Rand. (And for that matter, you're On Notice, Updike.)

I too am impressed with the scope of the banning (if I am reading that list right? Surely Atlas Shrugged isn't on the hundred best, but if we're including banned books that just miss the century cut, then where the hell is Huck Finn?). I don't know if it counts that at least half of these were assigned reading at one point or another.

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

via

Ilium

Like everything else imbued with human associations, geography is a funny thing: we have ways of sowing it with little landmines just in the course of living our life, nostalgic deathtraps that seem to grow in power the longer we ignore them, especially in those places that struggle to ever change. I had a trip to New York the other week, to the Saratoga Springs area, near which my current employers operate a mill. It is a stretch that is not by any means The City, but is also not upstate in a meaningful sense, and while New York has plenty of nowheres to find yourself in the middle of, it is close enough to a handful of somewheres to almost count. And there’s something additionally lonely in the nightlife of a tourist town off-season. Everything’s open, but no one’s there.

If you ever need to drive from Massachusetts to eastern New York, you can’t do better than to take the length of route 2. Even as a guy who resents every motherfucking minute of my life that I waste piloting a motor vehicle, I love this particular drive. It’ll take you up through the Berkshires, around the quasi-famous hairpin turn, descending into artsy Williamstown, and up again through mountains in New York. The vistas feel local and private, not open, made up of imposing tree-covered grades across which the road is compelled to switch back and forth in order to ascend, each turn opening up to find you in the thick of more wooded slopes. Where a view does open up on the peaks, it’s inevitably affixed with the quarter-century-old ruins of motels and kitsch shops, abandoned from a time when people did more budget sightseeing. I guess even the leaf-peepers can’t be arsed to go across that way, and something in that appeals to me. If I was in a field where I could make a living while avoiding people, then, if it wasn’t the Green or White mountains, or the Litchfield Hills, then I’d live in a place like this. It’s the trees and the hillls.

It’s a lovely way come back from the Saratoga area, especially in a solitary mood, but I couldn’t return along 2 without traversing the old minefields. I went to school in Troy NY, and while on one level I enjoyed it, and although it felt like one of the few life decisions I was able to make that was right, I also managed to plant a disproportionate number of depth charges there, and that town changes slowly enough to keep nostalgia alive, even if the university continues its quixotic effort to "improve." The trip took me right through the heart of memory, and I went so far as to stop at the student union to take a leak and hopefully steal a couple minutes of wireless access, but apparently the latter privilege only comes with a thirty thousand yearly subscription. Relieving myself is harder to prevent, I guess. The trip went badly, emotion-wise, dredging up regrets that I hardly knew I had in the day, and I am in a mind to take a big old piss on the place, instead of one discreetly within its borders, as if it bears some fault for how my life has gone.

In his books, Kurt Vonnegut often referred to the town of Ilium, a sort of Mecca of American innovation and urbanity that has evaded its actual namesake for at least a century. Real-life Ilium is that rare university town that suffers little of the prestige of the couple or three institutions within its borders. Up the river there’s the Schenectady where Proteus Steinmetz worked to define electrical engineering, where even now, GE still hasn’t outsourced its R&D headquarters. Down the river, there’s the goddamn capital. In between, you got a whole lot of depressing Trojanness, as if it were rebuilt, but only just barely, after the last time it burned down 150 years ago. Back on the Fray, I had a conversation a few years ago with a guy who went to RPI fifty years before I did. Troy was, he recalled, a shantytown then too, and it must have been quite a defiant one to suck so thoroughly in the middle of a technological hotbed in boom times, supplying it with engineers even. I mean, Wikipedia tells me that it was a prosperous town once, but that was over a century ago, sometime way back before Big Steel went to Pennsylvania. It’s been sliding inexorably since. It’s got to be why Vonnegut felt he had to code-name the place, to fictionalize the Capital District enough to write out its problem middle child.

