Matt E

I see interfaces. Interfaces are everywhere. They are simple, everyday, vital, like the doorknobs that let us use our apelike hands to manipulate the innards of a mechanical doorknobs. They are complex, obscure, ridiculous if we weren’t so dependent on them, like the computers simulating human users interacting with virtual mainframe programs from the 1980’s that operate critical pieces of our civic infrastructure. Pieces like banking, telecommunications, the military. The imposition of the interface of the interstate highway system on the landscape of the West unlocked it’s development. The imposition of the interface of the shipping container is a necessary condition of globalized trade.

In How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell explored resisting the interfaces and attitudes that make up modern (Millennial?) productivity culture. Some of her exploration involved naming and questioning foundational assumptions of the culture, e.g. why is it considered better to create the new and disruptive rather than the restorative? Another line of exploration was the incursion of the capitalist profit motive into our private lives. In Saving Time, she expands another idea opened in How To Do Nothing: that clock time is an interface imposed on many different natural rhythms and cycles for the benefit of capitalist growth, and that there may be benefits to attuning ourselves to other ways of tracking time.

It’s a great idea, and Odell curates a wonderful selection of texts to give various angles on the idea. She repeats a structure that worked well in How To Do Nothing: meandering, collage-like texts, sometimes extended paraphrases of anecdotes from other writers or long quotations, wrapped in a repetitive and bland account of a Bay Area walk. I didn’t mind this style in her first book, but this time I wanted either more artful prose or more disciplined synthesis of ideas. After making it about halfway through the book, the easiest way for me to open up more time was to put the book down and seek a richer experience.

I’m still looking for a book with sharper thought about how to shrink the power of the clock time interface. What kind of cultural practices would it take for there to be a society-wide floor of rest and leisure like the Jewish Sabbath? Or to resist unnecessary 24-hour work schedules? Seasonality of food?

What a great yarn! Excellent storytelling, with the kind of mundane, closely observed details of prison camp life that only comes by living it. It’s not perfect—it never quite lands on a consistent tone and swings between suspense and comic. Attitudes towards Asia span racist to patronizing, and always imperialistic, but that seems accurate.

A delightful discovery I made while starting to write this re-review was a blog post I wrote 10 years ago about the books that made a deep impression on me. Tangerine was one of those books. I'm tempted to rattle off things that my home town had in common with Tangerine/Lake Windsor Downs—a citrus growing industry, strange segregation between white and Hispanic neighborhoods and people, groves with fans and heaters for cold nights (I think I remember the orange glow of smudge pots on winter nights, but perhaps that is a memory incepted by this very book, as they were banned in California decades before I was born). The truth is that there were as many things completely outside of my experience in Paul Fisher's life as there were in it. My parents were not image-conscious people. We were not a sports family, and I did not have any physical characteristics that made me different other than being fat. I did not have a tormenting older brother; to my eternal shame, I was that older brother.

What Paul Fisher and I had in common, however, was the fear.

After Paul joins the War Eagles and the team comes together, they start winning:

“The War Eagles have set out on a bloody rampage through the county. We have destroyed every enemy. We have laid waste to their fields and their fans. There is fear in their eyes when we come charging off our bus, whooping our war cry. They are beaten by their own fear before the game even begins. This is a feeling that I have never known before. Anyway, I have never known it from this side of the fear. Maybe I am just a [substitute], maybe I am just along for the ride, but this is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.”

Paul feels the catharsis of stepping out of the fear that he experiences all of the time through soccer, a healthy channel for that need. As a teenager, I tried to escape that fear in ways that were unhealthy just as often as they were healthy. I spent a lot of time alone with music, creating a zone of safety around me, but I also was mean to people and made fun of others because while I was directing the target of mockery, it could never be me. Maybe it's because his fear is so focused on an actual threat, but Paul can see the fear and shame in those around him:

“Mom took me into the kitchen and got me a glass of water. She ran her finger under the strap of my goggles and slipped them off. Then she said, “Honey you know how it is with your eyesight. You know you can't see very well.” And that was that. But I can see. I can see everything. I can see things that Mom and Dad can't. Or won't.”

Tangerine

Tangerine

This collection is an expansion of a feature article that Salz wrote for New York Magazine with the same title. There's some new material, some reworking, but most of the content and scope is the same.

