tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63958710630785913582024-03-13T11:41:24.338-07:00UninterpretativeBenladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comBlogger228125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-20907953058270420432024-01-19T22:59:00.000-08:002024-01-20T12:01:45.728-08:00Valentine's Compilation #9: End<p> </p><p>The theme of this year's Valentine's Day Compilation is: <b>End</b>.</p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4IgUp0qxqgbtVxzx-wfbweN2cMMNA_lEPNMRt9HJLB2FGKw_6okHB4duNzYRyk5XDroxLeNTTYCIlIga8m-x4fEkyZtZcHmJwclPss3TOf9ceS5-R-6Iy_Dsim0B7cRMuDAbA0oLgsXj7FJuIk3sxjGFOjyPTME-2LED8I9HUMfo9jGEuU3aKOko_CPw/s1400/endcover.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4IgUp0qxqgbtVxzx-wfbweN2cMMNA_lEPNMRt9HJLB2FGKw_6okHB4duNzYRyk5XDroxLeNTTYCIlIga8m-x4fEkyZtZcHmJwclPss3TOf9ceS5-R-6Iy_Dsim0B7cRMuDAbA0oLgsXj7FJuIk3sxjGFOjyPTME-2LED8I9HUMfo9jGEuU3aKOko_CPw/s320/endcover.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /></div><p>As
always, the theme is unimportant. Use it as inspiration if it works
that way, or ignore it if it doesn't.</p><p>This might be the last one. It might not, but that's less likely. <br /></p><p></p><p>Some background: Since 2016, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/">Fuck the Polis!</a> have been organizing a compilation released on Valentine's Day. You can find them here: <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/pop-a-valentines-day-compilation">Pop</a>, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/solidarity-a-valentines-day-compilation">Solidarity</a>, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/extra-a-valentines-day-compilation">Extra</a>, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/digging-in-a-valentines-day-compilation">Digging In</a>, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/smash-a-valentines-day-compilation">Smash (b/w Pushing Through)</a> <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/chorus-a-valentines-day-compilation">Chorus</a>, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/set-s-a-valentines-day-compilation">Set(s)</a>, and <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/cute-a-valentines-day-compilation">Cute</a>. These
compilations have been home to anything that can be put on audio, but music is cool too.<br /></p><p>To be on the comp, all you have to do is email me
(uninterpretative [at] gmail) an audio file (preferably .wav or .aiff,
but I can make anything work) before February 14th and I can probably
include it. If you have any questions, hit up that email or <a href="https://twitter.com/BeeGabberel">@BeeGabberel</a> or wherever you talk to me.</p>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-14940603043645435282023-10-04T05:00:00.010-07:002024-01-03T20:56:39.462-08:00A war, a Myth, and a Genre: On More PerfectTwo of the best SF novels <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKKnY5ennRc">I read in 2023</a> happened to revolve around the Orpheus myth.<br /><br />
In Temi Oh’s <i>More Perfect</i> (her sophomore, after 2019’s nearly perfect <i><a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2021/02/top-10-books-published-pre-2020-of-2020.html#terratwo">Do You Dream of Terra-Two?</a></i>) a young man named Orpheus and a young woman named Moremi trade point of view chapters in a near future Britain where a semi-voluntary implant (the Pulse) allows users direct cortex access to the Internet (the Panopticon, in the novel’s language).<br /><br />
Born to an off the grid freedom fighter of a father, Orpheus has a decidedly ambivalent relation to the technology; Moremi’s lightly Luddite-leaning mother drives her to its wholehearted embrace. The two navigate their relationships—to the tech and the surveillance state it enables, to their families or lack thereof, to their labor, to their bodies and dependencies, to their traumas, and (this is a dual-POV novel, you have to see this coming) to each other—in ways that are often profound and always propulsive.<br /><br />
I read Oh’s debut three times in fewer years, the first time I’ve reread a book that avidly since (well, her work was bound to come up eventually; here’s to ripping the bandaid off) the first three novels in the school saga of The Boy Who Lived. The Potter septology’s influence is worn fairly openly, with both of Oh’s books referencing it explicitly. In <i>Terra-Two?</i>, it is a dogeared Latin translation of the first book. In <i>More Perfect</i>, Orpheus sees a “gorgeous Gothic revival hotel” that reminds him of it as he’s going through withdrawals in a post-Flood London, “across the road from St. Pancras station.”<br /><br />
This reference to “The Harry Potter Shop at Station 9 3/4s” (from <a href="https://harrypottershop.com/pages/platform934">their website</a>: “the first ever Harry Potter Shop to open anywhere in the world outside of a themed visitor attraction”) calls out the souvenir shop aspects of Rowling’s writing. Without attributing to Temi Oh any position whatsoever, this reference is, in my reading, clarifying. Specifically on the question of inheritance. Or, if you like, on the question of anxiety of influence, since I can’t imagine who would want to be in Rowling’s line of succession at this point. Without belaboring the point, Oh is the better worldbuilder, and that’s not her primary focus. As masterfully demonstrated in <i>Terra-Two?</i>, and as repeated in <i>More Perfect</i>, she writes primarily from and for character psychology.<br /><br />
Every character in her novels, from the point of view to the supporting cast down to one-scene plot movers, walks that fine line between being relatable and robust. None of them, not even the shitty ex-boyfriends who don’t show up once in a scene, feel like anything less than plausible people. But they also still function as characters in a story.<br /><br />
********************************************<br /><br />
Since Modernism, character and plot have been at war. And I think that war still wages.<br /><br />
But before we get to that war, a final note on succession. I joked earlier that I couldn’t imagine who would want to be Rowling’s inheritor. The joke is that there isn’t one. Like the demon, they are legion. Rowling’s inheritance is dead labor, witnessed in the style guides of every major publisher’s Young Adult imprint. Unlike her blockbuster forebear, Stephen King, who racked up so many hits so quickly (in a wildly different publishing landscape) that he famously became uneditable (see: <i>The Stand</i> complete and uncut), Rowling became editing itself.<br /><br />
If you feel inclined to test this hypothesis, here is an experiment: grab any book by a competent author who has written fiction and Young Adult since, say, the turn of the millennium. I have a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoon_Ha_Lee">couple</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nnedi_Okorafor">authors</a> in mind, and I suspect that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akwaeke_Emezi">some</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Roanhorse">others</a> would <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kacen_Callender">bear</a> this out as well. Choose any chapter number. Read that same chapter in both of the books.<br /><br />
What you’ll find, I posit, is that the latter are never more “developmentally appropriate.” It will always express the same themes, or the ones on the authors mind. It will bear the same cultural and literary assumptions the author requires of any reader of their fiction, and will, though it may require squinting sometimes to blur the sanded-down edges, still be solidly-paced writing with some standout sentences. What you will also find, across the author function, is a thumb on the scale.<br /><br />
When I read Young Adult fiction, that thumb has a very defined affect. It is condescension. No matter the author, no matter the publisher (but mattering very much the genre), the Young Adult novel treats its reader as being as incapable of critical engagement with the text as JK Rowling proved herself to be when her biggest controversy was declaring that she always thought of Dumbledore as gay—despite negative textual evidence—in order to court those then-young millenials who would grow into the fearsome transgendereds she has since made it her mission to Just Ask Questions about.<br /><br />
The staggering closemindedness of the Potter series is old hat at this point, and its subsumption into industry has largely (of course not entirely) subsumed that as well. The style guides don’t demand goblins be anti-Semitic stereotypes or that you marry the man you once argued with about whether slaves were happy (or, y’know, the tokenized names straight out of <i>Breakfast At Tiffany's</i>). They do, at least as far as I can tell from a good chunk of reading, demand a homogeneity of diction that reflects the lived experience/vocabulary of no teenager I’ve ever known, been, heard of, or considered plausible. They impose these things in pursuit of the runaway success of Rowling, whose playbook they extrapolated from and return to like gospel.<br /><br />
(A second hypothesis: pick any four books in the Young Adult genre (really a marketing term, but what genre isn’t?) from the decades since its coinage in the 60s to the 90s, and any four from the front and back half of the 2000s and the 2010s. Absenting author overlap, I would be surprised if the same experiment—pick a chapter and read it all the way through in all eight books—didn’t show that the first four books, despite having way more similarity in subject matter, weren’t way more differentiated. One from it’s closest neighbor in underlying tone, than all four of the latter combined.)<br /><br />
Harold Bloom was wrong and an asshole when he claimed that reading Rowling would not lead to reading real works of literature for two reasons, other than the third reason, which is that Harold Bloom was overwhelmingly wrong and always an asshole. The first is that the simple, multigenerational facts have panned out. Millenials and Zoomers have grown up, and it turns out that we can teach the Classics as well as anyone ever has (when the neoliberal university allows us the chance, of course, as it so rarely does). The second is that for 20 years, the mode of production, that structure that organizes social relations, took Thatcher’s big TINA and applied it more and more locally.<br /><br />
Capitalism said There Is No Alternative. Not just to this mode of production, but even to books for young readers that aren’t by JK Rowling. If not in signature, then certainly in the spirit of the style guide. And wouldn’t you know it, at the same time it swallowed up bookstores with venture capital, libraries with budget cuts that were diverted to militarization of the state and specifically police, and schools with Left Behind Acts and bloated administrations that turned them into landlords and businesses.<br /><br />
With <i>More Perfect</i>, Temi Oh (and, to her absolute credit with the <i>Binti</i> trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor) points to a future where the deadlock between Young Adult literature and its generic counterpart might break. Take, for instance, this passage from pages 211-212:<br /><br />
<blockquote>It’s 2am, as quiet as anywhere ever is at this hour in London. But then she turns and raises her hands to set a filter that he accepts. The cracked pavement becomes the black-ice surface of a stage. The streetlamps are spotlights and behind her are ghost dancers. The curtain is drawn. Orpheus watches as it rises, and an imaginary orchestra starts to play. Already captivated.<br /><br />
She is in the centre of the stage; she raises her arms and begins to dance.<br /><br />
Orpheus sits on the hot stone step in front of his apartment block as she dances a part from a ballet of The Bacchae. At the climax of the dance, she tears her son limb from limb. Her holographic corps members spin around her like shadow puppets. In the dance, she is a maenad, manic initiate of the cult of Dionysus, the god of the grape-harvest and winemaking, ritual madness and religious ecstasy. Orpheus is shocked by the sight of her. On the street a moment before, in her leopard-print leggings and crop-top, plain and strange, but now she is dazzling, now she is setting the imaginary stage on fire in a virtuosic pas de deux. God-crazed ballerina, given over to her wildest instincts. The translucent maenades riot across a moonlit glade, pulling bones from flesh, dressed in fox-skins and bull-helmets, mouths wet with blood in mad celebration. They are like witches, wild with delight: one breast-feeds a wolf cub, another sinks her fingernails into the mud and milk bubbles out.<br /><br />
Moremi is playing the role of Agave, the mother of the King of Thebes, driven mad by Dionysus when her son refuses to worship him. In the hologram Moremi is crowned with ivy vines, in a flesh-coloured dress, dancing the wild dance of maenads. Orpheus can barely watch the climax of the ballet when the women of Thebes descend on King Pentheus. In their madness they believe that he is a lion. He dances a frantic pas de deux with Moremi, his eyes pleading, hoping for her to see him. It’s the most tense moment. Is that a flicker of recognition in her eyes? No. She grabs his elbow, pushes her heel into his ribs and wrenches his arm from its socket. The orchestra swells, echoing the howls of his torment. Which is when the other maenads descend on him in fury, tearing at his flesh. They process into the city, his head on a thyrsus present him to her father Cadmus and it is only then that Agave’s eyes are unclouded. Only then that she sees, to her horror, what she’s done. Orpheus cries with her when he watches it. And when the curtain falls at the end he feels terrified and in love.<br /><br /></blockquote>
Moremi, whose acute loneliness (alongside her mother’s distaste) drove her to get a Pulse, is able to synthesize her two loves: being connected, and ballet. She dances with the maenads, further entwining the novel with Greek mythology. And she does it beneath the eyes of a man—this is a chapter from Orpheus’ point of view—who she already feels herself falling in love with.<br /><br />
Orpheus asks her to dance because she has come to him to ask for a followup on dream therapy he has designed that helps her forget her trauma. He has recently had to take a sabbatical to detox from the drug, Nox, that he uses in order to facilitate other people’s dreams; he is worried that helping her will cause him to relapse. His condition is that she dance for him. She does. He helps her regain access to the world in which she never had any trauma to begin with. There is a lot in this, but one of the things that is happening is that Orpheus is playing analyst to Moremi’s analysand; what we have here is a bit of upgraded talk therapy.<br /><br />
This science fictional psychoanalysis even has it’s own term for transference, the psychoanalytic concept of the person receiving therapy falling in love with their therapist when they displace onto the therapist feelings of growth that they themselves achieved (nb: transference is more complicated than this): <i>More Perfect</i> calls it Inversion Syndrome (314).<br /><br />
This passage is full of allusion and action, tension and release. There is nothing in it that couldn’t be found in the prose of post-<i>Azkaban</i> Potter, when the books seemed to fill themselves with nowhere-going incidental detail.<br /><br />
Earlier, I referenced Poppy’s well-loved Latin translation of <i>Sorcerer’s Stone</i>, which functions as a symbol that must be embraced or overcome repeatedly over the course of her own journey. Does she return to the (dis)comforts of home, cradling the object she previously used to escape from there in her mind? Does she plunge forward, carrying the complicated past into the unknown? Poppy makes her choice.<br /><br />
<i>More Perfect</i> is Oh’s push toward the future, carrying the complicated past. Not just of Rowling herself, but of the style guides that subsumed and buoyed her to billions. In <i>Terra-Two?</i>, she showed herself capable of miracles; with <i>More Perfect</i>, she cements her style. It is post-young adult, having moved through it. Oh has developed a voice which takes what really worked in the septology and unchained it from the condescension that has plagued this particular industrialization.<br /><br />
There was a war to attend to, though.<br /><br />
********************************************<br /><br />
Despite being published a half century earlier, this is no return to the past. The other Orpheus myth I read this year shares almost nothing in common with Oh’s—both are propulsive, yes, but the earlier is as poetic as anything Woolf ever wrote, as deliberate as Proust, as unafraid to play with form as your favorite postmodernist. And, crucially, even in that barely post-pulp moment, it is as unabashedly critical of gender as (say goodbye, friends, as we welcome her for her last appearance) the author of the school saga of The Boy Who Lived and her reactionary friends claim to be.<br /><br />
In 1967, Samuel R. Delany published his 2nd Nebula Award-winning novel <i>The Einstein Intersection</i>. The biggest page-turner of his I’ve personally encountered, it tells the story of Lo Lobey, a man with opposable feet and a flute machete, as he mourns the loss of a lover, fights a massive beast, and travels to confront Kid Death and bring her back. Lo Lobey as Orpheus is made very explicit early on, and it isn’t the only interpellation Delany engages in; the story is scaffolded with Greek myth, mortared by apparently-true diary entries from the “Writer’s Journal,” and painted in—of all things—thematic, structural Beatles references (eat your heart out Stephen King).<br /><br />
<i>The Einstein Intersection</i> juggles swashbuckling pulp adventure with deep meditations on the human in ways I don’t know that I’ve ever otherwise seen managed. The scene where Lo Lobey, having bested a factory-sized bull with human hands and confronted a computer that confirms that humans died out a million years ago and the people we are dealing with are something else,<br /><br />
<blockquote>I took up my machete and blew out the last of the blood. The tune now winding with me lay notes over the stone like mica flakes that would do till light came.<br /><br />
Stubbed my toe.<br /><br />
Hopped, cursed, then started walking again alone with the lonely, lovely sounds. (31)<br /><br /></blockquote>
