It's a magical world

Higginbotham, Adam. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019). 

I became gripped by the Chernobyl disaster last year after consuming the first three episodes of the TV show. I formed a somewhat jaundiced prejudgement of this book based on an interview he gave the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in which he discusses his strange decision not to engage more proactively in debunking the rampant misinformation about the disaster even as he hits out at the then-unreleased TV show for not being completely accurate. I think fiction is fiction and history is history; the differences between them are obvious. But having read the book, I would venture to say that it's excellent and important despite its flaws--and I think comparing it to the TV show is a worthwhile exercise that both helps keep the cast of characters straight and illuminates both some of the profound problems of the Soviet system that the show elides as well as the ways in which narrative shapes narrative. For example, it's clear to me that debunking misinformation would have interrupted Higginbotham's narrative flow, which is a legitimate concern, but to me doing it somehow, even awkwardly, outweighs the loss of textual elegance. Similarly, I do wish there were a few more diagrams of the plant interior.

Higginbotham's essential innovation is the hundreds of interviews he conducted with experts and survivors--many of whom have died in the interim--to construct a picture of the disaster itself and the acute phases of the aftermath. Did they save the world? Well, probably. I came away with slightly more sympathy for some of the main players in the TV show in some cases and in others slightly less; my personal evaluation is that Higginbotham maybe goes slightly too far in his quasi-exoneration of Dyatlov, whose perpetually unexplained decision to conduct the planned test at 200 MW instead of the prescribed 700 is probably one of the two key proximate causes of the disaster. (The other being Toptunov's mistake in failing to set the automatic power maintenance system, resulting in the system defaulting to a maintenance level of 0 MW.) But Higginbotham is right that the disaster was conditioned by every aspect of the Soviet system, and the Soviet deputy prime minister was right when he told Gorbachev that Chernobyl was inevitably going to happen somewhere. Ultimately the fact that none of the operators understood the profound risks in the reactor's design because the flaws and the intervening lesser disasters were treated as state secrets meant that something was always going to go catastrophically wrong. And now we know that above 1 sievert, radiation does have a smell: ozone, because it ionizes the air. And it tastes of metal or sour apples.

Higginbotham does gently push back on the idea of "radiophobia" and other conditions invented to obscure the profound damage done to the people who were exposed to radiation from the disaster--though one of Chernobyl's lessons is that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki binary of "survival" and "fatality" has more gray in it than previously realized; maximum survivable doses were revised upwards thanks to what doctors learned in 1986. Which is not to say that what happened is okay, because it isn't, but it is to say that there are a lot of health problems that can fall short of killing people in the short or even medium term, and these have not been adequately surveyed because survivors' testimony has been systematically denied and downplayed, in what for me as a trained historian is an obvious red flag. But the book for this topic is Kate Brown's Manual for Survival, which I haven't read yet.

( Larger implications )

What I'm Reading
Hostage by Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown, the sequel to Stranger. I'm enjoying it quite a lot so far--it picks up something like six weeks after the end of the first book, and the time jump allows the authors to continue exploring the ramifications of what went down at the end of Stranger in a way that feels believable. I'm only about 1/6 of the way through, though, so I can't comment on much else yet!

Silver Spoon vol. 7 - I know, I know, I'm so slow. In my defense, my usual commute on the train is only 11 minutes long.

What I've Just Read
The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal - Really, really excellent. The book winds up being divided into three segments--Paris; Vienna; Tokyo--and somewhere in the beginning of the Vienna section, the central episode of the netsuke's history and the Ephrussis', the story flipped over and became violently engrossing. I'm not sure I've read such a particularly Viennese portrait of the lead-up to the Anschluss, and the book also brings home all over again the ways in which the inability to deal with Jewish people really seems to be the central problem of modern Europe, even as de Waal stays focused on his family in particular. (I saw a tumblr post the day after I finished the book talking about anti-Semitism in France after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The OP concluded that Europe's response to anti-Semitism will always be "be less Jewish." But in interwar Vienna, as de Waal points out, not embodying anti-Semitic stereotypes was equally an affront to non-Jewish society. It was a catch-22.) More than half of Vienna's population was Jewish at the turn of the C20, but that was immaterial to the hatred that was marshalled against Austrian Jews, and German Jews, and the Jews of France and Eastern Europe. The core of the Ephrussi family survived the war, but at the very high cost of their property and even in some sense, it seems (though de Waal never says this explicitly) their identity. Although brief, de Waal is equally good on the hypocrisy of the newly reconstructed Austrian government ("Austria was the first victim"…no) and its refusal to even consider reparations. It becomes very clear that without his grandmother, the indomitable lawyer and scholar Elizabeth Ephrussi, the story would have gone very differently.

