Blog on Ana Ulin

Book Notes: Light From Uncommon Stars

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 10:00:30 +0000

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
Read Apr 4, 2022 - Apr 10, 2022
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is a lovely book, filled with lovable characters and feeling. It is a novel about food, music, and love, which are perhaps different expressions of the same thing.

I would call this more magical realism than sci-fi, with much humor and a lot of humanity. It is a book filled with women, in the best possible way. At the center is a depiction of a transgender character that I found touching and compelling (as a cis person), and an exploration of the steep costs she pays for being herself.

The story has a delightful sense of place. The sprawling extended LA suburbs – not exactly a glamorous locale – are described with a genuine warmth and deep familiarity. It is a region chock-full of different immigrant communities overlapping and mixing at the edges, making it an excellent setting for a story about food, family and music.

I enjoyed this a lot. It was a wonderful respite from the daily doom and gloom we seem to be living in lately.

Book Highlights

Here at Starrgate Donut, Lan and her family would safely wait out the fall of the Galactic Empire, continue their work, and live undisturbed, as long as -— as Mr. Thamavuong stressed —- they gave donuts to the police officers for free.

Tomorrow is tomorrow. Over there is over there. And here and now is not a bad place and time to be, especially when so much of the unknown is beautiful.

More fighting, more war, as if people’s very souls were falling away into disrepair.

And then there was an amazing substance she had discovered on this planet: MSG. Just a little, and everything took on a whole new level of tastiness.

“Lan, what would happen if someone played their existence not only to its inevitable end, but also to its inevitable beginning? “What if someone played their music to its inevitable everything?”

Shizuka would guide her, let her feel human, no matter how she might doubt. Let her feel old and broken. Let her feel childish and naïve. There was no need to be perfectly beautiful, nor immortal, nor untouchable.

And she sang and spoke until she could stand alone, in front of everyone, and declare herself beautiful.

Growing Kitty Grass Without Soil

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 13:37:03 -0700

A kitty prepares to taste some fresh grass

Iterating on my system for growing kitty grass at home (which I summarized here), I decided to reduce the mess the kitties make when eating/playing with the grass by not using soil. D dubbed this “napkinponics”, which is a great name, except it is not accurate – I used a paper towel, not a napkin.

The process is quite simple: take a paper towel, make it wet, put the seeds on it, keep the whole thing wet for a week or so, and the grass will do its thing. There is still a bit of a mess after the cats take a go at it, but at least there is no soil.

Some pictures of the process:

A wet paper towel on a plate, prepared for planting

Four days later, the seeds are starting to sprout

Two weeks after planting, the grass is ready to chomp

A view of the root system inside and under the paper towel

Embroidery: Clean Your Beans

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 15:01:12 +0000

I hadn’t done any embroidery since my early childhood, when I dabbled in cross-stitch, and this year I decided to sign up for the Year of Stitch series of tutorials and samplers from Badass Cross Stitch. It’s been a great way to get gently back into embroidery, and I’ve been having great fun messing around with thread and stabbing fabric.

This is my first fully finished “real” (i.e. not a sampler) embroidery project, done with a kit from The Flossy Feline.

Backstitch and satin stitch embroidery. A cat licking its paw, with the caption ‘Clean Your Beans’.

Back of the embroidery, finished with a piece of gray felt.

Book Notes: Perhaps the Stars

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 12:49:20 +0000

Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer
Read Feb 16, 2022 - Apr 2, 2022
⭐⭐⭐⭐

Perhaps the Stars is the fourth and final volume of the Terra Ignota series¹. As with the previous volumes, I was excited by the richness of the ideas that it presents, and its vision of a world organized very differently from our own. At the same time, this book is fading quickly from my memory.

This is a very ambitious, very complex book. Grandiose, even. Much of it went over my head. For example, I was surprised to read in an interview with Ada Palmer that entire sections of the book are written in meter². Palmer has said that her goal was to contribute to the Great Conversation, and she has probably accomplished that.

This grand ambition is the book’s strength and also its main weakness. The novel leans more towards political philosophy than storytelling, and I missed better character development and story. There are many topics packed into the series – political philosophy, mythology, religion, Greek gods, characters mixing different languages – but none of them is explored in the depth that it deserves. Despite being much longer than the previous books, Perhaps the Stars feels like it rushes to a conclusion, crowded and unsatisfying, leaving not only ideas undeveloped, but also what used to be major characters barely mentioned.

