To Be Taught If Fortunate

To Be Taught, If Fortunate

By Becky Chambers

At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. They can produce antifreeze in subzero temperatures, absorb radiation and convert it for food, and conveniently adjust to the pull of different gravitational forces. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to journey to neighboring exoplanets long known to harbor life.

A team of these explorers, Ariadne O’Neill and her three crewmates, are hard at work in a planetary system fifteen light-years from Sol, on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds. But as Ariadne shifts through both form and time, the culture back on Earth has also been transformed. Faced with the possibility of returning to a planet that has forgotten those who have left, Ariadne begins to chronicle the story of the wonders and dangers of her mission, in the hope that someone back home might still be listening.

This short novella got off to a slow start, and it was never really about the plot, but it was a nice change of pace for me at the moment.  I've been reading at a breakneck pace because all my chickens came home to roost, also known as all my library requests came in at once, even though I ordered them at different times and was on several different waiting lists.  So it's been a small frenzy here, and it's good to kind of catch my breath a little with To Be Taught.

The book, as you come to realize, is both a more-detailed-than-strictly-necessary-or-even-enjoyable description of what we might find on other habitable planets, and also a love letter to exploration, knowledge, and dreams of space.  The idea is that there are four astronauts who are on a decades-long exploration of four distant planets (or moons or something - I kind of returned the book to the library already).  When taking off, they don't expect to come back for at least eighty years.  Partway through the mission, they realize that Earth is no longer in contact with them for unknown reasons, and as they get deeper into space, and potentially closer to the mystery of Earth's silence, they have to decide why and for whom they are doing this - ultimately deciding that if Earth wants them to come back, they will come back, if Earth wants them to keep going, they will keep going, and they are prepared to wait forever for Earth to respond, since the question is too important to answer for Earth.  It's a little bittersweet, since it's pretty clear that Earth got real fucked and probably will not be responding, even if they'd wanted to. News alert, you're all going to die in stasis, how nice!

The part of the book that isn't taken up with philosophical questions about how much we owe to the human race is sort of a fun wilderness adventure.  The descriptions, as I alluded to above, are more detailed, and more scientifically accurate than I really even wanted, no doubt a side effect of the author's relying heavily on her mother's astrobiologist background.  My copy came with a short list of questions and answers between the author and her mother at the end, mostly about the interaction between science and science fiction, which I also found enlightening.

It's also managed to make me bookmark Chambers' other big work, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which I guess is now just the first in a trilogy.  I like her style enough - and the Big Ideas she has - to get into more by her.  We'll see how it goes - honestly, the interaction between astronauts was not always my favorite part in To Be Taught.  It's hard to give enough space to relationships in a book where the main focus is on the relationship with Earth, not each other.  And also, obviously, when they spend years just collecting samples and then going to sleep for years to travel.  Well, I guess we'll just have to see.

Five Days at Memorial

Five Days at Memorial

By Sheri Fink

This was an incredibly gripping book on the doctors, nurses, and patients at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent investigation into the numerous deaths there and accusations that patients were being euthanized (just as rescue helicopters were evacuating people again).  It's less concerned about pointing fingers or assigning blame than it is in warning how American social mores and patient care practices can break down in less than five days and how it might be prevented (or likely to occur) in the future.

Do I think that Dr. Anna Pou and her two assistants murdered at least nine and potentially eighteen patients? Yes.  Am I going to second guess her actions? Probably not.  However, although I was sympathetic to the conditions in Memorial (and in fact, all over the city, as this was not the only facility facing "suspicious" concentrations of morphine and midazolam in the bodies left behind), and I understand that the potential murder charges hang over her head, what I most aggrieved by was the complete lack of remorse, guilt, or doubt expressed by them and by their supporters after the fact.  Yes, you did what you thought was right at the time, and I don't doubt that you were despairing, after five days in post-Katrina conditions, fear, rumors, and foul smells, but when you left that hospital and realized that help had been available, that not everyone descended into chaos and death, I think that should have given you pause.  You made a mistake.  And it was life or death, and you chose poorly.  Face it.

It was only as we near the end of the book and you realize that not only did she have tunnel vision at the time, she's become entrenched into her position that I lost my sympathy for her.  Maybe it's a defensive mechanism to avoid having to examine her own actions more closely, but Fink's argument that this attitude of refusing other perspectives in end-of-life decisions can cause more harm than it purports to solve is a fairly persuasive one. There's a good argument that doctors, unfortunately, are human like the rest of us - (over)confident in their own skills, brought low by disaster, unending work and stress, and, while willing to make the "hard" decisions, unwilling to open that decision to criticism.  Of course, other actors in the justice process fucked up too, and maybe it could have been an opportunity for a discussion, but instead the whole indictment just screwed everybody over. This review is a bit longer than intended, and the book is no novella either, but it's worth a read.

