Matt E

I see interfaces. Interfaces are everywhere. They are simple, everyday, vital, like the doorknobs that let us use our apelike hands to manipulate the innards of a mechanical doorknobs. They are complex, obscure, ridiculous if we weren’t so dependent on them, like the computers simulating human users interacting with virtual mainframe programs from the 1980’s that operate critical pieces of our civic infrastructure. Pieces like banking, telecommunications, the military. The imposition of the interface of the interstate highway system on the landscape of the West unlocked it’s development. The imposition of the interface of the shipping container is a necessary condition of globalized trade.

In How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell explored resisting the interfaces and attitudes that make up modern (Millennial?) productivity culture. Some of her exploration involved naming and questioning foundational assumptions of the culture, e.g. why is it considered better to create the new and disruptive rather than the restorative? Another line of exploration was the incursion of the capitalist profit motive into our private lives. In Saving Time, she expands another idea opened in How To Do Nothing: that clock time is an interface imposed on many different natural rhythms and cycles for the benefit of capitalist growth, and that there may be benefits to attuning ourselves to other ways of tracking time.

It’s a great idea, and Odell curates a wonderful selection of texts to give various angles on the idea. She repeats a structure that worked well in How To Do Nothing: meandering, collage-like texts, sometimes extended paraphrases of anecdotes from other writers or long quotations, wrapped in a repetitive and bland account of a Bay Area walk. I didn’t mind this style in her first book, but this time I wanted either more artful prose or more disciplined synthesis of ideas. After making it about halfway through the book, the easiest way for me to open up more time was to put the book down and seek a richer experience.

I’m still looking for a book with sharper thought about how to shrink the power of the clock time interface. What kind of cultural practices would it take for there to be a society-wide floor of rest and leisure like the Jewish Sabbath? Or to resist unnecessary 24-hour work schedules? Seasonality of food?

What a great yarn! Excellent storytelling, with the kind of mundane, closely observed details of prison camp life that only comes by living it. It’s not perfect—it never quite lands on a consistent tone and swings between suspense and comic. Attitudes towards Asia span racist to patronizing, and always imperialistic, but that seems accurate.

I'm fascinated by Satya Nadella and his transformation of Microsoft. While there were moments where his personality came through, this is mostly a bland piece of corporate hagiography, and you should look elsewhere for insights into that work.

The first part of the book is the most valuable. It's a first person account of Nadella's upbringing, education, and entry into the tech field. It captured how much pride he has in being both his father's son and his mother's son, as well as his clear love for his wife and family and his love for the cosmopolitan and ambitious India he grew up in.

The next part is about his rise to CEO, and the undoing work he accomplished to change the corporate culture at Microsoft. There are a lot of corporate credits (our great work growing our cloud business was accomplished by such visionary leaders as blah blah blah) and a lot of telling but not showing (over the course of several meetings, we reached a consensus about how to move forward...).

As with all transformational stories, details matter. If you zoom out far enough, all transformational narratives are the same: I was doing it one way, I wanted to change, I finally let go of what was holding me back from change, I tried a different way, and that turned out way better.

There's not much more than that here. There are references to Microsoft losing its way and employee unhappiness, but a reluctance to call out specific mistakes. There is almost no specificity about the personnel changes that he made to signal that more changes were coming down the line. There is a little more detail about Nadella's “new way,” including: moving away from the mindset of corporate friends and enemies and toward thinking about all other corporations as potential partnerships, breaking down the inefficient communication and empty status symbols of 20th century blue-chip corporate hierarchy, and stoking a real hunger for learning about use cases and developing sales channel for every sector of the market.

If there's any value in this book, it's in this section.

The final section is Nadella's prognostication of the future. It seems completely ghostwritten and is structured around Nadella visiting various Microsoft R&D initiatives and marveling with wet eyes about what he finds. Skip it. Skip the whole book*.

*I am aware that most people probably never even considered reading the book, that a book by a major corporate CEO was guaranteed to be bland and impersonal. What can I say? I'm an optimist.

“Everyone knew it. Rarely has revolution been more universally predicted, though not necessarily for the right countries or the right dates.”

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution

“Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now [...] We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.”

Ursula LeGuin

When a crack appears in a dam, there's only a small window in which a repair can be made. Once the crack passes the threshold of repair, the forces of gravity and the weight of the water held back make the endpoint inevitable. The dam will be destroyed, the water will flow, a stream will appear.

In the period of 1789-1848 in Europe, there was such a dam. Built of rigid social hierarchies, the absolute power of aristocracy, and the moral sanction of the church, it restrained and extracted value from the great mass of feudal subjects and a much smaller number of middle class craftsmen and merchants. At the end of the 18th century, two cracks appeared in this dam at nearly the same time. By the beginning of the 20th century, the dam was gone and every inch of the globe had experienced aftershocks its disappearance.

