Thomas

I spent this morning as I spent every Saturday morning, I went to the cafe. Instead of reading, I spent most of my time working on an article and after found that I had a lot of trouble focusing, so after the second cafe I went for a walk. I meandered around DC until I realized I was at MLK Jr. Library and I went in and started to wander the aisles and eventually saw this on a shelf. It was right next to a big graphic novel about building an atomic bomb, which a friend had sent me a picture of at some point. A lot of weird circumstances went into putting me in a place to pick the book up.

I sat there in the library and read this through. It is a nice little graphic novel written by an intersex author about the frustrations of gender and navigating them.

Something that occurred to me while reading, though not for the first time, is how gendered language for beauty is, and how constrained some words seem. Handsome for men, cute for kids and younger people or people of a certain “look” (I've no idea how to define this); pretty and beautiful for women. This has frustrated me a little because I often think people presenting as masculine look very beautiful or people presenting as feminine look quite handsome. (What even is the difference? It's all vibes.) Even writing about it begs for a stumble, because language tries to box you into man/woman, masc/femme. Like a lot of the things the author spends time processing in this book, it's a bit annoying and is much about social construction.

Several years ago I was having lunch in a Mexican restaurant in rural Illinois with a Russian psychologist. This is true. I was a (younger) person learning about mental health professions and practices. We were discussing the process of diagnosis. In a sort of bizarre turn, my social work mentor thought of this as closer to a science, and took the statistics part of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders relatively seriously (though not rigidly). The psychologist had a much different approach, perhaps because she'd been educated first in Europe (who knows?) – she viewed it as firmly an art. My experiences over the past 8 years or so align many things in the social world as much closer to art than science. I don't think these two worlds exist outside of each other, and I think that's a fallacy that gets us into trouble. Anyway, I think gender is closer to an art than a science. I have no idea the temperature of that take.

This book is split into a series of chapters, each exploring a concept or process of decisions. Things like living with someone, the words you use to refer to yourself and your significant other, attraction, body image, etc. An underlying theme is that of hypervigilance / hyperawareness. I loved this. In one chapter, the author is talking about the stress of driving, something he has not done often. The stress is in how he presents himself when driving. I was thrown back into high school reading this. My high school car was a 1997 Ford Ranger with a camper shell (I loved the camper shell). I was always so stressed driving, because I did not know what the right way to look was. I was incapable of being relaxed (ever), and so I was always at 10 and 2. One day someone said they'd seen me driving and it looked like I was white knuckling the steering wheel. Funny, how some things stick with you.

I was also too paranoid of sounding feminine to order my favorite treat at Dairy Queen, the Mocha Moolatte, because I thought it'd out me as gay. Gee whiz.

There's a chapter all about buying glasses – something I did recently. I really loved this! So much thinking into something as small but as big as a few ounces of plastic and glass.

Probably the most profound question in it, at least for me, someone that is relatively unbothered by his gender but is sometimes frustrated by the social demand to categorize people, is on page 95: “If you had been born a girl & lived your life that way–what kind of life would you have lived?” I am a social worker, a ‘female' dominated profession. A friend asked me the other day if I have many female friends, and I realized I have mostly female friends and have since I came out, more or less. How different would my life be? Would I still be a social worker? Would I be working in the policy world? Would I make the money I do? Would I still be here? I don't know. It's quite a thing to think about. I have never even considered the question until now. Not even when I was in high school, and desperately lovesick over a cute straight guy, did I ever think about this.

This morning in the cafe a few people sat at a table adjacent to mine and there were a few little toddlers in high chairs. One of them was in the phase of tiny childness that means they like picking things up and dropping them. They were playing with their shoe and dropped it and it landed a few feet away from them. The child kept leaning over their high chair and reaching for it and the adults didn't notice. The child looked at me several times. I thought about getting up and walking over to hand the shoe back, but I thought this would be an aggressive violation of space and social custom. I thought about going to the bathroom, which would have put me in the walking path and made it incidental. I thought this, too, would be bizarre in the extreme. I distinctly thought that if I were a woman, it would not have been even thought about for me to do a thing like that. Perhaps I was too far in my head. The dad eventually got up and found the shoe, after the child sent their little picture book after it.

As far as a chance read, I really liked this!

I picked this up for a book club at work. I'm going to try to keep my review here quite short, because I have multiple things that I want to writer longer responses to / reflections upon on my Substack over probably the next few weeks. This book has caused me to reflect even more deeply and in much more specific ways about my particular role as an agent of the State in regards to housing standards, program provision, etc. These are not new thoughts, but they are honed here by sharp criticism and by realizations that this writing sparked.

Some notes on writing. I found myself wondering who the target audience for this book is. Is it housing organizers? That is the population that the author reports to represent. Yet, there is a distinctly academic vernacular in the book. Maybe this is because the book is in such heavy discourse with particularly Marxist ideas (and I do not consider this a bad thing!). I do not actually know enough about political theory to know, which I am a little embarrassed to admit. I know that I have not read the words bourgeois and proletariat in a book so much in a very, very, long time. I also know that the word ‘imbricated' appears twice in the text. I feel no insecurity about looking up words, I delight in opening up the dictionary app on my phone to find them. I get a little annoyed when I feel a cumbersome or overly-fancy word has been chosen where simpler language would communicate the idea more clearly. “Imbricated” seems to me a “tell me you've got a PhD without telling me” word. This is a petty thing to be annoyed by, and I recognize that.

I think why it occurs to me is that I want these ideas to be in discussion, and I wonder how in-discussion they will be if they are inaccessible. Maybe I'm not giving enough credit to folks. I had opened a dictionary app and surely other folks could. I don't know.

There is quite a lot of exploration around the idea of home. Privacy, the private space as obscuring violence, and the inefficiency of single family homes re: climate considerations. I admit I have a hard time envisioning some of the proposals because the commodification of necessities are so deeply established. I found myself balking at the idea of communal laundry, thinking back to using laundromats and how absolutely miserable this experience was, growing up having to use them. Broken machines. Not enough machines. Machines that were technically working but took two cycles to fully dry (and thus cost MORE money). Not having the freedom to do laundry whenever is convenient. You can see that much of these is because the owners of those laundries have no incentive to keep the machines at their best quality, especially when there is no competition among them (I do not believe competition breeds good quality, but still). So, halfway through writing out my notes on this I sort of had to pause and think a little more deeply.

Some of the proposals are very similar to housing as discussed in Ursula K Le Guinn's The Dispossessed. I sort of bumped on a lot in that. I'm going to reflect on this more before I write up deeper essays about them. But I am not comfortable giving up the extent of privacy that I think the author asks for a New Housing.

That said, I think many of the proposals operating in concert to other types of housing would be tremendous. This book is written from a UK perspective. In the US, the country has almost totally abandoned housing to the private sector. Landlords have no significant market force opposing them. The landlord never has an incentive to maintain high quality housing for low cost. That is in fact the opposite of their interest. I detest this. That publicly supported housing has abandoned the public housing model in favor of conversions to Project-Based Rental Assistance and Tenant-Based Rental Assistance (vouchers) is a great crime, and a heist from the landlord lobby. Now, meaningfully public housing is so limited and so restricted as to have no impact whatsoever to the landlord market. And vouchers are now in competition for the “limited” supply of housing available to the very poor. This means that localities are hesitant to apply even the most modest of standards to housing, because in most places it is perfectly legal to discriminate against voucher holders.

I can talk about this for a long, long, time. And I will write a separate piece about this (here's another thing: during COVID, the emergency housing response even included landlord incentives. Yes, sometimes thousands of dollars as a bonus to landlords willing to accept a voucher. Landlords being paid for the honor of being paid. That is fucking crazy!). It gets me worked up.

I like these parts of the book. There are parts I really bristle at (much of the family stuff is very hard for me to envision and I'm reflecting on that a bit more before I write more about it). I like that the book inspired questions in me. That is valuable.

All of that aside, it is firmly an “ask questions” book. I am relatively unconvinced that anything in it is even remotely implementable. The cultural changes are a matter not of decades but probably a century or more. I don't know. Much of it feels like pure fantasy, not practicality. That is a hard thing for me to deal with.

I did love the Conclusion. Pages 157-163 talks about ‘doing feeling' and the necessity of sitting with bad feelings and harnessing them towards social good. There is a particularly good passage on page 157 about anger, and how anger is “a way of expressing that the current state of things is unacceptable, and what [sic - I think this should be ‘that'?] we don't deserve what happens to us.” I was in a protest the other day and felt that I could not raise my voice, and I have been thinking about that a lot, because it really disturbed me. I don't get angry very easily. I got angry in a meeting at work last week, and it was a righteous anger. I liked that I had the reaction, because it was exactly as described here – it was a moral anger, not a violent anger. That is a meaningful difference.

I'll write more about this book on my Substack in the next week (maybe the next two weeks).

Okay, where to begin. I have a lot of love for David Lynch, and reading this (which I did in about an hour, it's quite short and spaced out), I heard his voice, which is very pleasant. I got a kick out of some of it.

I think my notes (not all of which are below like they usually are) are divided between three categories: advice to the artist, notes on Transcendental Meditation, and Lynch Trivia. I really enjoyed two of those things.

Lynch Trivia – there is quite a bit to love. The accidental discovery of BOB in Frank Silva standing next to a dresser. The evolution of INLAND EMPIRE. The trivia about Kubrick calling Eraserhead his favorite movie (what the fuck does it feel like to have one of the best to ever do it call your film his favorite? Must have been nuts.). Lots to love.

T. Meditation – listen. I don't find a lot of this all that much different from the hokey stuff that Rick Rubin was peddling in his book (which I detested). There are some differences. One, Lynch is notably less preachy. He is trying to convince you to give it a shot, and he goes on some really wacky tangents. Talking about Unified Field Theory and modern science catching up with ancient vedic science. None of that works for me. It gives me the willies. I'm allergic to it.