Longtime readers of this blog will notice a recurring fascination I have with New England’s midlist factory towns, as I’ve lived or passed through them, trying to piece the cultural character based on its vintage industry. It seems like I always end up in or around one of them, and I give you the likes of Waterbury and Torrington CT (brass), Willimantic CT and Lowell MA (textiles), Leominster MA Naugatuck CT (polymers). They’ve all as good as left, the industries, and the cities are filled with a different selection of immigrants servicing the different economic niches that are available nowadays. They’re similar enough historically, ethnically, and geographically, and make for interesting compare and contrast exercises. Do the cultural differences come from the nature of the work? Or maybe it’s the titans that once governed it. I still can’t answer that question well. You find all these old mills still perched on their now-less-polluted riverbanks, anti-jewels set in pastoral velvet, monuments in smoke-scorched red brick (America is only so old) to more barbarously productive ages. The rivers were convenient as drains or raw materials or (depending on how far back you might go) power, but the surrounding areas stayed rural for a long time, and you can head out to the outskirts of any of these places, and find, even now, a couple farms that aren’t quite given over to burbclaves. The vogue for the factories themselves is to renovate them into designer lofts, and the attendant railroads have been dismantled for scrap and landscaping.

My immediate and lasting impression of Troy was as a mirror of Waterbury, which is more or less where I grew up. (In one of the suburbs, itself an old factory town. I am more familiar with the edges of Waterbury, where my grandparents lived.) And although they’d look pretty comparable in a slide-by-slide comparison of their greater and lesser parts, there’s something about Troy that makes it seem so much more fundamentally shabby and depressing, like it just stopped trying. (I mean, it does have the universities, which is an incredible point in its favor, and eastern New York is almost as nice as eastern Connecticut, but these assets don’t seem to buoy the place up.) Maybe a technical college town just invites weary cynicism, because after all, who’s more grouchy and depressed than your average engineer? Waterbury, if you read the local paper, supports some sort of vindictive, authoritarian pride of place, but at least it’s something. The area is churchier, which helps the architecture some, and it has a downtown stretch that you’d be tempted to stroll around. When you drive past Waterbury, you go past the hospital, the iconic brick clocktower, and then, across the river, the south end of town manifests as white houses popping up through the trees. Troy, on the other hand, crouches on the side of the Hudson like a surly pile of rubble, like a rusting hulk, sucking away your hopes before you even cross the bridge. Yes, the alma mater rises tastefully on the hill, a pearl on the midden, and for reasons of its own, it’s been dwarfing the iconic green copper roofs with a succession of 1970s-style brutalism and zippy 1950s-style sci-fi palaces. The town itself has some notoriety for its preserved 19th century buildings, but not, like these towns east of the Berkshires, in the form of big, imposing industrial cathedrals, and more of the closed-in and oppressive variety that recalls the squalid living in old New York City that you couldn’t escape even with great wealth. Troy is a shithole’s shithole.

Although I have to say that to this day, I have never known a place in Waterbury where I’d like to get a beer, and those little niches of mordant hospitality were my absolute favorite part of living in Ilium. The place wasn’t so far gone that there weren’t places of peace and humor if you needed them, and there’s something satisfying and personal about being one to get that. And sure, the outskirts got interesting in one or two directions. It often occurs to me that maybe I’m the reason the place made such a weird impression. God knows I’m better tuned to love/hate than to uncomplicated love. Fucking regret. Seriously.

Five (minus two) More Thoughts - Social Justice Ed.

(A "five thoughts" feature that I sporadically generate. I only had three this time.)

1. Killing people, that is, looking them in the eye and murdering them (ignoring for the sake of discussion the usual realpolitikal weaseling of the biblical shalt nots), is a bad thing. Most of us grade the badness on a curve based on the level of malice committed, as probably we should. For example, if you commit murder in a spontaneous rage, it's less bad than if you spend a month contemplating it, and less bad than if you torture somebody over the course of days (again ignoring...). You can consider the cumulative evil as, roughly, the area under the violence-time curve.

(Parenthetically, the resistance to this evil is a good definition of toughness. In materials science, toughness is the area under the stress-strain curve. It measures how much ill treatment can be absorbed before failure, how much overall. Although it's cumulative, it also varies with the rate of abuse.)

Here's the thing though, we happily let people fall off the bottom edge of the evil scale. The bullying boss, the browbeating wife, the inconsiderate smoker, each of these people is likely to commit more stress over a longer period of time than someone who puts a knife through someone's heart. And even if the end result is the same--death through a broken spirit or through lung cancer--only the murder that peaks high in violence is a serious crime. Although it's no doubt unworkable from a criminal justice standpoint, it would be interesting (and better?) if our notions of social acceptance were wired differently. The victims of these long-simmering traumas are also tougher, of course, than people usually give them credit for. Our animal selves are not wired to love the people who willingly take shit every day of their lives. Paradoxically, they only attain social status when they resist their slow oppression with sudden violence.