The first crack was the French Revolution. It transformed the king into a mortal man, from divine symbol into mere politician. It turned the church from the house of god into land to be confiscated, and introduced the idea everywhere that reforms by vote that are ignored become reforms by blood.

The second crack was the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. A great many contingencies had to come together for the British Empire to arise and for the engine of the domestic economy to turn from pastoral agriculture in the English countryside towards William Blake's dark satanic mills. But they did come together, and that produced such a huge buildup of wealth that it broke the world, like a black hole distorting the very fabric of spacetime.

The work of the French Revolution never quite got finished, and the problems with a capitalist industrial economy—problems that were spotted almost immediately by both participants and observers of the new industrial paradigm; thinkers that thought it was not a tenable system included economists, politicians, factory owners, journalists, and bankers, as well as utopian visionaries—broke social contracts and created the need for poverty to enforce labor discipline. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are dying of this unfinished business.

Progress toward political equality has stalled almost everywhere. All of Earth's ecosystems are in existential distress because of the demand for extraction and growth by the modern global economy. In the last 15 years, I my mind has opened from the attitude that people who prophesize about “the revolution” were unserious and to be dismissed, to thinking that they are certainly right. What the damage to the planet is, I don't know, nor do I know what things we are going to be asked to accept as normal as conditions deteriorate and freedoms dwindle.

But the status quo cannot hold. The forces of social unrest that are at work in the world right now will not return to the status quo ante, any more than the water can be returned to the reservoir once the dam breaks.

I picked up this book because I do not have the ability right now to imagine what comes next other than a broken version of now. I think that reading about the circumstances in which industrial capitalism arose has opened my eyes to how many things could have gone a little differently and produced a different result. Hobsbawm is a genial and stylish guide to this time, and I felt like I got a lot out of this reading experience, despite a couple places where his frame of reference serves him wrong, specifically gender and racial analysis and not being able to see the future past when this was published in the 60's.

This review discusses sexual violence, racial violence, and once refers to gross stuff with poop. Reader beware.

In times of crisis, we look backwards for the ideas and leaders we need to transform the present. Ideas, intellectuals, visionaries, artists, philosophers are as strings in a vast sitar: when an idea in the present is plucked, a whole host of ideas from the past vibrate in sympathy. This is unfortunately as true for MAGAs as it is for the visionaries working to resurrect Martin Luther King Jr's Poor People's Campaign or 70's black feminism.

I started reading Samuel Delaney's 800-page epic Dhalgren because he fascinates me as someone who made space for himself in a sci-fi world that did not want him because of his race and his sexuality, and because he seemed to embody a fearless self-expression that is rare in any writer at any time. While I have seen his work mentioned in the context of black queer writers who brought the physicality of sex into the forefront of their work like Octavia Butler and Audre Lorde, and ideas from 1970's revolutionary movements in general, it seems like Delaney's work is more respected than read.

Dhalgren is not easy to read. The novel's protagonist, Kid, experiences memory loss, bizarre dreams, and psychotic breaks, all narrated in a formally experimental, stream-of-consciousness style. Episodes blur into incoherence without resolution, characters' names change throughout the book, and trying to imagine a geography is a fool's errand. Delaney himself compared the novel to a Necker cube—a simple graphic cube that seems to shift orientation by redirecting your perspective, but neither can be said to be the “right” answer. I was able to make headway once I surrendered to the feeling of being lost in the text and decided to forego trying to decode each line. Slowly, Bellona, USA, came into focus.

Bellona is a large city, on the scale of Chicago or Philadelphia, somewhere in the midwest, in which something terribly strange has happened. Communications with the outside has been disrupted, no tv or radio signals make it into the city, there are only a few gateways to get in or out, and parts of the city have been destroyed, as through there were an attack or a bombing. Out of a city of millions, only some thousands remain. Those who remain scavenge food and supplies from abandoned stores, squatting in apartments and carrying on some version of their life before. There are hippies that live in a commune in the park, with utopian visions of rebuilding. A small number of middle-class characters try to carry on their routines despite increasingly ridiculous obstacles, commuting to abandoned office buildings and enjoying family dinners made of dwindling supplies. There is a Clockwork Orange-style hyper-violent street gang that lives communally and dominates the less weak on the strength of their weapons and the strange digital shields that they wear, which make them appear to be large, colorful, holographic animals. There is an apocalyptic cult, centered around a hyper-sexual, predatory black man named George Harrison, that plasters posters of his genitals around Bellona. Finally, there is a small group of remaining aristocracy centered around Calkins, the editor of a bizarre newspaper in which the dates and day of the week are random, and which is one of the few points of reference that cut across all of the social groups in Bellona.

