Music In, 2022, Batch 4

October, November, and December acquisitions, & 2022 is in the bag!

• katie dey, "the kraken", 2022, 5 tracks, Bandcamp. I commented last time about how prolific dey is, they are not slowing down. These tracks are not hard to listen to, slow & dreamy, but no standouts. 3 stars.
• Björk, "Fossara", 2022, 13 tracks. The World's Greatest Living Composer does not disappoint. Some definitely odd orchestration, yay! Thematically, a lot of earth & nature mystical memes.
  The 1st video, of the 1st track, "Atopos", is LOL - I think I saw a quote "Björk at her Björkiest" - FTW! Bizarre visuals, instrumentation 7 bass clarinets. 4 stars. Here is the "Atopos" video.

• Various Artists, "Good Music to Ensure Safe Abortion Access to All", 2022, 49 tracks, Bandcamp. This was a 1-day special fundraider. Hmmm, apparently they meant it, searching for it on Bandcamp gives no results.
  Lots of good tracks from quite a roster of contributors, including:
  • Amanda Shires & Jason Isbell
  • Andrew Bird
  • Animal Collective
  • Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros
  • Cat Powers
  • David Byrne & Devo
  • Death Cab For Cutie
  • Dirty Projectors
  • Fleet Foxes
  • My Morning Jacket
  • Pearl Jam
  • R.E.M.
  • Soccer Mommy
  It was a "pay what you want" deal, $49 per my normal $1/track algorithm seemed too much, I think I gave $30. I should have given more, even if not tax-deductible. [Bullshit capitalist algorithm running ...] 3 stars.
• Todd Rundgren, "Space Force", 2022, 12 tracks. This took a while to grow on me, but it did. Some good tunes, some odd tunes ("Down with the Ship", "Your Fandango", "Stfu"). A different collaborator, in many different forms, on each track. Here's a really interesting 35 minute video on the album, with Rundgren talking w the Lemon Twigs brothers.
  4 stars. Here's a peppy "I'm Leaving", with the Lemon Twigs, which could have come from anytime in Rundgren's incredible career. Totally a fan, at age 74 he is totally an inspiration to this old dumbass.

• Blossom Dearie, "SINGS ROOTIN' SONGS", 1963, 12 tracks. This album was billed as 1963 hits. You got it by mailing in 3 Hires root bear bottle caps and $0.50. Some interesting songs, some I would have just as soon not heard again. As interesting an historical figure as she is, I think I'm done with Bloosom Dearie. 4 stars for "I've Got Your Number" and "He Loves Me", 3 stars for the rest. Here's "He Loves Me", which I remember from 1963 or so (although it was originally "She Loves Me").

• Takuya Kuroda, "Midnight Crisp", 2022, 6 tracks, Bandcamp. I really enjoyed his last album, this is more of the same, tasty jazz tunes. I almost don't miss vocals. 4 stars. I could have picked any of the tracks for the video, here's the title track.

• Marianne Faithful, "A Secret Life", 1995, 10 tracks. I got this from the old English guy whose "journal of a grumpy old man" I subscribe to - mostly to be aghast at his eating habits ;-> This album really seems like an old person making music for other old people. She was born in 1945, so currently 78 YO, she would have been only 50 when this album was recorded - her 12th of the 21 albums she is up to now. 3 stars.
• Low, "C'mon", 2011, 10 tracks, Bandcamp. An indie band that was founded in 1993, mostly a guitar/drums duo with 4 different bass players. Rick Beato mentioned it last year at the death of the drummer/vocalist Mimi Parker. They were known for slow, sparce music. I like it. 4 stars. Here's "You See Everything".

• Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, "Cool It Down", 2022, 8 tracks, Bandcamp. This band is a fav of my oldest daughter Erica. Their 1st album in 9 years. Very listenable tunes, some punkier than others. Here is my of course favorite track, the upbeat, poppy "Different Today".

• Sylvan Esso, "No Rules Sandy", 2022, 16 tracks, Bandcamp. 5 tracks are short (< 30 seconds), with their name parenthesized. I got their 1st album when it came out in 2014. I like this 1 better that that 1. 4 stars. Here's the peppy & upbeat "Didn't Care".

• Jodi, "Blue Heron", 2021, 10 tracks, Bandcamp. Hunh, very much cut from the same cloth as Low (above): slow, dreamy. Definitely borderline 3 stars, but the title track (last) saves it. 4 stars.

Happy New Year!

5 More

Well, I did start writing the review of the economics book. Got maybe 1/4 of the way done. Then, my wife came down Saturday Feb 10, & Saturday we drove to Miami & flew to St. Martin for a week's stay. Our 1st time back at Grand Case Beach Club in 15 years! After visiting Martinique & Guadeloupe, it was amazing how small St. Martin/St. Maarten is! But Grand Case was as funky as ever. Our favorite restaurant Il Netuno was gone, as was Le California. The FishPot was now Seaside 82 or some such. The French food did us in tho. You have got to be in training to eat that rich stuff. We found a place with a good seafood or shrimp or nicoise salad & ate there 3x.

Unfortunately, either during the ~1 hour I waited (unmasked) in Punta Gorda airport for my wife, or during the (masked) trip to St. Martin from Miami International, I finally caught the COVID. Symptoms Sunday, miserable Monday night, tested positive Tuesday. Still symptomatic, mostly mild but variable, I hope to be over it soon.

But enough brain fog that I don't think I'm up to trying to disentangle / refactor the economics book, so I'll grind through the easy books I've read since last time. I may go on and do another Music In batch too.

1st, "Imperium Restored", by Walter Jon Williams, 2022, 510 pages, 138k words. I think this is the last book of this series! I always enjoy Williams' writing, but, enough of this feudal, classist universe already! I looked back through my comments on the other volumes of this series and there is definitely ambiguity in my views. A little bit of a twist at the end, and, we're done!

2nd, "A Mirror Mended", by Alix E. Harrow, 2022, 132 pages, 33k words. More on the multiversal versions of Sleeping Beauty/Snow White, this time featuring the Evil Queen trying to escape her narrative. Quick & easy read, creative ideas. Harrow was my neighbor for a while, ~40 miles away in KY, it appears she has moved to Virginia :-(

3rd, "Children of Memory", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2022, 406 pages, 125k words. The 3rd in the series. It started with uplifted hunter spiders, then uplifted octopuses & a bacterial race with atomic memory encoding. This installment ... CORVIDS, FTW!!! Uplifted 2' tall crows with yet another very odd model of intelligence. Plus a very complex, very rewarding framework. Tchaikovsky continues to delight, he has done really well with this series. Just preordered the 4th book, out in June, yay!

4th, "Lady of Mazes", by Karl Schroeder, 2005, 402 pages, 116k words. Schroeder has some of the most interesting ideas out there, somehow I have found it hard to engage with his writings. Hence just reading this 2005 release. A future post-scarcity utopia, with AIs ruling the solar system & preventing humans from becoming post-human, although there are some "gods" who used to be humans. Virtual reality tech allows multiple, technologically incompatible worldviews to coexist and overlap. But, is it a utopia or a dystopia? A very good read.

5th, "Hopeland", by Ian McDonald, 2023, 495 pages, 153k words. What an odd novel! It starts out reminding me of John Crowley's "Little, Big" - high praise - with 2 "magical" "families" finding each other, plus electromancy with Tesla coils used to fight demons, & winds up a work of climate fiction?!?!? A great, if strange, read.

Only 3

It seems like I usually wait until I have read 4 books to blog them. I am going to go with 3 because I actually read an "economics" book, on which I will shortly begin writing an extensive review. So I want to get these 3 off the stack.

