recognito | June Book Blog

Weird book month: I read half of many very good books that I then put down and didn't pick up again and promptly guzzled down one text-heavy video game (Hundred Line--will not be reviewing it just yet but you know it's a Visual Novel when the "prologue" is 20 hours of reading) and one game that's about getting jump-scared by mimes while a man wanders around muttering, You would do this to our family?? Clair Obscur is actually SO good that it's making me want to get back to final fantasy.

Now all that is well and good, you might say. but what of the books you have read, recog? What can you tell us about those?

I finished three books this month, none which I loved and one that I experienced a knee jerk dislike of but kept reading due to my special interest (Rebecca West)... let's goooooo

Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, Nussbaum - Best known for being the New Yorker's resident TV critic, Nussbaum has always been one of the less stuffy writers on staff. Her write ups often included network TV shows such as Buffy, 30 Rock, The Good Wife, and so on. It is a bit odd to think about the span of her career: as far as I can tell, she's been publishing since 2004, which puts her at the end of cable, the start of the "golden age" of TV, and right through the "end" of that age. I read Nussbaum's previous book, I Like to Watch, and remember enjoying it, though I'm a little fuzzy on the exact contours of her arguments--while she's a pleasing writer, I wouldn't call her a dazzling or exciting one. The shapes of her articles fit, they're structured well, and you can always trust that what she's reported has been fact-checked by the famous New Yorker fact checkers. Uh, super? I like that.

I did notice that Nussbaum has had a longstanding interest in reality TV and was excited to see her newest book, Cue the Sun! as the subtitle suggests, it's a book that delves into the history of the "reality" genre over the past eighty or so years and the beginning of the reality genre that we know now. My own interest was largely driven by my recent descent into Survivor... yes, I realize I'm twenty years late.

It's a good book for the layperson, and I think it does a good job of explicitly drawing the line between the "audience participation shows" of the 1940s, which included call in shows and shows such as candid microphone (and its televisual successor, candid camera), and the early gap between the critical reception and audience enjoyment, and then pointing out the differences between the early radio shows versus their television counterparts, especially in terms of the anonymity and fame. Nussbaum also does a convincing job describing the actual shows themselves, both in terms of the larger narrative and the actual techniques and style of filming, along with connecting cinema verite to reality TV, and then linking the aesthetics of reality TV to its scripted counterpart. You can tell it's a passion project for her, and that she's enjoying her position of being a long-time watcher who gets to delve deep into some of her favorite shows.

Just what do people get out of reality television? For the audience, Nussbaum argues, it's the chance to glimpse an unfakeable emotion. I do think Nussbaum has a relatively gentle touch when it comes to explaining why people enjoy watching--to me, there's an undeniable invitation to indulge in sadism... I guess that may be an inherent part of television, but it feels way worse when that sadism is directed towards real people?! It doesn't take long, however, for Nussbaum to depart from the question of what the audience gets out of it to what the creators of reality TV--not just the executives or the headliners, but the editors, camerapeople, producers, and members of the cast. You'd think it'd be difficult to ignore the cameras, but time and time again, Nussbaum observes, the cast members become collaborators--unspoken collaborators at first, then more explicitly participants of their own production. Nussbaum notes the phenomenon of how the first season is often the one with the most innocent cast; as the seasons develop, the cast and crew act with increasing deliberateness towards a "result." Imagine getting anyone to do reality TV now--the metagame would be intense.

There's a lot packed into this book, and I really enjoyed Nussbaum chronicling the evolution of the genre. The chapters on Survivor are especially fascinating to me as a fan, but also for the history of its production: locations, sponsors, finding networks, even the deliberate geographical spread of the cast. (As a side note, apparently the executives at CBS persistently asked prospective cast members what they would do if they found out someone was gay, if they'd prefer that their partner should cheat on them with a man or a woman, and so on... okay!)

