random family

this book's important because it illuminates how all the seemingly crazy shit poor people do are grounded in rational reactions to crazy shitty circumstances. it says a lot about why people have babies. there's a huge amount about toxic, insane gender norms, about jail, about the unlikely, heartbreaking ways people pursue dignity, about cesar knowing to put on two pairs of underwear when he's carted off to jail so he can have one while he washes the other.

one striking, important thing is how even if you've done a heroic job of keeping your shit in order as a poor person, you've doubtless got a family and friends who don't. how you'll be the only thing keeping half a dozen people from being homeless, how rising in society means brutally casting off a lot of family and friends. which is a crazy weight. it reminded me of that fat history book about the balkans which described the refugees of conflicts would arrive elsewhere and proceed to foment unrest there because of their hard-won knowledge of evil, and their staid, ethnic counterparts'd get sucked in. analogous stuff.

just so many details. so much noble shit. i'd have a panic attack trying to turn 10 years into a book. am so glad she managed it. also, what a tour de force of facts. what a miracle of saying This happened and then that happened, of straightforwardness. it's like there's no interpretation, just searing thoroughness. that's a stylistic triumph, but also such an important thing for me to remember in trying to be a writer. how staggeringly better to just say what happened. don't foist meaning, just recite.

ferris bueller's day off

this movie's a hilarious bourgeois fantasy. the kid's idea of rebellion is eating at a stuffy french restaurant frequented by his father, looking at modern art, and getting married. that's his best day ever. also, it's entirely about rich white people.

forrest gump

Forrest Gump's a movie about the joys of obedience. It's a revisionist history of the United States told by Forrest Gump, an athletic, good natured, and mentally handicapped man.

Gump's a trojan horse, a set of guileless eyes through which his country looks guileless. Gump's Vietnam War consists of marching, friendship, and his uncomplicated heroism. And Gump doesn't read newspapers, so the Pentagon Papers don't come up. And when Gump, an Alabama boy, happens on a militarized school integration, he picks up a notebook a black girl dropped, and hands it to her. He doesn't know enough to be racist.

The conceit of the movie is that Gump's there at these historic American moments, that he meets Elvis and witnesses Watergate and plays football for the Crimson Tide, and always contributes his dose of childlike goodnesses. Gump's a game tour guide for this Potemkin village.

walking with the comrades

this book's really upsetting because i think pacifism's the way to be, and this book's an argument for violence in the wilderness, because what else can you do. the argument goes thus: if a pacifist dies in the wilderness in an illegitimate state with a collaborationist press, should they have had a gun? also, double down by saying that that wilderness is sacred to them, and that living in it is the only way they know and want to live.

i had no idea india was such a rotten place. i mean, i'd heard there were a lot of wretched people, but i didn't realize the government was so corporatist and murderous.

still, doesn't violence necessarily destroy democracy? doesn't this rebellion consign the people in these regions to total militarization? roy's pretty romantic about the guns slung over people's shoulders and the nightly thousand star jungle hotel, but i'm dubious. at best, if they win, isn't that doubtless going to lead to a lot of horror a la khmer rouge? violent revolutions are the pits.

from my rich white western perch: surrender the weapons and fight with unmoving bodies. cede the bauxite flat tops for a couple years, go to the cities, overwhelm them with the horror of your lives, start the peaceful revolution in the Public World. can't win a popular revolution in the jungle.

somebody wrote somewhere about haute liberals preferring people'd commit suicide than fight against genocidal armies, and it's uncomfortable close to home for me. i think it has more convulsive, revolutionary power. pacifism's a way humbler, more difficult thing to follow. what could be easier, more feel-good, than fighting back? but when you phrase it like suicide, what a hideous self-abnegation to ask of people. but just get yourself jailed! there's that delightful idea that if 2% of everybody drafted refused to go, all the jails in the world couldn't hold them.

but it's convincing that, yes, they'll lose the land, lose the way of life if they protest without guns. different story in a city square than in a jungle. is it worth fighting for? does fighting derail, or complicate, the broader potential for mass, peaceful revolution?

if the alienation, the utter immiseration is so massive, they've gotta be this close to a mass movement. also, roy spends much time enumerating the weaponry of the indian army, and the out and out dedication of the government to its violent ends. the rebels literally cannot beat the violence.

but would the state just kill all of them? it could dump millions in the wilderness, just like that imagined pacifist. but who's doing the killing? chiefly people an awful lot like the people they're killing. they couldn't do it to a mass, peaceful movement. at least not that much. humans are human!

the balkans and pacifism

what do i want to say about the balkans regarding pacifism? one huge shitty thing in the region was the expansionist ideas, the irredentism. everybody wanted to get in on macedonia, for example. croatia and serbia feuded over bosnia hercegovina. bulgaria was all over thrace. greece had its megali idea. serbia always had its hooks in kosovo, an overwhelmingly ethnic albanian territory. etc. etc. 

