July 2023 – Koba English

Scars of Sweet Paradise

One of my all-time favorite singers is Janis Joplin, and like any other esteemed member of The 27 Club there is no shortage of biographies on her. Out of the three in my possession, Alice Echols‘ Scars of Sweet Paradise is my favorite for being incredibly thorough and grounding Joplin’s career in the wider social context of the times. (That said, I have vague aspirations of one day reading Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren.) I read it once in high school and felt compelled to revisit it now.

An interesting book to read once at age 17 and again at 37. Two different sides of the 27 club.

It’s a well researched and well documented account of Joplin’s life, with numerous quotes and insights from all kinds of people who knew her, either personally or professionally. I think part of the reason she became one of my all-time favorites was because Echols’ biography immediately revealed someone who went through trials and tribulations not dissimilar from my own: either too precocious or too out of step to connect with her peers, deeply sensitive, struggling to escape the black hole of beauty standards. There was a lot for a teenager in the early 2000s to recognize in teenager life 40-odd years ago. Plus ça change.

There is very little editorializing from Echols, who treads a reasonable middle ground between often polarized camps: Janis as queer icon, Janis as feminist, Janis as promoting, purveying or appropriating Black culture. There’s also enough history and context presented that anyone interested in the fifties and sixties as historical periods would find a lot of value in it (though Echols’ subsequent general history books, such as Shaky Ground or Daring to be Bad, might be an even better bet). Certainly not a must-read biography for the general public but for anyone with the interest, it’s fantastic.

Vacation Reading List

This coming Saturday I’ll be in the US for six weeks or so, visiting family and catching up with assorted friends all over the country. So far my itinerary includes Seattle, Portland, Des Moines, Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley, and very likely Austin. What portion of the book backlog will I be catching up on in all these places?

I have two copies of The Little Horses of Tarquinia checked out of the library, one in Swedish and one in French. I don’t normally like to take library books with me on international trips but I’m making an exception this time around.
Back issues of Karavan that I can conveniently leave in airplane seat pockets or on buses without feeling guilty.
Rose/House for the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club (ebook).
There’s always The Essays of Michel de Montaigne I have at the ready on my phone.
The Gray House was a free Kindle download on World Translation Day years ago. I was almost immediately put off by the book and had forgotten about it until it turned up as the Armenian entry in the Eurovision Book Contest, so I might give it another shot.
A David Graeber paperback of some kind, though whether it’s re-reading Debt or branching out into The Dawn of Everything I have yet to decide.

Beyond that, I expect I will wander into bookstores while I’m in the US—never mind what I might have left at my parents’ house—so I’m deliberately exercising restraint when it comes to packing books. And, of course, now that I’ve written up an aspirational list, I’ve all but guaranteed that I’ll read everything else except those!

Infomocracy

Another selection from Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club! Alas, I had to miss the meeting for this book because sometimes sacrifices must be made to keep the tabletop RPG campaign going.

Malka Older’s Infomocracy opens on the eve of a major international election. We’re in a near but unspecified future, where nation states are (largely) a thing of the past and people instead live in enclaves of 100,000 that elect a governing party every ten years: microdemocracy. This is due in no small part to the machinations of the tech giant blandly called “Information,” which functions as a kind of worldwide ISP mixed with search engine and public media. Somehow the rise of Information-the-service led to the rise of microdemocracy, though exactly how is unclear.

These governing parties are global in scale, so you could have a chunk of what is now Australia and a chunk of what is now Brazil governed by the same party; you could have two adjacent chunks of Australia governed by completely different parties. The party with the most enclaves is declared the Supermajority, which grants them some kind of governing advantage. The reigning supermajority, the Heritage party, is losing votes and looking for a way to stop bleeding out. A renegade reactionary party is blowing up by insinuating that military conquest will be on the docket if they become the new Supermajority. Through all of this we follow three characters with interests that are often unaligned or even flat-out competing as they navigate a tumultuous election rocked by fraud and hacking attempts.