I've lost the netsuke again in these remarks. They reappear after the war, a small collection of objects saved from the wreckage of a family, a city, a society; they make their way back to Japan with Iggie, de Waal's great uncle, and by the end of the book have emigrated again, this time back to London. De Waal refuses to sentimentalize their return in a way that fits with the netsuke themselves; there is no juxtaposition to be drawn between their survival and the destruction of six million people, including many of the Ephrusssis' extended family. I liked the Tokyo section of the book; Showa Japan is gone, but de Waal is very good at evoking it, and in particular Tokyo immediately after the surrender. There are more commonalities between what was going on in Japan and Europe throughout the entire scope of the book than de Waal admits, though to me that was an unavoidable element of the whole story. I also really appreciated the ways in which the Paris section acts as something of a key to Proust's novels, which are wonderful but have more issues than a weekly periodical. In any case, highly recommended. You might also be interested in liv's remarks on the book.

What I'll Read Next
Earth Logic by Laurie J. Marks. SO EXCITE.

Kingsley, Mary. The Congo and the Cameroons. London: Penguin Books, 2007. [1897]

I first heard of Mary Kingsley in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, where she is singled out as one of the rare Victorian travelers to West Africa whose accounts were not completely racist. When I saw this extract from her 1897 book Travels in West Africa (this extract being part of Penguin Books' Great Journeys series - one of the many awesome Penguin editions we don't get in the States) at Half-Price Books for $2, I pounced.

The book has an extract on the Niger delta and another on the forests of the French Congo, but the meat of the book is the story of Kingsley's ascent of the southwest face of the Great Mount of the Cameroons, becoming the first Englishman (as she says) to reach the summit from that side, in 1893. I was surprised by how much I liked Kingsley - she is funny, self-aware, witty, and has a real gift for the pungent or poetic description, and was also clearly tough as nails. As a good chunk of the book is descriptions of the land and its flora and fauna, her gift for writing matters a lot. She was, one feels, someone one would have loved to have a drink with.

Travel writing always flirts with exoticization, though one suspects that given her audiences in Victorian England, Kingsley didn't need to do much more than tell her story as she saw it. For me one of the most interesting parts of the book was Kingsley's account of her encounter with an Alsatian engineer building a road in the Cameroons who had recently absconded from his post in the Congo Free State - this having been 1892/93, it's only about a year after Joseph Conrad's experience there which he later immortalized in Heart of Darkness. There's no hint in the extracts here of the mass atrocities that Conrad saw and documented in that book, though it was interesting to note that even white men weren't taken very good care of by Leopold's regime.

Although Kingsley's respect for African societies does show through, given that her porters are understandably skeptical of climbing a 13,000 foot mountain in tornado season, a good deal of the account is given over to her tribulations in getting all of them and herself up and down the mountain in one piece, which shows no one to their best advantage - if she isn't outright racist (and she mostly isn't; at one point she specifically disclaims the stereotype of the lazy African, and the Times refused to review her books for their anti-missionary stance), she certainly is patronizing, though it's also clear that she had a will of iron and the determination and ingenuity to match. Most people would probably seem incompetent to her, I'd imagine.

Sei Shônagon. Makura no sôshi | The Pillow Book (ca. 1005). Trans. Meredith McKinney. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Meredith McKinney has done the world a great service by bringing out a new, comprehensive and compulsively readable version of Sei Shônagon's idiosyncratic classic of Heian literature in English. The previous widely-known version by Ivan Morris, while eminently literary, omitted most of the sections of lists of things with which Sei sprinkles her miscellany, and which form a vital part of the book, conveying much more of her worldview and the culture it came from than at first one realizes.

