User Profile

• Victor "I'm sorry for what I did while I was manic" Frankenstein chases his creation, Monster "look what you made me do" Devil, until both of them die.
• It's always funny in old books when the author abandons the narrative framing device because a straight narrative is easier to write and to read than a framed narrative is.
• I'm pretty sure that without the constant geographical moving around in order to reflect human emotions in various towering and awe-inspiring views of nature, the entire narrative could have been told in the space of a long short story. I'm also glad that Shelley decided not to do that, because her prose in those moments is fantastic.
• It's outside of the viewpoint of both main characters, but I wonder how the French peasants felt when they realized that the hideous monster they drove away from their home was gathering firewood for them throughout the night, allowing them to focus on more complex and rewarding tasks. I thought this was a good example of comparative advantage (the monster being unable to do anything more complex than this on account of society) and the role of the underclass in an economic relationship. It also amounts to the monster repaying his hosts for teaching him French, which is mirrored when Frankenstein trades room and board on the ship with his story.
• I was surprised by how anti-science the book wasn't. The modern natural scientists are given their due respect as 'promising very little but performing miracles.' It's not really even anti-occultism, in its place as something in the past that laid the foundations of our present knowledge. It's the bringing forward of the grand ideas of occultism into the power of the modern natural sciences that is the cause of the issue, the hubris of bending the new science to the old imagination.
• However, this moral is undercut because that combination does result in a viable offspring. The monster is willing to work with humans, but the rejection by Frankenstein leaves him unable to bridge that gap on his own. "Have the courage of your convictions" might be a better final summation.
• We are though left to wonder what if any final moral Frankenstein takes from the whole thing. The closest we come are two statements from him, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the book. After arriving on the ship, he exhorts the narrator to "dash the cup (of ambitious knowledge) from your lips!" But later he says to the mutineers, "Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.” These are flatly contradictory statements given by the same man less than a month apart, each summing up the possible morals listed above. Of course, the first is made within a growing friendship, and the second is made while attempting to save both the friend and Victor's mission from an angry crew, so the contradiction is understandable, but the question I think remains.

A story of doomed love wrapped around an analysis of turn-of-the-century New England class dynamics. The local class structure is: rich folks in the city - middle and lower classes in the town - squatters in poverty on the mountain. There are multiple go-between characters. -Charity Royall was born on the mountain but grew up in town. She sees the townies as tiresome, outsiders as offensive, and the squatters as vague barely-entities to whom she must return at some point until she comes among them and sees how miserable their lives truly are. She expects that the city will be better somehow but has only vague ideas about how it operates. -Lawyer Royall belongs in the city, but came back to the town at his wife's insistence and stayed. He sees the townsfolk as mostly rubes, and the squatters on the mountain as a "blot" upon society who should be dragged down and forced into the social structure for everyone's good. -Lucius Harney sees the city folk as a bit vapid, the townies as small-minded, and the squatters as people heroically living their own way. -Liff Hyatt is from the mountain, but works odd jobs for the townies for money. He seems constantly baffled by the townies and their bourgeois concerns, but he knows that the rest of his kin are undesirable and troublesome. He has no concept at all about the city. He sort of wanders through various scenes, not quite present though generally engaged. -The squatters themselves are miserable, bickering over what little they have and drinking themselves to death in their squalor, resenting the folk below. So we get a pretty good cross-section of views out of the key players, and everyone shows their biases and blind spots clearly. Evidently this focus on class made this the least popular of Wharton's novels, which is a shame. Americans have been terrible at class for a long time it seems. The love story is mostly believable. Lucius never treats Charity as an easy-lay townie girl, and feels actual guilt over his being engaged to one woman and in love with another. However, initially one can't help feeling that his misplaced admiration for the squatters starts spilling over into his feelings for Charity once Lawyer Royall explains her origins to him. Charity at the start of the book hates pretty much everyone, and her feelings for Lucius come due to his focus on higher things beyond the petty concerns of the townies, even while she feels shame at her own ignorance and likely inability to understand those same higher pursuits. So there are some complicated feelings on both sides, but that's reality, so. The scenes of them setting up housekeeping in a nearby abandoned house, symbolically halfway between the town and the mountain, are tender with the feeling of a relieved isolation, and the end of the relationship has a depressed finality. Wharton's descriptions are clear and solid, rising sometimes to an awe-inspiring occasion. Occasionally she will shorthand a tangential character in a funny but striking way, as when discussing the pastor's wife's "crimped hair and large baby." She is able to handle tonal shifts well, passing with ease from tenderness to squalor to the homely oratory tone of Lawyer's Royall's speech at Old Home Week, summing up the book with the line "believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there." My favorite scene involved a hasty funeral on the mountain punctuated by the squatters fighting over the dead woman's possessions, a fantastic balance of dark humor and pathos. I enjoyed it and look forward to reading more of Wharton's work.

