Towards a Socialist America: Our Revolution, by Bernie Sanders
Today, it would take a minimum-wage worker an entire year to earn enough to cover the average annual in-state tuition at a public university--if that worker had no other expenses at all for that year. But we all know that a person cannot live on, much less save any money, on a minimum-wage job.
It is no wonder many students from low-income families are forced to work while attending college, sometimes holding down more than one job in addition to attending classes, studying, and working unpaid internships. Try working the late shift at McDonalds while you are preparing for finals. Not easy. I have talked to too many students who are trying hard to focus on their education while working thirty to forty hours a week. Some students concoct elaborate cost-saving schemes, taking courses at less expensive schools and transferring credits, only to find that not all schools will accept the credits. And as we've seen, most take on unsustainable amounts of debt.
Why do we put them through this? Why are we making it so difficult for these students to succeed?
I was enthusiastically for Sanders in the Democratic primary because he was the candidate who most represented my values, and i was enthusiastically for Clinton in the general for the same reason. Either would have been a fantastic president, and would have been downright incredible compared to what we ended up with. I'll thank you to refrain from using the comments on my book post to take one more shit on Bernie Sanders, or on Hillary Clinton. That ship sailed and got torpedoed long ago, and America's real enemies are in Washington DC fucking us over and destroying everything we love as I type this. Because we failed to unite against them.
Sander's manifesto is in two parts. The first, and least interesting, is a summary autobiography, devoted half to his Presidential run, and ending with his speech endosring Clinton at the convention. Nothing about the assholes (Russian trolls as much as Republicans) who hijacked his campaign and poisoned the well against his wishes, and nothing about America's national suicide or anything he wishes he'd done differently that might have prevented it. but a great deal about ordinary struggling Americans he met along the way, people in need of help, crying out desperately for liberal programs to help them thrive and make America a better place, and instead watching the rich get tax cut after tax cut, followed by bipartisan cuts to badly needed programs on the grounds that "we can't afford it".
Which segues into the more interesting part 2, which makes the case for the Sanders agenda--the plans that he pushed as part of his campaign, partially managed to insert into the Clinton platform, and that he continues to push today from the Senate floor. that agenda includes:
1. Overturning the Citizens United law that allows unlimited bribing of politicians under the guise of "campaign contributions" and that is unquestionably the biggest, maybe fatal, threat to having a government that works.
2. Substantial economic reforms, including an increase in Social Security benefits, higher income taxes on people who get paid more than $500,000 in a single year; gender and racial pay equity; unionization of workers; paid family and sick leave; investment in infrastructure, housing, child and elder care, and clean energy (which will create jobs).
3. Universal health care.
4. Affordable higher education for all, and better secondary education, especially in the poorest parts of America.
5. Combatting climate change
6. Criminal justice reform, including the abolition of private, for-profit prisons that get paid every time someone you love gets incarcerated; an end to the militarization of the police and the racial disparities in sentences and deaths in police custody; and programs to help prisoners transition back into society after their sentences
7. Immigration reform to make it easier for people to become US citizens
8. Breaking up the big media empires that control what people are told about the state of the country; and
9. Programs to help the most vulnerable Americans, including the homeless, Native Americans, the elderly and the young; veterans, people with disabilities, marginalized groups all over the country.
It's embarrassing to me that any of this is considered "controversial" within my own political party, and it seems to me that if Democrats loudly and consistently push for these goals--all of which, sanders cites statistics showing them to be popular with large majorities of Americans--and especially if they keep pushing for them after they are elected--then democrats would win large majorities all over America, and would deserve them.
Makin' Bacon Again: Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte
The human mind, by its nature, employs in its progress three methods of philosophizing, the character of which is essentially different, and even radically opposed: the theological method, the metaphysical, and the positive. Hence arise three philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, each of which excludes the others. The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the third is its fixed and definitive state. The second is merely a state of transition.
The refreshing part of Comte's major book, which apparently invented a new branch of philosophy (where other philosophers have been grouped into, e.g., the rationalists, the empiricists, and the idealists, Comte stands alone), and the only part that seems to me to count as "philosophy" the way we understand it, is in the first few pages, where he divides the progress of civilization into theology (being guided by idiotic superstitions on the grounds that they are comforting) to "positivism" or rule by reason and the way things really are, as opposed to what feels good; with metaphysics as a bridge between.
