kylegarvey's reviews
346 reviews

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

adventurous mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.0

Spufford's is a fabulous bigass alt-history-noir cannon spray, but I can't keep straight bare names or occupational identities, let alone the nuances (spilled like snow-globe fake snow, until it settles or seems to settle, when it's shaken up again and loosed into a blizzard cloud) of race or national loyalty or vague culture. Or non-culture, whatever the case, as I think the Mississippian civilization ebbed away, from genocide among other regrettable historical moves, and left behind basically no writing. 

 

We are allowed then to have some 'road not taken' fun -- in big, rollicking, intricately laid goof -- seeing the big tropes (femme fatale, speakeasy, Kirk/Spock bifurcated investigating cops) in rush of radically-swerved historical truth. Whether it's fun jazz squeaks like "Around every streetlamp, a halo of light fog floated within dark fog, grainy, restless" (213) to bitter, Sopranos-like hilarity like "was cherchez la booze, all right" (326), we plumb gray depths we've seen before. In a way I swear is brand new. 

 

We have three races then, takouma (Natives), taklousa (Blacks), takata (whites), with Anopa the lingua franca, in some '20s America where we can loose some Chinatown heaving plot. The Civil War still happened, the KKK (and Birth of a Nation), Prohibition, jazz, everything still sprang up. Just in radically different, odd way. Decidedly Catholic. Alaska's Russian, Mormons agitate for their own state out west, etc., etc. Ok. So I see. Two cops, Phineas Drummond (white) and Joe Barrow (Native but maybe Black too), investigate a murder whose import mounts steadily, suspiciously. 

 

Barrow's sympathetic, jazz-touched, maybe more pensive about the mixture of it all. The religious head of the city, the house of Hashi, elder Sun and his niece the Moon (Couma), approach him (trying to convince him he can be "Thrown-Away Boy", unlikely hero in one of their myths); while his partner, Drummond, pursues some of the safer leads. "The sky is full of smoke but the earth endures" (449). 

 

King's 11/22/63 or Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union are alt-history things I've read, and Dick's Man in the High Castle I haven't read but I've seen its TV adaptation and enjoyed the story. Spufford's Cahokia Jazz seems on its whole like Thelma & Louise sort of ( https://letterboxd.com/kylegarvey/film/thelma-louise/ ), or Lethal Weapon ( https://letterboxd.com/kylegarvey/film/lethal-weapon/ )? But pushing toward a simpler religious conclusion, perhaps? 

 

Apologizing for Christianity, whether it's the Catholic kind currently pushing most of Cahokia's takouma society or the Protestant kind from outside, is something Spufford's written about a lot before, I've read. It's probably rarely in an elaborate alt-history way but in the plain way pretending to offer but actually insisting. I don't know. Don't listen to me. Before sentiments unfold in quirky, precise perfection, five times, six, seven, it was stacking up swell, really. Novel? I don't know. 

 

Interesting, I suppose, very interesting in the alt-history way delicately carrying wisdoms about race, identity, commitment, compulsion, forward through a smart cop plot -- but straightening it all toward the end, too much, too many times, cute figures. So many cute figures, so cute. 

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders

inspiring reflective medium-paced

3.0

Crisply evocative, elegant, but i think almost a little 'too' tidy. True, it's always far from your regular how-to -- and, in particular, I liked during one of the concluding sections, when Saunders looks at Tolstoy's "Alyosha the Pot" (a story I'd probably take for brusque 'not for me' morals) through a tiny tangle of translation that proves warm and pregnant. The humuility from everyone -- Saunders at present, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol in amateur and unseen past -- deepens as it's marveled at. Generous it all is, magnificently humble, but for me a little too high on academia still. 

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

adventurous lighthearted medium-paced

2.0

After some bits of Argentine Spanish, and after some years shouted -- 1971! 1975! -- I should have guessed those peripheral, less-than-necessary elements would cover something oddly similar again and again and again: a timeless, super-thin, incidental girl sport story. All fine, the writer signs up for what they sign up for and the reader does too, but 'girl' 'tennis' should very quickly thicken a lot of elements, and it's frustratingly thin, low-stakes to me. 

