Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee

A Foreign Woman by Sergei Dovlatov

Introduction, a satirical sketch of Russian emigre neighborhood in Queens, is excellent. Story, not so much.

July's People by Nadine Gordimer

Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

Would be interesting to compare this to The Book of Daniel. What else have I read about being the child of radicals? That has to be a fairly developed sub-genre.

The Ivankiad by Vladimir Voinovich

French Intellectuals Against the Left by Michael Scott Christofferson

I'm going to claim this one despite reading only four of six chapters.

Notes on five & six:

Chapter 5: The New Philosophers and their Interlocutors

• “New philosophy” was a late 1970s philosophical moment - rather than a movement - that was always more about politics than philosophy. It’s most closely associated with two French intellectuals, Andre Glucksmann and Bernard Henri-Levy, though a number of other authors together formed a very loose affiliation. If I had to summarize their ideas in a single sentence, it would be a pessimistic doubt that any structured political project - either revolutionary or not - can avoid descending into large-scale totalitarian violence like Auschwitz or the gulag, which they saw as emerging from the same rationalist & statist tradition as the governments of Western Europe and the U.S. Revolutionary projects are perhaps slightly more suspect because they tend to lead to an intensification of state violence owing to the Manichean, millenarian dynamics inherent to revolution. This led to an intense skepticism and distrust of any form of state power, which ultimately seems vaguely anarchist or, you could argue, libertarian. Because of this fundamental distrust, the only acceptable politics are modest, moral, and rights-based. But what’s interesting about them isn’t their ideas so much as their embodiment of what Christofferson calls “the coming of age of French antitotalitarianism.”
• New philosophy got its start as a marketing campaign by a publisher to sell books and only acquired a hint of coherence once it gathered attention as a critique of the Union of the Left. Christofferson again and again emphasizes the extent to which domestic political pressures drove, if not the genesis of these ideas, at least their prominence in French intellectual life.
• The impresario of new philosophy was Bernard Henri-Levy, who seemed to possess an intuitive gift for identifying intellectual trends and marketing himself to them. He found work at the publishing house Grasset, where he arranged contracts for many of his friends and marketed them as “new philosophers” regardless of how disparate their ideas were. So, once again, new philosophy started out as an essentially meaningless marketing term and only later became associated with an antitotalitarian critique of the French Left.
• Their notoriety was a product of a unique and brief historical moment: after the 1977 municipal elections, which the Union of the Left won by a landslide, and before the dissolution of the Union of the Left and subsequent electoral defeat in the 1978 parliamentary elections.
• At the time, there was considerable anxiety among the non-Communist left about the PCF gaining state power, and - as with Solzhenitsyn and other Eastern European dissidents - the new philosophers served as a cudgel with which to beat the PCF. Again, their fame originated in their political relevance much more so than the actual content of their ideas.
• A large element of that political relevance lay in the identity of the writers themselves as former Marxists - or at least claiming to be former Marxists. Glucksmann grew up in communist youth organizations and was a member of the PCF before breaking with it during the 1950s in reaction to the Hungarian invasion and PCF policy on the Algerian war. Henri-Levy claimed to have been at the barracks during the events of 1968, though Christofferson writes that this was untrue. In any case, both he and Glucksmann were of the left, which made their critique of Marxism all the more damning -- because it was an attack from the left.
• Moreover, new philosophy was a mass media phenomenon as well as a philosophical movement. Both Henri-Levy and Glucksmann were not at all averse to speaking in dramatic and simplistic formulas that played well on French TV. Throughout the summer of 1977, they appeared on TV shows debating different prominent intellectuals. One of their common rhetorical techniques was to claim that their critics were engaged in the same absolutist, discriminatory thinking that led to totalitarianism and the gulag. This made them undebatable, since they would just discredit the principles of logical debate itself. All this combined to sell a large number of books.
• They cast themselves as dissidents-to-be under a feared tyrannical government by the Union of the Left. In this way, they claimed for themselves some of the moral authority that Eastern European dissidents had come to enjoy in late 1970s France without actually facing any political repression.
• The two key texts of new philosophy were Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers & Henri-Levy’s Barbarism with a Human Face.
• The Master Thinkers argued that many of the big names of continental philosophy - Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc. - had provided the intellectual basis for the modern state’s project of domination. They had “put together the mental apparatus indispensable to the launching of the great final solutions of the twentieth century.” The state, by definition, seeks to control the organic and chaotic energies of the pleb, with whom Glucksmann is allied precisely because the pleb is not an organized - and therefore coercive - political force. In this way, Glucksmann’s book is populist, anti-intellectual, and anarchistic. 
• While Glucksmann does see hope in the plebs and their resistance to state coercion, Henri-Levy’s Barbarism with a Human Face is even more pessimistic, arguing that the only acceptable form of political action is a defensive assertion of moralism and rights in the face of exploitative state authority. His book sees in religion a bulwark against totalitarianism because religion imagines an otherworldly sovereign, which Henri-Levy thinks discourages transformative earthly politics. Without religion, the state takes itself to be sovereign and embarks on millenarian social projects, which inevitably end in tyranny.
• In its suspicion of the state and all political action, you could make the case that new philosophy is weirdly conservative.
• New philosophy benefitted from the support and endorsement of well established French intellectuals. For instance, Foucault praised and promoted Glucksmann, even though Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers had appropriated and simplified many of Foucault’s ideas. Likewise, an established intellectual journal called Tel quel praised Henri-Levy and opened its pages to him. In general, Christofferson sees this support as a savvy political move: Foucault and Tel quel had accurately gauged the contemporary political mood and hitched their names to the new philosophers as a way to promote their own brands.
• I would note that Christofferson conceives his subjects as primarily self-interested and politically sensitive. He always looks for a political motive behind these intellectuals’ decisions.
• The irony of the new philosophers was that they often posed as would-be dissidents, soon to be thrown in the gulag by an ascendent PCF, at exactly the same time that the PCF was moderating its position, disavowing the dictatorship of the proletariat, and criticizing the USSR. There was also no sustained, hardcore opposition to the new philosophers in French intellectual life. They played dissidents while benefitting from what was the hegemonic ideology of their time - antitotalitarianism. And while fear of a PCF-led government drove much of the anti-Left critique, the Left lost the 1978 election, and the PCF never recovered thereafter. 

