How Long 'til Black Future Month

I've been meaning to read some N.K. Jemisin for a while now.  Why, when she's well known as a novelist, did I start with her book of short stories?  Yes.  But this backwards approach does have the advantage of heightening my anticipation for the novels; if these really inventive short stories are not her best stuff, the novels must be amazing.  She's a great story-teller, really able to control the pace and feel of things, but with a speculative mind that alights on just as many interesting ideas as any of the boys-with-toys hard sci-fi I've read.  And of course, as a black woman, her version of future is refreshingly filled with people who don't look anything like me.  Now that's what I call visionary!

Like any collection of stories, some are better than others.  The hit rate here is pretty high though.  There's no real theme holding the whole works together, but I did notice that many stories come back to the idea of the city as a living, breathing entity, with a spirit that watches over its least fortunate denizens.  The best speculative fiction always shows us how the everyday world around us is already part fo the future.

P.S.  The New Yorker recently ran a profile of her, if you are interested in learning more.

Strawbery Days

I read David Niewert's Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community in response to the recent stupidity at Bellevue College.  The book is a series of partially overlapping essays that tells the whole history of Bellevue, WA through the prism of the lives of the Japanese American farmers who initially cleared and settled the area.  It's well written, and besides suffering from the profusion of proper names that always forces one to flip back and forth trying to remember who was who in a history like this, it's quite a quick read.  If you'd like the short version though, the basic story is summarized in an article Niewert wrote in response to the recent events.

The really shorter version is basically that power and prejudice have a real strong tendency to feed on and reinforce one another in a way that propagates both down through the generations.  Many early 20th century Japanese immigrants, very poor, constantly discriminated against, legally barred from owning land or becoming citizens, ended up as tenant farmers in the then rural East-side suburb of Seattle.  Bellevue at the time was a landscape consisting exclusively of huge stumps left from the turn of the century clear-cutting of old growth forest.  The Japanese immigrants, and soon their Japanese American children, ended up with the brutal task of dynamiting those stumps and turning the land into productive vegetable farms.  As a result of their efforts, the area became known especially for its strawberry farms, to the point where there was a hugely popular Strawberry Festival that attracted crowds from all over.  Despite becoming central to the local economy, the Japanese were still distinctly marginalized by a racist white society.  Stop me if you've heard this story before ...

The most notable of the long-time fomenters of anti-Japanese sentiment in the area was none other than Miller Freeman, a local businessman and land owner who many regard as the founding father of Bellevue.  He was instrumental in getting what is now the I-90 floating bridge built across Lake Washington in 1940.  The bridge cut the travel time between downtown Seattle and Bellevue from over an hour to 15 minutes.  Now that the Japanese farmers had already cleared so much land, Bellevue was perfectly positioned to transform into what it is today -- a soulless Seattle suburb with a stick up its butt about how its not just a suburb.  In fact, Bellevue is still basically a large mall with a small and crappy city attached to it -- straight out of Dawn of the Dead -- and this is even 40 years after Microsoft landed in close proximity.  Once the value of the land was measured in potential houses and not strawberries, Freeman's anti-Japanese tirades really kicked into high gear.  And of course they turned out to be perfectly timed to coincide with the hysteria of the war.  

The rest is gut-wrenching history.  You can read about it in lots of places, but Niewert does a fine job of covering the facts and even helps you feel a little of what it meant (though a more personal and poetic history would be When the Emperor Was Divine).   In 1942, FDR imprisoned all people of Japanese ancestry who were living on the West Coast.  They remained in these concentration camps for the duration of war.  When they were finally released they were given $25 and train ticket so that they could return to find their homes burned to the ground, and their farms looted during their 3 year absence.  That was the end of the strawberry days in Bellevue.

The not at all funny punchline of the whole story is that somewhere along the way Miller Freeman ended up owning a big chunk of valuable former farmland in Bellevue.  His son turned that very land into the mutli-billion dollar mall that sits at the geographic and spiritual heart of today's Bellevue.  His grandson became a WA state congressman and today continues to manage the family mall.  And, as the recent events I mentioned at the beginning make clear, you still don't want to be a person of Japanese ancestry on the wrong side of the Freeman family.  Faulker's famous line has never been better illustrated: "The past is never dead. It's not even past".

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

I've never really read a lot of Freud.  I remember a few interesting things from college that he wrote late in his career, like Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism.  These are probably not representative of his work though, since they really fall more into the domain of speculative cultural history than psychology.  I always imagined delving further into his purely psycho-analytic work would be not only a long project (the guy was ridiculously prolific) but also one that only had a historical interest, like reading about the history of chemistry or electro-magenetism or something -- why bother learning about the groping origins of a science when you know that so much of it has already been du-bunked and re-conceived by future generations?

As a result, I was pleasantly surprised by Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  It is of more than historical interest.  Whether this is mainly because Freud was so far ahead of his time or because psychology hasn't gotten that far as a science in the past hundred years is something we could discuss at length.  Freud struck me as surprisingly modern in his mechanistic, almost fluid dynamic conception of how the mind works.  He talks about problems of 'binding', discharge, approach to equilibrium, etc ... which are not that far off what seems to be the latest rage in cognitive neuroscience, Friston's free energy principle.  That's pretty impressive for a guy that could know next to nothing concrete about the brain and had to infer everything from people griping about their moms.  

The other thing I found oddly modern about Freud was his abundance of caution.  He has an interesting (occasionally maddening) sort of garden-of-the-forking-paths writing style.  He begins with some clinical observation, carries it forward into a broader hypothesis, combines it with another observation that could lead in several directions, advances a ways down one of those, doubles back and looks a bit at the initial course of the other ... you're never quite sure what he really thinks because he's never quite sure either.  But the reasons for each of these turns are marked and clearly evaluated for how speculative he considers them to be.  You really end up watching the process of his thinking unfold.  This struck me as a very modern and scientific way of proceeding.  It contrasted with my image of him as the guru of psycho-analysis famous for insisting on his grand theories of the Oedipal Complex and such.

But what of his actual ideas, you ask?  What exactly does he think is beyond the pleasure principle?  The Death Instinct -- a living thing's compulsion to repeat an earlier state of inorganic matter.  He infers this instinct from both theoretical considerations, as well as clinical observations like the dreams of PTSD patients and the way children often play by repeating what was originally an unpleasant situation.  The Death Instinct is meant to account for why we feel compelled to repeat something unpleasant. 

I know that a longing to be inorganic sounds looney on the surface of it; unfortunately, a short description of what that means won't do it justice and the long one I just wrote in my notes filled up 5 pages and will bore you to death. 😶  The basic idea is less nuts than it sounds at first.  The real question at stake is who the instincts belong to.   With Freud's distinctions between the unconscious and the conscious, or the Ego and the Id (which actually translates "das Es", literally "the It") to whom the instincts belong is a non-trivial question.  Short version: it's not necessarily "your" unconscious, "your" It, whereas it is, by definition, your ego.   He tentatively concludes that before you can go around pursing pleasure and avoiding pain, the free floating excitation of pleasure in general has to be "bound" as your pleasure, and that this binding takes place through the circumscription of a nervous system that seeks to maintain itself as near to equilibrium as possible.  Equilibrium, for organic things, is another name for death, hence the name.  

For those masochists among you, my colleagues at FPiPE will soon be spending more time deep in the weeds with Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I read it only to improve my understanding of Deleuze's theory of repetition.  So stay tuned for that and in any case don't judge the usefulness of Freud's ideas just from the tragically brief description here.