Mostly Fiction: Reading 12.17.2023

 

The Invisibles Omnibus – Grant Morrison

The first thing I have to mention is the sheer physical heft of the book. It’s hard to read in a normal way. It makes it hard to find the time to sit down and read it because the only way I was able to read it with some momentum and not want to put it down every few minutes was propped up on a desk that I cleared of other stuff.

 

Content-wise, it was interesting. Morrison is a good writer, and the individual stories are connected to some larger arcs and there is payoff at the end, but it does feel like it takes a while for it to get there. He weaves in stuff from the situationists and mentioned memes way earlier than I had heard of them. Also, huge props to the series for including a trans character in the nineties.

 

The other thing that was weird reading the story now is that the Myan great cycle that hit the news at the end of 2012 is a plot point that is important but for a reader now it was just a quaint thing in the past (or did everything actually reset?).

 

Worth reading but I would recommend finding smaller versions because of the dang size of the omnibus book.

 

The Portable Door – Holt

 

At this point I have read a dozen books by Tom Holt. And I like Tom Holt but I’m not an evangelist for him. I heard of him at some point where I was asking for writers like Pratchett and his name came up and it was good that he’d been fairly prolific so there are a number of books one can read by him. But there’s something missing. Like all the ingredients are there but like maybe it’s too British or something. I like it for the absurdist comic fantasy that it is, and I will read more of the books, but maybe it was a detriment that his work was compared to Pratchett because it is hard to stand in that comparison. I’m still going to read the next one in this series, and well keep going from there.

 

The Red and the Black – Stendhal

If there’s one thing that I learned from this book, is that if you have women in your house, don’t invite Julien Sorel in. I had a challenging time getting into this book, as the first parts where Julian is in the provinces and then in seminary go a bit slow, but then once he’s in Paris, it picks up.

 

I didn’t see his crime coming, but it does seem to be in character because Stendhal makes this guy pretty loathsome to me. I don’t know why it’s not obvious to the other characters in the book. I think it may be a dramatic irony built in, but I am far enough removed from living in the context of the book to not really know if I should be rooting for Sorel or not, or if Stendhal likes his creation or not (or if that even matters).

 

I’m glad I read it because it is an important part of the canon but also enjoyable on its own, no matter what you make of the central character.

 

Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter

Carter here creates a meditation on truth and storytelling, as she tells the story of Sophie Fevvers and the journalist who is telling her story, Jack Walser.

We meet the characters in London and follow them across Europe to Petersburg and then to Siberia. Sophie is part human and part swan, or is she? Jack follows and falls in love with her, and they end up in a train accident in Siberia and meeting an exiled piano teacher. It’s weird and really peaks after the first third of the book where the characters have met in London and Sophie is telling her back story. But it is also beautifully written so even though it felt like it was spinning out and I was waiting for some resolution it was worth reading.

 

Think Python – Downey

 

I used this book as a supplement to a class I was taking in Python. It was good as a supplement, but I do worry that it would not be sufficient for someone who was only using this book or someone who had not had a bit of a background in doing some programming stuff. The exercises are also made for someone who has a decent understanding of math and personally I stopped trying the exercises after the first few chapters because of that, as well as having other problems that had been assigned to me for the course I was taking.

 

Camp Damascus – Chuck Tingle

 

I had only known Tingle as the author of the seemingly silly titled erotica but having followed him on social media for a while, I know the person behind the façade is an interesting and thoughtful writer. So, I was interested to see that he was making a more mainstream book.

 

Camp Damascus is a horror novel with a queer female teen protagonist who seems to have some sort of autism spectrum disorder. She is in a family in a town that is strongly centered on the titular camp that is run as a conversion camp. It is not giving too much away to say that hijinks ensue. The characters, especially the main one, are beautifully written and developed and the action flows really well. If you were raised around or within the evangelical movement, you might find that Tingle hits some notes perfectly. It feels almost like a backhanded compliment to say that the book is really professionally written and to note that I have already pre-ordered the next “serious” title, but you really should read this book if you like religious themed teen horror. It’s really well done and not even something that is in my normal wheelhouse.

 

Giants in the Earth – Rolvaag

 

My wife’s family is from the northern plains – Scandinavian immigrants to the Dakotas and Nebraska territories, and the story of their ancestor’s descendants is broadly the story told here. Rolvaag tells the story of a group of settlers and the dangers and trials they face trying to tame the empty wilderness and make it their own. If you have ever driven through the plains, you know the barrenness and emptiness of the landscape, but also, its wide-open beauty as the land is just an open ocean all around you.