The whole rest of the book is devoted to what they then called "natural philosophy" and what we now call "science", with the last section trying to present government and the process from theology to reason in the form of a science, which he calls "social physics". I make comparisons with Francis Bacon because both men, two centuries apart, attempted to classify and rank various sciences and branches of knowledge in comprehensive ways that seem clumsy and primitive when looking back to them across the centuries. The whole classification system, from mathematics to chemistry and biology, seems to me to have primary historical value, as a measure of where scientific thought of the day lay. It does not seem of practical modern use. But it is nice to see religious dogma put in its place.
Fair Fortune: Guy Mannering, or the Astrologer, by Walter Scott
Mars having dignity in the cusp of the twelfth house, threatened captivity, or sudden and violent death, to the native; and Mannering, having recourse to those further rules by which diviners pretend to ascertain the vehemency of this evil direction, observed, from the result, that three periods would be particularly hazardous--hit fifth, his tenth, his twenty first year.
I returned to Walter Scott upon noticing that Guy Mannering (an odd choice0 was included in the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction (along with much better-known English works by Fielding, Austen, Thackeray and Dickens). I'm not sure if anyone not a Scott fan in particular, has even heard of it.
It has much that I've come to expect from a Scott plot: A title character peripheral to the story, a stranger from England who happens to get caught up in something close and personal among the natives. Intimations of the supernatural without actually going all the way there. The "astrologer" part of the title refers to the title character's hobby of drawing horoscopes, which touches the plot exactly once, when he is present at the birth of a boy and tells his fortune (All together, now--He will go on a long journey frought with perils before achieving eventual success and live happily ever after at the end). There are traveling people (referred to unfortunately as Gy**ies throughout the text), and they tell a fortune about him too.
Naturally enough, the boy is kidnapped and disappears, and naturally enough, the travelers are blamed for it. Even more naturally enough, sixteen years later, a young man "told he had been born in Scotland, but ignorant as to his parentage" happens to come wandering by right about the time the ancestral estate is being sold to the greedy unscrupulous cousin.
Have a bottle of good Scotch handy when you read this, and take only small sips when the tropes happen, or they'll have to roll you home.
Aubrey/Maturin: The Mauritius Command; Desolation Island; The Fortune of War, by Patrick O'Brian
"Not hang the lad for cowardice? But surely, Sir", said Captain Pym, "Surely a medical man will cut off a gangrened limb to save the rest of the body?"
"A medical man does not cut off the limb in any spirit of corporate revenge, nor in terrorem; he does not make a solemn show of the amputation, nor is the peccant limb attended by all the marks of ignominy. No, sir. Your analogy may be specious, but it is not sound. furthermore, sir, you are to consider that in making it you liken the surgeon to a common hangman, an infamous character held in universal contempt and detestation. And the infamy attaching to the executioner arises from what he does: the language of all nations condemns the man and a fortiori his act, which helps to make my point more forcibly."
--from The Mauritius Command
"To be very sure, I shall be glad to get my collection home as soon as possible; the giant squid is already in an advanced state of decomposition, while my kangaroos below deck grow fractious for want of a proper diet. but I did so long to see a cassowary."
"I am sorry for it, indeed, but the exigencies of the service..." said Jack, who dreaded a fresh influx of Sumatran rhinoceroses, orang-utangs, and infant rocs.
---from The Fortune of War
Desolation Island, for me, is the point at which the series breaks away from exposition and stand-alone adventures, and into the main arc plot. Before that, years and major plot devices happen between books. After that, it's just about seamless until near the end of the series.
Here, have a song about it (tune = "High Barbary")
I'll tell you a story, if you listen unto me
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
Of the most unlucky warship that was ever put to sea
With Dr. Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey!
'Twas after Bounty's mutiny, with tempers running high
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
We were sent out in the Leopard for to pick up Captain Bligh
Awaiting down in New South Wales for Jack Aubrey
We were stranded off of Africa, with not a breeze in view
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
Gaol fever epidemics killed three quarters of the crew
Though Stephen did his best for Captain Jack Aubrey
Now, what's that ship that's drawing near, and are you English too?
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
"We're a 74-gun Dutchman, and we're coming after you!