The Terra Ignota series succeeds at building a compelling world, at asking good questions and providing interesting – if partial – answers. But it doesn’t quite excel as a work of fiction. The many disparate and complex layers distract from the story and its characters. The central characters are deliberate archetypes, and while that makes perhaps for some interesting philosophical questions, it makes for less human, less compelling characters.

Still, there was some fun to be had. I am dazzled by the big questions raised, and encouraged by a world that is neither pure dystopia nor utopia, but a more complex – realistic? – world that needs to be worked on, as all worlds do.

Book Highlights

The vastness of it felt spiteful, this huge, fat planet, as if Earth had planned this, knowing that no wall or battlefront could be so dispiriting a barrier as the cruel width of America.

The Cousin’s wrap and Red Crystal armband are shield and armor for those who count the faces around them not like theirs, and fear that the snores are growing shallow of that long-slumbering beast, majority.

Global access to shared world news is a defining part of our modern age, tying us together into one people, not many splintered peoples. If we keep that, we keep our shared humanity, shared experience.

Free Speech, that old tool of plutocracy, the intoxicating, rosy blossom under whose petals parasite lies can breed and multiply until they devour all the garden. […] I do believe it was a pretty thing once, Free Speech, such a lofty notion, but we outgrew it with our communications revolution, as with our machine guns we outgrew pretty chivalry.

Did we poison our ethics with the trolley problem? Is it bad for us, our minds, our souls, to dive, even in thought experiment, into a universe so artificially unkind?

I find that storytellers slightly poet-mad often age better than their factful peers, broad strokes the fitter for my distant gaze.

Empire is a thought process, the impulse to celebrate when you see a strong hand reach, and grasp, and exercise its power over all things human.

“No one should have to choose between building the future they love and doing so kindly.”

My notes on the previous books of Terra Ignota: Too Like The Lightning, Seven Surrenders and The Will To Battle. ↩︎
“Palmer: A lot of the prose is in fact secretly in iambic pentameter just with the line breaks taken out, and while the reader isn’t conscious of it you do perceive it unconsciously, and I make the meter be more perfect the more intense and Homeric I want the scene to feel, so I intentionally break the meter a few times in a paragraph in most sections, so that when I get to the ones that are fully perfect meter, the rhythm of it draws you in and feels like epic.” (from https://www.trackofwords.com/2021/11/01/author-interview-ada-palmer-talks-the-terra-ignota-series/) ↩︎

Book Notes: Fierce Fairytales

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 13:32:23 +0000

Fierce Fairytales by Nikita Gill
Read Feb 4, 2022 - Feb 18, 2022
⭐⭐

Fierce Fairytales is a collection of poems by Nikita Gill in which she retells well-known stories from a contemporary feminist perspective. Sometimes she also takes the point of view of characters traditionally depicted as evil. In The Stempother’s Tale, for example, she tells us about the cruel woman that “She didn’t start evil. None of us is truly born evil. Evil is man-made.”

I like very much the idea of what Gill is doing here, providing more empowering and compassionate versions of well-known tropes. But I found the execution quite disappointing. The language fell flat and artless, and the stories themselves were undeveloped and shallow.

Amanda Lovelace does this much better.

Book Notes: Leviathan Falls

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 14:44:24 +0000

Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey
Read Jan 19, 2022 - Feb 2, 2022
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Leviathan Falls is a satisfying ending to the epic Expanse saga. The story comes full circle and the protomolecule chapter of human history comes to an end.

The characters stay true to themselves until the end (and some of them even past it! spoilers!). Holden engages in self-sacrificing heroics, breaking Naomi’s heart for the umpteenth time. Naomi keeps a clear head, all systems running and various factions coordinated. Alex is his usual gregarious, convivial self; he continues listening to questionable music, and looks forward to dying of old age surrounded by grandkids. Amos puts his affable, loving knucklehead self to extremely good use. Muskrat the dog is embarrassed by the indignities of peeing and pooping on the float. Elvi Okoye does even madder science, the results of which help Holden with his heroics, as per usual.

Despite staggering sacrifices and tragic losses, the human race keeps on keeping on, shockingly and unsurprisingly. (I suspect we’re the real cockroaches.)

I loved getting this one last time to hang out with the these people, and say goodbye to them and their stories.

