Sunday, March 3, 2024

The N'Gustro Affair, by Jean-Patrick Manchette

I feel a little guilty confessing how much I loved this high-energy piece of toxic political cynicism, Manchette's first novel (1971). I found it un-put-downable, with its very clever narrative structure driving the action forward, and its manic, profane humor. Politically incorrect, no doubt, but Manchette is an equal-opportunity hater, and the intermittently brutal and fascistic (and ever-opportunistic) protagonist and narrator Henri Butron definitely gets what's coming to him. The novel is based loosely on a true story of post-colonial shenanigans, as explained in Gary Indiana's insightful introduction. Translated in all its gloriously hard-boiled and colorful prose stylings by Donald Nicholson-Smith. An entertainment on the level of, say, Scorcese's Goodfellas. Enjoy!

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Nice and damp at Hidden Villa

Along the Long Bunny Loop Trail... Hericium coralloides (coral tooth fungus) with some other stuff; Schizophyllum commune; and Toxicodendron diversilobum (look but don't touch!).









Reading roundup

Some good ones... one not so good... 

My Ántonia
Willa Cather

Fine story-telling, beautifully written. It is simultaneously two coming-of age stories – of the main characters, and of the frontier prairie society they inhabit and build. Cather's admiration for the immigrant farm girls who move into town and grow into strong and remarkably independent American women is evident, even if the most willful of them all, Ántonia herself, is the one who through unfortunate circumstances returns to the farm, devoting her life to bearing and raising an enormous brood of future farmers.

The Ruined Map
Kobo Abe

Abe's excellent 1967 novel is a noir in full-on existential mode. Our narrator is a private detective hired to find a woman's husband, who left one day and never returned. Hubby seems to have been messed up in something criminal, possibly involving his brother-in-law, but the clues, such as they are, lead in various directions with no real resolution. All angst and atmosphere, the book features moments of humor as well, such as when the detective describes in great detail his special method for examining a photograph through binoculars to discern the inner thoughts and feelings of its subject. The translation, which reads flawlessly, is by E. Dale Saunders. 

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport
Samit Basu

I quite enjoyed Basu's debut, The City Inside, a plausible near-future romp in post-Modi India. His follow-up, a more distant-future riff on the Aladdin story, has its moments, but bogs down trying to describe a bizarre and ultimately unconvincing mash-up of AI bots, modified humans, and mysterious aliens. Of course, be careful what you wish for! 

The Less Dead
Denise Mina

Another reliably well-written and entertaining thriller with a conscience from Mina, this time featuring a sympathetic portrayal of sex workers.  

The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I
Translated by David Hinton

Po Chü-I (Bai Juyi) was a Tang poet born in 772, not long after the deaths of the great generation of Tang masters: Du Fu, Li Bai, and Wang Wei. I have enjoyed reading Po enormously, in this exquisite translation by David Hinton. Many of the poems are contemplative, reflecting Po's interest in Taoism and Zen Buddhism. But his social commentary could really bite...

Songs of Ch’in-chou
7. Light and Sleek

Riding proud in the streets, parading 
horses that glisten, lighting the dust... 

When I ask who such figures could be, 
people say they're imperial favorites: 

vermillion sashes— they're ministers; 
and purple ribbons— maybe generals.
 

On horses passing like drifting clouds 
they swagger their way to an army feast, 

to those nine wines filling cup and jar 
and eight dainties of water and land. 

After sweet Tung-t'ing Lake oranges 
and mince-fish from a lake of heaven, 

they've eaten to their hearts content, 
and happily drunk, their spirits swell. 

There's drought south of the Yangtze: 
In Ch’ü-chou, people are eating people.

Saturday, January 6, 2024

A poem for our times

For Kenneth and Miriam Patchen 
Al Young

Here 
I am cutting you 
these fresh healthy flowers 
from my sick bed 
where I toss with nickel illuminations. 
Time is a fever 
that burns in the pores 
consuming everything the mind creates. 
I send you 
this cool arrangement of dream blossoms 
these tender stems & shiny leaves 
while I shiver 
& detect in your own eyes 
of gentle remove 
a similar disgust with what has come 
to our fat cancerous land 
of the sensual circus 
& the disembodied broadcast wave, 
swallowing in sorrow 
to hear the old hatred 
& uncover selfishness 
rumbling back up from the bosoms of men 
out into the good open air. 
May these new flowers 
from the forest of my heart 
bring you a breath of the joy 
men must believe they are going to recover 
by moving again & again 
against one another. 