"May the Lord make us true thankful now", says Jack Aubrey
(What do all the little Dutchmen say? "Aar, Aar, Aar...")
(What does Captain Jack say? "Oh shit....")
The thunderclouds broke open as the Dutchman gave us chase
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
In rain so thick you couldn't see the nose upon your face
The ocean rose, the Dutchman closed on Jack aubrey
(What do all the little Dutchmen say? "Aar, Aar, aar...")
(What does Dr. Stephen say? "Oh! I spy a petrel! Pray do not let the guns harm it!")
The storm blew solid water and the cannonballs did roar
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
A giant wave came crashing, and the Dutchman was no more!
600 men went down in front of Jack Aubrey
In triumph, we went south and neared completion of our trip
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
When a sunken reef of ice tore out the bottom of the ship
A desolation island home for Jack Aubrey
(What does Captain Jack say? "Oooops...")
Now we're stuck in the Antarctic and it's much worse than it looks
Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we
If you're wanting any more, you'll have to read O'Brian's books
Of Dr. Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey!
Towards an Abuse-Free World: Why Does He Do That? (Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men), by Lundy Bancroft
When a woman tells me of her concerns about her partner's potential for violence, I first encourage her to pay close attention to her feelings. If he's scaring her, she should take her intuitive sense seriously, even if she doesn't believe his frightening behavior is intentional. Next, I want to learn more about what's already happened. Has he ever trapped her in a room and not let her out? Has he ever raised a fist as if he were going to hit her? Has he ever thrown an object that hit her or nearly did? Has he ever held her down or grabbed her to restrain her? Has he ever shoved, poked, or grabbed her? Has he ever threatened to hurt her? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we can stop wondering whether he'll ever be violent. HE ALREADY HAS BEEN.
This one was recommended to me by Joreth Inkeeper, whose blog posts are among the most thought provoking that I've found on the Internet. My line of work brings me in constant contact with abusive men whose behavior I attempt to change, with varying success rates.
Bancroft runs an abuser treatment program. It is for abusers but designed primarily to help their victims (it is understood that nothing said by the abusers will be kept confidential from the abused, as accountability and amends are important), and most of the book is directly addressed to an abused woman as the reader. nevertheless, it spoke to me. Everything about it--the sections on abuser behavior, the excuses and myths frequently given, the real motivations behind it, and what can be done to change him--rang distinct bells, confirming things I have noticed and helping me to clarify my thoughts. soon after reading it, I interviewed a man with a restraining order against him, and EVERYTHING he initially said was straight out of case histories in Why Does He do That?. I was able to smash his excuses so effectively that he looked at me dazed and a little frightened. And then, with the illusions knocked away, we were able to get down to doing something useful.
Also--I read in public a lot, and most of the time, I am left to it by passers by. Why Does He Do That? is my first book in a long time that had several people start conversations with me when they saw the cover. One was a woman who had read the book and was quite affected to see a man reading it, too. Another was a successful-seeming man in a suit who wanted to know what it was about, and proceeded to challenge every premise I mentioned, and when I pointed out how, funny, he was saying a lot of the things the abusive men Bancroft works with say, he bitterly complained that I had maneuvered him into a catch-22 thing where he couldn't WIN. I said it's not about winning and reminded him that he had started making it into an argument. He stormed off. I hope I do not meet him professionally.
This is a book about a toxicity in certain relationships that needs to be addressed. It stretches beyond domestic abuse in residences to how people are portrayed in media tropes, how we talk to each other, and, yes, what we put up with from politicians *cough*TRUMP*cough* Very highest recommendations.
Have the Kel Stopped Screaming, Clarice? The Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee
Over one million people died at Hellspin fortress. Survivors were numbered in the hundreds. Kel Command chose to preserve Jedao for future use. the histories said he didn't resist arrest, that they found him digging bullets out of the dead and arranging them in patterns. So Kel Command put Jedao into the black cradle, making him their immortal prisoner.
Cheris's best move, which was also a desperation maneuver, wasn't to choose a weapon or an army. Everyone would be thinking of weapons and armies. Her best move would be to choose a general. The problem was that any swarm sent against the fortress would have to contend with the fact that its exotic weapons wouldn't function properly. She didn't need ordnance; she needed someone who could work around the problem. And that left her the single undead general in the Kel arsenal, the madman who slept in the black cradle until the Nirai technicians could discover what had triggered his madness and how to cure him. Shuos Jedao, the Immolation Fox: genius, arch-traitor, and mass murderer.