Book Highlights

It was hard to believe that there had been a time when her life hadn’t been moving from one trauma to the next like walking on stepping-stones in an ornamental garden.

It couldn’t be so hard to see how accepting a little restriction and regulation benefited everyone. But inner-worlds culture didn’t measure it that way. For them, being better meant being better than the person next to you, not both of you sharing the same increase.

Hopelessness and despair could almost look restful.

Every generation had its apocalypse. If they made humans stop falling in love and having babies, celebrating and dreaming and living out the time they had, they’d have stopped a long time before.

There had always been that thread in the tapestry of Laconian culture: the willingness to assert whatever reality your commanding officer proposed.

It was always like this. People trying to get their work done even while atrocities were blooming around them. Avoid eye contact and hope that the fire doesn’t spread to you and yours.

So yeah, you fucked me and mine over. And we’ve done shit here that the gods will never forgive us for. But when you’re feeling bad about it, remember that the alternative was somehow even worse.”

Book Notes: Braiding Sweetgrass

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 17:18:36 +0000

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Read Dec 23, 2021 - Jan 18, 2022
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

This book hit me in all the soft places. It made me weep in every chapter. It made me weep as I was reviewing my highlights. It made me weep as I edited these notes.

Braiding Sweetgrass is a lovely book, part memoir, and part exhortation to love our non-human neighbors – plant and animal – as we love our human families. It is filled with hope and a spunky perseverance. The overall impression is one of profound love, unwavering despite all the heartache. A practical “how to save the planet” this is not. If we all related to nature as Wall Kimmerer does, no how-tos would be necessary.

Wall Kimmerer weaves her science, her ancestry, her neighbors, her experience, her family, into a beautiful story about the interconnectedness of human lives and those of plants and non-human animals. She writes about what right relationship with the land might look like, about the urgency of recognizing that we have options other than either “exploiting” or “staying away from” the land. She writes about the role of settlers and natives. She writes about reciprocity and gratitude and hope and grief.

I was delighted to find Wall Kimmerer writing about the importance of language and how it shapes our thinking. She reflects on the awkwardness of learning the language that the boarding school took away from her grandfather, and also of the life-saving importance of doing so – both for her own healing, and to move ever closer to a way of feeling that recognizes plants and non-human animals not as resources, but as our equals. She tells us:

So in this book as in my life, I break with those grammatical blinders to write freely of Maple, Heron, and Wally when I mean a person, human or not; and of maple, heron, and human when I mean a category or concept.

Anyway. You should read it.

Book Highlights

These are not “instructions” like commandments, though, or rules; rather, they are like a compass: they provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map for yourself.

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.

That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.

If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

The botany I was taught was reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective. Plants were reduced to objects; they were not subjects.

My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide. But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer.

Back to the questions that science does not ask, not because they aren’t important, but because science as a way of knowing is too narrow for the task.

To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.

Puhpowee, she explained, translates as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You’d think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.

[…] while there are several words for thank you, there is no word for please. Food was meant to be shared, no added politeness needed; it was simply a cultural given that one was asking respectfully. The missionaries took this absence as further evidence of crude manners.

A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa —- to be a bay -— releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.

Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being?

The outlet from my pond runs downhill to my good neighbor’s pond. What I do here matters. Everybody lives downstream.

Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.

Imagine raising children in a culture in which gratitude is the first priority.

Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness.

Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking. That’s hard for scientists, so fully brainwashed by Cartesian dualism, to grasp.

Just about everything we use is the result of another’s life, but that simple reality is rarely acknowledged in our society. What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect?

For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?

Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention.

Rather than to greed, prosperity here gave rise to the great potlatch tradition in which material goods were ritually given away, a direct reflection of the generosity of the land to the people. Wealth meant having enough to give away, social status elevated by generosity. The cedars taught how to share wealth, and the people learned.

And we think of it as simply time, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story.

Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It’s not enough to grieve. It’s not enough to just stop doing bad things.

Tentatively sending out rhizomes through the sludge, slender tillers marching bravely away, sweetgrass is a teacher of healing, a symbol of kindness and compassion. She reminded me that it is not the land that has been broken, but our relationship to it.

Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration.

Nature herself is a moving target, especially in an era of rapid climate change. Species composition may change, but relationship endures. It is the most authentic facet of the restoration.

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.

Joanna Macy speaks of the Great Turning, the “essential adventure of our time; the shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.”

We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers.