 

And frankly, quite a lot of spindly emotional breaks throughout the whole of this, like Lars Van van de Berg calls all of a sudden and we never hear from him again; marginal pieces like these would probably be fine in cinema, but here in text they seem ludicrous. Supposed to be real, propulsive, but intensely artificial. "'You are going to do whatever you want to do, pichona,' my father says. 'That is how adulthood works'" (19) Reid starts our book, helpfully enough! 

 

The thin romance that's here  -- I was hoping for a lot more of it, a lot deeper -- "I felt such an insatiable need for him to touch me, a hunger for his body. It felt exactly like the hunger I felt to win" (56). Ok. "This closeness between us, it continued growing, like a balloon filling with air" (92). Lol: ok. I wouldn't have written it like that, but I'm no author! "It is maddening, working just as hard for a less impressive result. Playing with this body is like trying to cut a steak with a dull blade" (122) -- spots like that I admire but they're unfortunately pretty rare. 

 

"'You’re obsessed with tennis.' 'I’m not obsessed with anything,' I said. 'I’m dedicated to winning. And I work hard at that.' 'Right,' Marco said. 'And so let’s just keep doing what we’re doing'" (58) bats around, as later "Just wait until they find out I’m a lesbian.' Nicki looks at me out of the corner of her eye, as if expecting me to spit out my cocktail. But I have long suspected she is gay, and I couldn’t care less. Romantic relationships are so goddamn impossible, I’m honestly impressed with anyone who can keep one going at all… And fuck if it doesn’t make me like her more. Goddamn her" (305) bats around much later. Similar thin energy I find. Ok. 

 

For parallels from contemporary cinema, it's easy to reach for Challengers right away; but I feel like Barbie speaks more to Carrie Soto than that one. I like Gerwig's film quite a bit but don't love it, but even fans stauncher than me ought to concede it's a bit emotionally thin. Philosophical depth could fill in those thin spots, whereas here in Reid's book there's just Zen sport vapor. All fine in theory, but in practice I need some more. 

What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad

adventurous dark medium-paced

3.0

 

El Akkad, who wrote American War, made his next novel, What Strange Paradise, about similar, left-leaning sympathies. Migrant weirdness, refugee angst, 21st-century hell as it is. I suppose a lot of things are written about a lot of authors by a lot of critics, and that's all well and good if you like cacophony and/or limp, slapping arguments, etc.; but I must remark that El Akkad seems to write just the minimalist, clipped, pseudo-profound, leftist prose I enjoy dipping into occasionally. 

 

Sorry if that's a liäbility soon enough for him -- like if, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had mentioned liking Hans Hotter and then later Hotter had to be like 'Oy vey, Hitler again, ok, can't control who your fans are, '. El Akkad sort of begins "all the shipwrecks of the previous year are a single shipwreck, all the bodies a single body" (12). I'm that myself also, aren't I (unfortunately), 'a single body', so I relate? 

 

We can be very weary about the whole situation ("Loud Uncle once said none of this was real, borders being a European disease. In the flint beyond the windows there were no markers of where one territory ended and the other began—only the sea which was the sky and the sky which was the land and the land which, whomever it belonged to, was not his" (22)) but also strikingly wise ("The passengers in Kamal’s immediate vicinity turned to look at the bare blue glow emanating from the screen. They observed it the way a doll maker might observe a creation come to life" (185). 

 

But also, activism from regular people (like me?) might not 'matter', ultimately? "His father once told him that every man is nothing more or less than the demands he makes of the world, and that the more a man demands of the world, the bigger the magnitude of his success or failure in life. This, his father said, is what matters—the size of the asking" (205). And then also "You are the temporary object of their fraudulent outrage, their fraudulent grief. They will march the streets on your behalf, they will write to politicians on your behalf…" (223). 

 

Just me, where I'm at? Hate to selfishly, immodestly gather up what's not mine, but I'll have to if I have to. Or it can wrap its story up by returning to the image that opened it, but from a pronounced skew, morbid: "I remember the bodies started washing up on the shore and the municipality brought them here first. They were laid out side by side, maybe on these same tables. It was an ugly thing to see, all of them together like that. The dead deserve their space" (220). 

