some recent capsule reviews

With classes being over (they ended, for me, on Thursday), I've been able to take some time to catch up on this year's reading log. That said, here are some new capsule reviews for stuff I read this fall...

Alma, or The Dead Women by Alice Notley
This book is many things simultaneously: a collection of experimental poems utilizing different female personae; a cry of abject despair regarding US foreign policy; a set of incantations, curses, and other witchery; a call for the creation of a new species, defecting from the old. The fact that none of these things are particularly popular make it all the more impressive that this book ever made it to press. Enjoyable in small doses, sobering at its full length (at 344 pages it dwarfs most other volumes of contemporary poetry on my shelf).

Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie by Eric Lichtenfeld
A good overview of the action film as a genre, although I wish the book's theoretical basis was a bit more rigorous. It is best at positioning the films historically (it includes even minor details about their promotion and reception) and is weaker when it does ideological or formal analysis. The promise of an argument about "violence and spectacle" is only nominally fulfilled. Scavengings here.

You Just Don't Understand!: Women and Men In Conversation by Deborah Tannen
A careful analysis of the way gender differences manifest in conversation that scrupulously avoids taking a side in the "nature / nurture" debate. The book has no shortage of hard sociological data at its root, but most of the chapters are "humanized" with the inclusion of a lot of (sometimes repetitive) anecdotal data. This makes it slow reading at times, but the insights here remain sound: making this the rare example of a book that will genuinely help almost any adult who might take it to heart. Scavengings here.

Beautiful Evidence, by Edward Tufte
A masterpiece of beautiful design, but content-wise this book feels a bit like a "Tufte's Greatest Hits" collection. The Powerpoint-hatin' and the appreciation of Minard's "Napoleon marches on Moscow" graphic, for instance, will seem familiar to readers of Tufte's other books. (That's not to say that there isn't a pleasant sort of comfort to encountering them again here.) Of the chapters that felt really fresh, the one on "sparklines" is key: it's the one that best showcases Tufte's endless willingness to fruitfully rethink the ways that we visualize data. Scavengings here.

Movies As Politics, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Book-length volume of Rosenbaum's film criticism, collected from around the 1994-1996 era. I admire Rosenbaum as a critic, but I'm not entirely sure these short pieces, taken together, quite add up to a book. Arguments recur, yes, but in a way that betrays their piecemeal origins rather than working cumulatively. Scavengings here.

Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons 1978-2006, by Roz Chast
Roz Chast's cartooning work in recent years has been so content to mine the vein of child/parent relationships that it's easy to forget the pleasures of her early work, which is much more interested in the intersection between the odd and the quotidian. This is a great collection, although the first third (for my money) is vastly better than the final third.

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures The Life of The Mind, by Gerald Graff
A book-length argument for some relatively commonsense principles: students learn better when they understand a context for what they're learning; instructors have a duty to try to bridge the gap between academic language and the vernacular; student papers are better when they have a sense that they're arguing *against* someone rather than into a vacuum. Valid points, certainly: but as someone mostly convinced of these points on my way in, I found the rhetorical exertion on display here to be essentially skimmable. Scavengings here.

As usual, the full list of everything I've read this year lives here, and LibraryThing powers a RSS feed of my reviews here.

some recent capsule reviews

I've updated this year's reading log with some new reviews, posted below for your reading convenience:

Easy Travel to Other Planets, by Ted Mooney
There's a lot to like about the way this novel chronicles the interpersonal drama among a group of intellectuals and artists. The conversations are stylish, fragmentary, and mediated; the prose is compressed, with a cinematic sense of editing; a quasifuturistic theme (interspecies communication) provides ample opportunity for strange riffs; an atmosphere of geopolitical tension permeates obscurely at all times, threatening, at any moment, to condense into apocalypse—at its best, it recalls the energy and thrust of early DeLillo. At its worst, it reads like high-end erotica posing as lit: Mooney's attention to the sexuality of his [female] protagonist lurches towards the prurient at times (in the first thirty pages of the novel, she participates in three sex scenes, including one with a dolphin).

Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art by Jennifer New
Book dedicated to showcasing intricate art journals, mostly hand-drawn. The journals themselves are so self-evidently fascinating that it's hard to say why presenting them in this fashion doesn't quite work. The choice to reduce intricate journal-pages down to postcard size, rendering them mostly unreadable, certainly doesn't help; I think there's also a problem with the sheer number of journals represented here, which helps to give a sense of scope and variety but eliminates the ability to really immerse yourself in any particular journal. The framing essays profiling each journal-maker are worth a read, but ultimately they're not nearly as interesting as the journals themselves: it's just one more degree of remove between the reader and the subjectivity that's alive in the journal-pages. There's so much "frame" here that the art itself is choked out.

