I’ve only read third-party summaries of her work, so it’s likely that they’re cherry-picking extreme examples; I think the book has been a bit of a livewire situation, largely because archaeology tends to be conservative in areas like date-estimation and also her work is very deliberately taking on a lot of existing archaeological power structures.
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james stephens, the crock of gold - this has some funny parts in the same digressive conversational vein as the irish folktale parodies in at swim-two-birds, unfortunately other parts of it belong to like… that very dispiriting 1910s type of writing where characters go on long diatribes about how Man is Intellect and Woman is Emotion and Balance can only be attained by Love which is the Union of Opposites overcoming the Sterility Of Reason and etc etc… the god Pan makes an appearance… i guess you had to be there to understand why so many people at the time seemed to find this stuff so compelling. probably people in 2120 will wonder the same thing about all the contemporary videogames where characters talk like this (nothing personal against this specific game, it’s not you its me etc)
lucian, selected dialogues - most of these so far are taking the standard philosophical dialogue format and just changing the subject of the discussion to be, “does this particular contemporary guy suck or not”, which is pretty funny to me. i managed to bypass reading most of The Greeks so far but am enjoying how direct and lucid that stuff can be.
karl kraus, the third walpurgis night - written when the nazis were seizing power and mostly just looking at the way the press, the popular intellectuals and writers of the time, did their best to adapt to and naturalise this new state of affairs, i haven’t really started on it yet but wanted to share this passage from the introduction to the 2020 english language edition
good to know!
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so i finished this and ended up being kind of disappointed. it’s an interesting introduction to the archaeological issue, but i think because the author mentions oral histories and linguistic stuff in the introduction i was expecting a lot more attention to those. it’s all relegated to one chapter. i will probably end up following up on the sources cited there but this one doesn’t really have a whole lot to say other than they’re out there
any of these worth reading? i’m really curious now
i got the new dennis cooper book and before i started reading it i thought i will be crying in 5 minutes but i was crying in 2 minutes
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The opening is so so heavy
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I think I am gonna read his collection Wrong after I am done with Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. Never read a single thing by Dennis Cooper.
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i still need to read wrong! highly recommend the george miles cycle, which this new one is sort of a postscript to. it’s very uneven (and upsetting obviously) but worth seeing through, especially because the final book, period, is imo the best thing he’s ever written (that i’ve read). reading frisk when i was 16 was one of the most important experiences with a work of art i’ve had in my life. also recommend the poetry collections the dream police and the weaklings xl.
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Aw man, it was all internet bloggy stuff that I’m not sure where it lives now. It was mostly grad students being like “this is ridiculous!” or “perhaps this has some merit”, if I stumble back across any of it, I’ll linky.
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just read the most chilling dystopian sci fi story of the year
i find it very funny/disturbing how much of this is just ‘my actions have caused you harm, and for that i apologize. i promise to do better from now on. i’m listening’ high profile public apology boilerplate
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should i make this its own thread? i decided to add a bunch of books to my storygraph, both ones i read voraciously from middle school onwards and ones i want to read. heavily focusing on speculative fiction / SFF, especially by trans authors. A while ago I left off partway through Meanwhile Elsewhere which is an anthology of trans and queer science fiction.
anyway i’ve been rereading Ender’s Game, it’s still fascinating to me how Orson Scott Card can write with such empathy about the experiences of childhood marginalization and then be a vicious homophobe. weird weird dude. but book brought me right back to growing up as a ‘gifted kid’ and the kinds of things i used to think about. musings about time and space, what it must be like to be an alien, what if reality was a simulation, weird kid stuff that’s impossible to explain to adults who treat you like a baby.
i once hit a persistent bully with my tenor saxophone case on the bus when no one was watching. he called me f***** constantly, picking on me daily and in gym class etc. i smushed his face up against the bus window and held it there a couple seconds. he then threw a punch that glanced off my cheekbone, i kept walking down the aisle. he was fine but he knocked it off after that. stuff like that, where i had totally repressed a lot of that feeling, Ender’s Game brings back.
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in this case, its because Ender is Hitler and OSC’s entire MO is ‘don’t you feel sympathy for baby hitler?’
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Yeah ender’s game is very hard for me to reconcile because on the one hand that buried anger and feeling of exceptionalism is very tied to my childhood and I connect with it very much. But the moral of the story does seem to be that “some people are inherently better than others and we need to treat them as such,” which is also what I was told as a kid and fucked me up tremendously.
I think the hitler thing is overblown though. If anything Ender is forced into something horrific by a military state, so it could be more easily read as a libertarian thing where “superior” people need to be given full independence, and that trying to control them results in…genocide i guess?