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

informative sad medium-paced

3.0

Palestine has always been, during my life and well before, a hugely tortuous, heaving, nasty imperial issue. Intractably complicated, many say and many have said; but I've always resisted this. By being dumb and still grasping the right conclusion somehow sure, lol, if you agree with me, but also because complexity can mask a 'oh, might as well' passive acceptance of Israel's huge, psycho, warped, anti-human, anti-democratic injustices. 

 

Stitching Palestine, a little documentary I saw and liked ok, I think shows a big problem in how Palestine's presented to Western naïves like me sometimes: masculine/individual toward Israel and feminine/collective toward Palestine. Great big history then toward Israel too, no? Sympathies kneejerk. Holocaust payment, grave, the import. 

 

And a mid-'90s TV show I recall watching sometimes, Nickelodeon GUTS, had a spin-off its final season, Global GUTS, that accidentally proved quite formative for Israel legitimacy. By the way! The contestants from that country looked familiar to me with stupid blue and white flag, drab bowl cuts, khaki pants, etc.: so Israel's a legitimate country, had natives, a language, a flag? Oh. Legitimacy. A flag. 

 

Khalidi's Hundred Years' War -- while very well researched, tight, that's all too clear -- accidentally falls victim to some of these same problems, I believe. A grave abuse, epic sadistic catastrophe, huge awful theft need not necessarily have 100% convincing presentation, though, one can hope? To be relatively corrected, dues paid, apologies said, whatever; I am just a stupid bystander, I don't know anything. 

 

So explore the century of turmoil, in epic and frustrating detail. I mean frustrating because of the content and not because of the form, obviously; but histories are well-versed in that mistake especially, no? 

 

First, Khalidi's digressions to his own family, rare but enjoyable, are among my favorite parts. Typical, for history-abusing naïf like me. "The shining golden Dome of the Rock was just over three hundred feet away on the Haram al-Sharif. Beyond it lay the smaller silver-gray cupola of the al-Aqsa Mosque, with the Mount of Olives in the background" (8). General history recounting is powerful too: "Britain did not rule Palestine outright; it did so as a mandatory power of the League of Nations. It was therefore bound not just by the Balfour Declaration but also by the international commitment embodied in the 1922 Mandate" (71). 

 

City-by-city specifying is a strength of the book in a similar way. "In the rapidly growing coastal cities of Jaffa and Haifa in particular, change was more visible than in the more conservative inland towns such as Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hebron, as the former witnessed the appearance of a nascent commercial bourgeoisie and an embryonic urban working class" (28). We don't always need to defend against Zionist Israel, except when we do (lol?) which is always? 

 

And -- in modest success way, not that I'd know about that way -- we can catalog some of Arab liberators' mistakes: "Because it was a just cause, he did not build a fighting force in the modern sense.… I think part of it was that he feared a big organization, he felt that he could not control a big organization. He could control an entourage, people to whom he whispered and who’d whisper to him" (88) and furthermore "Much in this acute analysis of the patriarchal nature of the mufti’s approach applied to the entire generation of men of his class born during the late Ottoman era who dominated the Palestinian leadership, and for that matter politics in most of the Arab world" (89). 

 

I appreciate the candor, here and everywhere, I do, and other things as well. Everyone appreciates things. 

 

Political digressions are far more common than the family ones i tend to prefer: "Saudi Arabia never rocked the boat where the close American-Israeli relationship was concerned. Indeed, it was seen by the Saudi royal family as completely compatible with the intimate American-Saudi connection that went back to the first oil exploration and exploitation deal of 1933" (105). But the explanation is much more incisive, powerful, politically welcome? 

 

Soon, for Americans, it looked like Zionism "became a political football exploited at will by opportunistic politicians, as each sought to outbid the other in proclaiming their devotion to it" (114). I am not a politician, that's all too clear [he proclaims again and again and again and again, etc.] 

