Matt E

I reread The Count of Monte Cristo every couple of years. It is my favorite book. Whatever you want–a love story, pirates, bandits, social satire, a twisty plot—is all here. Every time I read it, it seems like something new comes to the surface.

In the shadow of the Trump election, I couldn't help but think about the way that Monte Cristo (Edmond Dantes) is basically a superhero of the Enlightenment. He accomplishes things that small minded, superstitious people cannot conceive of because he has unlimited amounts of the two resources of Enlightenment (and therefore the emerging global regime of capitalism): scientific knowledge and money.

Right now, we may be looking at the end of the Enlightenment project, or conversely the rebirth of it. Enlightenment virtues of progress over tradition, knowledge over dogma, curiosity over taboo, cosmopolitanism over parochialism, are all headed toward a moment where they must be defended or abandoned.

Even Monte Cristo has his limits. His progressivism did not overcome patriarchal tradition, and as elsewhere in Western culture, scientific knowledge is used by the Count to reinforce existing prejudices against undesirables. In the end, money does not triumph over death, and knowledge does not heal wounds.

Dumas was the first master of escapist fiction. The novel stands, but what we escape from seems to be shifting radically.

“Everyone knew it. Rarely has revolution been more universally predicted, though not necessarily for the right countries or the right dates.”

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution

“Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now [...] We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.”

Ursula LeGuin

When a crack appears in a dam, there's only a small window in which a repair can be made. Once the crack passes the threshold of repair, the forces of gravity and the weight of the water held back make the endpoint inevitable. The dam will be destroyed, the water will flow, a stream will appear.

In the period of 1789-1848 in Europe, there was such a dam. Built of rigid social hierarchies, the absolute power of aristocracy, and the moral sanction of the church, it restrained and extracted value from the great mass of feudal subjects and a much smaller number of middle class craftsmen and merchants. At the end of the 18th century, two cracks appeared in this dam at nearly the same time. By the beginning of the 20th century, the dam was gone and every inch of the globe had experienced aftershocks its disappearance.

The first crack was the French Revolution. It transformed the king into a mortal man, from divine symbol into mere politician. It turned the church from the house of god into land to be confiscated, and introduced the idea everywhere that reforms by vote that are ignored become reforms by blood.

The second crack was the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. A great many contingencies had to come together for the British Empire to arise and for the engine of the domestic economy to turn from pastoral agriculture in the English countryside towards William Blake's dark satanic mills. But they did come together, and that produced such a huge buildup of wealth that it broke the world, like a black hole distorting the very fabric of spacetime.

The work of the French Revolution never quite got finished, and the problems with a capitalist industrial economy—problems that were spotted almost immediately by both participants and observers of the new industrial paradigm; thinkers that thought it was not a tenable system included economists, politicians, factory owners, journalists, and bankers, as well as utopian visionaries—broke social contracts and created the need for poverty to enforce labor discipline. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are dying of this unfinished business.

Progress toward political equality has stalled almost everywhere. All of Earth's ecosystems are in existential distress because of the demand for extraction and growth by the modern global economy. In the last 15 years, I my mind has opened from the attitude that people who prophesize about “the revolution” were unserious and to be dismissed, to thinking that they are certainly right. What the damage to the planet is, I don't know, nor do I know what things we are going to be asked to accept as normal as conditions deteriorate and freedoms dwindle.

But the status quo cannot hold. The forces of social unrest that are at work in the world right now will not return to the status quo ante, any more than the water can be returned to the reservoir once the dam breaks.

I picked up this book because I do not have the ability right now to imagine what comes next other than a broken version of now. I think that reading about the circumstances in which industrial capitalism arose has opened my eyes to how many things could have gone a little differently and produced a different result. Hobsbawm is a genial and stylish guide to this time, and I felt like I got a lot out of this reading experience, despite a couple places where his frame of reference serves him wrong, specifically gender and racial analysis and not being able to see the future past when this was published in the 60's.

The highest praise I can give to Circe is to simply describe, simply and without exaggeration, how I felt when I finished the book. It felt like a heavy weight on my chest, and like every feeling of loneliness and powerlessness and fear had been dug up from the deep places I had tried to bury them in. I put the book down and immediately headed out into the rain to walk to a bar to be around people and to connect to my own worry-worn rosary made up of clichés like we met and talked all night and I took one look and knew.

That's what happened.

Circe, whose “official story” as a sexually tempting sea-witch is contained in a brief interlude in the Odyssey, is born as one of the least powerful immortals. Her family is not kind to her, and although she has a powerful father, this does not give her protection. Instead, it makes her a particularly vulnerable (easy to use) pawn in a game in which she has no place and cannot win. Things happen to her, she learns lessons. Ultimately, she has to choose between listening to what everyone around her tells her is her place, or, taking the lonely road of learning to listen and trust herself, and therefore discover her own power.