Dispatches

Dispatches, by Michael Herr

From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.

So I'm trying something new (and no, it's not "actually be faithful about doing book reviews" although it also, sort of, is) and I want to record it for posterity, i.e., my future self, who I assume has the same terrible memory that current self does.  At least, I can't imagine that my memory is going to get better.  So I'm committing myself to the 2019 PopSugar Reading Challenge, and my plan is to faithfully set down the books I choose and read, here, in my own personal corner.  As a warm-up, I've decided to post a review of the last book I read, Dispatches.  Who's up for some little light reading, am I right?!

Actually, that's not even true, and I just realized it, because I finished A Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue after Dispatches and didn't remember until just now, even though it was literally the day before yesterday.  I wasn't joking about my memory.

So maybe it makes sense for me to review Dispatches then, because it truly is a book that sticks with you.  Not the plot; there is none.  It's more the sense of being in a certain time and place (here: the Vietnam War, circa 1968) and the emotions that come with it than any linear story-line or through-point. 

The book is very roughly segregated into sections, but it reads more like one continuous fever dream.  For those who loved Apocalypse Now, this guy did the narration and honestly, probably hugely influenced the feel of the movie.  Michael Herr is a master at conveying the closing distance to madness from living in these conditions, the grunts who just want to leave, the generals who can't admit that the war is failing, the correspondents who are drawn to it, not realizing yet that everything else in their life will be duller and grayer by comparison (even if they aren't literally being shot at and mangled) once they leave the war zone.

This really was an incredibly well-written book.  It's sad, incredibly sad, as you realize the futility and waste going on, the refusal to consider the human cost of things, and, in hindsight, the loss of normalcy for the soldiers who went over there.  In one of the later sections about the correspondents who went over there, Herr describes a soldier trying to show one of the photojournalists pictures of a dead posed vietnamese woman, severed heads, ears, destruction, not realizing that "every other soldier had the same pictures". There's racism, not only towards the Vietnamese, but between the white and black soldiers.  There's the sense that these kids (one of them is twenty) may be indelibly wounded from the things they've seen and done.  A long section is about the siege at Khe Sanh, the endless shelling, and immobility, and also the strange quiet when the rains lifted and support arrived, a place where you could easily go mad in hell and return weeks later to find that it's nothing more than a standard outpost, returned again to being militarily unimportant. 

I also learned that Errol Flynn had a son, Sean, who was a Vietnam War photojournalist.  I was so taken by this news, I looked him up on wikipedia and spoiled the ending of the book: the golden boy (at least the way Herr describes him) two years after the events of Dispatches, takes a bike through Cambodia in search of Viet Cong and disappeared, declared dead fourteen years later, although it's believed he only lived one.

It's not the easiest book to read (in fact, I bemoaned to more than one person that I wished it were about a hundred pages shorter) but I'm glad I read it, sad it happened, but satisfied that this record was made, to preserve the time, to give us knowledge, possibly, to avoid a recurrence.

The Fountainhead

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead's protagonist, Howard Roark, is an individualistic young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision. The book follows his battle to practice what the public sees as modern architecture, which he believes to be superior, despite an establishment centered on tradition-worship. How others in the novel relate to Roark demonstrates Rand's various archetypes of human character, all of which are variants between Roark, the author's ideal man of independent-mindedness and integrity, and what she described as the "second-handers."

The problem with critiquing Ayn Rand is that she anticipates most of your arguments and makes fun of them in her books. You wind up feeling ridiculous for calling her out on her lack of empathy or humanity when it is clear that she abhors both. And anyway, it would be a waste of time since she demonstrably believes that any critiques which do not value her are simply products of erroneous beliefs. Which is a convenient Catch-22 she’s got going on there. Though, to be fair, she probably wouldn’t accept praise either, unless it was given in the appropriately selfish frame of mind.

What’s frustrating about Ayn Rand (besides her cardboard characters, who are not people so much as they are things, and who serve to merely act out some weird Kabuki play of melodrama rather than make any pretense of behaving like real people, mostly because there are no people who are like the characters in her novels) is her absolute adherence to an unworkable scheme. She, naturally, will make no attempts to make it workable, as that would be compromise, and compromise above all things is terrible to her. I feel like there are kernels of something real and important in there, but they are completely obscured by the medium – Ayn Rand and fiction do not go well together. It’s the flimsiest façade for her philosophical bent, which just aggravates me. You know the phrase, golf is a good walk ruined? The Fountainhead is a good book ruined.