We meet Kid at about the same time as he enters Bellona. He does not remember his name or his past and does not know why he is drawn to the place. The narrative is loose, basically a picaresque, with some metafictional elements as Kid picks up a notebook filled with some half-finished poems and begins to re/write them. Over the course of the story, Kid rises from naive outsider to leader of the Scorpions gang, to a larger-than-life figure that all of Bellona becomes fascinated by.

All of the things that make Dhalgren difficult to read make it impossible to tidily suggest what it might be about. There are some questions that clearly interest Delaney, however: What keeps society going when there is no possibility of economic growth or a future? How do hierarchies change when the outside world can neither influence the culture nor enforce power structures? Would a world in which everyone was free to express their sexual desire be dystopian or utopian? What is good writing anyway? How do you write about sex with no referent to shame? The images and textures that seem to fascinate Delaney such that they shoot through his writing include the slightly gross underside of sexuality, the ripe genitals and fluids and wounds and scars; the way that white Americans view and talk about black Americans, especially their sexual fascination with them; mental illness, psychiatric hospitals, and thought control; predatory and nonconsensual sex; classical mythology; violence that comes out of interpersonal disrespect; and this incredible vocabulary (I have a pretty large vocabulary, and I was constantly looking up words while reading).

Delaney's idea of how society responds to collapse basically boils down to this: people are who they are, and they will generally just keep going even if all of the environmental feedback that they get is sending the message that it is a doomed strategy. This is my point of reference, probably not Samuel Delaney's (although it certainly could have been), but I kept thinking about Pat Frank's 1959 novel Alas, Bablyon, in which an isolated community survives following a nuclear attack. In that novel, neighbors throw off social hierarchies, band together, and pool resources and skills to start to make a new life for everybody. No such communal spirit emerges in Bellona. Delaney's survivors maintain their social privileges, cling to familiar routines, and generally exist in a state of inertia slowly coming to rest. It is impossible to separate my reading of Dhalgren from the circumstances of my life: I recognized this futility in the various routines and rituals we have tried to bring into the coronavirus era. I am currently writing this from an empty office building in a massively depopulated downtown core.

On the other hand, there is no way for the formal institutions that backstop social hierarchies—no police, government authority, state or federal power—to enforce their norms within the boundary of the city, which creates a kind of utopia for transgressive sexuality. This is something so radical for its time (Dhalgren was published 6 years after the Stonewall Riot) but so normal now that I missed it at first. Nightlife in Bellona revolves around Teddy's, the last remaining bar, in which a nude trans (this is a contemporary label, the character never discusses their own identity the way we would now) dancer is the nightly entertainment. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual pairings happen at Teddy's, and even George, the avatar for predatory male heterosexuality, refers to queers with a mocking amusement and seems to enjoy their admiration of his posters. There's a kind of attitude of presumptive bisexuality, to the the point of comic absurdity. Jack, an astronaut representing institutional, bourgeoise squareness, complains, “I was real nice to people; and people was nice to me too. Tak? The guy I met with you, here? Now he's a pretty all right person. And when I was staying with him, I tried to be nice. He wants to suck on my dick, I'd say: ‘Go ahead, man, suck on my fuckin dick.' And, man, I ain't never done nothin' like that before...I mean not serious, like he was, you know? Now, I done it. I ain't sorry I done it. I don't got nothin' against it. But it is just not what I like all that much, you understand? I want a girl, with tits and a pussy. Is that so strange?

Kid meets Lana, a musician and teacher with more or less middle-class manners and attitudes, and Denny, a 15-year old bisexual hustler that seems to remind Kid of a younger version of himself. He has sexual relationships with them separately, and then they form a thruple, a relationship that takes on a character of its own: “The scent of Denny's breath, which was piney, joined Lanya's, which reminded Kid of ferns.” I'm so hungry for representations of those forms of relationships that these were my favorite parts of the book. Delaney's willingness to push way past the boundaries of taboo and taste make room for surprising moments of tenderness. When Kid intuits that Denny has a kink for degradation, he explores hitting and spitting and verbally humiliating him. After a few more times having sex, Denny nervously tells Kid—who has shown himself to be capriciously violent in the context of being the gang group leader—that he doesn't particularly enjoy the physical roughness, and Kid instantly changes his approach, saving small bits of verbal humiliation for sexual encounters. In the context of musing about whether he subconsciously wants to get gang banged (when does that happen in a novel, even today?), Kid remembers to the night before where, even though he finds bottoming too painful to enjoy, he let Denny fuck him. “...the emotional thing there, anyway, was nice,” he remembers. His relationship with Layna is totally hands off and non-controlling. When a character tries to shame Kid for Lanya pursuing other relationships, Kid growls back, “if my old lady wants to fuck a sheep with a dildo strapped to her nose, that is largely her concern, very secondarily mine, and not yours at all. She can fuck anything she wants—with the possible exception of you. That, I think, would turn my stomach.”