I saw a lot of myself in Circe's story. Although it turns out that, seen with hindsight and self-confidence, there was less to fear than I believed, I too felt different and removed from my family. But there is only so much kinship with Circe I can claim, because a lot of the emotional dynamics explored in this book involve family abuse and the violence that men enact on women. Madeline Miller writes in this wonderful, poetic register that is often punctuated by beautiful aphorisms, and they resonate, of course, not because Circe's experience is so extraordinary but because it's so common.

As a confused high-schooler, I took Latin classes, and as a confused young adult I chose a college that put a big emphasis on studying “the Classics.” Homer's world of wars and gods and glory and vengeance never came alive to me for two reasons: I was not a good student and spent no time completing reading assignments, and because the whole toxic-masculinity template, this foundational ethos that fueled scores of empires great and small seemed so stupid. Who can kill the most people is a question like who can run the fastest or who can lift the heaviest thing: useful to know in limited contexts but not very useful to most parts of life and definitely a poor indicator of divine favor or ruling authority. What Miller does so well is take the same stories (dominant, masculine, exterior focused), and retell them through the eyes of the other, who is usually left out of the tale (inferior, feminine, interior focused). It's a wonderful way of queering the text: reading Homer with the values that his culture tried their best to suppress. I may or may not return to the Iliad or Odyssey, but even if I do I imagine it will be Miller's Circe, Miller's Achilles, Miller's Agamemnon, that will be the “real” versions of the character to me, not Homer's. I hope that is the sweetest victory of all.

“There's no evangelism like the zeal of a recent convert” is a cliché with a lot of truth in it. The convert is the rare person that knows what it is like to believe A and to be persuaded to believe B. It's lonely, because they feel an affinity, a one-sided kinship with the A's, and however much they also feel connected to B's they are outsiders. Therefore they must find new converts because only they will understand the journey they have completed.

Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley is a memoir in which she looks back at her journey from being a founder of a startup at 19 to being a Marxist critic in her late 20's.

While she has some clearly expressed ideas and insights—I particularly loved the way that she drew a parallel between the structure of gig worker pay and the Amazon Web Services server credits that basically every developer uses—easily half of the book is skin-deep summaries of news events and startup culture ideas. The other half is a dull tick-tock of the saga of founding a startup and riding it into failure. It's just not that interesting, think: Abolish My Two Years Working at Kinko's.

If you misread the title, as I did, and inserted an unwritten How To at the beginning, please be aware that the sum total of the imagining a post-capitalism tech sector would fit in a not-very-long Medium post. It has one great idea about the possibilities of legislating code to be open-sourced after a certain period, the rest is banality.

I feel a little bad trashing this book because the sense of anger that Liu has at being hoodwinked and bribed into thinking that startup culture really was disrupting corporate evil and doing good doing well is alive. But kind of like the convert, in a world this upside down, if you have decided to maintain your belief that Silicon Valley is a force for good in 2020 (pub year), this book is not going to reach you, and if you have been there already, the naiveté of Liu's pre-conversion self is simply going to inflame your sense of injustice.

“Why is this on your reading list?” you ask [in the version of the world where anybody gives a shit about what I read]. The answer is that this is a waypoint on a journey that started when I came across a throwaway comment in an essay that was along the lines of “business books—which are self help for men.” As a self-help addict, I was immediately interested into this window into the emotional world of the straight white male titans of industry during the growth period of 20th century corporate America, and all of the people that wanted to take their place.

The first insight that I gleaned from this book is that at some point Boomers were told better. This book is sexist as all get out—the only time women are mentioned in the book is as an example of a type of employee that costs more, due to the completely unsourced claim that women take more sick days—and it would probably be racist too if Drucker considered the possibility that non-white people could be knowledge workers too. But there's some great stuff in here, really practical ideas about how to come to decisions, how to acknowledge your own biases, how to seek out other perspectives. So, for what its worth, when you come across Baby Boomer myopia and pigheadedness, know that even the straightest, most businessy ones have been told better.

My second insight was just to marvel at what a sorry state American capitalism is, even when you take it on its own merits. The book is unwavering in its commitment to R&D, efficiency, and meeting production goals. It's difficult to see today's world of disruption, venture capital bubbles, and a landscape where the largest companies seem to not need to make a profit represented anywhere in Druckers book. There's something comforting in the corporate world he describes, a world where you grow your business by being better and smarter than your competitors.

I'm not sure what I read, but I loved it. Was it fantasy, sci-fi, a detective story? A metaphor for class, for truth and fiction? Who cares, it's all good.

In my opinion, one of the most skillful uses of beginning in media res to build curiosity and epiphany as the reader slowly discovers elements of this world that all of the characters find too obvious to comment on.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. If there are readers that see themselves in Juliet and take strength in her journey, I want to honor that. If there are white readers out there that are able to see themselves through an outsider's eyes through this story, I think that's a valuable thing too.