I really enjoy Salz' craftsman attitude toward art an art making. It's both mystical and pragmatic. He treats training yourself to see better and training yourself to reserve some desk space and learning how to duck out of work early to give yourself time back as all parts of the same project.

If you haven't read the magazine article, I would give this a strong recommendation, if the title is enough to grab you.

I did not make it all of the way through Pleasure Activism. This is a collection of writing in various forms, primarily selected blog posts, transcriptions of conversations, and essays. The strengths of this approach and the collection as a whole is that there are a lot of voices and perspectives included, and plenty of breadcrumbs leading to other books, writers and teachers.

The weakness of the collection is that many of the selections are loosely or not at all edited, which leads to a lot of banal repetition across selections, and no individual selection has the depth or length to really address the topic or idea it is included to cover. Ultimately I got frustrated and bored with the low yield of ideas verses the time I was investing to read.

adrienne maree brown is a Black woman and an activist. If your experience of the world hews closer to hers than mine does, I have no doubt that reading this book would be a totally different experience. Clearly this collection has struck a chord with many readers. My recommendation to all readers is to take a look at the table of contents and dive right into the topic that you have the most interest in. If you're vibing with the material, this book may be right for you. If not, be aware that that level of depth and care in the writing is fairly consistent across the collection.

I'm delighted to discover this prolific series of mysteries. This book was like a perfect procedural, snappy, witty, plotty. Montalbano is a slightly less sexist pig in a land of pigs, so if that pushes your buttons you may want to skip these books. It did not turn me off, but YMMV. I'm planning on continuing the series.

The Wallander books are a drag when they brood too much on the changes to Swedish society or how all male spaces are disappearing or dive too deep into Wallander's depression. They are fun when Wallander spends improbably small amounts of time sleeping, when the plot moves quickly and the solution to the puzzle is just out of grasp. I think this was a pretty good one—I liked the first Wallander novel and greatly disliked the tone of #2.

I didn't finish this book, but I am finished reading this book. I decided to stop reading because I got bored with it, even though I know that's an unfair response. What does it mean to be bored with a piece of art that changed the world?

Let's take a look at what this book is, for a second. I think it's at least three things: it's a relationship memoir, it's an anti-novel that self-consciously inverts its tropes and standards, and it's a piece of postmodern cultural criticism that argues, for example, that the intellectual/inner life of women is so poorly represented in academia that the thought and critique must be contextualized and grounded in an individual's experience. I Love Dick was one of many pieces of art that was operating on this wavelength: the films of Jane Campion, Liz Phair, Mary Karr, etc. were all part of this zeitgeist. And they kind of won. Not a total victory, the patriarchy is alive and well and coming for your rights. But I think they did successfully expand what was “in bounds” regarding subjectivity, women's narratives, and deep structures of the patriarchy. That's part of why it's a little bit of a slog for me, reading in the present.

For example, the sloppy, confessional, raunchy and intellectual tone that must have been so refreshing when the novel (?) came out in the 90's has become the default tone of the feminist internet. Now that that tone is not as shocking, the callous way that she describes evicting her tenants, the “hicks” she lives around in various rural places across the country, and the mystical encounters she imagines with Guatemalan activists comes across as less savory, and out of step with the feminist conversations that are going on today.

In a similar vein, there are some clearly argued reasons why I Love Dick had to be written with real names and real ideas and real vulnerability. The part that hasn't aged so well is the aspect of it that is a comedy of manners among academics and artists–juice from a goose that's been cooked.

Anyway, if anything you've read about this book calls out to you, definitely go out and read it. But don't be surprised if the ways in which its dated leave you a little cold.

I'm currently experiencing a full body brain body spirit crush on Tommy Pico, which is inevitable because among other things Nature Poem is a major trap in the house of intellectual thirst. It's so exciting to read a poem in a voice that reminds you of your own voice, the voices of people you know. It's like your experience of this earth is worth of being sung, and you have found the poet to sing your story.

The collection moves with hyperactive energy from high and low culture, different levels of seriousnesses, playing very smart and very dumb, very brainy and very sexy, sentimental and cold eyed pragmatism both.

It could be Pico's one trick, but I'm immediately getting his other collections, and no other poet has made me do that before.