This is the second of the six Hugo-nominated novels for me to read this year, and it is quite different from Too Like the Lightning (see last month's Bookpost). It is not "Literature", but it is intensely thought provoking.
The closest comparison reference I've come up with is a sci-fi variation on The Silence of the Lambs, in that a government worker (Cheris, a military officer for a hive government called the "hexarchate") is given a mission (in this case, the taking of an impregnable planetary fortress) and seeks the aid of a notorious, evil madman (in this case, the aforementioned genius tactician General Jedao)...with the distinction that, instead of visiting the madman in a safe confined area, Cheris has Jedao's soul/ghost/something planted in her head so that they converse. Jedao can't read Cheris's thoughts, but he is an expert at reading her body language.
And so they go on the mission, with Cheris not only concerned about whether the military tactics (all sorts of strange weapons are used here) will work, but whether Jedao will support the mission or betray it, and whether he's going to go insane again mid-mission. Revelations about who Jedao is, why he did what he did back then, and how it relates to the current mission, ensue. Gripping, and highly recommended.
Outback Stake House: Voss, by Patrick White
If he had but known--there was a great deal that Colonel Hebden did not know; it was almost as if there had been a conspiracy against him--if he had but known, Death had just apprehended Jackie, crossing a swamp, during a thunderstorm at dusk. The boy had not attempted to resist. He lay down, and was persuaded to melt at last into the accommodating earth, all but his smile, which his tight, white, excellent teeth showed every sign of perpetuating.
This is a mid-20th century novel about a 19th century Big Important White Man who leads an expedition to "discover" inland Australia (SPOILER: This time, Australia wins). It's churchy and White Man's Burden-y and we're supposed to like the title character because he is a VISIONARY (literally, he has visions which let him commune with his girlfriend in Sydney while he's stuck in a cave in the middle of the continent) and a martyr. I, unfortunately, read it in the midst of books by the actual literary giants of the era, and found it quite wanting.
Postmodern Prometheus: A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers
Owl had said it was important to know how swearing worked, and it was okay under the right circumstances, but that Jane shouldn't swear ALL the time. Jane definitely swore all the time. She didn't know why, but swearing felt fucking great. Owl only had eleven adult sims in storage, but Jane didn't mind playing them again and again. Her favorite was Scorch Squad VI: Eternal Inferno. The best character was Combusto, who used to work for the Oil Prince but was a good guy now, and he also used to be a pyromancer in a previous life, so he had visions of the past sometimes and his eyes caught fire when he got mad, which was all the time, and his ultimate attack was called Plasma Fist, which made bad guys explode.
This is the third of the 2017 Hugo-nominated novels I've read. It involves a consciousness that comes into existence in a robot body, and meeting other...sentiences...in a strange world in which stuff happens. the consciousness learns things about living and the way things work on this world. That makes one of us. It works well during certain playful vignettes, such as where she maps her values based on a video game, or the time where she's out in the desert being menaced by starving dogs. Unlike Ada Palmer's and Yoon Ha Lee's offerings, chambers does not have a central character with a past full of brutal murders to be psychoanalyzed, so there's that.
I am surrounded by geeky friends who LOVE sci-fi at their favorite book genre, and who write songs about it, and whose conventions are about science fiction and not about mysteries or literature, and so I read things like the Hugo nominees to keep up. Sometimes I find a series that makes my heart sing. In general, though...I often get lost. This is one of those times.
The 19th Century Murders: Sold Down the River, by Barbara Hambly; Cain His Brother, by Anne Perry; Mrs. Jeffries Pleads the Fifth, by Emily Brightwell
"Angus's brother Caleb is everything he is not--violent, brutal, dangerous, an outcast even among the underworld along the river beyond Limehouse, where he lives....I used to beg Angus not to keep seeing him, but in spite of everything Caleb did, he felt that he could not abandon him." A shadow crossed her face. "There is something very special about being a twin, I suppose..."
--from Cain his Brother
When he looked back later on that chilly glittering afternoon by the river, he reflected that not only was his trust betrayed on all four counts--a good round average for a black man relying on Fate's good will in Louisiana--but he missed even cosidering the biggest catastrophe of all, lying hidden under the calm surface of the next forty eight hours like a snag in the river that rips the heart out of a boat and slaughters all on board. The worst was that it was one he should have foreseen.
