Tag: Utopia

5 Favorite Books of 2018

I read a lot of books and I like to think about the books I read. But, I never do enough of either. That will change this year as I plan to engage more with what I read and think about. What better way to start than with a list. Here’s are five of my favorite books from 2018 that had a big impact on me last year. They were not necessarily published in 2018, although one of them was.

Hav by Jan Morris

It’s no secret that I’m a connoisseur of architectural things. Rooms, buildings, structures, cities; urban areas in general. Hav is a fictional trading city located somewhere in the Mediterranean. It’s old. It has been around for centuries, if not millennia. It’s rumored to be on the site of ancient Greek Troy. It is ostensibly European, but has been conquered by Arabs, Turks, Russians, Venetians, British, and others. Each administration has left an indelible stamp on the city through buildings, urban planning, and population resulting in a labyrinthine conurbation with many distinct parts. It’s also a trading port. It’s most famous export is Hav salt, valued for its aphrodisiac qualities. Like other commercial hubs, it is populated by a varied mix of people that first arrive to do business, but end up staying, settling, and creating enclaves that add to the exotic richness of the place. The Hav Chinese built the most impressive structure, the tower of the Chinese Master, that boasts young Sigmund Freud as a one-time resident. Languidly paced, but hard to put down, Jan Morris’ Hav is a place I wish I could visit again.

The Future Won’t Be Long by Jarett Kobek

This is a prequel to I hate the Internet, which I loved. Set mostly in 80’s New York, against the backdrop of its waning hedonistic club scene, with short detours to Midwest and California, we get to see the origin and evolution of the friendship between Baby & Adeline. As someone who lived in New York for a few years, it was an easy novel to like. Revisiting old haunts and places I wish were still around was a nostalgic treat.

ATTA by Jarett Kobek

This is a short and incredible book. It’s the fictionalized life of Mohamed Atta, the mastermind of 9/11. I resisted this book for a long time. Having lived in New York during 9/11, it’s hard for me to revisit that moment. It’s probably some kind of generalized PTSD, although I was never near the worst of the action. ATTA is revelatory. His life unfolded like a dark version of my own. I grew up in Poland, he grew up in Egypt, both were outside the western prosperity sphere at the time. We emigrated, and arrived in the west in Hamburg, Germany. We both studied architecture and urban planning. Then our path crossed again in New York, 9/11. A haunting mirror of our world.

1491 by Charles C. Mann

I was aware of 1491 since its release. I read the first 100 pages or so, a couple of years ago at my sister’s wedding. A copy was available at the Airbnb I was staying at. I didn’t want to leaved it, and contemplated stealing the copy. I finally finished it this year when I finally got a copy of my own. This book is incredible on so many levels. From the deep history of the Andean and Mesoamerican societies, through the plagues that wiped out a mind-boggling percentages of Native American populations, to the astonishing ecological impacts of the native populations, this book was filled with incredible history, much of which was completely unknown to me. I say this as someone who’s read fairly extensively on all these topics, and yet 1491 surprised me again and again.

Unamerica by Momus

I’m a big fan of Momus; not just Momus the musician, or Momus the writer, or Momus the blogger, or Momus the YouTube lecturer. I’m a fan of ALL of those incarnations of Momus. I’ve listened to his music since the late 90’s, read his Click Opera blog in Oughts, I watch his YouTube channel now, and I read his books when they come out. I devoured and loved The Book of Scotlands and the Book of Jokes.

Parallel World

For some reason it took me a few years to get to Unamerica. Momus can really turn a phrase: The Book of Scotlands’ ‘motto’ is “Every Lie Creates a Parallel World, a world in which it is true.” The back cover of Unamerica announces that, “God doesn’t love America. Quite the reverse.” The book begins with a revelation. God speaks unto Brad, and asks him to go a voyage of discovery, but in reverse. God says: “Brad, Americans have become the opposite of everything I intended humans, especially Christians, to become. If I still could, I’d smash this nation to potsherds, or flood the entire continental basin from sea to shining sea. […] America has to become undiscovered. […] Now it’s the rest of the world that needs to become the shining example, the Tir na nOg, the Shangri-La, the Golden Fleece. You Brad, and your twelve hand-picked companions must learn-and teach the world-how to become as unAmerican as possible.”

Meander

Eventually, Brad embarks on this voyage, but he takes a lot detours and meanderings. Momus is not afraid of language, he frequently makes use of vocabulary that is difficult, and willfully obscure. He relishes it in fact. It’s a slim volume, as are all of Momus’ books, but it’s densely packed with invention, adventure, absurdity, and fun. It feels like a much larger book. It doesn’t play by any narrative rules (that I’m aware of).

Utopia

Above all, Momus’ work revolves around the concept of Utopia. He himself has moved from Britain to France to America to Germany to Japan, and back. It has made him a keen observer of social norms, how they are constructed, and how they differ from place to place. We’re often told of the impossibility of Utopia, or of the impossibility of changing the society we live in for the better. But we only have to step outside of our borders to see that even small changes can produce big results. Humans have been creating different ways of living for millennia, it’s just something we do. It’s nice to have Momus remind us of this ability.

I hope you enjoyed this short list of my five favorite books of 2018. I will have more to say about some of these books in the future. Stay tuned!

January 3, 2019
Let a Hundred Utopias Blossom

I got a few thought-provoking comments to my Post-Apocalyptic Dreams post from a fews days ago. Some thoughts got provoked, hence this follow-up.