1st, "The Goblin Emperor", by Katherine Addison, 2014, 514 pages, 139k words. Recommended by Doctorow or someone else whose opinion I respect. You've got pale-skinned elves & dark-skinned goblins. A half-breed prince becomes emperor after his father & older brothers are killed (suspiciously) in an airship crash. Ignoring sage advice & conventional wisdom, he acts in a much more egalitarian manner, treating everyone he interacts with with kindness & dignity. It mostly works out. A refreshing read - a protagonist who is notable for trying to be nice to everyone. There is follow-up trilogy based on a 2ndary character - I bought the 1st book, not in a hurry to start it.

2nd, "The Heaven Makers", by Frank Herbert, 1967, 189 pages, 54k words. Another old Herbert I was offered for $1.99 or somesuch. OK, enough of these! This is a story of immortal little grey humanoid aliens who use human history as an entertainment channel - and they don't mind vigorously tweaking the plot. Definitely reads like cheap, pulp sci-fi.

3rd, "Birthright: The Book of Man", by Mike Resnick, 1982, 360 pages, 98k words. I'm guessing another 1 I was offered for cheap. I remembered Resnick from the Year's Best days as having written some good short stories. This book is actually a collection of 26 short stories, strung together by intros, with a prologue & an epilogue, tracing Mankind as, over millenia, it creates a galactic empire, which it then of course finally loses. The various phases leading to and from empire are very sketchily described, very comic book.

Most of these stories are kind of repugnant. Mankind is kind of like the Earthlings in the movie "Avatar" - unrepentant, planet-destroying, alien-subjugating, out-of-control, capitalistic assholes. Can you imagine watching "Avatar" and cheering for the Earthings?

1 thing that was weird was that he mentions that they are still on a precious-metals-backed currency, so of course they need to vigorously extract gold & silver from every planet they encounter - conquistadors, For The Loss!

Resnick lived 1942-2020. He apparently smoked cigars, as cigar-smoking appears in several stories. And WTF is up with "14: The Biochemists": "My bedroom is usually filled to the brim with the fattest, nakedest women money can buy." ?????

I'm currently on the magazine stack. As mentioned above, next up a long review of an "economics" book.

Music In, 2022, Batch 3

This is the music I acquired in July, August, & September.

• Kaidi Tatham, "Don't Rush The Process", 2022, 12 tracks, Bandcamp. This is the third album of his I have, the Afro-Jazz is consistently relaxing yet energizing?!?!? 4 stars. Here's "We Chillin' Out (feat. The Easy Access Orchestra)".

• The Mountain Goats, "Bleed Out", 2022, 12 tracks, Bandcamp. I was somewhat flummoxed - the more I listened to the album, the more bloody-minded it seemed. Songs like "Make You Suffer", (we may run out of bullets, we're never gonna run out of) "Hostages", "Need More Bandages", and the title track, it all seemed somewhat thematic. So, I looked it up, and per the review on Apple Music, John Darnielle spent COVID lockdown in 2020 bingeing action/adventure thrillers, from whence this album sprang. OK, makes sense. 4 stars. Here's "Need More Bandages".

• Tom Waits, "Mule Variations", 1999, 16 tracks. Wow, his vocal style is all over the place, but there are many great songs on this album: "Pony", "Picture In A Frame", "Georgia Lee", "Take It With Me", "Come On Up To The House". The paranoid recital "What's He Building?" is oddly compelling, and the Captain Beefheart influence is evident. 4 stars. Here's "Hold On".

• John Legend, "LEGEND", 2022, 24 tracks. 11 collaborators. Very listenable. Funny, I looked up the album on Wikipedia, and noticed, as Rick Beato said, man, there were a lot of writers & producers. I created a spreadsheet, results are: writers, 2-11, average 5.6; producers, 1-5, average 3.1. I guess it's like all the (executive) producers in movie credits. Apparently big media is a massively multiplayer game. One wonders, though, how much invidual genius still manages to sneak through? 4 stars. Here's the catchy "All She Wanna Do", which is apparently a hit - it came up on the muzak when I was selling a high chair back to "Once Upon A Child" - I got $20, FTW!

• Lake Street Dive, "Fun Machine: The Sequel", 2022, 6 tracks, Bandcamp. Not quite as much fun as "Fun Machine" - which came out in 2014, wow, 8 years ago - but, it seems like this just came up, the 2nd album of fav covers is not going to be as good as the 1st album - duh. Several songs had weird beats & arrangments?!?!? Still, 4 stars. The big winner is "Nick of Time", by Bonnie Raitt. I put this song in my book, playing it I realized that the thing that makes this song is the backup vocals. I love this video! Rachel has stolen sooo many of my dance moves ...

• St. Vincent, "Daddy's Home", 2021, 14 tracks. The album celebrates the release from prison of her father, who did 9 years for financial crimes. The vampiness at times is a bit much. A lot of 70's sounding Fender Rhodes electric piano, sitar, ??? OK, per the Wikipedia Article on the album:

  Daddy's Home was inspired by Clark's father's release from prison at the end of 2019, as well as the musical palette of New York City in the first half of the 1970s. The record musically incorporates 1970s inspired rock and psychedelic music.

  Not my favorite of her work. 4 stars. Here's "The Melting of the Sun", featuring a psychedelic video.

  [Note, my Vincent blue Sterling By Music Man St. Vincent Signature guitar is still my current go-to electric guitar.]

• The Beths, "Expert In A Dying Field", 2022, 12 tracks, Bandcamp. The 3rd album of New Zealand energetic indie rock. Very listenable. 4 stars. Here's the title track.

That leaves the unrated smart playlist of October, November, & January acquisitions at a current count of 125 - and 49 of that is the abortion rights benefit compilation. I may actually go through my emails from Bandcamp & try out some new stuff, woo-hoo!

Fuzzy Gear

This post is to collect the links to the pix folder and equipment spreadsheets for the gear of my former musical duo partner Steve Konopka, aka Fuzzy. To access, click the header or cut & paste the URL into the browser of your choice.

Folder with pictures:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ezwhrp9wmi1jbf0/AACnYutJDf4irtsfm_PwyDR7a?dl=0

Guitars:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B5j1B6Y_i-meoDKAt4ohOBsIJRCfC-6j8JsO2IAMGQ8

Amps:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16YydHIQNJWnZv12NV5YkBwLgmM6JPhjWNgLCZQZ08a4

Pedals:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ljvlLkj3gJFaNfRdTyitRj1CS_VJxaq_q3gft2S_1aM

Mics:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1H9-R2yJR-XMO88xckDudgB60fXkeEu3kTdDcFMrfY9U

I Didn't Need More Of That

1st up, "The Flood Circle: A Twenty Palaces Novel", by Harry Connolly, 2022, ? pages, ? k words. The 2nd of the 2 books kickstartered for this series - the 1st was blogged here. Shit starts to go south, and we reminded that you cannot forget strategy no matter how good your tactics are.

Connolly says there will be 1 final book in this series.

Next, BookBub offered me "Sleepside", by Greg Bear, subtitled "The Collected Fantasies", 2014, 293 pages, 79k words, 9 stories. I think I had only read 1 of these before, so this was definitely FTW! 1 or 2 of the earliest stories were kind of odd, but still interesting reads. The last story was longish and set in the world of Eon/Eternity by Bear - definitely not fantasy, but I was very happy to read it, I loved that series.

Then, in an odd piece of synchronicity, the day after I finished this collection, the news of Greg Bear's death circulated on the net. He was 71, 2.5 months younger than me. So, I beat him - sadly, this is apparently how one thinks when you get to an advanced age like mine. He was probably my fav hard SF author for many years.

Next up, "Wayward", by Chuck Wendig, 2022, 1048 pages, 285k words. The sequel to "Wanderers", blogged here, this one is apparently even a longer tome. Phase 2 of the post-pandemic-apocalypse of "Wanderers". More on the AI who was heavily involved in the 1st book, more on our friendly christian fascist militias.