Sei Shônagon was in service at the court of Empress Teishi from roughly 993 to 1000, several years older than many of her fellow gentlewomen and far outstripping many of them in literary-poetic talent; The Pillow Book is among other things a selected recollection of various moments from the acme of Teishi and her branch of the Fujiwara family's glory, which was cut short in 995 with her father Regent Michitaka's sudden death. Her brothers Korechika and Taka'ie were easily shunted aside by their uncle Michinaga, who married his daughter Shôshi to the Emperor Ichijô on the day of the birth of Teishi's son and who went on to subsidize Murasaki Shikibu's service at Shôshi's court at the summit of Fujiwara and Heian glory, recorded vividly in Murasaki's diary and heavily fictionalized in The Tale of Genji. Sei, associated with Teishi and Michitaka despite her well-known admiration for Michinaga, left the court after her mistress's death in childbirth, and completed The Pillow Book, probably close kin to the commonplace books that many aristocrats and courtiers of both genders kept at their bedsides, sometime later. She did so without the official patronage that supported Murasaki's diary, which is obviously meant as a public record of Michinaga's magnificence and munificence, giving The Pillow Book the freedom to be more personal.

( A mini-essay on Sei, Heian Japan, and her book. )

Demick, Barbara. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010.

This is a harrowing but compulsively readable book, and everyone ought to read it.

Barbara Demick has spent the better part of a decade covering the two Koreas from Seoul, and for most of that time she's been interviewing North Korean defectors, who've made it out of their country at great personal and financial cost. In Nothing to Envy Demick focuses on six particular North Koreans, all living in and around the northeastern industrial city of Chongjin, and through their lives tells the story of the DPRK and in particular the story of the famine of the 1990s, which killed at least one million people, possibly more--it's impossible to know, but most estimates go as high as 20% of the country's population, which would be two million people.

Mass death on this scale simply doesn't happen without state action, or in this case inaction, and Demick and the North Koreans in the book lay the blame for the deaths of their families and countrymen squarely where it belongs, with the totalitarian regime begun by Kim Il-Sung and perpetuated by his son Kim Jong-Il, who is now preparing to hand power over to Kim Jong-Un, his son. Everyone who died in the famine--which hasn't really ever stopped, it's just been alleviated by the deaths of so many people and by the development of a rudimentary market economy--was murdered by their government.

In the United States and in the world at large we have the image of North Korea as a "rogue state," as a member of the "Axis of Evil," but essentially of a pathetic, backward regime whose people are fundamentally deluded at best or laughably ignorant at worst, and Kim Jong-Il is seen as more of a risible figure (cf. Team America: World Police) than as the oppressive dictator that he is. Also, when the famine is mentioned, and for instance I write that "up to two million people died," there are implications of some element of passivity on the part of those people, who naively depended on their government to save them and were betrayed. Nothing to Envy provides an essential corrective to both perspectives; Demick documents the ideological indoctrination that begins literally at birth (the only birthdays celebrated in the DPRK are those of the Kims) and which permeates every aspect of daily life. She also documents the extraordinary measures to which people in North Korea went to save themselves and their families from starvation; that so many failed does not represent their passivity in the face of death, but rather how high the odds were stacked against them.

What will happen in North Korea in the future is a crucial but still unanswerable question--everyone thought the regime was on its last legs in the 1990s, and fifteen years later it's still here. But the "currency revaluation" (aka: the regime stealing cash from its citizens) last fall set off actual public protests of some sort, to the extent that the regime apologized (!) and executed a senior official on whom blame was pinned, and no one has high hopes for Kim Jong-Un; reading Demick's reportage on current conditions, it's hard to believe that the regime can stagger along until 2012, the centenary of Kim Il-Sung's birth. In a way Nothing to Envy leaves it hard to imagine how things could get worse; what already happened is horrible enough.

• Dear Pyongyang, a documentary by a zainichi Korean (resident in Japan) filmmaker whose father sent her three older brothers to live in the DPRK;
• Seoul Train, a documentary about North Korean defectors fleeing to China and trying to get out from there--the PRC claims North Korean refugees are "economic migrants" and deports them back to the DPRK, where leaving the country is high treason, punishable by time in the labor camps.

LaMarre, Thomas. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

I'm going to pound this out while I wait for my dad to get home so we can go to the shore. Landmark book of animanga scholarship in half an hour or less: go!

Disclaimer: I am personally acquainted with Tom Lamarre; he wrote one of my reccomendation letters for my graduate school applications.