Chapter 6: A Revisionist History of the French Revolution

• Christofferson argues that the work of Francois Furet was, in essence, an antitotalitarian polemic directed at the French Left disguised as a revisionist history of the French Revolution.
• Furet was a committed Marxist and member of the PCF until the late 1950s, though he would later claim that he had grown disillusioned with the party in the early 1950s.
• In the late 70s, it was a mark of farsighted prestige to have spotted the essential totalitarian nature of communism ahead of the curve, and the earlier the better. Therefore, Furet tried to locate his rejection of the party as early as possible, but his published work shows that he was a member of a reformist communist group in the late 50s and remained a Marxist into the 1960s. 
• After failing to complete his state doctorate, he turned to journalism, only returning to history when, according to Christofferson, he saw a way to advance his public profile through history writing.
• The book that marked the full development of the position that made him famous was called Interpreting the French Revolution. It appeared in 1978, again at the high water mark of this antitotalitarian moment. 
• The book argues that the Terror was an inevitable outgrowth of the Manichean dynamics of revolution, and that conversely Jacobinism as a revolutionary ideology was sufficient to explain the development of the revolution. Ideology and only ideology dictated their actions. Revolutionary ideology led inevitably to repression because the revolution declares everything prior to itself to be obsolete and deserving of extinction, while at the same time denying that there can be any objective obstacles to the its revolutionary program. Therefore, if the revolution does encounter obstacles, they can only be the work of enemies, which must be destroyed.
• Moreover, Furet suggested that the repressive illiberalism of the Revolution still lay at the heart of French political culture, which explained why so many intellectuals, including his younger self, were blind to communism’s true nature. His thesis provided an excuse for all the ex-communists seeking to defend themselves from the antitotalitarian critique. 
• Ultimately, Furet was smearing the French Revolution with the now-disgraced reputation of the Soviet Union, suggesting that they belonged to the same tainted revolutionary tradition. 
• As with the new philosophers, Furet read the political winds correctly and enjoyed considerable success for his antitotalitarian interpretation of the French Revolution
• I dislike theories of totalitarianism because they tend to steamroll flat - often for politically questionable motives - diverse political and historical phenomena, ideas, trends, etc. It’s a process of clumsy equivalencies. Revolution becomes Marxism becomes the Soviet Union becomes Stalin becomes the gulag. 1937 becomes 1977. Stalin and Hitler might as well be the same thing because, hey, they both put people in camps. One immediate giveaway is that totalitarianism only exists for antitotalitarians, and so it is only defined in opposition, as a collection of undesirable tendencies. And since totalitarianism is always cast as the ultimate bad, it serves mainly as a political slur for all the things you’ve usefully grouped together. It’s just a shitty rhetorical technique, a reductio ad hitlerum.