I don't believe that meditation can let you tap into some great unifying force that connects everything. I do believe that taking some time to chill out and let your emotions settle can be healthy. Much of this stuff is the same as radical acceptance and mindfulness. Those are two things I like. Do I like them because they've been sanitized of Eastern influences? That would be a troubling thought. I don't think so. I think I like them because they don't try to tell me that the world works in ways that my eyes cannot see and my hands cannot feel. I don't have to accept any mysticism with them. I don't know. This is not an uncomfortability I had to confront at all with Rubin because much of his writing seemed completely batshit to me. Perhaps I am a hypocrite – probably I am.

Here's the rub: if taking 20 minutes in the morning and the evening to calm down is helpful to you, and you want to call it meditation, or mindfulness, or anything else, that is none of my business. What do I care?

I've tried meditation a bit, including a few years ago after I read Ruth Ozeki's The Face: A Timecode, which I think about a lot. Lynch says that meditation lets you tap into a wellspring of bliss and inner happiness. I am not convinced there is such a wellspring inside of me. I don't know. I don't think most people I know would say that I'm the happiest person in the world. Not that I want to be thought of as depressed or constantly sad. It's just that happiness is something I experience in the moment with people and not in quiet times by myself. I need a lot of external validation for that. Perhaps that is an insecurity that Lynch would say rests in my inner self, and that meditating on that would help me. That is probably not so far from what a therapist would say. I'm a social worker, I know. But so it goes and all that.

Lynch a few times mentions published research. I can't help but notice at no point is this cited anywhere. That doesn't impress me. I would be less annoyed at this lack of citation if other things weren't cited in the back. There are also a few names mentioned as doctors or whatever and I wondered what I'd see if I googled these names and ultimately I don't think it's worth my time to go poking around because what do I care?

Advice to the artist – there is a lot of it to be had and I like it all. All of it involves truth, which is important to me. I would say it is a core value.

[Sound] is just another tool to ensure that you're following that original idea and being true to it.

Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don't let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea.

I don't necessarily love rotting bodies, but there's a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? I love looking at those things, just as much as I like to look at a close-up of some tree bark, or a small bug, or a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie. You get in close and the textures are wonderful.

Selected notes/highlights:

you.

being true to it

If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really.

be

show

Keep your own voice.

Stay true to yourself.

Lots of spoilers in here.Yet another Hemingway – and boy, is this one the most racist and sexist that I've read! You can hardly go a page without hearing how bad Cubans are in the story. Also quite a lot of violence, and I don't mean the gunplay that comes up. People are frequently getting smacked in the head. Very early on you get this:* p38 - But I felt bad about hitting him. You know how you feel when you hit a drunk.No, Hem, I can't say I do know how it feels to hit a drunk! There's also this ditty:* p144 - “What's the matter with your old woman?” asked Harry cheerfully. “Why don't you smack her?”   “You smack her,” Albert said. “I'd like to hear what she'd say. She's some old woman to talk.”Just some casual domestic violence for everyone to read about. There's a fair bit of that.Around page 40 or so I closed the book and flipped it around because I was sure I'd read, “the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, a good man who is forced...” But that is not what it says, it says Harry Morgan is an honest man. And those are two very different things. I can say quite easily that I'm honest. But good is another thing. Harry Morgan is not especially good. Apart from his racism and his criminality and everything else, he is double crossing and schemeful.I have to say, re-reading the back of the book, some of this stuff doesn't really occur to me. Maybe it's because there are several vignettes of other characters that appear to only vaguely connect to Harry's story.I often think about when Hem's books were published, knowing that his life ends with his suicide. It is clear that Hemingway was depressed his entire writerly career. This book, published in 1937, is full of self-hatred and contemplation of suicide.Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up.p238 - (TB: emphasis mine.)It's 24 years until Hemingway ends his life, but you cannot read this book and not see the evidence of thought. The paragraph above almost savors it.Similarly, he writes about the psychic pain of depression. Two different characters talk about how difficult the nights are. This is the exact same vocabulary as Jake, Hemingway's protagonist in [b:The Sun Also Rises 3876 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1509802323l/3876.SY75.jpg 589497], uses. Also, one of the vets in this story talks about being able “to take it” and uses these words over and over again. Then:“Because we are the desperate ones,” the man said. “The ones with nothing to lose. We are the completely brutalized ones. We're worse than the stuff the original Spartacus worked with. But it's tough to try and do anything with because we have been beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the only pride is in being able to take it. But we're not all like that. There are some of us that are going to hand it out.” (page 206, emphasis mine.)The same language is given to Harry's widow in the ending pages, as she is contemplating how to move on in her life. She has no idea. She mirrors both the nights line, and the taking it line through a few pages of her thoughts:I don't know what to do. It ain't like when he was away on trips. Then he was always coming back but now I got to go on the rest of my life. And I'm big now and ugly and old and he ain't here to tell me that I ain't. I'd have to hire a man to do it now I guess and then I wouldn't want him. So that's the way it goes. That's the way it goes alright. ... I wonder if he thought about me or what he thought about. ... Nothing is any good to wish. ... Nobody's going to tell me that and there ain't nothing now but to take it every day the way it comes and just get started doing something right away. But Jesus Christ, what do you do at nights is what I want to know. ... You just go dead inside and everything is easy.(Across pages 260-261 in various paragraphs, emphasis mine.)Hemingway clearly loves Marie's character. The love between Harry and her seems pure and mutual. They make love, they seem to adore each other. It is maybe the most mutual relationship that I've read in Hemingway so far. Maybe I need to re-read For Whom the Bell Tolls and Farewell to Arms (especially Farewell to Arms) before making that claim. But it feels mature and respectful.There's also the episode in Chapter 19, p176-177, where a writer character witnesses a woman cross a street in tears. He mentally ridicules her, calling her a “battleship” and a “big ox.” He instantly goes home and makes up a whole story for her to work into his book and make her a point of comparison to a “young, firm-breasted, full-lipped little Jewess” (great... yikes...). I read this in fair horror. Then Hemingway gives a sentence to identify this woman and the reader suddenly understands everything (if they didn't already) and you are made to understand just how cruel this little exercise is, and you fairly hate the writer. I think this is no mistake. I think this is Hemingway hating himself, and to an extent, his craft.All in all, I found this very readable. It wasn't until the final two chapters that this went form middling thing to something I really liked. It's all sort of an over-the-top man doing something sort of dumb because he isn't willing to just get a regular job (something which, thankfully, the man realizes after it all goes terribly wrong). But when these actions are given their consequences in the lives of others, and when Hemingway probes the experiences of others in the yachtyard, we get something really special. This is certainly not my favorite Hemingway, but there is some very raw stuff here that I think comes right from his soul and struggles.—Notes/Highlights:* p38 - But I felt bad about hitting him. You know how you feel when you hit a drunk. * TB: No, Hem, I can't say I do.* p62 - “God looks after rummies,” I told him and I took the thirty-eight off and stowed it down below.* p98 - He was mean talking now, all right, and since he was a boy he never had no pity for nobody.. But he never had no pity for himself either.* p107 - Well, I got something to think about now all right. Something to ddo and something to think about besides wondering what the hell's going to happen. Besides wondering what's going to happen to the whole damn thing. Once they put it up. Once you're playing for it. Once you got a chance. Instead of just watching it all go to hell.* p128 - “His goddamn face,” she thought. “Every time I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry.”* p144 - “What's the matter with your old woman?” asked Harry cheerfully. “Why don't you smack her?”   “You smack her,” Albert said. “I'd like to hear what she'd say. She's some old woman to talk.” * Little casual domestic violence for the vintage Hemingway fans.* p174 - I guess it was nuts all right. I guess I bit off too much more than I could chew. I shouldn't have tried it. I had it all right up to the end. Nobody'll know how it happened. I with I could do something about Marie. ... I wish I could let the old woman know what happened. I wonder what she'll do? I don't know. I guess I should have got a job in a filling station or something. I should have quit trying to go in boats.* p176-177 - TB: there is a great little scene here where a writer observes a woman crossing the street. He has an internal monologue where he talks about how ugly she is and calls her a battleship. He starts to use her in his writing immediately and constructs a whole little tale to explain this woman that he's seen crossing the street in tears. Hemingway does a great little smash cut at the end in the last paragraph identifying her and the reader immediately understands her tears and there is a new dimension to the mental cruelty of the writer. One of the phrases that Hem puts into this writer's mental scribblings is, “It was good. It was, it could be easily, terrific, and it was true.” Probably Hem's most central piece of writing advice is boiled down to, “write one true sentence.” This is how I know this little two page vignette is an artifact of self-hatred. There are a lot of artifacts of Hem's self-hatred in this book.* p185 - “I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too.” * TB: this whole paragraph is fantastic. More: “It's broken and gone. Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknosed love. You writer.” (TB: emphasis mine. Another artifact of Hem's self-hatred. It's no mistake he puts these words in the mouth of the writer's wife.)* p191 - “Well, it's all over, so why be bitter?” (TB: really great emotional stuff from a Hemingway male character... Fuck this guy.)* p195 - The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.* p202 - TB: there's an exchange with some vets in this area, I guess 201-203 and maybe a little past that. I feel like there is more than what's on the page. I expect I will re-read this someday. But here are parts that stand out to me: * “Let us in,” the bloody-faced one said. “Let in me and my old buddy.” He whispered into Richard Gordon's ear, “I don't have to hand it out. I can take it, see?” ... “I can take it” ... “It's a secret.” “Sometimes it feels good,” he said. “How do you feel about that?” * “First it was an art,” he said. “Then it became a pleasure. If things made me sick you'd make me sick, Red.” * TB: Clearly they're talking about pain, the context is basically taking punches. But it's got to be a lot more than that. I think it's Hem talking about being able to take emotional pain. That “Sometimes it feels good” seems to me like something a ruminator says. I'm a ruminator. Sometimes you imagine terribly dark things and you imagine people you love being very cruel or saying things they would never say. It doesn't feel good. But I understand exactly what he's saying. It feels terrible, but there's something to it. Like smashing in your tear ducts. There's something to it.* p206 Related to previous note - “Because we are the desperate ones,” the man said. “The ones with nothing to lose. We are the completely brutalized ones. We're worse than the stuff the original Spartacus worked with. But it's tough to try and do anything with because we have been beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the only pride is in being able to take it. But we're not all like that. There are some of us that are going to hand it out.” (TB: emphasis mine.)* p212 - As Richard Gordon watched him he felt a sick feeling in his chest. And he knew for the first time how a man feels when he looks at the man his wife is leaving him for.* p221 - What he was thinking as he watched him was not pleasant. It is a moral sin, he thought, a grave and deadly sin and a great cruelty, and while technically one's religion may permit the ultimate result, I cannot pardon myself. On the other hand, a surgeon cannot desist while operating for fear of hurting the patient. But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anaesthetic? If I had been a better man I would have let him beat me up. It would have been better for him. (TB: emphasis mine.)* p225 - “A man,” Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. “One man alone ain't got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance.” He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all his life to learn it.* p229 - TB: line here about a side-character being impotent. Interesting. Hem seems to have a lot of impotent or rumored-impotent characters (do I only think this because I just re-read Sun Also Rises? Maybe). It's relatively interesting given all his affairs and all his characters' affairs and the extreme heartbreak in so many of his works.* p230 - “Didn't you ever notice any difference in nights?” (TB: character talking about how during the day it's hard enough but at night it's another matter. Two characters in this book have this thought and it's the same thought that Jake in Sun Also Rises returns to. Things are harder at night. A lot harder.)* Chapter 24, from page 227 to 247, has vignettes of other characters throughout the yachtyard. Just incredible. I loved all of them. * p238 - Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. (TB: emphasis mine.)* p260 - I don't know what to do. It ain't like when he was away on trips. Then he was always coming back but now I got to go on the rest of my life. And I'm big now and ugly and old and he ain't here to tell me that I ain't. I'd have to hire a man to do it now I guess and then I wouldn't want him. So that's the way it goes. That's the way it goes alright. ... I wonder if he thought about me or what he thought about. ... Nothing is any good to wish. ... Nobody's going to tell me that and there ain't nothing now but to take it every day the way it comes and just get started doing something right away. But Jesus Christ, what do you do at nights is what I want to know. ... You just go dead inside and everything is easy. * TB: emphasis mine. These are from Harry's wife from pages 260 to 261 across several paragraphs of thought.