It's the rate we respect.

2. For reasons I myself don't fully grasp, I try to keep content on this blog full of my more "writerly" stuff (um, usually), while the fluffier or more irrelevant gets shipped elsewhere. (I am reconsidering this model, maybe dumping it all here.) One thing I do that seems appropriate in that more literary motif is regular book reviews of whatever I'm reading. If you have a StatCounter^TM tool, one thing it can do is keep track of what search queries caused people to land on your blog. For a low-traffic site like mine, book reviews are a magnet for new arrivals, and it gives me a warm fuzzy in those rare instance when they go on to look at pages other than the one they landed on.

Not that they ususally do, mind you. I'm pretty sure it's been a common source of ill-researched book reports. (There are the .edu domains for one thing, and when someone googles "book report of XXX," I take that as sort of a hint.) I don't know what to make of this, really. I'm probably less sanctimonious about plagiarism than a lot of people, but on the other hand, even I can see how wrongness accrues as an area-under-the-curve thing. It's not as though any of these hapless schmucks is going to pass for me (in the unlikely event they'd want to) but I'm enough of a prick that I'd be happy if I knew a way to encode some bombs to alert a wary teacher that some kid is skating by on my material. Any ideas?

Popular book report queries, if you were wondering, are Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, and Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut. I wish I'd tried harder on those reviews. Maybe brilliant writing would have been enough to out the sneaky little bastards.

3. Plagiarists aren't a big deal but I actively hate spammers, and if they are not as bad as murderers, they still deserve a special place in hell. Just the same, they are quirky enough to provide me with amusement from time to time. It's tough to imagine that any sane email reader would answer an intimate letter from Melinda, especially when he's sitting on a boxful of identical ones from Raul, Julio, Ingrid, Courtney, Alice, Davey, Mustafa, Clementine, Axl, Stimpy, and Masumi and all of these old and unremembered friends are suspiciously eager to sell their stores of Viagra and Ambien at discount rates. Penny stocks aren't much better--you'd have to be stunningly naïve to conclude that the landslide of insider information from people you've never heard of constitutes some kind of clever tip.

Sure, you'll land some suckers with those techniques--stunning naivete being all too abundant--but smart spammers, should they exist, need to capitalize on subjects to which people spend lifetimes conditioning themselves in gullibility. The stock market is not a bad stab at this, I admit, but the real suckers are religious. If J. Random Idiot got 114 emails telling them that Jesus Christ (or Mohammed or Krishna) asked--no commanded--them to donate a dollar or to buy into Avalanche Pharmaceuticals (AVP, now trading at $1.98/share--last chance!), then that would really strike to the cultivated heart of their unreason. You just know that otherwise functioning members of society would be squirming themselves into knots about donating. Because what if God really does want me to do it?

So send $1.25 to Keifus at the address below or risk eternal damnation. Ganesh commands you!

Book Review Index

Since I bother to rate my enthusiasm for the books I review, it will be helpful to both of my readers to get a feel of my tastes. Here's the index since 2004, when I started keeping it. I omitted books that I either couldn't remember well enough or reviewed too poorly to re-grade. I also omitted most of anthologized shorts, and all of the world-events and opinion stuff I read when I am supposed to be working (and of course the technical stuff I read when I actually am working).

The grades reflect my subjective enjoyment more than any objective evaluation. (How else to explain how Conrad did so poorly? Tuan Jim just didn't have the snappy move-along plot I needed at the beach that summer.) The grades may seem to be on a curve, but I think that's less due to inflation and more to my care in choosing reading material.

