Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City by Gwendolyn Leick
315 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 10 to September 21
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
As a youngster, I had been enthralled by all the most ancient "civilizations," as they were defined by my brother's 6th grade social studies textbook: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River Valley. Egypt was the easiest to learn more about, which led me into a period of Egyptomania up until my tween years, but this was strictly because Egypt is far more ingrained in our pop history than any of the other river valley agricultural regions. The only other place young Rick discovered "information" relating to the Indus Valley, for example, was in a book about the Bermuda Triangle, and to this day I have only read one book that covered ancient China in any detail (and what a disappointing read it was). As Leick herself puts it in her preface, of the ancient civilizations, "Only Egypt, which is for us almost entirely defined by its morbid obsession with life after death, has continued to fascinate the public.... The Mesopotamian peoples... with their less spectacular art and crumbling mudbrick ruins, have no comparable place in the public imagination."
Which is an outright shame. My undergraduate career almost steered me into a future amid the pre-urban agricultural milieu of the Neolithic period, thanks to a research paper on the site of Tell Sabi Abyad, and to this day I feel an urge to tell each and every person I know how freakin' cool it is that town-dwelling people, supplied only with stone tools, had an advanced administrative system based on stamp-seals and counting tokens, long before the development of metallurgy or written language. The lack of popular interest in the ancient history and prehistory of Southwest Asia baffles me. This is where so many plant crops and animals were domesticated! This is where (so far as we know) people started living in substantial, permanent towns! The modern world, for better or for worse (and there's a lot to be said for both extremes), would not exist without the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. Yet your proverbial Patty and Joe just wanna gawk at mummies.
Even my undergrad years didn't teach me much about historical (as opposed to prehistoric) Mesopotamia. Leick's Mesopotamia fills a vital gap in my education; I only wish it were longer, more vividly written, and better supplied with charts, tables, plans, and illustrations. Leick spends a lot of time describing ancient floorplans when a sketch map would convey it far more clearly. That's more the fault of the publisher, however, and the amount of labor and ink they were willing to pay for; Mesopotamia, alas, remains a niche interest in America, even after nearly two decades of direct colonial occupation of the region.
One thing I was amazed to learn: The earliest cities qua cities in Mesopotamia, as represented in Leick's chronological organizational scheme by Eridu, were far more egalitarian, even democratic, than pop history had ever told me. Women and men held positions in society far more equal than they would hold over the ensuing 5500 years of urban civilization. There was little differentiation visible arising from wealth inequality, either. In Leick's telling, the idea of a city began as a cooperative, mutualist affair—something none of my cultural anthropology courses touched on, with their tidy narrative that agriculture correlates with emerging disparities in wealth and gender. The inequalities we associate with, well, all of written history crept in gradually, but Eridu, at least, sounds wonderful—an example that should be known throughout the urban societies of today..
Mesopotamia is an important and revelatory history, not just of the Land Between the Rivers but of the emerging concept of the city itself as a social body. I'd love for a fully updated edition of it to come out, double the length, offering a more sweeping panorama of its vast subject (and, naturally, supplied with way more tables and floorplans). In its present form, it left me wanting far more.
Friday, September 21, 2018
Monday, September 10, 2018
2018 read #15: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
421 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 5 to September 10
Rating: 4 out of 5
A brilliant novel of heartbreaking immediacy and intensity, A Tale for the Time Being stumbles somewhat at the end, losing its emotional resonance in a morass of corny pop science.
Ozeki explores a plethora of fascinating themes: the tandem act of creation between author and reader; memory and time; Zen Buddhism and the transience of being; guilt and heroism; the cruelty of human beings in war as well as in junior high. A vaguely climatepunk atmosphere of living on the edge of things hangs over the chapters from the viewpoint of Ruth, a middle-aged writer who has lost her voice in the woodsy silence of the Pacific Rim. Far more moving are the chapters told from the perspective of Nao, a cynical and suicidal schoolgirl in Japan who writes the memoir of her "last days on earth" with a voice of brittle forced cheer. The two are joined by Ruth's discovery of Nao's book, mysteriously washed up on the beach with a bundle of letters, a diary written in French, and a kamikaze pilot's vintage watch.