There’s also a sort of mixed-in thing about how extreme violence and unchecked anger can eventually result in really good things?? So it’s also sorta pro-military?? I have no fucking idea
Anyway I think about Ender’s game a lot and my takeaway is that OSC doesn’t know what he’s saying, but it has some cool imagery and some fucked up messaging.
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yeah I buy that. The baby hitler thing just doesn’t scan for me, that’s backformation from Card’s IRL beliefs, it’s really not in the work. I think there’s more room to criticize its attitude towards settler colonialism than anything - all these people died, but what are you gonna do, might as well use the land…
the negative reviews I’m reading from people tho, online, really seem to entirely miss the point of the book, which seems to essentially be that war is evil and wouldn’t it be nice if we could just talk to each other. like, that’s the text, not even subtext
the scene where everyone is cheering like “congrats Ender you won the war!!! it was never a simulation!!” and he’s just looking at them like
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the hitler thing is a tongue in cheek exaggeration but its still a book where school shooter psychology is utterly normalized: Ender is hated because he’s so superior to all of his peers! Everything he does that is morally reprehensible is a result of having no other alternative! He is blameless in all the violence he commits! Its frankly absurd to compare him to Florya in Come and See, who is pretty much the exact opposite of Ender in every way.
Its the story of a brutal monster who twists every situation he’s in into one where he’s helpless to prevent the brutality he enacts, that it was simply an unavoidable consequence of a series of decisions other people made. He broke a kid’s arm in school because he had to, the alternative would have been worse, he murdered his classmate after he already won their fight because he had to, the alternative would’ve been worse, he killed all the buggers because he had to, there was no way to know that the alien other was capable of communication.
“The only way to end things completely…” Ender thinks, “was to hurt Bonzo enough that his fear was stronger than his hate”
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Like, if I were to be more generous to the text, I would say that Ender is not Hitler, but the living incarnation of DARVO
He was never truly the victim, never the marginalized, he was an abuser the entire time (along with Graff), but the narrative has such utter confidence in his own blamelessness that it belies his actions within that narrative. None of those who ‘bullied’ him were given the same generosity of reading. They’re all sadists and bullies to their core, whereas Ender feels bad every time he has to exercise his superiority to put them in their place (in their grave). He doesn’t like having to kill and maim and commit genocide, but he doesn’t have any other choice when dealing with the other.
CW: real-life child abuse not to get way too personal but Ender’s Game reminds me of what my mom said after every time she whipped me with the buckle end of a belt: “This hurts me more than it hurts you”
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I don’t think this analysis holds up for a number of reasons.
- Per the plot, Ender believes that humanity is currently at war with the buggers awaiting their invasion for the bulk of the story. He doesn’t realize humanity are invading the other way until fairly late in the book. (actually good critique: given how smart he’s supposed to be, he should have been smart enough to conclude his superiors are lying to him about the war.) again, the major reveal is it’s literally hidden from him that what he’s doing is committing genocide; what he’s trying to do is flunk out of the test so he can go home.
- He is absolutely a tool of the military state; he doesn’t have a real educated option to say no to them until he’s already up to his eyeballs in war, they enact whatever violence upon him they desire, and they leave him defenseless as they desire too, as is stated in every situation where he kills a classmate (the first comes after his monitor is removed, and adults intentionally let him get assaulted; the second comes after the text states he is repeatedly waiting for an adult to intervene and protect him, and they intentionally do not.) if the adults were kind to him, and all the killings were actually his intention, then that would certainly be a different book!
- The way he is intentionally isolated and his peers set against him by his superiors is, per the actual explicit text of the book, much more to blame for their hatred of him than the fact of his superiority. (granted, he is portrayed as a superior being, which ought to come in for criticism). His peers are being manipulated to hate him just as much as he is being manipulated to isolate himself from them. they are victims too!
to me, dink meeker is the one who actually comes off morally ‘the best’ - he concludes he is being used, he refuses (for a time) to get promoted, he attempts to redpill ender on the battle school, etc - but i don’t see how you can take ender’s attitude as a ‘school shooter’ attitude. your analysis is giving individual ethical responsibility pride of place in a fictional system that is demonstrably a morally monstrous system. (again, critique ought to be the military system is insufficiently portrayed as monstrous, hence my comment about settler colonialism above. not the character!) doing terrible harm without meaning to do harm is literally the theme of the book, it’s not something only school shooters do.
cw ca the canonical child abusers in the book are the military state. this is part of the reason I relate so heavily to the work.
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speaking of card I found this interesting post trying to make sense of him and LDS
bobbyfiend·11 mo. ago·edited 6 mo. ago]
As a former Mormon and multi-decade fan of his work, I think I understand it. He’s followed a trajectory I saw the rest of the church follow from the early 90s to the present day. There has always been a struggle between (more or less) “left” and “right” in the LDS church, as two alternative cultural directions. Actually, true “left” has been a very small group since maybe the mid 19th century, so the struggle is really between “moderates” and “hard-liners.”