Only Words, by Catharine MacKinnon
MacKinnon is an anti-pornography feminist, which can cause people on both ends of the political spectrum to reject her ideas without taking the time to engage with them first. This is a shame, because MacKinnon's argument here is one of the most interesting anti-pornography arguments I've read, avoiding the easy use of anecdotal pathos, in favor of a legal argument, suggesting that pornography's status as "protected expression" is a classification error, and that it belongs more properly in the category of speech acts that are treated legally as actions rather than ideas (hate speech; sexual harrassment). Elegant and deft.

The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Final volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy, a children's fantasy trilogy built around the (Gnostic) notion of a War Against God. The fact that such a thing ever achieved a moderate success on the shelves of American booksellers strikes me as so profoundly improbable that Pullman earns points just for pulling it off; that goes double when you also consider that this book also features two heroically pair-bonded male angels and features a young girl's sexual awakening as a major plot point. But to focus on the anti-Narnian qualities on display here is to overlook the sheer strength of Pullman's prose and storytelling craft. In this volume, these strengths are most evident in Pullman's sequences of genuine terror (the passage into the Land of the Dead) and heart-rending tragedy (the parting of lovers). Heavy stuff, but Pullman is right to not flinch from confronting children with emotionally weighty material: it dignifies them as fully human.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Post-apocalyptic minimalism from master prosesmith Cormac McCarthy. This book could fruitfully be partnered with Jose Saramago's Blindness: both stare unflinchingly into extremes of human ugliness in an attempt to unsentimentally illuminate the fragility and sheer miracle nature of human love. In Blindness the love is between a man and a woman; here it is between a father and son, a framework that allows the book also to also rewardingly explore some of the thornier questions of parental ethics—when is it appropriate to lie to a child, for instance? What forms of protection are valid and appropriate? The book disappointingly pulls a few punches in its final pages, but prior to that it was one of the most rewarding novels I've read this year. Recommended.

Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
If I were to pick a book that this one most reminded me of, it would be Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: you could practically entitle this Understanding Video Games and be none the worse for wear. Like McCloud, Juul comes to his chosen branch of the media tree with a fresh eye, determined to coherently examine its component elements in order to build a new conception of the way they work their effects. For Juul, the key elements are narrative and rule-based play, and the unique experience of video games grows out of cooperation (as well as tensions and slippages) between these forces. Fascinating reading, clear and lucid, an essential work for anyone interested in the academic study of video games or cross-platform narrative. Highly recommended.

(Those of you who are interested in that last one might want to take note that all my "scavengings" from the book (85 in total) can be found here.)

some recent capsule reviews

A temporary break in the workload allowed me to get a chance to breathe yesterday, so I spent it making this collage and hanging out at LibraryThing reviewing books I read back in March. (April reviews coming soon, if all goes well, although I'm getting a new batch of papers today.)

Anyway, here they are:

Crypto Zoo, by Rick Veitch
Hearing other people describe their dreams is supposed to be famously boring, but Rick Veitch has developed quite the knack for it: his autobiographical dream-comics are enormously compelling. Even "inspirational" -- each time I read one of these Veitch volumes I'm driven to re-start my own intermittent practice of dream-journaling. Any book that can motivate me to write first thing upon awakening, instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, must be powerful indeed.

Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative
Nearly fifty essays compiled by the creators of the online journal Narrativity. The book promises, in its back cover copy, to represent writers "from Tijuana to Montreal," and sure enough they're there: the overall thrust of the book, however, is Bay Area through and through, and readers' enjoyment of the book will likely vary proportionately to how much mileage they can get out of that particular scumbling-up of aesthetics and theory and personal experience and politics that the San Franciscan literary scene has been reliably producing for a generation now. I tend to enjoy that stuff, but this collection is a mixed bag, in part because of the length restriction: averaging only about five pages apiece (a remnant of their Web origins), many of the pieces are able to squeak out a provocative line of inquiry, but very few develop fruitfully beyond that. This leaves the book feeling like a kind of intellectual snack food: often tasty, but not particularly nourishing.