is written with as much passion and literary flare as any of the more typically Delany moments where characters converse or fuck or think about how language bears down on and structures us, or what “us” even constitutes. He dives into the fundament with every sentence in his short novel, and communicates it with the reader in prose just slightly askew enough to catch the light and render that communication beautiful. A move that, one might argue, is the constitutive aesthetic maneuver of the literary Modernists.<br /><br />
By one might argue, I of course mean that many have—academically, colloquially, in praise, in dismissal, in disgust. Proust’s <i>In Search of Lost Time</i> might structurally be about memory, but in any given moment the narrator is thinking about pink hawthorns, a leitmotif in a sonata, a painting of the sea (or the many beautiful women (wink) that he keeps falling in love with), and doing so in sentences so artfully, musically crafted that one still stands as a Linguists party game—pin the diagram on the Proust sentence, as it were.<br /><br />
Woolf’s <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> might be about a day in the life of an upper class Londoner, but it wouldn’t be hard to argue that it is about the abrupt, filmic cuts it makes between characters’ interior lives and, specifically, how language affords that kind of cut where film might not. Especially when the level of sentencecraft is as high as Woolf’s. And that’s just sticking to books I’ve also read this year.<br /><br />
Broadly speaking, the Modernists were so interested in people—in individuals, even, and their interiority—that you might say that they forgot about characters. The M.s de Norpois, the Doris Kilmans exist in these books, of course, those people who, incidentally, describe broadly a type, embodied; narrative drivers. But these are not books interested in plot, where events accrue over simulated time in order to reach a conclusion, and so their characters cannot fire shots or man drones or trenches in its service. The war, then, is between fiction with an end goal of a satisfying story, and fiction with an end goal of illuminating people.<br /><br />
These aren’t the only two possible end goals of fiction, of course. In the same interwar period where the bulk of Modernism flourished, Georg Lukács is arguing in <i>Das Wort</i> that the claims of Expressionism and Surrealism being revolutionary are overstated. In Lukács case, the real goal of literature is to be found in works of Realists like Thomas Mann, and their ability to synthesize the social order: the goal, in a word, is neither plot nor person but reality. Other examples of end goals abound.<br /><br />
At the turn of the twentieth century, or, perhaps more precisely, in the interwar period from the late teens to the early 30s, literature bifurcated in a way no amount of coinages like “slipstream” have been able to resolve.<br /><br />
On the one hand, the Modernists (eventually absorbing and splitting off into other names) who became literary fiction, representatives of the side of the war dedicated to showcasing people. On the other hand, a weird old quasi-conman who wouldn’t shut up about his new coinage, “scientifiction.”<br /><br />
I’ll spare you my thoughts on Hugo Gernsback because (...but I really want to...) the point, I think, is clear enough: for the last century, literature has taken it as fact that it is about plumbing the depths of what it means to be Human; or that it is about telling a satisfying story, in genre. Other exigencies burble constantly, occasionally bursting. The pornographers and the didacts and the moralists and the minor literatures and the experimentalists and many more foment. But at the end of the day, you’re shelved in Fiction or Speculative Fiction, or you’re not shelved at all.<br /><br />
In some writers, this war reaches something of a détente, on occasion. Delany might be the foremost among them. When I point to the fact that Lo Lobey blowing blood from his flute is as beautifully described as any moment in which he contemplates, this is what I mean. It is of both camps. Since the dual blows of Gernsback and Freud, the writer has been forced to pick a side. And, it is I think safe to say, Delany ultimately did. But in <i>The Einstein Intersection</i>, he sent his head singing down the river, unconcerned with the mortars screaming overhead.<br /><br />
********************************************<br /><br />
And so we have our interlocutors. Oh, transcending the Young Adult style guide; Oh, engaging (if only in shared referent) with a self-consciously critical moment in the history of speculative fiction. She sees, at least in my reading, eye to eye with neither.<br /><br />
Her deep and seemingly intuitive sense of character psychology clashes with the propulsive narrative movement demanded by the former, to the point where readers trained only to see plot movement might find stagnation in her books’ most dynamic moments. At the same time, her psychology never transcends character; the formal commitments to plot preclude that swerve into interiority.<br /><br />
To try to illustrate: every character Oh introduces evinces thought processes, desires and sensual commitments that are irreducible to other aspects of the text, whether formal, literary, or functional. Aria does not leap into the Thames early in <i>Terra-Two?</i> In order to allow Jesse onto the ship, or to force Elliot to be an avatar of grief; she does it for her own reasons, clearly felt. Any reading of <i>More Perfect</i> that simply enumerated the ways in which Orpheus was actually Orpheus might unveil some neat easter eggs, but it would also impoverish the novel. The wildly different twins in both books certainly have many things to say about twinness beyond who the characters are, but they never dissolve wholly into questions of the uncanny or doppelganger myths—and nor do they become single-note refutations thereof.<br /><br />
At the same time, we never quite experience that transition to full interiority. Oh does not try to convey to us the full internal lifeworld of her characters in the same way, for instance, Woolf describes Septimus’ discovery of ASMR:<br /><br />
<blockquote>“K...R...” said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sand which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed—that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! (22)<br /><br /></blockquote>
The whole of Septimus in this moment is open to us; when we sit in the heads of Temi Oh’s characters, they retain autonomy. They have privacy.<br /><br />
It is fitting, I think, that the author who demonstrated this facility with character in <i>Terra-Two?</i> would go on to write a novel that more perfectly dovetails with her fundamental concerns. That privacy, that autonomy explode out into the world with the Pulse, turning the social world into a literal referendum on those very concepts by putting them in tension with the technological overdetermination of the individual, simultaneously through surveillance, expression, state-sanctioned and funded trauma repression, consciousness-sharing, and basically any other consequence of plugging one’s brain into the Internet, good or bad, one can readily come up with.<br /><br />
Beyond fitting, even. What we have in this book might be a genuine magnum opus, that singular synthesis of an artist’s concerns, their preoccupations, the social moment, and their skill in delivering on their prose and chosen subject. What could be more apt than wondering what a world where the final privatization, with the commons long gone and the biopolitical hegemonic, when even private thoughts become private commodities? What could be a more apt mode than the only truly popular novel form, the Young Adult, but freed of the style guide? What writer could be more apt to tackle these things than Temi Oh, with her deep well of character psychology mixed with her remarkable talents for worldbuilding and plot development?<br /><br />
A magnum opus, then. It is declared. History can let the rest shake out.<br /><br />
********************************************<br /><br />
Despite the occasionally materialist method, this essay has largely stayed in the relatively limited discourse of aesthetic history. (And the even more limited discourse of my own preoccupations and reading history in 2023, mostly.) Which leads to a question: is the magnum opus enough?<br /><br />
One answer, self-evident: no. It never has been, so why would it be now, especially in the long tail of literature’s importance? The novel was, once, a critical component of bourgeois class formation and could therefore at least index what an ascendant class thought of itself. These days, when the biggest publishing house in the United States is <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/11/01/1133032238/judge-blocks-penguin-random-house-simon-schuster-merger">blocked from buying</a> the second-biggest of its four rivals, said rival gets sold to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg_Kravis_Roberts">the private equity firm</a> that saddled Toys’R’Us with billions in debt upon and acquisition and slowly squeezed the still-successful retailer to death for their own gain.<br /><br />
Which isn’t to say the entrenched bourgeoisie have abandoned the form entirely; we can all thank one of the scions of the Koch fortune for Catapult press, and Orrin Henry Ingram, whose “systematic deforestation” of Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin in the mid-19th century funded, through the generational wealth it generated, his great-great grandchildren’s ability to maintain their position as one of very few viable distributors for independent bookstores.<br /><br />
There’s a more generous answer, though. The magnum opus can matter, according to your frame. And they can matter greatly.<br /><br />
For the individual, obviously—whether author or reader, the joy of experiencing something indelibly its own can be a transformative experience.<br /><br />
For communities, as well. Though they’re largely a commodified joke now, book clubs help with the real work of reading together something that cannot have been produced except in this singular way. In doing so, the reading group can forge bonds, lead to clarifying arguments, open up new aesthetic in political avenues in ways that few other things can.<br /><br />
For platforms? Absolutely. The subsumption of a genuine magnum opus can lead to that most precious commodity of all: engagement, to be sold to advertisers and venture capitalists in that most delicious way of all: quantifiably.<br /><br />
But that brings us back to our initial answer, in some way. Is a magnum opus important to the world? To our collective struggle to move beyond capitalism and the ecological apocalypse it has revealed as its inevitable telos?<br /><br />
No. No, it isn’t.<br /><br />
Unless it helps.Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-12231999940493475952023-01-31T15:53:00.001-08:002023-01-31T15:53:25.422-08:00Valentine's Day Compilation #8: Cute [Call for Submissions]The theme for this year's friends of Fuck the Polis! Valentine's Day Compilation is: <u>Cute</u>.<br />
<p>It's not that we aren't already, we know this. But I think we could use some more. Whether that's looking, getting, making, being, appreciating. It could be about bringing a certain softness to a life wracked with strife, or it could be about saying Don't Get Cute With Me, Pig. It could be pure aesthetic appreciation or just thinking about getting cute with a cutie. There's cute in the hard and unyielding, as well, and the darkness that a smile might hide.</p>
<p>Here's a little photoshoot I've been doing, something of which will end up being the cover, probably:<br /></p>
<div class="separator"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxkYxvE82gvsNdhXMGw6BLdfwo8FOdxInUsHdQx7UCAu7v2HTxxDCuRitAc7vALGXlnJdBKphX7VehgZXCT4Dx-lh2OLXA6fgQ9bv5NrBPdRIgb-4qKSYnxW8WB3G66Ex-U63yx5ck12UT6YeLpdYObtKhzvgT3hVhe9WhfPFRFW4Ok0M9enKiM1bq/s4032/PXL_20230131_185133179.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxkYxvE82gvsNdhXMGw6BLdfwo8FOdxInUsHdQx7UCAu7v2HTxxDCuRitAc7vALGXlnJdBKphX7VehgZXCT4Dx-lh2OLXA6fgQ9bv5NrBPdRIgb-4qKSYnxW8WB3G66Ex-U63yx5ck12UT6YeLpdYObtKhzvgT3hVhe9WhfPFRFW4Ok0M9enKiM1bq/w150-h200/PXL_20230131_185133179.jpg" width="150" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrl75IZqKkGNGNWymYkh7KiaYec8W8U5WEOuPT6EoNd81wJ5MmZCTxyhyCWZDh3MC4BcSUGWLBT6hGptKc7kFoe4TUpI2RxqhRZaQ2EqcexhKTZJnDP9GDiypbCnaSbzzwS8l0g-0WQ5HseL6hVhvZhYzHRWuiSC9oJGmNHYmNNboYg54R9lIO0szQ/s4032/PXL_20230131_182932229.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrl75IZqKkGNGNWymYkh7KiaYec8W8U5WEOuPT6EoNd81wJ5MmZCTxyhyCWZDh3MC4BcSUGWLBT6hGptKc7kFoe4TUpI2RxqhRZaQ2EqcexhKTZJnDP9GDiypbCnaSbzzwS8l0g-0WQ5HseL6hVhvZhYzHRWuiSC9oJGmNHYmNNboYg54R9lIO0szQ/w150-h200/PXL_20230131_182932229.jpg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiLbXlg7LbmUqSr2faYNd9jRL98SmcWbIC6jLWBnzEe5QNK-TqweXb6_Eaw2FmQQelUOPBO67XVNBxolwEULA5ttfS_2scZtR1Sxjn5KKbKYjuhgfwBe0whFAqLYiYFTNhV_Mw344I1wSzvYZS1k2vM5WjkrNWHSVUIhYf7bBtyNPdMJttSfCTvF7L/s4032/PXL_20230131_184333606.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiLbXlg7LbmUqSr2faYNd9jRL98SmcWbIC6jLWBnzEe5QNK-TqweXb6_Eaw2FmQQelUOPBO67XVNBxolwEULA5ttfS_2scZtR1Sxjn5KKbKYjuhgfwBe0whFAqLYiYFTNhV_Mw344I1wSzvYZS1k2vM5WjkrNWHSVUIhYf7bBtyNPdMJttSfCTvF7L/w150-h200/PXL_20230131_184333606.jpg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFjKO_FsHtzDwT8XLt3toPFMzJUQ4OM08p9X7FBfTlAV9pD70qHKCEadHCxBroHxlaFPfNSXUQ8yfMjwzZKwbZWcIF7p8Ceg79sSmtGaVcvpsO7IPlRWaK2KPcSv58v7OPpuS3wd2ewIdr4PJFkB8zPdqSC_ho8BNizJ6YrwsO8g2bAhDCPxGyb_Yy/s4032/PXL_20230131_193456698.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFjKO_FsHtzDwT8XLt3toPFMzJUQ4OM08p9X7FBfTlAV9pD70qHKCEadHCxBroHxlaFPfNSXUQ8yfMjwzZKwbZWcIF7p8Ceg79sSmtGaVcvpsO7IPlRWaK2KPcSv58v7OPpuS3wd2ewIdr4PJFkB8zPdqSC_ho8BNizJ6YrwsO8g2bAhDCPxGyb_Yy/w150-h200/PXL_20230131_193456698.jpg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcliGfMg1-_mGtAoYgd-t8lBfcHFfsRSm0r7RCTfwaaOEg6gDIKDqolXc-iulvsI70DyUWQueQtJ1cKDxjrcdS1AKPddfOhuY65S4o29KyVYd0vAljcnJJ9u0Ofy5fmoWdjEkq6TapCWteMVrAGeOeeZCD1CIbK6hAL-Yu7sDiCbrHwRlnubdSN8Me/s4032/PXL_20230131_194106824.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcliGfMg1-_mGtAoYgd-t8lBfcHFfsRSm0r7RCTfwaaOEg6gDIKDqolXc-iulvsI70DyUWQueQtJ1cKDxjrcdS1AKPddfOhuY65S4o29KyVYd0vAljcnJJ9u0Ofy5fmoWdjEkq6TapCWteMVrAGeOeeZCD1CIbK6hAL-Yu7sDiCbrHwRlnubdSN8Me/w150-h200/PXL_20230131_194106824.jpg" width="150" /></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1l6EvF_PHU_k6Qe08jI9iqQzcRL4wr-id1VGac348KhAGRGZVavnqva0DijsoT2-171ptXRmtL1bQ4ls27UO8uvUJ9KDOQezexKN02FyAAUbiL5h_5urju5DkutsTJ6jwUN6NR7Y098DUY9L82hYtsG5lRPQsGNReLnuU7wLmH11O89zF-2HNBD4P/s4032/PXL_20230131_211147311.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1l6EvF_PHU_k6Qe08jI9iqQzcRL4wr-id1VGac348KhAGRGZVavnqva0DijsoT2-171ptXRmtL1bQ4ls27UO8uvUJ9KDOQezexKN02FyAAUbiL5h_5urju5DkutsTJ6jwUN6NR7Y098DUY9L82hYtsG5lRPQsGNReLnuU7wLmH11O89zF-2HNBD4P/w150-h200/PXL_20230131_211147311.jpg" width="150" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDG7HKe2ax644grOmwQL3-s4SJj68n8zsOketG9Jc1rgAQ2kUoS3ebXt3fdj-aqkqLHMrFszVoR9djUg1Sde50DevgU60N0--urCsbhbufDhzJcoiz7dglOVXrFh3CYhcK5NcXFOkuh7LuJTzoWDdvSYC0AzG7_W0-tOJVb5zJjf81JDqzrsr5J4KE/w150-h200/PXL_20230131_211323421.jpg" width="150" /> <img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn1rL0VJ1KkV23j0kJB6Kbm9FCt3rYdmfEZIQAaFrSkotewTvdrdDW86CiseE6o3m5PjN4L7osoaxmyCnbTwNwp_sd_TcjMr2i8YXGSJdGyVUmHu6SDZnJktpCaJ2cwuT6mfeWTImgx47dJ0gIJopFC1BIW7Lz2EfnHrlFbrHY4EnCBWIxX4UJpH8T/w150-h200/PXL_20230131_212721737.jpg" width="150" /> <img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIDzFk91nhB48RVg4UVyNAG8aMRZWPO5-hrEl2Lk0BS5AX97q1_xpcnH6raDZbsMkbubB9VgxM9J29sNwyeaah4NtwpiMYQtVw11lrIHlGoz_ALoSX8VT2MCI2E-VGXeC8_CX1RC6K3yRr8qgmRjyRbkmJi4s3PXDcqNhwfubQ1ppJzDeTvZFo1P9y/w150-h200/PXL_20230131_213615525.jpg" width="150" /> <img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqkwJ-SF8yFrPtQswQv8WadsPnDYfSyQKjy2KTRKL28sd1XRvZzjaq-5wVYEPzVO7LkvSO_Hs5psjoe9drlnMF9n_d4GiBVK-WL4fFagb-ROKL3qNWoz7poGctJQFOR3bknQUQ7LR4D7fkOBr3cAyx3oSNN0mzDCaZza8p7luUOfbq1KDhFxMLQ8m2/w150-h200/PXL_20230131_222619755.jpg" width="150" /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<p>As always, the theme is unimportant. Use it as inspiration if it works that way, or ignore it if it doesn't. And as always, we're open to just about anything as long as it's an audio file. I don't think I have had to execute my curatorial powers once yet?</p>
<p>Some background: Since 2016, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/">Fuck the Polis!</a> have been organizing a compilation released on Valentine's Day. You can find them here: <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/pop-a-valentines-day-compilation">2016 (Pop)</a>; <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/solidarity-a-valentines-day-compilation">2017 (Solidarity)</a>; <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/extra-a-valentines-day-compilation">2018 (Extra)</a>; <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/digging-in-a-valentines-day-compilation">2019 (Digging In)</a>; <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/smash-a-valentines-day-compilation">2020 (Smash b/w Pushing Through)</a>; <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/chorus-a-valentines-day-compilation">2021 (Chorus)</a>; and <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/set-s-a-valentines-day-compilation">2022 (Set(s))</a>. These compilations have been home to experimental, noise, plunderphonics, bedroom pop, poetry, folk, punk, country, darkwave, and a whole lot more.<br />
To be on the comp, all you have to do is email me (uninterpretative [at] gmail) an audio file (preferably .wav or .aiff, but I can make anything work) before February 14th and I can probably include it. If you have any questions, hit up that email or <a href="http://twitter.com/beegabberel">@beegabberel</a> or wherever you talk to me. I'm happy to support, whether with words or sounds or whatever I can manage.</p>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-61026461144042827712022-06-03T09:31:00.001-07:002022-06-03T09:31:53.242-07:00A Ranked Paragraph About Every Book I Read in 2021 (part 2: pre-2021 books edition)<h3 style="text-align: left;">51) The End We Start From (Megan Hunter)<br /></h3><p style="text-align: left;">Nah.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">50) Bee People and the Bugs They Love (Frank Mortimer)</h3><p>I think I
would actively dislike Frank Mortimer if I met him in person, and I
didn't get a ton out of this book, but it was mostly fine.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">49) All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy)</h3><p>This story of two boys
who run away with some horses genuinely did nothing for me. I didn't
even really connect with the language. The plot kind of did something,
but I don't really like plot, so that's kind of bottom of the barrel.