The Zhakov Mission by Andrei Gulyashki

Absolutely hilarious.

God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène

An earnest attempt at grafting Marxism onto colonial Senegal. Maybe a little GVHD.

Black Wind, White Snow by Charles Clover

Russia, as Western commentators often say, is a country in search of a national idea. Until 1917, tsarist despotism sufficed to hold together Russia’s sprawling conglomeration of ethnicities, territories, religions, and languages. The USSR, of course, lived and died by the viability of its evolving brand of Marxism-Leninism, which was replaced in the 1980s by a short-lived desire to join the Western liberal order. Delt successive blows over the course of the 90s, Russian liberalism had all but expired by the 1998 financial crisis and currency devaluation, leaving as an open question what would come next. According to Charles Clover’s Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism, the answer is Eurasianism, a specious and – for most of its history – marginal strain of multiethnic nationalism that appears custom-made for the Kremlin’s neo-imperial project.

Black Wind, White Snow begins by tracing the intellectual history of Eurasianism, which developed in the writings of men brutalized over the course of Russia’s turbulent twentieth century. The first wave of Eurasianists belonged to Russia’s pre-revolutionary elite, who fled the country as part of the White diaspora and lived the rest of their lives in European exile, pining for a world that no longer existed. One of the most prominent, Nikolay Trubetskoy, was typical in that he achieved lasting recognition for his work in a different field – linguistics – and later disavowed his Eurasianist phase.

Perhaps because Eurasianism itself does not merit serious critique, Clover constantly psychologizes his subjects, arguing that they practiced political philosophy as therapy. Surviving mass violence and social upheaval, their “pet theory was born out of a collective questioning of the very value of civilization and progress” (9), Clover writes. Stateless and nostalgic for home, Eurasianists created a theory that promised powerful state protection and national belonging. In Clover’s telling, the circumstances of its creation determined Eurasianism’s features.

The result is a brutal, borderline fascist line of thought, which from the start was predicated on a rejection of Western liberal values in favor of a primal, traditional, geographically determined culture that Russia supposedly shares with the other peoples of Eurasia. Trubetskoy and his peers argued that “cultures and civilizations have natural boundaries that delineate the extent of the unconscious architecture of a unique cultural geometry. They are characterized by an entire substratum of unconscious relationships between language sounds, music scales, folk dress, art and even architecture which will naturally occur over a certain territory and end at common geographical frontiers of common culture (55).”  These first Eurasianists believed that the various cultures of the Eurasian heartland – the “world island,” in Halford Mackinder's famous term – were converging naturally and inevitably, and that the root of all Russia’s troubles was failure to respect “the frontiers of natural systems” (57). In other words, Russia foundered when it sought to join the West.