I have heard a lot about this book. Bummed that I felt an ethical panic that resulted in me leaving my apartment in the middle of the day, unprompted, a week or two ago to go to the book store and buy it.It's short and readable. The question is: is anyone that's likely to pick up a book called “On Tyranny” going to make a decision to adjust their lives to ingest its lessons? I don't know. This is the same fundamental question facing all of these books, from Albright's [b:Fascism: A Warning 35230469 Fascism A Warning Madeleine K. Albright https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513524068l/35230469.SY75.jpg 56577028] to something as basic as Goodwin's [b:Leadership: In Turbulent Times 38657386 Leadership In Turbulent Times Doris Kearns Goodwin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1519455513l/38657386.SY75.jpg 60268060]. Anything that promotes a ‘patriotic' value or thing that yearns for us to not passively accept the fall of a great experiment is subjected to a purity test. But I will try to put the crushing cynicism I'm feeling right now aside to think more about this book. I'm trying to do that because I have watched the same ten-minute video of Obama talking about cynicism periodically for the past, what, maybe ten years? (Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxuwazaXOMg). I really do believe that cynicism is a chronic condition that can wrap around your eyes and blind you and then proceed to your heart and hollow it out.The lessons are straightforward. I appreciate the historical element to them. It is one thing to know that everything happening right now has a direct analog in the fall of the Wiemar Republic and rise of Hitler and other fascistic leaders to power. It is another to read it spelled out succinctly and bluntly. I have personally witnessed in my work steps taken that mirror those that occurred back then. It is alarming, and is causing me a sort of crisis of confidence. I have shared with people I work with, and repeated to myself, that we have to remain calm, mindful, and carefully navigate. We cannot let ourselves panic and be pushed back into nothing. That's the goal of all this chaos.p54-55 - “In fact [Churchill] himself helped the British to define themselves as a proud people who would calmly resist evil. Other politicians would have found support in British public opinion to end the war. Churchill instead resisted, inspired, and won. ... Churchill did what others had not done. Rather than concede in advance, he forced Hitler to change his plans.” (emphasis mine, -TB)Back in November, a thing I worked on was quietly shuttered. The phrase, “strategic retreat” was used. It pissed me off something terrible. It was the first time I was majorly angry in my job. There is no strategic retreat. If ground is ceded it must be fought back and time is long and suffering in that time is the responsibility of those who refused to even attempt to hold back the tide. Snyder talks about this a lot in this book: anticipatory compliance. Changing things in an attempt to detract attention, giving up ground to hide or to not attract attention. I understand the want for this, but is there an imagining that by doing this, you are not simply capitulating to the pressure of a despot? I hate that I see people lying to themselves that, if we can just be very quiet and make it through a few years of stress, we can bring all of this back out of a box someday and pick up where we left off.That is not how this works. If you put this in a box, it will be lost. You cannot set your values down. If you hide them, they will suffocate and die within you. They need nurturing and they need exercise.p124 - “If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else's orders.”At work these past few weeks, I have heard our current situation described as a “swinging pendulum” and I think this is a manifestation of learned helplessness. I do not believe there is a pendulum. I think there is a clash between good and evil. The pendulum, as they describe it, are bulges in the fight. If you take for granted that the fight is a pendulum and will swing back as a matter of physics, you are ceding the fight.A quote that people go to, that I hear a lot, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Yet, I so often hear this in a capitulating or passive framing. As if we can simply accept that things will get better. This is something of what Snyder calls the politics of inevitability. King never meant for this statement to be a release from our responsibility to our fellows and ourselves to be the ones forcing the bend. The arc only bends because pressure is exerted upon it. We cannot be passive.I am thinking about this every day. Because I do not know exactly where my role is. How can I use what exceedingly little skill that I have to make any meaningful difference? Is my only role really as someone who might be able to pump breaks or mitigate harm? I don't feel very good about that. I want to do something.Snyder does not demand that we all take to the streets. In some ways, the resistance he imagines is small and obtainable (lesson 12, make eye contact and small talk). In discussion the other day, someone I was speaking to said they think this will continue until something gets people in the street, a sort of general strike. I am skeptical that such a thing is possible in this country. I don't think we have the in-the-streets culture of a country like France or others. Much of our populace is completely captured either in this cult of personality or in crushing poverty, and often both.Still, I think that we all have some role to play. I think identifying that role is non-trivial. I think this book is good reading for those who want to be able to start identifying even small things they can do in their lives to begin.—Notes/highlights:* p35 - You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them.* p37 - “We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocer's slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Even so, the real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place. (Snyder quoting [a:Václav Havel 71441 Václav Havel https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1300059716p2/71441.jpg].)”* p54-55 - In fact [Churchill] himself helped the British to define themselves as a proud people who would calmly resist evil. Other politicians would have found support in British public opinion to end the war. Churchill instead resisted, inspired, and won. ... Churchill did what others had not done. Rather than concede in advance, he forced Hitler to change his plans.” (emphasis mine, -TB)* p66 - You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. The renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.* p68 - The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims a president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your retribution.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that the transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Fuhrer.” * Connection to my clinical deprogramming thing.* p71 - [Fascists] used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.* p79- (TB: Snyder is making an analogy between publishing/sharing falsehoods and our behavior driving cars.) We know that the damage will be mutual. We protect the other person without seeing him, dozens of time every day. (TB: reminds me a lot of [a:Erving Goffman 149 Erving Goffman https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1210309065p2/149.jpg]'s facework theory, which was a sociological thing on how people engage with one another with a concerted effort to protect not only their face (reputation, impression) and that of those around them. Has fascinated me since I read about it in the UIC stacks in 2013.)* p81 - “Make eye contact and small talk.” (Lesson 12), then p32: “You might not be sure, today or tomorrow, who feels threatened in the United States. But if you affirm everyone, you can be sure that certain people will feel better.”* p84 - Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets.* p120 - We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called “liquid evil.” Once inevitability was taken for granted, criticism indeed became slippery. What appeared to be critical analysis often assumed that the status quo could not actually change, and thereby indirectly reinforced it.* p124 - If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else's orders. * TB: I have seen our current situation described as a “swinging pendulum” and I think this is a manifestation of learned helplessness. I do not believe there is a pendulum. I think there is a clash between good and evil. The pendulum, as they describe it, are bulges in the fight. If you take for granted that the fight is a pendulum and will swing back as a matter of physics, you are ceding the fight.* p126: “If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.”

