Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera. A meticulously researched, yet engagingly written dive into the British Empire. For anyone with the slightest interest in history, it is not surprising that many episodes of the colonial era are appalling. What is surprising is just how varied, diverse, and sprawling these stories are. The author states the historic truism that we need to understand this part of the past to make better sense of our present, and I think it's pretty fruitful. There are interesting parallels between the education system in Britain being squeamish about having students confront their horrific history and our similar dynamic here in the states.

So far a solid read. For all of the gut-wrenching massacres, there are plenty of fun facts, i.e. did you know the Dutch gave Britain the island in Manhattan to clear up a dispute over a two mile Pacific island that was the primary exporter of nutmeg?

losthighway wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2024 9:14 am

zircona1 wrote: Mon Jan 22, 2024 10:52 am Infinite Jest

It was $1 at the library. I've never read it, it's not too late to make a New Years' Resolution is it?

Don't be intimidated. Keep pushing through, read all the footnotes and let it wash over you. This book demands frequent reading, I couldn't put it down and pick it up a week later like an ordinary novel when I'm busy.

What none of the pretentious champions nor the dejected quitters of this book mention enough is that it's hilarious. The episode where they play Eschaton at the Einfield Tennis Academy (a highly complex version of Risk/model UN on a tennis court with inscrutable rules and impassioned arguments) had me in stitches.

The other thing that helped me read it was I had a little slip of paper where I worked out the family tree and jotted down some of the important years since they're all renamed by sponsors and not numbers. This helped me navigate the very nonlinear timeline.

If some awful person made a modified version of this book in chronological order with half the digressions it would be a big seller and immensely popular. This would be sacrilegious and reduce Wallace's interest in how modern life is largely navigating an absurd slew of information with our main challenge being attention: what to pay attention to and how to maintain attention should we be able to determine that. I'd still read this dumbed down book.

I think IJ is sub Vonnegut, emperor's new clothes territory, but this is a great defence right here.

Salut, great defenses of things I don't like!

Indeed, makes me want to give it a go, though I can't really manage longer novels any more due to parenting interruptions. Maybe that will shift in a couple years.

I finished By Night In Chile, which was brilliant. Decided to read Bolaño's Amulet next, a sort of companion novel it seems. Also reading and enjoying the last issue of Sound American and Jim Harrison's final collection of poems, Dead Man's Float.

Things like this is so sweet:

Another hindrance to the ‘positive’ reception of Order 234 in the factories was the unique culture of work that had developed in the factories after the war. The widespread hunger and deprivation – the same things that made increasing industrial production so imperative – had produced a kind of ‘Notgemeinschaft’, a heightened sense of solidarity and mutual assistance on the shopfloor. This ‘Gleichmacherei’, as frustrated economic officials called it, was not so much a romantic holdover of self-defensive egalitarianism under capitalism as it was a logical response to the challenges of survival after the war. The idea of individual workers being singled out of the ranks for extra pay, food and other benefits offended this cooperative ethic.

Order 234 was a thorough-going measure to increase workplace productivity in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany. Enacted in 1947, the order was a response to slow productivity and high absenteeism during the first years after the war. These things were both in large part caused by workers not having enough to eat, making them exhausted and frequently ill. Lack of available goods also meant money was of little use as incentive, and some preferred to forage in the countryside rather than going to work.

It called for a range of social measures to address the most immediate needs of workers, such as improved housing, better wages for women, factory clinics and industrial safety. But the principle aim of Order 234 was to get workers to produce more, and towards this end it established a set of incentives to improve productivity in key enterprises (especially coal, steel and machine building) such as differential wages, promises of clothing, shoes and a hot lunch above and beyond one’s rations, accompanied by various sanctions aimed to punish unexcused absenteeism and so-called ‘slackers’ such as the withdrawal of ration cards or deployment for rubble-clearing at bomb sites.

Successful implementation was halted not only by reluctant workers, but factory managers too frequently sided with workers in circumventing rules, for example in giving out wage bonuses they weren't mandated to. Ongoing war reparations payments also meant most production increase was siphoned off to the Soviet Union anyway, thus unlike what the SED promised, for the population there was little relationship between increases in production output and increases in living standards. The demand to work harder under such conditions was understandably not well met.