Language is our gift and our responsibility. I’ve come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land.

If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.

We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying.

So in this book as in my life, I break with those grammatical blinders to write freely of Maple, Heron, and Wally when I mean a person, human or not; and of maple, heron, and human when I mean a category or concept.

Truchas Peak Shawl

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 14:40:37 -0800

I’ve been getting back into knitting over the last months. A few years back I stopped watching TV almost entirely, and with that went the knitting. Or maybe it was the other way around, it’s hard to tell.

Late last year I picked up an old kit I still had from the Miss Babs Knitting Tour 2014. I always fall behind with this kind of “yarn club”. I’m never able to knit as fast as the new yarn and patterns arrive, and I have no idea how others do it. The point is: I still had this kit for the Truchas Peak pattern, and I finally got to make it.

I got through it with what felt like more than my fair share of mistakes. My pandemic-afflicted energy levels made it unthinkable to frog and re-knit the not-quite-right sections, so the end result has a lot of, well, let’s call it wabi sabi.

I feel neutral about this pattern. Nothing felt particularly interesting in it. It was a nice chill knit, which is exactly what you need sometimes. The colorway choice (which was made for me as part of the kit subscription) added some interest, with that bright pop in the final section of the shawl.

Details:

Pattern: Truchas Peak by Ann Weaver
Needle: US 7
Yardage: 1,200 yards of fingering yarn
Yarn: 3 skeins of Miss Babs Yet, in the colorways Quicksilver, Blacktop and Rhodolite
My Ravelry notebook entry: https://ravel.me/anaulin/tp

Book Notes: Of Women and Salt

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 16:07:50 +0000

Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia
Read Dec 11, 2021 - Dec 15, 2021
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Of Women and Salt tells the intertwined stories of women from different generations of the same family – first Cuban, then Cuban-American. Their stories tangle with those of other women, like their Salvadorean immigrant neighbor and her daughter.

The book is beautifully crafted. The stories are evocative and heartbreaking. There are themes of emigration and immigration, of colonization and war and revolution. Mostly it is a book about family and relationships, and about the things women do to survive.

Book Highlights

María Isabel thought it had always been women who wove the future out of the scraps, always the characters, never the authors. She knew a woman could learn to resent this post, but she would instead find a hundred books to read.

And Jeanette has wondered whether loss unspoken becomes an inherited trait.

Motherhood: question mark, a constant calculation of what-if. What if we just gave up?

Why anyone left a place only to reminisce, to carry its streets into every conversation, to see every moment through the eyes of some imagined loss, was beyond her. Miami existed as such a hollow receptacle of memory, a shadow city, full of people who needed a place to put their past into perspective.

I think about this often, about whether the past is real if we don’t bring it into the present. Tree falling in the forest and all that.

Falling in love. Nobody says rising in love.

Book Notes: Remote Control

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 16:02:22 +0000

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor
Read Dec 1, 2021 - Dec 5, 2021
⭐⭐⭐

Remote Control is a novella with similar themes to those in Okorafor’s other work (Binti, Akata Witch, Who Fears Death). The setting is a sci-fi West Africa where technology mixes with tradition in a way that borders on magical realism. The protagonist is a young woman with a special ability that separates her from others and sets her on an arduous journey.

The story is sweet and readable, but, like other Okorafor stories, it left me somewhat unsatisfied.

Book Notes: Ballad of Black Tom

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 15:56:47 +0000

Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
Read Dec 8, 2021 - Dec 10, 2021
⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Ballad of Black Tom mixes Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythology with the racism of 1920s Harlem. Although the plot doesn’t feel particularly novel, it is elevated by the depth of the main character, Tom. We see his relationship with his father, his community, and how the violence of the world twists him into rage and desperation.

Book Highlights

Walking through Harlem first thing in the morning was like being a single drop of blood inside an enormous body that was waking up.

He didn’t look like a wealthy man, but it was the well-off who could afford such a disguise. You had to be rich to risk looking broke.

Book Notes: Thick: And Other Essays

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 10:50:36 +0000

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Read Nov 30, 2021 - Dec 5, 2021
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thick is a collection of essays previously published elsewhere. The topics are varied and sketch out a broad analysis of the ongoing fuck-ups in our society.

McMillan Cottom writes about racism, beauty, class, whiteness, productivity culture, and more. Her writing is sharp and witty, wise and readable, and shot through with autobiographical details that give her insights more power and texture. One of my favorite contemporary writers, currently newslettering at the NYT.