And yes, I get that she basically grew up destitute because of Communism, and that would make anyone a hardened Objectivist, but she makes it such an unpleasant experience. There's a little afterword in my copy in which some of her notes during the writing of the book are printed, and there's an excerpt there about ease of access to a library, and Rand goes, "Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?" Because we don't have enough problems as it is, but we need to make it harder for people to educate themselves. I get where she's coming from, I do, and it can be frustrating that people have all these opportunities that they don't take advantage of, but it's not a great idea to get all pissy about it and effectively say, "You don't want to go up some steps to the library? Fine, wallow in illiteracy!" because the only thing that does is create more imbeciles. Rand's books are full of that idea though, the one that says, "You're not appreciating me the way I ought to be appreciated? Fine, I'm going to go sit in a hollow cave and sulk about it until you realize how much you need me!" In Atlas Shrugged, it all worked out, because people "realized" how much they needed the geniuses, so the populance were properly abject when they all emerged from the cave, but in real life? The only thing you've done is create people who have no need for you at all, because they can along just fine without you. Just because we don't have savants shipping the steel across the country doesn't mean it won't get done. Just not as efficiently, maybe. Books will still be written, houses still put up.


You might ask, why am I reading this book when I obviously don’t enjoy it? Well, I’m reading it for a book group. Also, I didn’t think I would find it as tiresome as I have, because I’ve read Atlas Shrugged before, and I found it entertaining and provocative. Part of my weariness with The Fountainhead is because I’ve seen it all before (if you’ve read one Ayn Rand you’ve read them all), and part of it is because I’m no longer fourteen. Ayn Rand would say it’s because I’ve already betrayed my own soul (this is not speculation, it’s in the foreword to my edition of The Fountainhead), but I think it’s just because I’ve met a lot of selfish people and the shine as worn off. You’re old hat now, Rand.

Ayn Rand is hard to like, because she does not respect you. In her mind, why should she? You haven’t proven yourself to her at all. She’s like the Kanye West of philosophy, except really unlikable, because she doesn’t even seem to be having fun looking down from her throne. At least Kanye knows how silly he sounds. But when Rand lords it over you, it’s a duty, not a pleasure. It’s certainly an interesting paradox, as to why when Kanye sings, “There’s a thousand yous, there’s only one of me,” that you can’t help but like him for it, even though you know he probably believes it, but when Ayn Rand says, "You have already betrayed your own soul because you compromise with others," you're like, "Right back atcha, beeyotch!"

Let’s get to the meat of the book. It’s about Howard Roark, who is an architect, wonderful or ruinous depending on who you ask, and all the people who seem oddly determined to put him down. Why? Who knows. Because people of genius are like the flames to which moths are drawn, I suppose. Rand likes to have her characters monologue for entire chapters about their creeds, but honestly, I still couldn’t quite fathom what Toohey (the Big Bad) gained from his shenanigans. I mean, possibly power over the people, but what did that get him? Just the satisfaction of being puppetmaster? I mean, no one even acknowledges that he is the one in control. That’s gotta be lonely. And that seems like a completely disproportionate workload in order to get the string-pulling power that he has. Maybe it’s just my objectivist showing, but he goes to all this effort to make sure that all artistic impulses in New York . . . come out mediocre? Just to . . . prove he can? What? I mean, couldn’t he just as easily manipulate the people into making nice things, and then at least have something decent to read, or watch?

Anyhow, Roark builds some stuff, and gets some praise, some criticism for it, he hooks up with (by which I mean rapes) Dominique Francon, who then spends the rest of the book married to other people, because she – I dunno, wants to prove how miserable she can be, I guess- and then builds a housing project which he blows up after too many other people try to put decorations on it, and then he goes on trial for it. But it’s just a kangaroo court because it is a trial of PUBLIC OPINION, and honestly, I can’t imagine that the state is not going to appeal a “not guilty” verdict when the perpetrator admits right off the bat that they did it.

Rand’s ideas are also still a little bit cloudy in this book, because she spends a lot of time complaining about collectivism, but demonstrates that just about all the forces against Roark can be attributed to one man. Maybe she just hates how easily people can be led by the nose. I’m trying to elucidate the exact reasons why I don’t exactly follow Rand’s philosophy, but everything I type out seems both obvious and beside the point.

Certainly Rand’s methods of communicating her ideas are pretty abrasive and unattractive. And all her relationships have a weird D/s tinge to them or are, in this book at least, admittedly outright rape (I can’t remember exactly if it was rape in Atlas Shrugged, but it was definitely not quite vanilla) and since I can’t imagine what purpose it serves the plot or characters (except maybe that if you have the courage of your convictions, raping people is a fine idea) so it really just comes across as Rand’s personal preferences, which is gross. I don’t want to know her sex life. TMI, Ayn, TMI.