Finally, "The World We Make", by N. K. Jemisin, 2022, 364 pages, 99k words. Book 2 of The Great Cities. The sequel to "The City We Became", blogged here. This is as enjoyable as the 1st book. It seemed a little short maybe, and in the Acknowledgments the author discusses how COVID and Agent Orange made this book hard to write, and truncated what was originally billed as a trilogy to 2 books. Not far into the book at all, here's our human bad guys: more christian fascist white supremacists. I really didn't need more of that. This is supposed to be escapist stuff, right? 2 in a row featuring very real and very scary actual threats to the US was a bit of a bummer. Still, this was a great read, and wrapped up well. I particularly liked the author's characterizations of some of the older cities that New York meets.

On to the magazine stack, and I think I will do a Music In post as well. Progress! Or rather, Process! LOL, I have been on the fence for years about using the phrase "In Progress" vs. "In Process". And here they both are. Hmmm ...

A Spectre, Haunting

"A Spectre, Haunting" is a 2022 revisiting of The Communist Manifesto by China Miéville, a noted British slipstream/fantasy/horror author whose work I enjoy, 332 pages, 90k words.

It has an introduction, 6 chapters, an afterword, and 5 appendices: the original 1848 manifesto, and the prefaces to the 1872, 1882, 1883, and 1888 editions.

When I was studying Economics, I had thought I would need to read some Marx at some point, probably "Das Kapital". I was leary of it because, who knows what lists that is going to get you put on? But when I saw this book, I thought, "OK".

I read the Appendices 1st, to get a feel for the source material before consuming the exegesis. The manifesto itself is only 12k words. A manifesto is

"A public declaration of principles, policies, or intentions, especially of a political nature."

So not a scholarly paper, and the declarations can be as inflammatory as is desired.

One thing that is surprising is that the manifesto starts off by praising and thanking the bourgeoisie aka capitalism aka neoliberalism for a great job overthrowing feudalism. But, Marx & Engels don't let them rest on their laurels, but rather propose that they should make way for the proletariat, the workers - who Marx & Engels feel are the true producers of value - to take over and run things. The way this is accomplished it by "abolition of private property".

This seems like an eminently bad idea to me. But Miéville clarifies what this actually means:

“private property,” importantly, here understood as the private exploitative control of the economy, rather than, as per a common misrepresentation, as the fact of any personal possessions.

[snark]
Ha ha, the philosophy that actually does disallow any personal possessions is ... Christianity. Acts 2:44-45

All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they shared with anyone who was in need.

Acts 4:32

The multitude of believers was one in heart and soul. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they owned.

And the penalty for keeping personal private property was death - see Acts 5:1-11, the story of Ananias and Sapphira.

So, sadly, I will have to stop accusing Christians of being Communists - with regard to property and ownership, Christians were much worse.
[/snark]

Another thing that I was not particularly aware of in the manifesto is its condemnation of the nuclear family. Women are exploited by the system, children would be better off raised by professionals. Damn commies!

Miéville comments on this:

There follow (2.39–2.51) several paragraphs about the “infamous” communist suggestion of the abolition of the family. The Manifesto stresses that this sentimental bourgeois concern for the family is predicated on work that splits real families apart, through, for example, drudgery and child labor. Advocating social education, rather than privatized and familial education, is not to propose indoctrination, but countering the doctrines of the ruling class. To the moralist concern about a communist “community of women”—some version or other of “free love,” a breakdown of the monogamous and privatized model of marriage—the authors (unlike some communist thinkers) don’t outline or defend any such model (in keeping with their career-long preference for critiquing what exists, rather than pre-empting post-capitalist norms). They do, however, insist that such fear bespeaks a bourgeois conception of women as property. With gusto, they point out the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, for whom sanctimonious familial piety co-exists with systematic bed-hopping, infidelity, coercion, exploitation, and abuse. This hypocrisy they see as baked into the system.

LOL, say it ain't so, moral turpitude amongst the well-to-do!

I really wondered, why the urgency to replace the bourgeoisie with the proletariat? One thing the Manifesto does is take potshots at various other socialist groups of the time - pretty standard stuff. It was interesting, tho, that in the introduction to the later editions it was noted that most if not all of the other groups criticized were no longer going concerns - they had been relegated to the dustbin of history. Those potshots though address the source of the urgency:

In their criticisms of the utopian socialists for faint hearts when it comes to anything other than “peaceful means” (3.52), the authors imply that the necessary rupture demands an elasticity of appropriate means. This caution against guiltily limiting “permissible” political methods might seem to be radically anti-ethical. In point of fact, whatever one thinks of the argument and its limits, it isn’t an abjuring of ethics but one predicated on ethical urgency, the absolute necessity of revolution as speedily as possible.

I think they greatly underestimate how we humans can become inured to almost anything. If hungry children aren't treated as an emergency that must be immediately addressed, what will be?

One topic that is discussed very insightfully in Chapters 5 & 6 is how much capitalism for the last 200 years or more has been successful in distracting the proletariat from issues of class with issues of race. Originally in England, it was the English vs the Irish. In the US, it was the white worker vs the black worker (but also, at times, the nativists vs the Irish, the Italian, the German, etc., and currently the Hispanic immigrants). I did not know that a big driver of BREXIT was resentment of Polish workers in England enabled by EU membership.

In a capitalism wherein the oppression of a group is inextricable from categories of race, defined in opposition to an implied “norm” that has come to be understood as “whiteness,” such a shift is one of racialization. To quote the title of a famous and seminal book on this topic by Noel Ignatiev, one celebrated example of this is “how the Irish became white.”
Not that promotion to “whiteness” might not be withdrawn, or diluted. There’s certainly a danger, in the words of one radical scholar, that as with much theoretical terminology, “[t]he promiscuity of the concept of whiteness” can make it slippery and hard to engage with. But the fact that it can be unhelpfully evasive doesn’t mean that it isn’t an important axis at play in popular consciousness—and the unconscious—and politics. It’s not, for example, a binary category, nor one that precludes internal differentiation. The aftermath of the Brexit vote saw a substantial spike in hate crimes against Eastern Europeans (and others), particularly Poles, in the UK, including the murder of the factory worker Arkadiusz Jóźwik when he was heard speaking Polish. To be sure, given years of Polish “whiteness,” various nuances have been suggested to describe this phenomenon at the edges of whiteness, so to speak, such as “xeno-racism.” But whether xeno- or not, this is a form of racism: indeed, “[r]acialisation does not require putative phenotypical or biological difference,” and “the nominal absence of somatic difference does not get in the way of xenophobic racism; it turns out racialised difference can be invented in situ.” Race, after all, is a function of racism, not the other way around. [My bold]

I don't think that last line can be emphasized too much. Scientifically, there is no such thing as race. The species homo sapiens sapiens (us) has 100s of genetic characteristics which can take on few or many values - 5,000 different skin tones, for example. But it is a single species in which all members can breed and produce productive offspring. So any time anyone talks about race, the correct response is "There is no such thing as race - there's only racism."

I also found this quote re W. E. B. Du Bois to be very powerful:

The great W. E. B. Du Bois, in his towering 1935 work Black Reconstruction, expanded brilliantly and seminally on the affective rewards of racism for the racist. Arguing against any optimistic faith in an ineluctable tendency towards working-class unity—such as the Manifesto can be read as evincing at times, and which remains tenacious—Du Bois sternly diagnosed racism as a key and powerful countervailing pressure.

The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite because of their opposition to exploitation by the capitalists. According to this, even after a part of the poor white laboring class became identified with the planters [in the US South after the Civil War] and eventually displaced them, their interests would be diametrically opposed to those of the mass of white labor, and of course to those of the black laborers. This would throw white and black labor into one class, and precipitate a united fight for higher wage and better working conditions.