However, as a piece of writing, I did not think it was very good. For all of the time that we spend in Juliet's head, I never came away with that deep an understanding of what shaped her attitudes towards gender and sexuality in the 19-ish years of her life before the events of the book take place. Despite being based on a set of meaningful real experiences, the observations of Portland, Oregon or the Bronx, of the people that fill out those places and attend the workshops, etc. never go past superficial observations. We find out fairly late in the story that it's supposed to take place in 2003, yet every character speaks in the language of queer subculture circa 2015, and I'm fairly certain that the undercut that brings catharsis to a character late in the story would have been perceived not as cutting edge queer fashion in 2003 but as a weird attempt to resurrect a Nazi haircut.

Even the plotting has a pageant-like quality where Juliet experiences cliched microaggression after another with a corresponding Socratic dialogue enlightening the reader about the real power dynamics at play. It left me wondering who exactly this novel was for. I don't think Juliet—in either her 2003 or 2015 incarnations—would believe the journey that we get in this novel. It does not seem like it's for a “mainstream” white feminist reader, exactly either, although the internal politics of white feminist spaces and relationships end up taking center stage in this story for much longer than brown queer spaces do.

But for all that, the description of finding strength in a queer scene free from the white gaze or the burden of navigating and accommodating whiteness was really effective and even though I had to slog through much of this novel, by the end Juliet had won me over.

I am interested in the new graphic novel adaptation that seems to be in progress. Perhaps the magic that illustrations can do to bring depth to characters through facial expressions and ground scenes in place can smooth out some of the roughness in the writing and allow the story to shine.

My attention is important to me, and I've been writing and reading a lot this year about ways to navigate a world that is increasingly filled with traps designed to capture, monetize, and waste my curiosity. Earlier this spring, I came across Jenny Odell's artist talk “How to Do Nothing”, given at EYEO in 2017, and I have been eagerly anticipating her full-length book expanding some of the ideas she shared in her talk. It's here, and I finished it this week.

How to Do Nothing is anchored by the ideas Odell shares in her artist talk: that grounding oneself in specific real places and paying attention to their physical, geographic, ecological, historical, and social characteristics is an act of anti-capitalist refusal against the various social media and big data businesses who monetize our attention and behaviors. In her book, she expands her scope to consider other questions: How much of a real possibility is it to opt-out of digital connectedness, and would that be a good thing anyway? Does the act of refusing to follow directions have any power or meaning beyond our individual choice? How, specifically, does one “grounding oneself”? How are the attention economy and the fiction of independence linked? Can we change how we think about production to include not just making something that wasn't there before, but maintaining something that was there before, or even removing something to make room for something else that hasn't had any room to develop?

These are wonderful, rich questions, and one of the real pleasures of this book is that Odell draws on so many different ways to contextualize these questions. Odell draws on sociology and economics to explain shifts in how jobs are structured, and history and journalism to bring context to the history of the East Bay places that she spends time in. There's a little smattering of philosophy and theory, which I am a little allergic to so I was happy there wasn't too much of it. But where Odell really shines for me are in her close readings (and connecting to the other ideas in her book) of conceptual art pieces, the life of Diogenes the Cynic, John Cage's sound pieces, Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and David Hockney's Polaroid collage pieces.

Maybe these are ideas that you could find in other books, off the top of my head I'm thinking of Cal Newport's Deep Work, Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants, or Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. One thing that sets this book apart is Odell's fierce resistance to framing her argument around “productivity.” This is not a book that argues that changing your frame of attention is going to make you better at your job, or faster at creating career ideas, or anything of the sort—in that respect, she is the anti-Cal Newport (who I respect a lot also, but I think his idea that we can all just be “winners” by becoming more productive is a bit shallow by ducking systemic questions). The other thing that sets her apart is a fierce, humanistic commitment to encouraging us to think in terms of ecosystems and social systems in which no individual is completely apart. I look forward to some of these most delicate and precious ideas continuing to move through my brain.

I loved this book. Read it and try something different.

This review discusses sexual violence, racial violence, and once refers to gross stuff with poop. Reader beware.

In times of crisis, we look backwards for the ideas and leaders we need to transform the present. Ideas, intellectuals, visionaries, artists, philosophers are as strings in a vast sitar: when an idea in the present is plucked, a whole host of ideas from the past vibrate in sympathy. This is unfortunately as true for MAGAs as it is for the visionaries working to resurrect Martin Luther King Jr's Poor People's Campaign or 70's black feminism.

I started reading Samuel Delaney's 800-page epic Dhalgren because he fascinates me as someone who made space for himself in a sci-fi world that did not want him because of his race and his sexuality, and because he seemed to embody a fearless self-expression that is rare in any writer at any time. While I have seen his work mentioned in the context of black queer writers who brought the physicality of sex into the forefront of their work like Octavia Butler and Audre Lorde, and ideas from 1970's revolutionary movements in general, it seems like Delaney's work is more respected than read.

