Some Recent Readings

Some Recent Reading

Safiya Sinclair’s “Cannibal”

Reading this made me want to compare her to Walcott,

With the islands in her voice. But that’s not so. She has

Her own voice, her own experiences. Distilled here through the

History of expectations for her to sound like Walcott,

To sound like Caliban.

Jennifer McCartney’s “The Joy of Leaving your sh*t all over the place”

This book is a comic book in reply to that other book.

Not sure if you need to to have read the other book for this to make sense. I think the thesis of the other book is simple enough that it’s not necessary. But this one stands in its own, It was a quick read that made me laugh.

Sebastian Junger’s “Tribe”

I picked this one up because I have been thinking deeply about tribalism and nationalism recently, a renewed interest after burning through texts like Anderson’s Imagined Communities several years ago. The election and the controversies about standing for flags and which flags to stand for really makes me think about the need for community that we lack - lonely crowd and bowling alone books really key this. Junger’s book hits on  this in terms of the military, in a group that has gone through actions that have defined their in-group status. My only issue is that Junger doesn’t go deep enough for me here, and the book leaves the reader wanting in a way because it raises so many issues that aren’t resolved.

Bohemians edited by Buhle and Berger

Verso was running a sale on their site, so I went ahead and bought this due to my love both of Bohemians and Graphic novels. Overall, it was an interesting book, with biographical info about some people I was familiar with and people I learned about for the first time. The only issue is that there is an unevenness to each of the stories in terms of quality of the art and the research that went into the story. For example, there is an example where the cartoonist is showing the Panama Canal (P. 11) - in a story that takes place prior to the digging of the canal. Little things like that in a book about history make you wonder what is wrong about what you don’t know. That said, the extended piece on Woody Guthrie makes it worth it for me.

Real Artists Have Day Jobs - Sara Benincasa

This little collection of essays is a nice readable book to show that you don’t have to have it all together to have it all together. The biggest problem with the book is that the type was set in a sans-serif type. I don’t know why that’s being used more and more lately. Its more modern, it seems. I’d bet that that typographical choice wasn’t the author’s so I’ll just point fingers at the designer. What the strength of the book is the honest Benincasa has about facing the various mental illness challenges in her life but not being wholly defined by them (through she did write a previous book about her agoraphobia, so maybe just a bit of that my illness defines me thing but not too much. She shows the struggle is real but it can work out. It is kind of self-helpy but not so much that if you’re the type of person to get self-conscious about those sorts of thing that it will really eat at you because you worry that people will think you don’t have it together enough that you need to read self-help books like some pathetic loser. Or maybe I’m just projecting.

What Do We Do About Inequality? WPC

The authors in this book approach the problem(s) of inequality in many different ways. One of the strengths of the work is the plurality of voices. This allows you to see the issue from multiple angles and experiences. If you don’t already, the voices here are important to follow across social media, especially twitter.

One weakness is that some of the writing is already available in other places. Tressie Cottom’s essay about the lived experience of being poor and making the wrong choices as perceived by outsiders is the most powerful essay in the book, and I’m pretty sure I’ve read it twice before this book because of people posting it on Twitter.

That said, there are other voices that I had not read in depth yet. There is an essay by Scott Santens, the first part of which is the best, most clear explanation of how a UBI would work - and this is something I’m very interested in as a potential response to inequality and I’m glad that in the last year or so that it has become part of the conversation.

Ultimately though, the book’s strength is also part of its weakness. Since there are a lot of voices, there is no one thing that we can take away as the answer to the titular question. Having this be an issue aired recently and on the tips of the tongues from economists like Deaton and Piketty and Milanovic is good, but it is at the grassroots that hopefully will move the needle. I just worry the robots will rise before we work out an equitable distribution to the gains of the productivity and that in ten years we will be asking the same questions from a scarier baseline.

I received an advance review copy, so I don’t want to talk too much about formatting, but a couple things stuck out. For one, there is no identification of the writers and their educational or professional background. This may have been a deliberate choice, but it diminished it a bit as a reader, since I wasn’t able to place the writer into my hermeneutic circle or whatever. Also, the notes are numbered sequentially and not broken up by the essay, making them a bit harder to get into if I wanted to chase a source.

Pound Foolish by Helaine Olen

The writer of the fine Trekonomics, Manu Saadia, pointed me to Olen’s work in a conversation (you can pick up that name, since I dropped it and am done using it). What this book is is a complete and thorough debunking of your favorite personal finance guru. Most are charlatans, it seems that the real question is to what degree are they charlatans.

What I take away is that like some presidential candidates, what is being sold is not success per se, but the idea of success. Wrap yourself in the rich dad poor dad millionaire next door Jim Cramer etc mindset and you too can be rich. Having long been skeptical of people searching for gurus, Olen’s book is a breath of fresh air.  What is missing is a bunking where the debunking went.