This utopian picture of prejudice melting away in isolation does not extend to race. Dhalgren is saturated with racialized language language to an extent that is just extremely uncomfortable to me. N**r is used 80 times in the text, and there are several more epithets used commonly and casually. One of the most provocative uses of race in the novel is in the character of George Harrison, who embodies the stereotype of a buck from his physically dominant frame, hyper-sexuality, and predation. When Kid arrives, Bellona is recovering from a riot in the black neighborhoods precipitated by an incident where George rapes a 17-year old white girl, after which photos and an interview where George boasts at length about the rape are printed in the newspaper. A subplot moving through the novel involves various Bellonians keeping the girl from finding George, there's an almost supernatural suggestion that if they were to get together then Bellona would really be finished. Delaney treats racial aggression, degradation, white consumption of the black body like Kara Walker's plantation cutouts: symbols of erotic power that are literally unspeakable in civil society but hugely active on the subconscious of the culture.

I did not quite like Dhalgren. It is hard to read, it is often disgusting, a lot of it is very boring. I cannot write it off, though, because look at how much there is to think about! I was hoping to have this encounter with a radical black, queer voice, and I don't think I was open enough, at the beginning, to understanding that Delaney and his work has it's own set of interests apart from being a defanged mascot for me in the present. There is so much depicted in this novel that has become even more taboo in sexual culture now than it was at publication: racial fetishization, sex with teenagers, rape fantasies, gang rape, physical violence. I don't think that it would have occurred to Delaney back then that there was even a question that depiction could be different than endorsement. Right now we have this weird thing going on—an interim period where renegotiation of sexual norms that were not working for many people is going on, something that is more good than bad, on balance—where the distinction between erotic fantasy, public reputation, and real-life sexual conduct are all collapsing.

The kind of freedom that Delaney takes to simply explore, with his imagination, flies in the face of an ethic that says that perpetuating harmful images does real harm to vulnerable communities. Who has more right than he to make that judgement? He writes about gang raped, and he was gang raped by three men while hooking up with men across a language barrier. He writes disgusting things about black people, and he was the grandson of slaves with family stories of lynchings and various artists of the Harlem Renaissance who were friends with his father. Delaney understood the power of disgust, how closely the feeling resembles pornographic thrill.

Put another way: if a man and a woman fantasize about enacting and being raped, and the real-life consequence of their fantasy is a mutually consensual sexual encounter, and another couple admits no erotic fantasies but has bought into wild Q-Anon fantasies that there are pedophile rings and sex trafficking on every street in America, who are the perverts?

The swing from sexual repression to sexual liberation is a pendulum, and right now I cannot see what part of the arc we are in. It seems like there is a lot of pressure on queer conduct from the right wing, and a lot of pressure on the queer imagination from the left. I cannot imagine writing Dhalgren. I can barely admit to reading it seriously. I wish for myself the freedom of imagination that Delaney granted himself, and I wish for myself the fearlessness he had in sharing it. That, I feel confident, is something Dhalgren has to give to the present.

The Wallander books are a drag when they brood too much on the changes to Swedish society or how all male spaces are disappearing or dive too deep into Wallander's depression. They are fun when Wallander spends improbably small amounts of time sleeping, when the plot moves quickly and the solution to the puzzle is just out of grasp. I think this was a pretty good one—I liked the first Wallander novel and greatly disliked the tone of #2.

I'm delighted to discover this prolific series of mysteries. This book was like a perfect procedural, snappy, witty, plotty. Montalbano is a slightly less sexist pig in a land of pigs, so if that pushes your buttons you may want to skip these books. It did not turn me off, but YMMV. I'm planning on continuing the series.

I rarely do this, but I abandoned this book just about 3/4 of the way through.

I realized that I just wasn't enjoying it anymore. Atwood's dystopia is a broad caricature of a hyper-capitalist future filled with clichéd, George Saunders-esque portmanteau satires on corporate naming (CorpSeCorps, Pigoon). With a more generous scholar's eye I can see how that vision may have been prescient and counter-cultural when it was published in 2003 in the shadow of 9/11, but dystopia has been fleshed out and deconstructed in media in the years since, and now it reads as flat and thinly characterized.

Her imagination of a teen boyhood in which these adolescents have been so numbed to exploitation that child pornography, executions, and animal torture are treated as normal entertainment options among many seems heavily influenced by A Clockwork Orange and maybe this is my old age speaking—one of the great surprises of adulthood is learning that I basically have no interest in the hyper-violent media that would have lit me up in high school—but I think that Clockwork came out of a particular context and it's assumptions about how culture and morality interact should be looked at a little more critically than they are in Oryx and Crake.