The next link in the Eurasianist chain, Lev Gumilev, associated this common culture with self-sacrifice and centralized state control, despite – or perhaps owing to – his own extensive suffering at the hands of the Soviet state. Gumilev, the son of renowned poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilev, spent fourteen years in the USSR’s system of forced labor, which included work on the White Sea–Baltic Canal. During his time in the Gulag, Gumilev conceived the idea of “passionarity” (пассионарность), which he defined as “the powerful impulse which pulls the human towards obtaining some kind of unnecessary benefit, in particular, posthumous honor” (96). According to Gumilev, cultures excel that abound with such self-sacrificing, militant passionaries: witness the waves of nomads that periodically swept out of the Eurasian heartland and across Europe. In his later years as an author of popular and fanciful “histories,” Gumilev wrote that the USSR was heir to this fighting Eurasian spirit, “emphasizing the ‘unity’ of the Soviet peoples under a benevolent Russian hand” (141). He would spend the end of his life waging a campaign to preserve the same Soviet state that had imprisoned him for so many years.

Black Wind, White Snow makes a sharp turn when it reaches the post-Soviet era and career of Alexander Dugin, the ultranationalist intellectual whom many consider the Kremlin’s unofficial ideologue. Beginning in the 90s, Eurasianism emerged from obscurity to become the ideology of choice for Russia’s military and security elite, and consequently Clover’s job becomes much harder  – he must demonstrate Eurasianism’s influence on the state, as well as its continuing historical evolution. Clover does not fully succeed at either task.

Dugin got his start in Moscow’s far-right underground of the 1980s, which gleefully appropriated Nazi, theosophist, and other esoteric ideas and iconographies as an expression of anti-Sovietism. However, after the USSR disintegrated, Dugin made an about-face and became one of the Soviet Union’s most fervent apologists, casting it in the role of latter-day Russian empire, host of primordial Eurasian civilization. In Dugin’s best known work, The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, Russia is described as a “tellurocracy,” or land power, with a civilization tending toward “settlement, conservatism...hardness and stability of social traditions” (238). Similar to his Eurasianist predecessors, Dugin believed that a “society’s juridical order and state institutions are expressions of the particular character of geography” (239). In Russia’s case, that meant a civilization-state defined by “upheaval and violence...as spiritual values in themselves” (239), authoritarianism, and opposition to “Liberalism in all its manifestations” (284). Among Dugin’s main prescriptions for restoring Russia to greatness was reconstituting Soviet territories: “Georgia must be dismembered and Ukraine annexed” (238). In all this, a reader could be forgiven for seeing a Russian version of National Socialism. One primary difference is the Eurasianist emphasis on multiethnic empire – made to order for the rulers of a revanchist, multiethnic state.

Therefore, it is not surprising that, as the Kremlin soured on Western liberalism, it would turn to Eurasianist ideas to justify an expansionist and authoritarian project. Putin signaled this change in an address to the federal assembly by citing Lev Gumilev’s passionarity as key to determining “[w]ho will lead and who will remain on the periphery, and inevitably lose their independence” (1-2). Dugin, who had long lectured privately to Russia’s future military leaders at the prestigious Academy of the General Staff, found himself in the public eye, appearing on television and granted his own radio show. Most prominent, of course, have been Putin’s annexation of Crimea and interventions in Georgia and eastern Ukraine, all territories Dugin had often called on the Kremlin to retake. Dugin even predicted “the design of the flag of the Donetsk Republic” (330). Altogether, Clover convincingly makes the case that Dugin has become the Kremlin’s unofficial political theorist – if only as a matter of convenience.

Yet, the latter half of Black Wind, White Snow has significant shortcomings. In what is foremost the history of an idea, Clover does not fully establish Dugin within the Eurasianist tradition of Trubetskoy and Gumilev. While Dugin’s ideas bear many similarities to those of earlier Eurasianists, the reader is mostly left to discern the resemblance and assume linkages; Clover traces few direct lines of influence. Moreover, Clover over-promises the extent to which his book explicates the Kremlin’s actions through the lens of Eurasianism. In the introduction, he argues that “[i]deas – both good and bad – play an underappreciated role in political life” (5) and that “[l]ooking at Russia’s recent behavior through the lens of Eurasianism [...] makes a lot of the current behaviour snap into focus” (17).

