Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

Bookshops & Bonedust is a prequel to Legends & Latte, which I haven’t actually read yet. But Bookshops & Bonedust was a fun read. It reminded me of J. Zachary Pike’s Orconomics, in that it’s a tongue-in-cheek examination of what a high fantasy world would look like if things were a little more … mundane. Yes, there’s an evil necromancer and an enchanted skeleton, and a magic sword. But most of the narrative revolves around Viv the Orc coming to terms with a quiet seaside town, learning to help others by renovating a bookstore, and connecting with the joy of reading. It’s a light hearted, fun, read – and if you’re looking for something like that, it’s well worth it.

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

I really enjoyed Exhalation by Ted Chiang. It’s a great collection of short stories – the titular short story, Exhalation, is available online. It’s also the strongest in the collection – a moving, beautiful piece that’s thought provoking. Later on, there were others that felt … long and overworked, the one about digital life being the prime example – for the amount of writing, it wasn’t clear what he was working towards. Still, it’s a great collection. I particularly enjoyed The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, which felt like an excellent homage to the material that inspired it – science fiction shedding a light on something deeper. The book is well worth a read.

Quotes

She left, and I wandered the streets for hours, crying tears of release. All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat’s words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.

… air is not the source of life. Air can neither be created nor destroyed; the total amount of air in the universe remains constant, and if air were all that we needed to live, we would never die. But in truth the source of life is a difference in air pressure, the flow of air from spaces where it is thick to those where it is thin. The activity of our brains, the motion of our bodies, the action of every machine we have ever built, are driven by the movement of air, the force exerted as differing pressures seeks to balance one another out. When the pressure everywhere in the universe is the same, all air will be motionless and useless; one day we will be surrounded by motionless air and unable to derive any benefit from it.

All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.

It cheers me to imagine that the air that once powered me could power others, to believe that the breath that enables me to engrave these words could one day flow through someone else’s body. I do not delude myself into thinking that this would be a way for me to live again, because I am not that air, I am the pattern that it assumed, temporarily. The pattern that is me, the patterns that are the entire world in which I live, would be gone. But I have an even fainter hope; not only that the inhabitants use our universe as a reservoir, but that once they have emptied of its air, they might one day be able to open a passage and actually enter our universe as explorers. They might wander our streets, see our frozen bodies, look through our possessions, and wonder about the lives we led. Which is why I have written this account.

Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you. Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am dog the same.

… I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.

Even if your initial measurements were so detailed that they included data about every cubic meter of the Earth’s atmosphere, your prediction of the future weather would cease to be useful within a month’s time. Increasing the resolution of the initial measurement has a limited benefit; because errors propagate so rapidly at the small scale, starting with data about every cubic centimeter of the atmosphere would prolong the accuracy of the prediction by only a matter of hours.

Peter Mair’s ‘Ruling the Void’

Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void is a book with an incredible title. More importantly, it has an interesting set of questions and issues to focus on – the widening gap between political parties and broader society.

In Mair’s telling, there was a period in the twentieth century when political parties were deeply connected to, and embedded in, broader society and community organisations (churches, unions, volunteer organisations and the like). But as time has passed, he argues that two things have happened. One is that society has withdrawn from political parties – their membership is dropping precipitously, and they’re no longer embedded in or representative of large chunks of the community in the way they once were. There’s a parallel in the long decline of the primary vote for the major parties in Australia, which has been consistently declining for decades. There was a period of time where the combined vote for Labor and the LNP was in the high 90%; but that was decades ago, in the 1950s; in 2022 it was 68.5%. In 2022, rusted-on voters (a different measure than total primary voters, to be fair) was just over one-in-three,

Conversely, he argues, political parties have withdrawn from society – retreating into the safety of state funding and state positions of power, becoming a distinct elite class that is set apart from broader society.

Two interesting things that flow on from those trends are the ability of political parties to almost ‘shop around’ for different bases in society (think of the remaking of the modern Australian Liberal party after its inner city seats are wiped out, with a focus on an entirely different demographic base in outer suburban seats), and that there is an increasing interest from politicians in using different mechanisms to ‘de-politicise’ the decisions they make. Think of the push to remove Australian executive government authority over the Reserve Bank, or in the example Mair focuses on, the decision making processes around the European Commission – removed from national elections, not directly accountable to constituents in individual European countries.

It’s an interesting read. Sadly, as the introduction sets out, it was published posthumously, after Mair’s death, pulled together from articles, a draft in progress, and other sources. So there are gaps, but it also makes sense that those collating the book didn’t want to put words in Mair’s mouth unwisely.