Do you like your financial advice served with a liberal helping of orientalism and a side dish of mediocre olde English? Then this is the book for you! Several Babylonian dudes who went from rags to riches tell parables to teach basic finance. The actual tips are the same ones you get with your 401(K) documents every time you switch jobs - save 10% minimum (30% is best), invest it in something practical, don't fall for get-rich-quick schemes, try to earn more money by being more useful to your betters, and be sure to trust the experts. One of the morals, "we cannot afford to be without adequate protection," may or may not still be applicable in these times when medical expenses account for some 66% of bankruptcies - there is, unfortunately, no adequate protection against the American medical system. I can't help but note that even with this advice being given to basically every working age adult for decades now we still don't have a paradise consisting solely of work-loving rich people. And yeah, it might be because some people are lazy and deserve to be slaves as the book implies, but it might also be because our society is actually run by ultra-rich people who want as much of our money as they can get so that they can build spaceships and abandon the rest of us here to die of climate-change-induced catastrophes, so they keep ratcheting up prices until no one can live on the pittances their betters are willing to pay. Just a thought. Also, there are of course no women in the book putting these principles to work for themselves, they all apparently have to hope that their husbands are wise and manly enough men to do so. Ultimately I think these methods could work for any one person or family so long as they are insanely lucky and don't have some horrific tragedy occur which wipes out their savings, as happens regularly in our society. On the other hand, if everyone actually saved 30% of their income, given that consumer spending accounts for about 68% of US GDP, and given that the current savings rate runs right around 4.5%, we would see an insane drop in all types of consumption spending, resulting in absolute carnage among American corporations. Maybe that's why they've stopped giving this book out to everyone who opens a bank account.

Isenberg traces the history of lower-class whites, from the waste people of pre-America England, to the lubbers of post-revolutionary US, the crackers and squatters of pre-Civil War America, ending with the poor white trash of the last 150 years. She succeeds in showing that poor whites have always been with us, and the ways that we have re-invented the American class structure to deal with that fact. The book seems like either it was cobbled together from different essays, or just could have used a heavier editing hand. For example, the same quote from Roy Blunt Jr regarding Jimmy and Billy Carter was provided in full in back to back chapters. The modern politics section covers Carter and Clinton, then curiously jumps Dubya and goes straight to Palin, which is a weird choice. Overall the book seems a little bloated, as if Isenberg is overstating her evidence. Throughout the book it's hard to pin down what Isenberg really thinks about poor folks. Upper class folks are of course skewered for looking down on the poors, but those who embrace the "white trash" moniker are held in approximately equal disdain. It's almost like she feels that anyone who recognizes socio-economic class with anything other than complete disgust isn't worth taking seriously, and/or that she feels that anyone who doesn't think the way she does about things is worthless. Part of this perhaps is that I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator's tone ranges from the "can you believe this bs" incredulity of Counterspin's Janine Jackson to the "condescending tone of a catgirl who hates you" that the memes warned us about. But, in the later chapters focusing on white trash in entertainment and media, Isenberg at first lumps Dolly Parton in with the other dumb rednecks, then chides those same rednecks for not having Dolly's natural talent, which to me points to a rather confused outlook on the author's part.

A bullshit job is one that ultimately doesn't need to be done. Graeber traces these mostly to corporate bureaucracy (smoothing over dumb inter-department arguments or checking boxes for unnecessary items) and the "entourage" effect of being a powerful exec. From there, he runs through interviews with several holders of BS jobs and explores their feelings of powerlessness, ranging from boredom to psychosomatic illnesses. Along the way he ties in several important realizations from psychology and sociology to help explain the impacts - the fact that children appear to start becoming differentiated when they realize they can manipulate the environment and how it impacts people to have this taken away; that men take the exciting jobs one can tell stories about, and stick women with the drudgerous jobs that you can tell stories during; the "scriptless" feeling of being in a situation not covered by pop cultural training. Graeber's argument is that the capitalists have essentially realized that the amount of labor needed to run our society has decreased drastically (this is part of what "efficiency" means after all), that they are terrified of a large group of people working less than full time (one assumes because those people might find ways to claw back power from the capitalists), and that therefore everyone in any position of societal power has agreed to play the game of keeping people busy at the cost of both efficiency and our collective cultural/psychological well-being. His main pieces of evidence for this are Obama dismissing single payer healthcare because 'then you've got 2-3 million insurance administrators out of a job, and what do you do with them,' and the fact that administrative staff at public universities (subject to USG regulations) went up by ~66% from 1975-2005, while private universities (less subject to USG regs) have gone up by ~135% over the same time period. I would add that Obama's argument against single payer is exactly the argument used by H&R Block et al against simplifying the US tax code and/or having the IRS present you with either a check or a bill every April with no action on your part. All of this made me think of Elon Musk and DOGE. The hack job that Musk and Thiel's minions inflicted the USG is in direct opposition to these ideas. DOGE itself only affected USG jobs, but the techbro set is intent on replacing as many workers as they can with AI in the private sector as well. What happens then? One can accuse capitalists of a lot of things, but being stupid isn't one of them. They appear to have good reasons (from their viewpoint) to have set up society in this way. When 50% of the entire workforce is sent home for the last time, what happens? Ideas like UBI get some traction, but still face stiff resistance from the "work is morality" set. We'll see how long that lasts, I guess. I also can't imagine UBI will be an amount of money that will allow people to thrive - imagine what society looks like with 75% of all citizens placed on a permanent minimum wage. I bet that's about what we can expect.