The party attempted to respond to this with the astroturfed Hennecke movement, modeled on the Soviet Stakhanov movement. The idea was to encourage competition among workers by giving out rewards, material and symbolic, for exceptional performances, putting forth the highest achievers as examples to be followed, the archetype in this case being a miner named Adolf Hennecke. This campaign too found little tangible success, in part because workers recognized that official reports were likely skewed, that the impressive production feats claimed wouldn't be possible, due to lack of available materials as well as natural limitations:

As one retired worker put it:

I’ve worked in factories and know what one can manage to do. But the idea that a worker nowadays triples his performance or even increases it sixfold seems impossible to me as long as everything happens in a normal way. In my opinion the Henneckes prepare everything hours in advance, pick out the best tools for
themselves and get provided with the necessary materials. In short, it's actually just a big song and dance (ein Theater) that is being performed. I know what it’s all about. We’re supposed to produce more, the workers are supposed to work more, but one cannot do this like the Hennecke movement is doing it. That way you won’t find any sympathy among the really honest workers.

The campaign had the further effect of introducing enmity between workers, as the original namesake of the movement discovered:

Despite their occasional successes, the Henneckists gained little influence over their fellow workers. In fact, their efforts won them more anger and hostility than admiration, as Hennecke himself had feared and quickly found out: ‘When I came to the shaft the next day the mates did not look at me anymore. That’s anything but a nice feeling when you look them in the eyes and say “Glückauf” and they nod, yes, but you don’t hear anything anymore. I used to be just Adolf, a miner like any other. But now there was a wall between us’.

... activists were often derided as ‘norm breakers’, ‘slave drivers’, ‘wage cutters’ and ‘traitors to workers’.

From Constructing Socialism at the Grass Roots: The Transformation of East Germany (Corey Ross, 2000).

Rereading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles

Rereading Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.

kokorodoko wrote: Thu Feb 29, 2024 12:59 amConstructing Socialism at the Grass Roots: The Transformation of East Germany (Corey Ross, 2000).

Of all the social groups the party leadership wanted to ‘win over’ for the socialist cause, the greatest expectations of all were placed on young people.

The main tool for accomplishing this was the ‘Free German Youth’ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ), the official organization for youth which came firmly under SED control in 1948–49.

... it nonetheless seems clear that the willingness to enlist – for whatever reason – was on balance far outweighed by refusals and by a general disapproval of rearmament, based on a range of different factors.

Given the deliberate cultivation of war-like values among youth and children under the Nazis, it is remarkable how much evidence of principled pacifism (by which I mean refusal to resort to violence under any circumstances) one finds in the reports. And considering the politically-charged, highly pressurized atmosphere in which the recruitment campaign often took place, it is also remarkable how forthright and unambiguous many of these pacifist refusals were.

But it seems that one important reason was that, in their campaign to produce a peace-loving ‘anti-fascist’ youth, the SED and FDJ had to a certain extent been too successful for their own good. Many young people saw in the current idealization of the virtues of military vigilance and unquestioning discipline some of the very values they were taught to associate with the fascist past, not the socialist future. Consequently, many of those who refused to join the armed forces did so at least in part on the basis of the SED’s own prior teachings. Indeed, the FDJ’s new emphasis on ‘Wehrerziehung’ and its decidedly militaristic displays at its Fourth Parliament in Leipzig drove many pacifist youths from its ranks.

In Kreis Loburg youths even founded a clandestine group that called itself the ‘FDJ Action Committee against the National Armed Forces’.

There was also a certain social stigma attached to being in the KVP [Kasernierte Volkspolizei, military police]. Popular disregard for the KVP as suitable only for ‘unemployed good-for-nothings’ and ‘the lowest kind of riff-raff’ is evident in opinion reports from the shopfloor as well as interviews with East German refugees to the West in the 1950s.

Moreover, given the horrible memories of rape and plunder at the hands of Soviet soldiers in 1945, the KVP’s Soviet-style uniforms, which replaced the previously modified Wehrmacht uniforms in autumn 1952, did nothing to diminish this social stigma. On the contrary, as one new recruit wrote to his girlfriend before holiday leave: ‘We look like Russians in these uniforms... I don’t dare come home at all’.

Just finished Bernie Taupin's recent memoir. About to start Alan Rickman's performance diaries.

Justice Warriors, by Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson.


https://www.mattbors.com/justicewarriors

Just finished The Mousetrap (play), and the scripts for the first three episodes of House of Leaves