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

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on anti-discrimination law, early 20th century shock art movements, early 20th century science fiction, or the Renaissance reception of classical mythology.

Marie Mercat-Bruns, Discrimination at Work: Comparing European, French, and American Law (trans. Elaine Holt)

A French legal academic interviewing distinguished American legal academics about anti-discrimination law and related topics, with her commentary. (The interviews close off around 2011, so Ricci vs. DeStefano is a big subject, and the idea of a Supreme Court case instituting gay marriage nationally is definitely beyond everyone's horizon...) In between the interviews, Mercat-Bruns provides her own analysis, including a lot of discussion of French and EU legislation, regulations and case law. Her accuracy on those topics is (obviously?) not something I can evaluate, but I found it notable that she's usually asking why European law can't be more like American law. (Thus our soft-power conquest of the Old World continues.)

I read this for the inequality class, because I was unhappy repeating "I know nothing about anti-discrimination policy in other countries, sorry" in response to very reasonable questions from students. I now feel entitled to reply "I know hardly anything about how anti-discrimination law works in other countries, but...", which is progress. §

Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (1977)

This is older, but it's still a really good book about the Italian Futurists. Indeed I can't think of a better one for a general audience with some background knowledge of modern art. The chapters on Futurist painting and sculpture, on music and performance, on women, and on politics are especially good. I fell in love with Futurist painting as an undergrad, so like a freak I've read far too much about them; this book is surviving the on-going purge of my library. §

Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)

I read Last and First Men as a boy, and it warpped my mind forever, but I never attempted any other Stapledon (aside from being left cold by A Last Man in London, both as a child and as a grown-up). This was a mistake I am glad I finally fixed.

Star Maker is a very conscious attempt at creating a truly cosmic modern myth, so the whole two-billion-year saga of humanities in Last and First Men is a passing incident mentioned in a handful of paragraphs. Rather this attempts to embrace the whole life of our universe, and of the other universes which are all the work of the titular Star Maker.

A few stray notes (avoiding spoilers):

• Some philosophical influences are very obvious: Hegel, Spinoza, Leibniz's Monadology. The Hegelianism is pervasive throughout; it leads me to wonder what a Deweyan equivalent work of science-fictional myth would be like. The Spinoza who comes through here is that of the Ethics, in particular (but not just) the "intellectual love of God", the life of the stars (and the way the order and connection of their material bodies is the order and connection of their mental lives, seen under a different aspect), and some of the presentation of eternity in the climactic myth-within-a-myth. That last is also where Leibniz is felt.
• I will be surprised if Stapledon wasn't familiar with Attar's The Conference of the Birds, in which a group of travelers of various species move through a visionary landscape which is also a series of spiritual developments in search of a transcendent being, only to have revealed to them that they collectively are that being. (The true Simurgh is the friends they made along the way, as it were.) Just so here, with the growth of the collective group of seekers. Indeed I'd not be surprised if Attar's seven valleys map, in order, on to the stages of Stapledon's future history. (But see Allen below...)

Readin