Someday I'll understand McCarthy.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">48) The Corona Crash (Grace Blakely)</h3><p>Another in Verso's weirdly
demsoc series on the covid-19 pandemic. Much better than last year's <i>The
Care Manifesto</i>, but also weirdly invested (if I'm recalling correctly)
on pseudo-Keynesian responses to the pandemic.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">47) I Am Cuba (Stephen Langdon Cost)</h3><p>Probably more on the historical
fiction end than the literary nonfiction, I ended up feeling about this
similarly to how I felt about a much better book by Miéville that comes
up much later, although on a different subject.</p><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">46) The Silence (Don Delillo)</h3><p>A slim Don Delillo novel about
how bad phones are, probably. No, that's not fair. It's about a power
outage and an escalating series of philosophical discussions with some
weird hetero shit thrown in. It's apparently classified as Humor in my
libro.fm app? That's a choice. Solidly written and completely
forgettable, honestly.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">45) Death in a Promised Land (Scott Ellsworth)</h3><p>I feel like I read
this a century ago. Ellsworth is an academic focusing on the Tulsa Race
Riot of 1921, and this is written in reportage style. It's hard, with
moments of resistance. It's similar in many ways to Les & Tamara
Payne's <i>The Dead Are Arising</i>, especially in the pacing. I am glad to
have read it.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">44) Angelica's Smile (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>I'm going to be honest: this
one kind of left no impression on me other than that I remember it being
unfortunately horny and I was into the fact that the people were
robbing rich folks' vacation homes. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">43) The Track of Sand (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>Another one that left little
enough trace on my memory that even reading summaries doesn't really
bring anything forth other than the image of the dead horse in the show
version. I'll be honest: it could be good, it could be bad. I did read
it! I just have no memory. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">42) The Paper Moon (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>One of the less great
Montalbano books sees the Inspector contemplating his age and getting
hit on by a bunch of hot young ladies. Never a womanizer, there are
moments that are fun but overall it ends up feeling a bit all over the
place. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">41) The Secret of Red Gate Farm (Carolyn Keene)</h3><p>The first four words of this book are “That Oriental-looking woman…” so yeah. There’s some shit about perfume. A really bad one. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">40) Treasure Hunt (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>While the explosive opening (two
old religious jerks firing rounds onto a town square in a house filled
with crucifixes and a sex doll) ends up overshadowing the actual
mystery, it is a really good opening. One of the better examples of the
way Camilleri starts playing with metafiction later in the series (as
the television show version of Montalbano begins eclipsing the books, at
least in parts of Italy) despite paring back some of the other literary
devices, and the mystery itself isn't bad. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">39) Phoenix Extravagant (Yoon-Ha Lee)</h3><p>Another casualty of brain fog,
Yoon Ha Lee's <i>Phoenix Extravagant</i> is a book I will need to revisit again
at some point down the line. My overwhelming feeling is that he is
being pigeonholed or incentivized to write things that are more in line
with Young Adult fiction than the Machineries of Empire series, and I
find that to be a bummer. Maybe in 2022 I will try to do a full
read-through of his work. I think he's one of the best authors writing,
and I'm bummed I haven't connected with his last two books.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">38) Rounding the Mark (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>Still fairly early in the
series, <i>Rounding the Mark</i> sees Montalbano disgusted with the
pseudo-fascist response of the Prime Minister to the G8 protests and
prepared to resign. He gets caught up with Ingrid again, as well as
inadvertently leading a refugee boy to some human traffickers. One of
the more tumultuous in the series, it's also a fairly solid case study
in the movement from the more complex early novels toward the later,
breezier ones.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">37) The Clue in the Diary (Carolyn Keene)</h3><p>Having flipped through it, I
still remember absolutely nothing about this mystery. Which is a shame,
because I literally don’t know if it was any good. I don’t think so,
though, really.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">36) The Bungalow Mystery (Carolyn Keene)</h3><p>One of the less interesting
mysteries, but it does start with a bang in a storm on a ship. I also
remember the Donnelly’s being likable.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">35) The Mystery at Lilac Inn (Carolyn Keene)</h3><p>A Nancy Drew
doppelganger and something called “charge plates” are most of why this
mystery is fun. There’s a marriage too I guess?</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">34) Tentacle (Rita Indiana)</h3><p>Rita Indiana is a Dominican genderfucky
songwriter. <i>Tentacle </i>is about a full-transition shot and the fulfillment
of a prophecy and time travel, I think? It's a good time if you dig a
really fucked up book that rings real through speculative elements. Also
their songs are very good. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">33) The Revolution of the Moon (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>Another
piece of historical fiction centered on the 27-day reign of a queen in
Sicily in the 18th century. It's a cute, zippily written political
thriller about a woman being in power and providing things the people
actually need - like bread and reproductive rights - right up until the
moment that the larger power structure gets rid of her. Like <i>The Sacco
Gang</i> (more on that later), it's probably more Camilleri than real history, and as with that
book I'm pretty fine with that.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">32) Breasts &
Eggs (Mieko Kawakami)</h3><p>I think this, along with <i>Detransition, Baby</i>, were
the two books I was most disappointed I didn't like more from authors
that were unfamiliar to me. There are some exceptional moments here,
descriptions of sweaty nights and intergenerational conflicts that
barely breathe a word. There is also a scene in a spa that involves a
possibly trans character. That scene really took the wind out of my
sails.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">31) The Patience of the Spider (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>This 2004 novel is
another example of a really solid early entry in the series, with the
closest I think Camilleri ever came to a genuine supervillain/rival
style antagonist. While not quite up to the mark of the great books in
the series, it's a real good one.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">30) The Age of Doubt (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>Another
one of the stronger late books, <i>The Age of Doubt</i> has a rock solid
opening that puts his aging issues, his relationship doubts, and his
dissatisfaction with his job into a hypnagogic cauldron and sets things
boiling. The luxury yacht juxtaposed with the speedboat (which
themselves, in the port, are juxtaposed against the many refugee stories
throughout the series) and the poisoning are fun.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">29) The Hidden Staircase (Carolyn Keene)</h3><p>Nancy
Drew does haunted houses, <i>Scooby Doo</i>-style. In my memory this is
actually one of the more elaborately-plotted books of the ten I read
this year, including the abduction of Carson Drew, Nancy’s lawyer
father. It’s a good one of these.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">28) Password to Larkspur Lane (Carolyn Keene)</h3><p>The tenth book in
the series is a pretty pleasant one as well. A mysterious wheel of fire
is showing up at her friend’s family’s house. There’s an old lady being
held against her will. I barely remember how it ends, but I remember
enjoying the ride. I also just dig any goofy supernatural shit, so maybe
that informed my take.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">27) The Secret of Shadow Ranch (Carolyn Keene)</h3><p>Fucking
cool-ass ghost horse. I remember this one really positively, but I also
remember reading that it was one of the ones more heavily edited for
being hella racist. So there’s that. I think this is the one that
introduces love interests for the gals, who are wildly uninteresting. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">26) The Dance of the Seagull (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>The
titular dance - Montalbano sees a seagull swoop and plummet and spin in
strange circles before expiring - is one of the more powerful images in
the series. Most Montalbano books rely on their propulsive prose, your
interest in the mystery, the landscapes and the exquisite descriptions
of food, with only a soupcon of interest in the surreal or poetic
movement of things. The mystery is a little less compelling, although
Fazio's twists make up for some of that. A good piece of texture for the rest of the
series, but maybe not the best starting point.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">25) The Wings of the Sphinx (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>Another entry in the
mid-late period Montalbano books sees the Inspector obsessing over
senescence. Which isn't bad or good, necessarily - I enjoy, to a degree,
the fact that he ages along with the author instead of staying
Bond-young forever and which paid off greatly in the last two stories
(see my <a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2022/04/a-paragraph-about-every-book-i-read-in.html">2021 books of 2021 list for those</a>) - but it can get a bit samey.
Of those, this story might be my favorite as Montalbano looks for a
girl with a sphinx moth tattoo and encounters some real weirdos.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">24) Nancy's Mysterious Letter (Carolyn Keene)</h3><p>Nancy
Drew is going to inherit a bunch of money! But it’s actually a
different Nancy Drew, who is an actress. This one is honestly probably
the best on a pure popcorn level, imo.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">23) The Potter's Field (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>If there were a Hollywood
movie in any of the Montalbano books, it's almost certainly this one.
A(n apparent) mob hit in a <i>Potter's Field</i> (effectively unmarked graves)
leads Montalbano on a Judean goose chase that sees him interacting with
Dons and academics. Published in Italian in 2008, it's almost like a
rewrite of <i>The Terracotta Dog</i> but with more dialog than history. For my
money, that means it doesn't rate quite as high; but then, I'm not like
other girls.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">22) How Long Til Black Future Month? (N.K. Jemisin)</h3><p>Reading the story
summaries on Wikipedia conjured a feeling or memory in my brain for
almost every one of the stories in this collection, which I kind of
wasn't expecting given the lifetime I feel like I've lived since I read
it early in 2021. I think the thing I said at the time to people was
that it was quite good, but it does feel like Jemisin really excels at
the novel (or, perhaps more accurately, trilogy) length. That's probably
true. It's also true that the broad range of genres Jemisin tackles
here within speculative fiction is exciting, considering what she is
capable of when working in longer form.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">21) Backflash (Richard Stark)</h3><p>Parker is the kind of noir
protagonist I can get behind, even if I haven't read a ton like him:
steely, ready to kill, but mostly interested in getting the job done. In
<i> Backflash</i>, the job is robbing a casino boat for an anti-gambling
politician. I'm curious about continuing my mystery tour after Carolyn
and Andrea grabbed my heart and my head in 2021. I don't know if it will
be soon, but Stark's Parker is definitely going to rattle around until I
get to him eventually. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">More on No! No Buzz</a>.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">20) The Colorado Kid (Stephen King)</h3><p>Stephen King at his Most, in some
ways. A mystery from the perspective of a new newspaperwoman, with the
state stamp on a pack of cigarettes as the central complicating factor.
It turns out to be nothing exceptional except in the ways it isn't;
there's genuine ambiguity and ambivalence in this in ways I rarely
associate with King, and a curbed storytelling impulse that instead
focuses on inessential relationships.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">19) The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich (Fritz Lieber)</h3><p>Leiber Does
Lovecraft. Specifically, the Horrible Document version of Lovecraft.
It's no <i>Our Lady of Darkness</i>, but what is. Pretty good, from what I
remember.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">18) Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency (Malm)</h3><p>My main memory of this
is that it's the best of the pamphlets in Verso's coronavirus series
(excluding Dean Spade's <i>Mutual Aid</i>, which I don't know if is technically
in the series but it far, far outstrips the rest), and that it gets a
little Lenin Bro-y in bits. Plenty of salient points throughout, though.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">17) The Deep (Rivers Solomon)</h3><p>Inspired by a clipping. song about
mermaids who were descendants of the slaves tossed overboard in the
Middle Passage, <i>The Deep</i> is about the one of them who remembers and the
toll that takes. Like <i>Sorrowland</i>, it's about flight from a supposedly
utopian community to find the fucked up reality of the outside world.
It's also about care for the individual and care for the collective, and
how those things can come into conflict without any conflict rearing
its head. And it's about cool mermaid shit. So it's good.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">16) The Visitors (Clifford D. Simak)</h3><p>Obelisk aliens land in Simak's
beloved landscape: a picturesque midwestern small town (probably in
Wisconsin). Newspapermen try to piece it together. The aliens are
<i>Roadside Picnic</i> levels of inscrutable. They're also metaphors for
industrialization. It's quite good. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">15) Cemetery Boys (Aiden Thomas)</h3><p>Definitely the best YA book I read
this year, as a hater of YA. I expected this to be another thing I read
and kind of enjoyed, but the ending really caught me off guard. The
story of a young trans brujo whose culture doesn't quite accept him and
whose attempt to prove himself goes awry when he summons the wrong
ghost. It's kind of the thing I might recommend for people that aren't
in the headspace to read the density of <i>Summer Sons</i> or the <a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2022/04/a-paragraph-about-every-book-i-read-in.html">visceral heartwrenching</a> of <i>Sorrowland</i>, but want some version of their themes and
storytelling polished, like a rock, in the editorial and publishing
tumbler of a book marketed as Young Adult.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">14) October (China Miéville)</h3><p>An early-in-the-year read, and (I
believe?) the only one of Miéville's books (excepting his dissertation)
that I hadn't read previously. An account of Russia's revolution(s)
written in a really solid literary nonfiction style, I was most
impressed by his acknowledgment of the failures on the part of the
revolution to respect the anarchist cadre. Probably a lot of things to
say about this, but I mostly remember appreciating the verve with which
it was told, Miéville's incomparable ability to focus in on particular
details and resonances, and the feeling of reading a pop history that
might not exactly reflect my poltics but didn't outright disagree with
them from the jump. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">13) The Housekeeper and the Professor (Yoko Ogawa)</h3><p>I fell in love
with <i>The Memory Police</i> <a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2021/02/bees-top-10-books-of-2020.html">last year</a>, and finally saw another Ogawa book
cross my path this year. On some level, I think I might like this
better. The story of a single mother who works as a housekeeper to a
mathematics professor who suffered a traumatic brain injury which means
his short term memory ends after 80 minutes, this is a decidedly
non-genre take on disability and care work and the beauty of math and
the beauty of language. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">I kind of adored it</a>.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">12) The Dead Father (Donald Barthelme)</h3><p>This is the book that got me
to start No! No Buzz near the end of this year. It's an interesting bit
of experimental fiction, and I'm curious to read more Barthelme because
so much of my reading has been of the fairly light variety, and there
are things here that challenged me (and others I found challenging). <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">Anyway I said what I wanted to say in the video</a>.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">11) The Only Good Indian (Stephen Jones)</h3><p>Among the best horror novels
I've ever read, definitely, <i>The Only Good Indian</i> is about four men who
commit a crime that comes back to haunt them. It fits in the model of
John Carpenter, to me, as a powerful example of homosociality in horror.
That Carpenter was heavily influenced into this by John Ford, the
Western film director, is an irony not lost. With powerful scenes of men
expressing emotions, genuinely fucked up moments of horror, and an
unflinching look at historical atrocity, it's another one I feel really
confident calling special.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">10) The One-Straw Revolution (Masonobu Fukuoka)</h3><p>A good chunk of the
reading I did this year was in preparation for some Island Demeter games
that didn't quite pan out as I'd hoped, and this sort of memoir, sort
of philosophy, sort of farming polemic was one of them. It tells of
Fukuoka's experiments in what he sometimes calls Do Nothing Farming,
where he cultivated land without use of any plows and, in doing so,
invented the seed bomb. The technicals were a little beyond my
comprehension, but his productive nihilism really struck a chord with
me.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">9) Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer)</h3><p>This was one of those
books that I picked up mostly because people just keep buying it? And I
was curious. I really enjoyed my time with it. It felt a bit overlong
and repetitive in parts, but the central thrust is really strong, Wall
Kimmerer is an excellent storyteller, and it was overall just really
positive. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">More on No! No Buzz</a></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">8) Princess Bari (Hwang Sok-Yong)</h3><p>Hwang Sok-Yong is apparently one
of South Korea's most well known authors, and I'm pretty embarrassed to
have just learned that. I'm excited to hopefully read more of
his work. This novel is about the seventh daughter of a North Korean
family, named after the titular character of folklore, a seventh
daughter of a royal family. Both were left to die and survived; both
experience harrowing travels that clarify the world and reveal that the
healing waters are the waters that give life to us and what sustains us.
<i>Princess Bari</i> stands out to me as a story of the abandoned and vilified
that unflinchingly tells stories of people who, despite being singled
out for truly harrowing experiences, continue to act in solidarity. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">More on No! No Buzz</a></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">7) The Sacco Gang (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>My introduction to Andrea
Camilleri, and one I'm happy to have been my first. Published by Europa
(unlike the Montalbano books, which are handled by Penguin Random
House), it's a sort of historical fiction about a family of leftists
called the Sacco gang who tangle with the fascist police and the mafia
in the late 1800s (I think that's right). I think it's ultimately more
clarifying of Camilleri's positions and interests than it is a
historical document, but I have no problem with that.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">6) The Secret of the Old Clock (Carolyn Keene)</h3><p>The very first Nancy
Drew mystery begins “Nancy Drew, an attractive girl of eighteen, was
driving home along a country road in her new, dark-blue convertible.”
Which upended a number of assumptions I’d had, including her age
(apparently she was originally sixteen, but was aged up in the 1950s
rereleases, which I learned later were the ones I read). I really didn’t
expect her to be driving. The mystery here is about a will hidden in an
old clock, which a rich family denies exists so they can become richer.