Odd double feature with my other review/finished book today, [b:On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century 33917107 On Tyranny Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century Timothy Snyder https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1484763736l/33917107.SY75.jpg 54882949] (link).I started this book a month or two ago waiting for some friends to get to dinner, and when they got there I ended up drawing maps of processes and systems that take place in homeless Continuums of Care all over the opening pages. So in some ways, the book is semi-un-loanable because it looks like a lunatic has had a time with it. In others, if you had any of the words to go along with it, you could get a pretty good sense of coordinated entry systems, prioritization, funding flow, and more. But mostly you'd just get a lot of bad sketching. (And I'm happy to loan it out anyway.)I have little in the way of nuanced thought about it. The 15 myths are quite well structured and Mary does a tremendous job of providing the historical angle, her personal practice experience, and practical policy thoughts on the myths. It is non-technical and straightforward without being overly simple. This is somewhat because homelessness is not a difficult moral problem if you have a heart. It is mostly because Mary has spent decades working on this cause and knows what she is talking about.I have been in the field for a little while and arguably have a policy job in homelessness. I think this book will be my go-to from now on when people want a ground-level introduction of why the systems are as they are in this country and the myths that go along with them. Most of these myths I have known and have worked against. Some of them I believed myself, and really value the background that Mary provides (that one would be Myth 4, that Ronald Reagan created modern homelessness – though he did exacerbate it, as we'll see shortly).It also gave me a chance to bust out my absolute disdain for Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan again. Clinton hollowed out and almost totally destroyed the social safety net with PRWORA, but I had no idea he outright offered the destruction of HUD:“Democratic support for the federal government's central role in providing affordable housing had diminished so thoroughly that, early on in negotiations to ‘reform' welfare, to avoid the possibility of any outright veto being overridden, Clinton offered House Speaker Newt Gingrich the wholesale dismantling of the Department of Housing and Urban Development—the realization of a decades-long Republican dream.”(page 102)Hey Bill, what the fuck?Reagan gets a lot of well deserved scorn. Here's one that I didn't quite know all of:“After famously not recognizing his own HUD secretary at a meeting of urban mayors (Samuel Pierce was Black), Reagan slashed HUD expenditures—both for public housing complexes and portable Section 8 vouchers—from $26 billion to $8 billion. It's impossible to overstate the significance of this carnage. If you are looking for the single, most significant factor that transformed US homelessness from a cyclical ebb-and-flow to a permanent fixture on the American landscape, this is it.”(page 88)Very frustrating that these are the folks in leadership positions. And that was back then. Take a look at who is in power now. You'd better be as worried as I am. And I know what to worry about, so please take my word for it.I really loved the section on international perspectives on affordable housing, particular the Finnish models. I love co-ops! I wish we better supported them in homelessness programming. I think it would be tremendous if some of our first-time homebuyer programs had options to help people purchase property in a co-op fashion and maintain affordability permanently.But again, relatively few thoughts on this. It is very basic and a great entryway into this area. I'd recommend it to folks looking to learn the high-level stuff.Notes/highlights:* p26, quoting A. Lincoln - “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”* p31 - “The most destructive aspects of the Calvinist belief system have endured and serve most importantly to emotionally distance the domiciled from the visibly impoverished–preventing us from fully investing in humane solutions proven to work.”* p40 - “In March 1990, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it would begin conducting a yearly national census of homeless people—a single-point-in-time numeration of Americans who were visibly homeless. The following morning, homeless activist Mitch Snyder—leader of Washington DC's largest shelter, ..., responded by dumping a massive load of sand on a bridge, preventing many Virginia commuters from entering DC. Once the two-ton dump trunk [sic] had emptied its load, Snyder conveyed this simple but enduring explanation: “It is easier to count grains of sand than homeless people in America.”“* p88 - “After famously not recognizing his own HUD secretary at a meeting of urban mayors (Samuel Pierce was Black), Reagan slashed HUD expenditures—both for public housing complexes and portable Section 8 vouchers—from $26 billion to $8 billion. It's impossible to overstate the significance of this carnage. If you are looking for the single, most significant factor that transformed US homelessness from a cyclical ebb-and-flow to a permanent fixture on the American landscape, this is it.”* p102 - “Democratic support for the federal government's central role in providing affordable housing had diminished so thoroughly that, early on in negotiations to ‘reform' welfare, to avoid the possibility of any outright veto being overridden, Clinton offered House Speaker Newt Gingrich the wholesale dismantling of the Department of Housing and Urban Development—the realization of a decades-long Republican dream.” (TB: Hey Bill, go fuck yourself. Idiot.)* p109 - “[Broken window theory] origins can be traced to a now infamous 1982 Atlantic article by George Kelling and James Wilson, which badly twisted a 1969 research paper by Stanford Universities Philip Zimbardo, by concluding, “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” Kelling and wilson's enduring malignant conclusion: law enforcement should come down hard on small acts of disorder or they will metastasize into something far bigger.” * TB: Zimbardo! I had no idea he was the origin of Broken Window. You may know him from the Stanford Prison Experiment.* p112 - “For the first time ever, median rent in the fifty most populous metro areas exceeded $2,000. Put simply, “In no state, metropolitan area or county in the US can a worker earning the federal or prevailing state or local minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom rental home by working a standard 40-hour work week.” More than 40 percent of US workers cannot afford even a one-bedroom fair-market rental with one full-time job.”* p125-128 or thereabouts, discussion on the point-in-time counts. Good discussion! Huge undercount, bad at counting rural populations, etc.* p136 - start of section on Housing First, an evidence-based best practice that you will likely see more or less scuttled by the second Trump administration for no good reason.* p163-172 - great section on international perspectives on affordable housing, including co-ops!!