Aside from don’t follow these fools, I was at least looking for something that might guide what I should look for - the best advice Olen claims to have found is to short the stocks that Cramer pumps, as well as buying TIPS. Even my well-worn advice of buying index funds comes under some scrutiny here, and I want a guru. Wait, I think I get it now.

Karl Marx - A Life

A three or four years ago, I went to go on a walk in the woods with my wife. It was early spring and the sun was shining, so we hoped to take the day and make the most of it. Or she did, and I have problems saying no to her when she asks because she’s just so darn persuasive. The walk didn’t last long. No one told the snowpack on the trail that it needed to have melted so that we could walk on the trail.

I’m not sure how I managed it, but there was a mall with an actual physical book store close by the trail we were trying to walk. At one point I had at least a couple hundred dollars worth of books in my hand (hardbacks at bookstore prices). One of them was the new biography of Marx that had recently come out. I almost bought it but put it down because I realized that a life of Marx is one of those things that is hard to be objective about. I didn’t want to spend seven hundred pages with an author who was a staunch Hegelian mad about Marx’s subversion of their hero or some marginalist economist mad that the subject didn’t fully wrestle with the mathematics of their revolution. Or, you know, whatever else you could possibly see the life of Marx and his ideas being politicized somehow.

So instead of buying that unknown book, I went looking for people who had read various lives and what they would recommend to read. The Wheen biography came up a lot. So I bought that book, and then I put it on my shelf as a decoration and then forgot about it for the next several years. And recently, once I finished my MBA program, I found myself with time and inclination to go about reading some of the scores of books I own but haven’t read yet, and a familiar name looked out at me from the shelf.

For any student of the left, the life and career of Marx is knowable in broad strokes - youth in Germany, exile in England, friendship with Engles. Wheen fills all of those blank spots in. What Wheen does more than anything else is to humanize Marx from someone that is a boogeyman of the cold war to a guy with a family trying to make due in Victorian England.

I think Wheen, like myself, had already made his mind up about Marx before he approached this book. If there is any criticism to be had, I offer two. For one, it is only 400 pages. What lacks for me is a deeper engagement with the philosophy and economics of Marx. I’m not sure if that was a choice made to keep the book more accessible or why it was made. But I think it plays into my other criticism. I felt that the author may have been too sympathetic to Marx. He was a human who did make some bad choices (like maybe cheating on Jenny Marx) and I think glossing over that nuance in fear of attacking the subject makes the book less than what it could be. This sympathy is also evident where he addresses some of the more well-known intellectual rivals to Marxism, namely Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and  Mikhail Bakunin, so that these men and their followers are diminished in the book, the casual reader isn’t really let into why Marxian ideas are superior.

Overall, though, if you only know those broad strokes then the Wheen biography is a good entry point for learning about the life of Marx. If you want to get deeper into his ideas, there are other avenues, like the work of David Harvey or Paul D’Amato. Or you can just climb the mountain of Capital itself, something I need to do.

Brief Reviews for Labor Day.

In the past few weeks, I read some more graphic novels, and some nonfiction and some essays.

First I read “It Gets Worse: A Collection of Essays”.

The blurb on the back compared the author, Shane Dawson, to Sedaris. Liking Sedaris, I picked it up. Overall it wasn’t bad. A lot of it was about being a Youtube star and coming out as bisexual, and he’s a bit younger than me, so there was a some things I couldn’t personally relate to. I remember thinking that his voice needs to mature a bit for me to really like it - I think he’s about ten years younger than I am. But what I realized was that I’m just not his target audience. I haven’t seen any of his work, but from the book it seems his target audience is younger than he is. That said, there were some places I did laugh out loud, so it was worth the read.

I read “Petrograd,” the graphic novel by Gelatt and Crook. This tells the story of the plot to kill Rasputin in St. Petersburg around the time of the Bolshevik revolution. It was really well done, but the angle of the storyteller focused on the British spy service in the city. I don’t know if that is historically true, but I don’t like it in that it takes away agency from the Russian Proletariat in their own revolution. It made me want to finally get to my copy of 10 Days that Shook the World that I bought but left sitting on my shelf for years.

I read “Black Paths” by David B. This is also a graphic novel with a historical bent. But this novel presented something I had never heard about - the siege of the free city of Fiume. It is less straight history but is instead more like reading a dream of someone who has done a lot of reading on the subject recently and someone who has an artistic mind.

I read “The Sculptor” by Scott McCloud. I really, really liked this one. It might be the best graphic novel I’ve read since Jeff Smith’s “Bone.” Aside from genre, it is one of the most fully realized pieces of narrative that I’ve experienced in years. I can’t praise it any higher.