Book Highlights

Black girls and black women are problems. That is not the same thing as causing problems. We are social issues to be solved, economic problems to be balanced, and emotional baggage to be overcome.

I had come so far that I could be considered a problem. It is an honor of sorts.

Smart is only a construct of correspondence, between one’s abilities, one’s environment, and one’s moment in history.

That is because beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.

Systems of exchange tend to generate the kind of ideas that work well as exchanges.

I am not the only one in love with the idea of competence. It is a neoliberal pipe dream that generates no end of services, apps, blogs, social media stars, thought leaders, and cultural programming, all promising that we can be competent.

Productivity tools promise you control where the political economy says you cannot have any.

Duality can breed insight, but it can also breed delusion.

Political theorist Corey Robin understands the history of the conservative right in the United States as a search for a fight, because the act of being conservative necessitates an undesirable progress against which it can rebel.

Book Notes: Somebody's Daughter: A Memoir

Sat, 18 Dec 2021 17:04:23 +0000

Somebody's Daughter: A Memoir by Ashley C. Ford
Read Nov 25, 2021 - Nov 29, 2021
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

For half a minute, I knew I had it in me to tell the truth, and be loved anyway.

Ashley Ford’s memoir Somebody’s Daughter revolves around her relationship with her father, who was incarcerated for all of her childhood and part of her youth.

Despite the many struggles in the book (a single mother raising two children with little money, sexual assault, trying to make a living as a writer), the book never feels bleak or hopeless. There is a bittersweet depth of feeling, insights into relationships and life that ring universal.

Ford is young, and the story ends on an upwards trajectory – better things seems to lie ahead. I want to know what happens next.

Book Notes: Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 12:11:52 +0000

Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith
Read Dec 12, 2021 - Dec 12, 2021
⭐⭐⭐

Open Borders is a book in comic form advocating for unrestricted migration. The book is illustrated by Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal in his usual simple and vibrant style. The main author of the book is Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University.

Although Caplan starts by presenting the moral and ethical arguments for removing legal restrictions on human migration, the book (unsurprisingly) focuses on economic arguments from an American perspective. Caplan carefully refutes each of the usual objections to immigration, centering his arguments on the idea that immigrants would bring more labor and, thus, more production and wealth, which would more than offset any potential costs. He devotes a section to discussing how a pro-open-borders stance is consistent with many philosophical perspectives (utilitarianism, Christianity, libertarianism, meritocracy, etc).

I personally don’t find this kind of economic argument compelling (I am in favor of open borders as a human rights issue), and I was somewhat uncomfortable with the talk of “mass production” as obviously good goals, without even a nod to the environmental costs. But I see the wisdom in Caplan’s approach for appealing to immigration skeptics. Towards the end of the book he talks about how his advocacy for an extreme – completely open borders – might help shift the Overton window for the immigration conversation. I hope he’s right.

Book Notes: Bullshit Jobs

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 12:02:51 +0000

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
Read Oct 9, 2021 - Nov 25, 2021
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Bullshit Jobs illuminates the baffling amounts of unnecessary make-work in modern workplaces. It helped me get a better view on managerial bureaucracies, and especially the category of work that Graeber calls “box-ticking” (the primary form of bullshit work I’ve encountered in my mostly-not-bullshit occupation).

Graeber’s definition of “bullshit job” is refreshingly humane and empowering: a job is a bullshit job if the person doing it believes it to be so. He theorizes that many of these jobs have proliferated in the last 50 years largely because there isn’t that much “productive” work to do for everyone, yet our culture demands that we have a job to be able to live. The book also addresses counterarguments such as “workers don’t see the whole picture” and “the market wouldn’t pay for these jobs if they were pointless.”

Although the subject is depressing (so much life wasted on a bizarre pursuit to prove we’re worth of making a living!), there are some ideas towards the end of the book on how we might improve the situation. It won’t be easy, since it would require a gradual change away from the Western anglo-inflected culture of work-as-moral-obligation and suffering-as-virtue.

The book is broad-ranging, tying the concept of bullshit jobs to topics like the underpayment of teachers and others in non-bullshit occupations, or the proliferation of the non-profit industrial complex. Lots to think about.

Book Highlights

But ultimately, the need to play a game of make-believe not of one’s own making, a game that exists only as a form of power imposed on you, is inherently demoralizing.

