Rich Mintz  

Just finished Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse, part of my near-future-dystopia binge. It was a bit softer and more sociological than some of the other sci-fi I’ve ready recently, which isn’t surprising because it’s set about 15 years in the future in a United States that’s recognizable as a place we might be heading toward right now. There hasn’t been an alien invasion, there hasn’t been a revolution. The economy and the social order have just gradually deteriorated, in the way that some would argue they’re already deteriorating now, and the authorities and the elites haven’t been able to keep a handle on it.

There are references to an orderly, well-run consumer society for the very wealthy, who live behind gates more or less the way we live now, but we readers never see those people directly; we spend our time among a dispossessed, squatting uncertain underclass whose members look uncomfortably like us. They’ve been to college, they remember what we remember from the 1990s and 2000s, and yet they live on and near the streets, are menaced day and night, are almost always hungry.

I enjoyed the fact that the book was set in Georgia, in places I recognize, mostly in the pine woods of east Georgia between Macon and Savannah. But I won’t tell you any more; read it for yourself.

I’m currently wrapping up Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India, the NYRB edition of a collection (first published in 1925) of letters written in the 1770s. Fay traveled from Dover to India (with her husband, a lawyer) at a time when the British imperial outposts were genuine outposts, beset by dangers of all kinds. When you set out for India in those days, safe arrival at which was not guaranteed, and Fay and her husband were detained and held hostage twice during their twelve-month (!) journey.

It’s hard to empathize nowadays, when anyone with $1000 can book an advance plane ticket and be safely in India next week, more or less guaranteed. Exoticism will never entirely disappear as long as people are tribalist and closed-minded (i.e., forever); but a world in which even modestly paid manual laborers have access to cheap mobile phones is very different from Fay’s world. When she dispatched her letters, she had no guarantee they would even arrive.

Just finished A History Of The World In Six Glasses, Tom Standage’s light historical narrative about six drinks (beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola) and the roles they played in different cultural periods.

On the “broad historical trends” front, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know, but Standage was good with details (for instance, I hadn’t realized the guy who yelled “aux armes!” and set off the French Revolution had a name; and I hadn’t known tea came into prominence so late) and it made a compelling read. The narrative construct felt a little forced, but since I have a sort of industrial history fetish it didn’t really bother me.

I haven’t had a chance to play with the iBooks Author app yet, but if it’s anything like what it seems to be, it’s a big step in the direction of democratized content distribution. And I say that knowing full well that Apple takes a big piece (don’t know how much) of any money you make selling your new creations in the iBookstore.

The first generation of democratized publishing came with Gutenberg. The second generation, though, didn’t come until the 20th century, when technologies like the mimeograph (and, later, the photocopier, and even later, the first-generation Macintosh) achieved wide circulation.

Now we’re in a third generation, when the Internet makes it possible for anyone to disseminate information and opinions electronically — and technologies like iBooks Author, which enable anyone to package up information into a physical or quasi-physical product, may usher in a fourth generation.

It’s important not to underestimate the emotional power of that ability to package the information you’re disseminating. Writers want to publish their books not just because they want to make money, but because they want to be associated with (to give birth to) a discrete, finished object. That impulse is so strong that I think being empowered to package up an iBook is a qualitatively different experience than simply putting up a bunch of web pages, and that would be true even if you could only give away your iBooks for free.

Finished this book, and although I got a little lost in the plot (it was hard to keep all the interweaving entities straight, and for the record I have just as much trouble following “traditional” spy vs. spy stuff), I loved the concept — avatars carrying off a heist inside a distributed virtual gaming universe that ends up stealing real-world wealth.

The setting was fun, too — Edinburgh of less than a decade in the future. It was recognizable as Edinburgh; I could even follow most of the action on Google Maps, and I cheered when a major plot event took place near Ocean Terminal, in a part of Leith I went through on the bus when I was there in December. But it was not-Edinburgh, too, given that everyone walks around with augmented-reality overlay spectacles all the time, and taxis are driven by remote operators in a call center.

I had a little trouble at first with the fact that the story is told episodically from the shifting viewpoints of seven or eight principal characters, but you get used to this, and the story is gripping enough that you get propelled through even if you get momentarily disoriented. Highly Recommended.