The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood, by Martha Nochimson
Critical appreciation of Lynch's work, up to and including Lost Highway. Iconoclastic to the point where it almost qualifies as "zany," Nochimson's read on Lynch is that he is not only feminist but also radically empathetic: she claims his films are designed "to bring the greatest consolation to the greatest number of people." Along the way we get lots of stuff about surging energy, living vs. constructed form, and forces beyond rational control. Odd, but never boring—in fact, its weirdness makes it often totally engaging. Recommended.

Baby by Carla Harryman
Carla Harryman has described her work as being a series of "studies in sentences, paragraphs, and the relationship of narrative to non-narrative," studies which allow her "to consider the social meaning of form without having to forsake [her] impulse to make things up." If that's the kind of stuff you like, check this one out: it produces a set of quasi-characters (most prominently a baby and a tiger) and suspends them in a void which has narrative elements but manifests as something quite different from a story. Intriguingly strange.

The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula LeGuin
Eerie SF novel about a world whose continuity is repeatedly revised by a man's dreaming mind, an ability which, predictably, begins to be exploited the very second another person gains a sense of it. Fascinating premise, but the book's real strength is in the way it locates the emotional heart of the story, becoming (at its best) a moving meditation on memory and loss, on power and the renunciation of power. Recommended.

assorted capsule reviews

So here's the last bunch of book reviews I wrote.

Batman: Year 100 by Paul Pope
Paul Pope is one of the best comics creators at the moment, not only because he's a great visual artist and a sharp writer but also because he has a wild, unsummarizable theory about the way that comics work as an iconic language. His theory, wild though it may be, intersects nicely with the way that superheroes are currently being treated in our culture: less as characters (who would need to grow and change as their narrative unfolded) and more as unchanging archetypes, collections of iconified traits. Once a set of traits is indestructibly established (as with Batman) you can improvise off of it pretty freely, just like you'd do with a jazz standard. Pope understands all of this, and it's part of what makes his superhero riffs so great.

In this book, Pope plants Batman in the 2030s, which permits him to riff mightily, telling his tale with verve and style, but ultimately the stock elements of the State-controlled dystopian setting erode some of the freshness on display. It's still a blast to read, but ultimately it doesn't hit as hard as the best Batman stories out there, or as Pope's own unfinished masterpiece, THB.

Godland Volume 1: Hello, Cosmic! by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli
In this graphic novel, Casey and Scioli blow the dust off the vast cosmic machinery of 1960's-era Kirby-Lee collaborations, and reboot it for the contemporary present (by deploying it in a world that contains junkies, S/M, punk rock girls, and irony). It makes an ambitious attempt to be both parody and homage and a satisfying SF/adventure story in its own right—and if it occasionally falls short of getting this balance exactly right, it at least gets points for trying. Fun.

Groundhog Day, by Ryan Gilbey
Part of the BFI Modern Classics series, slim critical volumes, each on a single film. The critical elements in this one are dialed back a bit—it's more of a summary-plus-appreciation. A quick read, likeable, on an enjoyable film.

Deer Head Nation, by K. Silem Mohammad
A paranoid mind, restless in its search for pattern, can take just about anything that can be named with a noun and make an organzing narrative out of it. In this book of poems (which utterly transcends the "novelty" origins of the "flarf" genre), K. Silem Mohammad chooses deer as the thread that joins up the rest: at the beginning of the book, a deer head is merely "spooky," but by the end of the book, after being presented with a "suite" in which dozens, possibly hundreds of disembodied Internet voices have made their ellipitical proclamations on the search term "deer," the animal and its oft-displayed head both seem deeply braided into the book's other concerns (war, terror, America, human abjection). Paranoid? Sure. But these are paranoid times. Highly recommended; one of the best new books of poetry to emerge in the last ten years.

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers by Henry Jenkins
Odds-and-sods collection from Jenkins, reprinting a smattering of essays, interviews and Congressional testimony [!] from the last dozen years. The divide between the more rigorous critical writing, and the more generalist Technology Review pieces renders this collection slightly uneven, but Jenkins is one of the preeminent thinkers on fandom and participatory culture, so even at its most fluffy, this book is always an interesting read.