[…] corporations are less and less about making, building, fixing, or maintaining things and more and more about political processes of appropriating, distributing, and allocating money and resources.

Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds—or rather, where every day it’s more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered “economic” and what is “political.”

it’s not just the senselessness of the process that rankles, but as with all box-ticking rituals, the fact that one ends up spending so much more time pitching, assessing, monitoring, and arguing about what one does than one spends actually doing it.

It is increasingly a system of rent extraction where the internal logic—the system’s “laws of motion,” as the Marxists like to say—are profoundly different from capitalism, since economic and political imperatives have come to largely merge.

the whole apparatus, rather than replacing old-fashioned industrial capitalism, is instead superimposed on top of it, blending together in a thousand points in a thousand different ways.

To a large degree, needs are just other people’s expectations.

In most of the testimonies I collected, “meaningful” was just a synonym for “helpful,” and “valuable,” for “beneficial.”

The fact that servants were paid is crucial because it meant that while wage labor did exist in Northern Europe, centuries before the dawn of capitalism, almost everyone in the Middle Ages assumed that it was something respectable people engaged in only in the first phase of their working life.

“producerism” […] focus on “production”—a concept which, as earlier noted, is basically theological, and bears in it a profound patriarchal bias

It is a recognition that the world we inhabit is something we made, collectively, as a society, and therefore, that we could also have made differently.

We can all imagine a better world. Why can’t we just create one?

caring for others, especially over the long term, requires maintaining a world that’s relatively predictable as the grounds on which caring can take place.

The more the economy becomes a matter of the mere distribution of loot, the more inefficiency and unnecessary chains of command actually make sense, since these are the forms of organization best suited to soaking up as much of that loot as possible.

Book Notes: A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Sun, 12 Dec 2021 19:26:30 +0000

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
Read Nov 23, 2021 - Nov 25, 2021
⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Psalm for the Wild-Built opens with the epigraph “For anybody who could use a break” and it delivers on that promise. It is a sweet respite from our daily doom and grind.

The book is a novella, quickly readable in a few hours. The main characters are a non-binary monk and the wild-built sentient robot they meet in their travels. The robot is perhaps the wisest of the pair, but they are both equally gentle, human and lovable.

I look forward to the next installments of the series.

Book Highlights

Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you’d find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi.

But a Factory Age building, a metal building – that was of no benefit to anything beyond the small creatures that enjoyed some temporary shelter in its remains. It would corrode until it collapsed. That was the most it would achieve. Its only legacy was to persist where it did not belong.

You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.

You and I —- we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?

Book Notes: The Sympathizer

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 13:45:23 +0000

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Read Nov 2, 2021 - Nov 17, 2021
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Nothing I write can do justice to this novel. Nothing I write can adequately convey the heftiness of the subject.

The Sympathizer tells the story of a Viet Cong spy embedded as a captain in the South Korean army. The action starts during the last days of the war and takes us through his exile to the US, as part of the “enemy” army in which he is embedded, and to his eventual return to Vietnam.

There are themes, of course, of war and colonization. But also of immigration and, mainly, of the atrocious choices and unspeakable acts we commit in the name of ideals and for those who we love.

There is much compassion and warmth towards the characters, no matter their allegiance. The unique sense of humor and original turns of phrase help make it all more digestible. A haunting, deceptively readable book.

Book Highlights

No, we fought to the tunes of love songs, for we were the Italians of Asia.

What was it like to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?

After the tenth putsch, I accepted the absurd state of our state with a mix of despair and anger, along with a dash of humor, a cocktail under whose influence I renewed my revolutionary vows.

Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?

We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in ’54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation.

I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

Catatonic on his bunk, Bon would remember nothing of the evacuation playing on television that afternoon and through the next day. Nor would he remember how, in the barracks and tents of our temporary city, thousands of refugees wailed as if attending a funeral, the burial of their nation, dead too soon, as so many were, at a tender twenty-one years of age.

I received an invitation to the grand opening of his new business on Hollywood Boulevard, a liquor store whose existence in the Cyclopean eye of the IRS meant that the General had finally conceded to a basic tenet of the American Dream. Not only must he make a living, he must also pay for it.

By the time I returned to campus, however, the students were of a new breed, not interested in politics or the world like the previous generation. Their tender eyes were no longer exposed daily to stories and pictures of atrocity and terror for which they might have felt responsible, given that they were citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it. Most important, their lives were no longer at stake because of the draft.