It’s a story about what you’ll do to live your dreams as well as what you’ll do for love. I stayed up too late reading it and I woke up my wife blowing my nose from the time it didn’t make me cry - I wasn’t crying I swear you didn’t see anything and can’t prove anything. That was catharsis, the Aristotelian “Purging of Pity and Fear,” that's what that was.

 The only thing that might be a knock against it is that the story is told through male eyes. So the female love interest has a bit of that Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing going on, but as a reader it satisfied both the intellectual and emotional sides of my being, so it worked very well for me.

I read “The Geek Feminist Revolution” by Kameron Hurley. This book contains essays on being a geek, being a woman, being a feminist, and being a writer. Sometimes they’re together, sometimes they’re not. What we also learn is that it is not about ethics in gaming journalism as she touches on the Gamergate phenomena and the attempt by reactionary forces in the scifi community to yoke the passage of time and exclude voices. At this point I haven’t read any of her fiction. I need to fix that. These essays show a strong, confident authorial voice of someone who has thought deeply about writing and everything that affects that in her orbit.

I read “The Three-Body Problem” by Cixin Liu. Overall, I liked it, but for me it was one of those books where the cool ideas took over the plot. I’m not sure if this is a translation thing or convention in the native language or being the first novel in the series, but there were some places that it felt like there were just some data-dumps. The plot gets to the idea of any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic, and we humans are as bugs. But it doesn’t just hand-wave the alien tech and motivation, so it works narratively.

I’m not sure if I’ll read the next two books though, since thought I liked the fiction about the science, ultimately I didn’t really care about the characters. I think part of it is on shoulders. I compare reading this to reading a russian novel. There are a lot of characters and the naming conventions are irregular to someone who reads mostly stuff written in English originally. So I had trouble keeping track of who was doing what because most of the characters had similar names. At least I hope that is it instead of cultural chauvinism.

I read “The Man Who Never Missed” by Steve Perry. Now this is one of those books I normally wouldn’t read, but a friend lent it to me. Then it sat on my shelf for like three years. I might get this back to him now. I read it because I was looking for some short fiction and there it was, guilting me.

Basically, it is the epitome of an 80s action movie. In space. In a book form. The main character is a loner with a conscious. He is an ex-soldier who hates war, so he becomes a rebel. He takes out soldiers that are on a base in a city occupied by the government. But he has a heart, so he doesn’t kill them. Then there’s a climax and you’re lead to believe he’s dead. But there are other books in the series so there’s nothing really at stake there.

It is super 80s in that the action is really good. It’s missing that scene where he really comes to hate the government. The book tells about his desertion, but it lacks something. It’s missing character development. There are only a couple real relationships in the text, and they’re all told straight through this first person construct. There’s a training partner and a mentor and a love interest but none exist independent of the main character. The main character falls in love with the real hot woman he works with and even that doesn’t feel organic. If this were a more ambitious book, i’d say that the flatness of the other characters was some sort of stylistic choice to show something or other about the main character, but I think it’s just authorial laziness or incompetence. But the funny thing is that doesn't make the book bad, because you know that that’s not what the ambition is. It’s a spaghetti western, with space stuff thrown in. Heck, I just might read the other books in the series, just to see what happens.

I read “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

If I said I knew what he was talking about, I’d be lying. I just know that Godel proved him wrong, so we can pass over this in silence.

I did want to make a twitter bot that just  tweeted the propositions, and wait for Godel bot to shout “Nein!”.

There is a prefatory essay by Russell that takes up almost a third of the page count in the Dover edition, and he writes more clearly to someone who is not trained in any form of symbolic logic. Maybe I needed more foundation work before I climbed this mountain.

I read “The Reactionary Mind” by Corey Robin.

I have developed a sort of intellectual crush on Robin in the last several months as I became more aware of his work. I know I have read it before in different platforms, but I started following him on the blogs and the tweeter and the facebooks. I liked his work so much that I wanted to grab something long-form to see the depth of his  though. Though this is ultimately an interesting book, it is not as deep as I was hoping. It’s like that because of how the book is structurally more existing essays that were yoked together to serve a common thesis than a book that evolved from the original thesis.

I also read “Art and Fear” by Bayles and Orland. A friend of mine who is a visual artist struggling to create while balancing a family and a “real job” recommended this to me when I told her I was looking to get back into poetry. She recommended this to me about conceptualizing ways to overcome both internal and external barriers to creating art. It both made me glad I didn’t pursue my MFA in poetry and made me want to go get an MFA, since for me there’s no greater motivation to create art than to be part of a community where it is valued and examined. That’s not many places for the poet in today’s society. You have to get your mind in the place where every situation is the thought of through a poetic or artistic lens, and that’s hard for me to maintain. I think this book helped a bit at that. But I’m still not writing for my art enough. Maybe it will be when I’m less busy, right?

Darwin Awards

Went out front to grab the paper.
Guy riding a bike down the street.
Playing with his phone,
No helmet, of course.