The church itself uses its significant (i.e., kind of crushing) authoritarian power to discourage any discussion of this divide or gradient; the church desperately wants to be seen as monolithic and united by any outside observers, so even members are usually reluctant to observe any differences, especially in leaders. Nevertheless, there have been the hard-liners, like Spencer W. Kimball, president of the church during the 70s and most of the 80s, and then the moderates, like Gordon B. Hinckley, president during most of the 90s. As with any organization, the head is not the whole thing, so there have always been members of the Apostles and lower-ranking leaders further center or right on the continuum (all men, of course; there are some female “leaders” with no serious administrative power, and they have their subtle political tells, too, but this matters very little to most members). And always there are the members, dominated by those in the US (and they are dominated by those in Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and California), who reflect and push these political currents, though they’re never, ever supposed to notice and especially not talk about that.
The church doesn’t have anything like the Catholic Catechism; there is no canonical repository of its beliefs and doctrine. If you ask, you’ll be referred to the 13 Articles of Faith, which leave out a great many key issues, or to the scriptures, which are open to a wide range of interpretation and are, canonically, subordinate to whatever the presidency said this week, anyway. So members believe all kinds of things while pretending to believe all the same things. Go to almost any LDS church in the USA on any given Sunday and, in a Sunday School class, start a conversation about evolution and listen to the apparently reasonable-sounding things that get said for the next half hour, while the sound of grinding teeth and quiet harumphing threatens to drown them out.
My perception is that the church as a whole, averaging across the members and the leaders, moved kind of more center during the 90s, then back to the right as the 21st century arrived. Prominent, public members like OSC, even if they weren’t specifically in church-level leadership positions, were (from conversations I had with many people during that time) under increasing pressure to toe the line and, if not vocally supporting the more hard-line statements coming from the leadership, at least take great care not to seem to contradict them. There has been a good deal of writing in the weird and interesting world of fringe-level Mormon writers and people like sociologists studying Mormons about the flurries of excommunications of prominent figures, especially anyone criticizing church actions, since the late 90s (though it happened earlier, too, of course). The LDS church had (and has) a lot of Martin Luthers nailing treatises to doors, metaphorically speaking–citing scriptures, past leaders’ statements, etc., to try to nudge the church further left, or arrest its slide to the right. Many of them are now no longer members, one way or the other.
The result of this is that almost any prominent, public LDS figure now, I think, either pretty strongly supports the church’s more right-wing, anti-gay, nationalist, etc. positions, or else they’re no longer members of the church. There are exceptions, but the more public your criticism, and the bigger your audience, the more likely the church is to pressure you to conform or get out.
Orson Scott Card conformed at every opportunity, taking him from the somewhat edgy LDS insider willing to write things that made Good Mormons blush and think deeply to something like a propagandist for the church’s unspoken agenda, speaking the worst of it out loud at every opportunity. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.
Edit : Another commenter has pointed out some things that don’t fit my theory about OSC’s behavior/attitude change, and they’re good observations. They need consideration. Whether or not my perceived broad-trend arc in church hardlininess is accurate, it seems possible that Card’s shift could be more complexly motivated. I should think about this.
Edit July 2021: As of a few weeks ago, another semi-prominent Mormon has been excommunicated for her criticism of the church’s leadership. Natasha Helfer (Parker) is a sex therapist, sex blogger, etc. (and sometime personal acquaintance) who has been outspoken about the destructive consequences of the church’s sex-negative culture and its anti-LGBTQ policies. She was excommunicated for this, and for refusing to walk her statements back.
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The big problem with the text is something you accidentally touch on: he didn’t intend to cause harm, so the narrative absolves him of any guilt. This extends to a literal act of genocide. He is not only a tool of the military state, he is a metonymic symbol of that state. America didn’t intend to cause any harm(an excuse any member of the CIA would swear by) when it overthrew south american governments and installed puppet dictatorships, but it just happened to work out that way.
I’m criticizing the plot directly because it is set up to intentionally make a person who commits genocide an object of sympathy because it wasn’t his intent and he feels a little bad about it afterwards (so he goes to space brazil as a missionary and then brings the people he genocided back from the dead in the sequel, the hitler joke practically writes itself)
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I’ll just quote John Kessel’s postscript to his classic essay on Ender’s Game since it says everything I want to:
Card sets up Ender to be the sincere, abused innocent, and rigs the game to make us accept that he does no wrong. I see the entire pupose of the “remote war by game” trick in the novel as a device to make this argument plausible. But in the real world genocide is not committed by accident. We see the immoral consequences of such a mode of thought in the heaps of dead bodies that history has piled up, committed always by leaders who tell us they only meant to protect us from evil. I just will not accept that.