--from Sold Down the River
Another three-pack of Murder She Housekept episodes that keep going downward. The first of these reveals early on that the killer, who shared some cake with the victim before killing him, had picked all the walnuts out of his own slice of cake and left them on the plate. then the climax involves the cook presented as going batty because she makes a bunch of walnut scones and insists on bringing them round to give one to all the suspects, and everyone else is like Omigosh, what could she possibly be doing?!? but note that I'm still reading them.
Cain his Brother, a variation on the trope of an identical twin accused of killing the other, is absolutely riveting---well, no it isn't, except that it becomes so, late in the book, because of a plot device I've seen before, but which completely took me by surprise this time, and I had to go back and read most of it again. the SECOND time was riveting. Yes, it's short, so stick to it if it seems to bore you at first. It's worth it.
Graveyard dust, the third Benjamin January book, has been lost by another library patron, and so I skipped ahead to Sold Down the River, the fourth mystery set in the horrors of the pre-Civil War South. for reasons you'll have to read about, January is persuaded to "go undercover" as a field slave to find out "which n****r" is behind the vandalism, sabotage, voodoo veves and murder attempts at a particularly horrible plantation. The owner is so vicious to everyone that the culprit is as likely to be a family member or a rival plantation owner...but if January dares to suggest that a white person might be responsible--or if he otherwise says some truth that the white man who hired him doesn't want to hear, he gets threatened with flogging or killing or being sold down the river by people who know that he is free, because in this environment where people are deemed to be things, actual communication is impossible.
Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Generation of Sociopaths (How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America) by Bruce Cannon Gibney
As economy and education faltered under the Boomers, a parallel system rose to contain the factory seconds, kept company by whatever portions of society Boomers found it expedient to impound. That parallel system is history's largest penal regime, and it extends well beyond the needs of deterrence and containment. Erected at enormous cost to the fisc (as usual, mostly debt financed), the corrections system has become a state within a state. Many of its charges could have been saved by the schools the Boomers failed, by social programs the Boomers let decay, or by the exercise of empathetic clemency instead of automatic punishments that appealed to the Boomers' crudest Old Testament instincts. Instead, boomer policy created a conveyor belt that leads from school detention to its lifetime equivalent.
Disclaimer: I am Generation-X, and I have been railing against the BaBoo generation as a plague of locusts since I was in high school. I was lucky to have been born to silent-Gen parents who had me late. My peers were latchkey children, born to BaBoos who considered them annoying hobbles to their quests for fun, given horror movies in which small children were Satan, of age sexually just in time for new and frightening STDs, out of high school just in time to watch financial aid dry up, out of college just in time for Desert Storm, the end of affordable housing, the end of the job market, and in time to be branded lazy slackers who wanted our butts wiped for us and who wore underwear on our heads.
I thought I was going to fucking CHEERLEAD this big dump on the generation that fucked up everything, and which is fucking it up even more for the Millennials who don't even get the gleanings from the picked-clean garden. They have squandered a nation's wealth, done nothing with it, and are viciously stomping the new young, who are smart, ready, raring to go and more deserving of a hand up than me or anyone who came before them but after WWII.
But, as we know, it's never that simple.
Bruce Cannon Gibney (born in 1979, so also Gen-X, but more than a decade younger than me) points out a lot of what I complained of, and a few more things besides (I had not noticed that the BaBoos had given us the fastest Constitutional Amendment ever passed, to secure them voting rights at age 18, AND had lowered the drinking age to 18 just long enough to be the only mass group of 18 year olds to get to vote while drunk). But there are problems.
For one thing, BaBoos, cannot simultaneously all be sitting, dragon-like, on great hordes of America's money and facing huge financial hardship "requiring" the young to break their backs supporting their old age because they never saved a dime. They cannot all be influential old white men (Gibney does occasionally exempt most PoC from his analysis, right down to President Obama who he faint-praises as not really Boomer, not really typical American in a way I find discomforting). they cannot be both religious, moralistic, faith-based judgment passers and devoid of temperance, chastity, frugality, etc.