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein

Questions beget questions, and those questions beget another whole generation of questions. We may start with basic ones like, "What is the meaning of it all?" and, "Does God exist?" and, "How can I be true to myself?" and, "Am I in the wrong classroom?" but very quickly we discover we need to ask other questions in order to answer our original questions. This process has given rise to an array of philosophical disciplines, each delving into particular Big Questions by asking and attempting to answer the questions that underlie them.

What's so neat is that a whole bunch of jokes just happen to occupy the identical conceptual territory as these disciplines. Pure chance? Or is there an Intelligent Designer after all?

Although I have, in my time, taken actual philosophy courses from actual philosophy professors, I feel like I've learned more about Deep Thoughts from Terry Pratchett and my tax law professor. Terry Pratchett, because, well, duh, and the later mostly because I find the ramifications and implications of taxation absolutely fascinating. That's not a joke, by the way, and I'm not embarrassed about it. Booyah.

Luckily, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar is more Feet of Clay than On the Social Contract, so I had a lot of fun reading it. The book is thin, and broken up into ten short chapters, which are then broken further by small topics and interspersed with jokes. Plato also won me over very early on by telling this joke, which I heard for the first time about a month ago and have been enamoured of ever since:

S: If Atlas holds up the world, what holds up Atlas?
D: Atlas stands on the back of a turtle.
S: But what does the turtle stand on?
D: Another turtle.
S: But what does that turtle stand on?
D: My dear, it's turtles all the way down!

I mean, "it's turtles all the way down" ranks right up there with my other favorite enigmatic, turtle-related phrase, from Stephen King's It: "The Turtle couldn't help us," which is where I'm stopping, both because I could go on for awhile, and also because every time I try to type out the word turtle, I misspell it.

It's a good format for talking about heavy stuff, although I did lie down on the couch for about 40 minutes in the middle of reading it, because I was struggling with "Logic". Oh, logic, why must you always defeat me? Anyway, you can't judge me until you read the section on the heterological paradox. AND THEN EXPLAIN IT TO ME, BECAUSE I STILL DON'T GET IT. I mean, I get the joke, about the barber, but the concept itself is kinda painful. For those of you who, for one reason or another, refuse to pick up the book yourself to see, the heterological problem is summarized as follows:

• A word that refers to (describes?) itself is autological. zB: Short. Polysyllabic. Seventeen-lettered.
• A word that doesn't refer to itself is heterological, i.e., monosyllabic, long, bonkers.
• If the word 'heterological' is autological, then it's heterological. If the word 'heterological' is heterological, then it's autological.

I mean, I kinda get it, but only in a really awkward way. Hence, the nap. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the barber version is: "I cut the hair of everyone who doesn't cut their own hair. Do I cut my own hair?"

But Plato manages to make this kind of strenuous concept (paradoxes make me anxious) palatable, and squishes a bunch of other highfalutin' talk in as well. In some ways, I wanted there to be more of certain topics, since this is necessarily a shallow dip in the philosophical pool. I don't have a ton of knowledge about a lot of philosophy (although most of the jokes were familiar, which I guess is good?) so it's hard to judge the quality of the discussion on those topics, but the two areas in which I have the most experience and knowledge (feminism and jurisprudence, both in the "Social and Political Philosophy" chapter) were treated pretty fairly, even if I could have wished that feminism had a higher ratio of explanation-to-jokes than it does.

I also found some things out about myself, such as the fact that I would be a really terrible philosopher, unless there is a philosophy for Detailists, who ignore the big picture because they're hung up on a joke about Mormons in Ireland. And for your information, there are Mormons in Ireland. I had to look it up because I was offended that the joke would place a Mormon in Ireland rather than Utah, because, like turtles, I prefer my stereotypes to go all the way down.

I am also clearly more of the Eastern philosophical persuasion rather than the Western. Though Cathcart and Klein do not spend a whole lot of time on the various Eastern philosophies (a ratio of . . . ennh, 90:10?) I did enjoy what I read about Zen Buddhism, which involves koans, questions like, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Which is meant to (as I understood it) briefly disrupt your thinking and upheave your world before you settle back down. I can totally get behind that. Getting my mind blown is one of my favorite feelings in the whole world. And whereas I amply demonstrated above that sustained philosophical thinking compels me to lie down and nap until it wears off, short sharp bursts of enlightenment are perfect.

All in all, I really liked this book: it doesn't pretend to much other than what it is, which is a basic philosophy primer, with jokes. I certainly felt smarter after I read it, which is always pleasant. One caution though - it may mislead you into thinking that since you enjoyed this book, studying philosophy is something you might enjoy, to which I want to reply that philosophy classes are the worst, and they really only serve to make you absolutely hate everyone who doesn't agree with you, including Rousseau, that wily fucker.