Reviews and Comments

Jim Brown

jamesjbrownjr@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 1 month ago

http://jamesjbrownjr.net English professor Teaches and studies rhetoric and digital studies Director of the Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center (DiSC): http://digitalstudies.camden.rutgers.edu

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Ulysses Jenkins (2021, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania/Graham Foundation) No rating

Well-Done Exhibition Book

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This is a nice encapsulation of an exhibition that run at the Hammer Museum in 2022. The show was the first to focus on Ulysses Jenkins work, a mural and video artist from Los Angeles. The book has some great essays and a roundtable about Jenkins' work.

The best essay is by Aria Dean, who takes on how Jenkins' work deals with race and representation. She offers a reading that goes beyond the typical understanding of Jenkins work - that he's offering a fairly simple critique of racist representations of Blackness (especially his work "Mass of Images"). Dean offers a much more interesting reading of Jenkins' work suggesting that a close look at Jenkins' work in the 1970s and 1980s reveals "a narrative unfolding, one that originates in Jenkins's massive failure to assert a legible ontology of himself as a black subject, capable of wreaking havoc over the images imposed …

Doggerel Life (2022, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania/Graham Foundation) No rating

"Stories of a Los Angeles Griot"

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This autobiography of video artist Ulysses Jenkins is an interesting look both into his career and the LA art scene at a moment when video and telecommunications were coming onto the scene. Jenkins shows how that technology opened up new avenues for expression but did not really change the core dynamics of that art scene.

I read this book as part of my research into Electronic Cafe, a telecommunications art project that extended from the 1980s into the 2000s. Jenkins was part of the first iteration of that project, the first version of Electronic Cafe which served to network neighborhoods around LA during the 1984 Olympic Games. Each neighborhood had a cafe equipped with Slow Scan TV, a Bulletin Board System, an electronic writing pad, and more. Jenkins was an arist-in-residence at one of the sites (Gumbo House) where he helped people in the neighborhood with both technical issues and …

Rabbit Hutch (2022, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Knopf) No rating

readable novel with lots of moving parts

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I moved through this quickly, and I think that speaks to Gunty's storytelling abilities. @jilliansayre says this is a bunch of short stories/novellas in a trench coat convincing us it's a novel. That's probably a fair description. There are lots of bits in here that feel like set pieces Gunty had and wanted to use somewhere, but they are good set pieces.

Exquisite corpse (1994, Verso) No rating

Beautiful Snark

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I can't believe that a book of essays about architecture is one of my favorite books of all time, but here we are. You don't have to know anything about New York City or architecture to enjoy these essays.

Sorkin was the architectural critic of the Village Voice for years, and this is a collection of his essays published there (and some that were published elsewhere). The main villain in this book is architect Phillip Johnson, who Sorkin absolutely despises. It's hilarious to read each and every take-down of Johnson in this book.

The best essay in the whole collection is "Dwelling Machines," which appeared in Design Quarterly in 1987. It's a discussion of how the design of homes has "diversified since the time the world became rational, sometime during the 18th century when the Enlightenment pulled the cord that turned on modernism's incandescent bulb." (188)

Here's one of my …

I saw Ramallah (Paperback, 2003, Anchor Books) No rating

Palestine is not an abstraction

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This book is about a Palestinian coming to terms with what happens when he is able to return to the land he was driven from. We see the distinction between his idea of Palestine and his encounter with the place and his people. Barghouti's life is upended in every way when he is forced into exile at various moments (from Palestine, from Egypt, constantly forced to move and migrate) - this transforms his relationships to people, to place, even to things. The book shows the ripple effects of Zionism, and it is written by a poet, so we are immersed in these problems in an intense way

Averno (Hardcover, 2006, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) No rating

Averno is a small crater lake in southern , regarded by the ancient Romans as …

Persephone

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A collection of poems, many of which are inspired by Persephone. Averno is a crater lake in southern Italy, and according to the book jacket it was "regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld."

My favorite moment is in the poem October, a moment where it's not clear whether the writer is speaking to their friend or calling the earth their friend:

"The brightness of the day becomes the brightness of night; the fire becomes the mirror.

My friend the earth is bitter; I tihnk sunlight has failed her. Bitter or weary, it is hard to say."

Potted Meat (Paperback, 2016, Tarpaulin Sky Press) No rating

a story told in fragments

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This is a picture of a working class town in West Virginia, told in narrative fragments.

Here's one fragment that gives you a sense for how the narrator, a young boy living in the town, paints the picture:

"Yellow

Everyone is downstairs crying. I walk upstairs to Grandma's room. It is dark. Her dirty pink house shoes are lined up by the nightstand like she just got into bed. The covers on her side are pulled back like she just got out of bed. I leave and ask my mom how Grandma died. My mom says she just turned yellow and died. What, I say. You heard me, she says, she just turned yellow and died. I will never eat dandelions again."