It’s one of the more fun entries in the series, and does a good job
introducing Nancy and the style of writing (The Most Cliffhangers
Imaginable).</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">5) The Shape of Water (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>The first Montalbano book
introduces the inspector and his crew, but most importantly it
introduces Ingrid, the Swedish race car driver whose flirtation with
Montalbano is one of the series' hearts. A mystery involving a
politician found dead in a field notorious for Mafia-run sex work leads
Montalbano to uncover corruption in the halls of power. Camilleri's
prose develops a lot over the course of the series, but not in a good or
bad way, necessarily; here there are a number of chewy, long sentences
and a sense of history that get pared down in the future, and it's nice
to see the development.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">4) The Sign of the Twisted Candles (Carolyn Keene)</h3><p>My favorite of
the Nancy Drew stories. It does the will trick again, but the candles
and spaces are actually really evocatively described. I believe this is
by a different ghostwriter than the bulk of the previous books, and I’m
unfortunately pretty into his way of keeping things moving while
focusing on images.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">3) The Mushroom at the End of the World (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing)</h3><p>Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing's critical investigation into the matsutake mushroom
is one of the best things I read this year. It's somewhere between
academic tome, journalistic travelogue, and extended personal essay on
race and capital. Lowenhaupt Tsing embeds with matsutake pickers and
buyers, examines the moment the undomesticatable mushroom becomes a
commodity (in the air, shipping between Seattle and Japan), ruminates on
the ways it refuses commoditization by developing a gift economy, and
touches on the weird, cool world of fungi. Not just one of the best
things I read; one of the coolest. It reminds me of Christine Yano's
work on Hello Kitty or Nisei Stewardesses. Well told, straddling the
line between popular and academic, thoroughly cited, and sticky.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">2) The Old Drift (Namwali Serpell)</h3><p>If <i>The Thousand Crimes of Ming
Tsu</i> wasn't <a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2022/04/a-paragraph-about-every-book-i-read-in.html">the best surprise of 2021</a>, then this was. Different lists,
though, so both count. I found Namwali Serpell through Transit Books'
Undelivered Lectures series (see my brief thoughts on Preti Teneja's
<i>Aftermath</i> from the same series, <a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2022/04/a-paragraph-about-every-book-i-read-in.html">also in the other post</a>, or my <a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2021/02/bees-top-10-books-of-2020.html">post from last year</a>) and then her previous novel (this one) came by. I'm not in
the practice of reading big intergenerational epics these days and
thought I would bounce off. I really, really didn't. The story of Zambia
from the late 1800s through the early 2020s, it weaves elegantly
between colonial history, magic realism, literary fiction, and science
fiction. And the thread is a sentient mosquito swarm. I really can't
speak highly enough of this book. <br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">1) The Terracotta Dog (Andrea Camilleri)</h3><p>The second Montalbano book, and my personal favorite. Being early, it still has Camilleri's more yarn-length sentences rather than the drumbeats of the latter novels, and because of that it has more going on in terms of developing the history of fascism in Italy as a player in the present than, say, the punchy joy of a <i>Cook of the Halcyon</i>. With interwoven mysteries about a grocery truck, a mafia hit in police protection, and two World War II-era bodies buried in a ritual fashion, everything here propelled me forward and really cemented that I love this goofy series.<br /><br />*************************************<br /></p><p>Plus, some bonus rereads! (unranked)<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"> How Much of These Hills is Gold (C. Pam Zhang)</h3><p>As I'll say a couple times throughout this, a good chunk of my reading this year was inspired by the fact that I thought I was going to be running some games for Island Demeter; one was a Nancy Drew-inspired detective game that involved a farm, the other a Weird West cooking game. I still hope to run them. I reread Zhang's incredible novel in service of the latter, and it only redoubled my opinion that it is a really special thing, full of gorgeous sentences and complicated in the most bountiful ways.<br /><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Do You Dream of Terra-Two? (Temi Oh) </h3><p>I started this year on my third reading of Do You Dream of Terra Two?, a fact I would have called auspicious if I didn't have this year. It's still an exceptional thing.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br /> </p>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-28218063008466976712022-04-12T20:07:00.001-07:002022-04-12T20:24:46.484-07:00A Ranked Paragraph About Every Book I Read in 2021 (part 1: 2021 Books edition)<blockquote><h3>36) My Annihilation (Fuminori Nakamura) (2022)</h3></blockquote>
A mystery about identity, electroshock therapy, subliminal messaging, and revenge. I was not fond. <a href="https://youtu.be/lmwWW61ihUM">More on No! No Buzz</a><br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>35) Grievers (adrienne marie brown)</h3></blockquote>
I have not been a fan of adrienne marie brown's writing since reading Emergent Strategy. I think this book is clunkily written. <a href="https://youtu.be/dkFx341I6Yg">(way too much) More on No! No Buzz</a><br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>34) Everybody has a podcast (Except You) (The McElroys)</h3></blockquote>
Maybe it's my fault for having started over a half dozen podcasts already, but I found this book pretty useless. Which is fine. They're fine to listen to talk. Honestly <a href="https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/vvvep3/your-voice-is-important-so-start-a-podcast">this short post is way more useful</a>, however many years later.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>33) Ida B. the Queen (Michelle Duster)</h3></blockquote>
A sort of YA biography of Ida B Wells written, I believe, by her daughter. I found it peculiarly unilluminating and weirdly centrist? It's been a while, but I don't have a ton of positive vibes about the experience.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>32) An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed (Helen Tursten)</h3></blockquote>
This slight mystery was super forgettable, honestly. The kind of thing that seems like it is playing on expectations that are completely alien to me.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>31) Chlorine Sky (Mahogany L. Browne)</h3></blockquote>
A young adult book-length poem about basketball and high school. It was fine.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>30) Blood on the Fog (Tongo Eisen-Martin)</h3></blockquote>
Eisen-Martin's third collection of poetry didn't hit as hard for me as his second (or even his first, honestly), but some of that is a headspace thing. The major theme seemed to be prayer, or theodicy. The man can still write an incredible line and wrench your head right around with an image. Definitely on a list to revisit at some point when I can process poetry again.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>29) Comfort Me With Apples (Catherynne M. Valente)</h3></blockquote>
A slight story, in the style of those feminist retellings of Disney/Brothers Grimm fairy tales. From what I recall, it's The Bible meets Wayward Pines. In all honesty nothing about it particularly stands out to me, in retrospect.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>28) Detransition, Baby (Torrey Peters)</h3></blockquote>
The popular trans book of the year, as far as I can tell, is about trans girls in NYC - one currently living her life, one who has detransitioned - who broke up. It's about family and bugchasing and queer community and navigating complex gender dynamics. I found it kind of insufferable, honestly.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>27) A Spindle Splintered (Alix E. Harrow)</h3></blockquote>
A slight story, in the style of those feminist retellings of Disney/Brothers Grimm fairy tales. From what I recall, it's Sleeping Beauty meets the multiverse. In all honesty nothing about it particularly stands out to me, in retrospect.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>26) The Death of Francis Bacon (Max Porter)</h3></blockquote>
I listened to this as an audiobook and know basically nothing about Francis Bacon except the screaming saints, so I probably have the worst possible take on it. It plays in the same space as Eternal Sonata, though it's more experimental fiction than High Anime. I can't say that it did much for me.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>25) Kill The Mall (Pasha Malla)</h3></blockquote>
An overeager narrator gets a residency at the mall, and shit gets weird. Told mostly in book report-style summaries, it has heavy "critique of consumerism" (as opposed to capitalism) vibes, which I generally find offputting. The hair that sprouts from the narrator's tongue, that floods the mall, that mind controls people? That part I was very cool with.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>24) Remote Control (Nnedi Okorafor)</h3></blockquote>
Sankofa (née Fatima) is a fourteen year old girl who, after a seed dropped from the sky on her favorite tree, gained power over death. She wanders Ghana looking for the seed that was stolen from her, pacifying those who are at their end and sometimes killing those who threaten her. There's something here that I expect I would have appreciated more had I read The Book of Phoenix & Who Fears Death, which share a world, and there is a solid emotional throughline which connects technological expansion to colonialism and the ravages of capitalism.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>23) The Color of the Sky is the Shape of the Heart (Chesil) (2022)</h3></blockquote>
A Zainichi Korean is about to be expelled from school in Seattle. She goes to a cabin and writes about her experiences about her first expulsion, from a Korean school in Japan. <a href="https://youtu.be/4Kmd75D4gxM">A fuller thing is this episode of No! No Buzz</a><br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>22) Victories Greater than Death (Charlie Jane Anders)</h3></blockquote>
A big goofy space opera trilogy-opener about a girl who knows she was born with an alien inside her getting called up to duty in a galactic conflict. Like a lot of YA the themes feel sometimes insultingly on the nose. The action is mostly good, the emotional moments tend to pay off, and mostly it's just kind of there, honestly.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>21) Colorful (Eto Mori)</h3></blockquote>
A spirit gets a second chance at life after dying through a lottery system that puts them into the body of a boy who recently attempted suicide. I don't read for plot and even I saw the turn coming in the first ten pages. It's a pleasant thing that touches on, well, the things I just described, and it has lingered with me more than I thought it would after reading it.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>20) Matsutake Worlds (Faier & Hathaway, eds)</h3></blockquote>
The only academic book I read this year, and I did so under the impression it was something similar to Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World rather than an essay collection (she is a member of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group that put this together and a contributor). I can't say I fell in love with it, or that it was equally compelling the whole way through, but I am glad I read it and hope I do more reading like it (in format if not in content) in the near future).<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>19) Rabbits (Terry Myles)</h3></blockquote>
A spinoff of a podcast with aspirations of being one of those popular postmoderns, most obviously The Crying of Lot 49 without any of the fun shit (or pretension, if you dislike it). A gamer gets caught up in an Alternate Reality Game called Rabbits which is kind of like Michael Douglas' The Game, but more speculative by the end. I organized this list around this book, because it needed to be dead center. Neither good nor bad, just there and readable.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>18) Aftermath (Preti Taneja)</h3></blockquote>
Transit Books' Undelivered Lecture series is cool. This book was really complicated to read. <a href="https://youtu.be/jLfOjun0ohk">More on No! No Buzz</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>17) The Last Fallen Star (Graci Kim)</h3></blockquote>
I unfortunately found out this year that the Rick Riordan Presents books are kinda solid. The way they scream #Representation made that seem really unlikely. In this, an adopted young girl named Riley Oh tries to trick her way into magic and ends up leaving her sister on the precipice of death. The prose sometimes hovers at the edge of grating (to someone for whom the YA Voice has grating as a default, which I attribute more to editors/publishers than authors), but it manages to stay on the right side of the line and tell an affecting story.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>16) Heaven (Mieko Kawakami)</h3></blockquote>
Kawakami's second book translated into English in as many years is, for my money, better than the widely-lauded (not wrongly!) Breasts and Eggs. A slim volume about a young boy with a lazy eye and an unkempt girl, both 14, who exchange notes and philosophies on the brutal bullying they both face. The central conflict seems to be between Kojima's martyr obsession - she is unkempt because her mother remarried a rich man and is seeking to reflect her father's poverty and struggles and finds weakness holy - and one bullies right wing nihilism - he bullies because nothing means anything, effects and causes are decoupled, so the strong cull the weak because they are able. As a left nihilist I tend to read books as being refractions of the mode of production, every one of them capable of showing us how social relations are structured by the material conditions that underly them. To that end, this is a pretty successful one, full of what we might call (un)sympathetic characters who have recognizable motivations that speak to the ways in which society amplifies those motivations. Plus I think I remember the sentences being super clean.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>15) Hao (Ye Chun)</h3></blockquote>
A collection of short stories that I remember feeling pretty high on at the time that I read it, but which seems to have slipped away from with a lot of other things from this year, among them my ability to communicate with loved ones. Which is relevant, I guess, because the titular story is about a grad student who suffers a stroke and as a consequence can only say Hao, meaning good or well. I remember, vaguely, that Ye's writing has a kind of honest lyricism. I remember also that none of the stories felt extraneous or lacking in emotional weight. I wish I could remember more.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>14) A Country of Ghosts (Margaret Killjoy)</h3></blockquote>
I keep meaning to read more Killjoy, and this one somewhat suffers from my general dislike of Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Which is mostly about style, to be clear. I did quite like this despite that for other reasons, though. <a href="https://youtu.be/tkGngu42c0g">More on No! No Buzz</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>13) Velvet Was the Night (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)</h3></blockquote>
This was probably the novel I was most disappointed I didn't like more, given how brutally hard I fell for Mexican Gothic in 2020 and how much of 2021 was defined by me finally exploring mysteries as a genre. I think in part that's because this book relies a lot more on character work, the aspect of Moreno-Garcia's writing I find the weakest, and probably just timing. The story of Elvis and the missing girl never really clicked for me. Which doesn't mean it isn't great; Moreno-Garcia is still an impeccaple stylist and genre chameleon, and can work her way through a sentence and a scene in a way I find joyous and surprising. Maybe on the reread.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>12) Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan)</h3></blockquote>
A morality tale in the Dickensian tradition that takes on a particular kind of systemic abuse of women in Ireland. All of the pieces are there for me to have not enjoyed this. I did, though. Quite a bit. <a href="https://youtu.be/ktT8qYu44xM">More on No! No Buzz</a>.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>11) Folklorn (Angela Mi Young Hur)</h3></blockquote>
I meant to read more Erewhon books this year, but. I'm glad I read this one at least. A woman at an Antarctic Research Station sees a ghost. The bulk of the novel traces her through her feelings of being haunted by folklore. It's an enjoyable read, full of melancholy and serious inquiry.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>10) I'm Waiting For You (Bo-Young Kim)</h3></blockquote>
A collection of four short stories, where the middle two are linked and the first and final are linked. The bookends are about a couple who use space travel as an attempt to time travel to meet each other, the first from one perspective, the final from the other. The middle stories are about gods and reminded me a lot of <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/the-strange-horizons-book-club-ten-billion-days-and-one-hundred-billion-nights/">Ryu Mitsuse's 10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights</a>. Maybe the only genuinely novel piece of SF I read this year.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>9) The Swimmers (Julie Otsuka) (2022)</h3></blockquote>
This book is pretty special, I think? <a href="https://youtu.be/1925sNp2LpM">More about it (and the ways it shifts perspective) on No! No Buzz</a>. The rough idea: an underground pool develops a crack in it. An older Japanese woman's senility progresses.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>8) The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu (Tom Lin)</h3></blockquote>
Maybe the best surprise of 2021? I picked it up because I'm (theoretically) running a Weird West game for Island Demeter and because I wanted it to sell. The story of a man getting revenge across the West, it isn't quite as much of a standout as How Much of These Hills is Gold but it did, for me, capture and convey some really striking images of blinding landscapes and circuses and moments of action. The kind of book I found real joy in reading on a scene-level, which is pretty rare for me.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>7) The Animorphs: The Visitor (K.A. Applegate)</h3></blockquote>
A graphic novel adaptation of the second book in The Animorphs. H approved. I was genuinely happy to see that they got an artist who was not just willing to explore the horror of the transformations, but seemed excited about them. The best body horror I've read in years.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>6) Under A White Sky (Elizabeth Kolbert)</h3></blockquote>
Elizabeth Kolbert is new to me - as is most popular science, which I have been cursed to get into since becoming a cooking nerd - but I thought this journalistic travelogue of the anthropocene was well put together and engagingly written. Kolbert tells a handful of stories of travels to significant sites, whether of water rehabilitation, underground lake species preservation, CRISPR lab or atmospheric engineering facility, and walks through what people are doing in the face of, and against, the rapid acceleration of human-propelled climate change. She picks interesting stories to tell and tells them well, which is nice.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>5) The Cook of the Halcyon (Andrea Camilleri)</h3></blockquote>
In the second-to-last Montalbano book, Camilleri goes full Bond and Montalbano fucking hates it. A really good, though coincidental, precursor to Riccardino, these two books closing the door on an Inspector I kind of fell in love with this year felt really gratifying.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>4) Summer Sons (Lee Mandelo)</h3></blockquote>
Slow burn queer Appalachian street racing horror in the academy. It caught the horror of medium-sized college town perfectly, in my experience, although I'm not from Appalachia or anywhere near. Mandelo's style can be a little dense at times and it took me almost a hundred pages to really dive in, but once I did it held me revenant-tight until the very satisfying ending.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>3) My Heart is a Chainsaw (Stephen Jones)</h3></blockquote>
The best Scream since 2 (I mean the second season of the TV show, obviously). Small town metafictional horror with an excellent ending and a genuinely excellent protagonist that also happens to be really smart about horror film and convey that in a way that is believable from a protagonist who is of high school age? A special book, honestly.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>2) Riccardino (Andrea Camilleri)</h3></blockquote>
Montalbano's final mystery, written some decades ago and lightly revised not incredibly long before Camilleri passed. It's pure metafiction, with Camilleri pitting himself as Montalbano's ultimate antagonist and collaborator. The writing feels (appropriately) somewhere between the early Montalbano books, with their dense depictions of history and food, and the later books that read breezily and imply much more than they say. Both styles work for me surprisingly well, and seeing both ends represented as Montalbano says goodbye was a real pleasant surprise. With an ending on par with Calvino (I assume, never having read him) or Borges, it made me happy to have fallen in love with this series in this particular year.<br /><br />
<blockquote><h3>1) Sorrowland (Rivers Solomon)</h3></blockquote>
I fucking adore this book. The Deep didn't quite hit for me, but this story of a young albino Black woman who escapes from her utopian cult with her twins and discovers love and superfungal powers absolutely fucking wrecked me. It does my favorite thing in the world - utilizing the flow and signifiers of genre fiction to address complex, systemic realities - so well that I still kind of don't believe it can possibly be as good as I remember. It also does my actual favorite thing (putting words into sentences on a page in ways alternately compelling, evocative, frustrating, and reflective) excellently. Genuinely masterful.
Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-84738846109501504962021-10-02T09:44:00.004-07:002023-10-02T18:44:56.983-07:00Bee's Birthday Gifts: A History, with Links<p>In 2011, I started a number of things. Very few of them are still ongoing. Here's one thing that is: Every year, for my birthday, I make a gift and put it on the Internet.</p><p>So: I'm posting this in order to document what I've done in the past. And updating it when I remember to.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2011: 23 (a poem)<br /></h3><p>The gifts began in 2011 when I recorded a poem I had written and put it on the Internet. Here is a video of that. I think it's very bad. It's about how I was convinced I was going to die that year because of numerology and some other shit that's really cringeworthy.<br /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/h3U5HKc_-MY" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p><p></p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2012: Celebrity-Mapping: Valentine's Are Over (an album)</h3><p style="text-align: left;">From 2009-2012, I would spend Valentine's Day chopping up pop songs in Audacity and speaking over them. Each year I produced, wrote, recorded and released an EP. As I was doing the 2012 EP, my computer was dying, and I knew it was going to be the last one. So that year, for my birthday, I took what I thought at the time was my best work, put it into an album format, and released it.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Four years later, I started another Valentine's Day tradition, this one focused more on the incredibly talented friends I somehow have than on me making dogshit solo. I'd highly recommend skipping this record and heading over to the <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/">Fuck the Polis! bandcamp</a> and listening to anything off any of the records subtitled A Valentine's Day Compilation.<br /></p><p><iframe seamless="" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1220436705/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/" style="border: 0; height: 120px; width: 100%;"><a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/celebrity-mapping-valentines-are-over">Celebrity-Mapping: Valentine's Are Over by Uninterpretative: no!</a></iframe><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2013: Not 23 (a song)</h3><p>A song I worked on, on and off, for a couple years and finished on my 25th birthday. I think it might still be the single best song I've ever written, but that's my taste I guess.</p><p><br /><iframe allow="autoplay" frameborder="no" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/113813451&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe></p><div style="color: #cccccc; font-family: Interstate, Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Sans, Garuda, Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-weight: 100; line-break: anywhere; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; word-break: normal;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/uninterpretative-no" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Uninterpretative: no!">Uninterpretative: no!</a> · <a href="https://soundcloud.com/uninterpretative-no/not-23" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank" title="Not 23">Not 23</a></div><br /><p></p><p></p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2014: The Haunting at HKE (a game)</h3><p></p><p>In 2014, I played a now long-defunct mobile game called Hello Kitty Kawaii Towns with some friends. I ended up making a tumblr out of our self-described Hell Towns, and documented some of my own ideas in story form.</p><p>By the time my birthday came around, we had mostly stopped playing. I picked up Twine and turned our goofy explorations into a story about ghosts, rent, and Hello Kitty. You can play that if you'd like.</p><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="167" src="https://itch.io/embed/18764" width="552"><a href="https://benladen.itch.io/haunting-at-hke">The Haunting at HKE by Benladen</a></iframe><br /></p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2015: Play Space (& 3 Years in Film) (a game and a book)</h3><p>My first 3D game; you walk around in a ballpit in space. An A Truly Blonde Child-ish track plays and balls click. You can see the moon. A roof falls in with chess pieces on it. I still visit this every once in a while, and for whatever reason I still find it peaceful. I made it in PlayCanvas, which I may or may not have used to be able to sneak some time in from the job I had at the time. I don't know, I still like it.<br /></p><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="167" src="https://itch.io/embed/38320" width="552"><a href="https://benladen.itch.io/play-space">Play Space by Benladen</a></iframe><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I also put together some of my favorite reviews I wrote for the year-end wrap ups I used to do on this blog and laid it out in a PDF I called <a href="https://benladen.gumroad.com/l/3yif">3 Years in Film</a>.</p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2016: CoSCAD (a game)</h3><p style="text-align: left;">I wrote most of CoSCAD (which stands for "Communist Society of Critics After Dinner," I don't know if that ever made it into the text) on a road trip back from Fantastic Arcade in a notebook. The goal was to create a library of texts from this society set 100 years after a successful Communist revolution in North America. The core characters were kind of revisionists, interested in prehistorical (e.g. capitalist) art and its relations, however tangential, to the revolution.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I only got one story in. The files are all gone, so there's no further way to update it. But you can still play it. To do so: use the WASD keys to walk up to the book on the table. Make sure to click in the lower right to get the game to full screen. The right arrow key will open the book/flip the pages forward, left will flip them back. The story's kinda trash, because I was trying to do worldbuilding and narrative through the voice of far-future academics in a wildly different society & mode of production that were revisionists. It was ambitious, at least.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Thanks to Jamie for the art. <br /></p><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="167" src="https://itch.io/embed/89208" width="552"><a href="https://benladen.itch.io/coscad">CoSCAD by Benladen</a></iframe><br /><br /><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2017: These Crowns (a dance)</h3><p style="text-align: left;">I think this is fucking unwatchable, but other people seem to find it cute. I fell so, so deeply in love with Kesha's 2017 comeback album (after being stifled by Dr. Luke's abusive ass for years) <i>Rainbow</i> that year (and I continue to love it, honestly). I've also lowkey wanted to use this tradition as an excuse to film something since, I don't know, probably about the beginning. Setting up the two-camera (laptop & phone) angles was fun, editing them together was... not.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The choreography & execution are terrible, because I do not know how to dance much less plan one out. It was a fun experiment, I guess, and when I'm glad I can't commit to any form of expression or lane of interest I'm glad I can point to this and say "fuck you, as long as I'm breathing I will continue to make whatever and everything."<br /></p><p></p><p></p><p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RzfB-_KNaNE" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2018: Reading Games: A Personal Critical Canon (a podcast, now defunct)</h3><p>Sometime in 2017 or 2018, I made a tweet with an image that said "1 like = 1 of my favorite pieces of videogame criticism" over a background of Ness surrounded by Mr. Saturns. For my birthday in 2018, I wrote some long pieces about some of the things I linked in that thread with the hope of turning the 44 pieces or so I had listed into a limited, solo podcast. My birthday gift that year was to <a href="http://islanddemeter.com/feed/podcast/rgapcc">release the first 3 episodes all at once</a>.</p><p>Those episodes cover articles by Winter Lake, Liz Ryerson, and Austin Walker; I went on to highlight articles by Emlie Reed (from the still-missed Arcade Review), Aevee Bee, GameFAQS, and Zolani Stewart. I haven't listened in some years, and the Twitter thread I was basing it off of was lost to the sands of time (read: tweetdelete), so it's never coming back, but I'm happy I tried.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2019: BBBS (an album)</h3><p style="text-align: left;">Over most of 2013, me and my A Truly Blonde Child bandmate watched Xena: Warrior Princess. In January of 2014, we dropped a record that's one of the only things I'm genuinely proud of as a musician: <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/xena-season-1-ep">Xena Season 1 EP</a>. In 2015 we teamed up again to record/write/produce/release an EP on the 4th of July called <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/let-freedom-ring">Let Freedom Ring</a>. That one's less good but it has a few moments. It only took four and a half years for us to make another thing.</p><p style="text-align: left;">You can check the liner notes on Bandcamp for a longer thing about this record. It's definitely an A Truly Blonde Child record, but one that I did most of the work on (the Bonus track is all me, and is the music for the Island Demeter podcast; I think I did everything on Brain and Blood also, but I'm not positive). As a result it's nowhere near as good as Xena, but hey. By now you're certainly aware that a good end product isn't exactly the goal here.<br /></p><p><iframe seamless="" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2163198169/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/" style="border: 0; height: 120px; width: 100%;"><a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/bbbs">BBBS by A Truly Blonde Child</a></iframe><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2020: 32 (a poem)</h3><p style="text-align: left;">For my tenth entry in the birthday series, and when my age was the same two numbers that I started with flipped, I decided to write a response poem. A bookend, of a sort, with the poem from 2011. It had been a long time since I stopped writing poetry; I had come out as trans & nonbinary; the pandemic was just really starting to settle in as a thing I was going to be navigating as a retail worker; etc., etc.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I liked it at the time and don't have any particularly bad/embarrassing memories of things in it. Which is definitely a first for a poem by me.<br /></p><p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5yIOeoNqec8" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p><p></p><p> </p><h3 style="text-align: center;">2021: Welcome to the City, My New Friend (a game)</h3><p> I made a roleplaying game about making friends in a city!<br /></p><p> <br /></p><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="167" src="https://itch.io/embed/1223060" width="552"><a href="https://benladen.itch.io/welcome-to-the-city-my-new-friend">Welcome to the City, My New Friend by Benladen</a></iframe></p><h3 style="text-align: center;"> </h3><h3 style="text-align: center;">2022: Dreams of the Devoured (a game)<br /></h3><p>In anticipation of Island Demeter season 2, I wrote a Twine game in the setting based on a recording we did. An experiment in form as much as a work, I think it's not a bad piece of writing with a cool gimmick.<br /></p><p> <br /></p><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="167" src="https://itch.io/embed/1733173" width="552"><a href="https://beegabberel.itch.io/dreams-of-the-devoured">Dreams of the Devoured by BeeGabberel</a></iframe></p>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-2598616891960413492021-08-01T00:54:00.001-07:002021-09-07T21:12:08.015-07:00A Diary Entry Loosely Organized Around Thoughts About Inspector Montalbano<p> At the beginning of this year, I started planning out season 2 of <a href="http://islanddemeter.com/feed/podcast/island-demeter">Island Demeter</a>. Instead of the freeform feel of the first season, I decided to go with something way too ambitious. It's currently coming together, slowly. For the purposes of this post, though, what's relevant is that I started loosing preparing campaigns around some systems I found interesting. One of them was <a href="https://dumplingsquid.itch.io/rude-detectives">Rude Detectives</a>, a game we've now run about a half dozen times and that I feel pretty positively about.</p><p>Sometime around the first session of <i>Rude Detectives</i>, I got it in my head that I needed to read more mysteries. I've never been a particularly huge fan of the genre, but mostly for lack of trying (and a deep antipathy toward police). What I did also remember early this year, though, by way of reading Terry Miles' <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9781984819659"><i>Rabbits</i></a> (a book that I think is pretty bad, all things considered, but which I did devour anyway and has for some reason stuck with me) is that I devour the worst kinds of mysteries; the ones with droll postmodern hooks and literary aspirations. It's the curse of falling in love with <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9780375703768"><i>House of Leaves</i></a> at a formative age and reading a lot of theory and cyberpunk immediately after.</p><p>Since I work at a bookstore, I grabbed whatever <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9780448095097"><i>Nancy Drew</i></a> books were lying around. Unfortunately there were two and I devoured them both in about a day a piece. I needed somewhere else to go.</p><p>Around this same time, I was seeing some success with the <a href="https://www.prisonlit.org/">Prisoners Literature Project</a> display I keep charge of at the store I work at, and was trying to branch out with different kinds of books for the display. I believe this is when I did some research into the authors we carried, and a used copy of Andrea Camilleri's <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9781609454234"><i>The Sacco Gang</i></a> landed in my lap. The book sounded interesting to me, so I chewed through it. I've been reading... a lot this year, and that was a while ago, but the things that stuck with me: it's billed as a gang of communists standing up to the mafia; it's a nonfiction novel; the writing style has the elliptical punch and brevity of a great headline, line after line after line; it opened me up to want to revisit Italian agitprop like Elio Petri's films and to want to learn more about moments like the Red Brigades and the Years of Lead; and it inspired me to look up more of Andrea Camilleri's work. All good things, in my book.</p><p>I didn't do almost any research about the Montalbano books, but I did want to make sure I started at the first one (since then I've read them wildly out of order, and don't feel like that's detracted much). Which, incidentally, lead to me taking a lunch break to walk over to <a href="https://twitter.com/moesbooksunion">Moe's Books</a> right around when <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/85780-moe-s-booksellers-unionize.html">their union was recognized</a>. I picked up <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9780142004715"><i>The Shape of Water</i></a> by Camilleri, a couple of cheap paperbacks by L. Sprague de Camp and Clifford D. Simak, and a copy of <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9780062397348"><i>The People's History of the United States</i></a> from the <a href="https://www.prisonlit.org/donate/">Prisoners Literature Project</a> over there. One of the Moe's Books employees is my contact with the PLP, so it felt like a nice way to send a book and be able to say congratulations on the union.</p><p>I've read the first 10 Nancy Drew books, about a dozen Montalbano books, and seen the same number of episodes of the BBC release of the <i>Inspector Montalbano</i> TV show (each episode is either an adaptation of a single book or a handful of short stories, and they tend to run about an hour and forty minutes a piece).</p><p>You know: the last time I wrote this style of entry on the blog? I think it was the weekend I went to see a bunch of Alt Lit readings. I've since unpublished that because nearly all of those people turned out to be sex pests at the least, and because I hated the style I wrote it in. I know when I sat down to write this (what a novel thing, writing, to my brain right now) that I wanted it to be more wide-ranging thoughts on Montalbano in general, possibly in another old style (those <a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2015/10/24-theses-on-beginners-guide.html">old</a> <a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2013/03/afunctional-definition-55-theses-on.html">theses</a>). Unfortunately these days my brain rarely works in any direction other than the total information glut, rambling expression of impossibly tangled hell. So here we are.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Detective Montalbano</h3><p>Reading the Montalbano books as I am - at the whim of what comes in used, primarily from other booksellers who I think are expecting me to handsell their used consignment books - has lead to a lot of interesting juxtapositions. The one I want to focus on is my recent read of <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9780142004722"><i>The Terracotta Dog</i></a>, book two in the series. Over just a couple weeks I ended up reading five of his books. <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9780143120926"><i>The Age of Doubt</i></a> from 2008, <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9780143122616"><i>The Dance of the Seagull</i></a> from 2009, <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9780143120131"><i>The Potter's Field</i></a> from 2008, <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/55636/9780143123767"><i>Angelica's Smile</i></a> from 2010, and <i>The Terracotta Dog</i> from 1996.</p><p>The style difference between his books from the 90s (that I've read) and his books from the late 00s and on (that I've read) are kind of unbelievable. So unbelievable, to me, that I did that deeply annoying thing of bringing both <i>The Terracotta Dog</i> and <i>The Potter's Field</i> over to my coworkers and told them to open to a random page. The visual difference in the density of words per paragraph on the page says it all, to me. Obviously it says very little to anyone else devoid of context, so here I am trying to explain it some more into the void.</p><p>I've been basically borrowing these books like library books, so I can't do the thing here where I snap a picture and post side-by-sides (or type out representative passages) (or rather, I could, but that would mean sitting on this piece for longer than I have any interest in doing). The long and short of it is that at the beginning of the series, the <i>Montalbano</i> books are a 2, maybe 3 paragraph-per-page series. By the end, a single page might have anywhere from a half to a full dozen paragraphs.</p><p>Or, to continue with the quantitative measures: in early books, Montalbano is surrounded by deputies. Catarella, Fazio, and Mimi are the ones who stick around; Galluzo, Gallo, and Tortorella fill up space in the earlier novels. That is: by the mid-2000s, the effective police force that surrounds Montalbano is halved. That may happen through plot contrivance (I don't know, having read them the way I do) or not, but it has an obvious effect. Half as many supporting characters means half as much space needing to be devoted to there whereabouts and motivations, or twice as much capacity to develop others. Roughly speaking, of course. I know it doesn't quite work out that way.</p><p>I point out these quantitative differences to get to an analysis of how that effects the act of reading these books, even wildly out of order, but I also know that being presented numbers with only a few words of context means basically nothing to me personally. So I'll come out and say right here: the difference of number of paragraphs and characters is <i>massive</i>. It's not quite the difference between reading, say, Proust and reading Chandler, or between reading <i>Anna Karenina</i> or a long tweet thread, but it isn't entirely dissimilar. Abstracted, it is absolutely baffling to me that the same author wrote <i>The Terracotta Dog</i> or <i>The Shape of Water</i> that wrote <i>The Sacco Gang</i> or <i>Angelica's Smile</i>. Actually reading it, though, at least to me, is seamless.</p><p>To contrast what I remember of <i>The Terracotta Dog </i>with what I remember of, lets say, <i>The Potter's Field</i> (even though the two end up closer together on the spectrum of themes and concerns than other juxtapositions might; it turns out my brain is my brain, as much antagonism as it might have toward me). <i>The Terracotta Dog</i> is motivated by a fairly banal mystery, where a secret cache of weapons is discovered behind a rock. There's a truck that stole a bunch of shit at a dock, a suspicious manager, Montalbano's ne'er do well friend Gege getting killed while in a car with Salvo (Montalbano's name to his friends), and some deductive twists and turns that make up the main plot. The central investigation, in other words, is filled with stuff that kind of doesn't feel important pockmarked with crucial character moments, like Mimi Augello (Montalbano's second in command) overstepping his station and Montalbano explicitly telling Mimi that he got Montalbano's friend killed by using police resources.</p><p>What <i>The Terracotta Dog</i> is interested in is actually a secondary mystery. Inside the weapons cave, Montalbano discovers two very old corpses. They're surrounded by a pitcher, some coins, a dog made of terracotta, and other accoutrement that I can't remember off the top of my head.</p><p>This secondary mystery is about the history of Italian Fascism and the people caught up in it, especially teenagers who happen to be in love at the time of war; it's about what it takes to disappear to the state (sometimes very little, it turns out, but done meticulously); it's about doing a humanities degree and how that hyperfocus can have repercussions down the line that barely ripple, and yet still matter; it's about complicity, people, trauma, desire, and death. It's also, very specifically, about semiotics (Umberto Eco's treatise on it is not so much a plot point as a leitmotif).</p><p><i>The Potter's Field</i> is also about semiotics, but instead of the question of religious stories of awakening that are brought up in <i>The Terracotta Dog</i>, it is about the semiotics of Mafia killings. In <i>The Potter's Field</i>, Montalbano has a dream that the state has officially become run by the Mafia, and then investigates the killing of a man whose corpse was left in a field of clay. Over the course of it, he decodes certain messages, mostly revolving around the fact that Judas was buried in a potter's field (another name for a field of clay) after returning his thirty pieces of silver. The long and short of it is that it is a fabrication of a Mafia crime according to old codes, in order to implicate the Mafia.</p><p>I juxtapose these because of how similar the concerns and themes are. The organization of the state (or the black market) by one or two individuals, for instance. They way that organization is obsessed with a particular type of meaning-making through allegory and structured message. The ways that meaning-making fails, through action and inaction.</p><p>The real juxtaposition, though, is in the style. In <i>The Terracotta Dog</i>, the sentences drag on. The paragraphs take a half a page, or even two whole pages. In <i>The Potter's Field</i>, the sentences cut themselves off quickly. They might take a page, but more often than not they're a quarter of a page or less.</p><p>Which brings me to the seamlessness.</p><p>At least from what I've read so far, Andrea Camilleri's books have certain questions at their core that don't change. This might be explainable by the fact that he wrote them all over the course of the last couple of decades of his 93 years of life. But the wild style differences tell a different story, to me. There's a clear story of Detective Montalbano being worked out by Camilleri, whose interest in the political history of Italy through the lens of Sicily is glaring, over the course of his novels.</p><p>There's also a clear story of this series doing extraordinarily well, probably beyond Camilleri's imagination, and a desire to continue that success. But.