Reviews and Comments

Marlene Creates is one of Newfoundland's most celebrated artists. Now late in her career, she has turned a small forest into an ongoing artwork, and invites people to go on journeys in its arboreal depths. In this publication, she documented every different type of ice and snow in the Newfoundland vernacular in word, short poetic response, and a photograph. Released at nearly the exact same time as Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks, Creates was clearly on the wavelength of that particular zeitgeist. Brilliant work.

This is the fourth in the Kinship series of five books ambitiously published and offering five different curated selections of writing on what kinship means. Persons is focussed on the idea of a person, what that means, how it affects being kin with one another and with a wider earth.

The breadth of voices here is admirable, and most of the essays and poems are excellent. I have had issue with this series for a few reasons, notably the extremely US-centric perspectives in two of the three I have read so far. While this book is also predominantly US-based writers, the array of cultures and perspectives on show is admirable and also enjoyable. I particularly appreciated Shannon Gibney's interview on being trans-racially adopted, and Liam Heneghan's playful and poetic view on being human. This was the best in the series so far for me.

Referenced in Vinciane Despret's Our Grateful Dead and sounds like a fascinating study on grief.

When researching the transatlantic cable, I was surprised to learn that Arthur C Clarke had written a book on it. I was also surprised to learn that he had been a naval officer and had written a considerable amount on technological history of the sea. Luckily, the national library service had a copy of this so I got it out.

Blindness tells of an epidemic where the world sees white. The result is a societal dystopia, first in quarantine and then in a world of the blind. Food is scarce, filth is everywhere, and any small injury could be fatal.

José Saramago was one of a kind, a unique storyteller and gifted artist who always had something to say, and always said it with such a brilliant prose, translated with equal skill by his two main translators. This is among his best books, an example of how he can make the societal personal, and can make even a very unlikely story seem deeply real and troubling.

In the late 1970s, experts in media and communication were commissioned in different countries around the world to write these case studies on broadcasting. It's not clear what the results were, or whether anyone ever made any comparison between one and another. Like many historical booklets and technical documents, the information contained in this 1978 book is very out of date but makes a fascinating historical artefact itself. The writer was a director general of RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, and is extremely well informed, but positions this in a social context that is clearly of its time (male centred and ignoring any minority perspective). Some dry information like financial data is accompanied by some amazing infrastructural and programming information.

This book was mentioned in The Post Office in Ireland as a primary source referring to signal towers and radio broadcast. I am working on a project about this, so I got it from the library.

Recommended by an artist and colleague during a call on critical technologies, who used this as research on another project.

I didn't read this cover to cover, but it is an interesting and thorough history of the post office in Ireland. The language has moments of gusto that spoil some of the rigour of the research, but the content is comprehensive.

I am a big fan of Despret and bought both this and her incredible book Living as a Bird at the same time last year. I've held off for a while on this one as I wanted to savour the treat of her wonderful writing.

Gilbert Simondon's philosophy is not widely translated into English, so most readers need to approach his writing from secondary sources like this. A friend who is a scholar of Simondon recommended this as a starting point.

The book gives a broad overview of how the philosopher entangled metaphor, technology and social behaviours in his philosophies. The language is dense and often difficult, but feels necessarily so as Simondon himself wrote very dense texts. Muriel Combes does a good job of dividing up his ideas into categories, and this becomes an anthology. It is certainly a good starting point, but I am not sure I am ready to fully embrace or understand Simondon, as I find many of the ideas seem contradictory or too opaque to fully grasp. This, I believe, is my own problem and not that of either the philosopher or the author of this book.

Deciding when the anthropocene started is something that social theorists mulled over for many years before eventually deciding on the early 1600s. Kathryn Yusoff offers a new way to consider this beginning, by considering beginnings more deeply. Each chapter proffers another start-point for colonial violence, and each time it is both valid and invalid. The book draws from different theorists, prominently Moten and Harney, in a well considered and short study of colonial violence toward nonwhite people. Brilliantly written, compelling, and very sad.

My partner took this out of the library and loved it, so recommended it.