I came across Triptych by JM Frey as part of a “people who liked X also liked Y” trip through Amazon, starting with a post-apocalyptic novel. Or maybe they sent it to me in a “hard SF” promo email. Whatever. In any case, they know what I like, and in this case “what I like” is apparently “a time-travel science fiction story bookending a polyamorous human-alien love affair told from the alien’s point of view.” Be warned, there is actual sexuality in this book, and not all of it is human, and not all of it is heterosexual (!); but once you get used to the fact that Kalp (that’s his name) keeps his genitals tucked into his chest, his sensibility turns out to be more like a human sensibility than you might expect, which I guess is part of the point.

I’m not sure how realistic it is that a different species from another planet has thought patterns that are so almost-human — hell, that he is able to be sexually aroused by humans (nevermind the fact that the fruits and vegetables from Kalp’s home planet grow so well on Earth that a vendor in a farmer’s market in suburban London carries a full range of them). And I got confused a bit in the time-travel subplot — maybe I wasn’t paying attention. But nevermind any of that, it’s a great story, and if you’re curious about how someone would write a scene in which an alien pleasures himself while he listens to two humans get it on, well, this book is for you.

I was referred by a friend (OK, it was her) to Wade Rouse’s At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life, which I read this weekend. It’s light, a loose collection of essays tied together. And Rouse takes the stereotypical gay thing a little further than I can usually stomach (and, hello, I’M GAY) but, you know, in the service of art. In the service of art.

And I have to admit I really enjoyed the book, and that Rouse’s spiritual journey has enhanced my spiritual journey.

The thrust of the book is “urban gay couple move to the great outdoors in search of a Walden experience,” “urban” meaning St. Louis (well, okay), and their “outdoors” being the middle of nowhere several miles outside of Saugatuck, Michigan. Not literally off the grid; but no Starbucks within an hour or more (!), no cable TV (at least initially), no NPR.

Can they survive? Can they thrive? Can they live without the things they have to live without, and learn to live with the things they have to live with?

You’ll have to read the book to find out, but I came to the end appreciating Rouse’s willingness to try to follow his passion (and make serious life changes in order to do it) and discuss it honestly, including the aspects of it that drove him crazy. If you want to be a writer, you have to write! And if you want to live a simpler life, you have to, well, simplify! And — if someone like Rouse can do it, someone much more deeply embedded in consumer culture than you probably are, then so can you! Etc.

Also: Dude doesn’t have to be Shakespeare to be worth reading.

Also: Why should I make fun of Wade Rouse, in my urban-cynical way, for being gayer than me? He is who he is. Not to mention that he isn’t gayer than me, he just wears more product and goes to the gym more often. Not to mention that he’s had four books published, and gets to live in the woods!

I eagerly awaited Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, having devoured his previous ones. This one was not disappointing, and I was sorry to see it end. It spans almost a century of time in England, from an era that has long been buried under the rubble of wartime and modernity to the present day.

In the long sweep of the first half of the novel, the earlier scenes that set up the contemporary second half, I was struck by the degree to which the book felt like an artifact of its age. Those earlier sections read like a contemporary novel (of their day) rather than like a later reconstruction, and I kept having to remind myself that Hollinghurst wrote this in 2009 and 2010 rather than, say, 1923.

As usual, there are Gay People in this novel (not always recognized as such at the time, of course), and a literary consciousness and a sense of humor, and an exceptionally fine sense of discrimination among types of shame and self-loathing and self-censorship.

I finally read Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, two years or more after Greg Payette recommended it to me. One of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read this year, and hard to paraphrase (like the best life-affirming practical philosophy always is).

Crawford’s mission is to show that the manual arts not only qualify as intellectual pursuits, but are more closely tied to human fulfillment than much white-collar work (in a world where so much so-called “creative” work has been both mechanized, and abstracted from its locus in a human community). Someone who works in an office can be said to be “successful” if he has met the internally defined, arbitrary constraints set by management, without regard to any ethics or even physics. But a motorcycle repairman, or electrician, etc., is successful only if his motorcycle (or wiring, etc.) “works” in reference to a standard that’s at once objective (verifiable), and aligned with the human experience of using the product of his work correctly.