 

Not a touch of unrealistic optimism we have at the end, then, but shades of interesting hope instead -- "As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it 'won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue'. This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a postcolonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other" (307). 

 

And Khalidi even manages somewhat a hopeful, relatively optimistic note at the end, even in spite of the hundreds of pages of miserable frustration, representing a century of filthy pain, that precedes his history: "Inequality is so crucial not only because it is anathema to the egalitarian, democratic societies that the Zionist project has primarily relied on for its support, but because equality of rights is key to a just, lasting resolution of the entire problem" (310). 

 

And furthermore "By embracing its illiberal and discriminatory essence, modern Zionism is increasingly in contradiction with the ideals, particularly that of equality, on which Western democracies are based" (312); but wait sir please don't be so quick with that democracy part of 'Western democracies', lmao, as the AIPAC-glutted part of MAGA conservatives want to get America out of that 'choice' now anyway, soon? 

Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays by Claire Messud

reflective medium-paced

2.0

 

Strictly not my jam I suppose, but overall Messud's essay collection is fairly worthwhile. As for the title, "reasons why" instead of just "reasons" is intentional, no? I assume Messud had her reasons for phrasing the title that exact way, but that'll make an ass out of u and me, so I'd better not assume. Maybe it was just roll-of-dice random; crazier things have happened. "Our human passion for storytelling—not simply for sharing information, but for giving meaning and shape to events—has motivated individuals and armies" we can relax a bit, ok (13). 

 

Well, nationality, first and foremost, has Messud touching the whole world: "My father was French, my mother Canadian. I grew up in Sydney, Australia; in Toronto, Canada; and then at boarding school in the United States" she writes in the titular essay (94). But unfortunately, the whole collection 'Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write' strikes me as not a good book, painfully pensive, clumsily expressed, most overwrought I'm sorry to say, thesaurus-burdened, MFA-colored in obnoxious relatabilities. 26 chances to prove different? Sure, and I'm sure there are many more after that. 

 

I like when day-to-day mundanity rides alongside those high-flown ideals: "Both figures have their Beckettian absurdity—my grandfather toiling at his desk (for what?), my father, reading voraciously alone (for what?)—but both also represent hope of a kind, and both inspire me to persist in my calling" (15), "The rules and rituals were endless, a language to be mastered and then—but stealthily, stealthily—trifled with. You learned the rules so that you might break them when the need arose" (25). 

 

But soon I think Messud spoils it, when she falls in love with her own prose. 'Fecundity'? "It is infinitely more real, blooming and billowing in the imagination in its fecundity and fullness, colored and enlivened by so many objects, so many sounds and smells, so many minute moments that can never, never be imparted… Like riding the red car: my sister just got on with it, which, in time, I would learn from her, to smile and smile and be a villain, and that our hold on this other life, like our memory of the red car, was not the less for that" (30). 

 

Could something or other "prompt at least a ruminative conversation" (54); "in the way of a Greek god: he was rather frightening, and usually not at home" (70). Lol. We all know about meaningful time vs. stupid time (37), including quiet bonding at the nursing home (39). Or so much that's overwrought anyway, ie. "vast, incessant sea, the enormous canopy of sky, mutable and immutable, eternity itself" (35), "the precise yet glaucous outlines of the buildings in Sultanahmet in the early day" (41), "Is the quiet banality of a place less real than its incipient evil? Isn’t life, most strangely, and even in evil, always made more real by its banalities?" (48) 

 

"palimpsest, beneath the city’s current geography. It is almost" (198); "a solipsistic failure of which we are all, with our PIN numbers and sudden fear of diseases, more or less guilty—that he proves a dark and possibly broken soul, someone for whom the role of flaneur is a hermetic one, rather than open at all" (204); "and he captures, too, the ways in which the greater subjects—violence, autonomy, selfhood, life and death—glimmer darkly in the interstices between bedbugs and Tower Records" (205); "superficially, very little happens. Szabó’s narrator, like the author a writer named Magda (in interviews, Szabó suggested that the novel was only thinly veiled personal history), follows the intricacies of" (210). Etc., etc., etc. 