Most persons do not realize how far this failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest. It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely [to various restricted amenities and milieu] with all classes of white people …

...

For Du Bois, then, racism wasn’t merely an encouragement to spite against a scapegoated other, nor only “compensation” to a poor white that there was someone “lower” (which begs the bleak question of why that would be compensation at all). It was, crucially, a project of generating cross-class solidarity among whites to the overwhelming benefit of the (white) ruling class, and for the downgrading of class itself as a perceived social schism, and its replacement with “the color line.” Such dynamics, in some cases somewhat more decorously dressed up, are hardly unfamiliar today.

Chapter 6, "The Communist Manifesto Today" has a lot of good stuff. I definitely had this thought several times during the pandemic, during which the government assistance programs cut childhood poverty in the US in half:

Such questioning [of Margaret Thatcher's TINA - there is no alternative (to capitalism) - assertion] has also occurred from the other pole of politics, with the profound crisis into which the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed it, forcing capitalism’s partisans to hurriedly offer the kind of massive, systemic support they scoffed at as impossible scant weeks earlier.

This reminds me of the main takeaway of Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything": that above and beyond wanting to drag out fossil fuel profits as long as possible, capitalism engages in climate change denial because to combat climate change will require concerted, world-wide big government, on a scale never before seen - which the current libertarian rulers of the world want no part of. Aside from a few more tax cuts, they like the way the game is currently rigged just fine. It's interesting that people seemed to be OK with increased government action to combat the pandemic, but that many still resist action against the slower-moving climate crisis.

At some point Miéville discusses how The Manifesto greatly underestimated how wily and adaptable capitalism would turn out to be. After 1848, the labor movement started getting things like limited workdays and workweeks, paid vacation, paid sick leave, higher wages, profit sharing, etc. And, as I learned in "Capital in the 21st Century" by Thomas Piketty, in Germany there is now "Rhenish Capitalism", "an economic model in which firms are owned not only by shareholders but also by certain other interested parties known as “stakeholders,” starting with representatives of the firms’ workers (who sit on the boards of directors of German firms not merely in a consultative capacity but as active participants in deliberations, even though they may not be shareholders), as well as representatives of regional governments, consumers’ associations, environmental groups, and so on." So maybe we really don't need a full revolution?

This is a good summary of The Manifesto's goals:

To have fidelity at all to the project of this Manifesto, no matter how critically, is to be convinced of certain claims of which capitalism and its ideologues demand we remain unsure: that inequality and oppression aren’t states of nature; that our social reality is controlled by the few; that it’s so controlled in opposition to the needs and rights of the many; that we have the capability, at the very least, to make it worth attempting to change the world.

The last 1/2 of Chapter 6 is a section titled "ON HATE". Its content is, well, somewhat hateful. I really don't like hateful. Here is some justification for hate:

It would admittedly be a prim and pious socialism which failed at least to empathize with individualized hate, or simply denounced it wholesale as an ethical failure. This is particularly so in our modern epoch, when sadism and trolling have become central to political method, especially among the ruling class. It would take an unreasonable amount of saintliness for no one on the left to feel any hate for, say, hedge fund founder, pharmaceuticals CEO, and convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli, for example, not only because of his ostentatious profiteering from human misery, but given his repeated, performative, stringent efforts precisely to be hated. And, of course, there’s the race-baiting, disability-mocking, sexual-assault-celebrating Trump Agent Orange.

Here's the final 2 paragraphs.

We must hate harder than did the Manifesto, for the sake of humanity. Such class hate is constitutive with and inextricable from solidarity, the drive for human liberty, for the full development of the human, the ethic of emancipation implicit throughout the Manifesto and beyond. We should hate this world, with and through and beyond and even more than does the Manifesto. We should hate this hateful and hating and hatemongering system of cruelty, that exhausts and withers and kills us, that stunts our care, makes it so embattled and constrained and local in its scale and effects, where we have the capacity to be greater.

Hate is not and cannot be the only or main drive to renewal. That would be deeply dangerous. We should neither celebrate nor trust our hate. But nor should we deny it. It’s not our enemy, and we cannot do without it. “At the risk of seeming ridiculous,” said Che Guevara, “let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” It’s for the sake of love that, reading it today, we must hate more and better than even The Communist Manifesto knew how.

I'm sorry, but to me hate is the tool of the enemies of progress, and 1 that we should avoid if at all possible. Even the ever-so-hateful Agent Orange is to me a horribly damaged human being who should be pitied - and of course barred from public office. But why upset my mental and physical well-being by allowing myself to hate?

So overall, the proletariat has made a lot of progress since 1848. And we all have cool toys now - supercomputers with access to the knowledge of the world in our pockets. But, as Piketty pointed out, the 15% of capital that the middle class clawed away from the 1% in the 30 years after WW II has now been returned to the 1%. The middle class is disappearing. The 50% of US citizens who cannot deal with a $500 emergency continues to grow - what is it now, 60%, 70%?

But "the abolition of private property" still seems problematic to me. It can be done - the USSR did it - but generally that is considered to not have worked out well. It doesn't seem like the right solution to creating a post-scarcity utopia. I would feel that with the vast advances in computing since the USSR that maybe a planned economy could actually be made to work - except for the fact that it would be based on the weakest "science" I know of, Economics.

Rhenish capitalism seems to have a lot going for it. But anytime I think about this stuff, I seem to go back to Kate Raworth's "Doughnut Economics":

when is each of the four realms of provisioning — household, commons, market and state — best suited to delivering humanity’s diverse wants and needs?

I wonder how much my unhappiness with The Manifesto is due to the general US anti-communist propaganda I have been exposed to throughout my life. We tend to forget that most European countries have active Communist parties. I had thought that Miéville was probably formally a commnunist, but per his Wikipedia page, apparently he is not. He is described as "active in hard-left politics".

Regardless of how much I agreed with this book, I did learn a lot from it. It was a quick, easy, and informative read, and I recommend it.

I Missed 1

I had 1 more book I should have included in the last post but which I missed: "3001: The Final Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clarke, 1997, 209 pages, 56k words. I'm not sure how I missed this over the years. It is billed as Volume 4 of the "Space Odyssey" series. A quick, easy read. Instead of Dave Bowman, our protagonist is Frank Poole, who somehow survived until 3001, when he is discovered suspended in his craft. It seems like the 2nd or so "really old guy comes back to civilization" I've read lately. He does unbelievably well integrating into the future society. Then it's on to chatting w Dave & HAL & discovering the meaning & purpose of the monoliths. An easy & fun read.

Argle Blargle

1st up, "The High Sierra", subtitled "A Love Story", by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020, 625 pages, 170k words. KSR, the dean of climate fiction, has been hiking in the California Sierra mountains for almost 50 years. It is indeed a love story. It covers a lot of different topics: geology, locales, types of trails, history, people, equipment. I have labeled this as travel? KSR is lucky to have formed such an connection with such a beautiful place. I certainly have nothing comparable in my life. I bought this in hardcover, others might like it as a vacation book.

Next, "Attack Surfact", by Cory Doctorow, 2020, 531 pages, 144k words. I also bought this in hardcover, so as to spread the memes. That is why I just got around to reading it.

Doctorow is the bard of the revolution. This story is a continuation of the story arc of 2008's "Little Brother", blogged here, and 2013's "Homeland", blogged here - no wait, I haven't read "Homeland" yet! This is what comes of buying hardcovers! Oh boy, I got that going for me, I needed something good to get rid of the bad taste in my brain left by the last 2 books (below).

In "Attack Surface", we go from teenagers vs the evil Department of Homeland Security to 20-somethings vs evil private security government contractors. Great insight into the tech & tactics of the burgeoning surveillance state.