 

Our heroes face locusts and snowstorms and wandering cows, as well as the natives (though I was surprised how little the people that the settlers were displacing on the land came into the narrative) to make the land their own.

 

The book made me think of how important the relationships you build were in the settlement process. You only had your family and your immediate community, and often you were on your own. The book it reminded me of most was Steinbeck’s East of Eden, not just because of the settlement aspect of it, but also there is the same sort of edge of misogyny in the female characters. The main character’s is Per Hansa and his wife is drawn almost as if she has clinical depression from the move to the prairie and Per Hansa doesn’t address her needs – ignoring them to his detriment.

 

There’s also what felt like a weird lack of tragedy in the book for a set of characters who are facing hardship – right up until the last chapter (spoiler alert). It’s well-written and made me feel like I was part of the settlers. I would call it an engrossing read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Graphic Novels and Protests: Recent Reads 10.28.2023

 The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott

 

I came to this based off of Thorogood’s newer text. It’s a more straightforward narrative than that one. It’s good though. It’s about friendship and mort importantly, the urgent need to create art. She’s certainly an artist to watch as her career grows. 

 

Monica

This was an interesting book because in structure, it’s a lot like the kind of graphic memoir that you can come across easily. But there is also this supernatural thread that Clowes weaves throughout the narrative. It’s beautifully weird, and then there’s this incredible payoff on the last page. Totally worth your time and attention.

 

If We Burn

“Bevins has a new book coming out,” I said to myself, “I’m pre-ordering that no matter what it’s about.” That’s how good the Jakarta Method was.

 

With “If We Burn,” Bevins moves into more recent history as he explores the protests that swept the world in the 2010s, some of which he was a part of, and interviewing other people who were firsthand witnesses. What struck me most was how he described so many of them taking their cues from recent past and contemporary movements. Protests in the social media age developed a whole vocabulary of action and reaction from both the protesters and authorities.

 

Also, of note is how he covers the emergence of leaderless protests. They can express real dissatisfaction, but they can also have no real (or shifting) demands or possible end states. They can also be co-opted as Bevins shows how some of the protests in Brazil and Egypt evolved.

 

Overall, as someone who wants to see the world develop towards a society of greater equity and citizen rights, the mood is somber. The protests covered here were ineffective for the most part in creating any change that was durable. Perhaps we need a new vocabulary or need to revisit old paradigms.

 

 

Recent Reads 7.30.2023

 On the Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures

 

I got this because I have vague positive memories of the movie, especially the gritty steam punk art deco vibe they had going on. I barely remember the plot except for the rocket pack and German bad guys. I have to say in reading it, it makes sense that the style is what I remember since neither of the two main plot lines make a lot of sense and are full of holes and coincidences. What’s more interesting to me is that the art is more cartoonish than I would have thought based on the movie. The one thing of note is that the artist really likes drawing the female form in sheer fabrics – that’s where he goes for the “realism.” It’s an adventure comic studded with pinup girls.

 

 

On The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze.

 

Years ago, I read Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed. Afte reading that, I was interested in finding a good English language biography of Hjalmar Schacht because I was interested in seeing how the German War Machine ticked at a financial level. I didn’t find it then, but I came across this, and it was better than what I thought I wanted. Tooze goes into great detail about the war and how much the need for materials and food and hard currency really shaped the decisions the Nazi leadership were making about the war effort.

 

On a side note, reading this made me realize why reading about WWII or the Civil War is so appealing. You already know the outlines, but different histories just focus on different details. You know how it ends though. The bad guys lost. It’s a great feeling and not something you can guarantee with anything more contemporary.

 

On The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre.

 

This is one of those books that I normally wouldn’t have picked up, but I got it as a gift. I’m glad I read it though, as it was an intriguing look at the cold war and the espionage on both sides. It’s mainly the story of a KGB officer who moved up the ranks and spied for British intelligence. There’s also a bit about Aldrich Ames, but that part is not as developed and he’s not as interesting a character in the text. It’s a fast-paced read I couldn’t put down and it was enjoyable.