</p><p>There's also a story of Montalbano, a character who struggles with the fact that he's a cop despite being involved in the 1968 student movement, who hates his bosses but is involved in one of the most repulsive institutions in history, who gives scoops to the communist journalist at the Free Channel and despises the Tucker Carlson motherfucker on the news. The Montalbano who, well. Allow me to quote Camilleri here, from an interview with <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/andrea-camilleri-once-upon-a-time-in-sicily-430760.html">The Independent</a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRsGWp0UlzMAhSyCDHVni6ophiVL1lzMgJeT36GIHZBFVE3KcdYfB_I0WcjwPH_qTbB_6PsUy-tyTK5ycSP_0lWYsrGGQbEV7CYeSkTgHoBoa1FVt1SoJSJIyBkwEOuytu_XuWa3Iyri8/s654/montalb.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="337" data-original-width="654" height="165" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRsGWp0UlzMAhSyCDHVni6ophiVL1lzMgJeT36GIHZBFVE3KcdYfB_I0WcjwPH_qTbB_6PsUy-tyTK5ycSP_0lWYsrGGQbEV7CYeSkTgHoBoa1FVt1SoJSJIyBkwEOuytu_XuWa3Iyri8/s320/montalb.png" width="320" /></a></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Inspector Montalbano</h3><div>The most egregious crimes of the <i>Inspector Montalbano</i> TV series, to me (having watched six episodes, each of feature film length), are as follows:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Montalbano is regularly seen eating and talking</li><li>The food is barely remarked upon</li><li>I haven't once seen Salvo sitting on a flat rock talking to a crab. I hope this is simply a later development.</li><li>Ingrid was like "I'd like pasta con la sarde" and Montalbano was like "I can make that"??? Motherfucker Adelina made that and we all know that.</li><li>The shift in point of view - from a tight 3rd person on Montalbano to including flashbacks or setup - is understandable in terms of making a popular TV show out of popular novels. The near-complete failure to represent Montalbano's internal dialogue sucks.</li></ol><div>Here is a transition: the show's adaptation of <i>The Terracotta Dog</i> is damn near note-perfect. Each beat of the novel is represented in the show, from the discovery of the weapons cache to the conversation between Mimi and Montalbano about the death of Gege to the reveal of why those corpses were positioned in the way they were, in the room they were, by who they were. Note-perfect. But devoid of a certain history.</div><div><br /></div><div>Basically every episode of the <i>Inspector Montalbano</i> show that I've seen starts, after the opening credits, with Montalbano swimming. Maybe there's a cold open, maybe there isn't, but he is almost always doing a freestyle stroke through the ocean in the first handful of minutes of an episode. It's an attention to detail to the novels that I really appreciate; the director is clearly interested in the way that swimming looks on television, to the way that this is an important aspect of Montalbano's character that isn't expressed anywhere else. He lives next to the sea, and with it. That is both worthy of being represented on screen, and worthwhile to represent on screen.</div><div><br /></div><div>What's also worthy of being represented on screen is finding joy in food, or the relationship between a police inspector and his housekeeper that is fraught with class difference.</div><div><br /></div><div>The history that the television adaptation of <i>The Terracotta Dog</i> is devoid of is all of the things that the book is interested in. They show up, in plot form: a big deal is made of the dog and the corpses. A good chunk of the episode is about how the central mystery isn't that interesting, what's really at stake is these two half-century old corpses. What is missing is the way that this is the real concern.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let me back up. And acknowledge that we are nearing the end of this discussion, which won't be narratively satisfying. The things I write never are.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here are the things I adore about the <i>Inspector Montalbano</i> show:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Ingrid. Her actor delivers lines with laughter that really brings out her character.</li><li>Sicily. The way shots of the island are full of particular architecture, or particular beaches, really works for me.</li><li>The complexity, reduced. There's something about the way that the ending montage, over the end credits, recapitulates elements of the story. It reminds you of everything that happened in the acting</li><li>The fidelity. There have been times that I saw a clip of the show and then read the book, and almost felt like I had fucked up. I thought I had read the book before but didn't remember the previous 100 or so pages, because the dialog is so particular and perfectly represented.</li></ol><div>Here is an admission: I love movies that don't work. I am much more comfortable with the written word, because there's nothing quite like the failures of language.</div><div><br /></div><div>But then, there's always the failure of adaptation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Or the question of how long it takes to convey an idea.</div><div><br /></div><div>Like, for instance: does it take a paragraph? A sentence? What's the difference?</div><div><br /></div><div>Does it take the particular framing of a shot, one that slowly pans around a beach following a car? Or one that takes its time showing a labyrinthine house, only to disappear into someone saying "come on" who reveals a dead body that they don't (and can't) acknowledge?</div><div><br /></div><div>This show - this 2-episode season where each episode is a feature film - wrestles with so many things. With shooting in Sicily, and finding locations that occasionally really work (and often don't). With who to give screen time to, in order to make an episode as compelling as possible while staying true to the source. With choosing what to adapt. It's all very obvious on the screen. Or, rather, it's all very messy, and all very comforting. I've fallen asleep while watching this show multiple times. I don't do that.</div><div><br /></div><div>Have I just been writing to write? Yes. I'm so out of practice, and I chose this title before we even got to the discussion of the books. My brain is a tangled hell. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean a tight package of a post.</div><div><br />Have I been to be clear about the difference between a paragraph a page and twelve? Yes. Not because I think I have the capacity to write quite like Camilleri does, but. Sometimes it's important to lose your style, to engage in mimesis.</div><div><br /></div><div>And sometimes it's important to talk about how in the novels of Andrea Camilleri, the focus on food is paramount. For instance: the books don't belabor the moment of eating, but they do revel in it. Even as they identify who made it, how it is a moment of peace among a difficult time, and so on. The show does not.</div><div><br /></div><div>Just like it's important to talk about how the shots of the coastline, lingering, or the particular staircases, or the architecture or even the trattorias being represented on film are things that the books cannot do.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ah. I'm tired now. It's 1am. I started writing this hours and hours ago. I didn't edit it, except in the process of writing it. I think, like that other post I mentioned, that this will be unpublished someday. I look forward to regretting writing it.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-91271311787681753862021-02-21T23:22:00.000-08:002021-11-08T19:19:28.607-08:00Bee's Top 10 Books of 2020<p></p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><h3>10. Stranger Faces (Namwali Serpell)</h3><p>Namwali Serpell’s <em>Stranger Faces</em> wasn’t the kind of book that sent me pinwheeling off in a hundred different directions, excited to counter theses and research new avenues of thought. It wasn’t the kind of book that frustrated deeply-held assumptions and developed new critical pathways for me.</p><p>It was one of the purest personal joys of reading I had all year. Both to read it, because it is so full of delight and curiosity in the language, but also as an act of joyful reading itself.</p><p>A rough precis is that Serpell uses a handful of texts that focalize non-normative faces – from ephemera about Joseph Merrick to Hitchcock to emoji – as a way to theorize stranger faces. These are positioned against the "ideal face," which Serpell reads in ethical, aesthetic, and evolutionary traditions. In this juxtaposition, Serpell finds visual pleasure in the non-normative using the frame of racialization and disability.</p><p>I place it at the bottom of this list because I can't really speak to the arguments, I don't think, or at least not alone. Maybe in conversation I could, but this is not a conversation on its own. I read it for the pleasure of its tone, for the way it reads like an intimate seminar with a facilitator who cares, who wants to be engaged with. I read it because of how much it loves to read, and because I love to read, and I loved it for both the leaps it takes and the joy it radiates in taking them.</p><h3>9. Pen Pal (Tiyo Attallah El-Saleh)</h3><p>One of a handful of nonfiction audiobooks I listened to this year (including <em>Oak Flat</em> by Lauren Redniss and <em>The Dead Are Arising</em> by Les & Tamara Payne, both interesting books in their own rights) that helped me supplement some of my other reading. This collection of letters from Tiyo, an incarcerated abolitionist who formed an abolitionist organization in the 90s from behind bars, to (mostly, at least) Howard Zinn, is pretty engaging. Tiyo's analysis is sharp, his complaints quotidian in the heartbreaking way. And his voice is powerful, full of moments of pride and frustration and fierce love and occasional triumph.</p><p>The dude did some real organizing work over his life; not just as an abolitionist, but as a teacher who established a program to help prisoners get their GEDs. His documentation of that process is kind of invaluable; certainly not the only document that covers that ground, but unique in its content.</p><h3>8. Disability Visibility (Alice Wong, ed.)</h3><p>In the little black notebook with red pages that I catalogued the books I read in 2020, I wrote "Disability Visibility (Alice Wong) (unfinished)" after the first day I started reading it. I was convinced I wouldn't complete it; not because I wasn't interested or was turned off by it, but because there were so many things and something always falls away. I didn't even borrow it from work; I simply took it out with me on breaks, reading it in three or four five minute chunks a day. After about a week I struck through that (unfinished), because it was clear I was all in.</p><p>I don't have a ton to say about this collection of essays, honestly. Some essays opened my eyes, others had them shifted to the side. Some days I think that if I had a better background in disability justice I would find this quaint, other days that I would love it even more as a whole. I am no expert, though, and can only say that it impacted me both interpersonally and politically.</p><p>This year has, I would hope, reinforced to everyone the importance of mutual aid. This book helped me clarify the importance of disability justice alongside that. Networks of care are crucial, fragile things.</p><h3>7. Black Sun (Rebecca Roanhorse)</h3><p>When I blurbed this book for the store I work at, I wrote that "If Roanhorse keeps this level of lush worldbuilding, compelling character interactions, and strong narrative voice going through the rest of the trilogy, we might be looking at another Broken Earth Trilogy level of success." I stand by that: this book brings to mind Jemisin's epic in scale and scope, in delicate, serious interactions, in histories simmering just below the surface. It's fucking hardcore.</p><p>According to the jacket it is "inspired by the civilizations of the pre-Columbian Americas," it tells the story of what happens in a holy city when a Winter Solstice meets a total solar eclipse in a society where a dead God has come to rise again and take revenge on their oppressors.</p><p>I've talked a lot over the course of these two lists about the prose of the novels I'm writing about (and I'll be talking about it more to come!) because that tends to be what I primarily come to novels for. I'm not generally particularly interested in plot; characters have grown on me over the last half decade or so, but they're still secondary. I read most things similarly; I watch movies more for images and their juxtaposition than I do progress along a narrative, I make music for contrasting sounds, listen to it for the ways it presses on the body, moment to moment.</p><p>Sometimes, though, the prose doesn't have to be brutally moving; sometimes it's good, but not particularly notable in turns of phrase or sentence-by-sentence construction and deconstruction. Sometimes someone comes along and tells a really fucking cool story, with really deep characterization and interpersonal dynamics that evokes brilliant images and is twined together with really smart themes and ideas, and that rules.</p><h3>6. The Butterfly Lampshade (Aimee Bender)</h3><p>Way back in 2013 I read and <a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2013/12/2013-in-shit-color-master.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>wrote about Aimee Bender's </u><u><em>The Color Master</em></u></a>, a book that still lingers in the back of my brain even as I explicitly remember almost nothing about it. When I picked up <em>The Butterfly Lampshade</em>, I knew to expect a sort of low-stakes Magical Realism (having forgotten entirely about the Slipstream genre with which I was so preoccupied back when I reviewed her last book I read, befitting of the total irrelevance of that genre) and wonderful sentences. I wondered how that latter would fare in a novel - I've still yet to read <em>The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake</em> - and was excited to find out.</p><p><em>The Butterfly Lampshade</em> is written almost in the style of a memoir. Our narrator, Francie, is a woman in her thirties who basically runs an eBay shop. She spends her time scouring garage sales and finding ways to zhuzh up items that are suffering not from uselessness, but only a little neglect and bad presentation. Outside of this, she hangs out with her cousin who she was raised with as a sister, erects a tent on her patio in which she can have memories, and occasionally visits her mother in the institution she has been in since Francie was a child.</p><p>The titular event references one of those memories which the novel revolves around: with her mother newly institutionalized, a young Francie is left with a babysitter until her aunt and uncle can adopt her. She develops a fascination with a lamp that has butterflies on it. Just before she goes to live with her new family, she sees that there is a butterfly that looks exactly like one of the patterns on the lamp, dead in a glass of water. She swallows it before the babysitter can see. There is a small pattern of this in her childhood: representations of simple things - a beetle, a butterfly, roses - become the presence of those things. Abstractions materialize, inconsequentially.</p><p>The novel is magical realist because it doesn't ask how this could be true or false; it simply is. It is good magical realism because something simply being does not preclude it from reflection, from inquiry, from interpretation.</p><p>We are talking about an Aimee Bender book, here, though. The what is way less important than the how. How she tells this story, the sentences themselves, are breathtaking.</p><p>I read this back to back with Yoko Ogawa's <em>The Memory Police</em>, which was a nice double shot of that particular kind of mundane magic where the world is simply different, and the emphasis is only partially on that difference. Both are prose-first, with <em>The Memory Police</em> building a symphony out of fundamentally sound blocks and <em>Lampshade</em> luxuriating in fecundity. I recommend both of them, but there is a specific something to <em>Lampshade</em> that put it over the top, for me.</p><p>That something is a little hard to explain. I can only speak to it in very personal terms. The best I have been able to manage is: Aimee Bender writes like I dissociate. It's not, exactly, the way she represents interiority, or the way that the world bleeds between reality and surreality. It's not the point of view; <em>Lampshade</em> is written in first person, and in my worst dissociative episodes - which I've only learned to name in the last few years as being dissociation, but which certainly preceded being able to name myself as trans - I am in what you might call a close third; I've analogized it, to friends, as like being in one of those dreams where you are floating just behind yourself, watching yourself act, sitting where the camera might in a third person shooter. It's not, in other words, representation or identification, not mimesis or ethics. It's lyricism.</p><p>Aimee Bender writes the way I dissociate with words alone, the way that they balloon into short sentences, overfull. She writes the way sentences tumble over themselves, nonsensical but utterly coherent, on a rainy train ride home after a show. She writes like language has long been abolished, and all that is left of it is a love felt.</p><p>It is baffling to me that I read a novel whose prose I more admired this year.</p><h3>5. Beyond Survival (Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Perez, eds.)</h3><p><em>Beyond Survival</em> is one of those books that would either be much higher or entirely off this list if I had read it later in the year, I think. Although that's hard to say, because reading it fleshed out so many discussions I've had over the course of 2020, and it's hard to imagine not having read it exactly when I did. It's the kind of book that I don't really believe came out in 2020; not because January was decades ago (I promise that's the only "time is weird! Covid!" joke I'll make here) but because it seems like it must have been around for a decade or more.</p><p>Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Perez bring together a bunch of voices who have been active in the transformative justice movement to tell stories and share skills.</p><p>There are some stinkers in this collection, of course. As someone who found <em>Emergent Strategy</em> mildly insulting, I didn't care for adrienne marie brown's weird opening salvo in her current crusade against cancel culture much at all. But looking back on the table of contents, I can't say that I remember any others sticking out.</p><p>I'd have to reread Kai Cheng Thom's essay "What to Do When You've Been Abusive" to have further thoughts on it, but it stands out, to me, as an example of what I really appreciated about this book when I read it in February. <em>Beyond Survival</em> is a book that takes the task of transformative justice to heart holistically, at least as far as I can tell. I'm sure there are ways it fails in its particulars that I'm unaware of - having been part of a failed community accountability process a decade ago doesn't exactly make me a practitioner, much less an expert - but I really needed something that didn't simply reiterate that we should be better to people to personally understand the real remit and possibility of TJ.</p><p>I think it's worth it, especially for those - like me, earlier this year - who have some vague idea of what it would be like to live in a world where we addressed the harm and abuse done without in the total absence of the carceral state, but have had trouble finding a good resource on what that might actually look like.</p><h3>4. FINNA (Nino Cipri)</h3><p>I had the opportunity to gush at Nino about how great <em>FINNA </em>is over on Spectology, so you can always <a href="https://www.spectology.com/e/digital-book-tour-nino-cirpi-on-finna-a-story-of-parallel-universes-as-found-in-furniture-store/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">give that a listen</a>. The Quarantine Digital Book Tour was very much me stretching my critical legs in a semi-promotional capacity, so for most of them there are issues I have with the book in question that I would include in a review that I don't there. I don't believe that's the case for <em>FINNA</em>.</p><p>Maintaining friendships after a relationship ends has been really important to me, especially after I failed to do so with someone I suspect would have continued to add a lot of wisdom and lightness to my life if I hadn't been such an enormous piece of shit. <em>FINNA</em> is so good on the topic of what it takes for that maintenance to happen; up to and including the fact that beyond the work, sometimes it takes some wild shit to happen that you couldn't predict or even imagine. Like finally knowing yourself and coming out as trans after years of studious denial, or a wormhole opening up in the IKEA you work at and some carnivorous furniture and pirate retail zombie escapades. Similar things.</p><p>I think in that interview I talked with Nino, vaguely, about the final sequence. I'm going to spoil it here. At the end of the book, Jules has elected to stay behind and Ava is struggling through the return portal to her world, dragging an alternate universe Nouresh along. The wormhole is collapsing, and she can see all of her alternate universe selves failing. Some caught up by pursuers, others valiantly trying and getting smashed by the inexorable multiverse, others simply giving up and crying into the inevitable end. She pushes through. It's a corny moment, described, because you really do need to buy in to the characters. I did, and found it to be one of the more powerful visual metaphors for anxiety and self-doubt that I've ever read.</p><p>God, what a good gay book.</p><h3>3. Mutual Aid (Dean Spade)</h3><p>After reading the first book in Verso's Coronavirus Pamphlet Series - <em>The Care Manifesto</em> by The Care Collective - I had pretty low expectations for this. I've known Dean Spade's name for a while, but haven't really engaged with his work. I liked <em>The Care Manifesto</em> right up until I didn't (or, to be more specific, until I realized that what I took to be a solid analysis of neoliberalism started showing cracks and eventually chasms as the authors basically reinvent Keynesianism for the millionth time).</p><p>I think probably just by ranking you can guess that my expectations were incorrect.</p><p><em>Mutual Aid</em> is a book that should be riven in half. It is a pamphlet, a slight 150 page thing that refuses to focus. There isn't (to my memory at least) a moment of it that doesn't want to engage people new to the concept of mutual aid, people actively engaged in affinity groups and other practices of non-hierarchical organizing, <em>and </em>people who are being exploited by the non-profit industrial complex. It doesn't (again, in my memory) doesn't forget to include the possibility of every potential reader, fucked up or on point. And it doesn't split, doesn't fall apart, doesn't say nothing while trying to say everything. That is one achievement, which is enough. For me, at least. Not, apparently, for Dean Spade.</p><p>Because this book doesn't stop at presenting a theory that takes into account the broadest possible variety of practitioners. It actively engages with the practice and its pitfalls. Mutual aid groups can be shot through with burnout-oriented tendencies. Spade provides tools of identification and preventative care to avoid that. There are long sections on recognizing and combating cooptation, with relevant examples. It's a synthesis of theory and practice, of practical and comprehensive.</p><p>I think at one point I described reading this at the end of the year, after reading <em>Beyond Survival</em> at the beginning, as a perfect palliative to reading <em>Emergent Strategy</em> the year before. It's maybe a category error on my part to have wanted genuine political theory out of brown's book that was clearly marked Self-Help on the back, just above the barcode. But between Spade's pamphlet and the Dixon/Piepzna-Samarasinha edited collection, I felt like I actually got those takes on facilitation, transformative justice, mutual aid, and burnout-preparedness that were vaguely alluded to and dealt with, by brown, mostly in breathing exercises and advice for potential non-profit gurus.</p><p>I don't want to end shitting on <em>Emergent Strategy</em>, but I also feel like I've said most of what I wanted to say here. I guess I'll just sort of reiterate what I feel like I've been saying, and what placing it at this point of the list is meant to mean: This is the highest nonfiction book on this list because it's a triumph. There are problems in it, of course, ways Spade could have been clearer or engaged more deeply with certain aspects of struggle. But I'll be goddamned if I didn't find this book both staggeringly impressive and incredibly useful, and I really, really highly recommend it.