And he diagnoses them with mental health disorders, collectively. Because of mass behavior. To Gibney, sociopaths' symptoms are their behavior--irresponsibility, lack of empathy, aggression, disregard for healthy societal norms...and he goes back and forth defining people by policies pushed by their governments, mostly while BaBoos have controlled legislatures. Meanwhile, many people struggle with actually diagnosed mental illnesses and DO restrain themselves from behaving badly.
Gibney indulges in false equivalences, failing to distinguish between Democratic policies that have failed to go far enough in problem solving, and Republican ones that eagerly seek to tear it all down. So, for example, Reagan and the Bushes are to blame for endless tax cuts, cuts to education funding abandonment of the Kyoto treaty, etc., while Clinton and Obama's loud advocacy for reversal of such policies are denounced as laughable slaps in the face to our intelligence, because they supposedly knew full well that Republicans would never allow it. So a pox on all their houses. Al Gore, the environmentalist crusader, is no different from Republicans who actively resist addressing climate change, because Gore is a hypocrite for not living in a mud hut.
Boomers hate science because nukes and the military-industrial complex made them distrustful of all technology, or because STEM is hard and Boomers don't like schoolwork, or because they all got religion, or something something garbanzo.
Worst of all, Gibney (a venture capitalist with his fingers in such great socialist projects as AirBnB and Uber) devotes a substantial part of the book to hating on the one big "entitlement program" that Boomers are still enjoying: Social Security, which they supposedly intend to drain and abandon to be destroyed just as they die (at which point it will be the large population of Millennials working to pay the social Security of a smaller population of Generation-X, the opposite of the huge glut of Boomer seniors currently on the backs of a smaller younger crowd). Gibney's proposed solution is to destroy Social Security NOW and hand it over to venture capitalists like himself, cheering as we sock it to those undeserving BaBoos!
Fuck that. Holy Cow, one of the big milestones in which i felt I had "arrived" was the day when the annual Republican proposals to get rid of Social Security and turn it over to the banksters and money lendering operations started to propose phase-outs for people born AFTER my birth date. Now I have to worry about people like Gibney YOUNGER than me trying to take the benefits I've already paid, for their own purposes.
So maybe the BaBoos are not the only ones showing antisocial behavior that the ableist can categorize as a pathology. Maybe there's an extent to which politics itself is self-interest behavior at its worst, and the big imbalance we're suffering under right now happened only because one core bulge in the population had the number of voters sufficient to have everything favor their own particular interests at the expense of ours, for the last 40 years. Maybe this too shall pass.
Generation of Sociopaths does seem to be right on many fronts, but not on all of them. Tellingly, the jacket touts the book in several places with promises that it will be CONTROVERSIAL, not that it will be RIGHT.
Sorrel and Sore Losers: The Red and the Black, by Stendahl
Well, good! he said to himself, laughing like Mephistopheles. I am cleverer than they are; I know how to choose the uniform of my century. And he felt his ambition and his affection for the ecclesiastical habit increase vastly. How many cardinals, who have been baser born than me, have been in government! Little by little, Julien's agitation calmed down; prudence resurfaced. Like his master Tartuffe, whose role he knew by heart, he said to himself: "I may see in these words a plain pretence. I'll put no trust in these flattering remarks until a few of her favours for whom I repine arrive to confirm what they tell me is mine."
I find Julien Sorrel, whose character is one of two main reasons for The Red and the Black's place on the "great books" shelf (the other is the portrayal of French society as Sorrel's ultimate antagonist) to be an enigma wrapped up in a can of worms and stuffed into Pandora's Box. The book's blurb, and passages in the novel itself, make Sorrel out to be a villain, a bad guy, and people today speak of unscrupulous social-climbers as "a regular Julien Sorrel", but I'm not seeing it.
Sorrel is born into poor circumstances in post-Napoleonic France, too late to do what the generation before him did and win praise and honors as a soldier, and so he is steered into the church instead, although he is not religious (the military and secular world contrasted with the clergy are the "red and black" of the title). He wants to get ahead in the world, and the world happens to be toxic. They don't have academic professions, and so for learned people, it's the clergy or become rich by any means necessary.
