Category Archives: Reviews

What I’ve been reading

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The book Sad Tiger and a cup of coffee

(Despite the photo, I have NOT been reading Sad Tiger. I picked up my pre-order and saw it described as “devastating” and was not ready for it.)

First Love by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Isaiah Berlin

The Mookse and Gripes podcast has started a novella book club, and this is the first selection. It’s an experiment in using Discord to collect former book twitter folks into a reading group. It’s also an experiment, for me, in slowly reading a novella. This could be read in one sitting but instead it’s being spread out over a week. I read the first third and had to pause myself from reading further.

Notebooks by Tom Cox

I haven’t had time lately because my mornings are now used for exercise, but I used to have a “morning book” that I read a little bit of every day before writing in my journal. It was usually diaries or something similar, and I would spend a bit time examining how other people process their lives before processing mine. Notebooks sort of fits that theme. It’s excerpts from Cox’s notebooks, so it’s real like a diary but the excerpts are more like tweets. They are short quips, with an occasional longer bit that might take up a whole two paragraphs. It’s hard to read in long chunks for the same reason it would be hard to sit down and read someone’s twitter feed all the way through. Each individual bit, however, is a delight with hilarious stories about mischievous Devon hedgehogs and the antics of his dad WHO TALKS LIKE THIS.

Strike! by Jeremy Brecher

Ok, I haven’t really started this one yet. My local DSA chapter is about to start reading this history of American strikes alongside The Troublemaker’s Handbook. I am a little less enthusiastic now that Shawn Fain is out there making the labor movement look bad, but I do want to be more educated about the subject for the next time I get into an argument about “why don’t Americans call a general strike?” I might not actually manage to read my assigned bits before we meet, but the DSA bookclubs are the sort where the discussion the books prompt about current conditions is the vital part.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton

This is the book that I’m actually reading in the sense that I carry it around with me everywhere and dip in as time allows. I picked it up on a whim at the bookstore when I saw Barton’s name and the cover blurb. Rika is a young female journalist at a publication that has never had a woman writer. She works long hours to become the first, neglecting her own love life and comforts, eating only 7/11 onigiri and grab-and-go salads. In an attempt to get an exclusive interview with a former food blogger, Kajii, accused of murdering men she met on dating apps, Rika starts to follow Kajii’s orders about what to eat and cook. From prison, Kajii gives Rika assignments such as to bake a quatre-quarts and serve it to a man while it is still hot from the oven. Rika begins to embrace the sensuality of food in a way she hadn’t before, but also gains weight, forcing her to confront the extreme fatphobia and misogyny of Japan. The ways the case transforms her life aren’t straightforward, and about two-thirds of the way through, this novel takes a different direction which pleasantly surprised me after I had been lulled into a routine of jailhouse interviews and baking. I still have at least a hundred pages to go, but I feel like I am in good hands with Yuzuki and Barton.

5 Things Regular Drivers Might Not Know About Cyclists

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  1. At stop lights, we flirt with our fellow cyclists. We compliment each other’s bikes. Or sometimes we just say “hello” or let them know their shirt is on backwards. Personally, I engage in many passive aggressive undeclared races with cyclists who are rude. The point is that we are sometimes interacting directly with other cyclists, as part of a community. We are not isolated from one another, or from the consequences of our behavior. (But seriously, more people flirt with me when I am on my bike than at any other time in my day.)
  2. We can feel the paint on the road. We are sensitive to road conditions like debris that a driver wouldn’t even be conscious of. If you wonder why a cyclist is in the car lane instead of what appears to be a perfectly good bike lane, it’s likely because there are dangers in the bike lane that aren’t apparent to drivers. For instance, a pile of leaves can conceal dangerous glass or holes, so it’s best to avoid them altogether.
  3. We see a lot of broken glass and car parts at intersections. We see curbs that have been destroyed by vehicles that don’t stay in their lanes. We see more of the effects and frequency of poor driving than drivers do.
  4. We are not expected to follow the law (by traffic engineers). A cyclist has trouble following traffic law 100% of the time because, for cyclists, those laws are poorly-defined and in flux. For instance, on my morning commute there is a light that triggers when cars pull up to it. It doesn’t trigger for my bike. I have to run the red light if no car shows up to save me. Engineers have considered this when installing the light and decided it was ok. There are areas of town where according to the city, cyclists are not allowed to ride on the sidewalk. Some parts of this area also have road paint indicating that cyclists should ride on the sidewalk for a block and then abruptly hop back onto the bike lane. Sometimes the bike lane suddenly switches to being on the left side of the road, and I have to merge across three lanes and ride on the left before having to merge back right and ride on the right. Sometimes safety takes priority over either indicators or laws. It’s safer for pedestrians and cyclists to cross a street slightly before the light turns green for drivers. Many intersections will flash the walk sign for pedestrians a few seconds before the light turns green. As a cyclist, do I wait for the light to turn green or do I cross with pedestrians? Do I follow written laws, or do I follow the road indicators installed by traffic engineers? Or in cases when neither is safe, do illegal but safer for everyone near? Cyclists constantly have to make their own decisions about when to follow the law.
  5. There are more of us than you know because we’re deliberately riding on roads where you won’t encounter us. When I first started commuting to my current office, I took the direct route. Not necessarily the one a driver would take, but still using whichever major roads had bike lanes. Over time, through experimentation and talking to other cyclists, I landed on a route that zig zags through residential neighborhoods and parking lots, selecting for quiet and well-paved paths. I see many other cyclists on this circuitous route; apparently they have discovered the same paths I did and made the same choices. The only drivers who see us on this route are homeowners along the path. Other drivers would not be aware of how many workers are commuting by bike every day because we’re deliberately hidden.