The narrative is delightfully rich and complex, moving across time and perspectives from World War II to the aftermath of the Tōhoku tsunami. Ruth's chapters could verge on the self-indulgent, as authorial self-inserts usually do, but Nao's pained navigation of cultural dislocation, bullying, exploitation, and multiple generations of suicidal ideation was stunning in its affective power.
Like far too many literary authors, however, Ozeki was not content to let the mysteries of her tale remain shrouded in the fog of time, and dredged up one of the hokiest, most over-used clichés of science-fiction to "explain" what never needed to be explained. I'm talking about quantum mechanics and the many-worlds hypothesis. I remember getting one of my short stories rejected by a magazine in 1999, when I was 16 years old, because quantum mechanics and many-worlds were such hoary old-hat—fourteen years before the publication of Time Being. Perhaps like her namesake in this novel, Ruth became unmoored in her current reality and fetched up in an alternate universe where quantum multiplicity isn't the corniest plot device in the world. The ending thus set in motion by Schrödinger shenanigans felt unearned, not squaring with the emotional truth of Nao's story.
That isn't enough to ruin what is otherwise a magnificent and moving work.
421 pages
Published 2013
Read from August 5 to September 10
Rating: 4 out of 5
A brilliant novel of heartbreaking immediacy and intensity, A Tale for the Time Being stumbles somewhat at the end, losing its emotional resonance in a morass of corny pop science.
Ozeki explores a plethora of fascinating themes: the tandem act of creation between author and reader; memory and time; Zen Buddhism and the transience of being; guilt and heroism; the cruelty of human beings in war as well as in junior high. A vaguely climatepunk atmosphere of living on the edge of things hangs over the chapters from the viewpoint of Ruth, a middle-aged writer who has lost her voice in the woodsy silence of the Pacific Rim. Far more moving are the chapters told from the perspective of Nao, a cynical and suicidal schoolgirl in Japan who writes the memoir of her "last days on earth" with a voice of brittle forced cheer. The two are joined by Ruth's discovery of Nao's book, mysteriously washed up on the beach with a bundle of letters, a diary written in French, and a kamikaze pilot's vintage watch.
The narrative is delightfully rich and complex, moving across time and perspectives from World War II to the aftermath of the Tōhoku tsunami. Ruth's chapters could verge on the self-indulgent, as authorial self-inserts usually do, but Nao's pained navigation of cultural dislocation, bullying, exploitation, and multiple generations of suicidal ideation was stunning in its affective power.
Like far too many literary authors, however, Ozeki was not content to let the mysteries of her tale remain shrouded in the fog of time, and dredged up one of the hokiest, most over-used clichés of science-fiction to "explain" what never needed to be explained. I'm talking about quantum mechanics and the many-worlds hypothesis. I remember getting one of my short stories rejected by a magazine in 1999, when I was 16 years old, because quantum mechanics and many-worlds were such hoary old-hat—fourteen years before the publication of Time Being. Perhaps like her namesake in this novel, Ruth became unmoored in her current reality and fetched up in an alternate universe where quantum multiplicity isn't the corniest plot device in the world. The ending thus set in motion by Schrödinger shenanigans felt unearned, not squaring with the emotional truth of Nao's story.
That isn't enough to ruin what is otherwise a magnificent and moving work.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
2018 read #14: From the Forest by Sara Maitland.
From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales by Sara Maitland
354 pages
Published 2012
Read from August 5 to September 4
Rating: 3 out of 5
Once again I've let a few months go by without reading much of anything. When I began this book I was brimming with enthusiasm, finishing the first half within a couple days, but somewhere along the way my interest drained away, leaving the rest of the book something of a dry trudge. Anyone expecting a modern classic of British nature writing, along the lines of H is for Hawk, Wildwood, or The Wild Places, will be disappointed. Maitland's writing lacks the poetry of Macdonald's, Deakin's, and Macfarlane's, and From the Forest seems to have been edited in haste; lines repeat themselves paragraphs later, seemingly less for emphasis than for want of a polished draft.