We used fish sauce the way Transylvanian villagers wore cloves of garlic to ward off vampires, in our case to establish a perimeter with those Westerners who could never understand that what was truly fishy was the nauseating stench of cheese. What was fermented fish compared to curdled milk?

Did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn’t my culture right here since I was born here?

He was more embarrassed and discreet about sex than about things I thought more difficult, like killing people, which pretty much defined the history of Catholicism, where sex of the homo, hetero, or pederastic variety supposedly never happened, hidden underneath the Vatican’s cassocks.

Ties, handkerchiefs, and socks were thrown in, though what was really needed was cologne, even of the gigolo kind, anything to mask the olfactory evidence of their having been gleefully skunked by history.

I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.

His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination).

But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.

The paper with which the West wiped itself was softer than the paper with which the rest of the world blew its nose, although this was only a metaphorical comparison.

Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory’s laminated floor?

Refugee, exile, immigrant—whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers.

I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.

The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.

We can argue about the causes for these wars and the apportioning of blame, but the fact is that war begins, and ends, over here, with the support of citizens for the war machine, with the arrival of frightened refugees fleeing wars we have instigated.

Book Notes: Citizen: An American Lyric

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 21:16:23 +0000

Citizen by Claudia Rankine
Read Oct 30, 2021 - Dec 7, 2021
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Painful and beautiful words, mainly about racism, about being Black in America. Hurts so good.

That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you, words outmaneuvered years, had you in a chokehold, every part roughed up, the eyes dripping.

That’s the bruise the ice in the heard was meant to ice.

– Claudia Rankine

Book Notes: Meddling Kids

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 12:41:25 +0000

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
Read Oct 25, 2021 - Oct 30, 2021
⭐⭐⭐⭐

Meddling Kids is a Scooby Doo / Enid Blyton mashup-spoof full of adventure, humor, and pop culture references. The teen detectives – complete with nerdy redhead and a dog – are now in their twenties. After years of being haunted by the strange events in their last case, they return to the scene to get to the bottom of things. They find a much changed little town (named, subtly, Blyton Hills).

The characters are a lot more three-dimensional than I expected from such a story. We see the shadows behind the amusing hijinks and the ridiculous villains in cheesy costumes. There is trauma, insanity and suicide.

A Lovecraftian horror, long documented by the ancestral inhabitants of the land, undergirds it all. No, they didn’t imagine the monsters. And now a hundreds-year old villain (who makes a living writing lesbian erotica) is trying to bring it back. Because they can and because they are bored. The plan foiled, the town saved, the detectives make off with some gold (spoilers!). Meddling pays off.

Book Highlights

That was about the sum of the benefits of being institutionalized: living with crazier people helped put things into perspective.

Some form of unremarkable weather, profoundly commonplace for meteorologists but somehow relevant to the overall color of the scene, was taking place. Let us say soft rain and sunshine; let us say lightningless, borborygmic thunder.

She was joyfully drowning in Kerri’s hair, its fragrance and softness pounding on her senses like a cheerful Mongol army banging on the gates of Baghdad.

“Looks like the place of an old lady who never got married.” “That’s Puritan for ‘witch,’ ” Nate said, and he knocked again.

Never cry about a gun. Sadly it’s one of the easiest things to replace in this country.

Book Notes: The Department of Truth, Vol 1: The End of the World

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 10:07:12 +0000

The Department of Truth, Vol 1: The End of The World by James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds
Read Oct 31, 2021 - Oct 31, 2021
⭐⭐⭐

I got a copy of The Department of Truth Vol 1 after reading Cory Doctorow gushing about it in his newsletter. Given that I don’t love Doctorow’s fiction writing, perhaps I shouldn’t be putting too much stock in his book recommendations, but his review intrigued me and I got the book.

I don’t regret reading it, even if the story felt a little trite. Our hero gets recruited to work for a shady government agency he has never heard about before. The shady agency battles an even shadier Evil Organization. Slowly, our hero starts to question which side is the real “good guys”. Might he be one of the “bad guys”? The main original twist in this comic is that the agency is battling “conspiracy theories”, under the surreal premise that when enough people believe something, it becomes actually true, essentially rewriting reality.

I liked the art, and it made for an entertaining hour. But I don’t think I need to read the next volume.