Reviews and Comments

I loved this book. At moments, it's a very typical novel, and at others it's as if David Lynch took the wheel. The NYT review says it well:

"“Ah, a nice old-fashioned novel,” the reader thinks, gliding through the opening pages of “Carnality.” The author, Lina Wolff, begins in a conventional close third-person perspective and quickly dispatches with the W questions. Who is the main character? A 45-year-old Swedish writer. What is she doing? Traveling on a writer’s grant. When? Present day, more or less. Where? Madrid. Why? To upend the tedium of her life.

Premise established, we are safely buckled in for the ride, which rumbles along a scenic track for roughly five minutes before a crazed carnival operator assumes the controls and we take off at warp speed through loops, inversions and spins."

I am definitely going to read Wolff's earlier books, especially Bret Easton Ellis and Other Dogs.

And because I'm a sucker for any moment in a book that talks about the torture of writing...

"It occurs to her that everything gets easier when she makes no attempt to write. Her should no longer aches and she no longer has to come up with topics for her columns. Somewhere deep inside her she knows she has never been a good columnist...In any case, she thinks, when you are writing you have to create the situations and the links between them yourself, but when you are living you get them for free. She says this to Mercuro, which is when he says that writing is the kind of occupation that consumes you. You pay for it with your soul, and one fine day your soul has been used up." (134-135)

An excellent study of the cultural forces that went into creating the idea of the "good mother" - attachment parenting and a host of other ideas constructing (mostly by men) that put mothers in an impossible bind. Be constantly available to your baby. Follow your instincts, but trust your doctors. The research portions of the book are woven together with Reddy's own experience as a mother. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, with a special focus on the women in the shadows of that research program. The wives of these famous researchers, it turns out, had lots to say about mothering (who knew?), and/but their careers were sidelined for their husbands.

"The underlying problem is that the 'good mother' isn't really a person. She's a subject of capitalism, charged with optimizing every aspect of her kids' childhood so she can produce good future workers and consumers. And this, too—the competitiveness and individualism baked into our image of the good mother sacrificing anything to get the best for her kids—is part off the trap. If we're indoors obsessing over whether our baby is meeting developmental milestones fast enough or which private preschool to select for our toddler, if we're memorizing scripts that promise to fix tantrums and googling lunchbox hack, we're not out in our communities organizing for universal pre-K or free school lunches. The good mother thinks always of her own children first." (8)

This is a great and quick-reading memoir by my colleague at Rutgers-Camden. Each chapter is a short essay for each year of McAllister's life. My favorite essay was 2006 when Tom is in Iowa City and dealing with a tornado for the first time. He's lived most of his life in Philadelphia, and the book offers an interesting picture of Philly during his early years 90s and 00s.

I'm always amazed at how vulnerable people are willing to be in memoirs, and this is no exception.

My favorite passage is about the slam dunk contest from the 2005 essay:

"I want to clarify something: dunks matter more than you think they do. You may want to tell me it's all a big dumb spectacle, and the scoring doesn't make sense, and it's just a show to sell Sprite and sneakers, and yes, sure, that's what it is. But strip all the nonsense away and you see an aesthetic achievement that can only be performed by a tiny percentage of humans in world history. Each dunk is one of the most perfect sporting feats on the planet, a beautiful expression of athletic perfection, of power, speed, and creativity. These players—their bodies built specifically for this task, spinning in the goddamn air, not just floating because there's no violence propelling it, and throwing it down behind their heads with more grace and fluidity in the coordination than many dancers—are the culmination of a century worth of training, learning, and evolutionary adaptations." (90)

This might be a perfect book, if there is such a thing. I'm selecting an incredible passage to include here, but I think you could just grab any paragraph and be be blown away:

"The wonder-horse show that evening in 1935 included a wolf-boy. He wore a mask of fur, and a suit that looked like fur but was really something else. Shining in the electric light, silver and blue, the wolf-boy frolicked and gamboled around the stage in such a way the watchers couldn't be sure if he meant to be laughed at.