where's this itch come from? more territory makes a state more powerful, sure, but why did it capture public imagination so much? the biggest issue was the power vacuums, topped off by the demographical scrum. when the ottoman empire got booted out of macedonia, etc., there was all this territory and all sorts of people and no government and no single country to swallow it up. and so there's war. simple enough. 

irredentism also comes about from without the country. bulgaria, for example, got its itch for southward expansion in large part from its refugees fleeing northward, who then agitated to return south under the flag, and arms, of their adoptive nation. so that, too. 

there're also racist, nationalist movements that spring up among benighted people and threaten minorities. the idea of "greater serbia" gained tremendous currency during the ustase regime during world war two. serbs WERE cleansed, terrible things DID happen, and the resultant fixation on having every serb be in a state together, and never a minority, ultimately lead to terrible things. 

reading The Balkans, by Misha Glenny, has made me think these things. it's also reaffirmed in my mind that all this stuff happens in states full of poor, ignorant people. investments in a country's infrastructure, and education, and industry, is the best and simplest way to stop wars from happening. 

as far as arguing that Violence Always Makes Things Worse, there's a lot of individual things to point at, but putting together a grand argument is way beyond me. there were the yugoslav partisans launching deliberately quixotic attacks on nazi positions solely to provoke retaliation against the locals who would then often join up the fight against the nazis. 

i originally started with all this because i wanted to know what the world should've done in the face of milosevic's bad behavior. did the world have to stop Greater Serb violence with violence? 

a calculation that's super taken for granted these days but which i'd like to undermine is that it's better for a thousand people to die in a war to stop the ignoble, peace time political murder of a single person. warrior-on-warrior casualties are infinitely easier to stomach than civilian deaths. that thinking leads to a lot more heinous (but noble!) death and misery than there'd otherwise be, i think. 

on marriage

had an afternoon of arguing with my cousin about a number of things. one of them started when she talked about all the shopping she had to do for bridesmaids dresses, ended up being about marriage as an institution (nothing to do with k or anything personal). i said i don't believe in marriage and we argued about it.

interesting things that she and my mom argued were that the vow of traditional marriage, this frankly outrageous promise, help smooth over the inevitably difficulties of being with somebody. it helps give one the endurance to deal with petty things to then have the bounty of a long term relationship because IT'S IN THE CONTRACT, whereas if you didn't have that "forever after" you'd be less tolerant and more liable to traumatically split up because you wouldnt have that obligation, so they say. logically following from this (though they didnt say this) would be that divorce should be harder, because that'd force people to work harder to work things out and reap the ultimate payoff of staying together. i'm not sure about that.

i mean, sure, down with traditional marriage, but i end up feeling kind of silly railing again marriage as a thing because, well, i'm down with long term relationships, and marriage is just a way of codifying them. i suppose the thing in my mind is when there're children. rather than a couple pledging to sort out their pettiness for decades on end and have somebody to fall back on, marriage or something like it should be all about kids. having kids, if you want to, should be this crazy serious undertaking occasioning all the preparation that weddings currently get. a commitment to not fuck up the life of a life you're creating is a far more substantive and important pledge than Let's Love Each Other Forever. THAT should be the big moment.

i dunno. why codify longterm romantic relationships? is there any harm to it? i mean, imagining a marriage excised of all the hideous bridesmaids-ing and gift registries etc, is there some evil cost associated with pledging formally to be with someone for a long time? one does it anyway telling someone they love them, love them forever. why not a plain old contract? perhaps i'm not thinking radically about this. i'm not questioning long term relationships, or monogamy or something. people in long term relationships breaking up sucks a lot, but that's all divorce rates are; nothing to freak out about maybe. this is super messy and dumb, disappointingly lacking in bold prescriptions. a reformed marriage'd probably be fine, i guess.

erin brockovitch and the prestige

erin's a simple feel good movie that's also got nice stuff about stay at home dads that i appreciated. there's just that the crux of the whole thing rests on this number, 335 million. there's a huge celebration over it. but it's actually a super pathetic number before you even count the 40 number that lawyers take out of it. it's a triumphant "true story" about the system working, but one wonders how much actors had to ham up that ecstasy at the end. i hope they did, anyway. the system is fucked, however blindingly julia roberts smiles.

i just watched the prestige which is neat. gotta give this plot a lot of leeway. if you don't think too much the metaphors are killer, but it rests an awful lot on an outrageous premise. but it's a spooky, enthralling premise. i also appreciate all the ugliness—dead birds, broken hands, drowning—the big ugly stakes. life's so much more interesting when things go wrong; i'm thinking again of people being blind in Unforgiven. and the image of all those hats in the field? that's haunting. if only the electricity didn't already look so dated. i was super ready to hate a christopher nolan movie, but this was pretty great.