Maitland's guiding thesis -- that the fairy tales we know arose from an ancient tradition of storytelling in the great Northern European forests, and reflect the mores and concerns of forest-dwelling life -- is flimsy. Successive chapters don't build up the thesis so much as repeat it in different contexts. One underlying flaw in her argument is the fact that, as a British author, she is writing about British forests yet using German folktales to illustrate her "forest culture" arguments. Traditional British folktales were largely lost before they could be recorded, but Maitland justifies using the Brothers Grimm by positing a sweeping pan-Germanic cultural continuity that includes Anglo-Saxon peoples, even though mainland Germanic and Anglo-Germanic cultures diverged some thirteen centuries ago. She treats the cultural contexts of the Grimm stories as interchangeable with the forest yeomanry of England, despite vastly different histories, modes of government, traditions, and notions of labor.
The perils of this sort of thinking become apparent when Maitland decries a culture in which young British children grow up without "blackberry" and "conker" in their Oxford Junior Dictionaries: "The child of the Oxford Junior Dictionary is an urban, deracinated technocrat, not so much multicultural as de-cultured." One can see what she was getting at, but coming as it does in a book embracing a myth of pan-Germanic cultural identity, it feels a bit iffy. Robert Macfarlane made the same point far more elegantly (and at greater length) in his Landmarks.
Maitland's retellings of the fairy tales themselves leave much to be desired. They are grim and gritty in the worst tradition of the 1990s. Seemingly every male point-of-view character, for instance, thinks of a female character as "that bitch." Her excursions into English and Scottish woodlands, on the other hand, are often interesting, segueing thematically into bygone aspects of life in the forests -- hunting, coppicing, mining, leisure -- and how they are practiced (or not) in modern times. I would have preferred a more focused book that explored the cultural histories and uses of supposedly "wild" British forests, perhaps with fairy tales relegated to their own chapter.
354 pages
Published 2012
Read from August 5 to September 4
Rating: 3 out of 5
Once again I've let a few months go by without reading much of anything. When I began this book I was brimming with enthusiasm, finishing the first half within a couple days, but somewhere along the way my interest drained away, leaving the rest of the book something of a dry trudge. Anyone expecting a modern classic of British nature writing, along the lines of H is for Hawk, Wildwood, or The Wild Places, will be disappointed. Maitland's writing lacks the poetry of Macdonald's, Deakin's, and Macfarlane's, and From the Forest seems to have been edited in haste; lines repeat themselves paragraphs later, seemingly less for emphasis than for want of a polished draft.
Maitland's guiding thesis -- that the fairy tales we know arose from an ancient tradition of storytelling in the great Northern European forests, and reflect the mores and concerns of forest-dwelling life -- is flimsy. Successive chapters don't build up the thesis so much as repeat it in different contexts. One underlying flaw in her argument is the fact that, as a British author, she is writing about British forests yet using German folktales to illustrate her "forest culture" arguments. Traditional British folktales were largely lost before they could be recorded, but Maitland justifies using the Brothers Grimm by positing a sweeping pan-Germanic cultural continuity that includes Anglo-Saxon peoples, even though mainland Germanic and Anglo-Germanic cultures diverged some thirteen centuries ago. She treats the cultural contexts of the Grimm stories as interchangeable with the forest yeomanry of England, despite vastly different histories, modes of government, traditions, and notions of labor.
The perils of this sort of thinking become apparent when Maitland decries a culture in which young British children grow up without "blackberry" and "conker" in their Oxford Junior Dictionaries: "The child of the Oxford Junior Dictionary is an urban, deracinated technocrat, not so much multicultural as de-cultured." One can see what she was getting at, but coming as it does in a book embracing a myth of pan-Germanic cultural identity, it feels a bit iffy. Robert Macfarlane made the same point far more elegantly (and at greater length) in his Landmarks.
Maitland's retellings of the fairy tales themselves leave much to be desired. They are grim and gritty in the worst tradition of the 1990s. Seemingly every male point-of-view character, for instance, thinks of a female character as "that bitch." Her excursions into English and Scottish woodlands, on the other hand, are often interesting, segueing thematically into bygone aspects of life in the forests -- hunting, coppicing, mining, leisure -- and how they are practiced (or not) in modern times. I would have preferred a more focused book that explored the cultural histories and uses of supposedly "wild" British forests, perhaps with fairy tales relegated to their own chapter.
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