An unsettling play changes the lives of those who read it for the worse. A man thinks himself the lost king of America and plots murder and exile for his family and friends. A sculptor finds a chemical that instantly transmutes flesh to stone, and suicides when his wife throws herself into a pool of the stuff. A man is followed by a malevolent organist for no reason, only to find that he was being stalked by The King himself in his dreams. A "coffin worm" of a man haunts a group of acquaintances, decaying rapidly when he dies. The last 4 stories all involve love, but do at least involve some sort of horror (or at least discomfort). Finding an old lover dead after many years; facing the gruesome reality of raising your future wife's son by another man (coupled with the horror of war); falling in love with a prostitute; falling in love with a closed-off young woman who cannot requite your feelings. These love stories are more or less effective. My main issue with the final 4 stories is that none of them relate to the main themes or include the King or the play. It makes the book unsuccessful in some way, as though Chambers couldn't fill out the conceit, and tossed in whatever was around to meet the publisher's page requirement. It's always hard to tell how frightening (or otherwise impactful, offensive or titillating or whatever) a novel from the past is. This one isn't super effective today, but certainly was at the time. Part of this may also be that grand cosmic and psychological horror doesn't bother me much, having swallowed too much Lovecraft as a youth. Nowadays I am much more scared by things that might actually happen to me, like mass murderers and cancer. The technique of connected short stories influenced Lovecraft among others, and this structure helps to keep the reader a bit off balance throughout. There is a discomforting sentence in the first story where the author states that the Jewish and black populations have been driven out of America, bringing the nation to a united and happy state, but as this occurs during a section that is clearly parodying utopianism I don't know if Chambers is serious about it. The writing carries a decadent quality, not as overripe as something like Huysmans' 'A Rebours,' but fluid and florid. Chambers comes up with some astonishing metaphors, as when during a discussion between strangers in a pension, "...Miss Susie, forgetting to address herself exclusively to Mr. Bladen, and Hastings replying to her general question, the entente cordiale was established, and Susie and her mother extended a protectorate over what was clearly neutral territory." I was very disappointed that the name Jean d'Ys, being such a fantastic pun, was wasted on a time travel story with a beamingly healthy young love interest. Overall I enjoyed the book very much, but I find it far from perfect. This one will likely stick with me for a while.

'Every photograph is merely a flaccid imitation of some painting somewhere, except for the photographs that interest me personally, not of course because of anything the photographer might have intended, but only because of some tiny detail that makes me think of something other than the fact that I'm looking at a photograph. The best photographs, in other words, like the best books, are ones that I can project my own thoughts and feelings onto, ignoring whatever the 'camera operator' may have intended me to see. Take, for example, this picture of my dear dead mother as a small child, half-hidden behind her slightly-older brother, her face slightly out of focus, her gesture naive, her stance uncertain. Ah, what can I not project onto this photograph! And yet, it torments me with its world that I cannot join. The photograph defeats time, and also me individually. Computer! Enhance, until my mother's face no longer haunts me with its distance, its unknowability, its obscurity! But no, it is fruitless, pointless. Photography is too wild, too precise, too direct for society to manage, and so society seeks to tame the photograph by turning it into an illusion. I, of course, am far too smart for that, so I am able to confront in the photograph the dawning of intractable reality. Maybe someday you, dear reader, can join me on this rarefied plane.' To be serious, the prose is good, and the ideas are interesting if flawed. Not sure I'll read anything else from Barthes but this was enjoyable enough as something to think against.