I picked this up recently because I wanted to read this before watching Luca's adaptation with Daniel Craig. Also because I have been reading a lot of [a:Cormac McCarthy 4178 Cormac McCarthy https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1611995562p2/4178.jpg] and [a:Ernest Hemingway 1455 Ernest Hemingway https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1654446435p2/1455.jpg] over the past year or so but am desperately sick of reading straight relationships and reading [b:Love, Leda 63577939 Love, Leda Mark Hyatt https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1669140290l/63577939.SY75.jpg 99499818] made me yearn to read more gay writing.I am not sure that was a thing much rewarded with this. Burroughs is an odd character (most famous, probably, for shooting and killing his second wife with in a drunken “William Tell” act, I guess), referring to himself as a ‘homosexual' and being a big fringe politically, or so it seems. Truth be told I know nothing about him other than, except a brief look at his Wikipedia page that I took after finishing this book, trying to see if the author was gay or not. I recognize the differences of time and all of that. Queer, my understanding written in the 50's but published in 1985, is from a different time. Burroughs grew and developed in a different time. But I certainly see no love for the idea of being gay. Everything is very cold.I've also learned that this book is a semi-follow-up to [b:Junky 23940 Junky William S. Burroughs https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386920565l/23940.SY75.jpg 24861], which I haven't read. It seems clear that this is vaguely autobiographical. Burroughs does himself no favors. At the start of the book, I find myself relating to Lee very much. He is anxious and insecure, but also putting on a show. He is attentive, and presses his eyes on those he watches. Burroughs does not write this pleasantly: “Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmtic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face.” (p23.).Lee is also highly sensitive to even the slightest of slights. There is a lot going on in his head, though the writing doesn't delve too far into it. Page 32-33: “In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull toward Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes.”That use of strange, biological-clinical language again. Desire and fantasy are ectoplasmic and amoeboid. You don't feel any love, here. Just a sort of animal lust. Of course lust happens all the time, and Lee is eyeballing boys left and right the entire book. I struggle to understand Lee because his desire for Allerton is so all-encompassing but at no point does he display or evidence thoughts of love for him.About midway through, Lee starts trying to basically buy Allerton's time. He is really pressuring his presence on him in a way that clearly makes Allerton uncomfortable. When Allerton says he must work, Lee experiences physical pain: “Now Allerton had abruptly shut off contact, and Lee felt a physical pain, as though a part of himself tentatively stretched out towards the other had been severed, and he was looking at the bleeding stump in shock and disbelief.” (p50.) His solution is to offer to pay Allerton not to work. Lee seems immune to the social discomfort of this, and when it is refused he goes home and lays on his bed and cries. A few pages later he is accompanying Allerton to get his camera back from a pawn shop and is happy to spend out money to get this thing for Allerton. He does not understand why Allerton is so cold to him, does not understand that his actions are not being understood as loving or even affectionate. Lee says to himself: “I liked him and I wanted him to like me,” Lee thought. “I wasn't trying to buy anything.” (p53). I understand trying to find some way to express a feeling for someone, I really do. But this is a profound misunderstanding of people, of himself, from Lee. He starts panicking and desiring to leave the country, to travel somewhere else. Now there is a feeling that I know well.I guess this is turning more into a summary and less into a review. It's because I really do not understand Lee's character at all. I felt kinship and understanding to him at the start of the novel, but became more and more alienated the whole way through. To points of complete disgust. There's a line where, discussing Yage and telepathy, he tells Allerton that he could change anything about him he didn't like. How do you say that to someone you love? If you believe that, you don't love them. And so, of course, Lee is obsessed with Allerton and lusting for him, but I don't believe there is a real love there.The ending pretty well perplexed me. It quite grinds to a halt.Burroughs has a lot of interest to say in the Appendix, in previous editions this was his original introduction. I'm not sure what to make out of it. I understand parts. On page 131 he says, “I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can't read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape, and by which one feels immediately threatened, years after the events recorded—painful to an extent I find it difficult to read, let alone to write about. Every word and gesture sets the teeth on edge.” That I can relate to.Very similarly on page 135: “I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”Overall I find this a very odd and unpleasant book. Lee is a lost person, who I think does not know quite how to love and I think it's possible the contexts of gay life at the time has made it impossible for him. It's hard to say without knowing the character's backstory from Junky, though I'm skeptical it is relevant. This is a pretty stark contrast from writers like Christopher Isherwood which well-capture love, in my opinion, even if it is often tragic.I'm not sure I'll read more Burroughs. But I'm glad, I guess, to read a character that I think is more messed up than I am, at least.Highlights/notes:* p2 - What Lee looked for in any relationship was the feel of contact.* p7-8 - Actually, Moor's brush-off was calculated to inflict the maximum hurt possible under the circumstances. It put Lee in the position of a detestably insistent queer, too stupid and insensitive to realize that his attentions were not wanted, forcing Moor to the distasteful necessity of drawing a diagram.* p15 - The result was ghastly.   As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wretched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child's smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and place, mutilated and hopeless.* p23 - Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmtic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down over the ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs. His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips.* p24-25 - [Allerton] was forced to ask himself: “What does he want from me?” It did not occur to him that Lee was queer, as he associated queerness with at least some degree of overt effeminacy. Allerton was intelligent and surprisingly perceptive for a person so self-centered, but his experience was limited. He decided finally that Lee valued him as an audience.* p32-33 - In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull toward Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes.* p45 - (Baked Alaska and Lee's dish idea.)* p50- “How about dinner tonight?” asked Lee. Allerton said, “No, I think I'll work tonight.” Lee was depressed and shattered. The warmth and laughter of Saturday night was lost, and he did not know why. In any relation of love or friendship, Lee attempted to establish contact on the non-verbal level of intuition, a silent exchange of thought and feeling. Now Allerton had abruptly shut off contact, and Lee felt a physical pain, as though a part of himself tentatively stretched out towards the other had been severed, and he was looking at the bleeding stump in shock and disbelief.* p50 - (TB: around this area, Lee begins to really press on Allerton. He starts offering him money to spend time with him, but it's not phrased like that. He says things like, “I subsidize non-production. I will pay you twenty pesos not to work tonight.” He is surprised and hurt when Allerton rejects this. It doesn't stop him from repeating it a few times later.)* p51 - He got up and walked out. He walked slowlly. Several times he leaned on a tree, looking at the ground as if his stomach hurt. Inside his apartment he took off his coat and shoes, sat down on the bed. His throat began to ache, moisture hit his eyes, and he fell across the bed, sobbing convulsively. He pulled his knees up and covered his face with hands, the fists clenched. Towards morning he turned on his back and stretched out. The sobs stopped, and his face relaxed in the morning light.* p52-53 - He forced himself to look at the facts. Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee's affection irritated him. ... [Lee] had no close friends. He disliked definite appointments. He did not like to feel that anybody expected anything from him.. He wanted, so far as possible, to live without external pressure. Allerton resented Lee's action in paying to recover the camera. ... “I liked him and I wanted him to like me,” Lee thought. “I wasn't trying to buy anything.”   “I have to leave town,” he decided. “Go somewhere. Panama, South America.” ... A feeling of cold desolation came over him at the thought of arriving in another country, far away from Allerton.* p56-60 – (TB: an extended “routine” from Lee, initially to Allerton and his chess partner and implied lover, Mary, and concluded after they have left. Lee is telling stories and it isn't clear to me if he is sharing memories of real things or just making things up. It is basically irrelevant as the ‘routine' on Corn Hole Gus's Used Slave Lot - a fantasy(?) of Lee taking a slave boy and seeking to trade him in for a pure Beduin. These are children, by the way. In the appendix/original introduction by Burroughs, he describes these as flights of fancy, routines, Lee settling into his writing. Okay.)* p65 - (TB: Lee is so pining for any attention from Allerton that he contemplates buying a stake in the bar where Allerton keeps a tab, so that the man could not ignore him. Awful.)* p72 - (TB: At a point in the story where Lee and Allerton are more or less traveling outside of Mexico by themselves, Lee sets up a contract where Allerton will sleep with him twice a week. This feels abhorrent and unreal. Why would Lee want this if he loves Allerton? Doesn't he want there to be some warmth? At no point does Allerton ever express anything but disgust for Lee. Anyway, on page 72 Lee shows him where to buy sex from women where they're at, and encourages him. I really don't understand Lee at all. Isn't he haunted by that thought? It's so bizarre.)* p79 - [Lee] had an arm around Gene's shoulders. They were both wearing swimming strunks. The sea was glassy. He saw a fish rise in a swirl of water. He lay down with his head in Allerton's lap. He felt peaceful and happy. He had never felt that way in his life, except maybe as a young child. He couldn't remember. The bitter shocks of his childhood had blacked out memory of happy times.* p80 - “While we are in Ecuador we must score for Yage,” Lee said. “Think of it: thought control. Take anyone apart and rebuild to your taste. Anything about somebody bugs you, you say, ‘Yage! I want that routine took clear out of his mind.' I could think of a few changes I might make in you, doll.” He looked at Allerton and licked his lips. “You'd be so much nicer after a few alterations. You're nice now, of course, but you do have those irritating little peculiarities. I mean, you won't do exactly what I want you to do all the time.” (TB: Holy shit, can you imagine someone saying this to you? This is insane! How can you think that way about someone?)* p113 - I have dreamed many times I was back in Mexico City, talking to Art or Allerton's best friend, Johnny White, and asking where he was. Dream about Allerton continually. Usually we are on good terms, but sometimes he is inexplicably hostile, and when I ask why, what is the matter, his answer is muffled. I never find out why. (TB: this is from the last chapter, 2 years after the events of the book, and notably the writing has changed from third-person to first-person. Anyway, I recognize these dreams. Have had them. But for Lee to think that hostility from Allerton could be inexplicable demonstrates no insight.)Appendix, Burroughs's original introduction:* p131: “I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can't read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape, and by whicih one feels immediately threatened, years after the events recorded—painful to an extent I find it difficult to read, let alone to write about. Every word and gesture sets the teeth on edge.” * p135 - I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

Borrowed from a friend. Aggressively not for me, I'm afraid.

I picked this up, brand new and in its shining jacket, from a little free library months and months ago. I read Station Eleven and thought it was pretty good (I did not love the TV series). I quite enjoyed this, probably more than I did Station Eleven, even. Despite that, I have few thoughts.

I've seen it described as “quiet” science fiction. Fitting. The story is quiet, not exactly contemplative but patient. That is not to say slow: I found it paced very well. In fact, despite a rotating setting and cast of characters, each character feels separate and well formed. That is impressive. This helps the pacing a lot, I think, because we never get bored of anyone.

I don't think it tries to hide anything or obscure itself. It is very pleasant to read and when the action comes it is not the world ending whatever of other books, it feels more personal. I like that.

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that ti's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

Thanks to my friend Erin for loaning me this book!Standard disclaimer about poetry: I don't know anything about it and am rating based on my response.I liked these! Not as much as I did [b:The Sun and Her Flowers 35606560 The Sun and Her Flowers Rupi Kaur https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1499791446l/35606560.SY75.jpg 57044162], but still. I thought the poems dealing with themes of trust, belief, self-compassion, and acceptance were my favorites (list of page numbers at end). There are several that speak to Kaur's experience as an immigrant, particularly as a child. While I don't relate to the immigrant experience, a lot of them felt familial to growing up very poor. I related to those aspects, both the experiences of them and the sensitivies and anxieties the experiences leave you with. Several I really did not quite get / they did not speak to me at all. That's okay. I bumped on a few. That's okay too!I thought the introduction(?) of poems on productivity and anxiety around success or putting out an image of success/competency was really interesting. I don't remember those from Sun & Her Flowers. I appreciated the inclusion and liked these, particularly the ones around kind of acting a certain way or working your way to happiness (like p105).Favorites (page numbers): 22, 27, 35, 42, 65, 97, 105, 119, 120, 153, 156.

I picked this up from the bookstore after loving [b:Love, Leda 63577939 Love, Leda Mark Hyatt https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1669140290l/63577939.SY75.jpg 99499818] so much. I have been trying to read a little more poetry. Like my recent review for Rupi Kaur's [b:The Sun and Her Flowers 35606560 The Sun and Her Flowers Rupi Kaur https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1499791446l/35606560.SY75.jpg 57044162], I have no idea how to review poetry. I don't know what good poetry looks like or what bad poetry looks like. All I know is that sometimes words are strung together and they give me an emotional reaction. So that's what I'm rating this collection on.I liked them! Some are depressed, some are lovesick, some are funny, some are farcical. In some, you can imagine the poet sitting at a typewriter and hitting his head against it trying to make things come out. I can understand that, at least to an extent. None of them hit me in any way comparable to how Love, Leda, did. They are not really personal (to me), but they're nice to read.It was lovely to read poetry written by a man about a man in a romantic or yearning way. I am pretty sure I've never had that experience before (at least, not knowingly). You do certainly feel the 60's England of it all. Some of the yearning is written in very rigid gender roles and that is a bummer. Still, there is an emotional thing that it sort of communicates. It comes across most starkly in “‘Let Him Go In My Mind'”, “Oral Pictures of Love” and “True Homosexual Love” (and the age certainly in the title of that one). In some of these, words like man and girl are juxtaposed in a transferencial (cannot believe I just wrote that sentence, what a snob I sound like). In some, Hyatt writes about being a wife or a woman to the object of the poem.It's a pretty interesting way of writing, to read in 2025. You wonder what is poetic license, the author communicating the ideas that go along with those concepts, and what is just a reflection of the author's understanding of gender constructs at that time. Still, if you're willing to empathize with the words, I think you can understand them. Two of those were some of my favorites (favs in a table below).Then again, another one of my favorites is this little ditty:when cornflakes fart boy how I singAnother one that gave me a big chuckle:“I LOVE MY ARSE TO BE SUCKED”——————————I love my arse to be suckedit makes me come awfully niceand I stretch the body open..................................................................you and today's fixed fantasiesreport you are bored by shitthat's because you're fucking weird..................................................................you write ugly poems to deathand you are a whore for wordsyou're a lovely tragedy..................................................................balls on your stupid wordshave games with your bloodless wifeand let imagination go..................................................................now if you really careand honestly understandthen gently dieNow, I have absolutely no idea what that is saying (other than the first two lines, I guess). But it is hilarious. I haven't read much poetry, but what I have didn't ever have the words “you're” and “fucking” and “weird” in that order. Gave me a good chuckle.It's impressive and admirable. Hyatt was illiterate until adulthood and worked with others to get his writing together. I think that is fascinating. He had a hard life, and it ended badly. But I am glad that he gave us these things. It is sad that they were not widely available for generations and only have been rediscovered and put out in the last year. Still, I very much appreciate being able to read these and read about queer experiences over time. Sometimes, despite all my reading and schooling and all of that, it feels like we tumbled out into the world over the last 30 years. It feels like so much of our literature deals with AIDS and oppression that having stuff about regular old love and heartbreak and cornflakes is rare. That's probably just a side-effect of me being so poorly read. I'm glad at least that I'm reading more of this.Some other favorites that I haven't mentioned in the review so far:- Daggers, p74- Poem. p86- Dear Friend Go Away, Please, p106-He is a Rose, p155-Queers, p35-“Two queers live on a hill”, p80

I liked it! Reading about the South is always a little fascinating. The regionality of this country is at times hard to reconcile, especially today with this vague monoculture and supposed shrunken world. I did not grow up in The South, but I grew up in a place that was quite insistent it was Southern, and would you please remember that, everything in their character insisted.