The key thing that was missing from the book, to my mind, was an analysis of why parties have become so disconnected from broader society. There’s been plenty of analysis done of the reasons why community organisations are failing – think of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone through to Andrew Leigh’s Reconnected, and a thousand books in between. Without that broader trend analysis, it feels like attempts to understand political party decline are missing the broader picture. As one review notes, Mair never had an opportunity to put forward what his solutions might be. So it’s an interesting book, on an important issue; but it feels like it’s missing several pieces.

Quotes

… citizens are withdrawing and disengaging from the arena of political conventional politics. Even when they vote, and this is less often than before, or in smaller proportions, their preferences emerge closer and closer to the moment of voting itself, and are now less easily guided by cohesive partisan cues … there are now fewer and fewer standpatters, and hence more and more citizens who, when they think about politics at all, are likely to operate on the basis of short-term considerations and influences. Electorates in this sense are becoming progressively destructured, affording more scope to the media to play the role of agenda-setter, and requiring a much greater campaign effort from parties and candidates.

… there is less and less choice in policy terms, suggesting that political competition is drifting towards an opposition of form rather than of content. Competition in these circumstances can be intense and hard-fought, but it is often akin to the competition on show in football matches or horse races: sharp, exciting, and even pleasing to the spectators, but ultimately lacking in substantive meaning. It was precisely this that Kirchheimer (1957) long ago associated with the ‘elimination’ of opposition – the situation that prevails when polities experience government by cartel, and when no meaningful differences divide protagonists, however vigorously they may at times compete with one another. Likewise, public policy is no longer so often decided by the party, or even under its direct control. Instead, with the rise of the regulatory state, decisions are increasingly passed to non-partisan bodis that operate at arms length from party leaders – the ‘non-majoritarian’ or ‘guardian’ institutions … since this broad network of agencies forms an ever larger part of a dispersed and pluriform executive, operating both nationally and superanationally, the very notion of accountability being exercised through parties, or of the executive being held answerable to voters (as distinct from citizens or stakeholders) becomes problematic. Party, in this sense, loses much of its representative and purposive identity, and in this way citizens forfeit much of their capacity to control policy-makers through conventional electoral channels.

In the main, these closed political communities were built on a foundation of closed social communities, in which large collectivities of citizens shared distinct social experiences, whether these were defined in terms of occupation, working and living conditions, religious practices, to name the nost important. These social collectivities were in turn cemented by the existence of vibrant and effective social institutions, including trade unions, churches, social clubs and so on … At the same time, however, there was never any automatic or ‘natural’ translation of relevant social divisions into political oppositions and party formation. In and of themselves, for example, class structures largely failed to sustain a major socialist party in either the United States or Ireland, even though this development was the standardizing political experience in all other western democracies almost a century ago. Other social contrasts, and most notably gender, also failed in and of themselves to generate major political oppositions. Thus while social divisions helped to sustain political identities, they were not in themselves a sufficient precondition for the development of mass parties. A second impetus was therefore usually required, and this came through the mass organizations themselves, and through the conscious intervention of party. In other words, by actively mobilizing citizens into a set of collective political identities, the political parties themselves helped to construct their own independent networks of partisan loyalties. Organizational intervention was crucial here, for in supplanting the loose-knit parties of notables that had flourished in the perod prior to mass suffrage, the new parties approached their supporters with claims that, as Sigmund Neumann … put it, were ‘incomparably greater’ than those made by those earlier parties, in that they began to demand ‘an increasing influence over all spheres of the individual’s daily life’.

… parties in most democracies have moved from a position in which they were principally dependent for their organizational survival on the resources provided by members, donors and affiliated organizations, to one in which they now increasingly rely on public funds and state support, such that in most countries today, and in particular in almost all newly established democracies, the preferred source of party funding has become the public purse … Whatever the proffered rationale … the end result is that more and more parties in the democratic world have become increasingly dependent on state subventions for their organizational survival. Without this public support, it is likely that many parties would have difficulty performing their parliamentary roles, or even maintaining their extra-parliamentary presence. It is in this sense that parties have become dependent on the state, and appear as agents of the state.

Despite its evident idiosyncrasies, the EU should not be seen as particularly exceptional or sui generis, but rather as a political system that has been constructed by national political leaders as a protected sphere in which policy-maing can evade the constraints imposed by representative democracy.

Anthony Trollope’s ‘The Warden’

For various reasons, it took me a few tries to get through The Warden – I stopped and started at different points over a number of years. It’s not the most enthralling thread. But it is interesting for the way it dives into the life of small English country towns, and the way national political turmoil played out in the relationships between church figures, doctors, and other town leaders.