3rd, "The Iron Gate: A Twenty Palaces Novel", by Harry Connolly, 2022, ? pages, ? k words. I liked this series years ago, then its publisher discontinued it. Connolly did a kickstarter for this book & 1 more in the series. It was a nice, diverting read. The mystical Twenty Palaces society continues to protect earth from extra-dimensional horrors with a taste for human minds.

4th, "Victories Greater Than Death", by Charlie Jane Anders, 2021, 373 pages, 101k words. This is billed as YA, which I generally do well with. This seems to be targetted to younger YA readers, tweens maybe - agonizing on "should I kiss them", etc. If you have seen the movies "Jupiter Ascending" and/or "The Last Starfighter" you have most of the plot. But these aliens are so much more considerate and advanced than the aliens in those other stories - they always introduce themselves both by their name and their gender pronouns. I won't be continuing this series, it's just too juvenile. I think I got spoiled by the YA novels of Paolo Bacigalupi. Cory Doctorow, & others.

Last, "A Half-Built Garden", by Ruthanna Emrys, 2022, 345 pages, ? k words. An interesting premise - 50 or years in the future, aliens show up just in time to help us emigrate from Earth to their Dyson sphere, before Earth becomes unlivable. Earthlings in 2080 feel they have the climate crisis under control such they can save the Earth & not abandon it. Conflict.

Ok, starting to get weird. Local government on earth is ... watershed watch networks?!?!? My wife has collected water samples from local creeks for Kentucky River Watershed Watch for many years. I act as her 2nd pair of hands and puller-out-of-the-creek. I have attended KRWW meetings. It really, really seems like an unlikely group to be running things - and to have succeeded in banishing the corporations & capitalism to New Zealand and other island sanctuaries. I'm guessing the author is active in their local watershed watch.

Plus, above & beyond the expected gender pronouns, the corporations use gender pronouns based on role-playing roles - 6 of those. The author in the acknowledgements calls out their gender pronoun wrangler - maybe something you didn't used to need to write a book. By the end of the book you are guessing that words are gender pronouns with no idea what they are supposed to represent. There should have been a table.

Most annoying of all, the protagonist (& the author?) is a kosher-keeping practicioner of Judaism. So the aliens offer her food in greeting & she can't eat it because she doesn't know if it is kosher. The book should have come with a large-type warning label:

WARNING: CONTAINS BRONZE AGE RELIGIOUS BULLSHIT!!!

The protagonist (& the author?) is a nursing mother, so we get lots of detail on breast pain & letting down, etc. My wife nursed our 4 kids, it is a wonderful thing, but I don't think all the breast-feeding detail added to the narrative of the novel.

The watershed watch society is based on social media reputation-based governance, with algorithms for everything. I have been off social media for years, it is toxic, & I think as stultifying as the society in this book seems to be.

Then at the end, the big reveal: the wife of the progagonist (& the author?) used to be a male.

The book seems like the author constructing a narrative where all her interests & life choices are what will save the earth, defeat capitalism, & provide a safe & just place for all. To me, that seems, what, narcissistic? Solipsistic? Self-centered?

Meanwhile, the pacing is totally odd - "hi, we're aliens, can we come in?". There was a trip to visit the aliens during a hurricane that was suspenseful, other than that the drama is fairly minimal.

I almost quit reading this book several x, but I wanted to see if it got any better. Not particularly. Interesting that I can write so much about a book with no Spoiler Alert. I'm giving you a precis so you don't have to read it.

On to "Homeland", yay!

Music In, 2022, Batch 2

I don't seem to be getting to listen to this music enough. Spending most music time on Music Out aka Jaz Dumoz. That is a better use of my time, I think.

I'd been getting a bit more music than usual lately, then bought, a 1-day-only sale, 49 tracks, 3h15m, in support of abortion rights, by a complete all-star cast - Bandcamp of course. I like getting these compilations, sometimes they point me at good new artists.

OK, time to get cranking, back to the start of spring.

• Ella Fitzgerald (& Duke Ellington & his Orchestra), "Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Duke Ellington Songbook", 1957, 3 discs, 51 tracks. Quite a sprawling effort. In addition to Ella singing songs, there is also a spoken/orchestral "Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald" with many takes (which I rated 2 stars to get rid of). I don't like this album as much as some of Ella's others, which I think just reflects that perhaps I don't like Sir Duke's songs as much as those of some others. Still, 3 songs in the Jaz Dumoz songbook:
  1. "I'm beginning to see the light"
  2. "Don't get around much anymore"
  3. "Squeeze me (but don't tease me)" (In progress)
  Ella is in good voice, plus great guitar - Herb Ellis & Barney Kessel - plus great jazz violin, so 4 stars for the album. Here's "In a sentimental mood".

• Barrie, "Barbara", 2022, 11 tracks, Bandcamp. Really easy to listen to, laid back chick emo pop. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "Jersey".

• Destroyer, "LABYRINTHITIS", 2022, 10 tracks. Destroyer is the side project of Dan Bejar, also of New Pornographers. This is the 4th album of his I have & I thought at 1st that his eclectic singing style had gotten to be too much for me, but I did warm to it after a while. 4 stars. Here's "Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread":

• Elmore James, "Shake Your Money Maker: The Best of the Fire Sessions", 1961, 16 tracks. One of my harp player friends told me I needed to learn 1 of the songs on it - "Look On Yonder Wall" I think. As usual, it's just another 12 bar blues song. But this whole album - Elmore James is supposed to be 1 of the great fathers of slide guitar, but listening to this album, it sounded to me like he has maybe 3 licks, tops. Very disappointing. 2 stars.

• Nick Teale, "Love Was", 2021, 6 tracks. Nick is a very nice & talented young man from Louisville whom I met at the Twisted Cork open mic. This is a very very good 1st effort, but still, it feels like a 1st effort. Interesting songs, but the engineering needs some work, & occasionally the songs have 1 of those chords where you go, "that's not quite the right chord". I'm looking forward to more of his stuff. 3 stars.

• Kate Bollinger, "Look at at in the Light", 2022, 6 tracks, Bandcamp. More laid back, quirky, dreamy, chick emo pop. I seem to be a total sucker for this stuff. 4 stars. Here's the very poppy "Who Am I But Someone":

• David C. Johnson, "Songs About You And Me", 2003, 8 tracks. David Carlton Johnson is an incredibly talented multi-instrumentalist (vocals, bass, guitar, keyboards, drums) who for maybe 2011-2021 was bass player & vocalist for the SW Florida blues/rock band Mudbone - here is my review of their great album "Live at Dogtooth".

  David also was a member of the Aaron Neville Quintet & toured with them - here he is on vocals, keys, & bass on Aaron & Linda Ronstadt's big hit "Don't Know Much". But, Aaron retired last year (age 80) which apparently was a blow to David's income. So he has moved his family to near Orlando, where apparently the gigging is better. I will miss David. Here is his website. I'm guessing I bought this album there. 4 stars, here's the existentially titled "Where Did Lisa Go?".

• Willie "The Lion" Smith, "Willie "The Lion" Smith and His Cubs", 1944, 17 tracks. Willie "The Lion" I really don't think measures up to his contemporary Fats Waller. Ah, but they weren't contemporaries - Willie was born in 1893, 11 years before Fats. That would explain why his song selection seems more ragtime than swing. I find that for Jaz Dumoz, I don't like the older, more ragtime stuff, particularly before 1920. Very limited videos on YouTube of Willie, so I am going to go 3 stars for this album.

• Andrew Bird, "Inside Problems", 2022, 11 tracks, Bandcamp. Wow, the 13th album I have from Bird. He is such a good songwriter, and I love his sparse, eclectic arrangements. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "Underlands":

• Harry Styles, "Fine Line", 2019, 12 tracks. I read a glowing review of his latest album, somehow I wound up buying the 1 before that. I like the album. A good amount of variation in the arrangments, and good tunes. Also, some of the songs, his voice sounds so much like Gene Clark of the early Byrds - & I always loved Gene Clark, and a few years ago determined that all my fav Byrd songs were the ones he wrote.

