BirdIsGone/KarlMarx/Ripper Street

Today I read the first fifty pages of The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto, a 2003 novel by Blackfeet Native American author Stephen Graham Jones. I mention his tribal affiliation up front because a lot of the critical response to Jones’ work in general and Bird in particular focuses on the ways in which he revises existing understandings of what ‘counts’ as Native American fiction. Partly because he writes experimental fiction, and partly because he works in popular genres including horror, science fiction, and crime fiction, Jones has been widely praised for his originality and the sui generis nature of his narrative voice. Bird exists somewhere in the territory between experimental and crime fiction. There is a crime (or crimes) to be solved but we don’t know much more than that. The victim(s), the suspect(s), the investigator(s), it’s hard to say that any of those standard figures of the genre exist in any stable sense and that’s entirely consistent with the speculative basis of Bird (the Dakotas are once again Indian territory and are now populated by millions of Indians) and its setting (a bowling alley named Fool’s Hip that is the gathering place for a collection of truly strange characters, many of whom rework fictional and pop cultural stereotypes of Indianness).

I also finished Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx. In this closing section of the book, Sperber obviously spends most of the time discussing Marx’s final years, which were defined by a mixture of continued political activism, periods of increasing ill health, and the realization that the revolution he had spent so much of his life hoping and working for would not happen in his lifetime. The final section of the book is especially interesting for Sperber’s discussion of how Marx was turned into an icon, in at least three ways: as a practitioner of positivist social science (this emphasis was largely a product of Engels’ efforts at interpreting and publicizing Marx’s legacy), as a Jew (an element of Marx’s iconicity that I must say with embarrassment that I was completely unaware of), and as an intransigent and uncompromising revolutionary opponent of the existing social and political order. Sperber casts doubt on the accuracy/relevance of the first two parts of this characterization, while arguing that the third part gets quite close to describing the essence of who Marx was.

I also watched the first episode of Ripper Street, a BBC television series that debuted at the end of 2012. It’s set in the Whitechapel area of London in 1889, six months after the last Jack the Ripper murder. When another woman is found murdered, it seems that the Ripper has returned, but over the course of the episode Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfayden) disproves that theory. The sets in this show are absolutely extraordinary and recreate the world of late Victorian London with amazing depth and accuracy. The acting is uniformly strong and the show explores some interesting ideas, such as people’s investment in the idea of the Ripper coming back (an investment that is partly personal and partly professional), the kinds and extent of violence that can get overlooked because they’re not tied to the Ripper, and the exploitation of the weak by the powerful. All in all, a very promising start to what looks like a great series.