Matt E's Books by Status
Matt E's Most Popular Reviews
There is a shelf on the third floor of Central Library in downtown Portland. It contains all of the nonfiction books specifically about bring queer: books about raising your gay teenager, coming out in later life, how to support your partner who is transitioning, and about four books on bisexuality. I have never done anything in my life without reading a book about it first, so I picked out the most relevant of those four books, which was Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution.
It turns out that Bi has everything to do with why there are only four books on that shelf. Shiri Eisner has put together a book that discusses the particular political, economic, and social marginalization experienced by bisexual people—distinguished from the experience of gay, lesbian, and straight people (“monosexuals,” in her terminology). Eisner starts by describing how bisexual can be a radically inclusive term for all sorts of people that experience attraction to more than one gender, then goes through the myths, stereotypes, and stigmas attached to bisexual people. Next, Eisner examines how bisexual identity intersects with sexist and racist axes of oppression, then proposes this vision of a radical bisexuality that inherently destabilizes patriarchy and gender based oppression.
Whew!
There is a lot of material in this book, and because of the jargon-bordering-academic language it uses, the tedious and repetitious disclaimers of privilege, and activist-y eye rolls at global capitalism and the police state, I would say that it's more of a reference than a book to read front to back. I did appreciate the thoroughness of the work, and I have to admit to a certain bias against radical and activist thinking that sometimes provokes me into greater critical thinking and sometimes makes me churlishly dismissive.
Unfortunately, I was also turned off by some methodological loosey-goosey and an inconsistent analytical lens that made it seem like polemic. For example, a lot of Eisner's evidence for the argument that bisexuals experience worse health economic etc. outcomes is based on a single set of demographic data. That's certainly not Eisner's fault—she argues persuasively that bisexuals are an understudied group of people. But in another part of the book, she points out that because this data set is based on self-reported categories, it dramatically under-represents the group within bisexuals that would have the best outcomes due to other kinds of privilege, namely cis bisexual men.
Whatever gripes I might have with the rigor of some of her evidence, I also have to admit that despite coming in with a lot of skepticism, Eisner ended up convincing me that there is a unique stigma attached to bisexual people, and I came to understand why she considered bisexuals and their relationships as a battlefield of patriarchy and queer liberation.
And yet, I did end up walking away a little disappointed. I was still looking for some idea of what the specific bisexual experience of the world is. My gay identity was built not only from crushes and eyes averted and inconvenient erections and hot shame, but also from books and poetry and movies and narratives and testimony and role models. And a lot of that just isn't out there for bisexual men—or at least I might have to keep working to find it.
“There's no evangelism like the zeal of a recent convert” is a cliché with a lot of truth in it. The convert is the rare person that knows what it is like to believe A and to be persuaded to believe B. It's lonely, because they feel an affinity, a one-sided kinship with the A's, and however much they also feel connected to B's they are outsiders. Therefore they must find new converts because only they will understand the journey they have completed.
Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley is a memoir in which she looks back at her journey from being a founder of a startup at 19 to being a Marxist critic in her late 20's.
While she has some clearly expressed ideas and insights—I particularly loved the way that she drew a parallel between the structure of gig worker pay and the Amazon Web Services server credits that basically every developer uses—easily half of the book is skin-deep summaries of news events and startup culture ideas. The other half is a dull tick-tock of the saga of founding a startup and riding it into failure. It's just not that interesting, think: Abolish My Two Years Working at Kinko's.
If you misread the title, as I did, and inserted an unwritten How To at the beginning, please be aware that the sum total of the imagining a post-capitalism tech sector would fit in a not-very-long Medium post. It has one great idea about the possibilities of legislating code to be open-sourced after a certain period, the rest is banality.
I feel a little bad trashing this book because the sense of anger that Liu has at being hoodwinked and bribed into thinking that startup culture really was disrupting corporate evil and doing good doing well is alive. But kind of like the convert, in a world this upside down, if you have decided to maintain your belief that Silicon Valley is a force for good in 2020 (pub year), this book is not going to reach you, and if you have been there already, the naiveté of Liu's pre-conversion self is simply going to inflame your sense of injustice.
Reading Habibi is like watching Craig Thompson juggle with chainsaws. The huge ideas he works with: the intractable divisions of gender, sex, ecology, religion, and colorism, are live and dangerous and complicated. He chose to set this story in a dreamlike world outside of time and concrete geography, and it frees him to explore these divisions as aspects of the human condition.
There are no easy answers found in this story, grey area is everywhere and anyone looking for relief or prescriptions is bound to be disappointed. Except maybe in the values of story and art. Story, art, words and ink are intwined, and I have to note as well that I cannot think of a more beautiful object than the book that is and contains this story.
This is, like, a very important and beautiful book to me. Tara Brach takes clear aim at the voices in our heads that tell us that we don't deserve happiness, that keep us stuck in our wounds, and try and keep us disconnected from our true feelings because we worry that if we open ourselves up to them they might drown us, like one more passenger on a lifeboat that's barely above water.
Writing about self-help is vulnerable to me because it's like shouting Hi! I have all these problems. And they are also easy to make fun of, and not even in a mean-spirited way. There is something a little goofy about looking to Buddhism for answers (as an American, given the cultural history of “looking to the East” for enlightenment) or taking in meditations with exercises like saying hello to your pain. There's a real and sad truth to texts like these: I turn to them when I need to hear them. I allow them in when trying to muddle through endless grey days without compassion for myself is worse than trying to do something about it.
Self-help/growth books are one of those things where some work for some folks and others work for other folks, so I wouldn't just blanket recommend it to everyone. The most I can say is that if it seems like it might contain something you're trying to find, you owe it to yourself to open it up and see if it is.