Party Members

Party Members

By Arthur Meursault

This is a satirical novel about a lowly Chinese bureaucrat whose penis starts talking one day and begins telling him how to live his life.

Your reaction to the above sentence is a good indicator of whether this book is for you.

The humor is black and the book would be really unpleasant if it were remotely realistic. The two main characters, our bureaucrat hero and his penis, are both terrible beings. Don’t make the mistake of getting attached to anyone -- the only reason the story has characters who are not 100% reprehensible is so that the main characters can treat them horribly. And of course there are some big gross-out moments. I’m not necessarily being negative -- all of this is by design. I rather enjoyed it, but then I think I have a high tolerance for both scatalogical humor and surreal insanity.

Yang Wei is a low-level government bureaucrat in the fictional Chinese city of Huaishi (Badville?). He has led an utterly mediocre life, and he has a wife he doesn’t particularly like and a lazy son who shows no promise.

The turning point in Yang Wei’s life comes when his penis starts encouraging him to be (yes, I’ll say it) a dick to everyone. And he finds that the more dickish he is, the better his life becomes, as doors begin opening for him that he hadn’t known existed. How low can he sink? If he wants to rise high in society, he’ll have to sink awfully low indeed.

China, we can infer, is a society run entirely by dicks. Not because the Chinese people are inherently dickish, but because of the twisted incentives in place that reward dickishness as a way to get ahead.

Towards the end of the book, our phallic protagonist lets loose with a rant indicating that this is simply the natural condition of humanity everywhere, which may help shield Meursault from charges of being a Westerner up on his self-righteous pedestal, inappropriately bashing Chinese society blah blah blah five thousand years of history and so on.

It may be true that people are dicks everywhere, more or less, but I would rather be part of a society that doesn’t reward dickishness quite so much.

History of Rome Volume I

History of Rome Volume I: The Republic

by Mike Duncan

For me, this book was a review of material already covered. Practically all the important stuff i know about Ancient Rome, I learned through podcast. My education took me through only the barest details of Roman history -- togas, Caesar, Vesuvius -- and the classes I took as a history major in college covered far later eras. The first time anything stuck was when I discovered Dan Carlin’s podcasts on the Punic Wars and on the fall of the Roman Republic. Carlin has a knack for making things memorable, giving me a mental framework on which I could hang additional information.

At that time Mike Duncan was diligently working away on his History of Rome podcasts, but I didn’t know about him yet; I only discovered him in 2013, when he’d finished with Rome and was starting his Revolutions podcast. Revolutions was (still is) a brilliant cast for anyone interested in political history, and I was sucked in by its first season, which covers the utterly fascinating (and bloody) events in the British Isles between 1640 and 1660. (Apparently Britain wasn’t just ahead of the rest of the world when it came to industrialization; they also had one or two modern military coups in the mid-1600s as well!)

I started listening to The History of Rome very soon after. I came to admire Duncan’s ability to tease apart very complex (and potentially very dry) history and make it interesting and comprehensible without simplifying or dumbing it down.

So when Duncan edited the transcripts of the first quarter of his old podcast’s run into book form, from Rome’s founding to Julius Caesar’s assassination, I decided to spring for the Kindle edition immediately. For one thing, even though I’d heard it all already, it couldn’t hurt to consolidate it all. Besides, I figured it was about time I spend real money on something Duncan put together.

I enjoyed reading what I had listened to back in 2013-14. The editing is good enough that it doesn’t generally seem like a written record of spoken English (though there are more than a few comma splices and spellcheck-invisible typos) and although I’d forgotten a whole lot of the details of 700 years of ancient history, I did smile with recognition when I came across a witty aside that I remembered Duncan making in the podcast.

So, how about the content?

In the first half of the book, we read about Rome’s mythological founding, and then follow the city as it establishes itself as a force to be reckoned with in Italy, suffers growing pains (sacked by Gauls), recovers, becomes the master of all Italy (Samnite Wars), branches out and establishes colonies, and then becomes the master of the western Mediterranean Sea (first two Punic Wars). All interesting enough, but mostly because the stage is being set for what’s going to happen later on.

I feel like things change with the Third Punic War. I hate the Third Punic War. Rome is the bad guy. I can’t think of any way Rome isn’t the bad guy. And Rome wins, because in this era, Rome always wins.

But in the aftermath of the Third Punic War, things become very interesting for their own sake, as Roman politics become the center of the narrative. This isn’t Game of Thrones-style medieval politics where the only question is which ruler gets to rule; no, this politics seems weirdly modern, with ideological factions and competing interest groups. The modern history geek looks at the Optimares and Populares of ancient Rome and thinks holy crap, they kinda had right-wingers and left-wingers back then. And then, after a few decades, the Republic fell apart, the Empire rose, and and the era of politics that looks so oddly familiar to us was over.

In the end, the basic impression I am left with (and this is not something I specifically remember Mike Duncan or anyone else specifically saying) is that throughout the era of the Republic, Rome never really stopped being a city-state. Even as Rome took over the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Spain, and much of northern Africa, it wasn’t so much a large country with Rome as its capital, but rather a powerful super-city with lots of colonies and vassal states. If you weren’t in Rome, you were ruled by Rome. The political issues of the city of Rome were the issues of the country as a whole. This eventually changed, but only well after the Republic had been replaced by the Empire.