Towards the end, there's a chapter devoted to The Apprentice, and I'll be honest, I could barely get through it--I kept experiencing like, these minor blackouts of uhh I guess rage and nausea as Nussbaum describes the way executives produced and edited their way around Trump's general fucking idiocy and behavior. Nussbaum balances it with a deep dive into Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the Bravo shows/network, but man it was a real bummer to go from "wow! I love well-structured games!" to "WOW I guess the term 'preditor' (predator + editor) is super apt. fuck Mark Burnett" but lmao I guess that's just..... modern day...... happy pride everyone.

The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson - [intellectual] I liked it

I do not have much else to offer here on this book--I do appreciate the technical fineness on a character/relationship level and the well done ambiguity. It's a haunted house novel that operates on a level of low key anxiety, clear markers of exclusion and inclusion, and a special kind of enjoyment and nervousness around congeniality: what it means, how it's made (a shared purpose? a lot of white lies?), how quickly it can be broken. Someone needs to tell you that you can't be there to make being there, as a group, especially enjoyable, yet an interloper can easily spoil the mood. Eleanor repeatedly reproaches herself for wanting to be the center of attention or seem like it. What's with that! Shirley Jackson apparently did not care for lesbians yet (not a surprise) continues to write books where lesbianism is the only reasonable explanation. What's with that!

What are the horrors Hill House has to offer? Visions, a change in temperature, the will of a parent grabbing the living by the ankle and yanking them away from "good" things. You smile because others smile at you, but what's making them smile? What do they like being around you but don't being with you? Why does no one ever love you?

But also, in a serious question, why do things happen in this book?? What happened on that one outing where Theo saw something, told Eleanor to run, and then starts screaming, but then bam, next chapter, no mention of what was seen. Why does Eleanor lie about the apartment? I spent a lot of the last half of this book going, "ummm" "uhhh" "what's happening" "I know what's happening" "I don't know what's happening" "wtf?" Not in a bad way, but also not in a way that plays along with my own preoccupations.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Morris - What IS it about the Illyrian coast that brings out the weird racism in the British?

I picked this book up because I impulse bought one of Morris' other books, Hav, from eBay after seeing a reference to it in either Gladman's Calamities or Cain's A Horse in the Night. I hadn't heard of Morris until then and, on looking her up, found myself intrigued: Jan Morris was a trans woman, historian, and writer with an extensive career in journalism. Among her many accomplishments was being on the 1953 British ascent of Mount Everest?!

I picked up this particular book because Trieste is east of Venice just west of Slovenia. Morris was posted there at the end of World War 2 and returned to Trieste frequently over the years. This book is a history of Trieste and an attempt to explain its appeal to her over the 50+ years since her first visit. The book, published in 2001, was meant to be her last.

I picked up Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere for two reasons: first, its location puts it very close to the cities on the Illyrian coast, which Rebecca West writes about in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. The second reason was because I got false friended by how "Trieste" sounds like a cognate of triste, as "sad/melancholic" coming down from the Latin or as a form of "trusted"... as it turns out, Trieste means marketplace in Proto-Slavic... in retrospect, completely expected.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon reaches the Illyrian coast and, after lamenting World War 1, launches backwards all the way to Roman Empire. To be fair, Rebecca was on a quest to write a thesis of all of Europe's failings and how it culminated in Yugoslavia; the violent ethnic cleansing of the 90s are a dark rebuttal of her racial romanticism around the Slavs, but one can't help but see echoes of the same conflicts of interest West articulates around longstanding ethnic tension and the necessity of forming some kind of, any kind of nation state in order to participate in the modern international project, which demands at the very least the illusion of a single unified body (economic, if nothing else), to avoid being eaten for its resources.

Morris' history starts with the golden age of Trieste, during the mid-to-late 19th century under the Habsburgs. the Austro-Hungarian empire was, once Italy broke away and took Venice with it, without a port, and so it chose Trieste, a city also on the Adriatic sea. the Austro-Hungarian empire was multiethnic and multilingual; Trieste's particular make up consists of Italians, Teutons, and Slovenes. After World War 1 and the break up of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the city lost its purpose--or, I suppose, it lost its sponsor, and became not a major player on the world stage but a contested piece on the board between Western Europe and then-Yugoslavia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Trieste briefly became a place where Eastern Europeans could purchase western goods, but that purpose, too, evaporated as the forces of the liberal market economy established themselves. So, one might ask, what is the purpose of Trieste now?