One more critique:

I thought the whole storyline involving how the boys "met" Oryx was tasteless and irresponsible. There are many real life stories about men getting obsessed by girls they encounter in porn, and I think that there's a certain seriousness and gravity to those stories that demand good, rigorous storytelling if they are to be fictionalized.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. If there are readers that see themselves in Juliet and take strength in her journey, I want to honor that. If there are white readers out there that are able to see themselves through an outsider's eyes through this story, I think that's a valuable thing too.

However, as a piece of writing, I did not think it was very good. For all of the time that we spend in Juliet's head, I never came away with that deep an understanding of what shaped her attitudes towards gender and sexuality in the 19-ish years of her life before the events of the book take place. Despite being based on a set of meaningful real experiences, the observations of Portland, Oregon or the Bronx, of the people that fill out those places and attend the workshops, etc. never go past superficial observations. We find out fairly late in the story that it's supposed to take place in 2003, yet every character speaks in the language of queer subculture circa 2015, and I'm fairly certain that the undercut that brings catharsis to a character late in the story would have been perceived not as cutting edge queer fashion in 2003 but as a weird attempt to resurrect a Nazi haircut.

Even the plotting has a pageant-like quality where Juliet experiences cliched microaggression after another with a corresponding Socratic dialogue enlightening the reader about the real power dynamics at play. It left me wondering who exactly this novel was for. I don't think Juliet—in either her 2003 or 2015 incarnations—would believe the journey that we get in this novel. It does not seem like it's for a “mainstream” white feminist reader, exactly either, although the internal politics of white feminist spaces and relationships end up taking center stage in this story for much longer than brown queer spaces do.

But for all that, the description of finding strength in a queer scene free from the white gaze or the burden of navigating and accommodating whiteness was really effective and even though I had to slog through much of this novel, by the end Juliet had won me over.

I am interested in the new graphic novel adaptation that seems to be in progress. Perhaps the magic that illustrations can do to bring depth to characters through facial expressions and ground scenes in place can smooth out some of the roughness in the writing and allow the story to shine.

This collection is an expansion of a feature article that Salz wrote for New York Magazine with the same title. There's some new material, some reworking, but most of the content and scope is the same.

I really enjoy Salz' craftsman attitude toward art an art making. It's both mystical and pragmatic. He treats training yourself to see better and training yourself to reserve some desk space and learning how to duck out of work early to give yourself time back as all parts of the same project.

If you haven't read the magazine article, I would give this a strong recommendation, if the title is enough to grab you.

Am I too old to read books as medicine, to read or reread something just to connect to the inner world it makes in me? No, not at all.

I read this book the day after Christmas because I wanted to escape into the story of these two men, both afraid of each other in different ways for their own reasons, trying to find strength in each other. It's a quiet and cozy book, and I wouldn't recommend it to just anybody. But if this is what you need, it will scratch your itch.

The highest praise I can give to Circe is to simply describe, simply and without exaggeration, how I felt when I finished the book. It felt like a heavy weight on my chest, and like every feeling of loneliness and powerlessness and fear had been dug up from the deep places I had tried to bury them in. I put the book down and immediately headed out into the rain to walk to a bar to be around people and to connect to my own worry-worn rosary made up of clichés like we met and talked all night and I took one look and knew.

That's what happened.

Circe, whose “official story” as a sexually tempting sea-witch is contained in a brief interlude in the Odyssey, is born as one of the least powerful immortals. Her family is not kind to her, and although she has a powerful father, this does not give her protection. Instead, it makes her a particularly vulnerable (easy to use) pawn in a game in which she has no place and cannot win. Things happen to her, she learns lessons. Ultimately, she has to choose between listening to what everyone around her tells her is her place, or, taking the lonely road of learning to listen and trust herself, and therefore discover her own power.

I saw a lot of myself in Circe's story. Although it turns out that, seen with hindsight and self-confidence, there was less to fear than I believed, I too felt different and removed from my family. But there is only so much kinship with Circe I can claim, because a lot of the emotional dynamics explored in this book involve family abuse and the violence that men enact on women. Madeline Miller writes in this wonderful, poetic register that is often punctuated by beautiful aphorisms, and they resonate, of course, not because Circe's experience is so extraordinary but because it's so common.

As a confused high-schooler, I took Latin classes, and as a confused young adult I chose a college that put a big emphasis on studying “the Classics.” Homer's world of wars and gods and glory and vengeance never came alive to me for two reasons: I was not a good student and spent no time completing reading assignments, and because the whole toxic-masculinity template, this foundational ethos that fueled scores of empires great and small seemed so stupid. Who can kill the most people is a question like who can run the fastest or who can lift the heaviest thing: useful to know in limited contexts but not very useful to most parts of life and definitely a poor indicator of divine favor or ruling authority. What Miller does so well is take the same stories (dominant, masculine, exterior focused), and retell them through the eyes of the other, who is usually left out of the tale (inferior, feminine, interior focused). It's a wonderful way of queering the text: reading Homer with the values that his culture tried their best to suppress. I may or may not return to the Iliad or Odyssey, but even if I do I imagine it will be Miller's Circe, Miller's Achilles, Miller's Agamemnon, that will be the “real” versions of the character to me, not Homer's. I hope that is the sweetest victory of all.