</p><h3>2. How Much of These Hills Is Gold (C. Pam Zhang)</h3><p>Zhang's debut novel was the last one I added to any of these lists. Partially because it was the last one I finished, because it might have been the only book of 2020 that took me months to read. I say "might" because it was a long year, and there were definitely a few months there (let's say around March, April, just, y'know, theoretically) where I didn't read anything at all, I don't think. I picked it up in late October, I believe, and didn't finish it until late January. It's a hard book, in both subject and style. It's definitely the most rewarding piece of fiction I read this year.</p><p>There is, in my mind at least, this critical cliché (or dogmatism) about a book that teaches you how to read it as you do. I cannot think of any concrete examples, but the names Nabokov and Pynchon ring around in the back of my mind when I say it; it's the kind of book that asks that you follow the rules of fiction in general, but also presents you with a subset of rules that it guides you into following. I have an enormous soft spot for this. I love reading. I love reading within reading. I love it largely because I love to learn to read, over and over again, whether books or financial systems or interpersonal dynamics or the signs of failure or the way bodies unconsciously act in public space under different ideological commitments.</p><p>There is something to be said, though, for a book that demands you meet it. That offers no space for you to catch up. That does not say "this is how you read me" but simply "read <em>me</em>." <em>How Much of These Hills is Gold</em> is, at least in my experience, that book.</p><p>In the year XX62, in the middle of a Gold Rush, two siblings are orphaned when their father dies. They need silver to properly bury his body, and one of them nearly murders a bank teller. They have to run; they are already marked by the color of their skin. Structurally, the book tells the story of their wandering attempts to bury their father, flashes back to an earlier childhood where they were being raised by both parents, and then forward again to them meeting when they are older and deciding what their futures hold. It's a curious thing: described right, you have an obvious Book of the Month contender on your hands.</p><p>But then you read it. And it gives you <em>nothing</em>.</p><p>No pretty frame narrative that guarantees a happy ending, no pithy tumblr-adjacent slang to ground you, no <em>in media res</em> to propel you back to. There is simply a dead father and the whole miserable, freeing weight of that. There are simply two children, ready to do what they think they must. There is simply the whole structure of an imperialist ("pioneer") nation, each of its edicts and temperaments, weighing down on these children who only have bits and pieces of understanding. And every sentence bends under that weight.</p><p>It gives you nothing because it refuses to offer anything less than everything.</p><p>I want to say that there isn't a single bad sentence in this book, but that's a fairly meaningless statement. I want, instead, to say that there isn't a sentence in this book that doesn't build, doesn't produce more potential outcomes and thematic resonances and maneuver feelings, but that's not something you can say honestly having read a book once. What I can do, honestly, is say this: I opened this book five times, at random, and typed out the first sentence I focused on. One I omitted, because if the only context you know is that these are preteen kids then it reads poorly; another I included all of the lead-up because I couldn't help myself:</p><blockquote>"Ba's face is torn between fury and fear as the red jackal drags Lucy to the door."</blockquote><blockquote>"A man couldn't grow rich on coal, or use it to feed his eyes and imagination."</blockquote><blockquote>"The parts she keeps are her weapons."</blockquote><blockquote>"She washes in the stream and considers the finger still in her pocket. Look at it this way, and it again resembles an insect. A talon. A twig. Just to see, she drops it into the mud. A curl of dog shit."</blockquote><p>If you're at all like me, you might read these and vaguely think "huh." and move on. If you're more like me, you read the first six words, or maybe the whole first sentence, and decided that this is a bad way to experience sentences - ripped of context, unexplained - and skipped further to find that explanation. Unfortunately you're reading something written by me, Bee. And all I can tell you is that I found those sentences at random, flipping through the book, and even the ones that I don't remember the exact context for bowl me over completely.</p><p>Because the only thing this book has to offer is everything. The whole of itself, in each sentence.</p><h3>1. Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)</h3><p>I've <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/mexican-gothic-by-silvia-moreno-garcia/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>written a bit</u></a> <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/2020-in-review-part-one/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>here and there</u></a> about how much I love <em>Mexican Gothic </em>(I may have even <a href="https://www.spectology.com/e/digital-book-tour-nick-mamatas-on-move-under-ground-a-novel-of-beat-literary-figures-fighting-lovecraftian-monsters/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>said it out loud into a microphone</u></a> once or twice), and I don't know that I have a ton to add (here, at least; I expect I will come back to it someday and be aghast at how little justice I've done it). It's fucking phenomenal. The ending is one of the strongest I've ever read, in image, execution, theme, deconstruction. I love that sapient scream of mushrooms, that particular manor-on-fire.</p><p>I don't know that I've ever pushed a book this hard in my life before (even if you're not counting the rando customers I recommended it to) and I don't know that a single person who read it off my recommendation didn't like it. Which is <em>wild</em>. I am terrible at recommending things! My tastes are weird!</p><p>It's that good, is what I'm saying.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-87097197973798519512021-02-17T23:21:00.001-08:002023-10-02T18:52:44.925-07:00Top 10 Books (published pre-2020) of 2020<p></p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><h3>10. From Democracy to Freedom (crimethinc)</h3><p>Certainly the most frustrating book of the year for me. But then I've never met a crimethinc product that wasn't annoying to me, so I expected that going in. It turned out frustrating because, even though I rolled my eyes at the prose often and found myself in fundamental disagreement with many of the arguments, I haven't been able to dislodge it from my brain. It works, I think; not necessarily in convincing me whole cloth, but in leaving that nagging doubt that there's more to be worked through.</p><p>Basically, the argument is against democracy; not representative democracy, but democracy. Including participatory. In its stead, they propose anarchy as the horizon of political thought and the practice to aspire to. What do they mean by anarchy? Sometimes I suspect they mean "good stuff, you know what I mean? Not the bad stuff." Other times they are more concrete, but those felt too far and few between. Affinity and autonomy, certainly. And there are useful critiques of participatory democracy in the book, ways in which it has failed historically, ways in which it can come apart theoretically, from what feels to me like a genuine left wing perspective, as opposed to crypto-right.</p><p>But then they keep doing shit like breaking Democracy down into it's etymology (demos, common people; kratos, power/rule) and harping on that kratos, that power. And at those moments it feels, to me, reductive; a world where there is no power together, only power over. Where all power is subjugation, and all freedom, all anarchy, is (as a corollary) free of power. Is freedom powerlessness?</p><p>They don't, of course, get into the <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=freedom" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>etymology of freedom</u></a>, at least as I recall. It's not from the Latin, so it's much less sexy; from etymonline: "Old English freodom 'power of self-determination, state of free will; emancipation from slavery, deliverance;'..." They would say, I think, that the critique of kratos is a critique of rule, not of power. But I waver, because in my reading that didn't seem clear at all.</p><p>And yet.</p><p>I remain frustrated.</p><p>Because these disagreements, as I read the argument, that I have stand just at the far edge of comradely, threatening to teeter over into foundational, constitutive. And yet this book won't leave my brain. Not every day, not every week. But the critiques continue to stand. And not just that; they feel <em>productive</em>.</p><h3>9. Heaven is All Goodbyes (Tongo Eisen Martin)</h3><p>It's been months and months since I read this or talked about it, so the memory is a little faded. But it was the first poetry book I fell for in like, a decade, and I think that's worth a slot on its own.</p><p>I preferred this one over his early one because, while both show the same felicity with language and Eisen Martin's ability to veer headlong into the descriptive absurd, the multiplicity of settings in this collection lend themselves to his style, I think. The free roam of labor and marxian interjections on fabric just go together, you know?</p><h3>8. Dragon Pearl (Yoon Ha Lee)</h3><p><em>Dragon Pearl</em> is one of those unfortunate books where every time I remember something that happened, I love it. It's unfortunate because it takes remembering; for whatever reason, this book doesn't stick out in my memory unbidden. Unlike, say, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machineries_of_Empire" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Machineries of Empire</u></a> trilogy, which still <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/hexarchate-stories-by-yoon-ha-lee/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>takes up so much space in my head</u></a>.</p><p>The comparison to Lee's major trilogy isn't just because I love it, of course. This book also follows a woman haunted (possessed, even) by the ghost of a soldier of a different gender; it also deals with hierarchy as represented by military rank and the pressures that puts on consent (though not nearly as graphically; this is a young adult book in the Rick Riordan Presents series about a girl who can shapeshift searching for her AWOL brother in space and getting caught up with a powerful artifact that can terraform worlds, not military science fiction about calendrical warfare and the place of mass death in revolution, after all); it also interrogates revenge and secrets and camaraderie. It's not exactly Machineries of Empire, but For Kids, but it's not <em>not</em>.</p><p>Which is why I can't help but have it in my top 10, and why I can't help but be sad that it didn't grab me the way that trilogy, which I once called <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/hexarchate-stories-by-yoon-ha-lee/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>my favorite of the 2010s</u></a> (over Leckie's Imperial Radch, Okorafor's <em>Binti</em>, and even Jemisin's Broken Earth), did. But that's not the remit of this book. It's a much more playful, MacGuffin-oriented thing than all that, and I did enjoy it for what it was.</p><p>Plus, books that are fairly easy to forget make for better re-readable material, I'd imagine.</p><h3>7. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King)</h3><p>I have no idea how this book made this list. But I kept staring at it, and I kept cutting other things instead of it. And I got down to the last few and it made it on. And then I started arranging the list; I knew <em>From Democracy to Freedom</em> held that 10-slot, so surely this one was number 9. And then it just kept creeping up. It took James fucking Baldwin to stop this weird little thing in its tracks, and even now I'm like…</p><p>From what I've read, I think King has three modes. The first is unhinged, raw King; <em>The Dark Tower</em>. The second is King going off, but reigned in a little; <em>Cell</em>. The third is fully reigned in King, succinct storyteller; <em>Joyland</em>. I've read a weird selection of his work.</p><p>The second variety is my least favorite (<em>Cell </em>might be one of my least favorite books of all time). It's King on his bullshit, but with none of the things that make him a special writer except for his inconsummate ability to tell a story. There are none of the interesting cracks, just the boilerplate. The third variety ranks next. I enjoy when King is hinged, a little cautious, clearly edited. He still shines through, but that shine doesn't overwhelm. The stories he tells in this mode stand on their own, but they also reveal something about his work. The first is my favorite, because love it when someone is on their bullshit. It's full 'Sutter Cane' King. Like he might bend the world to meet the fury with which he tells stories.</p><p><em>The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon</em> is the third variety, closer to the second than the first. I don't know why it's on this list; I read so much good shit this year. I read <em>Cujo </em>this year! <em>Cujo </em>is certainly a better book than this, closer to that third King that I prefer. I read Okorafor and <em>The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions</em>! Why on earth is this story about a girl who gets lost in the woods and imagines getting advice from Red Sox semi-star Tom Gordon here?</p><p>I ask because I don't have a great answer. There's something about this fucking book that I haven't quite been able to put my finger on since I read it; the way flirts with <a href="https://thenewinquiry.com/mievilles-anticlimaxes/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>fantastical materialism</u></a> in its big threat, maybe, or how novel it is to take this really tight perspective and roll with it, almost never deviating from the simple horror of being one girl, alone, lost and trying and failing. Maybe it's as simple as a single scene, where an imaginary Tom Gordon talks about closing and god.</p><p>I don't know that it's a particularly special book. I don't know that it's something anyone needs to read. I do know that I really liked it, though.</p><h3>6. The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin)</h3><p>There was a period this year where I was obsessively playing Destiny 2 while listening to old roundtables on YouTube. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZmBy7C9gHQ" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Baldwin and Giovanni</u></a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNpitdJSXWY" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Hughes and Hansberry</u></a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LL0k6_pPKw" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>hooks and Cornell</u></a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAEsyMwVpmQ" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Malcolm X vs James Farmer</u></a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MojDoeloUTc" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Fannie Lou Hamer and Angela Davis</u></a>, for example. It started with wanting to know more about James Baldwin, specifically, but of course it kaleidoscoped out into many other things, as often happens.</p><p>Near the end of this period, I found a full recording of Baldwin's <em>The Fire Next Time</em> on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi43zpigptI" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>YouTube</u></a>. It's read well, I think, and I'm surprised I hadn't found this book prior. I remember reading <em>Giovanni's Room</em> in, I believe, a course on the American Novel after WWII and thinking it was something special, but for whatever reason this is only the second thing of his I've read. More to look forward to, I guess.</p><p>Having now seen a number of his public speaking appearances, it seems to me - ah, but is it possible to even type those four words without hearing them in Baldwin's exact cadence? - that <em>The Fire Next Time</em> must be the most powerful distillation of the arguments he repeatedly returns to. That integration is not a goal but an established fact, for instance; or that white racism systematically dehumanizes white people, without mincing words on how it oppresses Black people. I wouldn't trust me with his arguments, though; the book takes less time to listen to than most tentpole movies these days, and PDFs <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EQBWels5S1JsqSye5K6pn4jZPwWm4kAZ/view" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>aren't hard to find</u></a>.</p><p>What impressed me most was a twenty-ish page stretch that starts right around the middle of the book, a long, reportage-style rumination on the Nation of Islam and centers Baldwin's meeting with the Honorable Elijah Muhammed. Baldwin sparkles, here, the meeting shiny with detail and wit, the quiet asides as clear as a shout. Even absent the substantial contents, it's the kind of reporting that I have only seen in negative. You can see, in those pages, what every profile writer has been trying to do since, and all the myriad ways they have failed to live up to Baldwin's storytelling.</p><h3>4 & 5. Carceral Capitalism (Jackie Wang) & <em>Are Prisons Obsolete?</em> (Angela Davis)</h3><p>I had been meaning to read <em>Carceral Capitalism</em> since it came out (Wang is a friend of a friend). I'm annoyed that I didn't get to it sooner, but glad that I read it back to back with <em>Are Prisons Obsolete?</em> by Angela Davis. The two come together like a one-two punch of theory. Wang does some theoretical heavy lifting, Davis historicizes. Wang captures the living advancements of an increasingly technocrat prison industrial complex while Davis delivers the ability to understand those developments</p><p>I came to them in 2020 for fairly obvious reasons. The uprising that developed over the summer in response to the police murder of George Floyd brought abolition back into the consciousness, and I wanted to press past the rapid deterioration of that conversation (abolish police to defund police, liberal recuperation of harm reduction, Obama's NBA strikebreaking bullshit, etc etc) and get, as the radicals say, back to the roots. Maybe it's ahistorical, but in my mind the abolition movement originates in the call to abolish prisons. That, coupled with a new friend's work doing jail support, ended up in an opportunity to work with the <a href="https://www.prisonlit.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Prisoners Literature Project</u></a>, which is one bright spot in a workplace that's been <a href="http://instagram.com/blacktranspegasus" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>a bit of a bummer</u></a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1360326838279618567" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>might be being threatened by the Biden administration's move to end physical mail to prisoners in favor of a wretched tech solution</u></a> that only serves to increase surveillance and develop opportunities for profit.</p><p>This technocratic development is not isolated; <em>Carceral Capitalism</em> is very clear on this. It weaves high-level theoretical work with personal anecdotes about the ways that Jackie Wang's ability to communicate with her incarcerated sibling have reflected that theory in practice. In my reading, it takes that central concern - the ways that prisons are increasingly surveilled and developed as instruments of profit-generation - and expands it out to the general structure of carcerality in the United States, from municipal fines and fees to the problem of our concept of innocence as such.</p><p><em>Are Prisons Obsolete</em> deals more in abstractions than personal stories; but then, it's a pamphlet, and it's written by Angela Fucking Davis, so. A family dinner friend described it as a good back pocket book; the kind of thing that's easy to recommend to someone interested in the topic, both because it's short and readable and because it's thoroughly on point throughout. I think that's a good, succinct way to put it, and that I don't have much to add that simply picking up the book (or finding a PDF online or whatever) wouldn't get you to faster and more elegantly.</p><p>Yeah. Read these books.</p><h3>3. Book of Salt (Monique Truong)</h3><p>The only reread on this list, although I’m fairly certain I hadn’t read it cover to cover since sometime around 2008 or 2009 in one of Karen Tei Yamashita's classes. Likely the one she ended with a lecture on food in Asian American (and other diasporic) literature, and how it comes to represent dialectically (not, I'm sure, her words exactly): as self and other, home and exotic, body and culture, past and future. Or, to maybe stray closer to Karen's original argument, food in Asian American literature represents both exoticization and assimilation, because it is both in the most literal way. As someone who recently came into cooking I have been thinking about that lecture a lot, and it inspired me to pick up The Book of Salt again. I'm so glad I did.</p><p>I've said it before in these little reviews and I'll say it again, but: god, Monique Truong's prose is gorgeous. Baldwinesque, maybe, full of sensuality and langor. This book, about (and from the point of view of) Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas' Vietnamese cook, sells itself on its historical referents (Ho Chi Minh shows up! etc.) but the reality of reading it is that the historicity pales in comparison to the daily activities of cooking, fucking, drinking.</p><p>One might argue, reductively, that the point of the novel is precisely that: the great figures in history can do nothing - are nothing - without their cooks, their lovers, those they share camaraderie with. It's a good argument, I think, as someone whose work is all about reproductive labor.</p><p>But it lacks specificity. It's the why of a recipe, but not the how or with what. Which is what a recipe is.</p><p>I came back to this book with the memory that it said words about food in pleasing ways. I left it with the confidence to say that the words about food are great.</p><h3>2. Salt Fat Acid Heat (Samin Nosrat)</h3><p>I technically haven’t read <em>Salt Fat Acid Heat</em> cover to cover – I haven’t even cooked with a single one of her recipes, I don’t think – but I did read everything that lead up to the recipes. I don't know that I can give anything else, in media or in life, as much credit as I think this book deserves in terms of developing my ability to cook (with the probable exception of Family Dinner). But then, I don't really believe in singular influences.</p><p>In some ways this stands in for some other texts that I didn’t “finish;” specifically, the <em>King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook</em> by Brinna B. Sands and <em>On Food and Cooking</em> by Harold McGee. The three of these together sort of encapsulate my journey through cooking in 2020, but <em>Salt Fat Acid Heat</em> is the one I think I can both claim comfortably to have read through and the one that I actively reference in my head when thinking technique.</p><p>The most common thought, of course, is in reference to properly salted pasta water, which should taste like <em>your memory of</em> the ocean. Not briny, waves crashing, but not actually (anywhere near) the actual salinity of the Pacific. The reason this book is so effective is because of how Nosrat doesn't just give you that useful metric, but how cleanly she explains it.</p><p>The short, non-scientist version of it goes something like this: salted water actually helps retain nutrition, color, and flavor in vegetables, for instance, because it limits the amount of diffusion. Properly salted water actually reintroduces diffusion in the opposite direction, so that whatever is boiling is absorbing salt from the water as it does. This makes it better because salt doesn't just taste salty; it helps us taste things in the first place. Nosrat is obviously not the first person to explain this - as far as my research has gone, I think McGee is still the Bible here, although much of his writing has been updated on - but she's among the clearest and most practical (Alton Brown's in there too, and I'm pretty sure all of these people are Republicans or, at best, liberals, which I've been meaning to write an Always Bee Cooking about for over a year now and haven't… eventually, I swear it).