Reviews and Comments

I was intrigued to hear an argument that American democracy needs Christianity, and I was especially intrigued to hear it from an openly gay atheist. In all, the book is interesting. The argument basically goes like this: There are things that the U.S. constitution does not deal with (morality, ethics), and there need to be other institutions that step in to handle those things. The bargain between Christianity and the U.S. form of government has been that each will handle what it does best. Of course, that bargain has broken down. The church has become a political entity, and American politics has taken on the look of religious institutions (people worshiping at the alter of red and blue).

Two things Rauch assumes in this book (unsurprisingly, given that he works at a Washington thinktank): that liberalism is a desirable political system/ideology; that capitalism is a desirable economic arrangement. I think if he were to question those two terms, the argument might have to be rethought.

But also: I am not convinced that Christianity is the only way to fill the gap here. There are other ways that people can choose to organize themselves and address questions of morals and ethics. He might agree with this argument, but I think he's taking a pragmatic approach: Christianity is so big and powerful that we should look for ways to persuade Christians to change the church.

I picked this book up on a whim - I didn't really know anything about it. And now I am excited for Volume 2 and interested in what the translation schedule is for the remaining volumes (8 in total).

Yes, this is a Groundhog Day-like story, but it is much more than that. My favorite parts are when the character works through what it's like to attend to the same day over and over and also when she is trying to understand her relationship to her spouse as she remains stuck in this loop.

"Suddenly I remember the sounds of summer. I remember the creaking of the stairs. You don't hear it when there is moisture in the air, it is never there in winter, but there comes a point in the course of the summer when the stairs start to creak. It has to do with the wood drying out and you have to tread carefully, especially if you're going up or down the stairs when someone is sleeping. If it is the middle of the night or early in the morning when all else is still and when the dry creak fills the room if you don't set your feet very carefully and silently on step after step after step. It is a sound that speaks of summer and the many years those stairs have been there, of the generations of feet they have carried up and down. But when summer is over, in the middle of September or some time in October, the sound disappears from the stairs, the moisture seeps back into the wood and autumn sets in with its breezes and silent stairs." (95)

"Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it's a chemical reaction, I don't know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other's company. Maybe we are a weather system - condensation and evaporation." (46)

I was not a big tumblr user - tinkered here and there. This book is a great account of tumblr's technical affordances as well as its cultural significance. It's written by insiders, which I think brings a lot to the analysis. I read it for research on federated/decentralized networks, and that meant I was most drawn to their concept of "silosociality."

The authors argue that tumblr has a shared sensibility, oriented toward social justice and creating "safe space." They describe that sensibility in terms of silosociality, which involved the maintenance of boundaries that is not always creating cozy, happy places. There's a toxic side to it. Still, even with that toxicity, silosociality need not always be demonized - it's a different way of thinking about how we gather (online or offline).

"Tumblr users experience tumblr in silos that are defined by people's shared interests, but sustained through inward-facing shared vernacular and sensibility, made possible by tumblr's features, functions, and rules." (52)

Navigating, learning, and becoming part of silos - this is hard. That's what drives some people away. But that friction is interesting and sometimes useful. Current discourse is allergic to silos and echo chambers (even as people flee to these kinds of set ups - group chats, private messaging apps) but that discourse is (to my mind) driven by corporate social media companies that want you to post more, and more, and more so they can mine the data. They can, obviously still data mine private messages. But their business model would have to change if people thought more about cultivating their silos and then moving between them (or looking for ways to manage the connections between their silos).

At any rate, this concept of silosociality is really interesting, and the authors suggest in the conclusion that it might be a way of thinking through the futures of social media.

The key thing that comes out of this collection of writings (taken from letters but also excerpts of various texts) is that Marx and Engels thought unions were necessary but no sufficient for revolution. Unions remained, for the most part, too narrowly focused on economic issues and were often hostile to political advocacy or organizing. However, M&E also saw unions as crucial organizing spaces, as "organizing centers" and as places where the working class "trains itself."

I read this as I work on an essay about unions as places where workers can engage in crucial rhetorical practice - learning to talk to other workers, honing arguments for labor, and gaining important experience in organizing. Until recent years, these "organizing centers" or "schools" for honing one's rhetorical skill with regard to questions of labor and militancy have been pretty weak. The recent interest in labor organizing means that we can think about union spaces as crucial places for learning, thinking, and practice.

This is a nice encapsulation of an exhibition that run at the Hammer Museum in 2022. The show was the first to focus on Ulysses Jenkins work, a mural and video artist from Los Angeles. The book has some great essays and a roundtable about Jenkins' work.

The best essay is by Aria Dean, who takes on how Jenkins' work deals with race and representation. She offers a reading that goes beyond the typical understanding of Jenkins work - that he's offering a fairly simple critique of racist representations of Blackness (especially his work "Mass of Images"). Dean offers a much more interesting reading of Jenkins' work suggesting that a close look at Jenkins' work in the 1970s and 1980s reveals "a narrative unfolding, one that originates in Jenkins's massive failure to assert a legible ontology of himself as a black subject, capable of wreaking havoc over the images imposed on him, and ends with an abandonment of this pursuit. By the end of this period, Jenkins – in a semi-linear progression – has moved away from grappling with the slippage between the black subject and its representation and toward a non-ontological blackness, or what he deems a new black universalism." (42)

This autobiography of video artist Ulysses Jenkins is an interesting look both into his career and the LA art scene at a moment when video and telecommunications were coming onto the scene. Jenkins shows how that technology opened up new avenues for expression but did not really change the core dynamics of that art scene.

I read this book as part of my research into Electronic Cafe, a telecommunications art project that extended from the 1980s into the 2000s. Jenkins was part of the first iteration of that project, the first version of Electronic Cafe which served to network neighborhoods around LA during the 1984 Olympic Games. Each neighborhood had a cafe equipped with Slow Scan TV, a Bulletin Board System, an electronic writing pad, and more. Jenkins was an arist-in-residence at one of the sites (Gumbo House) where he helped people in the neighborhood with both technical issues and by prompting ideas for creative projects and communication with other neighborhoods.

His career is really interesting, given his experience both with creating art across media and with organizing art collectives and labs around LA.