  Back to Harry, 4 stars. Here's the great video of his catchy, anthemic song, "Treat People With Kindness":

• Kaidi Tatham, "Galaxy", 2022, 4 tracks, Bandcamp. Some nice vocals to complement his Afro-Jazz beats. 4 stars. Here's vocalist Lola Vialet on the "upbeat mix" of the title track:

• Cribaby, "crii EP", 2022, 6 tracks, Bandcamp. More laid-back vocals and arrangements. Not quite as funky as her last outing. 4 stars. Here's "hurt (feat. Somni)":

• Blossom Dearie, "My Gentleman Friend", 1959, 10 tracks. My friend Lexington music legend Tom Cool recommended this artist to me, in particular the song "You Fascinate Me So" shown below. What an interesting artist, & I am totally surprised I had never heard of her growing up. Per her Wikipedia page, she played in France 1952-1957.

  The 1st time through, her kewpie-doll voice was a little offputting, but, that was just how she sang. Plus she was an accomplished & influential pianist. I'm still surprised I'd never heard of her before. Here's the track Tom recommended:

OK, that brings me to the end of June, perfect for Batch 2! And, no, I am not OCD!

Still? Really?

After chiding myself in my last post for downwarding spiraling into reading old Frank Herbert novels, I of course next read ... another old Frank Herbert novel: "Destination: Void", 1966, revised 1978, 275 pages, 74k words, $1.99 at Kobo.

This is the novel that served as the seed for the "The Pandora Sequence" blogged about last time. It was really not good. The philosophical rummaging in search of a definition of consciousness is way lame. Of course this was written years before Dennett & "Consciousness Explained" (1992), etc. But still, lame. The computer terminology is beyond dated. Plus we have 1 of the crew of scientists experimenting on herself with tailored cannabinoids to find the nature of mind - I bet we loved that during my college years. And, of course, the way heavy-handed ending. Well, hopefully that cures me of old foo for a while.

So next up my fav relatively newly discovered modern sci-fi author. "Cage of Souls", by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2019, 720 pages, 196k words, $1.99 at Kobo. This is set in the far distant future when the sun is starting to expand, so almost more like fantasy. A Devil's Island story. 2 interesting flashback threads. Well paced, well written, yay modern stuff!

For my middle daughter, I next read "Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland", by Lisa Schneidau, 2018, 180 pages, 49k words. An enjoyable set of short folk tales, with some interesting twists to some of the better known stories. So off to my daughter it went.

Finally, "The Time Ships", by Stephen Baxter, 2014, 608 pages, 165k words, $0.99 at Kobo (all these bargains!). Written to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the original H. G. Wells "The Time Machine", by a very reliable British hard sci-fi author. It does not disappoint, cosmic in scope but still very respectful of the original.

Next up ... Music In.

Note, most of Music Out has transitioned to the Jaz Dumoz blog. With today's Song of the Day - stardust - I posted the following:

Today is the 2nd birthday of Song of the Day. 1st video posted September 27, 2020.

Today is Song of the Day #158!

Downward Spiral?

OOOO0000oooo....

Wow, pretty good textual image, neh?

1st up, "January Fifteenth", by Rachel Swirsky, 2022, 147 pages, 40k words. I really liked some of Swirsky's early stories. I was excited for this collection of stories based in a near-future world where everyone receives UBI (Universal Basic Income). In her world, it happens annually every January 15th, which seems stupid to me. My Social Security comes every month, I pay Medicare every month, my annuities pay every month, I cannot imagine why a UBI program would pay annually. So I guess it is just a (stupid) literary device.

We follow 4 different UBI recipients, including a slave teenage wife in a polygamous (Mormon) society. Ugh, ugh, & ugh. Way too much domestic detail. I was glad when it was over. So something you should read, but maybe not particularly enjoyably.

So, after that, I regressed. I reread the "Tbe Pandora Sequence", by Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom, a trilogy, total 1340 pages, 388k words. A reissue of 3 novels:

• "The Jesus Incident", 1979, 445 pages, 129k words.
• "The Lazarus Effect", 1983, 493 pages, 144k words.
• "The Ascension Factor", 1988, 430 pages, 124k words.

These stories are the sequel to "Destination: Void", 1966. The AI of a voidship becomes sentient, & then omniscient, omni*, etc. (oops), and declares, "Decide how you shall WorShip me." Big oops.

The 1st novel was especially memorable. A hell world, horrible predators populate the surface, what was Ship thinking?

The 2nd novel, more Ransom than Herbert. The 3rd novel, all Ransom, a poet, as Herbert had died.

"Jesus Incident" is the best of the lot, mostly because Ship is still around & messing with people. The 2nd reads like a 2nd novel, i.e., transitional. The 3rd novel seemed to be mostly just plot waiting to be inevitably resolved. Yawn. Still, not bad for a reread.

I then tried something very random. My oldest daughter Erica in Brooklyn passed on a recommendation to me (yay!): "Reclaimed", by Madeleine Roux, 2021. I read the 1st chapter, and was like, "Noop". Not good writing. I tried to analyze why I concluded that. I think, in that 1st chapter, the banality was overwhelming: 2ndary character wants to kick traumatized protatagonist out of her apartment because she & her boyfriend want to have a baby. And, while she is discussing this w the protagonist, she of course spills her Starbucks on her cashmere sweater. Because, she hasn't wasted nearly enough of my time already ...

This surely must be a generational thing of some sort ...

So, alarmingly, I regressed yet again, and read another old Frank Herbert: (should I wish they would quit offering these to me to buy for $1.99 or $0.99???) "The GodMakers", 1972, pieced together from stories going back to 1958! 200 pages, 58k words. Some Dune tuneup material here, on the nature & meaning & utility of Religion. Dated but interesting.

What to read next? Totally not sure. Certainly something newer ... We'll see, I guess.

Cormorant Menace?

I just sent the following email to the most excellent IslandWalk Lakes Committee.

When I posted my 2021-2022 IslandWalk Birds report, I noted a lot more double-crested cormorants than what I remembered as being usual.

A month or so ago, I read an article about how 10s of 1000s of cormorants were wreaking havoc on the salmon population in the pacific northwest. I couldn't find that article again, but if you google DuckDuckGo "cormorant problems", there are dozens of articles.

Then a couple of weeks ago, my wife & I vacationed in Ottawa, Canada. On the way there we spent a night in Clayton, NY, and took a 5 hour boat tour of the Thousand Islands - the area where the St. Lawrence River leaves Lake Ontario.

We learned an island is defined as: 1) above a minimum size; 2) always above water; 3) has at least 1 tree. We were shown 1 ~30-40' island that had no tree, but instead dozens of cormorants. The cormorants had started roosting there, and their acidic droppings had killed all the trees on the island.

I wanted to get at least 1 more data point, so I compiled my 2020-2021 IslandWalk bird data:

http://portraitofthedumbass.blogspot.com/2022/08/islandwalk-birds-2020-2021-season.html

Between the 2 sets of data, there was indeed a large increase in cormorant #s. 2020-2021, I counted at least 1 cormorant 100% of the time, the average was 3.2 birds, with a max of 10. 2021-2022, it was 95% of the time, but the average was 7.9, with a max of 25. That is around a 2.5x increase.

Hopefully I will be counting again this year, and hopefully this trend will not continue. And, of course, 2 data points is not nearly enough from which to extract a trend line.

But I wanted to bring it to your attention as something that needs to be watched. Does our lake management company also monitor the wildlife? If so, maybe pass this on to them? Maybe this is something that could be nipped in the bud before it becomes a problem?