The Mother's Mouth, by Dash Shaw
I seem to remember reading an online profile (or something) where Dash Shaw described his work in indie comics as exploring the effects of "putting one thing next to another." I've been unable to relocate the exact quote, but The Mother's Mouth is testament to this as an aesthetic. At its most straightforward it tells the (fragmentary, partial) story of an emerging romance between Virginia (a sunken-eyed, heavy-set librarian) and Dick (a gaunt musician). But this story is intercut with other kinds of visual material--from cutaways of geological formations to dance instructions to the drawings of children in therapy --which expand the context and deepen the narrative in intriguing and evocative ways. Recommended.

some fresh book reviews

Book-review page for 2007 is up now, kicking off with these three reviews:

A Short Guide to Writing about Film by Timothy Corrigan
Slim, steeply-priced volume which deals tidily with the subject promised by the title. Clearly intended for a classroom environment, although general readers wanting more methods for thinking about film might be able to extract something from it as well. (My students are using this book this semester; we'll see how it goes.)

Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow
Encompassing a 1980 New Yorker article and a 1997 companion piece, Trow's book is an exercise in stylish despair. At its most basic level it functions as a critique of a media-based society, but this book is neither manifesto nor jeremiad--it's something altogether more sly. For every point made by an incisive aphorism there's another made only obliquely, by way of, say, a witty anecdote, or an evocative coinage. As a result the critique here is essentially slippery: it seems to explain everything, but by way of not actually explaining anything. Tricky. (Also oddly riddled with typos: you'd think Atlantic Monthly Press would be able to scrape up a few proofreaders.)

The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick
PKD at his loopy best: starts out as a spirituality-based thriller (what if Christ were secretly reborn in a dystopian future?), but by the book's midpoint the entire universe has become queasy and unhinged as the novel's theological forces grapple and debate. Messier than Valis and with more "wtf?" moments, but a worthy follow-up nevertheless.

A few more coming soon(ish), and as always, anyone wanting a more real-time-ish feed of my reviews can find such a thing on this LibraryThing feed page.

some fresh book reviews

Here's some of the books I've finished in the last two months or so, along with some capsule reviews:

Justice League America: World War Three, by Grant Morrison & co.
Grant Morrison closes his run on JLA with a bang, taking us from Atlantis to Heaven to cosmic space in a dogged determination to out-do every previous comic-book end-of-the-world storyline. The result is hyper-kinetic and deliriously crammed: a psychedelic mandala made out of superheroes. There's no room for (much) character development here, but amid the fireworks there are still moments where the story manages to feel surprisingly moving and personal. A blast.

Kalpa Imperial, by Angelica Gorodischer
Fabulist allegories investigating the relationship between power, humanity, and storytelling, using Empire as the central metaphor. Often fascinating, although the book has a tendency to skew towards abstraction: this has the feature of making the stories feel more universal (a plus) but also saps them of concrete details that would make them more memorable.

Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace
Strong collection from Wallace, with the opening and closing stories ("Mister Squishy" and "The Suffering Channel") being the high-water marks. These two stories are perhaps the strongest pieces of fiction I have ever read about life in corporate America, revealing yet another vast field of human experience that Wallace has seemingly obtained mastery over. Impressive.

The Garden of the Departed Cats, by Bilge Karasu
Strange narrative about a traveller who grows embroiled into a conspiracy / human chess game, interspersed periodically with fables, metafictions and allegories. Sounds promising: the combo of "fantastic tales plus framing narrative" recalls Calvino, and the tales themselves are akin to Kafka's parables. But in the end, the book misfires more often than it connects, rendering these comparisons tragically superficial.

Time Maps, by Eviatar Zerubavel
Brief, readable book about the ideology of historical narratives and timekeeping systems (i.e., the calendar). I'm no stranger to the ideological dimension of the quotidian, so the revelations on hand here didn't feel especially startling, but having so many examples so accessibly presented kept the book enjoyable.

All of these reviews are mirrored over at my LibraryThing page, for those of you who are into that sort of thing. Plus they're also on the Raccoon Books page for the year-in-progress.

Since the year's almost over, some year-in-review posts will appear soon (my anuual one for albums of the year and for books of the year). But I'm still on the road, moving ever further north and not logging a lot of time on the computer, so those posts may not appear until early 2007. Stay tuned.

recent reading: november

Some new capsule book reviews of things I've read in the last couple of months:

Y: The Last Man Vol. 1: Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughn & co.
Q: In a near-future where only one man survives, will there still be stereotypical man-hating feminists? A: Oh my yes. Promising premise (first pitched by Mary Shelly in 1826) degrades quickly into garden-variety gynophobia.

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
Short stories. The title story is a killer, one of the best I've read in recent years.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Autistic boy attempts to solve neighborhood crime. A promising premise, one which the book dutifully carries out, and then memorably transcends. Recommended.

Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared by Mike Rose
When a book defines itself as "moving" in its own subtitle, approach with caution... and, indeed, this memoir-ish book is not without its soft-focus moments. It does manage, however, to amply convey that peculiar love that a teacher feels for even (especially?) his or her worst students. But its episodic nature and unwillingness to follow through on its argument(s) grows wearying by the end.

Venusia by Mark von Schlegell
Delirious piece of writing growing out of that verdant patch where the tributaries of science fiction, psychedelia, and abstract critical theory all drain into one another. Equal parts William Burroughs and Edgar Rice Burroughs, this book features sentient plants, unstable psychic landscapes, drug-induced reptile hallucinations, and pulp-grade sex: what's not to like?

Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
Take a topic which is inherently fascinating (the inner workings of America's transportation industry), and then hand it over to "writer's writer" John McPhee, with his unerring eye for illuminating detail, and his unerring ear for unusual turns of phrase, and the result is absolute delight. Steering a barge, braking a locomotive, getting a package through UPS: McPhee handles them all with great elan, rendering them accessible to the mind of the reader without sacrificing an iota of their boggling complexity. Highly recommended.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Polymath whiz David Foster Wallace on John McCain, pornography, grammar, 9/11, sports memoirs, conservative talk radio, and, yes, lobster. And yet from the welter of topics a coherent theme emerges: how to communicate in a world so thick with irony and spin that genuine, sincere communication is automatically considered suspect. An important book, highly recommended.

The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon
Short stories by Bosnian-turned-Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon. Hemon, like Nabokov, is an ESL writer who puts most native speakers and writers of English to shame: the language-acquistion process seems to generate linguistic strangeness (or at least a total liberation from cliche). Hit or miss overall, but certain sentences here are as good as they come.

I've also begun to maintain a LibraryThing page, for those of you who would rather go there than dig around in the Raccoon Books directory... expect old reviews from 2005 and 2004 to be appearing over there sometime soon(ish). And if you have a LibraryThing profile, dear reader, don't hesitate to post a link to it (or your username) in the comments box, so that I can add you to my watchlist.

recent reading: september

Writeups of a few books I've finished recently:

The Totality for Kids by Joshua Clover
Arch little poems and hypercondensed travelogues ambiguously regarding the waning of Europe, modernism, and theory and the concomitant rise of America, pop, and capital. Occasionally exuberant, but only in a way that suggests deep and abiding sorrow.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
It's kind of amazing that a story cycle containing so many different hot-button global elements (art thieves! disembodied souls! apocalyptic cults! artificial intelligences!) can end up feeling so oddly understated. The end result is something like one of Warren Ellis' Global Frequency trades, only four times the length and lacking most of the kinetic energy. Interesting enough to be worth finishing, but I would have preferred the faster, denser book that the subject matter suggests.

Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory by Franco Moretti
I'm interested in diagrams and info visualization at least as much as I'm interested in literary history, so when Moretti argues that the former can be used as a tool to learn more about the latter, I don't find it particularly controversial. But the examples he uses to prove the utility of his method are startling in their clarity and force. Recommended.

This Is Not A Novel by David Markson
Novelist attempts to write an anti-novel, seeing what survives when you reduce narrative to a cascade of facts (literary anecdotes and gossip, mostly). The experiment yields its most interesting results over the first 40 pages or so, so the remaining 150 serve primarily as feeble inquiries into the effects of perserverance and duration, effects explored more intriguingly elsewhere.

...

I've also read the first three volumes of the Seven Soliders of Victory trade paperbacks, which represent the newest comics work by Grant Morrison: I have some things to say about this series but will probably wait until I've read the fourth and final volume.

I'm also still working on writing up some thoughts on David Foster Wallace's new[est] book of essays, Consider the Lobster. The book is complicated, and my thoughts on it are thorny, but I can probably say that it has been the best book I've read so far in 2006.

recent reading: summer

Sorry things have been so quiet over here in blogland lately. I've been writing a lot elsewhere, mostly in the form of steady progess on the Novel of Adequacy (currently titled Meanwhile, although that might change). I just wrapped up Chapter Nine, and the chart has been complicating pleasingly. I'm working on a few other visualizations of the book's network; expect them to appear here if I ever finish them.

In other news, still broke, which means I've been continuing to churn through summer reading. Who wants capsule reviews?

Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu
This book lucidly debunks the notion that the Internet inherently possesses territorial independence or extra-legality, mostly by clearly laying out various ways that governments can (and do) enact enforceable restrictions upon Internet content and behavior. Recommended.

Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus
A curious book, collecting essays which straddle the line between art review and memoir of alienation (book club question: is Kraus' BDSM practice a cure or a symptom?). The institutional critique is sharp, the observations on LA are witty / bleak, and the overall grimness is leavened by Kraus' obvious yearning for meaningful human interconnection (and art that can express it). Bracing, enticing.

Demonology by Rick Moody
A frustratingly uneven collection, containing one story which I'd consider to be a modern classic ('Demonology') and one story so torturously overwritten as to be unreadable ('Pan's Fair Throng'). Sometimes I found myself suppressing the feeling that these stories exist primarily as an excuse to showboat, that they're really more about Moody as a stylist than they are about the people they are ostensibly about. In this way the book ends up reminding me of the Coen Brothers movies: inventive, flashy, often entertaining, but with little sense of human urgency.

Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, by Steven Johnson
Breezy book making what essentially amounts to a three-point argument: that video games engage mental skills such as problem-solving and pattern recognition, that a lot of contemporary TV indulges in fairly complex narrative strategies, and that online discourse rewards writing skills and in-depth thinking. I'm pretty sympathetic to these arguments, so the book's conclusions felt a bit foregone to me, although certain examples felt freshly cogent (the diagrams of character networks in a show like 24, for instance).

On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
This slim volume attempts to develop a theory which will position bullshit in the framework of moral philosophy, and along the way answers questions like: how does bullshit differ from the lie? A blast to read, although I disagree with almost every major conclusion Frankfurt makes (with the anti-postmodernism argument that closes the book being particularly unwelcome).

I might write up a more thorough critique of the Frankfurt at some point, we'll have to see. And, despite the fact that I finished the Moody book only under some (self-imposed) duress, my interest in literary fiction does seem to have re-awakened after the slumber of the last few years. Consequently, I'm looking for recommendations: use the comments link down there if you want to plug anything.

recent reading: june

I find myself, this summer, with less disposable income than I have had at any time in the past ten years: my paychecks are covering rent and bills but just about everything else (including, say, groceries) either needs to be put on credit or done without.

This has kept me suspended in a foul mood that's hard to shake but it has also resensitized me to just what a friend the university library can be. Needless to say, I've been reading a lot. Here are some books I completed last month, with some brief notes:

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
MacArthur fellow Mike Davis hunkers down and attempts to produce a readable synthesis of the enormous body of current literature on global urban poverty in this book, which ends up averaging about four footnotes per page. The general adherence to hard fact makes it difficult for Davis' usual theoretical insight to shine through, but the urgency of the subject matter more than compensates. Required reading.

Europeana, by Patrik Ourednik
Twentieth-century events, intriguingly reordered and recontextualized into something that more closely resembles experimental fiction than a history book. No characters as such: Ourednik instead works mostly with collective masses such as 'scientists' or 'soldiers' (although a few representative individuals shimmer through occasionally). Fascists and communists factor in as the big baddies, with capitalists and neoliberals getting more of a free pass than I'd be inclined to give. But then again I'm not Czech.

Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Davis
Slim, readable critique of the prison-industrial complex. Points out ample racism and sexism, although, oddly, the titular question of "obsolescence" is mostly left unaddressed. Useful as an introduction to the prison abolition movement, although newcomers to the topic may want more convincing that punishment and/or reformation would function better in a post-prison world.

I've completed four other books this month; expect some notes on those soon. And the list of all the ones I've read this year lives here, as always.

recent reading: may

Couldn't sleep, so I got up and wrote capsule reviews.

Kathy Acker's Great Expectations

In this novel Acker aims her critique at the gnarly intersection of capitalism, violence, sexual dysfunction, and male dominance. In order to live out this critique, Acker jettisons most of the (male-dominated) traditions of narrative as she writes, systematically disrupting the stability of characters and setting, and rejecting the claim to authorial originality (as you might guess from the title). Some might say that this rejection is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I'm more inclined to say it's form following function. Exemplary.

Johanna Drucker's The Visible Word : Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923

This dense book by the brilliant Johanna Drucker focuses primarily on four practicioners of experimental typography: Tristan Tzara, Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, and Guillaume Apollinaire (with Mallarme visible in the background). It's not merely a general overview of these four poet-typographers, however: it's a sustained book-length argument about the nature of signification and textual materiality. This increases the intellectual value of the book but also makes it less welcoming to a non-academic audience, despite the one-chapter recap of the history of semiotic theory that's crammed in there. Essential for visual poets who want to better understand the historical and conceptual underpinnings of what they're doing, less useful for graphic designers or casual browsers.