 

Structurally, there are a couple of places in the book that sort of give away the ending, which isn’t great since it is a thriller and if you don’t know the case, you don’t know how it’s going to end. Weirdly, though you’re in the spy world, there was something about it that felt both high and low stakes to me. It was like everyone involved was children playing high stakes games. The other thing is that the whole thing is biased to a western reader – with Gordievsky being on the side of the good (327) – when things really feel more ambiguous than that black and white reading.

 

Chantal Mouffe: Towards a Green Democratic Revolution

 

Verso has been putting out some of these thin books that are essays, and they are nice because they are a quick read in the afternoon. The problem is that they have to really grab you to be memorable, and Mouffe’s text did not do that for me.

 

Nature’s Metropolis

 

Look. There’s a lot of ways to do economic history. A lot of them are bad. Many are good. But there’s only one Nature’s Metropolis. It’s the story of Chicago. But it is more than that, it is the tale of the growth of the Republic in the nineteenth century. You will learn more about grain and trees and railroads than you thought you wanted to know and be thirsting for more.

 

On Managing & Using Information Systems: Pearlson et al.

 

This was the textbook for an entry-level MIS class in my data analytics course progression. Overall, I liked the text. The chapters were well laid out with well developed examples of the chapters’ main ideas that carried though the whole chapter. Each of the thirteen chapters could easily be a course in itself, but in paring down each topic to the most pertinent details, not much is lost in the legibility of the topic. The only thing I didn’t like was partially structural with my course. There are case studies at the end and the answers are hosted in various places online. My instructor used these as discussion prompts and it was clear a quarter of my peers just copied the answers and ran them through a remix software. 

Read some comics 7.23.2023

 On The Plunge by Joe Hill et al

 

Do you like the Thing? If you do, then you will like this book. It owes a lot to John Carpenter’s The Thing. We have an isolated, cold setting, and weird things happening in a way that’s claustrophobic and isolated. It’s spooky And scary.

 

On Night Fever by Brubaker and Philips

This is an interesting story about identity and growing up and trying to be someone you’re not. Or is it trying to be the person you really are? The main character is on a business trip and assumes a new identity, and it takes him to places he never know existed. There’s one element in the story that is somewhat supernatural and I wanted to see it more developed but it isn’t. So it’s the one weird thing that makes me wonder if the story isn’t 100% self contained to the volume or may be the seed for something more.

 

Nailbiter is developing (By Willimanson et al)

The general premise of this story is that there is a town that spawns serial killers. It feels a little goofy, but the first volume of the series was enough for me to go get the next three volumes in the series and read them in an afternoon. The titular character is a serial killer that bites the nails off of his victims.

Volume two deepens the mystery and is a little more cinematic than the previous volume. It starts to flesh out the story and develops characters in the town.

Volume three is where we start to see hints at something that is behind all the serial killers. Is it something supernatural or more mundane? I don’t know yet.

Recent Reads 7.9.2023

 Thoughts on Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper’s “The War on Neighborhoods”

 

This is a Chicago based book, so I am a little biased in that the streets and neighborhoods the authors cover are familiar streets. Chicago is one of the nation’s most segregated cities, and some of the neighborhoods, like Lawndale featured here, have vast disparities in all sorts of resident outcomes compared to other neighborhoods. If you look at a map showing cancer rates or a map showing shootings, you’ll see the same things. There are bad outcomes in the south and west sides and comparably better outcomes in the north and a lot of the southwest sides. This is largely racially coded as the only public investment that goes into the neighborhoods are in policing and incarceration. It’s a problem that has all sorts of policy decisions at its root and has continued through to today.

 

Thoughts on Malm’s “Fighting in a World on Fire.”

This is an interesting text because it is a children’s adaptation of Malm’s book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” which is not something you see every day. It’s a manifesto for ecoterrorism for kids. I know there’s a severe problem with climate change, but I’m afraid this is a wrong path. It puts people at great personal danger both in terms of in the act but also through the incredibly overzealous charging from governments which exist to protect capital and the status quo. You can try to be a Ghandhi or King, but you know what happened to both of those men? The same thing that happened to numbers of others who have names we don’t remember. However, I am torn because we do have these problems and it doesn’t seem as if the current regime in power or the protest movements that exist will move the needle before it is too late (is it already too late?). The whole thing made me think of the Children of Kali, from Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. There they seemed like a necessary evil – but that was fiction. I often feel like the agglomeration of evidence for climate change will make its existence and the need to do something quite obvious, but then I read the comments and there are so many willfully disengaging with the truth or making excuses for inaction. We do need large governmental and corporate action at the global level, and any one individual feels powerless in the face of the existing half measures. Malm and company understand that urgency, but ultimately, I don’t know where best to channel that energy.