Tom Lamarre's overarching concern in The Anime Machine is polemical; as I've discussed at greater length before, he has a bone to pick with the vast majority of (English-language) anime and manga scholarship heretofore, namely that people tend to focus on the minutiae of narratives over technical means and that in these narratives, moreover, people go looking for and thus find some sort of amodern, tautological Other "(traditional) Japanese culture" or whatever. In defiance of this tendency, Lamarre insists on reading anime as what it is, a carefully calculated global entertainment phenomenon, and on looking not at what anime talks about but how it talks, how it thinks, what it does.

( How anime thinks technology )

deepad on vidding as a grassroots feminist praxis quilting together a female gaze.

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Chang, Leslie T. Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009.

This is a really good book. I had some quibbles (I always have quibbles, seriously), but all in all Chang has done a remarkable job of telling the stories she found rather than the story she wanted to write, and Factory Girls resonates accordingly.

To wit, in this book Chang, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who is married to the writer Peter Hessert, explores the lives of migrant workers in China, mostly in and around the southern city of Dongguan, where (among many other things) 2/3 of all the world's running shoes are made. Migrant workers in China are overwhelmingly young and female, girls from the villages with varying levels of education whose only real option for economic advancement is moving to the cities to work. There are 130 million migrant workers in China, the largest migration in human history according to the back cover.

( Going out | 出行 )

Written at the top: The English translation of the first two volumes of Yoshinaga Fumi's manga Oooku has won the 2009 Tiptree Award! How cool is that? Pretty cool, that's what.

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Mechademia, vol. 4: War/Time. Ed. Frenchy Lunning. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

I feel that Mechademia has just been getting stronger and stronger since the publication of its first volume in 2006; while this volume doesn't surpass #3 (Limits of the Human), it's just as good. And since this is the last volume which I will be able to discuss with any real degree of objectivity, I'm going to do so.

In his introduction Tom Lamarre argues persuasively that war/peace is a false dichotomy, that the modern industrial capitalist state is predicated on the existence of war somewhere, and it's really hard to disagree with him. (My inner classicist makes noises here about the circling of modernity back around to one aspect of the ancient; namely that in Greek one declares not war but peace, war being the default state.) But by foregrounding the falsity of that binary, the editors are attempting to call attention to it, and thus to open a space for criticism of it.

( Manga and anime are catalysts for the emergence of networks, fan groups, and communities of knowledge fascinated by and extending the depth and influence of these works. )

If any of this sounds interesting, all of Mechademia is now available on Project Muse for free, to those with access. [Obligatory denunciation of academia's opposition to the free dissemination of scholarship goes here.] You can also buy the volume directly, which supports more images in future volumes, and of course the Press. I recommend checking out other books by the University of Minnesota Press on popular culture and anime as well, particularly Azuma Hiroki's Otaku: Japan's Database Animals.

Swanwick, Michael. Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career & Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees. Upper Montclair, NJ: Temporary Culture, 2009.

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I mentioned in a recent post that I had ordered this book from the internet on impulse, and it arrived in the Friday post. There is something viscerally thrilling about getting books in the mail, I have to say, at least for me.

Michael Swanwick is now unquestionably the foremost living expert on Hope Mirrlees, though I think eventually Erin of hopemirrlees.com, who is doing her graduate work on the writer, may rival or surpass him. In the meantime, Swanwick's monograph takes an appealing middle course between academic and genre writer in evaluating Mirrlees' life and work, the former being as long as the latter was brief. He's not afraid to state his own opinions, particularly on Mirrlees' first two novels (Madeleine and The Counterplot, respectively), but he also knows when to withhold judgment despite the facts making intuitive sense towards a conclusion, particularly with regards to the influence of Mirrlees' poem Paris on her friend T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.

Essentially, this book confirms my own conclusion that Mirrlees' life effectively ended with the death of her friend Jane Ellen Harrison in 1928; she returned the contract for her fourth novel during Harrison's final illness, and in her remaining 50 years of life produced 1.5 biographies and one chapbook of 12 poems. It seems to be the consensus among Mirrlees fans that her money was her undoing; instead of being forced to keep writing to keep a roof over her head, she was able to rely on the trust her father had set up for her and so had no need to keep writing. Considering that she died when she was 91, that is clearly a treasure trove of books that were never created. (Just think if she'd had Ursula K. LeGuin's output, and LeGuin is only 80!)

