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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Fuller's faith in design is both disturbing and inspiring. This book is certainly "of a moment." Agel and Fiore designed, it has a "Medium is the Massage" feel to it. It's also difficult to get your hands on a physical copy - I snagged one on AbeBooks, but I paid a decent amount.
There are also at least four different ways to traverse the book, two of which require that you turn the book upside down.
In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating …
Nature fights back, translating Blake, into the astrological weeds.
New collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography …
I was familiar with Ruth Wilson Gilmore but primarily because I've seen her cited by others. This book laid out some core concepts for me when it comes to her work on abolition (anti-state state was one of these).
I also appreciated that many of the essays here both describe and enact activist scholarship, describing her work with organizations and other scholars.
There's a lot here, and it spans many years of an incredible career.
China Miéville's brilliant reading of the modern world's most controversial and enduring political document: the …
A book about how to read, and a wonderful demonstration of the method. This is about the Manifesto, it's history, its debates, its import, but it's also just about how to read generously and rigorously:
“The only reasonable way to read the Manifesto - or anything - is to be as flexible as the text itself.”
“We should strive to read as generously as possible - and to read ruthlessly beyond that generosity’s limits.”
One of the best books I've read, full stop. It made me want to dig back into Miéville's fiction, especially since The City and The City is another favorite of mine.
In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving …
This started slow for me, but I did eventually get into it. It could easily be staged as a play, and I think the time travel piece is somewhat interesting (though, the author does try to get around the inevitable plot holes of a time travel story with a series of unexplained "rules").
What if the world broke and the only written evidence was authored by a self-absorbed, retired school teacher who took pride in his prize-winning poultry?
This book is really interesting. Published in 1939, it has lots to say about the coming war and colonialism.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal …
How else could we organize ourselves? How did we lose "the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another"?
This book gets into the weeds of anthropology and archaeology, but it's "zoom out" moments are really interesting. The Rousseau/Hobbes debate leaves out much and, they argue, makes everything much more boring than in actually is, given the actual data available about previous social arrangements.
How did we get stuck? We have forgotten that social organization have been a matter of play, tinkering, and sometimes is even dependent on things like seasonal changes. It feels like we are in the least playful and least imaginative epoch, succumbing to the ideology of Thatcher's "There is no alternative."
One interesting set of arguments in the book is about scale. Received wisdom says that structures of domination are tied to population scaling up. Larger, more dense populations means complexity, which …
How else could we organize ourselves? How did we lose "the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another"?
This book gets into the weeds of anthropology and archaeology, but it's "zoom out" moments are really interesting. The Rousseau/Hobbes debate leaves out much and, they argue, makes everything much more boring than in actually is, given the actual data available about previous social arrangements.
How did we get stuck? We have forgotten that social organization have been a matter of play, tinkering, and sometimes is even dependent on things like seasonal changes. It feels like we are in the least playful and least imaginative epoch, succumbing to the ideology of Thatcher's "There is no alternative."
One interesting set of arguments in the book is about scale. Received wisdom says that structures of domination are tied to population scaling up. Larger, more dense populations means complexity, which means hierarchy, and hierarchy becomes "chains of command," and thus the origins of the state. Thus, once populations grow, certain freedoms are left to the side. But the book questions this kind of story by pointing to any number of non-linear movements between systems of social organization that do not follow this pattern. This is the trick of the book - to tell the received story and then show how that story cannot account for a mountain of evidence that contradicts it. For instance, Bureacracy did not emerge in large communities to manage massive amounts of information but insted first emerged in small communities.
I almost wish there was a "pamphlet" version of this argument, one that left much of the anthropological record deep in footnotes (or just referred to this book) and hit all the high notes and "big" arguments.
This is a really funny book.
The afterword by Donna Tartt in the Overlook Press edition taught me that this book was taught in Honors English classes and then fell out of favor (probably due to the John Wayne film based on it).
Welcome to Grouse County, somewhere in the Midwest, where the towns are small but the …
Content warning mentions a large plot point toward the end of the novel
A pretty amazing picture of midwestern life. Beautifully written. There was a pretty intense depiction of preeclampsia and the death of a child, but it was done in a way that most books can't pull off. It didn't feel exploitative (still tough to read, especially if you've had any personal experience with traumatic pregnancies), and I appreciated the way it handled the couple's difficulties dealing with it while also not making it the centerpiece of the novel.
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
I didn't expect this pandemic/space travel novel to be so much about children who are disappointing their parents.
This felt more like an interconnected collection of short stories in the same world than a novel. In that sense, it was similar to Rion Amilcar Scott's The World Doesn't Require you.
If you liked Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, then you'll like this.
I can't imagine the amount of research into mathematics and physics that McCarthy had to do in order to write both this and The Passenger.
A final note: There is significant overlap in the worldview of Alicia and No Country For Old Men's Anton Chigurh, which really has me wondering about the worldview of Cormac McCarthy...because that worldview is pretty bleak.