 

Thoughts on Fredrick Harry Pitts’ “Value.”

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting with this text. I think I wanted a more cut and dried history of value from labor theory of value to the marginalists. That is more or less in here, but it felt like it got more esoteric to me, and less grounded in exchange. I mean, there’s not a single equation in the text, not a one. It’s a short text and was worthwhile but didn’t resolve anything for me. Instead of a brief survey it is more a starting point of an argument. Heck, the last paragraph begins with the idea that value is still up for grabs (134), so there’s always something more to learn.

 

Thoughts om Nancy Fraser’s “Cannibal Capitalism”

This is the first book I’ve read by Fraser, and I think I read it at the right time. I had just read Delong’s “Slouching Towards Utopia,” which was a decent history of the past 150 years but was too optimistic about the future – especially in ignoring climate change. Fraser’s text was a good counterpoint to that, in showing the challenges we face, and that the current political and economic system that we have, and which delivered it, is not up to the task of solving the problems it created. Will we be able to deliver on the promise of reorganization before it is too late though? I am skeptical but would like to be surprised.

 

On Robert Bevan’s “Monumental Lies”

This is a good examination of the controversy about statues and what they mean and how we should deal with them. The problem is that there is a huge chunk in the middle that is more about architecture. This large section felt like it should be part of a related but separate project – or maybe that’ more my USA-centric parochialism showing in that I am less concerned about the legacy of fascist architecture in Italy than I am about the Confederate statues in the US or the honoring of people who held other people as property (and got rich from that trade).

 

Recent Reads 7.3.2023

 Thoughts on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers

 

I read Hard to be a God last year, and really liked it. I read this one as a follow up and since it is more famous. The difference is that Roadside Picnic is less plot driven. This one feels more like a making of atmosphere as the reader gets deeper into understanding the Zone but never really understanding it. In this it feels a lot like Lem’s Eden, where the exploration is the point. It’s a work from a different tradition of science fiction and it is incredibly interesting but a slower read.

 

 

Thoughts on Kerouac’s Desolation Angels

 

Jack Kerouac climbed up a hill and then down it eighty pages later. Then he spent time together with his friends and got drunk. There was a time when this would have been more compelling to me, but there were too many writing classes where I read so many things that were derivative of this sort of thing that going back to the source doesn’t work for me. It reminded me that when I read On the Road two decades ago, it didn’t really work for me then. Like I need more work in the structure. At the very least this is the most genuine realization of the exhortation to write what you know.

 

 

Thoughts on Mumbo Jumbo

Man, I was about eighty pages of this one before I picked up any sort of plot. It was interesting but I kept waiting for the thing to cohere, but it never did for me. It was more like watching a slow strobe where you would only get brief glimpses of the plot and try to figure out what was going on in the periods of darkness.

 

 

Thoughts on Jean Toomer’s Cane.

 

This book came out in 1922, which would have been the same year as the Wasteland and Ulysses and the author should be on the same tongues as those that speak the names of Joyce and Eliot. But Toomer isn’t a forgotten name from a hundred years ago.

The individual stories are well structured and beautifully rendered, the problem with the text is that it jumps around a good bit and there’s an issue with some thematic flow. It takes the reader from the Midwest to the south and to DC and back. The whole thing shows just such incredible skill and promise, and if you look at the publication cadence of the stories and poems it shows just such an incredible output in the one year of 1922. And it was the only book he published. What a loss for the culture.

 

 

Thoughts on A Culture of Growth by Joel Mokyr

First off, whoever designed this book needed to increase the font size a point or two. I’m getting older, but not that much older. In terms of the book, Mokyr does string a nice thread from Bacon to the Enlightenment as the source of the eternal question of why the industrial revolution happened when and where it happened. Not 100% sure why solely in England and not the rest of Europe, but the continent and the intellectual environment of the Republic of Letters seems to have a good connection. I have not read any criticism of the text, so I imagine that this is accepted as gospel truth in the economic history community since the publication of the text. One thing that I find really interesting is that at the end of the text he looks at China in the same period and examines some factors that might have inhibited the industrial revolution there, even though they had a technological lead. The most crucial point is not that China (Or elsewhere in Asia or Africa) failed by not grabbing onto the rocket of the industrial revolution, but that it was a unique set of intellectual institutions that really helped grow the economy as we know it. As a side note, it’s probably time to read McCloskey on similar issues.