A delightful discovery I made while starting to write this re-review was a blog post I wrote 10 years ago about the books that made a deep impression on me. Tangerine was one of those books. I'm tempted to rattle off things that my home town had in common with Tangerine/Lake Windsor Downs—a citrus growing industry, strange segregation between white and Hispanic neighborhoods and people, groves with fans and heaters for cold nights (I think I remember the orange glow of smudge pots on winter nights, but perhaps that is a memory incepted by this very book, as they were banned in California decades before I was born). The truth is that there were as many things completely outside of my experience in Paul Fisher's life as there were in it. My parents were not image-conscious people. We were not a sports family, and I did not have any physical characteristics that made me different other than being fat. I did not have a tormenting older brother; to my eternal shame, I was that older brother.

What Paul Fisher and I had in common, however, was the fear.

After Paul joins the War Eagles and the team comes together, they start winning:

“The War Eagles have set out on a bloody rampage through the county. We have destroyed every enemy. We have laid waste to their fields and their fans. There is fear in their eyes when we come charging off our bus, whooping our war cry. They are beaten by their own fear before the game even begins. This is a feeling that I have never known before. Anyway, I have never known it from this side of the fear. Maybe I am just a [substitute], maybe I am just along for the ride, but this is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.”

Paul feels the catharsis of stepping out of the fear that he experiences all of the time through soccer, a healthy channel for that need. As a teenager, I tried to escape that fear in ways that were unhealthy just as often as they were healthy. I spent a lot of time alone with music, creating a zone of safety around me, but I also was mean to people and made fun of others because while I was directing the target of mockery, it could never be me. Maybe it's because his fear is so focused on an actual threat, but Paul can see the fear and shame in those around him:

“Mom took me into the kitchen and got me a glass of water. She ran her finger under the strap of my goggles and slipped them off. Then she said, “Honey you know how it is with your eyesight. You know you can't see very well.” And that was that. But I can see. I can see everything. I can see things that Mom and Dad can't. Or won't.”

Tangerine

Tangerine

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.

Faith, reason, morality, progress all come into conflict under the shadow of the launch tower at Cape Canaveral! Kings, magicians, doctors, executioners, all bound to their own arcane rituals. A girl appears just like in a prophecy. And then a new bright light appears in the sky.

I really did not care for this book. Whicker has imagined a world where mad cow disease has led to a societal collapse, and after thousands of years, people in the United States have devolved into followers of mystic religions that believe in blood sacrifice to bring about the return of the space shuttles, which will save the world.

You have to invest a lot in this setting to get anything out of the book–which is another way of saying that the plot, character, and prose style didn't do much for me–and so much of the setting didn't make any sense to me. Whicker clearly loved this idea of a medieval/feudal world that has adopted NASA as its religious symbols, but never quite explains how that could have come about. Yes, there is prion disease and societal breakdown, but how are there artifacts from the 20th century but no city ruins? Given what we know about how tribalism forms in times of scarcity, is it really plausible that no characters notice each others skin colors? For that matter, in Florida of all places, why does everybody speak English?

For that matter, Whicker doesn't have very much respect for medieval knowledge either. In an interview with The Qwillery, Whicker mentions being inspired by figures like Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe and yet none of that seems to have made it onto the page, except for cutesy character names.

I'd suggest skipping this book and watch Waterworld instead.

My attention is important to me, and I've been writing and reading a lot this year about ways to navigate a world that is increasingly filled with traps designed to capture, monetize, and waste my curiosity. Earlier this spring, I came across Jenny Odell's artist talk “How to Do Nothing”, given at EYEO in 2017, and I have been eagerly anticipating her full-length book expanding some of the ideas she shared in her talk. It's here, and I finished it this week.

How to Do Nothing is anchored by the ideas Odell shares in her artist talk: that grounding oneself in specific real places and paying attention to their physical, geographic, ecological, historical, and social characteristics is an act of anti-capitalist refusal against the various social media and big data businesses who monetize our attention and behaviors. In her book, she expands her scope to consider other questions: How much of a real possibility is it to opt-out of digital connectedness, and would that be a good thing anyway? Does the act of refusing to follow directions have any power or meaning beyond our individual choice? How, specifically, does one “grounding oneself”? How are the attention economy and the fiction of independence linked? Can we change how we think about production to include not just making something that wasn't there before, but maintaining something that was there before, or even removing something to make room for something else that hasn't had any room to develop?