Dhalgren is not easy to read. The novel's protagonist, Kid, experiences memory loss, bizarre dreams, and psychotic breaks, all narrated in a formally experimental, stream-of-consciousness style. Episodes blur into incoherence without resolution, characters' names change throughout the book, and trying to imagine a geography is a fool's errand. Delaney himself compared the novel to a Necker cube—a simple graphic cube that seems to shift orientation by redirecting your perspective, but neither can be said to be the “right” answer. I was able to make headway once I surrendered to the feeling of being lost in the text and decided to forego trying to decode each line. Slowly, Bellona, USA, came into focus.

Bellona is a large city, on the scale of Chicago or Philadelphia, somewhere in the midwest, in which something terribly strange has happened. Communications with the outside has been disrupted, no tv or radio signals make it into the city, there are only a few gateways to get in or out, and parts of the city have been destroyed, as through there were an attack or a bombing. Out of a city of millions, only some thousands remain. Those who remain scavenge food and supplies from abandoned stores, squatting in apartments and carrying on some version of their life before. There are hippies that live in a commune in the park, with utopian visions of rebuilding. A small number of middle-class characters try to carry on their routines despite increasingly ridiculous obstacles, commuting to abandoned office buildings and enjoying family dinners made of dwindling supplies. There is a Clockwork Orange-style hyper-violent street gang that lives communally and dominates the less weak on the strength of their weapons and the strange digital shields that they wear, which make them appear to be large, colorful, holographic animals. There is an apocalyptic cult, centered around a hyper-sexual, predatory black man named George Harrison, that plasters posters of his genitals around Bellona. Finally, there is a small group of remaining aristocracy centered around Calkins, the editor of a bizarre newspaper in which the dates and day of the week are random, and which is one of the few points of reference that cut across all of the social groups in Bellona.

We meet Kid at about the same time as he enters Bellona. He does not remember his name or his past and does not know why he is drawn to the place. The narrative is loose, basically a picaresque, with some metafictional elements as Kid picks up a notebook filled with some half-finished poems and begins to re/write them. Over the course of the story, Kid rises from naive outsider to leader of the Scorpions gang, to a larger-than-life figure that all of Bellona becomes fascinated by.

All of the things that make Dhalgren difficult to read make it impossible to tidily suggest what it might be about. There are some questions that clearly interest Delaney, however: What keeps society going when there is no possibility of economic growth or a future? How do hierarchies change when the outside world can neither influence the culture nor enforce power structures? Would a world in which everyone was free to express their sexual desire be dystopian or utopian? What is good writing anyway? How do you write about sex with no referent to shame? The images and textures that seem to fascinate Delaney such that they shoot through his writing include the slightly gross underside of sexuality, the ripe genitals and fluids and wounds and scars; the way that white Americans view and talk about black Americans, especially their sexual fascination with them; mental illness, psychiatric hospitals, and thought control; predatory and nonconsensual sex; classical mythology; violence that comes out of interpersonal disrespect; and this incredible vocabulary (I have a pretty large vocabulary, and I was constantly looking up words while reading).

Delaney's idea of how society responds to collapse basically boils down to this: people are who they are, and they will generally just keep going even if all of the environmental feedback that they get is sending the message that it is a doomed strategy. This is my point of reference, probably not Samuel Delaney's (although it certainly could have been), but I kept thinking about Pat Frank's 1959 novel Alas, Bablyon, in which an isolated community survives following a nuclear attack. In that novel, neighbors throw off social hierarchies, band together, and pool resources and skills to start to make a new life for everybody. No such communal spirit emerges in Bellona. Delaney's survivors maintain their social privileges, cling to familiar routines, and generally exist in a state of inertia slowly coming to rest. It is impossible to separate my reading of Dhalgren from the circumstances of my life: I recognized this futility in the various routines and rituals we have tried to bring into the coronavirus era. I am currently writing this from an empty office building in a massively depopulated downtown core.

On the other hand, there is no way for the formal institutions that backstop social hierarchies—no police, government authority, state or federal power—to enforce their norms within the boundary of the city, which creates a kind of utopia for transgressive sexuality. This is something so radical for its time (Dhalgren was published 6 years after the Stonewall Riot) but so normal now that I missed it at first. Nightlife in Bellona revolves around Teddy's, the last remaining bar, in which a nude trans (this is a contemporary label, the character never discusses their own identity the way we would now) dancer is the nightly entertainment. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual pairings happen at Teddy's, and even George, the avatar for predatory male heterosexuality, refers to queers with a mocking amusement and seems to enjoy their admiration of his posters. There's a kind of attitude of presumptive bisexuality, to the the point of comic absurdity. Jack, an astronaut representing institutional, bourgeoise squareness, complains, “I was real nice to people; and people was nice to me too. Tak? The guy I met with you, here? Now he's a pretty all right person. And when I was staying with him, I tried to be nice. He wants to suck on my dick, I'd say: ‘Go ahead, man, suck on my fuckin dick.' And, man, I ain't never done nothin' like that before...I mean not serious, like he was, you know? Now, I done it. I ain't sorry I done it. I don't got nothin' against it. But it is just not what I like all that much, you understand? I want a girl, with tits and a pussy. Is that so strange?

