Reading for fun, threads over the years of scifi, history, social movements and justice, farming, philosophy. I actively work to balance out the white male default in what I read, but have a long way to go.
He/they for the praxis.
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Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were …
Linked meditations on time, the moment, the futility of striving, full of overturned binaries, overtones of religious or monastic fervor, but also not quite. The first of these, Burnt Norton, felt strongest, perhaps just more quoted.
/ We make too much history / with or without us / there will be the silence /
Some wonderful lines jump out, more from the newer poems in here. Not an immediately coherent collection, on themes of death and long views and nature of course, but will revisit over the years.
/ It takes a while to learn to talk / the long language of the rock. /
Ethnographic report from working as a fieldhand in rural Oaxaca for subsistence food and small scale cash crops, and perspective on the community relationships that non-industrial production methods create that help contextualize and contradict a western agricultural critique of efficiency and productivity.
Focus shifts from town fantasy conflict to a stranger inhospitable environment and the diffuse intense culture of survival. Some beautiful didactic bits of other ways of organizing kin and relationships, and measured plot revealing a deeper backstory.
“Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic …
Pop history of technology and neuroscience, the mental processes of books vs media embedded in distraction, the ongoing plasticity of our minds to optimize towards what we attend to, failures of hypermedia in education and adtech-driven fragmentation of thought.
Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were …
Library sent me what appears to be an original 1943 printing.
This was nice, visually engaging, girl-led, empowering, power of truth and justice in collective struggle.
A perfect blend of deep historical translation, East vs West metaphysics and cosmology, mindfulness, poetry, and walks in the woods. Seeing mind as landscape, emptying our mind like "gazing into a flawless mirror of sky", in sincerity our inner thoughts are the same as our outer thoughts.
This debut novel by an Arab-American voice,takes us inside the lives of conservative Arab women …
This was a struggle, the setting and generational story of arranged marriages, domestic violence, and isolated women in strict conservative households is grounded, relevant, and sometimes well delivered. The author stand-in character really irked me in her attempts at advice, and I'm realizing it's regularly difficult for me to read average characters acting confused in the dark about well-foreshadowed violence.
An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties ; an idea which, by its intrinsic …
Unnerving and fragmentary, very satisfying exploration around questions of memory, trust, and institutional decay.
Vivid and imaginative, crams so much in and not all of it fits but such fun. I originally read this as it was appearing wiki'd on e2, and many years later it reads much more like comic book superheroes than hard mysterious sci-fi, and that's perfectly enjoyable.
A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize–winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation …
Look, this is not-a-novel and is not-sci-fi, unless we freeze and shatter those definitions - but I would read more fictive-philosophical-observational whatever this was on most any subject. There's no plot, there's hardly movement as we do just what it says at the top, circle the earth 16 times in a single day aboard the space station. Instead, we dive deeply into the human experience of Earth, family and civilization and war and politics and futures, and separation and disorientation from it all.
Survey of a life's poems, themes of loss, teaching, friendship, and freedom, a broad sweep of the American West and disappointment. Not many for me but uncluttered thinking by writing.
It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the …
Oddly hilarious, actual electric sheep, and an overindulgence of layers of binaries between real and simulacra, valued and disposable, purpose and performance, without an attempt to choose sides in a dark doomed world.
A difficult read: first for a rambling conversational style that demands steady accumulation along threads of memoir, travel, genealogy, and history; second and deeply, for layering complications on The South, our senses of racism and slavery and treason and charm. Responding to current events - BLM, MeToo, Monuments - but not lingering there for long.