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.