Anderson, Poul Operation Chaos (B)

Bellairs, John, The Face in the Frost (B+)

Benford, Gregory Cosm (A)

Blake, Katharine The Interior Life (B)

Blish, James A Case of Conscience (A)

Bourdain, Anthony, Kitchen Confidential (B)

Brown, Dan Angels and Demons (C+)

Bujold, Lois McMaster Diplomatic Immunity (A-)

Carroll, Jonathon After Silence (A)

Carroll, Jonathon Sleeping in Flame (B+)

Chabon, Michael The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (A+)

Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood's End (B)

Clarke, Arthur C. Rendezvous with Rama (B)

Coatzee, J. M., Elizabeth Costello (A)

Conrad, Joseph Lord Jim (B)

Dahl, Roald The Roald Dahl Omnibus (B-)

Davies, Robertson, The Rebel Angels (A)

Daniel, Tony Superluminal (B+)

Dean, Pamela The Secret Country (B+)

Dean, Pamela The Hidden Land (B)

Dean, Pamela The Whim of the Dragon (B+)

DeLillo, Don Underworld (B+)

Eco, Umberto Baudolino (C)

Friesner, Esther Wishing Season (C+)

Gaiman, Neil Anansi Boys (A)

Gibson, William Idoru (B+)

Gibson, William Pattern Recognition (B+)

Gibson, William Neuromancer (B)

Goldman, Willian, The Princess Bride

Greene, Brian The Elegant Universe (B)

Greene, Graham The Power and the Glory (A)

Harris, Bob Prisoner of Trebekistan (B+)

Helprin, Mark Winter's Tale (A-)

Holman, Sheri The Dress Lodger (A-)

Juster, Norton The Phantom Tollbooth (A+)

Kay, Guy Gavriel The Last Light of the Sun (A+)

King, Stephen Wolves of the Calla (A-)

King, Stephen Song of Susannah (B+)

King, Stephen The Dark Tower (B+)

Kushner, Ellen Swordspoint (B+)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed (A)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness (A)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Telling (A-)

Levitt, Steven and Stephen Dubner Freakonomics (B+)

Lieber, Fritz The Big Time (B+)

McCarthy, Cormac The Road (A)

McEwan, Ian Saturday (B)

Mirrlees, Hope Lud in the Mist (A-)

Morrow, JamesTowing Jehovah (B+)

Nafisi, Azar Reading Lolita in Tehran (A-)

Noon, Jeff Vurt (B+)

O'Connor, Edwin The Last Hurrah (A)

Park, Paul Celestis (B+)

Park, Paul Soldiers of Paradise (A)

Patterson, James and Andrew Gross The Jester (C)

Powers, Richard, The Echo Maker (A-)

Powers, Tim The Drawing of the Dark (B)

Powers, Tim Declare (A)

Powers, Tim Last Call (A+)

Pratchett, Terry Maskerade (B)

Pratchett, Terry Soul Music (B-)

Pratchett, Terry The Wee Free Men

Pressfield, Steven, Gates of Fire (B)

Priest, Christopher The Separation (A)

Robbins, Tom Jitterbug Perfume (B+)

Roberts, Keith Pavane (B+)

Ryman, Geoff Air (A)

Saberhagen, Fred The Berserker Throne (B)

Stephenson, Neal Zodiac (A-)

Stephenson, Neal Snow Crash (A)

Stephenson, Neal Cryptonomicon (A)

Stephenson, Neal The Diamond Age (A-)

Stewart, Jon Naked Pictures of Famous People (B)

Stewart, Sean The Night Watch (B+)

Swanwick, Michael Bones of the Earth (B)

Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace (A)

Twain, Mark Letters from the Earth (B)

Varley, John The Golden Globe (A+)

Varley, John Millenium (B-)

Vinge, Vernor Across Realtime (A-)

Vinge, Vernor Rainbows End (B+)

Vinge, Vernor Tatja Grimm's World (C+)

Vonnegut, Kurt Cat's Cradle (A-)

Vonnegut, Kurt Jailbird (A-)

Westlake, Donald E. Bad News (B+)

Westlake, Donald E. Drowned Hopes (B)

Williams, Walter Jon City on Fire (B+)

Wilson, Robert Charles Blind Lake (A)

Wilson, Robert Charles The Harvest (B+)

Wilson, Robert Charles Spin (A+)

Wolfe, Gene The Knight (A-)

Wolfe, Gene The Wizard (A)

Wolfe, Gene Nightside of the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene Lake of the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene Calde of the Long Sun (B+)

Wolfe, Gene Exodus from the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene On Blue's Waters (A)

Wolfe, Gene In Green's Jungles (B)

Wolfe, Gene Return to the Whorl (A)

Wolfe, Gene Soldier of Sidon (A)

Zelazney, Roger Changeling (D)

Zelazney, Roger Damnation Alley (C-)