Absolution (2024, HarperCollins Publishers Limited) No rating

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, the surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s blockbuster …

The Southern Reach prequel we may not have needed

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Don't get my wrong. If Vandermeer writes it, I'm going to read it. But I don't know quite what to make of this one. I loved the beginning, the middle was okay, and the last third was a slog. I think @sophist_monster's theory is that Absolution mirrors the Southern Reach Trilogy, which would track nicely since I love Annihilation, like Authority, and can take or leave Acceptance.

I will say that the book's blending of so-called technology with so-called nature (cameras that are seemingly organic, that change and morph as soon as they are examined, and that are eventually "shucked like oysters") is fantastic and vintage Vandermeer.

The book also does interesting things with time - time has always been weird in Area X, but it seems to take center stage in this book:

"Amid all this sea wrack, the excesses and mundanity, the heavy fog of the moment, …

Amor Cringe (2022, Deluge Books) No rating

Amor Cringe explores the dually base and beautiful aspects of self-obsessed media culture. In a …

One rule: make it as cringe as possible

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K Allado-McDowell wrote this book with GPT-3, mixing their own voice with that of the LLM. The only rule they followed while writing was to make it "as cringe as possible." I'm interested in how the book is steeped in the bodily (lots of sex) while also making clear the lack of connection in a world shaped by social media. The main character is lost in a world of people who are the "main character," looking for community in religious communities and raves. They never find that community - they mostly just offer hallucinatory episodes (GPT) is good at that.

Intermezzo (Hardcover, english language, 2024, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) No rating

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have …

Rooney doesn't deserve the hate

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Sally Rooney gets hate, but I'm convinced that people are made that she's so good at such a young age. She's great at relationships. I want to write a paper about her use of the word "Yes" in this book - it comes up during so many internal monologues, across characters. Characters stumble into an understanding of something and say "Yes." I'm not sure if it's a tick across her novels - I've never noticed it before.

In Ascension (2023, Atlantic Books, Limited) No rating

Leigh's upbringing in Rotterdam revolved around her fascination with the waterfront, which served as a …

Cixin Liu + Jeff Vandermeer

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Beautiful book.

"Even at this distance, Jupiter is incomprehensibly vast. We stare through the porthole at its soft milky hue, the watercolour whirls, repeating our unbelief. K looks at the settings on the screen showing the camera feed. Something in the rendering of Jupiter looks too virtual, too predictable. It's exactly like the images I've seen of it before. This is a senseless thing to say, of course, but I expected the gas giant to appear different when I saw it myself, so close. It looks too perfect, too controlled. It lacks independence, as if conforming to our expectations, which is ironically not what we expected at all. You're in shock, Tyler says. We all are. It isn't the camera, or the screen, K, it's us. We don't know how to see it." (357)

The Message (2024, Random House Publishing Group) 5 stars

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of …

Tempting to think that a book might break through

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The tide has certainly shifted in the U.S. when it comes to the conversation around Palestine, and this book is more evidence of this. It is tempting to think that because Coates is the author, this book will somehow break through or crack open the rhetorical situation and allow things to be said that have, to date, been deemed unsayable. But I think that's a dream. Unfortunately, the shift in public conversation has tended to coincide with a ratcheting up of the killing of civilians. Those who think that rhetoric and discourse are an alternative to violence will have to contend with that fact.

"An inhuman system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think that they are not part of such systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their …

Never Let Me Go (Paperback, 2010) 4 stars

Kathy, a clone about to donate all her organs and die, reflects on her past …

what's happening at the edges

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In a recent review of The Remains of the Days, I said that Ishiguro's characters "revel in tedium," and this happens again in Never Let Me Go. This time, that tedium is their attempt to make sense of their lives. It's either unthinkable or too difficult for these characters to accept that they are just disposable, that they have no interiority. The book is evidence that they do in fact have that interiority, but the ending makes clear that there's a whole set of cultural machinery set up to treat them as resources rather than people.

In that review of The Remains of the Day, I said the book "is deep in the weeds of something that seems ridiculous while all of these other more important things are happening around the edges." I'm realizing that this is Ishiguro's modus operandi. He's not ignoring the important historical events - he's just …

Toward Camden (2021, Duke University Press) No rating

meditation on place

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This is a beautifully written book that focuses on Camden, New Jersey, where I teach. I was also lucky enough to meet the author during a visit to campus. The strongest feature of this book is its ability to sit with the complexities of urban spaces that are constantly exploited, "revitalized," ignored, bulldozed, exoticized, and more. Romero grew up in Camden, and she wrote the book during a return visit to the city after her home was gone. It's a work of poetry, narrative, and analysis. It's rare to see an author pull of all of these at once.

Nicked (2024, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) No rating

Another great one from one of my favorite writers

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Anderson can craft a sentence and a story. He's also great at historical fiction, and this one is quick, funny, and based on historical events. I was raised Catholic and was always weirded out by relics - this book leans into that weirdness.