Peter Gatti > Recent Status Updates

I: what is this power of God?
M: to do things through skilled workers

You should know that everyone who adores images does so out of respect for some valiant man who once lived, such as Hercules

This book is boring as shit but chapter 6 of this on productive/unproductive labour produced the funniest and hardest fought argument our reading group has had yet.

Freedom is what his fathers fought, and if he heard the story right, bled, for

Carrying this around as a flex

Reference to the Odyssey/Polyphemus’ reply to Odysseus in The Prince’s big culminating speech to the Italian emissary? “They (Piedmontese) arrived to teach us good manners, and we will ignore them because we think we are gods”

I forgot where I was going with this. anyway this type of land expropriation appears in the text lol.

… the sale of huge tracts of land to upwardly mobile citizens. And also (this is either directly from him or my own extrapolation), because the Church was responsible to some extent for the poor, it cut them adrift as well, freeing up more cheap labour. I’m going to bed but I’ll finish this thought later.

I’ve still got Capital on the brain so I’ve been thinking about primitive accumulation throughout this, and how it appears in the text. Marx forwards a theory for the link between capitalism and Protestantism that I think is more compelling than the Weber “work ethic” stuff— that expropriation of Church lands is crucial in capital formation because it’s means….

“‘And after dinner, at nine o'clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends." For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. And the Prince, who had found Donnafgata unchanged, was found very much changed himself, for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation; and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.”

I remember making fun of secular humanism a lot on message boards at this time in my life

What a pain it was to establish the eternal laws of nature

Essentially a book about hosting etiquette. The villains are just bad hosts. A few things:
- I’ve read more horror than any other genre. Polyphemus’ line “Stranger, you are a foreigner or a fool telling me to fear and revere the gods, since the Cyclopes care nothing for aegis-bearing Zeus: we are greater they” is up there with the most terrifying.

“I have disturbed my own tomb, now I go to lie in it”

You are two, as people are normally counted. How many do you think I am?

~100 pages left. Gene Wolfe is a true 5 tool player. Style, imagination, control, pathos, erudition. He’s got it all folks. It’s control and erudition that I feel so many writers, especially american scifi writers, struggle with. He knows exactly what he intends to say and has the skill to say it in a compelling way. It’s convoluted but there’s nothing improvised or out of place.

I’ve read through four dense books to get to the storytelling contest here in CotA, which i read before I started BotNS and is the main reason I picked up the book in the first place. It’s probably my favourite passage in any piece of fiction I’ve ever read. Just incredible.

Typhon is so cool

These books are just incredible. I reviewed a couple of PKD books recently and a major difference in between the Wolf and PKD is that it really feels like Wolf has a really mastery of the subjects he’s discussing and the people/things he’s referencing. Even just the naming of characters and places in this book testifies to how much more thought through it is than PKD

Honestly not great so far. Every story thus far is basically the gods making some kind of dishonest deal with a giant or ogre and then Thor killing them once they violate it. Loki and Thor both are pretty boring.

Compared to the War Nerd Iliad, another modern prose retelling of mythology, this so far fails to convey the weirdness of the world it’s describing.

My major complaint about PKD is that even when he’s asking questions about PKD topics (ontology, drugs, religion, etc.) he never seems to be in control. It frequently feels like he hasn’t thought things through. To me, Ubik was totally out of control and sloppy, philosophically, and the plot was basically not interesting. This book doesn’t seem to suffer from any of that. My favourite PKD so far.

Grant had a look like a man who had resolved to put his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it

McClellan was definitely plotting a coup, right?

Second chapter not great. A lot of “white worker” stuff. I understand the feeling that leads to believing in it, but it just seems hopelessly optimistic. Even in times where the political conditions have called out more strongly to white workers, what have they ultimately chosen to do each time? But who knows, maybe this time is different.

Anyway he redeems it after. Very good again after chapter 2.

I suppose ive based a lot of my views and political activyt on the feeling that the working class still very much exists and is the agent of history, and that the working class is currently a disorganized mass in the inner suburbs that needs to become organized. I’ve seen very little contemporary theory that helps clarify this. Appreciate his references to Kilcullen. COIN theory often overlooked by socialists.

Only part way through but to sum up my initial thoughts: this book does the thing that I find only really strong communist writing capable of doing, which is to distill and clarify feelings you’ve had about politics/the world out there. I massively appreciate his attempt to outline “communist” geography as distinct from the absolute fucking husk of “Marxist” geography (cont…?)