 

Sorry. I'm afraid it doesn't mean much. I like stacking personal things, Camus (literary criticism), Teju Cole and Magda Szabó and Rachel Cusk (book review), Marlene Dumas and Sally Mann (aesthetic criticism); but the whole just has a formless 'Ok. Why?' thing going. And going. And going. Don't ask me to make a book, or it might be a lot like this; and that's not inspirational or anything, more just a warning, from her to me, I guess, or something. 

Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen

informative lighthearted medium-paced

3.0

 

Jody Rosen's Two Wheels Good, his capsule of bicycle life, is most powerful to me when it's embracing big philosophy rather than persisting in small-scale journalism. Wouldn't you agree? I guess I kind of appreciate when he's remembering with nostalgia being a teen bike messenger: "I’m sure that bike riding made me more confident in these misapprehensions, a more self-possessed dolt. It definitely calmed me down and bucked me up. I could get on my bike in a fog of neurosis and dismount a while later feeling all right -- brave enough, at least, to pick up a phone and call a girl" (384). But often I personally don't relate. Lmao, ya goof! 

 

I appreciate, but I'm not thrilled by, new terms Rosen takes -- like 'equilibrium' when he's meeting the Scottish guy Danny MacAskill early on or 'cycleur' (a combo of cycle and flaneur) when he's recalling Mexican-born writer Valeria Luiselli, now a New Yorker like him, later. And I like it when the author takes it upon himself to begin trying out some musing: "The connection we make between cycling and flying is metaphorical. You might even call it spiritual: an expression of the powerful feelings of freedom and exhilaration we experience when we ride bikes. But it is also a response to a physical fact. If cyclists imagine themselves to be flying, it is because, in a sense, they are. / When you ride a bicycle, you’re airborne. The wheels that spin beneath you slip a continuous band of compressed air between the bike and the road, holding you aloft" (24). At the end, though, we can turn again to what is less sympathetic: "City officials ascribe the problem, vaguely, to vandalism and theft. Alcohol surely plays a role, and there could well be a kind of ecosystem at work: a bicycle is pulled from the canal and recycled into a beer can, whose contents are guzzled by an Amsterdammer, who, weaving home at the end of a dissipated night, spots a bicycle and is seized by an impulse to hurl the thing" (424). 

 

Digestible history we have sometimes. "As decades passed and successive bicycle crazes gripped Europe and the United States, momentous transformations were ascribed to bikes. The bicycle was praised as a class leveler, a cleanser of bodies, a liberator of spirits, a freer of minds" (27). We get some odd digressions, like Frank Sinatra had a brother Ray who did some bike stuff. "Ray Sinatra—the elder second cousin of Frank—led a 'cycling orchestra' whose sixteen members performed while straddling gleaming Silver King cruisers. In the mid-1930s, Sinatra and his band landed a radio show, Cycling the Kilocycles, broadcast weekly on NBC—not the ideal medium, perhaps, for a bicycle orchestra. Presumably listeners took the whole bike thing on faith" (188). Lol. 

 

But really I suppose, comforting snatches of quotes seem like what we read things like this for! Hypothetically. In general. "To see that wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting,' Duchamp said. 'I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace" (95); or "In 1896, H. G. Wells wrote about the way a cyclist keeps biking through the night: 'A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow'" (412). We might see in these pessimism or optimism really: "enormous agglomerations. These places have been called 'bicycle graveyards,' but in overhead photos and videos captured by drone, they often look more like fields of flowers: the bright yellow and orange and pink hues of the bike frames stretch out for acres, like a lurid carpet laid over the land" (429); and "On a 2010 episode of a popular TV dating show, If You Are the One, a twenty-year-old contestant was asked by a suitor to go for a bicycle ride on a date. Her response became a much-memed viral catchphrase. 'I’d rather cry in a BMW,' she said, 'than smile on a bicycle'" (458). Lol again! 