I'm fascinated by Satya Nadella and his transformation of Microsoft. While there were moments where his personality came through, this is mostly a bland piece of corporate hagiography, and you should look elsewhere for insights into that work.

The first part of the book is the most valuable. It's a first person account of Nadella's upbringing, education, and entry into the tech field. It captured how much pride he has in being both his father's son and his mother's son, as well as his clear love for his wife and family and his love for the cosmopolitan and ambitious India he grew up in.

The next part is about his rise to CEO, and the undoing work he accomplished to change the corporate culture at Microsoft. There are a lot of corporate credits (our great work growing our cloud business was accomplished by such visionary leaders as blah blah blah) and a lot of telling but not showing (over the course of several meetings, we reached a consensus about how to move forward...).

As with all transformational stories, details matter. If you zoom out far enough, all transformational narratives are the same: I was doing it one way, I wanted to change, I finally let go of what was holding me back from change, I tried a different way, and that turned out way better.

There's not much more than that here. There are references to Microsoft losing its way and employee unhappiness, but a reluctance to call out specific mistakes. There is almost no specificity about the personnel changes that he made to signal that more changes were coming down the line. There is a little more detail about Nadella's “new way,” including: moving away from the mindset of corporate friends and enemies and toward thinking about all other corporations as potential partnerships, breaking down the inefficient communication and empty status symbols of 20th century blue-chip corporate hierarchy, and stoking a real hunger for learning about use cases and developing sales channel for every sector of the market.

If there's any value in this book, it's in this section.

The final section is Nadella's prognostication of the future. It seems completely ghostwritten and is structured around Nadella visiting various Microsoft R&D initiatives and marveling with wet eyes about what he finds. Skip it. Skip the whole book*.

*I am aware that most people probably never even considered reading the book, that a book by a major corporate CEO was guaranteed to be bland and impersonal. What can I say? I'm an optimist.

Wow.

I will be thinking about the bold ideas in this book for days and months and years.

Reading the opening sections of the book as Lewis lays out his concepts of gift exchange, market exchange, the way that they parallel logos and eros, and the exploitation and life draining that can happen when different modes of exchange are used inappropriately electrified me. It was like finding out the proper name to a geographic feature that you have always known, but did not know this history of. There are ideas I read that have been deeply held in my being without being able to recognize their name or their logic.

I did not follow most of the critical writing on Whitman and Pound.

It's also made me think a lot about the futility of wishing for a context and time that is more friendly to art, and the importance of finding the new structures to support and patronize art in the present. Like with a person, there is usually less of a point to wishing they were different than the hard work of finding a way to coexist with them.

A confession: this is the first book so far that I've marked as “read” without finishing. It's not like there aren't going to be more books or more things to say, and if I was a better person I would just move on and not worry about getting credit or social media points.

However.

I found this book so tedious that I want credit for every minute I spent with it. I heard on a podcast this week that the apex of the literary experience sitting down silently with an object as the writer's inner sensibility melds with the reader's imagination. This book did not reach those heights. In fact, I thought it was more like a boring person telling a boring story, say, Kristen Stewart describing the traffic she hit on the way to the post office.

I don't want to pile on, negativity is just too easy. But I really didn't like this book, and would not recommend it.

I am a huuuge fan of the Ask Polly advice column in The Cut. I come back again and again because I feel some kinship with her. She's got sharper edges than a Dear Sugar, but like Sugar is deeply compassionate. Polly is funny, but not flippant or sarcastic like Choire Sicha's NYT Styles section advice column.

I guess what I love the most is that she has become the person that people like me—millennial weirdos who feel stuck because all we seem capable of doing is looking around in shock and disappointment asking “oh my god, is this really it?”—send their deepest questions. And we have changed her in turn.

Like any book of essays, there are some that speak right to me, some that don't speak to me at all, and some that I hope to god speak to some future, more courageous and secure form of myself.

Read it, and feel free to skip the one about Tony Soprano unless you really like the show.

What a sweet little book! I picked it up because I follow Richard Lawson on Twitter, but I guess I wasn't following him when it was released. Although the novel starts with a dramatic bridge collapse, most of what unfolds are the quotidian dramas of being alive: insights into the self that you try and shove down into the unconscious, trying to be brave enough to make a leap into what you know you have to do, the loneliness and despair of trying to stay connected to someone who is trying like hell to run away.

