Reviews and Comments

I taught this book in my "How to Pay Attention" class, and I've also organized with the folks at the Strother School of Radical Attention. This is all to say that this review is probably partisan. The book itself is beautiful, which is one part of its project - to get attention, to get you to attend to the object itself.

But the big project here is to wake up people up to the attention fracking that's happening to all of us. People on Bookwyrm are likely not the audience for the book. The audience for this book is over on Goodreads. But the book is solidly in the genre of manifesto - a call to action.

It's written by artists and poets, and I'm guessing some of the stylistic choices rub some folks the wrong way. Maybe that's a failure in editing, or maybe the authors decided to just go for it. Either way, we need this book and more books like it if we're going to actually construct something like a broad attention activism movement. Some seeds are out there, but it will take a time before we can reap.

I bought this because I loved Mason's North Woods, and this one didn't wow me in the way that one did. I think part of the issue for me is that I read too many books about people who work in academia (this is mostly on me!). But maybe there are too many of this kind of book?

Mason is an excellent writer, so even if he story felt a little scattered, the writing was really good. Like this account of a cross country road trip:

"The state they'd left that summer was in its usual state of suspended animation: sere, and brown, and ready to burn. The foothills of the Sierras were just as dry, as was the floor of the Sierran forests. Nevada: also brown. Utah: brown, white, lots of white, brown again; rad in places, ochre, vermillion. Colorado: definitely red, brick red, until aspen country, and though it was August and the aspens had yet to change their colors, there was something about the shivering leaves that seemed a premonition, pale, washed-out. Nebraska we have discussed already: yellow, save some multicolored gardens near the Cather Center. Iowa, in the daughter's journal of the expedition, was depicted with a single line of green above a line of brown, beneath a blue that filled the very edges of the paper. Illinois was mostly experienced at night; for all they knew, it might have been a rain forest. Indiana, or at least what they saw of Indiana, had successfully replaced most living things with billboards. Ohio was a surprise: rich, crowded islands of forest at the edges of the fields. The point of all of this is that by the time the family reached Niagara Falls and decided against the turnoff, the daughter was down to a nubbin of brown in her box of Crayola 64 and had exhausted all blues, and tan, and tumbleweed, burnt sienna, timberwolf, mahogany, orchid, and thistle. She had sacrificed her yellows and oranges (apricot, dandelion, 'macaroni and cheese') on the altar of seven suns. And yet she had barely dulled the crisp Crayola rim of forest green and 'asparagus.' At which point they turned from Lake Erie and dove into New York." (26)

I read this book after this recommendation from Nicole Lipman, an Associate Editor at N+1:

"There’s no better balm than reading Laurie Colwin. Her novels are palliative but far from empty, like a really delicious slice of cake that also somehow makes you smarter."

But I just found that this was a slice of cake (not necessarily the most delicious slice), and that's about it.

Ukraine 2013-2014, the war before the war. Brutal at moments and beautiful at others.

"Loss, when it occurs, has memory stronger than the mind, stronger than visual recollection patterned in the brain. It's something the flesh knows, the muscles know, like a dancer reciting a step done hundreds of times, like a musician playing a song or a scale after decades without practice. It's something the body knows, something the body is aware of while the mind adapts, responds, reacts." (154)

I started this book two different times, and I even tried moving back-and-forth between the audiobook and paper copy to get into it. Overall, it's very ambitious, but I couldn't always see how it held together. It asks a lot of the reader - a speculative world made of time and a series of nested narratives. I was most drawn to the Arendt and Spinoza sections, but I never quite understood what the thread of the book was.

I'm not sure there's anything I could say that hasn't already been said. Two things struck me: 1) the style is striking, especially the way he draws children - they have adult faces, and that is obviously a very intentional choice; 2) Writing in the 90s, he expresses skepticism about a two-state solution and suggests a single state is a better path, but that it would require an entirely different set of dynamics. Given how much the two-state discussion dominated things at this time, this seems prescient (especially given that a two-state solution is now dead).

Reading a book about Palestine that is 30+ years old that could have been written yesterday is...

I didn't know anything about Rustin before reading this book, but I subscribe to Damage Magazine, and they published this book to contribute to contemporary discussions of how to build working class coalitions. Rustin's writings are followed by essays from contemporary critics.

Rustin's critiques of the left will sound familiar, as he was bothered by the New Left's focus on identity in the 1960s and 1970s. He is offering those critiques and others from the left, and his thoughts on prisons, policing, universal basic income, are really interesting to hear. It is hard to believe these things were written so long ago.

I also really recommend Damage Magazine. I wish they were sticking with a print edition, but their focus now is on electronic publication and also on books like this. If you're looking for interesting voices on the left, this is one place to look.