From The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press 2010)

Reading roundup

Happy New Year! 

Chain-Gang All-Stars
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

A thrilling read from start to finish, this near-future dystopia is Hunger Games for grown-ups, with plenty of racial justice politics thrown in. The plot, in which the masses of incarcerated are invited to participate in gladiatorial battles to the death for the slavering live and video mass audience, seems close enough to reality that it does not really shock. And presumably that is Adjei-Brenyah's point. The main characters are appealing and well-drawn, even if some of the parallel plots are underdeveloped. Occasional informational footnotes are well intended but seem gratuitous to me. 

I can't say I thought the novel was good enough to make the NYT Top 10 list, which it did, but then again I have not read much of the competition, so perhaps I should withhold judgment. The ending is satisfying and abrupt, and leaves enough hanging that a sequel seems inevitable... perhaps after a movie adaptation, which would probably be a blockbuster and would render its viewers as complicitous in the spectacle and the atrocity as the book does its readers.

Every Day is Mother's Day
Hilary Mantel

This was Mantel's first novel– a nasty piece of dark comedy, in the mode of Muriel Spark. Indeed, one of the main characters is a mentally challenged young woman named Muriel, perhaps in homage. Mantel was already very good, but not yet at the top of her game compared with triumphs like Fludd, let alone the Wolf Hall trilogy. Read this one when you are in the mood for some misanthropy.  

The New Animals
Pip Adam

Set in the fashion scene of Auckland, NZ, The New Animals meanders through a few hours in the lives of its not very interesting characters before taking a rather bizarre and unexpected turn in its last quarter. I'm not sure what to make of it, but I am pretty certain that I will not re-read it to figure it out. Your mileage may vary!

Friday, December 15, 2023

Once I finally quit the New York Times, where will I turn?

Obviously to Dean Baker, who seems even more frustrated than I am at the nihilism of our "newspaper of record," which repeatedly feeds the (false) narratives that will help return fascist Trump to the White House. 

In keeping with its apparent commitment to ignore the data and insist homeownership is no longer possible, the New York Times ran yet another piece on how homeownership is becoming impossible for young people. The piece begins with the sad story of a young woman worried whether she and her spouse will ever be able to own a home....

It is unfortunate to hear about this nihilism. It would have been helpful to note that it does not correspond to the data. While homeownership rates have fallen back somewhat in the last few quarters, as a result of the sharp jump in mortgage rates, they are still above the pre-pandemic levels.

This is true across the board, including for young people. 

Monday, November 27, 2023

Progressivity

This article, based on a longer research paper, is interesting throughout. Working with an enormous database of distributional national accounts, the authors quantify the redistributive impacts of tax and transfer systems across countries. I repeat their key findings here: 

We establish five main findings:

1. Tax-and-transfer systems always reduce inequality, but with large variations.

2.About 90% of these variations are driven by transfers, while only 10% come from taxes.

3. Redistribution rises with development, but this is entirely due to transfers; tax progressivity is uncorrelated with per capita income.

4. Redistribution has increased in most world regions, except in Africa and Eastern Europe, where it has stagnated.

5. About 80% of variations in post-tax inequality are driven by differences in pre-tax inequality (predistribution), while 20% are driven by the direct effect of taxes and transfers (redistribution).

Some caveats are in order, some of which spring from somewhat arbitrary or at least contestable choices made in the classifications. First, they count "social insurance" payments such as social security as part of pre-tax incomes, and hence "predistribution." Second, conditional cash grants are counted as transfers; presumably this implies that "negative income tax" programs such as the earned income tax credit (EITC) are counted as part of the transfer system, not the tax system. And inevitably they have to make numerous simplifying assumptions about the incidence of taxes and transfers (who really pays?), etc.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is the last: cross-country differences in the inequality of pre-tax income accounts for the lion's share of cross-country differences in post-tax inequality. Of course, predistribution includes lots of determinants, many of which are driven by government policies, such as educational systems. It would not seem to be a category error to think of educational equity as part of redistribution, rather than predistribution.