They were ready to laugh in order to prove they hadn't been fooled. They had seen and laughed at such as the Magnet Boy and the Chicken Boy, at the Professor of Silly and at jugglers who beat themselves over the head with Indian pins that weren't really made of wood. They had given their money to preachers who had lifted their hearts and baptized scores of them and who had later rolled around drunk in the Kootenai village and fornicated with squaws. Tonight, faced with the spectacle of this counterfeit monster, they were silent at first. Then a couple made remarks that sounded like questions, and a man in the dark honked like a goose, and people let themselves laugh at the wolf-boy.

But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a 'roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship's horn, the locomotive's lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan-music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever." (115-116)

About 30 pages into this book, I thought "this seems like a Joan Didion book." That's a good thing for me, but the comparison only goes so far. Kitamura's writing is less impressionistic than Didion's. This is a book about an actor but more than that it is about acting - how it works, what it requires, what it means to be in a space where "it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind" (195).

These are my favorite parts of the book, the part where the protagonist is talking about acting:

"I sat back into my seat and my attention returned to Josie and Clarice. I was instantly engaged in the intricacies of their rehearsal, as if my focus had never shifted, I had worked with both of them but I did not think they had previously worked together. I could see that they were strongly attracted to each other, in their mutual admiration, their curiosity, but at the same time there was an edge of rivalry between them that had the potential to flare into open antagonism, it was the nature of the work and its rapid, temporary intimacies. And so, in addition to the story of the play itself, the narrative that was being enacted by Josie and Clarice, I was also observing the drama between the two women, who at times circled each other in the manner of prizefighters, wary and in a posture of constant assessment." (38)

Wythoff argues that a closer analysis of user techniques (how we directly engage with new and emerging technology) offers ways to respond to the creeping feeling that technology utterly controls users. He recognizes the power of "the feed" or "the scroll" or of AI, but he doesn't think that power leads to complete user disempowerment. The techniques users develop while engaging with tools are worth paying attention to as they open up space for rethinking how these tools can be put to use. He makes the argument with fascinating historical research into other technological moments, including a deep dive into the term "gadget."

The closing chapter takes up the efforts of community technology projects (especially the Philly Community Wireless project that Wythoff helps organize) as an answer to the solutions offered by "digital minimalism." The latter is often about individualized approaches to weaning oneself off tech, and it is also often about relying on more technological solutions to solve the problem (see the "Brick" that I keep seeing ads for that is supposed to keep us off our phones). Wythoff argues that "community tech" presents a more collective response and that it recognizes the possibility that people/communities/users can develop techniques together.

The deck is probably stacked against "users," but that doesn't mean the game is completely unwinnable. Examining and developing new techniques together offers one path forward for those interested in building potential solutions.

Bookwyrm is actually a good example of the kind of solution Wythoff has in mind.

This book, by my Rutgers colleague Eric Blanc, takes up some of the difficulties of labor organizing in the contemporary social and political climate. He argues for a worker-to-worker model of organizing, which relies on training workers to organize one another rather than hiring large numbers of staff to establish unions and organize workers. A staff-heavy model is expensive and doesn't scale, and a worker-to-worker model is not only more efficient but also (obviously) draws on workers' direct experience.

To me, the most interesting part of the argument is about "decentralization." Workers are mostly, unlike in the 1930s, not gathered in large numbers in hubs of labor (factories, etc.). How do we organize workers when there's no central "shop floor" let alone social clubs or other spaces where everyone gathers on a regular basis? More than this, I'd argue that workers aren't necessarily "decentralized" in many industries. Instead, they are dispersed, especially those who are working from home. This is a massive challenge for contemporary organizing, and Blanc offers the worker-to-worker model as a way to try to answer it.

He also is pretty optimistic about "digital tools" in this book. I am not. I see how zoom trainings can get people started with organizing even if an organization can't afford to send an organizer for face-to-face training. And maybe Instagram gets the word out about a union election and/or campaign. But more than anything, digital technologies seem to be mostly exacerbating the problems of dispersal, alienation, and isolation. When it comes down to it, f2f organizing is the key, and it's really difficult to do that when everyone is in different places and different times. Blanc knows this, and this is why he turns to the digital. He also recognizing that digital tools can't replace tried-and-true methods of organizing. But I am just more skeptical than him that we should rely on those tools much at all given that they are contributing to the problems we're trying to address.