Now, maybe you watch a lot of Netflix crime shows and the only thing that seems dramatic now is a race to decode cryptic clues before a baby rapist detonates explosives underneath the final match of the world cup. Compared to that, this book may very well seem plotless and boring to you. I cannot help you there.

I give it a few extra points for incorporating some teen characters that are neither the bland upper-middle class that usually peoples YA nor are they only in the book to edify the white characters. A few points knocked off for still centering bland upper-middle class teens.

The reason I didn't think it added up to a five star book to me is that it didn't really ever answer why we were looking at these characters. They were all fascinating, but they never quite cohered together because the present-day narrative is packed into a single day. Second, although it has a beautiful message about dealing with uncertainty and taking each day as it comes, it doesn't quite present that in a way that allows the reader to take it away in their own life (unless there has been a bridge collapse in your community).

But please give it a read! I'd love for Lawson to get the chance to write another one.

Tommy Pico is incredible, and if you haven't read him you should run not walk to one of his poetry collections. He writes directly to my sensibility–insecure, introspective, and horny–and the beautiful experience of reading something written for you is like drinking deeply of spring water or breathing in the air after a rain.

I know I'm being a little tough on this book. It's not a bad book, it's fine; pleasant to read, and fairly well plotted. But I'm going to use this book to open a question that I have been thinking about when I read gay YA romances: what is their purpose?

OK, that's a little disingenuous. There's a part of their purpose that I know extremely well, and I know it because of it's absence during my childhood and adolescence. Sometimes my head swims when I think about what that time would have been like if there were stories like this available to me in libraries, and not just the one scary “issue” book about being young and gay. Instead, I had to gather bits and pieces of interior experiences from other kinds of stories, like a crow gathering bits of tinsel and shattered glass. Family alienation and distrust from Sharon Creech's The Wanderer and Edward Bloor's Crusader. How to let crushes smoulder from Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved and Carol Fenner's Yolanda's Genius. And for how to get close to others when what is inside you is so big and what we show to each other can be so small, I loved E.L. Konigsburg's The View From Saturday.

Here I am, getting lost in memories of my own identity formation.

S0 let's get to my real question: are LGBT YA romances just low-fat, low-cal romances, with younger protagonists and a less steamy helping of sex? Or is there still some part of YA literature that is didactic, helping young people with these kind of stories in their own life to navigate their way through?

I don't miss the didactic-only era of children's literature, which seemed to go away in the 70's and 80's in favor of a more interior-experience focused way of telling stories (except for maybe utility picture books and books for therapists and religious books). Those weren't very fun, and once the cultural morés that produced them went away, there was not very much charm in them either.

But I'm also left a little unsatisfied by What If It's Us. There's so much going on! One narrator's parents are in a strained marriage, is away from his friends. The other is struggling with school. They are both navigating having sex for the first time. One of them is obsessed with Broadway musicals, particularly Hamilton. And yet we don't really get to see how all of these factors affect them on the inside. How does one boy's parent's fighting affect how comfortable he is experimenting sexually? We don't know, because these parts of the story are siloed off from each other. Why does he like Hamilton? We don't know, and so although we know a lot about his preferences, we don't get the chance to have those preferences illuminate what is inside him.

Maybe the representation is enough. It certainly would have meant a lot to me. But I can't help but thinking that when stories are told all on the outside and we don't see enough of the inside, our noses pressed up to the glass of a room we can't enter, we might end up thinking that the only thing that matters is outside too.

Faith, reason, morality, progress all come into conflict under the shadow of the launch tower at Cape Canaveral! Kings, magicians, doctors, executioners, all bound to their own arcane rituals. A girl appears just like in a prophecy. And then a new bright light appears in the sky.

I really did not care for this book. Whicker has imagined a world where mad cow disease has led to a societal collapse, and after thousands of years, people in the United States have devolved into followers of mystic religions that believe in blood sacrifice to bring about the return of the space shuttles, which will save the world.