… Mr Harding got into another omnibus, and again returned to the House. Yes, Sir Abraham was there, and was that moment on his legs, fighting eagerly for the hundred and seventh clause of the Convent Custody Bill. Mr Harding’s note had been delivered to him; and if Mr Harding would wait some two or three hours, Sir Abraham could be asked whether there was any answer. The House was not full, and perhaps Mr. Harding might get admittance into the Strangers’ Gallery, which admission, with the help of five shillings, Mr Hardy was able to effect.

This bill of Sir Abraham’s had been read a second time and passed into committee. A hundred and six clauses had already been discussed and had occupied only four mornings and five evening sittings: nine of the hundred and six clauses were passed, fifty-five were withdrawn by consent, fourteen had been altered so as to mean the reverse of the original proposition, eleven had been postponed for further consideration, and seventeen had been directly negatived. The hundred and seventh ordered the bodily searching of nuns for Jesuitical symbols by aged clergymen, and was considered to be the real mainstay of the whole bill. No intention had ever existed to pass such a law as that proposed, but the government did not intend to abandon it till their object was fully attained by the discussion of this clause.

Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Oliver Twist’

I’ve been reading a bit about Victorian England recently, and so I’ve felt a (entirely regrettable) compulsion to read some Dickens. Surely, I thought, it’ll be more readable. There must be something there, if other people have found it worth reading.

I … really struggled. I’ve enjoyed Jane Eyre, some Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Jules Verne and Victor Hugo. It’s not like I don’t enjoy fiction from an older period, and Victorian authors. But with Charles Dickens … it feels as though he can never pick whether he’s writing a satire or a melodrama, and all of it feels very self-conscious, in a very awkward way.

Quotes from Oliver Twist

They walked on for some time through the most crowded and densely inhabited part of the own, and then striking down a narrow street more dirty and miserable than any they had yet passed through, paused to look for the house which was the object of their search. The houses on either side were high and large, but very old; and tenanted by people of the poorest classes, as their neglected appearance would have sufficiently denoted without the concurrent testimony afforded by the squalid looks of the few men and women who, with folded arms and bodies half doubled, occasionally skulked like shadows along. A great many of the tenements had shop-fronts; but they were fast closed, and mouldering away: only the upper rooms being inhabited. Others, which had become insecure from age and decay, were prevented from falling into the street by huge beams of wood which were reared against tottering walls, and firmly planted in the road; but even these crazy dens seemed to have been selected as the nightly haunts of some homeless wretches, for many of the rough boards which supplied the place of door and window, were wrenched from their positions to afford an aperture wide enough for the passage of a human body. The kennel was stagnant and filthy; the very rats that here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were hideous with famine.

‘Ah!’ said the man, bursting into tears, and sinking on his knees at the feet of the dead woman; ‘kneel down, kneel down – kneel around here every one of you, and mark my words. I say she starved to death. I never knew how bad she was, till the fever came upon her, and then her bones were starting through the skin. There was neither fire nor candle; she died in the dark – in the dark. She couldn’t even see her children’s faces, though we heard her gasping out their names. I begged for her in the streets, and they sent me to prison. When I came back, she was dying; and all the blood in my heart has dried up, for they starved her to death. I swear it before the God that saw it, -they starved her!’ – He twined his hands in his hair, and with a loud scream rolled grovelling upon the floor, his eyes fixed, and the foam gushing from his lips.

Mr Fang was a middle-sized man, with no great quantity of hair; and what he had, growing on the back and sides of his head. His face was stern, and more flushed. If he were really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good for him, he might have brought an action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages.

… I am anxious to disclaim at once the slightest desire to tantalise my readers by leaving young Oliver Twist in situations of doubt and difficulty, and then flying off at a tangent to impertinent matters, which have nothing to do with him. My sole desire is to proceed straight through this history with all convenient despatch, carrying my reader along with me if I can, and, if not, leaving him to take some more pleasant route for a chapter or two, and join me again afterwards if he will. Indeed, there is so much to do, that I have no room for digressions, even if I possessed the inclination; and I merely make this one in order to set myself quite right with the reader, between whom and the historian it is essentially necessary that perfect faith should be kept, and a good understanding preserved. The advantage of this amicable explanation is, that when I say, as I do now, that I am going back directly to the town in which Oliver Twist was born, the reader will at once take it for granted that I have good and substantial reasons for making the journey, or I would not ask him to accompany me on any account.