It's clear Trieste is Morris' favorite city, but I am really struggling to figure out why?! Her conclusions feel almost entirely vibes-based: Morris claims that Trieste is a city of kind and polite people. The people are polite because they, too, are people of "nowhere"--that's to say people of "the Fourth World, ... a diaspora of their own." this clunk of a description is right in the beginning of the final chapter, and I don't think it really improves from here:

They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. ... They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. ... They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.

Jan, you're describing friendship!!! You are describing what it's like to have friends and have community!! How much of this has to do with Trieste itself? The book has a fantasy at heart, of a global fellowship, of having people who love and accept you wherever you go. So straight away I think Morris is too wrapped up in this fantasy of what Trieste means for her to see Trieste for what it is, or how its current state represents what's happened to the Europe or the world at large.

Morris' obvious infatuation with Trieste leads to some awkward discordant notes once you think a bit more about history-- Morris venerates Trieste's glory days and has a striking chapter about the beauty of Austrian city planning and bureaucracy--how great it was when it works!--but it's impossible to not think of the reality of living in the Austro-Hungarian empire, one clearly illustrated by Black Lamb and Grey Falcon's chapters on the Illyrian coast, where Rebecca West clearly breaks down how the Austro-Hungarian empire sucked the cities and towns and islands of the Adriatic sea and Illyrian coast dry. The goods and labor and tariffs extracted from those places went through Trieste and then up to the rest of the empire. Maybe it's not too surprising that a globe-trotting British Welsh journalist would have some romanticism of empire in 2001, but come on.

More troubling are her passages on race: she describes Trieste as free of racism, but then goes on to insinuate in every mention of the recent Chinese immigrants that the Chinese shopkeepers will probably sell you drugs or immigrated illegally (but don't worry: Africans and Eastern Europeans are possibly also being smuggled in with the tomatoes!), writes extended paragraphs on how racism animated widespread fascist support in Trieste, and caps it off with lmao the mention that Trieste had a flourishing Jewish community until World War 2, and Trieste was also the location of the only concentration camp built on Italian soil. and aksdfmg I don't think that it is good enough to point out the history?? I don't think that you can say Trieste is free of the racial problems that the rest of Europe faces and then out of the corner of your mouth say uh everything else. The chapter detailing the fucking awful extermination of Trieste's Jewish community includes appalling lines such as a quote from a rabbi who says "I don't think anti-Semitism is really in this city, although I have encountered anti-Semitism, but I bet I wouldn't know anyone was anti-Semitic if I dressed differently and didn't wear a kippah" and a comparison between a bad hotel stay that goes, no joke, "in retrospect that one night seemed as long as all the rest of her life put together, just as what happened to the Jews of Trieste in 1943 may well last longer in the collective memory than all their years of successful exile."

I think about how pervasive these sympathies towards the 19th century glory days of empire are in the popular imagination at large. People imagine these empires to be somehow uh I guess efficient, luxurious, and cultured, better than the nation-states that replaced them; weirdly enough, I also feel like people associate these empires with somehow not being capitalist, too?? and I think this period of time is the most bizarre one to yearn for--like, what is this doing for you? I guess the newness? the sense that there's more to take from the world? getting to read all the big novels in serialization?

There's an obvious tension between anticolonialist theory, which basically everyone's familiar with by now. The building and establishment of an empire promises glory, wealth, and power, and the technical accomplishments are amazing and sometimes kind of enviable (driving around my city, I think of Roman cement all the time) and we live in a time of wheezing imperial order. The promises an imperial force made to the subjects and the subjects' awareness that this shit has a cost for people in places we'd rather not be in creates these bizarro texts: this book, for certain, but I also think of A Memory Called Empire, which I will be upfront in admitting I've never liked. I wonder if, by "nowhere," Morris really means the empire was great once, and we can carry all the best parts of the empire with us to the present day with the worst parts--my god, the worst parts--with the worst parts nothing more than the history of a people from some other plac