A few times in the Southern notes, Didion talks about free flag decals. Impossible not to think of Prine's Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore an incredible song as applicable in the late 60's as it was in 2002 and 2025. I say 2002 because I remember after 9/11 and the years following when the local newspaper would come with full page inserts: one side an American flag, the other at times a tearful eagle. These were all over the place. You couldn't pass a busted up mobile home or hole-roofed house without seeing them in the windows.

So, while Didion is trekking around the South in the 60's, it sure does feel like the Southern region of the state I grew up in. Similar people, maybe with some proclivities a little dampened. Same fondness for the high school gymnasium and the one restaurant in town. There is a lot that I see familiar, anyway.

The short section of Western notes is quite different. I don't relate to the San Francisco or Sacramento of it all, though it is lovely writing.

Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.

Southern

Wow! Another certified Vonnegut classic. I have yet to read one that I haven't liked. When I was debating what book to read next (choices were this and [b:South and West: From a Notebook 32842454 South and West From a Notebook Joan Didion https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611917690l/32842454.SX50.jpg 53445066] by Didion), unanimous support for this across two Discord servers. One friend said this is their all time favorite Vonnegut.Vonnegut is one of my all time favorite authors. I read Slaughterhouse-Five once a year (very white-bread, I know, sue me), and I have the big Library of America set that I'm working through. I love his voice and his pleading for us to be better. To listen to our better angels. [b:Slaughterhouse-Five 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut Jr. https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440319389l/4981.SY75.jpg 1683562] comes nearly ten years after this work, but there is a lot of it in here.“An eighty-eight was set up in it, and the gun was manned by boys about fifteen or sixteen years old. There was a success story for Heinz's late wife—boys that young, and yet with men's uniforms and a fully-armed death trap all their own.”Hard not to think about Slaughterhouse-Five, the Children's Crusade.There's also just a lot about what Vonnegut says right up front as the moral: be careful what you pretend to be, because that's what you become. Act as if ye have faith, and faith shall be given to ye. Put it another way, Leo McGarry says on the West Wing, fake it til ya make it. It's the flip side of that same coin. I love it.It is of course frustratingly prescient because we humans make the same mistakes on a schedule that'd make a stationmaster jealous.Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in mose cases.The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information—That is how the Nazi's took a functioning republic into one of the deadliest totalitarian regimes in history. It took about 53 for Hitler to end democracy in the Weimar Republic, apparently. He gained power in January 1933. Dachau opened in March.The willful filing off of gear teeth. A valuation of ignorance. A valuation of national pride over all else. A revulsion to immigration, civil liberties, hope, and love.It is hard to read this book and not feel a little depressed about where we are in 2025, 64 years later. As hard as it is, I basically refuse to be a pessimist. I don't know how or why I have that resistance in me. But I still believe that this world can be better today than it was yesterday, and tomorrow, today, and so on. Not all better, and some days maybe not net-better. But I think and hope it is a cumulative thing. And if I don't believe that, then I don't know what the point of it is. So, I will choose to believe it.

I think this is my favorite book I've read in a book club. I am afraid to share what I love so much about it. But I see myself in this book in a way I never have so completely. Not all of Leda is me, but so much is that it felt fragile and scary to read at times. Sometimes it was a loving familiarity, or even a pleading with him to do something different. My copy is riddled with sticky tabs sometimes two to a page and often every other page so that it looks like the centrepiece of a research project. I have filled the margins with pencil scratchings. I have no idea if I could ever describe my feelings for it.

I have a vague memory that a high school teacher assigned this out of one of those big Literature textbooks. Maybe the one with the teal spine and black cover. I remember loathing it and finding it dreadfully boring. I think a lot of the texts assigned in high school literature classes are stupid things to assign people with very little life experience. And I say that as someone who adored The Great Gatsby and would only find in later years just how deeply parts of it spoke to me. The Old Man and the Sea did not speak to me in high school, because the parts of my spirit that it could speak to were still under construction and had yet to grow ears.

I know that Hem did not love ideas of theme or symbolism in his stories and routinely mocked critics for thinking about them. In a letter to Bernard Berenson he wrote:

Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

“Take a rest, small bird” he said. “Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.”

It is silly not to hope, he thought. Besides, I believe it is a sin. Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people. But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it.

* p50 - That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly.
* p55 - “Take a good rest, small bird,” he said. “Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.”
* p60-61 - The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.
* p64
* There are three things that are brothers: the fish and my two hands. It must uncramp. It is unworthy of it to be cramped.
* I wish I could show him what sort of man I am. But then he would see the cramped hand. Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so. I wish I was the fish, he thought, with everything he has against only my will and my intelligence.
* He was comfortable but suffering, although he did not admit the suffering at all.
* p66 - “I told the boy I was a strange old man,” he said. “Now is when I must prove it.” ¶ The thousand times he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
* The page made me think of Hamlet. “...to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them...” Hamlet holds a special place in my heart and I suppose I see it in many things.
* p88 - I must hold his pain where it is, he thought. Mine does not matter. I can control mine. But his pain could drive him mad. (TB: were it so easy.)
* p103 - “But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
* p104-105 - It is silly not to hope, he thought. Besides I believe it is a sin. Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it. ¶ I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people. But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it.
* p110
* “I wish it were a dream and that I had never hooked him. I'm sorry about it, fish. It makes everything wrong.” (TB: feeling like you've ruined something in the seeking of it or the attainment of it, or of its vision, anyway.)
* Now is not the time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
* p115 - What will you do now if they come in the night? What can you do? ¶ “Fight them,” he said. “I'll fight them until I die.”
* p117 - I hope I do not have to fight again, he thought. I hope so much I do not have to fight again.

I have been habitually in the book store on Saturdays around 10 or 11am for no good reason since getting back into town. I have a 4x4 IKEA KALLAX shelf at home stuffed with unread books and a pile of books on my coffee table and on my record player just staring at me. Yet, I keep going to the store. Anyway, I saw this sitting on the new arrivals table and had a skim of the inner jacket and a random page and thought, well, fuck it. Why not.

My first read of the characters was often one of really unfortunate familiarity, or at least empathy. Thankfully, that familiarity ends at pretty abrupt points in each narrative. There is a place in each where the author takes the commonality of emotional experience and the emotions and thoughts that rejection unsettles within you and stretches them far, far, across the horizon. To the point of almost total absurdity. This makes them feel a little safer to read because you can sit there and feel much better about yourself and point and say, “hey! I'm doing better than I thought!” Then of course the next story starts and you have to see characters doing things you do or think and start chewing your lip again, hoping they too will pass beyond the veil of reasonable personhood.

Not all of the stories were relatable (thankfully). “Our Dope Future” features a narrator speaking via probably-reddit post. The “OP” features no insight whatsoever and describes the absolute worst behavior you can imagine away as being considerate and kind and empowering and blah blah blah. It's a short story that feels ridiculous and stupid, until you think about it for a few minutes and know that if you went to reddit or twitter you would see people just like this and that is pretty unsettling.

Then there's “Main Character” which does have some relatable lines and things that threw me back into the past (mIRC lol, SomethingAwful). The ‘protagonist' of this story recedes so far into the internet that they start to question their sense of self. They come to believe or want to believe that they are literally nothing, nobody. There is something there. I'm realizing I have a habit of saying “everyone” or “all of us” to generalize emotional experience rather than being vulnerable about mine and so I will go to a branch and say, yeah, I think I have felt like no one at all before. Or wanted to be no one at all, because it would be easier. It's a pretty dark place, and so naturally when the author stretches this out to absurdity in this particular story, it goes to strange places.

“Main Character” was not my favorite of the stories, but it is one of the funniest. It also does a lot of meta-narrative stuff, especially towards the end, that always makes for a fun time.

I suppose my favorite of the stories is “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression.” Probably because this is the sole gay story, and there are certain experiences in the first half that are just very relatable to extents. I definitely remember driving 40 minutes to an insanely questionable hookup and leaving distinctly nonplussed when I was like 20 years old and living in rural Illinois. Hey folks! It's a weird old life.

“Ahegao” also becomes perhaps the funniest and most outlandish of the stories. It even features a recipe and hex code (HEX CODE! written in my giant shocked handwriting in the margin) of the perfect simulacum, which is apparently (#)F6F3E9. No comment.

The story also goes way(!!) into the absurd by about the midpoint and continues to escalate into an ending that made me cackle and cringe. Like I said, you feel a lot of empathy and I at least feel a measure of relatability to several of the characters before the point comes when they jump the shark. That makes it more comfortable to read because, frankly, if you were just reading a book about bummed out people getting rejected and becoming more bummed out, you would be a lot more bummed out by the end of it.