Kid meets Lana, a musician and teacher with more or less middle-class manners and attitudes, and Denny, a 15-year old bisexual hustler that seems to remind Kid of a younger version of himself. He has sexual relationships with them separately, and then they form a thruple, a relationship that takes on a character of its own: “The scent of Denny's breath, which was piney, joined Lanya's, which reminded Kid of ferns.” I'm so hungry for representations of those forms of relationships that these were my favorite parts of the book. Delaney's willingness to push way past the boundaries of taboo and taste make room for surprising moments of tenderness. When Kid intuits that Denny has a kink for degradation, he explores hitting and spitting and verbally humiliating him. After a few more times having sex, Denny nervously tells Kid—who has shown himself to be capriciously violent in the context of being the gang group leader—that he doesn't particularly enjoy the physical roughness, and Kid instantly changes his approach, saving small bits of verbal humiliation for sexual encounters. In the context of musing about whether he subconsciously wants to get gang banged (when does that happen in a novel, even today?), Kid remembers to the night before where, even though he finds bottoming too painful to enjoy, he let Denny fuck him. “...the emotional thing there, anyway, was nice,” he remembers. His relationship with Layna is totally hands off and non-controlling. When a character tries to shame Kid for Lanya pursuing other relationships, Kid growls back, “if my old lady wants to fuck a sheep with a dildo strapped to her nose, that is largely her concern, very secondarily mine, and not yours at all. She can fuck anything she wants—with the possible exception of you. That, I think, would turn my stomach.”

This utopian picture of prejudice melting away in isolation does not extend to race. Dhalgren is saturated with racialized language language to an extent that is just extremely uncomfortable to me. N**r is used 80 times in the text, and there are several more epithets used commonly and casually. One of the most provocative uses of race in the novel is in the character of George Harrison, who embodies the stereotype of a buck from his physically dominant frame, hyper-sexuality, and predation. When Kid arrives, Bellona is recovering from a riot in the black neighborhoods precipitated by an incident where George rapes a 17-year old white girl, after which photos and an interview where George boasts at length about the rape are printed in the newspaper. A subplot moving through the novel involves various Bellonians keeping the girl from finding George, there's an almost supernatural suggestion that if they were to get together then Bellona would really be finished. Delaney treats racial aggression, degradation, white consumption of the black body like Kara Walker's plantation cutouts: symbols of erotic power that are literally unspeakable in civil society but hugely active on the subconscious of the culture.

I did not quite like Dhalgren. It is hard to read, it is often disgusting, a lot of it is very boring. I cannot write it off, though, because look at how much there is to think about! I was hoping to have this encounter with a radical black, queer voice, and I don't think I was open enough, at the beginning, to understanding that Delaney and his work has it's own set of interests apart from being a defanged mascot for me in the present. There is so much depicted in this novel that has become even more taboo in sexual culture now than it was at publication: racial fetishization, sex with teenagers, rape fantasies, gang rape, physical violence. I don't think that it would have occurred to Delaney back then that there was even a question that depiction could be different than endorsement. Right now we have this weird thing going on—an interim period where renegotiation of sexual norms that were not working for many people is going on, something that is more good than bad, on balance—where the distinction between erotic fantasy, public reputation, and real-life sexual conduct are all collapsing.

The kind of freedom that Delaney takes to simply explore, with his imagination, flies in the face of an ethic that says that perpetuating harmful images does real harm to vulnerable communities. Who has more right than he to make that judgement? He writes about gang raped, and he was gang raped by three men while hooking up with men across a language barrier. He writes disgusting things about black people, and he was the grandson of slaves with family stories of lynchings and various artists of the Harlem Renaissance who were friends with his father. Delaney understood the power of disgust, how closely the feeling resembles pornographic thrill.

Put another way: if a man and a woman fantasize about enacting and being raped, and the real-life consequence of their fantasy is a mutually consensual sexual encounter, and another couple admits no erotic fantasies but has bought into wild Q-Anon fantasies that there are pedophile rings and sex trafficking on every street in America, who are the perverts?

The swing from sexual repression to sexual liberation is a pendulum, and right now I cannot see what part of the arc we are in. It seems like there is a lot of pressure on queer conduct from the right wing, and a lot of pressure on the queer imagination from the left. I cannot imagine writing Dhalgren. I can barely admit to reading it seriously. I wish for myself the freedom of imagination that Delaney granted himself, and I wish for myself the fearlessness he had in sharing it. That, I feel confident, is something Dhalgren has to give to the present.