 

For tourism? It can be a little dreary honestly. "Longyearbyen is known as the world’s northernmost town, the only settlement at its latitude with a permanent population of over one thousand. The place is also a tourist destination. Visitors come to soak up the stark Arctic beauty, to hike, to go snowmobiling, to take dogsled rides, to view the northern lights. Hardier eco-tourists camp overnight in ice caves. I stayed on Spitsbergen for a week several winters ago. I arrived in mid-February, the waning period of the polar night, when the sun was beginning to appear above the horizon for the first time in months" (234); and then "Bhutan’s national animal, a stocky ungulate called the takin, which looks a bit like a goat that’s been doing a lot of barbell work at the gym" (249); and much later, in a totally different setting, "In fact, it’s inaccurate to speak of “China’s bicycle culture,” as if it’s monolithic, or even comprehensible. There are only bicycle cultures, plural—too many of them to inventory or to wrestle into a grand unified theory. For some young people in Beijing, the appeal of the bicycle is that it is subcultural: something they’re into that’s a little bit weird and niche" (487). 

 

And to Dhaka we can go. "Dhaka’s drivers may be the most aggressive on earth. They may also be some of the best, if your idea of skillful driving is expansive enough to include the lawlessness that Dhaka demands" (336); "To the extent that Dhaka can be said to function at all, it is propelled by pedal power. When people or things travel from point A to point B in Dhaka—when a university student or a dozen two-hundred-pound sacks of rice make it through the gridlock and arrive at their destinations—you will usually find a man bent over the handlebars of a cycle rickshaw, hauling the load" (339) [tempting racism a tiny bit, no?]; "Today it is a maze of roads and alleyways that wend along the northern banks of the Buriganga River. The area retains a medieval flavor: bustling marketplaces, wafting scents of chilies and fish and raw meat, pedestrians everywhere darting and yelling, clanging sounds from storefront workshops" (353). Yeah? 

 

And even "His bursts of aggression are tactical and professional. Once, in central Dhaka, we found ourselves in a frustrating jam, marooned for several minutes in an unmoving column on a side street called Garden Road. At last, the jam dissolved and wheels began to roll, but the rickshaw directly in front of us remained motionless. This would not do. So Badshah bulldozed forward, ramming his front wheel" (355). But then, we visit a prof and Rosen can quote him: "Islam said: 'I think this also explains the images of planes. That’s the highest level of transport, isn’t it? In the mind of the rickshaw puller, maybe, that represents a different kind of fantasy. It is an aspiration, a dream of the future. If I do this backbreaking work—if I pull this rickshaw in this unyielding, insane city—perhaps then someday my children will fly in that plane" (377). The most meaningful bit a quote that goes un-analyzed? No, won't do. 

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

 Narrated quaintly just as Housekeeping was, Robinson's follow-up came almost a quarter-century later. Interesting I guess how it's so delicate, but I'm afraid I can't relate to very much at all: Christianity the least of all our crazy leaps. Sorry to throw down a stubborn, impassable speed bump so soon, ha, but I really took that Obama recommendation to heart. Frankly, things like "how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed" (34) are few and far between. 

 

Why does everything need to be a ponderous theological debate, nearly impenetrable to anyone who isn't already hard-core on the right side? Haha. It's with regret, and in only the most casually tossed-off and barely published words, that that kind of prose should ever be signed off by a writer, I believe. 

 

Some things acceptable ("the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that" (17), "I can’t tell you, though, how I felt, walking along beside him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world—what a sweet strength I felt, in him, and in myself, and all around us" (71), "I was in on the secret, too—implicated without knowing what I was implicated in. Well, that’s the human condition, I suppose" (113))… 

 

…but a lot not ("There is a tendency among some religious people even to invite ridicule and to bring down on themselves an intellectual contempt which seems to me in some cases justified. Nevertheless" (203) ['Nevertheless' like you disagree? Well, I must close my quotation of you there then.], "Though I must say all this has given me a new glimpse of the ongoingness of the world. We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable" (250), "I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that’s all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal" (306)) 

 

…and even a heathen could recognize acceptability without really accepting it, just hypothetically: "You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it" (165) and then "Well, I can imagine him beyond the world, looking back at me with an amazement of realization -- 'This is why we have lived this life!' There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient" (312). 

