Reviews and Comments

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 reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read and so much resemblance to the systems I've known that I am left believing that, at least here, this objectivity is self delusion."

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 telling us what happens around the edges of those events.

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.

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.

This is a detailed study of Mobile Image, an artist group that built innovative projects using telecommunications in the 1980s and 1990s. Super detailed account of their experiments with satellite technology, videoconferencing, BBSs.

Most importantly, if you've seen the hullabaloo about the "portal" in NYC, you should know that Mobile Image built that in 1980 - a live, synchronous video connection between LA and NYC. It was called A Hole in Space and there's footage on YouTube.

This is the second of Ishiguro's I've read (the other was Klara and the Sun), and I'm struck with how much his characters love to revel in tedium. In this book, it's done to comedic effect often (since the narrator is obsessed with the details of what makes a "good butler" or what counts as "dignity"). But it then surprisingly dips into a love story and Nazi sympathizers. 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. In the end, it works.

The introduction to my edition says that the third part of this book was initially its own thing, and that makes a lot of sense. The first two parts of the book offer a kind of nest for the last part of the narrative.

An intergenerational story, which seems to be a trend in the 20th Century Japanese fiction I've read. Bleak also...kind of another trend. I have tended to link both of those things to WWII, but this one was published in 1914, so that theory doesn't hold up.

I bought this book because Jeff VanderMeer blurbed it. It was not what I expected. All the issues with tech (AI, privacy, virality, inequity and inequality, the difficulties of parenting in a world of devices) are right on the surface. The book reads like YA fiction, but it doesn't appear to be marketed that way. I skimmed through to the end to figure out the narrative payoff, but mostly this book just wasn't what I was expecting.

This book is a history of socialism, and a pretty accessible one. I was expecting more of a manifesto (because of the title...), but the final section is really the only thing approaching that. And even then, it's not really a manifesto in style or substance.

This is a great historical introduction to socialist projects, but if you're looking for a fiery defense of socialism you should look elsewhere.

In the U.S., we tend to draw a fairly firm line between "research" and "creative activity," especially when it comes to granting agencies. It's frustrating, since the most interesting work straddles this boundary. This book is good for both people in places where research-creation is more of a possibility (like Canada) and for those who are not often trained to think in these ways (like the U.S.).

I think it's probably best as an intro text for beginning grad students in art and design or for advanced undergraduates. It lays out steps for developing a "research document" and offers some examples in each chapter, but I wish the examples were a little more fully fleshed out...sometimes it seems like they're just listed rather than used to explicate the idea of the chapter.

The design of this book is excellent, so it might offer some inspiration in that way as well.

My favorite parts of this book were dream sequences where the protagonist is dreaming about dialogues between all kinds of people (at one point, Lisa Simpson and Trump).

There's a deus ex machina that I didn't love, but the writing is great.

I spent a good bit of time trying to figure out what this book was trying to accomplish. Given the title, I was assuming there would be a large discussion of racer/racism and the worlds of ornithology, birding, naturalism. I assumed the book was designed to show that these fields are (I assume?) very white. But that's not really what this book is - it's primarily just a memoir, one that does directly take up race (especially in some sections that address the horrors of slavery and genealogy) but not in the way I expected.

The most gripping and depressing section addressed moments when Lanham was trying to just do his job (going to a place and logging the birds he sees and hears) and had to be constantly vigilant about his own safety, since he's a Black man walking through the South. I was struck that he needed to have the ability to both do a job that needs so much attention while also having to split his attention between that job and the violent, terrifying world around him.

This is a love story with power dynamics that will make you angry - an older, married man with a much younger women, the former often manipulating the latter. But all of this happens in the context of 1980s Berlin, just before (and then during) the fall of the Wall. The writing is great, which makes me wonder how much we should thank the translator (Michael Hofmann).

There are moments in this book that remind me of China Miéville's The City and the City. Here's one:

"Through a tunnel and then up to the platform, and now she's suddenly on the other side of the steel barrier. She knows what it looks like when seen from the East. You're almost forced to look at it when you stand on the eastbound platform, waiting for the train heading towards Strausberg or Erkner or Ahrensfelde. But now all of the sudden what was inside is outside, and what was ordinary is now cut off from her and no longer visible. Suddenly everything is inverted, topsy-turvy, now she's behind the picture, behind what was once the surface of some unreachable beyond. The white line, a foot and a half from the edge of the platform, is not to be breached before the train has come to a complete stop, says the voice on the PA. Katharina and all those others waiting follow the rule, they don't cross the line, they even prefer to stand in the middle of the platform, On the short side of the station the glass facade cuts off the top of the building from the air outside, which in principle is still Eastern air, but because it gives access to the West is sort of Western air too, and outside the glass facade is an iron platform, where soldiers patrol back and forth with rifles on their backs, their silhouettes clearly visible. Behind the steel barrier that runs parallel to the train track, and that on this side too is a steel barrier, the S-Bahn prusumably continues to run, in the familiar way, towards Strausberg or Erkner or Ahresfelde. Or not? Does the East, which so far has been her element, cease to exist the moment she can no longer see it? Has she, Katharina, displaced it from present to past with those few strides to the other side of Friedrichstrasse station? Or is this gray station endowed with the power to hold two different sorts of time, two competing presents, two everyday realities, one serving as the other's netherworld? But then where is she, when she stands on the borderline? Is it called no-man's-land because someone wandering around in it no longer has any idea who he is?" (67-68)

This essay/short book is an extension of the research Saper did in Networked Art. It continues his thinking about how artists use sociopoetics to "score social situations" and how those same artists use "intimate bureaucracies" to cultivate and maintain small networks. Whereas bureaucracy is thought of as a management tool for "everyone" or for large groups of people, these groups use the tools of bureaucracy (rules, procedures, stamps) to build tigh-nit, smaller groups.

This text ties some of these ideas to Occupy Wall Street, but it also introduced me to a text I'd never heard of - 'bolo'bolo:

"The pseudonymously written bolo’bolo (1983), published by Semiotext(e) in their conspiratorial-sounding Foreign Agents series, describes the practical steps toward a utopian international social system. The author known only as “p.m.” (at least before post- publication interviews revealed the author’s identity) explains how small groups gathering outside the functions of an economy will form the foundation of this new social system. Instead of impersonal production and consumption, in which people’s work, for an abstract economy, defines the social system, people join together only in groups of common enthusiasms. No group, or “bolo,” forces anyone to stay, and individuals move from group to group depending on their current enthusiasm. The examples of common enthusiasms listed by p.m. include a very wide, and endlessly elastic, range of interests: garli- bolo, blue-bolo, coca-bolo, no-bolo, retro-bolo, les- bolo, etc." (7)

This decentralized (federated) structure is one more example of something folks working in/on federated networks might turn to as they think about how to build and maintain federated networks.