The authors argue that national interest and power over local affairs is in decline due to polarization and increasing debt, that the city-state is the most direct comparison model to use in predicting the future of governance due to demographic changes and population scale effects, and that multi-level cooperatives of public, private, and civic institutions are best suited to tackle the problems that arise from this situation. They then provide a series of examples from the US and other nations to show how such structures have already functioned to solve problems at the local level. The problem is that their examples don't show what the authors claim they do. Pittsburgh PA built a robotics education hub via grants to numerous universities, only for large corporations to swoop in once the real work was done to start hiring professors and adjuncts away from the universities. Cleveland OH provided millions in subsidies to sports teams and orgs like the NCAA to lure them into town, an approach that was not only highly risky (stadium impacts on local economies are debatable at best, even if the teams are good) but directly stole any benefits attendant to the teams from neighboring cities. Copenhagen Denmark merged a lot of smaller land and development authorities, created a publicly held but government-controlled corporation, re-zoned a bunch of land to make it worth more, borrowed money on the now more valuable land, and redeveloped their run-down port area with 100% control. In every case, the city itself took the necessary actions to create growth, and the corporations came in once the real work is done to say "don't worry, we'll take it from here." This doesn't stop the authors from centering corporate interests in these cooperative endeavors. They argue that public-private partnerships should be majority-private to drag the conservative government forward, minority-public to reign in the corporations a tiny bit. As additional justification they point to the pride effects of CEOs being able to develop nice neighborhoods. What this would mean in practice is that the corporations could do whatever they want whether or not it helps the city generally, because the public stakeholders can't stop them. No real mention is made of possible environmental or negative fiscal impacts that might arise from this. Gentrification is shrugged off as a necessary evil. They are at least honest about how much TIFFs suck, preferring pay-on-completion bonds and borrowing against (most likely re-valued) city land holdings. The authors do devote a chapter to methods for making sure the wealth is distributed more evenly. They point to 4 ways this can be accomplished: person-to-job/opportunity matching programs, innovating K-12 education (which naturally means charter and magnet schools), lengthening education opportunities (by providing pre-K and post-HS ed), and expanding social capital (essentially leveraging communities to increase economic activity). The programs brought up generally sound worth pursuing, but they would need to be relentlessly expanded to make any kind of impact. My vote is still for UBI or something similar - we have enough evidence showing that it does not overall make people lazy or ungrateful, and it would be the fastest way to make a difference. I even think that if it does make some folks leave work to lounge and watch TV forever, that shouldn't be an issue. Let those folks go - what it will cost us is negligible compared to what we will gain from the rest, and as time goes on and citizens are less estranged from labor and shut out of the economy, we should see less dropout. I'm not necessarily against public-private partnerships. I try to be as much a realist as an idealist about these things. I just think that if the poor have to take their medicine, so do the rich. And Katz and Nowak's solutions essentially hands the reigns and most of the benefit of future development to the rich at the expense with essentially no oversight. I will give it 3 stars for the research and providing a lot of good examples of things that cities can do without leaning on corporations to save us.

a parable about the dangers of fckboi lesbians. the titular Carmilla spends her time seeking out beautiful young women, often at parties, befriending them under a variety of assumed names. after proffering some unexplainable happenstance which compels her to sleep on her victim's couch (with never a single word about payment of rent and board), she immediately moves in. she then seduces her young victim with overwrought speeches about 'meeting in dreams as children' and 'dying in each other's souls' and 'the rapture of that cruelty which is love.' once the seduction is complete and Carmilla has had her way with the poor girl, she ghosts, never to be seen again. in the end, after plying these tricks too often in the same neighborhood, Carmilla is discovered and driven out by that eternal enemy of fckboi lesbians, a band of overly suspicious fathers. sadly this book so depleted Ireland's Strategic Comma Reserve that James Joyce ran entirely out in the last chapter of Ulysses several decades later.

A highly detailed account of the background, proceedings, and aftermath of the witch trial of husband and wife Hugh and Mary Parsons in Springfield, MA in 1651. Gaskill apparently had access to a ton of diaries because he has a lot of info on private conversations and thoughts, but he's honest when he doesn't have info on any point. He also has the governor's ledger of township transactions, which allows him to trace the monetary entanglements of the participants. The atmosphere is impeccable, communicating a sense of isolation and dread. Gaskill also does a great job of briefly spelling out various Christian heresies and arguments of the time without getting too far into the weeds. The blame for the affair is placed squarely on Puritan psychology - Calvinist chauvinism, fear of the world as full of soul-damning wickedness, and a contrasting focus on worldly wealth as a proof of one's fitness to serve God combine in the accusers to drive out those seen as different or unworthy and hopefully absorb their property. After tracing the main narrative, Gaskill describes his walks through the modern city looking for the old places within the new ones, and reminding us how the past impacts the present and the future. As with all books based on extensive individual research, there isn't a way to check much of anything until someone else goes back through the archives and comes to a different conclusion, so I'll have to trust him on the details. Highly enjoyable in a morbid way.