 

Though, abstracted around the ethics of a dimly pious old white man, what have we? Really, a book? Mentioning vaguely some interracial love, but persisting in theology anyway, it's ok. No really, it's ok: two fifths? Two fifths. 

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

challenging lighthearted medium-paced

2.0

 First of all, it's fortunate I never tried this text itself before/during schooling touching occasionally and gently on "Marxism" mis-apprehended by a bunch of capitalists. I'd be even more confused than I am right now, and I'm pretty confused in general, because I'm naturally kind of an idiot and also because the Manifesto's written to be naturally provocative, because it builds on a whole bunch of European and world history I have only the vaguest/flimsiest familiarity with, and because it's written by committee in this very impersonal, abstract, odd way I didn't think texts were written in! I think it's pretty vital, though, nevertheless! 

 

Actually, I think I've read, though, Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, but it was a long time ago. And Chomsky's 9/11 too; but that's modern and, thus, not timeless. 

 

Hold up, though. Are you 'Communist', though? Are you subscribed completely to this Manifesto? Or just pawing idly at it in distraction, curiosity, firm Capitalism at heart but a thin, superficial Communism on your surface sometimes? There should be a pg 1 'Communism? -Yes -No Yes? Well, in that case, read on' and then begin the book proper. All books should do that, I think. Even novels. Even romance novels. 

 

"The bourgeoisie has disclosed that" is a weird way to start a sentence, however valuable may be the historical nuance following. A lot of the points -- maybe with the exception of the very basic "The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie" -- strikes me like that, valuable and powerful nuance phrased in such an off-kilter way that I am not really able to absorb it at all. 

 

I want us to be conscious of 'care economy' and 'social fabric' dismissals, but I am afraid here only the barest glimpses of 'wife and children' this Manifesto affords us. Like, "the proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations… Law, morality, religion, or to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests." 

 

"The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." I do not think that is a sentence, but ok. "The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination. Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?" Well, honestly, hold up, hold up, yes. 

 

"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win"! You want to win a world? For 175 years or so they been trying to win a world -- Broken Blossoms (1919), Welcome Danger (1929), King Kong (1933), Pinocchio (1940), Lusty Men (1952), Viva Maria! (1965), One sings, the other doesn't (1977), Speed Racer (2008), etc. -- and I been like 'Wait wait, 'win'? Sorry, thought you said 'winch', so I was stuck on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), trying to figure out the relevance there, trying to learn auto mechanics intricacies, so sorry. 

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

sad medium-paced

2.0

Very sad, almost too sad, but what's sadder than mortality really and isn't that the saddest thing ever and how could you be sadder. The author was this prestigious surgeon -- and you could just end the book there pretty much and have it be a not terrible memoir, stress of med school, relentless life angst, reflecting on medicine's philosophy quite profoundly -- but on to death we go. He has cancer this surgeon, you know, and succumbs to what's inevitable. A tragedy befalling all us mortals. I am serious. A plain tragedy. Plain tragedy. The whole book's sorta like Gomes's 2012 Brazilian film ONCE UPON A TIME VERONICA maybe? in parts? 

 

He puts on himself huge tasks. "When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool" (90) and "But the skull wasn’t going to close itself. There would be time for speculation tomorrow" (110) and "I recalled Henry Adams trying to compare the scientific force of the combustion engine and the existential force of the Virgin Mary. The scientific questions were settled for now, allowing the existential ones full play, yet" (146) and it falls anyway -- but I'm probably citing things weird. 

 

I definitely have my nits to pick. "The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning" (156) -- a problem for you, maybe, but a problem in general? And then "No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience" (157) -- except yours, we presume. But picking nits here seems very inappropriate. Lol (lots of love). 

 

There's an afterword written by the wife. To be frank, she lands in many of the cliché traps he avoided, so I know why she didn't write the whole thing; plain B- prose can make you really glad you'd gotten so much B+, A-, A work. Dude. The "version of Paul I miss most, more even than the robust, dazzling version with whom I first fell in love, is the beautiful, focused man he was in his last year, the Paul who wrote this book—frail but never weak" (197) is a heck of a 'About the author, your late author', huh?