My own experience correlates. The time in my life when I felt most certain that I was situated and successful, as a human participating in a community, was the two years in Atlanta when I ran a money-losing, objectively failing bookstore. The money-losing part was a problem, of course, and imposed painful side effects of its own, which led me to abandon the endeavor; but I suspect I would have been perfectly happy taking home $50,000 a year indefinitely (an achievable sum) as proprietor of that shop, especially in a city where it’s possible to live respectably on a mortgage payment of $800 a month.

The reviewers said that Jonathan Raban’s new essay collection Driving Home: An American Journey was uneven, that it could have benefited from a bit of pruning. And after grazing my way through it I can assure you they were right. But his essays on the landscape, culture, and history of Seattle are spot-on. That’s the reason I soldiered on to the end of the book, and it was worthwhile.

My father’s family is from Seattle. To be precise, my father’s mother’s family is from Seattle. My grandmother (who is still living out her destiny as queen of the family hive) was born in Seattle a bit more than a century ago, was the first valedictorian of the then-brand-new Garfield High School, grew up in a house on Yesler Way where her brother ran out to catch the streetcar as they heard it clang past. (My father’s father grew up in Spokane, and came to Seattle to court and marry my grandmother. Two Jewish families in Washington at the turn of the century, go figure.)

My grandparents moved to Los Angeles in 1927 (my Spokane-born father was barely out of swaddling clothes when they caught the train south), and most of my remaining family left Washington long ago, mostly for California; but one branch of cousins has stayed on to this day, and others have returned to Seattle in their old age, preferring to live out their last years in a familiar place. Seattle isn’t a place I visited frequently as a child, but it was symbolically important to my family, I did experience it enough times that I have memories of it from each stage of life, early childhood and tweenhood and young adulthood and, more recently, my twenties and thirties and forties. I have only the most rudimentary Seattle geography in my head, but the directions toward mountains and sea and canal are usually clear, and on each adult visit I get better oriented.

After spending longer in the East than in my childhood California, the Seattle landscape always surprises me with its Western brightness and crispness. It’s an evergreen city, with surprisingly traditional houses on secluded hillside streets and unexpected water views everywhere. Portland is like that, too, but Portland is somehow softer, gentler; Seattle is angular, craggy, proud.

I loved the way Raban captured the aspirational cosmopolitanism of Seattle in these essays, not just now, but throughout history. It’s a big city with an unusually large rural catchment area — Raban claims the hinterland of urban Washington State reaches to North Dakota, barely 600 miles from Minneapolis, the next place of note as you travel in an easterly direction. This may sound absurd, but I must point out that my great-grandparents, before moving to Spokane at some point in the nineteen-teens, came from the Pale (from a village in present-day Belarus) first to Fargo, North Dakota, where my grandfather attended elementary school. Someone or something they encountered in Fargo drew them west to Spokane.

Seattle has always had an unusually large proportion of midlife arrivals (Raban points out that early explorers like Vancouver and Puget were among them), disproportionately non-American immigrant in origin, disproportionately Scandinavian (perhaps matching the weather). People who don’t know Seattle are often surprised at how international a place and how self-consciously cosmopolitan a place it was from the very beginning, which is reflected in the architecture and in the healthy civic life and self-consciousness. People call it provincial, but it isn’t, really; it’s merely a frontier city (as Raban, through someone he quotes, observes), with all the positives and negatives that that implies.

Charleston, South Carolina (another city I have some experience with, which is worth its own post) is another bright and cultured, internationally aware urban settlement at the edge of the wilderness, or at least it was 300 years ago. But Charleston faced directly toward both England and more established Caribbean colonies such as Barbados, giving it a cultural connectedness that a place like Seattle never had in its earliest days. Even in 1900, before the Panama Canal, when the typical rail journey from Chicago to Seattle took three or five or seven days, the place must have felt awfully remote. And so it built its own heimishness, which is still much in evidence.

My dozen or so visits to Seattle are seared in my memory. I think of the trip to the Kingdome I took in 1977 to see the Mariners, with my great-uncle and some cousins, and I remember everything I saw and heard and tasted and smelled. I remember taking two elderly relatives (both now deceased) to dinner in Pike Place Market five years ago. I remember visiting my great-aunt’s modest house in View Ridge in the mid-1970s, a traditional-style home that’s common in any city built before 1950 but which in my childhood I thought incredibly romantic. I remember driving around trying to find the location of my grandmother’s childhood home on Yesler Way in early adulthood and realizing it was probably buried under Interstate 5.