It's too bad, I have enjoyed watching the cormorants fish on Lake #1, and I like how an aid to identifying them is how they always, whether swimming, standing on the bank, or roosting in a tree, keep their head at the same 20 degree angle.

And, of course, cormorants are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty.

Best regards,
Chris Heinz

IslandWalk Birds, 2020-2021 Season

My overall birdwatching strategy for IslandWalk is posted here.

My 1st ever "IW state of the birds" post was for the 2021-2022 season. I am cloning this post from that post. That post contains discussions of things I found interesting about a lot of the species.

I was of 2 minds about posting the data from 2020-2021. There were only 9 X & X2 datasets, and the final X dataset, on March 4, 2021, was cut short when the arch of my right foot totally gave out at the 4.5 mile point in the 5.41 mile walk. I went straight home (cut down Freeport rather than walking the SW corner) and finished at 5.0. But, there is a bird issue, and I wanted this data for comparison purposes, so I went on and entered it.

[Note, I have quit going barefoot on our tile floors, and have put arch supports in all my shoes & my new comfy slippers, and my feet are doing much better. :-) Hopefully I will be up to walking the 5.41 & 5.47 mile X & X2 routes by December.]

I will do a follow-up post on the bird issue I mentioned. (Hint: cormorants).

I manually entered this data in this spreadsheet

I will be reporting for all observed species the following 4 datapoints:

1. % of days seen;
2. total birds counted;
3. average;
4. max.

Note, the 2021-2022 post, I reported "# of days seen" vs "% of days seen". I will go back to that post and revise it to show the % instead of the #, for easier year to year comparison.

Doing this post ~18 months after the fact, I don't remember any fun anecdotes to share.

Here's the link to the IslandWalk hotspot at eBird.org.

Each bird name listed below is linked to its IslandWalk activity page in eBird.org. So click on the name, you will get a picture & all the data eBird has on that bird in IslandWalk.

Swimmers

I guess all are dabbling "ducks"? "Dabbling" === "stick your bill down in the water & swish it around & eat what you get from that" - as opposed to diving ducks.

• mottled duck: % days 100; tot 293; avg 33; max 51.
• muscovy duck: % days 100; tot 186; avg 21; max 41.
• common gallinule: % days 56; tot 9; avg 1.8; max 3.

Divers

• pie-billed grebe: % days 100; tot 53; avg 5.9; max 13.
• hooded merganser: % days 56; tot 20; avg 4.0; max 10.
• lesser scaup: % days 56; tot 20; avg 4.0; max 6.
• ring-necked duck: % days 56; tot 21; avg 4.2; max 6.
• double-crested cormorant: % days 100; tot 29; avg 3.2; max 10.
• anhinga: % days 100; tot 54; avg 6.0; max 10.
• brown pelican: % days 56; tot 9; avg 1.8; max 5.
• belted kingfisher: % days 0.

Waders

• great egret: % days 100; tot 42; avg 4.7; max 6.
• great blue heron: % days 44; tot 4; avg 1.0; max 1.
• snowy egret: % days 89; tot 14; avg 1.8; max 3.
• cattle egret: % days 11; tot 1; avg 1.0; max 1.
• tricolored heron: % days 100; tot 36; avg 4.0; max 7.
• little blue heron: % days 33; tot 3; avg 1.0; max 1.
• green heron: % days 0.
• wood stork: % days 44; tot 4; avg 1.0; max 1.
• white ibis: % days 100; tot 166; avg 18.4; max 41.
• glossy ibis: % days 78; tot 51; avg 7.3; max 14.
• limpkin: % days 0.

Beach Birds

• killdeer: % days 11; tot 1; avg 1.0; max 1.
• black skimmer: % days 0.

Raptors

• osprey: % days 67; tot 8; avg 1.3; max 2.
• bald eagle: % days 0.
• cooper's hawk: % days 0.
• red-shouldered hawk: % days 0.
• broad-winged hawk: % days 0.
• swallow-tailed kite: % days 0.
• loggerhead shrike: % days 22; tot 5; avg 2.5; max 4.
• black vulture: % days 11; tot 2; avg 2.0; max 2.
• turkey vulture: % days 78; tot 14; avg 2.0; max 4.

Corvids

• fish crow: % days 67; tot 132; avg 22.0; max 55.
• blue jay: % days 67; tot 40; avg 6.7; max 20.

Perching Birds (Passerines)

• mourning dove: % days 100; tot 32; avg 3.6; max 8.
• eurasian collared dove: % days 22; tot 3; avg 1.5; max 2.
• common ground dove: % days 0.
• common grackle: % days 100; tot 77; avg 8.6; max 61.
• boat-tailed grackle: % days 11; tot 1; avg 1.0; max 1.
• red-winged blackbird: % days 0.
• european starling: % days 0.
• northern mockingbird: % days 89; tot 65; avg 8.1; max 42.
• brown thrasher: % days 0.
• northern cardinal: % days 0.
• red-bellied woodpecker: % days 78, tot 44, avg 6.3, max 15.
• pileated woodpecker: % days 0.
• downy woodpecker: % days 0.
• northern flicker: % days 0.
• palm warbler: % days 100; tot 85; avg 9.4; max 20.
• black-and-white warbler: % days 0.
• yellow-throated warbler: % days 0.
• prairie warbler: % days 0.
• blue-gray gnatcatcher: % days 22; tot 3; avg 1.5; max 2.

Multiverse Fatigue

1st up, a duology from Stephen Baxter, whose series I have enjoyed over the years:

1. "World Engines: Destroyer", 2019, 523 pages, 142k words;
2. "World Engines: Creator", 2020, 500 pages, 136k words.

Set a few hundred years in a future, on a post-climate crisis world where humanity has decided that space exploration is a bad idea. Then, an artifact of a level 2 or 3 galactic civilization turns up, and it's pretty exciting from then on.

********************** SPOILER ALERT **********************

But then, stuff starts happening in multiple, parallel planes of the multiverse. In 1, Armstrong had a heart attack & died on the moon. In another, the British Empire didn't go away. Etc, etc, etc.

I think I 1st remember the multiverse being introduced in the Michael Moorcock Eternal Hero stories of the 1970's? It never caught on much.

But now that Marvel has gone that way, I suspect we'll be seeing more & more of it. My wife & I watched "Everything, Everywhere, All At Once". My wife actively didn't like it, I was like meh.

The thought that I have been entertaining is that, once you invoke the multiverse, science fiction becomes much more like fantasy - anything goes, internal consistency not required. I'm not sure this is a good thing.

Both books are well-written page turners, and worth reading.

********************** END SPOILER ALERT **********************

Next up, "Up Against It", Laura J. Mixon, 2011, 504 pages, 137k words. The main progagonist is an 18YO, so I guess this is a YA novel. A well-plotted tale of plucky youngsters helping to save their asteroid home. Lots of plot, good adult characters as well as our teenaged heros. I liked this enough that I purchased the 1st novel of a trilogy by Mixon.

Next up, "The John Varley Reader", subtitled "Thirty Years of Short Fiction", 2004, 899 pages, 244k words, 18 stories. I think this was a $1.99 special via BookBub. Varley has been 1 of my fav authors going back to his earliest stuff in the 1970s. These are some great stories, I had read most of them already. In addition to the stories, after having been reticent about discussing his work for years, Varley introduces each story with autobiographical info about when the story was written. A very pleasant read.

I was recommending Varlay to a young person who had just begun transitioning to being female. Not sure if that is good advice or not. Varley was writing about gender change from the beginning, late 1970s, but surely modern people know a lot more about it now.

Following those great words of wisdom from that emminent post-modern philosopher Bruce Ehrler - "wait a while" - I put off writing this long enough that I read a 5th book: "Wanderers", by Chuck Wendig, 2019, 975 pages, 265k words. Wow, was that book that long? It was definitely a page turner, I finished it at 1:30 am this morning. Published in 2019, a disease jumps from bats to ravage the human race? Seriously? If I had realized that was the plot, I might have skipped it. But, it was a very good read. Plus very spot on re white supremacist militias, christian nationalism, most of our modern political quarrels.

