Reviews and Comments

A beautiful book, both in terms of writing and as an art object. It includes a volume that reproduces Cage's 1972 portfolio, Mushroom Book, authored in collaboration with illustrator Lois Long and botanist Alexander H. Smith.

Cage on his composition course:

"I wasn't concerned with a teaching situation that involved a body of material to be transmitted by me to them. I would, when it was necessary, give them a survey of earlier works, by me and by others, in terms of composition, but mostly I emphasized what I was doing at that time and would show them what I was doing and why I was interested in it. Then I warned them that if they didn't want to change their ways of doing things, they ought to leave the class, that it would be my function, if I had any, to stimulate them to change."

Regarding his poems on mushrooms:

"My poems on mushrooms are nonsense in the sense of not being ordinary sense," Cage observed of his mesostic poems; pleasantly counterposing Wittgenstein's rationalism. "Words which you're used to going in one direction can go in at least two directions. They can be used to set your mind floating."

In ways similar to Kasulke's Several People are Typing, this book is taking up the materiality/immateriality of digital media. An app tracking more than just your clicks (biometric data, facial expressions) combines with big data in surprising ways. Plus, the main character is an Art History major who is working in content moderation.

If you liked the FX show Devs (and if you haven't seen that, watch it!), this book has a number of similarities.

This is a strange book about Mariella Novotny, who (among other things) was an underage sex worker who had sex with JFK. But the story is much more interesting than that.

The book is interesting in that it peels back the curtain on a British underworld from the 1960s and 1970s. The author includes her own process in the reporting - we hear not only about Novotny but also about Pizzichini's attempts to chase down various threads of the story. This part was less interesting to me and served to kind of interrupt the historical narrative.

The plot of this (unpublished, unfinished) book is much more complicated than most other Manchette novels. It made me sad that he didn't get to finish this book or the series he was thinking would follow it.

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.

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.

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.

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").

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.