How to do something

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I have been feeling so helpless lately, and that’s not usual for me. Being locked into my very effective local DSA chapter, I usually feel like there’s a way I can contribute. Everything now is so overwhelming that nothing feels like it’s enough.

Maybe you feel the same way. Maybe you live in a rural area and can’t even make it down to one of the many Tesla protests. If so, here’s an action you can do from your home. Libraries for the People, a leftist libraries advocacy group, needs volunteers to gather data on library boards around the country. If googling library boards and maybe calling for more information sounds like something you can do, scroll down on this page to Research Support for more information.

You can find other suggestions for things to do ranked from easy to hard in this guide from The Disruption Project.

One of my friends was surprised to hear that there were multiple protests going on around town. He hadn’t heard about them, which seemed like a failure in the advertising of the protests to him. If you’re not on social media—maybe you’re one of the people who recently dumped Instagram and FB after Meta’s increased technofascism—how would you hear about a protest? You’d have to be a deliberate part of a group that’s communicating events to members or have a friend who is doing the research for you as part of a group and then sharing that information directly. This isn’t extremely efficient, especially given the time sensitive nature of many actions. I think more people should leave social media, so this problem of how to learn about mass events is one that I am chewing over.

If you are in Austin, here are some groups you might join to find out about these events:

  • Austin DSA
  • Your workplace union – If you are a worker, you have a modicum of power in capitalism. Don’t leave that power on the table. If you don’t have a union yet, you can get advice and support from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee.
  • Indivisible Austin – they would not be my first choice because they are only activated during crises and maybe we could have avoided those crises if they were, for instance, preemptively working with Austin DSA to keep Tesla from moving to Texas in the first place. They are extremely active right now, though.
  • Austin Justice Coalition
  • Former council member Jimmy Flannigan has started a mailing list to connect people and was one of the primary promoters of the recent Tesla protest. You can sign up at https://www.jimmyflannigan.com/the-work-2-0/

Recent links

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How to Be a Fighter When You Feel Like a Punching Bag An essay about the helplessness we all feel right now and how we might regain a sense of agency by connecting with community.

Trapped in the Mine – Helen Sullivan. A devastating account of miners trapped in an illegal gold mine in South Africa.

My Favorite Etymologies: To Curry Favour – weird medieval guys – Exploring the etymology of the phrase ‘currying favour,’ Olivia introduces us to the most evil horse in history.

The Blogosphere

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I have been trying to swap social media for blogs, probably due to nostalgia rather than good sense. There are a few sites now to make it easier to find small blogs, tools that act like modern-day webrings. For instance, there’s Kagi Small Web, where you can flip through recent blog posts and the similar indieblog.page. Marginalia, Feedle, Indieseek and Search My Site are search engines that prioritizes small sites which also have browsing options. Then there’s Ooh! Directory, modeled after the old Yahoo directory where you could browse sites by category. Then there are blogrolls, like Blogroll (lol). There is unfortunately (for me) a bias towards programming blogs on the small web, but there doesn’t have to be. It’s still entirely possible to create your own free blog on Tumblr, Bloggr, or Neocities. 