I will pick a couple of bones though.

********************** SPOILER ALERT **********************

Last line of the Interlude at the end of Part One:

And by then, it would be far too late for him — and for everyone else.

Middle of Chapter 15:

They had no idea how true that was.

Isn't this way heavy-handed foreshadowing? Or is this not foreshadowing, but some other blunt instrument? It reminds me of those true crime shows on cable, where they dole out the info in dribbles amidst dire insinuations of things to come. Pretty tacky.

********************** END SPOILER ALERT **********************

I have pre-ordered the sequel, which is due out in November.

Perfect timing, I'll switch over and clear the magazine stack. Momentarily tempted to ditch it, as I was tempted to blow off blogging these books. I may have a bit of process fatigue. But, I think that the older I get, the more important it is to keep my exocortex updated. So, brace up! Books blogged, #SongOfTheDay recorded, Music In processing proceeding, on to the magazine stack!

Phew!

5 books to blog, I'll do them in reverse order, starting with the "Phew!".

The "Phew!" was my completion of "The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice", by Catherynne Valente, 2007, 512 pages, 148k words. This is Book 2 of The Orphan's Tales. I blogged Book 1 here; I found its tales within tales (nesting 4 deep) confusing, but in the end I think I liked it OK. This 2nd book, not so much. I just wound up being really confused and wanting it to be over. When I was done, I was like "what happened to that character? Or that one?". I almost gave up a few x. I persisted, but at the end, definitely "Phew!"

The 1st book had a bit of an Arabian Nights feel to it, this 1, hardly at all. ?!?!?

I think the author should provide a tree diagram of the chapters/stories & the characters therein! ;-P

---

Before that I read another cheap ($1.99) 2-novel reissue of some classic sci-fi, this time Roger Zelazny. "Isle of the Dead, Eye of Cat", 402 pages, 109k words.

"Eye of Cat" was originally published in 1982. It follows the Zelazny formula of "Lord of Light" (Indian religion/mythology) and "Creatures of Light and Darkness" (Egyptian religion/mythology) of borrowing memes from religion/mythology. This time it is Navajo religion/mythology, seemingly studied very lovingly and in depth. The protagonist winds up being a really old guy, the last living human who still has a true Native American mindset. It is a good adventure.

"Isle of the Dead" was originally published in 1969. Another really old guy, who is also the galaxy's 67th richest person. He is also the only human trained in world-building by the alien race whose speciality this is. We again have borrowed religious/mythological memes, this time from the religion/mythology of the world-building alien race.

LOL, in the 2nd book, our ultra-rich, really old guy goes on a tirade against the service industry due to their wanting to be tipped. I guess Roger had just come into some book $$$ & was starting to think like a conservative ... Social commentary in SF in general ages very poorly more often than not.

---

Before those, a totally pleasant surprise! A 5 star rating! Recommended by Cory Doctorow, in his incredibly informative blog "Pluralistic".

"An Absolutely Remarkable Thing", by Hank Green, 2018, 376 pages, 102k words. Book 1 of "The Carls". A totally charming tale of 1st contact. Totally up on social media, online fame, etc. Great characters, great plotting. If you haven't read it, please do so now! ;->

Of course I forged straight ahead into the 2nd book, "A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor", 2020, 542 pages, 142k words. A pleasant read, but not as charming as the 1st book. Plus the plot got a lot more "duh duh DUH!!!", more ominous & stressful. I guess there was some stress in the 1st book, but it was overwhelmed by the joy & optimism of discovery.

Music In, 2022, Batch 1

Not too too many albums to get caught up on. I'll do maybe the 1st 1/2 for now.

• The New Pornographers, "In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights", 2019, 11 tracks. This is the 7th NP album I have. It is yet another collection of catchy pop songs. NP is very reliable, 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "You'll Need A Backseat Driver". Note the album title in the 4th line of the lyrics.

• Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "Barn", 2021, 10 tracks. A nice effort, these guys are definitely keeping on keeping on. 4 stars. Here's "Canerican", which definitely seemed to get stuck in my head - totally vintage Young?

• My Morning Jacket, eponymous, 2021, 11 tracks. Louisville's finest delivers again. What a great guitar band! 4 stars. Here's a great guitar song, "In Color".

• Cleo Sol, "Mother", 2021, 12 tracks, bandcamp. Very nice, chill piano & vocals. I guess R&B rather than Alternative Rock. Out of London, her 2nd album. Born Cleopatra Zvezdana Nikolic, mother Serbian-Spanish, father Jamaican, both musicians.
  The melting pot that is London is producing some great musician mixes. Makes me think of Lianne La Havas, Greek dad, Jamaican mom - or visa versa?
  4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "Don't Let Me Fall".

• Bright Moments, "Fracture", 2022, 9 tracks. Bright Moments is 1 of the bands of Lexington and Dunbar HS fav son Kelly Pratt. This is a good effort. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track, "Lonely Child".

• katie dey, "forever music", 2022, 10 tracks, bandcamp. dey certainly is prolific lately. I have 1 album/year of hers since 2019 for a total of 4 albums. Her vocals are definitely ... quirky?!?!? A good listen nonetheless. 4 stars. Here's the title track:

• Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, "Georgia Blue", 2021, 13 tracks, bandcamp. A Georgia-themed album, with guest artists??? Ahh, explained on the album notes on bandcamp: a labor of love, conceived after the 2020 elections, dedicated to turning Georgia blue (democratic). Proceeds to:
  • Black Voters Matter - blackvotersmatterfund.org
  • Georgia Stand-Up - www.georgiastandup.org
  • Fair Fight - fairfight.com
  So, totally a worthy cause. But, I didn't need a cover of "Midnight Train to Georgia" in my collection at this point. 3 stars.

• Various artists, "French Disco Boogie Sounds Vol.3 (1977-1987 - selected by Charles Maurice)", 2018, 13 tracks, bandcamp. I really enjoyed Vol.4 - every time a song from it came on and I was up, I would start dancing. More dancing please! 4 stars. LOL, here's something different: a 41 second prerelease teaser for the album.
  Note, if you are offended by the suggestive album cover, I apologize.

• Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong", "Ella and Louis Again", 1957, 19 tracks. 4 stars. Apparently a double album. I didn't like it as much as their 1st duo album, which makes sense. The 1st album had the best songs, these are their 2nd-best songs. I am all about the songs. Already in the Jaz Dumoz songbook are:
  • let's do it (let's fall in love) [red flagged]
  • i won't dance
  • love is here to stay
  Added to the list to be worked up:
  • autumn in new york
  • gee, baby, ain't i good to you?
  • i've got my love to keep me warm
  • i get a kick out of you
  Here's the 2nd of those:

• Willie "The Lion" Smith & His Cubs, 1958, 24 tracks. Nice, per Wikipedia his full name was William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholf Smith.
  Hmmm, this album does not show up in the Wikipedia discography. The earliest album they have listed is 1957, somehow I thought this album was 1958. The tracks are all from 1935-1937. I've written about how my college friend Delbert Lionel Hilgartner III turned me on to Fats Waller > 50 yrs ago. He also was a fan of Willie "The Lion", so it seems odd that I'm just now getting around to checking him out.
  4 stars. Here's the album cover:
  

  Here's "Echos of Spring". Not a lot of choices on YouTube.

• Delta Sleep, "Spring Island", 2021, 12 tracks, bandcamp. Brits, out of Canterbury, Kent. Great guitar rock. 4 stars. Listen to this song. 2 guitar parts playing seperately, together, in harmony, not in harmony. Really well done. "The Detail".

11 down, n to go ...