That the Kremlin is driven to defend territories that are not in all cases Russian, but does not ‘defend’ Russians in other states, is indicative: there are certain parts of the former Russian Empire that are seen as ‘ours’ and certain parts that are not. This dividing line appears to follow a strategic and cultural logic strikingly in tune with the theories of the Eurasianists who drew cultural frontiers across Eastern Europe, approximately where the Kremlin seems to have done the same. (16)

Fascinating as this idea is, Clover does not return to it. In fact, the book’s final chapters, in which Clover attempts to show the Kremlin acting on a Eurasianist agenda (or at least exploiting Eurasianist ideas), read like a hasty addendum. Once again, Clover only sketches lines of influence. In part, this is because Kremlin decisionmaking is notoriously opaque, but may also be because Clover was caught unawares at a late stage of composition when his obscure intellectual history abruptly became politically relevant.

Black Wind, White Snow is a history of nationalism, yet rarely questions the idea at nationalism’s core: that there exists a primordial nation to be mobilized and harnessed by the state. This reflects Clover’s tendency to handle his biographical content more deftly than his characters’ ideas, which he presents more often than he scrutinizes. This may have been a deliberate choice, an acknowledgement that Eurasianism has never been about robust thinking, or even Eurasia. At heart, Eurasianism is a program of anti-Westernism, anti-liberalism, and political expedience, cynically adopted by Russia’s leadership because, for the time being, they work.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

See, I hate this. I know I read this within the last five or so years. Looking up the plot summaries of many of the stories, I recall their general arcs, more or less. Some of them clearly made no impression whatsoever, but I did read the book. Yet, I didn't record it at the time, and my memory of the stories is considerably fuzzier than usual, much like Dear Life by Alice Munro, which I also had to enter years later after vaguely recalling that I had read it but never recorded doing so. Yes, I do find short story collections harder than usual to get through, unless listened to as audiobooks, but I have no justification for either my bad memory of these two or failure to make an entry.

Being Red by Howard Fast

Fast's is an extraordinarily non-ideological Communism, presented as a common-sense commitment to human dignity and anti-fascism. It's also very national, rooted in and concerned with the U.S. context, and often ignorant of the broader international Communist movement and, of course, Stalin's various crimes, at least through the mid-50s. What rumours filtered out were troubling, but for the most part whatever was going on in the USSR was low on Fast's list of concerns, until finally it wasn't.

Fast casts himself as a bright-eyed American boy in the Mark Twain tradition, a man of principle, action, and optimism, falling into success with a pretense of aww-shucks modesty that he only sporadically maintains, always the naive innocent (though also always "working the angles"), shocked when his sunny assumptions collapse again and again.

By far the best part: Fast horrifying Ilya Ehrenburg by offering him chewing gum after a full French meal at the Paris Peace Congress of 1949. (I read a good chunk of Ehrenburg's post-war memoirs last week, which were fascinating.)

Splinternet by Scott Malcomson

A short history of the internet. Born in the military-industrial-academic complex, briefly flourishing as a utopian boomer subculture, now increasingly nationalized and commercialized in an uneasy standoff with remnants of hacker autonomy and openness.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia by Anne Garrels

Nothing is True and Everything is Permitted by Peter Pomerantsev

Dear Life by Alice Munro

I remember reading this years ago, but apparently never recorded it.

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Neonomicon by Alan Moore

Don't be that writer where, as soon as women are introduced as main characters in a grimdark world of men, the reader thinks, "oh, well of course she's going to be raped." With Neonomicon, that's what Alan Moore has become. Then he has Merril Brears blandly announce herself as a recovering sex addict, making her eventual Moorian rape all the more inevitable. Moore writes her as a sex addict and a rape victim and very little else.