Most of these characters cannot get out of their head. They are overthinkers that have had 8 cups of coffee and whatever other chemical or nootropic they can find that will let them mine themselves deeper into that catacomb. They cannot get out of their own way. Even when they get things they want, they cannot believe it, and they sabotage their lives with their lack of trust and lack of belief and hatred of self. What they cannot do is communicate their feelings, either to themselves or to the people they care about. If they could think about themselves with more care, and be kinder, I think that trust would grow, and they with it. I think this is part of what the author suggests in his final line: “...rejection is not one-way, and always comes paired with its opposite. For a rejection to be settled, first you–the reject–must hear, and comprehend, and accept.”

Overall I really liked the book. It gives you the opportunity to scrawl in the margin, “oh please, don't do this to yourself” or “you don't have to do that” knowing full well that you (or at least I) would do those same things or ruminate over similar experiences, though hopefully to a much lesser extent. At least until they go into the absurd and you can feel a little bit better about yourself by comparison, which is a nice little treat. For those you can scrawl, “holy shit” or “wtf” or “oh my god,” which is a lot more fun than seeing yourself in the book! My annotated copy will certainly have to go on the “think about it before loaning out” shelf. Then again, a lot of the characters in this book are the way they are because they refuse to be vulnerable, they refuse to believe people, and they refuse to trust themselves and the people around them. So, maybe weaving that fine line between good boundaries and bad boundaries helps everyone out.

This short little book of short stories from Hemingway is good. I've read some of these, mostly the Nick Adams stories, before in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway which I've gotten about halfway through on my Kindle years ago.

Some of these stories worked better than others, for me and for the place I'm at in life. There are classics like Indian Camp and The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife, and they are good. I loved The End of Something and The Three-Day Blow the most. These are all Nick Adams stories, the latter two dealing with the end of an important relationship. Hemingway often depicts relationships (and particularly men behaving in them) in ways that I do not really understand or feel frustrated by. Nick basically detonates his relationship for little reason. Maybe I need to read it again. But I love The Three-Day Blow because Nick is upset and depressed about it but trying to put on a face. Then he finds hope and is pleased with that hope of something in the future. I don't think any of the other Nick Adams stories in this book return to this.

Of course the writing is swell. One of Hemingway's favorite adjectives. It's funny, reading Ernest Hemingway On Writing the other day, he specifically notes in a letter that he tries to avoid timely words and talks about his use of the word swell. It cracks me up.

Pretty good! Will probably re-read some of these. I am not typically a short story person but I'm trying to get more into them.

* “He says opening bottles is what makes drunkards,” Bill explained. “That's right,” said Nick. He was impressed. He had never thought of that before. He had always thought it was solitary drinking that made drunkards.
* Pages 46-48. Nick is exploring the end of his relationship and is clearly depressed and trying to put on a brave face in front of his friend. His friend is telling him all the ways in which he is better off, which is always high on the list of things you do not want to hear and do not believe, anyway. Then the idea of hope comes to him. Then, of course, he is happy.
* “He says he's never been crazy, Bugs,” Ad said. “He's got a lot coming to him.”

I am not a great lover of poetry and am usually stumped by it. Historically if poetry isn't a haiku or in iambic pentameter I am a little too dumb to read it, because I don't know how to make it sound in my inner voice. Don't ask me to read it out loud. I am self-conscious of this blind spot. I tried reading The Waste Lands last year and was totally bumfuzzled by it.

Anyway, I saw this in a little free library yesterday. Chewed through it rapidly. It is not surprising that I did not relate to all of these, but some of them really dropped into a hollow place within and bounced around, echoing all the while.

I am usually pretty open to vulnerability in my writing but these are pretty raw and I am a little too self-conscious to type the ones that meant the most to me here. But I will obscure them in a bit list of the page numbers for those that spoke to me so loudly:

19, 22, 25, 26, 30-33, 35, 36, 47, 52, 53.

63, 67, 79, 87, 97, 103, 105, 109, 122.

160, 185.

205, 207, 229, 240.

I also really liked the closing poem (?) on an unnumbered grey page towards the back that starts, “and then there are days...”

This did not work for me and I detected that quickly. Ronin is a great short, and it's one of those things that I don't think having more of is that much of a good thing. There are many, many characters in this book. Too many, I think. I wish it had focused on the Ronin and Fox and left many of the others behind. It felt too scattered and felt very long and drawn out because of that. Every time we got to a Kouru chapter I wanted to skip it because I found that character and their story uninteresting.

I considered DNF'ing this about halfway through and looked at reviews here to see what the flavour was. I am disappointed in them. A lot of people pissy about pronouns and queer storylines in Star Wars. Dumb. The editing in this book was not good and there are too many adverbs. The pronouns are not the problem nor are the relationships. Get over it.

A nice little book collecting notes on writing from Hemingway over his career and across his publications. It is probably foolhardy to read a book about a writer's habit in search of your own habit, but it is at least interesting to compare and contrast. I thought a lot about Stephen King's On Writing while reading this. King writes 10 pages or thereabouts a day. Hemingway might write 400 words according to this book. Neither is right nor wrong, it's just the work of the writer.

I took a lot of notes and made a lot of flags. Here are some that I particularly like:

Ch 1 What Writing Is & Does
* Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm (sic).

Ch 2 The Qualities of a Writer
* The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
* Good writing is true writing.
* Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?
Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

Ch 4 What to Write About
* The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life—and one is as good as the other.
* Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damn hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.
* Love is also a good subject as you might be said to have discovered. Other major subjects are the money from which we get riches and poores. Also avarice. ... Murder is a good one so get a swell murder into [your] next book and sit back.

Ch 5 Advice to Writers
* All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
* Remember to get the weather into your god damned book—weather is very important.

Ch 6 Working Habits
* Mice: Do you know what is going to happen when you write a story?
Y.C.: Almost never. I start to make it up and have happen what would happen as it goes along.
* The minute I quit trying to write the rest of it is easy.

Ch 7 Characters
* Keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to by symbols.

Ch 13 The Writer's Life
* ...Had never had the real old melancholia before and am glad to have had it so I know what people go through. It makes me more tolerant of what happened to my father.
* But [Bernard Berenson] I think we should never be too pessimistic about what we know we have done well because we should have some reward and the only reward is that which is within ourselves...
* I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
* All criticism is shit anyway. Nobody knows anything about it except yourself.

I picked this up because it is at one point referenced in [b:God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning 56097578 God, Human, Animal, Machine Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning Meghan O'Gieblyn https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611107182l/56097578.SY75.jpg 87380849], and then I also saw it referenced in Carl Roger's [b:On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy 174879 On Becoming a Person A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy Carl R. Rogers https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348329148l/174879.SY75.jpg 168933], which I was thumbing through in the bookstore the other day. I picked this up with little knowledge of Kierkegaard beyond those two citations, other than a vague awareness of his status as a philosopher/theologian.This is a strange text to approach as someone without belief. Kierkegaard retells the story of Abraham and his task to sacrifice Isaac four times and then engages in a discussion. Part of the problem with my read of this is that I can't meet Kierkegaard at the same starting point. After his description of Abraham's tale, in the Preliminary portion of the Problemata, he begins: “Thus, then, my intention in telling the story of Abraham is to extract from it, in the form of problems, the dialectical element it contains, so that we might see what an enormous paradox faith is, a paradox that is capable of turning a murder into a holy act that is well-pleasing to God, a paradox that restores Isaac to Abraham, which no thinking can master, because faith begins precisely at the point where thinking leaves off.”It is simply that I do not believe there is any virtue by which a murder transmutes into a holy act. It is not even that I do not believe in the holy, it is that I cannot find it in me to condone a murder. That is not to disparage self-defense or even to some extent revenges of passion or something, but the cold, hard, murder that Abraham sets about towards his son. I do not think there is any circumstance in life that could make this admirable or awesome. Kierkegaard says repeatedly through the text that he cannot understand the act, but that he admires it. I do not admire it. I find it befuddling.There are some other groundfloor values that I cannot meet Kierkegaard at. In Problema I he discusses a scenario involving a father sacrificing his daughter, “for the good of the whole community.” He then speaks at some length about what a hero this makes the father, but nothing compared to the heroism demonstrated by the girl's fiancé. Of course, there is no consideration to how the girl feels. What the hell!? This is crazy stuff. The murder of a person is not heroic. Least of all when it is in some so-called sacrifice to figments.I know that there is much I did not get out of this that maybe I would if I had faith, but I am a doubter. I have always had doubts, about god, the world, myself, everything. I am beyond the point where I have doubt in faith and a god and am at the point where I am simply concerned by those that don't. Kierkegaard describes infinite resignation, which I can understand and relate to. He describes the final movement beyond that to be the movement to faith, the leap of faith. He expresses difficulty with that. He at one point describes faith as the leavetaking of thinking. That I cannot understand and cannot relate to and do not desire.Of course I have had times where I've fallen down and begged to nothing. I've talked to the air like it could hear me, and sometimes wished it could hear me. But I can't make that leap. I think that leap is a salve for some, to accept how difficult life often is. Sometimes I wish I could use that and be supported by it, but not often. Certainly not if it meant condoning some of the things taught as heroic in the Christian bible. I just can't do it.These are some of the lines/quotes that stood out to me, for whatever reason:* “What those ancient Greeks (who, after all, did have a bit of understanding of philosophy) assumed to be the task for an entire lifetime because expertise in doubting is not acquired in days or weeks; what was attained by the old, veteran combatant (==who had preserved the equilibrium of doubt through every seductive snare, fearlessly denying the certainty of the senses and of thought, uncompromisingly defying the anxiety of self-love and the flattering advances of sympathy==)—in our times, this is where everyone begins.” (I really love the phrase equilibrium of doubt, and I think this is a splendid description of doubt. I will probably quote this at some point.)* Abraham: “Lord in heave, I thank you; it is after all better that he believe me to be a monster than that he should lose faith in you.” What provokes such dedication to a thing so terrible?* “No one who was great in the world shall be forgotten, but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved.”* “the power whose strength is weakness, great through the wisdom whose secret is foolishness, whose form is madness, great through the love that is hatred of oneself.”* “The entire content of his life is contained in this love, and yet the situation is such that it would be impossible for this to become a reality, impossible for it to be translated from ideality to reality.”* “Only inferior natures forget themselves and become something new.”* In Problema I re: a peasant more or less and approaching the King's chamber. See page 77 for full context. “On the contrary, he should find joy in observing every rule of decorum with happy and confident enthusiasm, which is precisely what will make him openhearted and cheerful.” Difficult to suppress the chortle I made at this. Get real.* “It is far more difficult to receive than to give—that is, if one has had the courage to do without and has not proven a coward in the hour of need.”