There’s thrills, there’s intrigue, there’s speculation about how technology will continue to develop. Much of the book clearly draws on Older’s experience in humanitarian aid and natural disaster response, which makes her near-future feel much more grounded and connected to the present day than, say, something like Star Trek. Top notch world-building all around. The best example of the complexity and thought that Older put into it is the sheer number of parties that turn up in the book. Only a handful are in focus for the big important plot stuff (Heritage, Liberty, Policy1st), but nonetheless an easy dozen or so come up in passing and yet manage to maintain a distinct personality and agenda. Nestlé is a party in this future. So is PhilipMorris. (Is that any different from today oh ho ho.) Then you have groups like All4One/AllFor1, YourStory, LesProfessionels, 888, Free2B, SecureNation, Earth1st, one that uses Kanji that I’m never going to remember, others that are essentially theocracies, still others that are vestiges of the idea of a nation state (1China), and others that are entirely unknown to our characters as they zoom around the world. A lazier writer would have capped it at four or five, but Older went all in. Respect.

Infomocracy ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. I say “a bit” because while most of the narrative threads get conclusively resolved, they still set the stage for some further intrigue down the line. So I just went ahead and checked the next two books out of the library and we’ll see if I finish them before my vacation at the end of the month!

A Gun in My Gucci: Two Outsiders Take Down the Chicago Mob

A Gun in My Gucci: Two Outsiders Take Down the Chicago Mob is right what it says on the tin. Author E. C. Smith, one of a mere handful of women in the FBI in the 80s, recounts how she managed to help put away a not-insignificant chunk of the Chicago mob based on testimony from gangster-turned-informant Ken Eto, the highest-ranking (and maybe only?) Japanese-American member of the Chicago Outfit.

I first came across the book from an episode of Parallax Views, but this story might be familiar to anyone who’s deep into true crime. At any rate, Smith’s inside account of not only the Ken Eto case but how she became an FBI agent is worth reading on its own merits. Have I ever stopped to think about what it takes to become an FBI agent? No, and I doubt many people have. But now that I know, it’s little wrinkle that will stay in my brain forever; another puzzle piece in my understanding of how the world works.

Over time, I’ve realized that my favorite non-fiction is biographies, auto- or otherwise. It’s all of the interesting bits of going out and meeting new people without all of the stress entailed by smalltalk and social interactions. This certainly holds true for A Gun in My Gucci. Smith’s personality (warts and all) comes through crystal clear in lucid prose packed with wry humor and direct asides to the reader. In the hands of a less competent writer this would be awkward, but since Smith started her professional life as an English teacher she can put together a sentence or two. Is it polished, NYT bestseller writing? No, not quite, but it also doesn’t need to be. Even though I’m not sure we’d get along in real life, all the way through I was rooting for Smith (and Eto) and found her an engaging pyschopomp in the world of FBI agents and Chicago organized crime.

This expertise from a past life also means that A Gun in My Gucci is a quick read; according to my Kindle, I finished it off in three and a half hours. All killer no filler. Insecure writers often fail to trust their prose—usually with no good reason—and end up conveying the same point in two or three different ways, making redundancy a hallmark of amateur writing. If it’s not redundancy, then it’s superfluousness: an inability to murder their darlings. Part of the reason that A Gun in My Gucci reads so fast, in addition to the Hollywood-level source material, is that Smith doesn’t mince words or pad things out with a bunch of irrelevant incidentals. Not once did I get bored enough to start skimming, and praise from Caesar is praise indeed.

Smith was also interviewed for a Japanese documentary about Eto in 2008, Tokyo Joe: The Man Who Brought Down the Chicago Mob (Mafia o Utta Otoko), which is available in full on YouTube (for now). But if you want an engaging read for your next flight, or to keep you occupied during your commute, A Gun in My Gucci is worth the buy.