I rarely do this, but I abandoned this book just about 3/4 of the way through.

I realized that I just wasn't enjoying it anymore. Atwood's dystopia is a broad caricature of a hyper-capitalist future filled with clichéd, George Saunders-esque portmanteau satires on corporate naming (CorpSeCorps, Pigoon). With a more generous scholar's eye I can see how that vision may have been prescient and counter-cultural when it was published in 2003 in the shadow of 9/11, but dystopia has been fleshed out and deconstructed in media in the years since, and now it reads as flat and thinly characterized.

Her imagination of a teen boyhood in which these adolescents have been so numbed to exploitation that child pornography, executions, and animal torture are treated as normal entertainment options among many seems heavily influenced by A Clockwork Orange and maybe this is my old age speaking—one of the great surprises of adulthood is learning that I basically have no interest in the hyper-violent media that would have lit me up in high school—but I think that Clockwork came out of a particular context and it's assumptions about how culture and morality interact should be looked at a little more critically than they are in Oryx and Crake.

One more critique:

I thought the whole storyline involving how the boys "met" Oryx was tasteless and irresponsible. There are many real life stories about men getting obsessed by girls they encounter in porn, and I think that there's a certain seriousness and gravity to those stories that demand good, rigorous storytelling if they are to be fictionalized.

I did not love this book. I appreciated its unabashed pulpiness, but the premise is stated in the title and it doesn't develop much beyond that.

What really worked for me is that the story is set in Lagos, and Braithwaite doesn't waste much time explaining details in the setting for a reader like me that is not that familiar with Nigerian culture. Food, clothing, common phrases are incorporated and the onus on the reader is to learn or keep up. I really appreciate that because if Ezra Pound can drop in untranslated Italian, German, French and Sanskrit into poems that high school students are supposed to give a shit about, I think US reading audiences can grow up when it comes to non-European settings. I also loved the grotesquerie of the main character, there's a slow inversion in the plot where we realize that a binary that we've been presented with is maybe not all as it seems, and I thought that was great.

What did not work for me is that the sharpness of the satire of beauty culture and social media culture kind of trails off, and I did not find it as clever as folks who loved it. I also think there wasn't quite enough conflict, either external conflict in plot or in the internal conflict of the main character.

Don't let me turn you off from the book, though. It's a strong first book, and my rating is way more “this was not for me” rather than “this was bad.”

Cover Her Face is a bit of a mess. It seems to belong to a different generation of mystery novels than P.D. James' later novels. It's set in an English country estate with lots of judgmental villagers, not that different than Agatha Christie's Mrs. Marple novels, just without the...uh... charming ethnic stereotypes? (That's sarcasm.)

Adam Dalgleish is a bit of a non-entity, there's none of the depth that comes in into her later novels featuring the character. There's a lot of judgey slut and victim shaming and maybe that's an accurate depiction of village morés, but it's still not that fun to read. And, frankly, the puzzle box plot was not that interesting and I found it extremely tedious to finish.

For completists only, if you are looking to get into P.D. James' novels, I would pick a different starting place.

I have connected with so many of my friends through Tamora Pierce books—there's something about her fantasy settings and characters that bolsters and nurtures the curious and weird and brave parts of us. I was browsing my library's ebook page and came across this book, which is the beginning of a new series.

This series has a boy protagonist, which Pierce writes less often. He's a sweet orphan, almost like a YA-sized version of Taborlin from The Name of the Wind. Like Taborlin, Arram Draper is prodigiously talented and is deeply devoted to becoming more adept at his gifts. Also like Name of the Wind, there is not quite enough tension because every obstacle that Arram encounters is easily overcome by the power of his gifts. All that said, I did enjoy the book because I am a sucker for magic and wizards and shit.

Just like you can never return home, returning to familiar imaginative playgrounds can be a disorienting experience. As much as I love the Tamora Pierce-verse, it's easier to see the cracks in the façade. It's great that she has always built sex-positivity and consent ethics into her books, but the lengths (no pun intended) this book goes to try and find a Ye Olde way to avoid the words penis and “boner” was even more awkward than just using the real words. While I like her attention to imagining an inclusive world that everyone can be a part of, I did not like that every dark skinned character was described in terms of the shade of their skin (sometimes in reference to food items) and light skinned characters were described in terms of their culture. Plot beats signaling the compromised values of a character on their journey to becoming big bad are clunky and obvious and slow.

I would definitely recommend this book to a young person or as a nostalgia trip for anybody who already likes Tamora Pierce books. If nothing in this review has pinged your interest, I'd give it a skip.