For the past few years, my touchpoint when describing the small web to friends has been Clive Thompson’s concept of “rewilding.”  He originally borrowed the idea from someone else, but it’s Thompson’s series of blog posts with suggestions on using sites like Marginalia to rewild your Internet browsing that have stuck with me through the years. The idea is that you break out from the algorithm and allow yourself chances to be surprised rather than marketed to. The recent changes to Meta’s policies and algorithms has me meditating on the concept once more. One of my sources for web wildness for the last few years has actually been Facebook groups. I keep getting suggestions to join groups about moss or clay pots or “pretending that we are boomer birders.” On Facebook, I was able to browse through many niche hobbyist forums, and the more I looked at, the more eccentric the next one the algorithm suggested was. I was successfully using the algorithm to rewild my browsing. Now I am trying to stay off of traditional social media but looking for that same experience.

There’s a tension between findability and avoiding the algorithm. Does a book blog like this really need to be “findable” though? Not really. I am going to add this blog to some of the webrings I mentioned so that people can stumble upon it (do you remember that website?) I hope it strikes people as a wildflower on the web, and not a weed.

Lies and Sorcery #NYRBWomen25

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Cover of Lies and Sorcery. It’s mostly blue tones with two women whispering to each other, while several other people go about their business around them.

I have been reading Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante (translated by Jenny McPhee) as part of the #NYRBWomen25 readalong hosted by Kim McNeill. This is the second year that Kim has organized a reading group specifically for women writers published by NYRB Classics. Last year, I read a few of the same books at roughly the same time, but I wouldn’t say I participated. Now I am actively trying to join discussions on Bluesky. Some people are posting about it on Instagram as well, and Paul and Trevor from the Mookse and the Gripes podcast have been discussing the books briefly on air.

Lies and Sorcery is the longest book in the lineup this year at 800 pages. Kim provides recommended dates to read each chapter, which causes me to slow down and spread the book out of a longer period of time than I would if I were simply reading until I fell asleep each night. The pacing combined with online “watercooler talk” makes it feel more like watching a prestige tv show than reading a book. I have to wait until the next week to see how these characters who hate each other will (as revealed at the start) marry, or to find out what happens to the cheerful but destitute prostitute. The novel is melodramatic so it lends itself especially well to this type of serialization. The last time that I had this experience was when I participated in a different NYRB classics reading group and read The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning. That book was less sensationalist, but it was long and epic in scope, and I watched it unfold slowly alongside other book twitterists.

The most obvious comparison for Lies and Sorcery is the Neapolitan trilogy; even the authors Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante rhyme. (Of course, given that Ferrante is an alias, the name Elena Ferrante may have been chosen to recall the former queen of Italian literature.) Both works are about the constraints of poverty, particularly as they affect women, both focus in on the relationships within an Italian neighborhood, and both are extremely melodramatic. Whereas I count My Brilliant Friend as one of my favorite novels, I initially found Lies and Sorcery a slog. Every character is miserable and hateful. Ferrante does a better job of placing this misery within an intellectual context, drawing on Marx and Cixous. Lies and Sorcery, on the other hand, is cynical. No one has true political convictions; communism and elitism are both merely clothes that characters put on as needed to try to advance their selfish goals. No character has as much self respect as Elena or Lila; Nino Sarratore is not remotely as despicable as Lies’s Eduardo. After a few hundred pages, I at least came to respect Morante’s work, and I had invested myself enough to care what happened next. In the very first chapters, the narrator, Elisa, describes all of the major plot outcomes of the novel, and so I am not reading to find out what happens but to see how emotionally these characters can degrade themselves to that point. I am glad that I am reading it as part of this group because the discussion pulled me over my initial resistance and is helping me appreciate the melodrama rather than resist it.

Criterion Channel films expiring soon

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A still from Say Anything with the words “Leaving February 28.”

My method for choosing a movie to watch is to pick from the Criterion Channel’s list of expiring films for the month. Some months, like this January, there weren’t that many on the list that I was interested in watching. When that happens, I look for suggestions in the subreddit Criterion Conversation. They have compiled posts for new collections and for expiring films where users give suggestions for little known gems to watch. They also have a film club where they vote on expiring or thematic films to watch.

This month, there are many great films leaving the service. Three Cameron Crowe movies, Body Double, The Lady Eve, Momento, and many Hitchcocks and John Waters. If you want a less obvious recommendation, Blood and Black Lace seems highly recommended. I personally recommend Hitchcock’s Rope which is unusual for several reasons, including being a pseudo single-shot film.

Any other suggestions for what I should watch from the list?

I’m too depressed to read more BlueAnon theories

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After over a decade using Metafilter, I think I am going to have to take a step back. I’m not closing my account, but I am going to try and avoid the site for a while. Every time I visit, I am incensed to find someone whose moral center I trust posting disappointing BlueAnon conspiracies.

