Reviews and Comments

Rush is a very funny writer, and he does a great job of portraying a group of Hudson Valley elites in the shadow of George W. Bush's march to war. The ending is disheartening but feels true...maybe too true.

This is a great catalog of the main character's relationships - each chapter is a portrait. From the translator's note, which perfectly describes the book:

"In some ways Detaljerna was an unexpected sensation. It's a quiet book, comprised of four chronicles of mostly ordinary people, a novel where 'nothing really happens.' That quiet, however, holds a grace that vaults the sum total of quotidian moments into something more expansive. (136)

This is a canonical book in sociology, but many of it's arguments have been refuted or called into question by later research. I'm still trying to figure out why it holds so much weight - perhaps because it makes big claims that match with our common sense. It "feels" right to say that large groups are hard or impossible to organize and small groups are easier to organize, which is (an overly simplified version of) what he argues.

The basic idea is that large groups attempting to organize collective action suffer from the "free loader" problem. People will benefit from some public good whether or not they join the collective effort to gain or keep that good, and if they operate in their own self interest (Olson argues that mostly will) they have no motivation to join up. He argues that smaller groups can be more effective in this regard because there are social costs to not contributing to the collective effort. For Olson, large organizations like labor unions can only survive with some kind of compulsory participation.

I read this as part of my research on federation, and he does say that federations offer a kind of middle way. Small union locals can organize on the ground while also benefiting from the resources of a national union.

Olson's blanket arguments about size have mostly been refuted, but I was interested in his framing of federations as a middle way, an argument I'm trying to make about federated social media. Federated networks can allow for small groups to organize while also allowing those groups to negotiate connections to other groups.

"To look at contemporary Delhi is to look at the symptoms of the global 21st Century in their most glaring and advanced form." (439)

A deep dive into Delhi, neoliberlization, culture and politics, and (as the above quote mentions) the logical endpoint of contemporary capitalism.

I was lucky to get an early look at this (it's out in April) for a review I'm writing. A number of interesting key ideas in the book, which aims to offer a broad account of "the secret life of data" without falling prey to the many "bullshit" accounts from the tech press industry. The authors succeed in this regard.

The secret life of data is premised on this idea:

“There is no limit to the amount and variety of data - and ultimately, knowledge - that may be produced from an object, event, or interaction, given enough time, distance, and computational power” (xii).

They also develop the idea of "algo-vision":

“The widespread and disorienting experience of seeing oneself through the ‘eyes’ of the algorithm” (xx)

Finally, they offer the notion of "triangulation" as an ethical approach to tech development

“A model for artificial intelligence and machine learning systems…based on a multiperspectival approach to knowledge creation as a more equitable and accurate alternative to the single-point perspectives presented by many platforms.” (xx)

My favorite part of the book is its argument that collective approaches will have to beat out individualized ones if we are to actually deal with how much data is out there and how many nefarious actors are champing at the bit to use it, aggregate it, make money from it, etc.

This book documents a horrific system set up to hold horror at bay...monsters to guard against the monstrous, a policing system that stands in the way of thinking and building a new world. It does so through an analysis of policing procedures, technologies, and narrative ("police stories.")

Why does such a horrific system/network remain in place? What does it hide and hold at bay, and what stops any process to imagine a world without police?

"What is hidden from view - or, rather, what provisions have we made to shelter our own minds from that which is too terrifying to confront?" (4)

"The ongoing and perpetual hunt for the monster - in the mind and on the streets - calls forth and reproduces the police power." (49)

"Rather than diagnosing a personal preference or even political ideology, the widespread unwillingness to soberly confront just what the police are and what we ask them to do is rooted in our subjective experiences of living in and actively crafting this world-for-us. Collectively, we have not yet let the police go, because to do so would require that we let this world go. And so, we endorse, adopt, and reproduce an ontology where a never-ending war between good and evil is determined by savior, hero, God." (71)

"Despite what we are taught to believe, we must face the horrifying fact that the police offer no real protection. Even when positioned to do so, police are under no legal obligation to save the proverbial cat from the tree. Quite often, in fact, they just turn and walk away...police have the best of both worlds, able to invoke the gift of fear to excuse both overreaction and inaction. This contradiction, revealing yet again that police are not the faithful protectors they claim to be, lies at the heart of our shuddering ontological schism, the horror of police." (163)

Fullbright scholar travels through Mexico with a migrant caravan. Incredible and infuriating look at immigration in Mexico and its relationship to the U.S. border.

The ending section on methodology is interesting. The book's approach to narrative and voice is explained there, and it's what makes me describe this as "gonzo anthropology." There's not an IRB in the world that would approve this, but I'm glad it was written.

Beautifully-written, brutal tale of eugenics and racism. The story is devastating and tells the story of Apple Island (based on a true story) from the perspective of a group of people who lived there across generations. A mixed-race collective that was ripped from their home, placed in "schools for the feeble-minded" or state hospitals. This is one of many books of historical fiction (or at least "historical fiction adjecent") up for awards recently, and I'm thinking of this trend part of a broader grappling with history. One version is MAGA, of course, or "parents rights" advocates who are banning books. Another version is this book (or The Maniac or Blackouts...two others I've read recently) that are using fiction to engage with history, telling histories without claiming to be offering just the facts of the case. Using the archive rather than claiming to represent it.

I love what this book does with both historical material and with storytelling. Sometimes I leave novels based on actual historical events wondering why a novelization or fictional approach is necessary, but this book both taught me something I didn't about Jan Gay and also reminded me how queer communication is...how true communication never hits the mark, never reveals itself, never lands.

Someone recommended these books to me because 1) I'm researching BBS systems and other pre-internet online communities; 2) They thought my kid would like it.

The picture of 80s life is pretty interesting, the artwork is great, and the depiction of BBS culture is especially interesting in that it's woven into the day-to-day of a world that (for the most part) didn't really know the personal computer was coming.

My favorite part of this book is the section on Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth. The nature writing was less of a draw for me, but even when I wasn't that engaged Oliver would come out what a pearl like this:

"I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned: that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out. in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart." (15)

This installment focuses on the 70s (Harlem Shuffle focused on the 60s), and the writing is great. There's a lot of New York specific detail about neighborhoods and streets that is lost on me, but it's necessary for a series that is so intent on using NYC much the way The Wire used Baltimore. My favorite moment is probably when the Magnavox Odyssey (the "brown box") makes a cameo. The research behind this book is pretty awesome.

If you're interested in federated social media (and I know that you are), you should check out this book. What's happening here on Bookwyrm shares a lot with the BBSs that Driscoll talks about in this book.

I was especially into the chapter on FidoNet given that I have been thinking for a couple of years about how much ActivityPub/Mastodon/Bookwyrm/etc. owe to FidoNet's attempts to "federate" (not the term they would have used) Bulletin Board Systems.

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."