A friend gifted this book to me for my birthday last month. I'm glad they did, because I'd have missed it otherwise! I did not quite know what to expect going in, but it proved to be a lovely mix of memoir, history, and question-asking. Very me.

I'm going to keep this constrained to just my experience reading the book. This has been one of my most notated books in recent memory and a lot of my notes are questions. I'm going to resurrect my dusty substack to meander through some of those. I'll edit this review later with links to those posts.

I picked up the book about two months after my friend explained it to me and had for some reason an understanding that it was about AI. It is about a lot more than that. I was initially thrown off by the philosophy discussion opening the book, but found the writing so approachable and so personable that it didn't feel so divorced from the practicals of the human experience. I'm not sure what I mean by that. I tend towards a low tolerance for highly philosophic books because ultimately it ends up being a lot of stroking that doesn't lead anywhere. The deep philosophical questions of the world, like, are we in a simulation? don't mean that much to me as I'm working on homelessness or how technology is impacting people experiencing it. They would mean more if someone told me how to open the console and the codes to make the world a better place and fast.

Perhaps that's an imagination failing on my part. Anyway, the discussions often feel more about the speaker than about the mysteries of the world when they're in writing. I quite adored the weaving of self into O'Gieblyn's writing. It is refreshing to read someone struggling with these big questions and choosing not to try and separate themselves from their thinking. Context matters! Context always matters. She discusses this on pages 152-153 in passages that I've drawn giant exclamation marks adjacent to.

I think a lot about equity when it comes to AI tools and how they are deployed. Really not even deployed. Developed, trained, deployed, utilized, evaluated. I tend to be suspicious of people who claim these models will be able to balance out or be prompted in such a way as to solve for the bias within their models. I get a bit freaked out about these models making decisions in the human/social services that could impact things like people being referred for housing or who gets a voucher.

There are a couple of places in the book where O'Gieblyn describes AI of significant sophistication as to render it indistinguishable from revelation. Or, that because we cannot understand the decisions made and cannot possibly probe these models for understanding, that we must accept their say in a way analogous to the believer accepting the word of their god. It reminds me of that old thing that technology of significant sophistication is indistinguishable from magic. Magic, Majesty, Mysticism, Machines. This is the stuff of nightmares when you're trying to ensure equity and accountability. The first three of these things have been co-opted by systems to dominate populations – and it's probable that we are witnessing or have witnessed the co-opting of the fourth. Not that I am resigned to this cynicism.

Which is to say, I think these tools can be used for good. But I think it is hard to square these extremely sophisticated machines as tools when their complexity is nearer a galaxy than a hammer.

I have a ton of little notes throughout the book and even more simple tabs marking passages. But almost all of those are going to show up in some form of writing in the next few weeks, and they're all about questions in my head instead of the book itself.

So I'll try to cut this short. I really enjoyed this! The blend of memoir, science, theology, literature, and philosophy is right up my alley. I love thinking about these questions, and they are presented in such human terms that they are not clinical or obtuse. I need to chew on this for a while, and write out what I'm thinking and chew on it some more. I mean, the author talks about the story of Job several times and that is one of the stories that really sprung a leak in my faith, so it's always a real treat to accompany someone else's thoughts on it.

Probably one of the more compelling realizations I had while reading involved a quote or story from Niels Bohr around page 174. Basically, the realization or remembrance that mathematics and physics are not, in fact, the language of the universe. There is no connective tissue between those squiggly lines in textbooks and LaTeX editors on your computer to the underpinnings of the Universe. If there are underpinnings at all, we have no mechanism by which to observe or interact with them. The best we can do is create symbols and bestow upon them meaning. The best we can do are shallow metaphors. That is, for whatever reason, quite freeing and compelling to me.

A very beautiful coffee table book featuring water colors, background stills, reference drawings, etc ft the architecture in the Ghibli films. I adore these movies, they are some of the most beautiful works produced in animation history. This has a lot of interviews and discussion about the various architectural styles and decisions, which are super interesting! Would be a lovely companion in rewatching the films.

I am a little frustrated by the square form factor. Mainly because there are a few two-page spreads of stunning artwork that are ruined by the bisection of the spine. I don't know why they did this. I wider format would have better lent itself to those.

It's finally done, I've read everything that Cormac ever published. What a year. I plan to write something about that elsewhere, but for now, Suttree.

I think this is Cormac's longest novel at nearly 500 pages. It is episodic in nature and the episodes are presented without a lot of scaffolding to let you know. Cormac provides you with the changing of the seasons and that is the major progressive force of the novel. There is little plot other than Suttree's sort of underboiling search for self. I think you'd have to read it a few times to really mine it, and I think there is something there to mine.

I'm not sure this will be one that I re-read yearly like The Road. It is a little too long for that and parts of it a little too unpleasant. Not unpleasant in the way that The Road can be unpleasant, but I'll get to that.

There is, as usual, a lot to love in Cormac's prose. The characters are compelling and they do ring true. There is the somewhat biblical nature of certain events, questions, etc. I continue to find those big existential questions that Cormac's characters struggle with compelling, even if they are all somewhat wrapped in a system of faith that I do not hold.

There were a few things that stuck out to me. First, published in 1979 and set in the early 50's, I found the discussion of certain characters pretty interesting. There is a character that presents as trans, and my first read of Suttree and his conversation had me pause. There was an actual discussion of pronouns in search of the right one – it was NOT perfect and far from it, but for the scope of that conversation the identified pronoun was respected. I found this really interesting. I went back through the book after and it turns out the pronoun is not exactly respected throughout, and Suttree refers to this character by a different name at points – I didn't track this for a while because I got confused and thought they were different characters. So, complicated and not ideal. But that a book published in 1979 – by Cormac of all people – has this discussion and it didn't turn into a joke or scorn was fascinating to me. The character recurs several times and is a sort of duplicate in some ways for Suttree, and they clearly respect each other. Very strange. There are a couple of articles written on this that I found really interesting, too.

Still, there was a fair bit of the writing that I bumped against pretty hard. I saw a statement somewhere that the women characters in this book exist to fuck or cry and that's about it. That's about how it feels. There are exceptions, but they are at best one-page characters anyway. The men in this book revile women and talk like it, and I found it really unpleasant. I found myself wondering if this was an intentional thing because this is how people (men) in this era and in this region talked, or if this is just Cormac's pen. I think it's a little of both, really. Cormac has exceedingly few if any complex female characters and it is one of his great failings. What I am frustrated by is that the dialogue still rings true. I can imagine people speaking like this. It bummed me out.

Similarly, there is a relationship between Suttree and the teenaged daughter of another character. Apparently this character is 18. Yet, they are frequently described as child like in a way that I found extremely unpleasant. It is possible that the recent Vanity Fair article exploring (in a very poorly written way, and in a very man-defends-Cormac way) Cormac's essentially predatory behavior around a 16 or 17 year old that he (as a 40 year old) began an affair with. Maybe I'd have read this differently if I didn't know about that. But I don't think so. I think I am not all that interested in “childlike” being anywhere near a sex scene. Just stop.

Race is similarly handled as gender. There is a lot of racism in the book, mostly from other characters and in a way that I would expect for the time period. That said, there are a number of visual comparisons to apes and such and those weren't coming out of the mouths of characters, they were in the text as description. Surely we could have done without that. Suttree is not a character that demonstrates racism in the book, but he is surrounded by people and a narrator that use a lot of either directly and maliciously racist language. Again, if it lived solely in the mouths of the riverdwelling characters, it could to an extent be understood as true for the time, place, and characters. But it's in the narration, the author's voice! No thanks. It undermines the characters of color that are players in the story.

Those things aside, I found much of the book spoke to me. All of those big questions, the statements. I'm just going to write out some quotes I liked in closing.

* “... I'm not like you.. I'm not like him. I'm not like Carl. I'm like me. Don't tell me who I'm like.”
* You told me once you believed in God.
The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could.
What would you say to him?
Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: What's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldn't put any part of it together.
Suttree smiled. What do you think he'll say?
The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I don't believe he can answer it, he said. I dont believe there is a answer.
* He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me?
* There is no one to ask is there? There is no...
* Sometimes I dont know what people's lives are for.
* Jesus wept over Lazarus, said the goatman. It dont say it, but I reckon Lazarus might of wept back when he seen himself back in this vale of tears after he'd just done been safe and dead four days. He must of been in heave. Jesus wouldnt of brought one back from hell would he? I'd hate to get to heaven and then get recalled what about you?

There are several characters that intend to have some direct conversations with their makers on their way out the door. All of them wondering why they've been subjected to all of this. I think we've all had sad or angry questionings like that to the empty air, whatever our beliefs.

I don't have many thoughts on this. Engaging screenplay for a 1970's PBS movie. The language is very Cormac, and I appreciated the story. Relatively unremarkable as far as a Cormac goes.