Reading this book was a bit like meeting a really cool new friend for the first time at their going away party. I enjoyed it well enough, but there was a certain amount of disengagement from it that I felt because the timing just isn't right. I can think of many dark nights of the soul where McNiff's gentle but unshakable belief in our human capacity to create would have been the right thing, and I'm certain there will be more of those in the future.

And let me take a moment to admire how good this book is in the context of what it doesn't try to be. It doesn't try to be a method. It doesn't try to be a step by step guide. It doesn't pretend to be anything other than what McNiff has learned from his years of practice. It has structure, but it's not interested in any strong sense of direction or endpoint. Any chapter could be read in any order, and it is highly quotable and remixable, down to the paragraph.

What it is is a quiet reminder that creativity is exploration, respect, and deep engagement, and we have almost infinite directions we can go at any point. LaMonte Young's Variations 1960 instructed the performer to “draw a straight line and follow it.” Sister Corita Kent advised her art students to “find a place you trust and try trusting it for a while.” Well, sometimes you follow that line and you get very far away indeed, and sometimes you trust places and then you don't trust them anymore, or at least you get that itchy feeling that maybe its time to gather your bindle and move down the road. Trust The Process reminds us that an infinite number of straight lines runs through any point, and if you're stuck in place, the best thing to do is to take a step.

Here's what I knew coming into the book: it was an Oprah's Book Club pick, and it was about the consequences and effects on a marriage of a black man's interaction with a racist and unjust legal system. I wanted to remain open to what the book, and Tayari Jones had to say, but my expectations were tempered a little bit by the cynical baggage I brought to it. I did not think I needed a book to teach me that the legal system in this country is racist, I did not need a book to teach me that the personal consequences were devastating (do you hear the cliché of that word? Our cliches fail us: devastating, heart breaking, immense, incomprehensible. They all relate to a quantity so vast as to challenge human scale, but they're equally so vague as to be almost bloodless).

This wasn't that book, it's better than that.

This book asks difficult, almost despairing questions. What happens when injustice is as commonplace, as unbounded, as inhuman in scale as the weather? What's the point of shaking your fist at the weather? Roy is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, and once he has successfully appealed, the system may expunge his record and release him but it can never give him the the time lost, the life that he could have lived, back. Who pays him back for that time? It's not the state, and if it's not the state, then the only other people can pay are the people around him, but they've changed too.

It's the irreconcilable paradox of our prisons, the math that never penciled out in the first place. It's become so encumbered by history and politics and violence and profit that we delude ourselves into thinking that our reforms and incremental changes and civic religion of equality can fix it, but when you take it all away, the same conflict remains: if prisons are places of rehabilitation, at some point the prisoner becomes a different person than committed the crime. If prisons are places of retribution, who believes anymore that wasting years of human life does anything to mend what cannot be broken?

I loved the characters in this book. Not loved them in the sense of being good or likable people, I don't feel the need to judge them but nobody in the book is perfect. But Tayari Jones makes you believe in their dreams, believe that they are real, and that means that the painful realization that all of these dreams together did not add up was real too. Nobody was going to get exactly what they want, and even those that got most of what they want will have to live with the knowledge that some of it came from some pretty selfish choices.

The justice system, the whole legal system, is based on the ideas that everything is owned by someone, and when something is stolen, somebody has to pay. Except for the system itself. It never has to pay.

Continuing my cyberpunk kick! I thought JG was so much fun from start to finish. Corporate dystopia straight from SNOW CRASH, a bit of perverse wacky fun with the upside down incentives of the world from SIDEWAYS STORIES FROM WAYSIDE SCHOOL, and the big guy vs. pathetic little guy dynamics from George Saunders' short stories. Highly recommend.

There's this thread that runs through a lot of different subjects: fitness, marketing, learning, cleaning, etc. If I was to boil it down, it would be: just do it (and do matters much more than it).

The version of that thread runs throughout Peak is a little bit different. It goes: You can't practice without paying attention. If you're having fun you're probably not growing as fast as you could. You can develop almost any skill you want to a high degree. Whatever your excuse is, it's probably bullshit.

If that's a message you need convincing of, this is a great book to do it. If you've been primed by other books like Growth Mindset or The Power of Habit that explore similar territory, you might not need to read the whole thing. Either way, there's a good 20-30 pages that break down the conceptual pieces of how to practice deliberately and in a way that leads to fast growth, and I found that really useful. Your mileage may vary, but if you think you might be interested in this, you probably will be.

How quickly style can turn to crutch, spicy phrases turn into tics, and a streetwise narrator turns into your cranky coworker that keeps coming around to complain to you! I really liked Altered Carbon, but it seems like maybe one was enough. This time around, I can't unhear the way that wildly different characters rely on the same cliches, and the way that a post-biology post-human world opens up space for Morgan to describe human racial/ethnic characteristics in a really creepy colonial pseudo-scientific way. Also, unforgivable for a pulpy novel, really really boring. Boo! I was really expecting to like this one.

