Reviews and Comments

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)

Doctorow defined enshittification in 2022 and then elaborated on it in various essays and op eds. This is a book-length version of the argument that "two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time."

The book is meticulously researched and well-written, but I do think maybe this is an argument that is more persuasive in a tighter, shorter format. There's tons of evidence in the book, and I might argue there's (strangely) too much evidence.

I love that the book walks through the natural history, pathology, epidemiology, and cure for enshittification. The structure is excellent, but maybe the book is a bit too "baggy."

I avoided this book for quite some time given the Good Morning America sticker. I think what I was suspecting ended up being true. The beginning of the book is decent (especially the discussion of the space shuttle - appreciated by this Gen Xer), and I also appreciate that it offers a queer love story (especially given that I listened to it with a queer teen). However, the melodrama ends up overtaking everything, and the characters' one dimensionality limits what was maybe possible.