BlueAnon refers to conspiracy theories posted by and for U.S. Democrats. These conspiracy theories are usually not as extreme as their QAnon counterpart’s claims of child sexual abuse. Instead they are usually focused on electoral concerns.

Common BlueAnon theories:

  • 2024 election was fraudulent due to vote tampering by Musk or Russia (election tampering is a common QANON claim as well).
  • No one would care about a genocide if it weren’t for Russian propaganda.
  • Biden really wanted to end the genocide but for reasons could never voice that opinion and had to continually send more weapons to Israel.
  • There are things conspiring to keep Dems in office from proposing any good policy. This is a general complaint, but there were elaborate explanations specific to student loan debt that were disproven the two times that Biden did indeed cancel student debt.
  • Harris would have won except the country would never elect a Black president, or the country would never elect a woman president. Or some other reason related specifically to Russia or the American left.

The goal of these particular conspiracy theories is to create a version of the world in which external forces are preventing elected Democrats from taking any positive action. Dem politicians are doomed from the start because of vast conspiracies against them. Some theories have such similarity to QAnon conspiracies that they don’t pass even a sniff test, while others could be plausibly argued if you left out any data that conflicted with it. For instance, claiming that Harris wasn’t elected because “the left” won’t vote for a Black woman ignores the women of color that leftists supported when centrists Dems wouldn’t, such as Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, India Walton, and Jessica Cisneros. It also ignores the fact that there was a time when it seemed very much like she would do better in the election. During Brat summer, donors and volunteers were lining up despite the genocide to contribute to the success of Harris and Walz. I personally know people who were protesting the genocide during the day and phonebanking for Dem candidates at night. By the time the Walz/Vance debate rolled around, the Democrats’ messaging changed and their new approach led to diminished excitement. An analysis of Harris’ loss that ignores that shift isn’t aiming for truth. We have evidence that the campaign vibes shift came from tenured Democratic party operatives, and that the party still ignores messaging suggestions from Walz and others. BlueAnon theories ignore this and any other campaign decisions because the entire goal of BlueAnon is to absolve the Democratic party of any responsibility.

Instead of the politicians themselves being responsible, blame is shifted to nefarious others. In fact, the nefarious others are often the same forces that Americans have been blaming for over a century: Russia and the left. The symmetry between these conspiracy theories and previous theories should serve as a red flag, but instead it only makes the theories “feel” correct. Those of us who are middle-aged and older were raised on the threat of Russia as an all powerful enemy whose shadowy ways could be the cause of any negative forces in the U.S. This mental path is so well-worn that it’s comforting for us to retread it.

None of this is new. The 1964 essay ”The Paranoid Style in American Politics” starts:

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing.”

Sound familiar? The author, historian Richard Hofstadter looks back to political paranoia regarding the Masons in the 1700s and many other examples of conspiracies in the two centuries between. He says that modern (in this case, 1964) paranoia stems from a different source, though, a feeling of being dispossessed within national politics. “America has been largely taken away from them and their [rightwing] kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” One of the primary dangers of this thought mode is that the logical political goal, if you believe your life is controlled by an all powerful enemy, is the obliteration of that enemy. When the “enemy” is half of the U.S. or your potential political allies on the left, the tendency is to damage coalitions and retreat from mass action.

I think Hofstadter’s essay is still fundamentally correct, but that BlueAnon, unlike its QAnon counterpart, is largely motivated by fear and learned helplessness. Without the conspiracies, we have to confront the fact that there is no functional opposition party in the U.S. The leaders that we placed our hopes on, that we elected to prevent fascism, either are not up to the job or actively aiding the fascists. Having invested most of our energy into this one failed party, we think we have no other political levers to pull. I sometimes feel helpless, and I was not as emotionally invested in the Democratic party as liberals are. The terrible onslaught of trauma from genocide, climate change, and other crises is unbearable without something to believe in, so people are building an illusion of a party that they can still count on.

I am seeing this conspiratorial thinking spreading both in its reach and scope. On Facebook and Instagram, friends were outraged to find that they were “forcibly following” Trump and Vance when the simpler explanation is that they were following the Presidential and Vice Presidential accounts, which transitioned to Trump and Vance after the election. On Metafilter, conspiratorial thinking appears in analysis of other current events such as the D.C. plane crash and even personal conversations where users speculate on other users’ mental health. For my own mental health, I am going to opt out. For the health of Metafilter and other liberal communities, posters need to be honest about if they are posting from panic or from facts, otherwise we’ll be supporting the fascists by using their own critical framework.