 

 

On Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

 

I don’t think I’m the right audience for this book. I’ve long been skeptical of any sort of Freudian-based psychological framework (and I do accept that the text is going on a hundred years old at this point). However, Reich does seem to be convincing that there is a psychological basis for fascism in all populations. I just don’t think there’s a good explanation for why it rose up in Italy and Germany but didn’t really anywhere else embedded in the text. So, there’s a few places you could find some good pull quotes, but it doesn’t really work as a coherent whole for me.

 

And then there’s the whole thing with Orgone energy in the background of the whole thing. The edition I have is a third edition and he says that this edit is after the discovery of this phenomenon, and it was incorporated into the text. I am really curious about what the first or second edition was like when it was more based on the psychological / class-based approach. I have some friends who get a lot of Reich, but this just didn’t do it for me.

 

 

Thoughts on Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky

 

There are a lot of books like this coming out now. There is the protagonist who is going through a gender transition. There is a set of friends meeting for a bachelor party. There is a near future sea-steading utopia where laws don’t exist. There’s a cult recruiting at a conference in the hotel where the characters are staying who might be working to unleash horrors unknown that come from out of time and space. And it’s up to the protagonist to bring all these threads together to a resolution.

 

Like I said, we all know the story. The thing is here that Lubchansky (a well-known, national treasure) does it better than anyone else. I don’t want to get too deep into spoilers, but there is a scene where the protagonist hunts their own clone that is worth the price of admission. (Why Lubchansky here is giving their approval to clone is beyond me, but I’m quite sure it’s a direct endorsement of the sport.)

 

Recent Reads 5.14.2023

 A few thoughts on Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet

This is an adaptation (in part) of the Beowulf poem. The art is cute, and the adaptation is adjusted to the battles children fight with themselves and the specter of growing up. (I like the freedom, but who invented work? They need to send that guy to the big rock candy mountain).

It is a quick read and I think it makes me want to go re-read the original (in translation, of course).

 

 

 

A few thoughts on The Heavy Bright

This is a weird book. I couldn’t really grasp what was going on or why. I get the pacifism and feminism and unity of all souls but there was something missing. The world building was such that I would call it dreamlike if I were being charitable but otherwise it was a miss for me.

 

 

A Few Thoughts on Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

 

Shandy is an amazing book. More than anything it made me think of a late 1990s vibe with Seinfeld and David Foster Wallace. I can imagine the discourse that must have grown up around it. It I about memory and storytelling but also about nothing but also childbirth and siege warfare. I’m glad I read it; it was worth it even if it took a while.

 

A few thoughts on Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson.

 

The format of this book is really interesting. There are two essays by Anderson about the structure of the market and then private corporations and their control of their workers. Then there are a few response essays by scholars of various fields and then her response to the respondents. In one way, you can basically make the gist of her argument in the title. The real drawback to the form is that her original essays don’t get into enough depth. I was personally surprised that there were very few references to Marx. The index only has three references, and the next listing is “masterless men” which has even more than Marx. The other thing I don’t like is that that have an economist as one of the respondents – good! But that economist is Tyler Cowen – bad! It would have been better if they had found someone from the academic mainstream because in my opinion, Cowan just kind of sucks.

 

A few thoughts on The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

 

I read this more for historical relevance more than anything else. I do like the thought behind it, finding the individual experience of religious feeling and events. James was trying to bring some empiricism here, and that is good. I kept thinking about how this could be done again with the 20^th century fruitfully to see what has changed and what has stayed the same. My big, big complaint is that the book focused almost entirely on the west, and Christian experiences. There is but passing references to Islam, Hindu, or Buddhist experiences. And with a 500-page book, they could have found some room. A smaller complaint is the formatting of the text in this edition. There’s a lot of references, which makes sense since James is quoting people and getting their experience. But a lot of the quotes aren’t written as well as the main body of the text James writes. And there are in text references and then some that are dropped to the notes which are in like 4-point font and really hard to read.

 

A few thoughts on Prisoners of the American Dream by Mike Davis

 

In this book, Davis reviews a lot of the class struggle in America with amazing granularity of the 20^th century through the early 80s. The big takeaway from this is that the workplace has always been a place of contention and struggle. I think leftists of my generation forget that as we look back to the period that was often seen as a time of relative peace as the economy was growing after the second world war, but there was always a struggle. And there always will be!