It is interesting to read an argument from 2005 about centralized media (or "the media.") I always wonder what folks from this moment are thinking about today's internet, which is just as centralized as the broadcast networks that many hoped would be unseated by it.

The argument of this book is that we engage in a series of rituals that create and bolster the "myth of the mediated centre," which is "the belief, or assumption, that there is a centre to the social world, and that, in some sense, the media speaks ‘for’ that centre" (2). "The media" has most of the symbolic power, and that power is held in place via a range of rituals: "from certain ‘ritualised’ forms of television viewing, to people’s talk about appearing in the media, to our ‘automatic’ heightened attention if told that a media celebrity has just entered the room" (2).

The conclusion to this book is really interesting. Here's a nugget from there that is especially interesting to users of Bookwyrm and other federated social media:

"The alternative vision of the media process we should work towards, then, is not a chaotic ‘Tower of Babel’, but a world with many ‘centres’ that produce and distribute media messages, each of them only a relative centre, in whose formation and operations a very wide range of people can participate, and which holds no entrenched monopoly that would prevent further ‘centres’ forming. Instead of the absurd nightmare of everyone broadcasting simultaneously, our alternative image of mediation could be a non-hierarchical space in which people have some degree of choice over whether to broadcast or to receive messages and images, at least for a significant number of purposes and contexts." (138)

I'm a sucker for a short book. There's something to be said for being able come complete a narrative in a sitting or two.

The Fifth Year is told from a child's perspective in a believable way. Fragments of meaning emerge. It's not clear what is a dream and what is reality.

I appreciated this book's depiction of childhood. The main character is the only child in the household, but she is not lonely, and she relishes everything about the adults caring for he.

A concise, accessible set of definitions and arguments. It's well designed, and it can fit in a back pocket. Good propaganda has to look good too, something socialists often forget.

An interesting story about people looking for a different way to live. The novel makes clear that an attempt to escape can end up trapped in the same power dynamics from which one seeks respite. The most interesting part of the book is how it deals with the leaders of cults/communes/"leaderless" movements.

A short primer on sabotage. I appreciated this book's condensed argument for understanding technology as a site of class struggle. It's bibliography offers a great path for digging deeper, if you want. But the goal of this book is to offer 136 pages that get you thinking about what it means to put forward a decelerationist politics. From the followers of Ned Ludd to quiet quitters, we have lots of tools for sabotage, and Mueller argues that we should be thinking critically about how to use those tools.

I found this in a used bookstore with a label on it that said "truly scary." I had never heard of this book. What a find.

Published in 1982, this book reminds you that Silicon Valley's history of depravity runs deep. A computer company is developing Ultrachip as a hail mary to save the company, and they organize a Turing Test of the SOCRATES artificial intelligence program to show off what the chip can do. There's some schlock here, but it's definitely worth a read both in terms of being a quick fun read and (maybe more importantly) as a historical document.

Lots of great stuff in here, but I especially appreciated that the book frames the central constraint for AI as a hardware issue, something we are of course living with today in a more intense way. Also great stuff in here about labor...very hard to believe this was written in the 70s/80s. Here's an exchange between a Stanford computer science professor and a New York Times journalist:

"Tomasso paused for a second and leaned back, gazing down at the gray terminal atop his desk. 'I remember,' he said, 'about five years ago, I was at some technical conference, where I met a consultant who works for different computer firms. And she was telling entry-level programmers that they'd be better off learning a trade.'

'I don't follow,' Maralee said.

Tomasso spread his hands wide. 'Which would you rather do? Hire some good engineers once, to design a smart system that basically operates in natural language, or else keep paying overpriced programmers forever?'

Maralee frowned. 'So where do the programmers go?'

Tomasso shrugged. 'I'm no sociologist. But I suppose they either get more sophisticated at what they do or' - he raised his hands again - 'they learn a trade. Computers or not,' he said with a slight smile, 'we're always going to need plumbers.'" (94-95)

This series continues to deliver. This book focuses a lot on how to name things: what to call the situation (not a catastrophe but maybe an anastrophe?) and what to call the people stuck in the 19th of November.

Here's my favorite passage from this volume:

"Maybe that is why I write. Maybe it's my way of being alone. Maybe the page is my door out of the disarray. A means of finding a way through all the thoughts and voices that blur together. To sit alone with paper and pen and know that there is nothing but Tara's hand moving gently across the page, gathering the voices and gestures into that motion, ideas and explanations, all that we share, that we are many, a community, a flock, an odd bunch, and yet: my hand moves simply with all that has seeped into my sentences, into my hand, and I write myself onto a narrow path, sentenced by sentence, I make my way forward, tiptoeing, so softly. Alone." (160)