These are wonderful, rich questions, and one of the real pleasures of this book is that Odell draws on so many different ways to contextualize these questions. Odell draws on sociology and economics to explain shifts in how jobs are structured, and history and journalism to bring context to the history of the East Bay places that she spends time in. There's a little smattering of philosophy and theory, which I am a little allergic to so I was happy there wasn't too much of it. But where Odell really shines for me are in her close readings (and connecting to the other ideas in her book) of conceptual art pieces, the life of Diogenes the Cynic, John Cage's sound pieces, Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and David Hockney's Polaroid collage pieces.

Maybe these are ideas that you could find in other books, off the top of my head I'm thinking of Cal Newport's Deep Work, Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants, or Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. One thing that sets this book apart is Odell's fierce resistance to framing her argument around “productivity.” This is not a book that argues that changing your frame of attention is going to make you better at your job, or faster at creating career ideas, or anything of the sort—in that respect, she is the anti-Cal Newport (who I respect a lot also, but I think his idea that we can all just be “winners” by becoming more productive is a bit shallow by ducking systemic questions). The other thing that sets her apart is a fierce, humanistic commitment to encouraging us to think in terms of ecosystems and social systems in which no individual is completely apart. I look forward to some of these most delicate and precious ideas continuing to move through my brain.

I loved this book. Read it and try something different.

I have connected with so many of my friends through Tamora Pierce books—there's something about her fantasy settings and characters that bolsters and nurtures the curious and weird and brave parts of us. I was browsing my library's ebook page and came across this book, which is the beginning of a new series.

This series has a boy protagonist, which Pierce writes less often. He's a sweet orphan, almost like a YA-sized version of Taborlin from The Name of the Wind. Like Taborlin, Arram Draper is prodigiously talented and is deeply devoted to becoming more adept at his gifts. Also like Name of the Wind, there is not quite enough tension because every obstacle that Arram encounters is easily overcome by the power of his gifts. All that said, I did enjoy the book because I am a sucker for magic and wizards and shit.

Just like you can never return home, returning to familiar imaginative playgrounds can be a disorienting experience. As much as I love the Tamora Pierce-verse, it's easier to see the cracks in the façade. It's great that she has always built sex-positivity and consent ethics into her books, but the lengths (no pun intended) this book goes to try and find a Ye Olde way to avoid the words penis and “boner” was even more awkward than just using the real words. While I like her attention to imagining an inclusive world that everyone can be a part of, I did not like that every dark skinned character was described in terms of the shade of their skin (sometimes in reference to food items) and light skinned characters were described in terms of their culture. Plot beats signaling the compromised values of a character on their journey to becoming big bad are clunky and obvious and slow.

I would definitely recommend this book to a young person or as a nostalgia trip for anybody who already likes Tamora Pierce books. If nothing in this review has pinged your interest, I'd give it a skip.

I know I'm being a little tough on this book. It's not a bad book, it's fine; pleasant to read, and fairly well plotted. But I'm going to use this book to open a question that I have been thinking about when I read gay YA romances: what is their purpose?

OK, that's a little disingenuous. There's a part of their purpose that I know extremely well, and I know it because of it's absence during my childhood and adolescence. Sometimes my head swims when I think about what that time would have been like if there were stories like this available to me in libraries, and not just the one scary “issue” book about being young and gay. Instead, I had to gather bits and pieces of interior experiences from other kinds of stories, like a crow gathering bits of tinsel and shattered glass. Family alienation and distrust from Sharon Creech's The Wanderer and Edward Bloor's Crusader. How to let crushes smoulder from Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved and Carol Fenner's Yolanda's Genius. And for how to get close to others when what is inside you is so big and what we show to each other can be so small, I loved E.L. Konigsburg's The View From Saturday.

Here I am, getting lost in memories of my own identity formation.

S0 let's get to my real question: are LGBT YA romances just low-fat, low-cal romances, with younger protagonists and a less steamy helping of sex? Or is there still some part of YA literature that is didactic, helping young people with these kind of stories in their own life to navigate their way through?

I don't miss the didactic-only era of children's literature, which seemed to go away in the 70's and 80's in favor of a more interior-experience focused way of telling stories (except for maybe utility picture books and books for therapists and religious books). Those weren't very fun, and once the cultural morés that produced them went away, there was not very much charm in them either.

But I'm also left a little unsatisfied by What If It's Us. There's so much going on! One narrator's parents are in a strained marriage, is away from his friends. The other is struggling with school. They are both navigating having sex for the first time. One of them is obsessed with Broadway musicals, particularly Hamilton. And yet we don't really get to see how all of these factors affect them on the inside. How does one boy's parent's fighting affect how comfortable he is experimenting sexually? We don't know, because these parts of the story are siloed off from each other. Why does he like Hamilton? We don't know, and so although we know a lot about his preferences, we don't get the chance to have those preferences illuminate what is inside him.

