December 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part II

Aside from James Baldwin's Another Country, I began reading Edward Snowden's book Permanent Record, a present from my godfather, and published earlier this year.

It is written in a philosophical vein at the beginning and perhaps two thirds of the way into the book, when Snowden writes his meditations on privacy and the American Constitution and the role of whistleblowers, etc. I take a little longer to disentangle the phrase, but usually I welcome it. There's also a clear-eyed assessment or two of the Bush era that is refreshing to read in retrospect.

It is as edifying as it is dumbfounding to read a person my age making so much effort to think of things and take responsibility for ethical dilemmas in his work. I don't think it's easy to look beyond one's tasks and beyond the context of one's workplace and end-of-month paycheque.

As Snowden's computer-obsessed childhood and teenagerhood in the 80s and 90s, his family, his rather abstracted approach to coping with the demands of school, and his flight from community college into a technological career, unfold earlier in the book, my amazement is hardly lessened. I'm not a libertarian nor was I ever a fan of a badly-defined 'War on Terror.' It's also true that I'm not prone to 'gaming the system,' preferring to negotiate the school and work world according to the rules. But the lack of that shared experience didn't weaken the feeling that he is like most of the people I know, for example me, who grew up in the 1980s and 90s and had some exposure to technology. So it is astonishing that he did strike out on his own path.

Whether I'm over-inclined to praise the book or not, I liked how the 'secondary characters' are sketched — whether by Snowden himself, at the prompting of his editor, or through the pen of a ghostwriter. Snowden's father, for example, or his then-girlfriend, now-wife; a handful of details about his wife already suggests people whom I've known, and I can imagine a personality half-way between reality and analogical figures. Snowden mentioned in his introduction that he tried to respect the privacy of the people around him while writing, but the portraiture has not become too vague.

I hadn't heard before, likely due to ignorance, that the Arab Spring had been an indirect factor in Snowden's decision to publish details of the mass surveillance programme. The extent to which private companies have been running American foreign and domestic security — this is one of Snowden's complaints — was also unknown.

In a way the book helps reduce the guilt I've tended to feel toward Edward Snowden. After all, he went through a great moral conflict, when the public for whom he did it — at least I speak for myself — trots along in ignorance. Even his photographic portrait on the book cover looks faintly martyred in expression, and it's no wonder. The book does help bring closer to the reader the aspects that bothered him of the American intelligence community's mass surveillance programmes, in a way that the press articles might not have, so one feels less ill-informed.

As for his elucidation of the techniques of the modern American intelligence community, I am not certain whether I am comfortable 'spying' on the CIA and the NSA and defence contractors as the public may do while reading Snowden's book — sometimes it feels as if he has shrunken the reader to the size of a mouse and taken us along in his pocket into the buildings at Fort Meade, a top-secret facility in Hawaii, etc., where he worked. He makes it pretty clear that the people who work in these buildings are individuals with their own quirks, needs, strengths and weaknesses. Even if Permanent Record feels like a rare opportunity to examine the people who examine us, and it is kind of gripping, and Snowden makes pretty clear that security and the protection of secrets can be incredibly lax within the agencies, I also feel ashamed about my snooping instinct.

Anyway, not having finished the book yet, this is only a half-informed review. As for the technological details, I cannot tell whether a reader who knows something about hacking or system administration or other things will find their curiosity appeased, or be disappointed that it has been reduced to a more lay-reader-friendly version.

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Besides, I've been making progress in the physics textbook about particle detectors: Teilchen-Detektoren by Otto Claus Allkofer, from the 1970s or 80s.

I couldn't tell you the difference between a fog chamber, a spark chamber, and a scintillation detector easily, or specify which detects neutrons, muons or electrons.

But it is thrilling enough to imagine that if I had a physics background, the prose and structure are straightforward and well-reflected enough that maybe — just maybe — it would be a pretty helpful reference work.

And I'm also wondering if this is relevant to my father's work.

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Lastly, I have begun reading an e-book version of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, hoping that this will help me begin to read up on computer science for my own career.

December 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year

The Guardian, January 5, 2019

In November I read Another Country by James Baldwin, a fictional book about a group of friends in New York City (and in France) who are making or breaking careers for themselves in creative fields: writing, acting, and music. The friends also navigate the boundaries between the black and white communities in New York, and between heterosexuality and homosexuality, American conservatism and liberalism.

In general Baldwin's writing seems contemporary: He feels pretty unjudgmental. His curiosity about many kinds of environments and conflicts, economic class as well as race and gender, is what I'd call "intersectionality." (Even if Kimberlé Crenshaw invented the term intersectionality after Baldwin's death.)  And I like that he's interested in misogyny and gender double standards, for example, without seeming to be bored-but-dutiful about it.

"Brooklyn Bridge and New York City skyline"
Photo by Irving Underhill, 1911
via Wikimedia Commons

As for gay life in the United States (and France), historically and contemporarily, I'm not an expert on it. That has not impeded me from forming opinions that are hopefully not stupid:

Baldwin doesn't seem to spend much time depicting the guilt and morality that are built up around gayness in modern American and European political discourse — maybe because e.g. Greenwich Village was not necessarily a Catholic or Baptist hotspot — in Another Country.

He presents sexual orientation as a 'threat' to traditional and mistaken ideas of masculinity and to traditional power relationships, rather than to morality. He writes about times and places where homosexuality was seen as weakness, and where a few men who were straight, or closeted, raped other men.

But when Baldwin writes about genuine same-sex relationships, between freely consenting adults, these are a mixture of romance and friendship with sex, exactly as the hetero relationships he writes about are.  I think that this mixture is another aspect of bisexuality and gayness — that being bisexual or gay is no more 'sexual' than being straight — that often takes a long time for homophobic or half-informed people to grasp.

One worries that being this rational filter between prejudice and reality required a large sacrifice of time, thought and effort on Baldwin's part, but I have to confess I'm glad he was.

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I guess that Baldwin's other prose might be more Gesamtkunstwerk-y than Another Country. It was written over a long time with painful effort. Also, there are so many sex scenes! awkward to read in public transit. But I liked it nonetheless.