You have to invest a lot in this setting to get anything out of the book–which is another way of saying that the plot, character, and prose style didn't do much for me–and so much of the setting didn't make any sense to me. Whicker clearly loved this idea of a medieval/feudal world that has adopted NASA as its religious symbols, but never quite explains how that could have come about. Yes, there is prion disease and societal breakdown, but how are there artifacts from the 20th century but no city ruins? Given what we know about how tribalism forms in times of scarcity, is it really plausible that no characters notice each others skin colors? For that matter, in Florida of all places, why does everybody speak English?

For that matter, Whicker doesn't have very much respect for medieval knowledge either. In an interview with The Qwillery, Whicker mentions being inspired by figures like Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe and yet none of that seems to have made it onto the page, except for cutesy character names.

I'd suggest skipping this book and watch Waterworld instead.

There is a shelf on the third floor of Central Library in downtown Portland. It contains all of the nonfiction books specifically about bring queer: books about raising your gay teenager, coming out in later life, how to support your partner who is transitioning, and about four books on bisexuality. I have never done anything in my life without reading a book about it first, so I picked out the most relevant of those four books, which was Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution.

It turns out that Bi has everything to do with why there are only four books on that shelf. Shiri Eisner has put together a book that discusses the particular political, economic, and social marginalization experienced by bisexual people—distinguished from the experience of gay, lesbian, and straight people (“monosexuals,” in her terminology). Eisner starts by describing how bisexual can be a radically inclusive term for all sorts of people that experience attraction to more than one gender, then goes through the myths, stereotypes, and stigmas attached to bisexual people. Next, Eisner examines how bisexual identity intersects with sexist and racist axes of oppression, then proposes this vision of a radical bisexuality that inherently destabilizes patriarchy and gender based oppression.

Whew!

There is a lot of material in this book, and because of the jargon-bordering-academic language it uses, the tedious and repetitious disclaimers of privilege, and activist-y eye rolls at global capitalism and the police state, I would say that it's more of a reference than a book to read front to back. I did appreciate the thoroughness of the work, and I have to admit to a certain bias against radical and activist thinking that sometimes provokes me into greater critical thinking and sometimes makes me churlishly dismissive.

Unfortunately, I was also turned off by some methodological loosey-goosey and an inconsistent analytical lens that made it seem like polemic. For example, a lot of Eisner's evidence for the argument that bisexuals experience worse health economic etc. outcomes is based on a single set of demographic data. That's certainly not Eisner's fault—she argues persuasively that bisexuals are an understudied group of people. But in another part of the book, she points out that because this data set is based on self-reported categories, it dramatically under-represents the group within bisexuals that would have the best outcomes due to other kinds of privilege, namely cis bisexual men.

Whatever gripes I might have with the rigor of some of her evidence, I also have to admit that despite coming in with a lot of skepticism, Eisner ended up convincing me that there is a unique stigma attached to bisexual people, and I came to understand why she considered bisexuals and their relationships as a battlefield of patriarchy and queer liberation.

And yet, I did end up walking away a little disappointed. I was still looking for some idea of what the specific bisexual experience of the world is. My gay identity was built not only from crushes and eyes averted and inconvenient erections and hot shame, but also from books and poetry and movies and narratives and testimony and role models. And a lot of that just isn't out there for bisexual men—or at least I might have to keep working to find it.

What a strange, contentious little book! I must own up to the baggage I brought to it. On one hand was contemptuous dismissal by some highly intelligent, educated people in my life (perhaps coincidentally, they were also dull and without poetry). On the other hand were some of my heroes of radical individuality, Brene Brown, Krista Tippett, Elizabeth Gilbert, that seemed to revere Cohelo and this book. What was I going to think?

I think that a half allegory is a difficult thing to love. Why bring in religious language when Cohelo seems to believe that the forces of destiny he writes about are beyond religion? Why engage with Orientalist fantasies of warring tribes, bandits at the pyramids, fertile oases, if they ultimately do not carry meaning? With this eye, The Alchemist is too long, and not a short book after all.

Maybe I can be this jaded because the message of fearless self-actualization that Cohelo preaches has permeated into the culture. I'm just not sure that this is going to melt the heart of a cynic any longer, if it ever did.

One small minded quibble: for a book that paints its story with such a broad brush, has there ever been such a tin-eared phrase as “personal legend”? I can't decide if Cohelo was deliberately writing around the word destiny, or whether it's just a clumsy translation from the Portuguese.