Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, October 2021

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the history of monsters in 18th century France, medieval political philosophy, the history and archaeology of images of monsters, trends in mortality and inequality in early 21st century America, or the comparative sociology of slavery. (Monsters, monsters everywhere.)

Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast

A full-fledged historian of early modern France tackles the beast of the Gévaudan, with full attention to the cultural, political and journalistic (!) context. Smith disclaims wanting to tell the story of the beast, in favor of telling the story of the stories about the beast, but along the way he finds himself forced to make a good circumstantial case that "it" was, in fact, multiple hungry wolves. Strongly recommended for anyone with an interest in folklore, the intellectual history of early modern Europe, cryptozoology, or the dynamics of media-driven spasms of public and official attention.

Carol Goodman, Ghost Orchid

Mind candy: literary ghost story, involving a haunted writer's colony in upstate New York. About half of it might be a direct relation of the events a century before that set the haunting in motion, or might be the present-day heroine's novel in progress; they work either way.

Joan Aiken, The Green Flash, and Other Tales of Horror, Suspense, and Fantasy

Mind candy, displaying a remarkable range of flavors and tones. One uniformity: Aiken's men are all clueless about her female characters (it wouldn't be accurate to say "her women"), to comic and/or ominous effect.

F. G. Cottam, The Colony

Mind candy horror. There are some moments of real creepiness, but the whole plot for the last quarter or so is a bit rushed and sloppy.

Abu Nasr Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Farabi (trans. and ed. Charles E. Butterworth), "Political Regime" and "Summary of Plato's Laws"

Political Regime opens with barely-comprehensible metaphysics (to put it kindly), before getting into an explanation of the different kinds of polities, and why the ones most favorable to philosophers are the best. (There are eventually connections between the metaphysics and the politics.) The Summary of Plato's Laws is, in fact, a summary of Plato's Laws, except for a few sections with no obvious antecedent in Plato's text as we now know it, and some very mysterious narratives (parables?) at the beginning. Reading between the lines, one has the clear impression that al-Farabi thought of Muhammad (pbuh) as a law-giver in Plato's sense... The translator is clearly a Straussian, which colors his commentary, and may contribute to this impression. (OTOH, I could believe that Strauss was right about al-Farabi, even if not right about the entire tradition of pre-Machiavelli political philosophy.) I found this fascinating in a "you are clearly very smart but also alien and just wrong, wrong, wrong" way, like many of the medievals, but mileage will vary. (Of course, as a denizen of one of the democratic cities or associations of freedom, I would think that.)

David Wengrow, The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction

This is an interesting historical/archaeological argument about the origin and spread of images of unreal, "composite" creatures combining distinct features of real animals (and/or distinct features of real animals and of human beings). Many at the borders of psychology and anthropology have claimed that such hybrid creatures are compelling and attractive objects of thought because they are "minimally counter-intuitive", they break just enough rules to focus the mind while still being amenable to various forms of intuitive cognition. (Obviously a griffin eats food, which it consumes through its mouth, it stab