All of the comments mentioned Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road. The comments inspired me to read it. But, since I haven’t finished it, I don’t have much to say. I’m about half way through, though I’m not sure if I reached, what Chris called, the self-parodic moment yet. Hopefully I’ll have something more informed to say about it soon. Stay tuned.

Speaking of hope, I wanted to expand a little on Obama and, for lack of a better name, the Utopian Moment. I hope a general outline of what the Utopian Moment might be, will become clear below. I’m working on the final part of my Trans- series of mini-comics (alas, currently out of print, sigh…) and it deals with Utopias (as did parts 1, 2 & 3 in one way or another). These posts are a way to clarify some of the ideas I’m working with.

In his comment Chris Nakashima-Brown said:

”I’m afraid when it comes to optimism about imminent real change in Washington, despite my relatively high opinion of Obama as a rare politician with some bona fide intellectual integrity, I’m afraid I’m with Zizek (in the New Yorker profile you link) in comparing the choice between Democrat and Republican to the choice “between Equal and Sweet’n Low, or between Letterman and Leno.”

I’m on board with the Republicrat bit. I’m also pretty cynical about the amount of change that Obama will actually be able to pull off. I’m less interested in Obama’s practical abilities, than in the psychological effect he’s had on the collective unconscious of the planet. I’m interested in what he represents. In that sense, some of the ’empty rhetoric’ criticisms leveled at Obama during the campaign by McCain and Clinton are true, but at the same time that rhetoric matters a great deal. Zizek:

”[…]Obama has already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change the limits of what one can publicly say. His greatest achievement to date is that he has, in his refined and non-provocative way, introduced into the public speech topics that were once unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity to talk with “enemies” like Iran.”

He may or may not be able to achieve practical changes in the Washington, but the effects of his victory reach further into less tangible mental realms. His victory is an optimism tsunami reconfiguring whole archipelagos of calcified ideologies – not in any specific way, but in a kind of general ‘things are possible’ way.

It’s important to note, that Obama is just a part of the Utopian Moment equation. If the financial crisis hadn’t materialized, if the US hadn’t over-stretched militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, he probably wouldn’t have been elected. Or, if he had been elected, there wouldn’t have been this kind of urgent impetus for change. The message of hope is meaningless when everything is going well. Obama needed this crisis as much as the crisis now needs him. In other words, he’s the right man for the right time. I don’t want to perpetuate too much the meme of Obama as ‘The One’ but there is some truth to that. The idea of ‘Jesus the Son of God’ was revolutionary for it’s time regardless of who ‘Jesus the man’ actually was. In that sense, the idea of an Obama is more important then Obama the politician.

The current crisis is probably a more important component of the Utopian Moment. The financial meltdown exposed the fictional nature of Capital. Basically, everybody stopped believing that things were worth what the banks said they’re worth. Mental recession indeed! We’re in a rare moment when we’re allowed to realize that all these economic structures and systems surrounding us are invented and made up by people just like us. They’re made of theories, habits, laws and conventional wisdom. In other words, they’re fictional. They’re no longer natural or inevitable. We can make up new ones that might work better. Or at least we can try.

Hope & crisis (utopia & apocalypse… maybe that’s a little too neat…) form a kind of space-time-mind zone – the Utopian Moment – where the horizon of possibilities has expanded exponentially… at least until the currently semi-fluid economic-political relations congeal into another consensus reality. It’s conditions like this that make optimistic Utopian narratives and projects not only possible but realizable.

I don’t want to give the impression that the Utopian Moment will have a positive outcome. I think there are always real dangers of it’s liberating energies being sublimated into negative objectives. This has happened frequently in the past, the French Revolution being one of the most obvious examples. But, even if we can’t seize the moment in the US, the Utopian Moment will have reverberations across the planet.

It’s possible that I’m giving too much credit to Obama and that I’m blowing up another market correction into something bigger than it is. It feels big. Only history will tell… well that depends on who will write it.

November 25, 2008
Post-Apocalyptic Dreams

The always interesting Chris Nakashima-Brown at No Fear of the Future posted a link to an interesting Reason article about Science-Fiction as a playground for political ideas. But I found his subsequent discussion more interesting, especially since it touches on something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. In the post he says:

“[…] the persistence of post-apocalyptic scenarios (as well as many disaster movies) expresses a latent yearning for the destruction of the state apparatus and the abolition of private property. At a deeper psychological level, […] the idea of roaming a depopulated earth rummaging for useful artifacts articulates the extent of our individual alienation in a thoroughly commodified society.”
No Fear of the Future

I think Chris is correct. I would add that the apocalyptic imagination is symptomatic of an inability to imagine a society different from ours. The Slavoj Zizek quote: “it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system,” is particularly apt. The future event horizon is so saturated by commodities, markets and debt (think about it, every 30 year mortgage is a financial spore which ensures that capitalism keeps blooming in our future) that it becomes increasingly more difficult to imagine a future that is different from the present. It becomes easy to think that some kind of Apocalyptic Event (AE) maybe our only way out.

But, much of this is tied to the continued survival of the capitalist system. Recent events, such as the financial crisis, put that survival in some doubt (I’m not counting out capitalism just yet though). Add to that the boundless optimism sparked by Obama’s victory and all of a sudden you have a license to imagine a different future. I wonder what kind of Science-Fictions the current situation will spawn? Will the apocalyptic imagination be as prevalent? After all, an Apocalyptic Event (real or imagined) is often prerequisite for the dream of Utopia.

November 20, 2008
The Story of Utopias

September 16, 2006