I loved this book... big worldbuilding sci-fi is just my jam and always has been. I loved figuring out the puzzle of the world, the space-opera elements, and the novel use of math in the setting.

If you hate sci-fi because thin characters and shallow emotional arcs make you check out, you might not like this. If you hate wandering around in a setting that you don't understand for the first half of the book, you're not going to like this book.

But if you like a fun, plotty, sci-fi novel, this is a pretty good one.

Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty is a title that is designed to grab me, specifically me. It also has a couple subtle pieces of misdirection in it. “Every song ever” and “musical plenty” seem to be talking about the endless Spotify playlist that we all listen to, music from every land and age becoming ever more accessible. “Ways to listen” to music that can accommodate this wide open world seems like rich territory to explore. I was looking forward to a master writer introduce some new ways of breaking down and listening, some new ways to explore.

That's certainly part of Ratliff's project, but it very quickly becomes clear that Ratliff thinks that any grand systems of taxonomy or replacements for the genre markers that once guided record buyers in a Sam Goody's are doomed to fail. His twenty ways of listening are not the only twenty ways of listening, not even the best twenty ways of listening. Just twenty of his ways of listening. If we accept this, than the project of the book becomes more modest. We're not thinking of new taxonomies at all, merely observing that there are techniques and spirits that animate music that manifest differently across musical traditions, and an open listener has it in their power to appreciate music in this new way.

Which, by the way, is not that different from the old way. Ratliff makes the implicit argument that genre as a system of classification is tied to the mid-20th century record industry and should be thought of as a historical anomaly. If this is so, as I think it is, what came before? Every Song Ever is an exercise in the tradition building written about by T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Artist:”

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

What did I think? That's almost the wrong question. What did I feel seems like a better question. I feel tired and empty. This book was written, this book was published, the whole public conversation about this book has been completed and moved on from but wounds keep getting inflicted, new rending in the fabric of our sense of national selfhood. I have been reading Coates for nearly 10 years, and even the darkest of his writings in those years did not prepare me for the bleakness of the ending of this book.

It's my greatest hope that one day we will be able to read this as a cry of despair from a very poisonous moment in history, but I am a lot more hopeful than Ta-Nehisi Coates and I have nothing to stand upon except a faith in beauty and light.

The dedication to Night Sky With Exit Wounds reads: “for my mother [& father]” and the brackets between love for mother and love for father is one of the strongest threads in the weave of this collection of poetry. Ocean (I use his first name because I feel like I know him now and I've already fallen in love with his author photo & it's a beautiful name too) writes sharply about the deep unembraceable hunger for love and touch and wanting that comes with a father that hits your mother and hugs you with liquor on his breath and scares you with his weapons and his physicality. But he also has that poets eye, compassionate and cosmic, that sees his father as the survivor of a terrible war and a terrible time.

Sexuality is ever present and always questioned with suspicion in these poems. Straight women worry about becoming their mother in their relationships. Straight men worry about whether they are becoming their fathers. Gay men worry about whether they are their mother who sublimates her self for a man or their father who possesses another (not all straight relationships are like this, but I don't see the value in pretending like most are not).

Mixed race and immigrant children take the hard work of coexistence and assimilation into their bodies. The political status of your people are the winds that can blow self-esteem and security away. When I'm with white people, I say that I'm Mexican-American. When I'm with Latinos, I say nothing at all, because the real truth of it is that my home culture is neither Mexican nor American, it is the negotiated culture of my parent's marriage.

The cover photo is of Ocean as a young boy seated between two women. On his shirt is written—I gasped out loud when I made out the faded words—”I Love Daddy.” White bars with the title and author hide their eyes, echoing documents censored by the military, but also maybe protecting the people in the photos from being completely seen. You can still make out the scared expression on the little boy's face.

I thought this was a truly excellent work of speculative fiction that both took its time with what ifs and remained grounded in reality and real motivations. Winters writes about the poison of compromise with real insight. The compromises our country has made with white supremacy after all, are just different terms than the ones explored in Underground Airlines. I'm looking forward to reading Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad soon.

I love miniatures, watercolors, preludes, the works of small crystal perfection. This collection is almost more poetry than poetry, as Neruda weaves personalities and drama into time and abstraction, all with the tightly folded brevity that comes with the Spanish language.

I thought this was such a beautiful book on a sentence-by-sentence level. Greenwell is a poet, and you can feel that in his language.

There's a petty reason why this is not going straight into my soul, and that's because Greenwell's protagonist is well observed and well written and has a plausible internal subjectivity, but his life experience is so different from mine and with such a different toy box of issues, repressions, and contradictions that it's hard for me to see myself in him. It's like an incredibly well aimed bullet striking the person just to your left.

Of course, that's not the only purpose of fiction, and I enjoyed the journey anyway.