Maybe the representation is enough. It certainly would have meant a lot to me. But I can't help but thinking that when stories are told all on the outside and we don't see enough of the inside, our noses pressed up to the glass of a room we can't enter, we might end up thinking that the only thing that matters is outside too.

I am a huuuge fan of the Ask Polly advice column in The Cut. I come back again and again because I feel some kinship with her. She's got sharper edges than a Dear Sugar, but like Sugar is deeply compassionate. Polly is funny, but not flippant or sarcastic like Choire Sicha's NYT Styles section advice column.

I guess what I love the most is that she has become the person that people like me—millennial weirdos who feel stuck because all we seem capable of doing is looking around in shock and disappointment asking “oh my god, is this really it?”—send their deepest questions. And we have changed her in turn.

Like any book of essays, there are some that speak right to me, some that don't speak to me at all, and some that I hope to god speak to some future, more courageous and secure form of myself.

Read it, and feel free to skip the one about Tony Soprano unless you really like the show.

This was, and I am not exaggerating, a terrible book.

I did not love this book. I appreciated its unabashed pulpiness, but the premise is stated in the title and it doesn't develop much beyond that.

What really worked for me is that the story is set in Lagos, and Braithwaite doesn't waste much time explaining details in the setting for a reader like me that is not that familiar with Nigerian culture. Food, clothing, common phrases are incorporated and the onus on the reader is to learn or keep up. I really appreciate that because if Ezra Pound can drop in untranslated Italian, German, French and Sanskrit into poems that high school students are supposed to give a shit about, I think US reading audiences can grow up when it comes to non-European settings. I also loved the grotesquerie of the main character, there's a slow inversion in the plot where we realize that a binary that we've been presented with is maybe not all as it seems, and I thought that was great.

What did not work for me is that the sharpness of the satire of beauty culture and social media culture kind of trails off, and I did not find it as clever as folks who loved it. I also think there wasn't quite enough conflict, either external conflict in plot or in the internal conflict of the main character.

Don't let me turn you off from the book, though. It's a strong first book, and my rating is way more “this was not for me” rather than “this was bad.”

I'm currently experiencing a full body brain body spirit crush on Tommy Pico, which is inevitable because among other things Nature Poem is a major trap in the house of intellectual thirst. It's so exciting to read a poem in a voice that reminds you of your own voice, the voices of people you know. It's like your experience of this earth is worth of being sung, and you have found the poet to sing your story.

The collection moves with hyperactive energy from high and low culture, different levels of seriousnesses, playing very smart and very dumb, very brainy and very sexy, sentimental and cold eyed pragmatism both.

It could be Pico's one trick, but I'm immediately getting his other collections, and no other poet has made me do that before.

I didn't finish this book, but I am finished reading this book. I decided to stop reading because I got bored with it, even though I know that's an unfair response. What does it mean to be bored with a piece of art that changed the world?

Let's take a look at what this book is, for a second. I think it's at least three things: it's a relationship memoir, it's an anti-novel that self-consciously inverts its tropes and standards, and it's a piece of postmodern cultural criticism that argues, for example, that the intellectual/inner life of women is so poorly represented in academia that the thought and critique must be contextualized and grounded in an individual's experience. I Love Dick was one of many pieces of art that was operating on this wavelength: the films of Jane Campion, Liz Phair, Mary Karr, etc. were all part of this zeitgeist. And they kind of won. Not a total victory, the patriarchy is alive and well and coming for your rights. But I think they did successfully expand what was “in bounds” regarding subjectivity, women's narratives, and deep structures of the patriarchy. That's part of why it's a little bit of a slog for me, reading in the present.

For example, the sloppy, confessional, raunchy and intellectual tone that must have been so refreshing when the novel (?) came out in the 90's has become the default tone of the feminist internet. Now that that tone is not as shocking, the callous way that she describes evicting her tenants, the “hicks” she lives around in various rural places across the country, and the mystical encounters she imagines with Guatemalan activists comes across as less savory, and out of step with the feminist conversations that are going on today.

In a similar vein, there are some clearly argued reasons why I Love Dick had to be written with real names and real ideas and real vulnerability. The part that hasn't aged so well is the aspect of it that is a comedy of manners among academics and artists–juice from a goose that's been cooked.

Anyway, if anything you've read about this book calls out to you, definitely go out and read it. But don't be surprised if the ways in which its dated leave you a little cold.

My heart is in too much grief for my brain to think.

I loved this book... big worldbuilding sci-fi is just my jam and always has been. I loved figuring out the puzzle of the world, the space-opera elements, and the novel use of math in the setting.

If you hate sci-fi because thin characters and shallow emotional arcs make you check out, you might not like this. If you hate wandering around in a setting that you don't understand for the first half of the book, you're not going to like this book.

But if you like a fun, plotty, sci-fi novel, this is a pretty good one.