Several times during the course of the book, Sorrel fails because, given the chance to "win" by being a hypocrite, by seducing a wealthy woman, by cheating at business or by pretending faith--his conscience or sense of self won't let him follow through. He does much internal wrestling between the good person he feels himself to be and the dirty climber who will be valued for what he appears to be but condemned as soon as the mask falls off. In today's world, he would be given an MBA and told to make something of himself by embellishing his resume, kissing asses and aggressively "marketing" himself while gagging all the way and losing promotion because he doesn't strike some middle manager as enough of a team player.
And then finally, his behaviour at the climax comes from being denounced by someone he trusted as being everything he was told to be and failed to be, at which point he gives up on life. The show trial frought with bribery and presented as a dramatic spectacle for the fun of the public, is every bit the window dressing in the novel that it is supposed to be in the society of the day.
Compare and contrast with Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, in which an actual villain who commits murder for social/financial gain is presented as a "victim of society" who should be redeemed because Remorseful. Sorrel is, at least partly, arguably very much guided by conscience at his own expense; he does not kill anyone, and far from presenting as a "victim who has suffered enough", he goes out of his way to condemn himself, resisting the best efforts of the people he has harmed the most to forgive and rescue him. And so I'm going with Not a Villain here.
Baw-aww-lzac: The Wild Ass's Skin; Gobseck; Pierre Grassou, by Honore de Balzac
Possessing me, thou shalt possess all things
But thy life is mine, for God has so willed it
Wish, and thy wishes shall be fulfilled
But measure thy desires, according
To the life that is in thee.
This is thy life
With each wish I must shrink
Even as thy own days
Wilt thou have me? Take me.
God will hearken unto thee.
So be it.
--from The Wild Ass's Skin
Like Stendahl, Balzac seems to be developing a pattern involving post-Napoleonic French society as a sewer of hypocrisy that breaks the souls of innocent young people afflicted with youthful folly and idealism. "Gobseck" and "Pierre Grassou" are stories of young artists drawn by necessity to compromise their art, in one case resorting to forgery.
The Wild Ass's Skin, one of Balzac's first, and by far the longest of the three for this month, is a variation on the monkey's paw/sell your soul to get wishes parable, in which the protagonist can have whatever he wants (for real, not with ironically horrible outcomes), the price of which is that every wish causes the magic patch of skin to shrink a little, and when it's all used up, he will die.
Balzac's twist is that we do not get the usual progression of debauchery and repentance. The protagonist, Valentin, is shown in the last extremity of desperation, being given the talisman and wishing for a fortune, which he instantly inherits from some distant relative, and has a banquet that night with the boon companions who come to tell him the news. About half of the entire story then ensues during said banquet, as Valentin relates his backstory of hard luck, poverty (which he has refused to dishonorably escape from) and unrequited love. The episode ends with everyone around him demanding that he sacrifice his life making wishes for them--just one little wish each--oh, such a cad, who can make anything happen, and denying his friends this one little thing! The remainder of the tale has Valentin in self-imposed exile, living as if he is Dorian Gray's portrait in the attic, shunning the world in order to avoid making any more wishes. There is more, but I won't spoil the entire plot here. Well-written and moving.
Poldark Next-Gen Epilogue: Bella Poldark, by Winston Graham
Demelza said, "Do not, I pray, claim too much for me. I am--just me. I am just happy to be myself...and to be your father's wife. I have no wish to be anywhere else than at his side. I also believe that he has no wish to be anywhere except at my side. That will be the way it will be, until I die---until we die. I have only one regret, and that is that time just goes too fast."
The final Poldark book, set about five years after The Twisted Sword, is almost an afterthought, or an epilogue. Graham had called The Twisted Sword the conclusion to the series, but apparently got bored and kept going.
The result is comparable to the final season of Babylon 5--we have the same characters going on after the major events of the series have been wrapped up, but sudden new and somewhat related conflicts are brought up. Graham introduces new characters who come and go before we can care about them, introduces for the first time a serial killer mystery with neon blinking arrows pointing to one unlikely suspect (who is either going to be a boring big reveal or a surprise red herring); more weddings; a tragic climax involving a custody fight, a pet ape and a burning house; and it all concludes with a production of Romeo and Juliet where the star-crossed lovers are both played by women.
It's a bit of a muddle compared to most of the other Poldark books, but it is ultimately satisfying, and Ross and Demelza's 30 years of marriage are a charming role model for how to make relationships last through ups, downs, and creamy middles. Highly recommended, as is the whole series.