The opening story, "The Courtyard," which Moore published years earlier, is quite good and stands on its own as a horrifying and eerie tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. It's the later Neonomicon that goes badly wrong. First, Moore involves Lovecraft himself as a metatextual element, and the characters stand around talking about just how weird it is that their case resembles various Lovecraft stories. Actually, it's more accurate to say that Lovecraft's stories exist in Neonomicon as nearly literal histories, which creates weird tensions in the text. Early pages play Moore's usual game of references to The King in Yellow, Ambrose Bierce, etc., until the agents themselves notice that nearly everything they're investigating refers to Lovecraft or his influences, which seems at odds with Neonomicon's conclusion that Lovecraft merely documented supernatural forces already at play. Like, if the cosmic horror came first, why would modern devotees scrupulously reference Lovecraft and co., rather than the forces themselves? Does Cthulhu give a shit about Lovecraft? Also, why does Lovecraft chronicle  so literally what for him would be recent events and call them stories? Sure, you can invent explanations, but you're probably excusing writing that doesn't deserve it.

Much worse is the dayslong, multi-issue rape of Agent Brears, which reads like Alan Moore's private stash of fetish porn, complete with Brears arguably gradually getting into it. It basically is the plot of the second half of the book. 

There's nothing wrong with depicting extreme violence so long as the causes and consequences are treated seriously. But Neonomicon ends with an airy, banal chat between Brears and another character who carved two women into "tulips" while they were still alive. These two people, who are supposed to have had their minds rearranged to perceive cosmic, inhuman reality to the point of psychosis, talk like neighbors discussing the price of gasoline. 

And if Sax is on board with the Cthulhu/Deep Ones mythos, why would he carve a swastika into his forehead? Aren't swastikas the only thing that keeps Deep Ones at bay?

The Other Wind by Ursula Le Guin

Also, several Lovecraft short stories on my phone at Deathfest 2016 while taking a little breather from bands. Good atmosphere, very silly, super racist.

Providence Act 1 by Alan Moore

Tales from Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock

One of the many reasons I dislike air travel is because it reduces geography—former arbiter of cultural and political identity, of the literal shape of history—to a curiosity, and travel itself—properly a pilgrimage across physical and social barriers, which being passed are in part assumed—to a convenience. It decontextualizes the deep old god of place into an arbitrary novelty. The effect is much more pronounced than with land transit, which is still beholden to geography to varying extents. At least, you're forced to watch it pass by.

Of course, you can always opt to take the long way round, but air travel makes the choice an affectation.

Part of the appeal of fantasy is that it returns to worlds still governed by geography, where journeys are difficult ventures into unknown territory that transform travelers along the way. Elric truly does not know what lies beyond the nearest pile of scree, has no choice but to scramble up it, and arrives at the top understanding the place and its locales better than if he had teleported a shortcut. It's not that we want to do it ourselves, but magical, pre-Industrial worlds are a vicarious reminder that something is missing: geographic rootedness/limitation/context.

A Feast Unknown by Philip José Farmer

A pulpy mix of pornography, satire, pop Freudianism, and adventure fiction straight from the 1960s. Victorian orientalism is more or less directly addressed, as are the sexless supermen that we're still dealing with at the multiplex. Will sent this to me along with The Sailor on the Sea of Fate, and it does check some relevant boxes: superhero antecedents, Victorian romance of the wild other and the strong men of civilization that straddle that line and cross between worlds, immortality and how immortal people might truly be, airy, compunctionless sex, cathartic perversity. I could have read it in a few hours if I still read books.

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

A system built on self-conscious, ideological subjugation of nature confronts a natural force it can scarcely comprehend, much less control.

Soviet men pride themselves on hurling their bodies into the nuclear pyre, which is chunks of irradiated graphite scattered across a reactor roof, and also months spent burying dirt beneath more dirt and shooting housepets.

"People are already living after the nuclear war—though when it began, they didn't notice. I felt like I was recording the future."

The Rebel of Rangoon by Delphine Schrank

Bloodchild by Octavia Butler

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Stoner by John Williams