Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, January 2022

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the history and geopolitical context of Antarctic exploration, the social structure of medieval China, or philosophy of any kind.

Berlin Station

MI-5

For reasons I will not elaborate on, I binge-watched the entirety of these two spy drama series over a period of about eight weeks. (My viewing-partner needed a lot of distraction, and had lived in both Berlin and London.) Both had ripped-from-the-headline plots and some good acting [*], including some overlapping cast. Over-all, I liked Berlin Station better, since it had more ambitious and more coherent plots, though there was a development late in the third and final season which at last made me get why people write "fix it" fanfic. (Yes, I went looking and found that people had indeed written the relevant fixit fics. Yes, I read them. No, I will not link to them.) There is a dissertation to be written about the absurdity of many of the plots in MI-5 (the economics alone -- oy vey). One nice question to investigate in such a dissertation would be whether those hare-brained notions arise from the writers' sincere ideas about how the world works, the audience's ideas about the world, the writers' ideas of the audience's ideas about the world, or the writers' ideas of what the audience will tolerate in escapist entertainment. §

*: Except for the painful imitations of American accents in MI-5.

Adrian Howkins, Frozen Empires: An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula

A solid history of political conflicts over the Antarctic Peninsula between the British Empire, Argentina, Chile, the US and the Soviet Union, with other parties showing up as bit players. Howkins makes a big deal out of a contrast between the imperial powers' claiming "environmental authority", in the sense of producing universally-valid and useful scientific knowledge about the environment, and the "environmental nationalism" of Argentina and Chile, claiming a more intimate, specific and un-generalizable connection to Antarctica and its environment. (I'd like to read some of the literary works Howkins references, but lack the Spanish.) In this view, the Antarctic Treaty, which suspends sovereignty claims over the continent but limits influence to countries engaged in serious scientific research, constitutes a full, apparently final, victory of environmental authority over environmental nationalism. The actual Antarctic environment and its history is thus not in the foreground. It appears more by way of an obstacle to (e.g.) Chile trying to actually have a naval or administrative presence on the Peninsula, or whaling becoming unimportant, than in the foreground. While I began this very skeptical that there was anything interesting to say about imperialism in the only part of the world where there wasn't anyone to imperialize, by the end Howkins had me convinced this was, in fact, a real part of the history of Antarctica. (That Argentine and Chilean nationalists were an alternative to imperial environmental authority, as opposed to just wanting to be the authoritative imperialists themselves --- there I was less persuaded.) §

Nicolas Tackett, The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy

This is awesome: it's a social network study of office-holding elite of the later Tang dynasty (after the An Lushan rebellion*), based on funerary inscriptions that gave extensive biographical and genealogical details. Archaeologists have dug up thousands of these, along with others recorded by epigraphers; in some cases these can be connected to biographies in the official dynastic histories (and the two sources usually agree). By assembling a database of these inscriptions, Tackett is able to, in turn, construct a social network of the Tang elite --- rich families that held high office, for many generations on end, in many cases over multiple dynasties. Tackett documents their persistence in office, their peregrinations around the empire, their residences in or between the two capital cities of Chang-an and Luoyang, and their intermarriages and ties of patronage. (Interestingly, the marriage network seems to show two modules or blocks**, one centered on the imperial family. I would have expected more; this would be worth investigating with good community-discovery methods.)

Tackett's argument, convincing to this non-expert, is that this elite was incredibly successful at maintaining their position, despite all the challenges put in their way