Three Sentence Reviews: Readings 3.4.2023

 

The Sentences on In the Shadow of the Poorhouse by Michael B. Katz

 

I really enjoyed this book as a history of American welfare.

One thing that you can really trace is this ebb and flow of who is responsible for people and how they should be aided.

My main wish is that this were more up to date since it ends right as Clinton ended “Welfare As We Know It”.

 

Three Sentences on State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben

 

I was not even aware of Agamben until the pandemic, where both his views on the pandemic and the concept behind this book came into renewed importance in debates on the response to the pandemic.

The book is short and easy to read, but the chapters get bogged down in references. So to read this, you need to go back to Schmitt and Benjamin and maybe to Hobbes and more and more.

 

Three Sentences on They Call It Love by Alva Gotby

I have some mixed emotions about this book. It’s a short book that builds to some interesting ideas about the abolition of the family and the abolition of gender.

However, there is something about how it is written that makes it a slog to get through despite its brevity.

 

Three Sentences on Slouching Towards Utopia by Brad Delong

 

I generally like Delong’s stuff, but he is often very prolix so I was interested to seeing what he would do working as a sole author but with an editor. Delong tries to do a lot here and you can tell he wanted to do more; one paragraph has the entire Anschluss, and you could feel his restraint on the page.

One big quibble for me is I don’t agree with him is with the periodicity and choosing 2010 as some endpoint when it really felt more like a convenient place to stop.

 

Three Sentences on Spa by Erik Svetoft

I picked this up because the blurb on the back name-checked David Lynch but it could just as easily mentioned Cronenberg as a point of comparison.

The story acts in some sort of nightmare logic where there are several threads that weave through the text but they never really resolve. The art goes very well with that nightmare theme in a complementary manner.

 

Three Sentences on Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

 

In Ducks, the author Kate Beaton writes her memoir of spending two years working in the extractive industry to pay off her student loans when she would rather be working towards her artistic dreams.

The story and the art work well together, a straightforward telling of her time in this place that was extractive and exploitative on several levels.

The worst part is in her having to deal with this heavily masculinized space and the story is in part about the sexual violence she (and her female peers) faced not just on the jobsite but in life in general.

 

Three Sentences on Schmitt’s Political Theology

 

This book is one of the only books that is basically an explication of its first sentence.

I came to this text from reading Giorgio Agamben, and now it has made me want to go read Hobbes.

Thinking about the Schmittian world makes me long for the embrace of a Kantian world with a defined and defended constitution.

 

Three Sentences on Bors et al’s Justice Warriors

 

I bought this because I am a huge Matt Bors fan, and I was not disappointed in seeing how Bors and his teammates create a world and a narrative within it.

One of the fun things about this text is in the crowd scenes and seeing the detail and care that went into these throwaway background jokes.

Just because the main characters are police, doesn’t make them the good guys.

 

Three Sentences on Harvey’s Spaces of Global Capitalism

 

This text feels more like an introduction to Harvey’s thinking on geographic spaces and development that a fully fleshed-out theory.

When Harvey isn’t talking directly about Marx part of me is like a fan of a band’s particular album: “It was good, but they didn’t play the hits”.

In spite of this being a newer book, the collection is a couple of essays that may feel dated but remain eternally relevant.

 

Three Sentences on Lazarov’s ACAB Yearning

 

There is a harnessed yet incandescent rage in these poems.

Lazarov admirably melds poetry with his activism.

The best and most memorable lines would trigger a website’s auto-moderation so that the text would not post (see June 7 2020).

 

Three Sentences on Debord’s Society of the Spectacle

 

I read about the Situationists, and they sounded interesting, so I went to Debord’s text.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I got much out of it.

The version I have has no introduction so I lack context and the individual sections read more like linked koans than a building argument.

 

Three Sentences on Rankine’s Citizen

 

Citizen is a powerful poetic document of racism in America.

It stands as true now as it was written and as true now as it was in 1863.

The struggle for the powerless against the powerless is an ongoing battle but one that must be fought with all arrows in our quiver.

Cycles : For CJM

A week turns
into a month turns
Into memories coming back
When the commercials remind you

And yet
The cycles of the seasons
Make the calendar a talisman —
The most hopeful day
Is December twenty-second.
The second shortest day
But the first in months

Longer than the last
That reminder
That things get better
If only a little every day.