Somewhere else on the Internet recently (anyone know who?) I saw someone saying that even if Mirrlees only produced one masterpiece (well, two if you count Paris, which the few scholars who know it seem to do, albeit in a minor way), that's one more than most people ever write, and that's certainly true. But personally speaking, writing is such a central part of how I relate to the world that I literally cannot imagine who I would be or how I would go about my life without it, even if I never publicly posted another word anywhere until the day I died, and so I found Mirrlees' story to be ultimately rather terrifying.

My copy is, somehow, signed by the author, and the book also includes an illustration by Charles Vess, which I may have framed one of these days, and Swanwick's "Lexicon of Lud," which has opened up new perspectives on my interpretation of Lud-in-the-Mist. In light of my comments on Cat Valente's The Girl Who…, I couldn't help but think that I should have twigged to the Ned-Chanticleer-as-Eleusinian-initiate that Swanwick puts forward, because I think it's utterly correct. There are a few annoying typos in the text, and the cover doesn't look as good in person as it does online, but Temporary Culture seems pretty cool nonetheless, and I shall have to keep an eye on them in future.

Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

I'm not sure I can even begin to convey the importance and the earth-shattering content of this book. Mann, a science journalist, marshals more than a half-century's worth of research from an astonishing panoply of disciplines to completely overturn every preconception of life in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus that is still inculcated even in otherwise decent history textbooks. Thousands of lost cities, millions of people whose lives were cut short by disease, and countless fascinating technologies and cultural practices march through these pages, conjuring a world that is forever lost yet has many lessons to teach people around the world, particularly the descendants of the colonized and colonizers who live together, often uneasily, in the Western Hemisphere.

In fact, my only complaint about this book is that it seems too short--I would happily read Mann's cogent, well-argued and profoundly sympathetic precis of research on every geographical region and society in the Americas, although in practice Mann focuses less on places and peoples than on three big ideas. In the first section, the revelation that millions of people in the Americas died of infections disease in the decades after European contact, so that humanity lost as much as one-fifth of its members during the long sixteenth century. In the second section he looks at two places where civilization arose independently in the Americas--Norte Chico in Peru and the much-better known Mesoamerica, while in the third he looks at native populations' terraforming their environments, both places in which they succeeded brilliantly (i.e. the anthropogenic forests of Amazonia, which too many people erroneously regard as pristine) and in which the societies failed to find effective solutions (i.e. Cahokia, in what is now St. Louis), and at what relevance this new view of pre-Columbian societies means for contemporary environmental debates. The Amazon in particular may be as much part of our cultural heritage as our natural.

Throughout, Mann maintains an evenhanded tone, even when he details the flabbergastingly horrendous views of the many researchers, and many others, who did so much to promote the wrong-headed views of life in the Americas before the Europeans showed up. In a sense, Mann has bigger fish to fry--his account rescues Indians from their usual roles of either children or savages and restores to them full human agency, both in their achievements and in the consequences, positive and negative, of their own decisions. Despite Mann's non-adversarial tone, most of the non-Indian researchers of the old guard come off rather terribly (I mention Alfred Kroeber, the patron saint of Low Counters, who maintained that only about four to six million people lived on both continents when Columbus blundered in, because he is Ursula K. LeGuin's father), guilty of intellectual blindness at best and racism at worst. People like Patricia C. Wrede and Hugh Thomas, by extension, come off horribly, too--they're so wrong they don't even realize that they're wrong, when it wouldn't have taken much to remedy their ignorance. And indeed, though Mann's research is cutting edge, the general outlines of this re-revised picture of life in the Americas before Columbus has been known in most cases at least since the mid-1980s, and some of the "new revelations" were known in the 1940s. Hopefully Mann's book will take its well-deserved place alongside books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel as a cornerstone for better understanding human development, and for promulgating a more just history, and a more just future.

Postscript, 10/11/10 -- I think I want to reread Guns, Germs, and Steel again before recommending it so unreservedly, but it is unequivocally an important book for the global approach it takes. There are also some of Mann's concluding points that stick with me daily, in particular his point that 1491 was the last year in which the hemispheres' biodiversity was not intermingled seems to me worth remembering; it ties in with his larger point that so much of what we think of as 'natural' when we look at the landscapes of the Americas is, historically speaking, just as terraformed as Dubai or the Netherlands or some future Moon or Mars.