</p><p>It's been a bad year for living, in a lot of ways, but for me it was a year of really digging into cooking and baking, and for that I have Samin Nosrat to thank, at least partially. And hey, can I <a href="https://www.patreon.com/benladen/posts?filters%5Btag%5D=ABC"><u>recommend cooking</u></a>? It's nice.</p><h3><a id="terratwo">1. Do You Dream of Terra-Two? (Temi Oh)</a></h3><p>You could argue that what I said about <em>Book of Salt</em> above is a lie: technically, I also reread <em>Do You Dream of Terra-Two?</em> in 2020. But I also read it for the first time in 2020. Yeah. I read it twice in one year. I’m currently reading it again as I write this. Prior to <em>Book of Salt</em>, I have no idea when the last time I reread something was. I doubt I’ve read the same book three times since back in the days when I reread the first three <em>Harry Potter</em> books a dozen times each in a single summer, waiting for the fourth one to come out.</p><p>There's a moment in <em>Do You Dream of Terra-Two?</em> where one of the six teenagers - chosen from some 500 candidates over the course of years of schooling - lounges in the crew quarters of the spaceship that they are in that is on a 23 year long journey to a near-identical planet called Terra Two, lacking only intelligent life in comparison to Earth, pulls out a copy of <em>Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone</em> written in Latin. She's a polyglot, and it reminds her of home, and it is the moment where the Earth disappears from their view and her homesickness begins. It is a strange moment to read in 2020, when people have finally caught up to the fact that Rowling is a miserable reactionary transphobe. In one of two <a href="https://www.spectology.com/e/281-do-you-dream-of-terra-two-pre-read-w-bee-estelle-alternate-history-destiny-and-space-travel/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>episodes of Spectology</u></a> I did with Adrian on the book late last year, <a href="https://www.spectology.com/e/282-do-you-dream-of-terra-two-post-read-belief-depression-and-courage-in-sociological-hard-sf/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>he mentioned</u></a> that the book functions as a sort of surreptitious critique of not just <em>Potter</em>, but the British genre of school stories. If you want my fuller thoughts on the book, I'd point you to those pre- and post-reads.</p><p>One thing I can do here that doesn't work in the conversational podcast format, though, is cite some stuff. Unfortunately I've given away every copy I've read previously (and then some), so I don't have a book that's marked up. A random passage I read yesterday, though, contained two bits that I thought really define something particular about my complicated and weirdly complete love for this book. First, a sentence:</p><blockquote>"The metal was cold like space was cold."</blockquote><p>I love the prose in this book. I mean that in a very different way than I usually mean that statement. Usually, when I say that, it is because I love the tangle, the weave, the deft undercutting of language as supposedly-spoken. I long for words that tumble over each other and trip while they sing and snarl, sharp as canines when they gnaw ideas. At a glance, this is none of these. It is childish observation, repetition meant to Convey Information. It is young adult, all concerned with Reader Comprehension, none with the dense thicket of interiority.</p><p>At a glance, it's an example of why I should hate this book. It has none of the (alleged; I've never read them) poetry of Hemingway or Carver, none of the subtle rage of McCarthy. What it does have, though, is weight. Heft. It clunks because it is terrifying and huge and meaningless, except for the things it means to these characters.</p><p>Second, a page:</p><blockquote>"'I just wanted to be alone for a bit,' Astrid said. 'I'm just grateful I made it.' Juno put her head in her sister's lap. And as she did so, she felt an inward release of pressure. The feeling of being home.</blockquote><blockquote>Juno and Astrid had been born three and a half weeks early. Their mother had told them the story only once, described the trauma she had suffered, the blood loss. The isolating terror of that night. And when the sun rose, their mother, delirious with exhaustion, had gazed at them--these keening blue creatures that the doctors had ripped from her--and said to their father, 'We can't undo it now.' Words that had frightened Juno for years. Her mother had been saying that she would never not be a mother. That when she laid eyes on the twins, the permanence of her new status hit her with a sudden and brutal force. She would be their mother until she died and even after.</blockquote><blockquote>'Did we make a mistake?' Juno asked. Astrid was making quick, sharp, gasping sounds, her shoulders shuddering. 'Are you crying?' Juno strained to discern her sister's face in the darkness. Her cheeks glistened. She nodded.</blockquote><blockquote>'Do you think we made a mistake?' Juno ventured again.</blockquote><blockquote>Astrid shook her head.</blockquote><blockquote>'Are you homesick?'</blockquote><blockquote>Astrid shook her head again."</blockquote><p>With that same workmanlike prose, in the same scene, Temi Oh takes the concept of home - one of the novel's, and genre's, prevailing themes - and twists it four different ways. Home as comforting presence, home as place, home as loss, home as irretrievable and unmourned. It is astonishing.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-14694695298036560532021-02-12T23:19:00.000-08:002021-11-08T19:19:18.487-08:002020 in Review Primer - Just Books This Year, y'all<p></p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>Hello! Been a minute. I am currently working on the two top 10s of 2020 media I will have for y'all this year. It's only books. I read a lot of books.</p><p>The two lists (books published in 2020 and books published pre-2020 that I read in 2020) will be out fairly soon. Before that, though, this: some a full list of all the books I read last year, at least as far as I was able to remember when I thought to start listing them. Between a new job at a bookstore and running the <a href="https://www.spectology.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Spectology Quarantine Digital Book Tour</a>, it turns out I had a lot of incentive and had to spend very little money to read, so I did a lot of that!</p><p>I'm not doing other lists this year because I did way less film watching, album listening, and show watching than usual. Highlights:</p><p>I watched very few movies (<em>The Turning</em> <a href="https://letterboxd.com/benladen/film/the-turning-2020/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">sucked</a>, <em>Fantasy Island</em> was <a href="https://letterboxd.com/benladen/film/fantasy-island/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">a fun kind of messy</a>, <em>Invisible Man </em><a href="https://letterboxd.com/benladen/film/the-invisible-man-2020/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">sucked a whole bunch</a> in that <a href="https://letterboxd.com/benladen/film/hereditary/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Message Horror</a> way, <em>Mrs. Serial Killer</em> <a href="https://letterboxd.com/benladen/film/mrs-serial-killer/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">was hella reactionary but the colors and that one <em>Vertigo</em> zoom-pan were excellent</a>, <em>Mutiny of the Worker Bees</em> was <a href="https://letterboxd.com/benladen/film/mutiny-of-the-worker-bees/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">techieprop with one good riot porn scene</a>, <em>We Summon the Darkness</em> <a href="https://letterboxd.com/benladen/film/we-summon-the-darkness/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">was the worst kind of twisty</a>, and <em>Time to Hunt</em> which was <a href="https://letterboxd.com/benladen/film/time-to-hunt/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">the only good movie I saw this year</a> <em>and</em> it hated the shit out of cops), two shows (the end of <em>The Good Place</em> and the end of the then-current season of <em>Riverdale</em>), and haven't cataloged my albums at all this year (Kesha's <em>High Road</em> is the only thing that matters, Fiona Apples <em>Fetch the Bolt Cutters</em> and Lori McKenna's <em>The Balladeer</em> also rule)</p><h3>The Full Lists (as remembered circa Dec-Jan)</h3><h3>Published 2020</h3><h3>Finished</h3><ul><li>Mutual Aid (Dean Spade)</li><li>The Care Manifesto (The Care Collective)</li><li>Pen Pal (Tiyo Attallah Salah-El)</li><li>The Butterfly Lampshade (Aimee Bender)</li><li>The Memory Police (Yoko Ogawa)</li><li>Black Sun (Rebecca Roanhorse)</li><li>Goldilocks (El Lam)</li><li>The Obsidian Tower (Melissa Caruso)</li><li>The Chosen Ones (Veronica Roth)</li><li>FINNA (Nino Cipri)</li><li>Westside Saints (WM Akers)</li><li>Flyaway (Kathleen Jennings)</li><li>Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)</li><li>You Let Me In (Camilla Bruce)</li><li>Beyond Survival (Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Perez)</li><li>Anarcho-Blackness (Marquis Bey)</li><li>All Boys Aren’t Blue (GM Johnson)</li><li>Deciding for Ourselves (Cindy Milstein)</li><li>Cemetery Boys (Aiden Thomas)</li><li>An Onion in My Pocket (Deborah Madison)</li><li>The Dead Are Arising (Les Payne)</li><li>Ikenga (Nnedi Okorafor)</li><li>Stranger Faces (Namwali Serpell)</li><li>Tokyo Ueno Station (Yu Miri)</li><li>Barren Grounds (David A Robertson)</li><li>Disability Visibility (Alice Wong)</li><li>The Queer Games Avant-Garde (Bo Ruberg)</li><li>Oak Flat (Lauren Redniss)</li></ul><h3>Unfinished</h3><ul><li>Harrow the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)</li><li>A Taste of Sage (Yaffa S Santos)</li><li>The Man Who Ate Too Much (John Birdsall)</li><li>Luster (Raven Leilani)</li></ul><h3>Pre-2020 Books I Read in 2020</h3><ul><li>The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King)</li><li>Cujo (Stephen King)</li><li>Do You Dream of Terra-Two? [twice] (Temi Oh)</li><li>Book of Salt (Monique Truong)</li><li>Dragon Pearl (Yoon Ha Lee)</li><li>From Democracy to Freedom (crimethinc)</li><li>Are Prisons Obsolete (Angela Davis)</li><li>The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin)</li><li>Akata Witch (Nnedi Okorafor)</li><li>Akata Warrior (Nnedi Okorafor)</li><li>Heaven is All Goodbyes (Tongo Eisen Martin)</li><li>Someone’s Already Dead (Tongo Eisen Martin)</li><li>The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions (Larry Mitchell)</li><li>Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)</li><li>Salt Fat Acid Heat (Samin Nosrat)</li><li>Carceral Capitalism (Jackie Wang)</li></ul></div></div></div><div class="sc-dkIXFM gazfQP"><span></span></div><a aria-label="Edit post" data-tag="editPost" href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/2020-in-review-47461393/edit"><div class="sc-crrsfI ejVMUJ"><span class="sc-iqHYGH kUapdH"><svg viewbox="0 0 24 24" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"></svg></span></div></a><div class="sc-dkIXFM gazfQP"><span><br /></span></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-70353462069674451632021-01-25T11:11:00.000-08:002021-01-25T11:11:30.674-08:00Valentine's Day Compilation #6: Chorus<p>The theme of this year's Valentine's Day Compilation is: <b>Chorus</b>.</p><p>The chorus is the bit that repeats, and it's the coming together. It's the prologue and the epilogue, the voices that comment on the action from outside of it. It's sounds coming together, the moment the crowd joins in. The line of kickers, the harmonies, the refrain, the unison.</p><p>Here's a gif I made of what might be the cover.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY3dKJ4PHuPQ3P9YWR2oyLVb4tuzXnfylVZSy4gXwt900J0pa9qgjrp1KiGIOjZ8AiAjwgv-Z7gO-IVv2WE0ZqhgS9vmdimHjCtokyzAw_XMGCw4oq9X2xN-1n3yZnuKD8uLrK07HH2Ng/s893/chorus.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="888" data-original-width="893" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY3dKJ4PHuPQ3P9YWR2oyLVb4tuzXnfylVZSy4gXwt900J0pa9qgjrp1KiGIOjZ8AiAjwgv-Z7gO-IVv2WE0ZqhgS9vmdimHjCtokyzAw_XMGCw4oq9X2xN-1n3yZnuKD8uLrK07HH2Ng/s320/chorus.gif" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>As always, the theme is unimportant. Use it as inspiration if it works that way, or ignore it if it doesn't. And as always, we're open to just about anything as long as it's an audio file. I don't think I have had to execute my curatorial powers once yet. Come test them!<p></p><p>Some background: Since 2016, we here at <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/">Fuck the Polis!</a> have been organizing a compilation released on Valentine's Day. You can find them here: <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/pop-a-valentines-day-compilation">2016 (Pop)</a>, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/solidarity-a-valentines-day-compilation">2017 (Solidarity)</a>, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/extra-a-valentines-day-compilation">2018 (Extra)</a>, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/digging-in-a-valentines-day-compilation">2019 (Digging In)</a>, <a href="https://fuckthepolis.bandcamp.com/album/smash-a-valentines-day-compilation">2020 Smash (b/w Pushing Through)</a> These compilations have been home experimental, noise, plunderphonics, bedroom pop, poetry, folk, punk, country, darkwave, and a whole lot more.</p><p>To be on the comp, all you have to do is email me (uninterpretative [at] gmail) an audio file (preferably .wav or .aiff, but I can make anything work) before February 14th and I can probably include it. If you have any questions, hit up that email or <a href="https://twitter.com/benladen">@benladen</a> or wherever you talk to me. I'm happy to support, whether with words or sounds or whatever.</p>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-10523364252203990592021-01-10T23:17:00.000-08:002021-11-08T19:19:11.317-08:00Linkout: Island Demeter<p></p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>Sorry for the radio silence the last couple months! I've been ... very busy. Between working holiday retail in a global pandemic and releasing <a href="http://islanddemeter.com/feed/podcast/island-demeter" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><em>Island Demeter</em></a> I have had roughly no time to think. But hey, here's a show that I put together over the last 10 months and a thing I'm incredibly proud of having made with my friends. Season 2 is already in the planning stages, and it's going to be even more special.</p><p>Per the description above, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/4HPN97wbiT8SMvJo7DoFVh" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><em>Island Demeter</em></a> is an Actual Play podcast (that means it's recordings of people playing tabletop roleplaying games) focused on critical play and queer bonhomie. I've played around with describing it in a few different ways, but the best is probably just to listen to the first episode where a handful of us introduce ourselves and talk about the games we end up playing. It's goofy and it gets serious at times. Boiled down, it's basically recordings of a handful of queers (that's us) telling short stories to each other and you - and including the process of how we got there.</p><p>I'm writing this at 7am on January 10th, and I just started preheating 2 Dutch Ovens to experience the basic recipe from Ken Forkish's <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/216098/flour-water-salt-yeast-by-ken-forkish/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><em>Flour Water Salt Yeast</em></a> book. I've baked some bread and some cakes recently, and been experimenting with eggs + pork again. Nothing quite enough for an Always Bee Cooking, but after December spending any time in the kitchen feels like a win for me. More soon, I hope.</p><p>Oh, I also popped into the massive reviewers roundup at <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/2020-in-review-part-one/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Strange Horizons</a> to yell from the rooftops for one final time in 2020 about how great Silvia Moreno-Garcia's <em>Mexican Gothic</em> is (plus some other science fiction and some picks on transformative justice, disability justice, and mutual aid that helped me imagine that a future might someday be a thing that could possibly maybe be looked forward to)!</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-79572825585263722822020-11-21T23:15:00.000-08:002021-11-08T19:19:08.239-08:00Always Bee Cooking #15: On Not Cooking<p></p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>The Friday after my birthday, I was on a short break at work. A question came unbidden: am I spiraling? The answer, of course, was no: I had spent most of the last week in total freefall. It was a strange moment; I’m usually hyperaware of when I’m doing poorly. But there it was. A week had passed and I hadn’t so much as used the rice cooker. I decided, of course, to lean in. I pulled my shelf out of the fridge and tossed the already-going-bad vegetables I had last bought. For the entire month of October I ate takeout, ordered pizza, or simply didn’t eat. The most I did at home was microwave canned food. I fucking hated it.</p><p>One of the things I have brought up a number of times in these posts is that I didn’t really start cooking until around two (maybe nearly three, at this point) years ago. It happened when I moved to San Francisco for a year and, for the first time, lived within reasonable walking distance of a grocery store (and worked from home at a job I really disliked, but which paid well). Immediately prior to that I had lived in Los Angeles for a couple years. I lived off of Carl’s Jr., 7-Eleven pizza, and Maggie’s, a really excellent breakfast sandwich spot in the Rampart (I even occasionally splurged on IHOP). Prior to that I was in Oakland, where I lived off breakfast burritos from a food truck near my job in Pleasanton and Pizza Man in Oakland. This month has consisted of a lot of bagel sandwiches from Bagel Street Café near my job in Berkeley and dubious Hot Pockets from the corner store.</p><p>The decision not to cook was an impulsive one, made in a state of bad mental health. It has had a deleterious effect on my mental health and my already complicated, and not exactly ordered, relationship to food. It has, more than regularly being misgendered by customers or service workers or folks outside of my inner circle, exacerbated dysphoria by putting me in a headspace I associate with pre-transition times. It has been a reminder of how easy it would be, despite how miserable, to give up; on myself and what I love doing, on my responsibilities to the people I live with, on everything except maintaining a bare minimum of life by making money and spending it to be alone.</p><p>Like I said, I’ve hated it. Even the supposed convenience has been a burden. Every time I look at Postmates or whichever delivery app I’ve decided might be worth a shot, I freeze. It’s too much. I order Domino’s online or simply don’t eat that night, convinced that if I go to sleep early enough I can tough it out.</p><p>I’m afraid, though, too. That I will have forgotten. Not the techniques, necessarily. Not how to make weird or good. But the joy of it, the rhythm, the ability to find what’s there and make it new and filling and share. I know that’s unlikely, even maybe impossible. That I don’t need to remember those rhythms in order to build them; that even the rhythms I had were constantly shifting and changing as they were building. That, in a real way, you can’t forget something like that because it’s never a memory, only a performance. A thing one does. But knowing and fearing are not mutually exclusive. What was it that Marx said? Heretofore philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point is to change it? You can have all the ideas in the world. They don’t, in and of themselves, mean shit when faced with the realities of anxiety and dysphoria and a broken history with food.</p><p>But then, what is this space for if not some measure of holding myself accountable? It’s certainly not the Big Ideas, left wing cooking blog I wanted it to be. I’d like it to be more than a flimsy pretext for having a tip jar, but that’s what it is most months. When I’m being generous to myself I think of it as a way to think about and through food differently, from novice eyes, a dead palate, and a passion for experimentation, community, and a ruthless criticism of everything existing.</p><p>Which isn’t to say it is all dysphoria and disorder, of course. Or, at least, that there aren’t things to be learned from there.</p><p>Most of the lessons are personal, of course; that my body will still accept that diet, that I am terrible at reaching out of my comfort zone in certain areas, that I do, in fact, still kind of love eating like shit. Or that as much as I can enjoy cleaning, it can sure produce resentment. Or that the whole Lent-style abstention thing is not really my deal.</p><p>****</p><p>I wrote the above on October 30th, early to work to eat breakfast and find a space to type. My coworker never showed up, so I worked alone all day, listening to World's End Girlfriend's discography while people browsed books and I told them I couldn't buy the ones they brought in. It is now November first, before opening. I am reading myself try desperately to pull a broad lesson out of an act of self-flagellation. It's super not going to happen.</p><p>I became obsessed, a week or so ago, with breaking my cooking fast by making sour patch kids. I've let that go. I think I will go home, at the end of the day, and make a pot of rice. Maybe I'll throw a little butter and dried thyme in the rice cooker and get really uneven results. Maybe I'll toast the rice ahead of time, to try something new. Either way, I will eat food I've made again, and it will not be revelatory. I'm excited.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-90491334150683138862020-10-11T14:38:00.000-07:002021-11-08T19:19:05.316-08:0032: A Birthday Poem<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5yIOeoNqec8" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><p> </p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>I turned 32 at the beginning of this month, and like every year I used that as an opportunity to make a gift for the internet. Since it's <a href="https://twitter.com/Benladen/status/1312816223634169857" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">the tenth time</a> I've done this, and my age is now the age I started doing it in reverse, I decided to respond to <a href="https://youtu.be/h3U5HKc_-MY" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">the poem I wrote in 2011</a> to get this tradition kicked off. Enjoy, if you wanna.</p><p>Bonus Thoughts:</p><p>The roughest part of this was revisiting the previous poem repeatedly, and how clear it seems to me that that poem was about desperately attempting to have a libidinal investment in masculinity (all while being the witchiest thing I've ever put together, or ever will, in all likelihood, weirdly enough) cloaked in a sort of preemptive mourning. It was anticipating 2012 (the end of the Mayan Calendar!) and testament to how much Shea & Anton Wilson's <em>The Illuminatus! Trilogy</em> affected me some three or four years before.</p><p>The central conceit actually comes from (my memory of) an appendix in that book. I have no particular interest in reading it again, so my memory will have to do. The Law of Fives comes up repeatedly throughout the novel, and is explained in the appendix (again, according to my memory at least) in a particularly material way: a human hand, more often than not (and culturally, certainly) has five fingers. Numerology finds fives in the world because we interact with the world through a thing that has five digits. In my memory, the book has a line about how if we were all born with six fingers, we would find sixes. It's a clever trick, and a false one, of course, but it stuck with me (and my understandings of it have certainly changed as my understandings of ableism and body normativity have).</p><p>Otherwise: thank you to Fergy for leading the life you did; to many friends for being there for me when I feel like I deserve it least; to my own fucked brain for putting in the work even when you're in total freefall; and to all of you out there on this cursed internet for accepting my gifts, sometimes.</p><p>Full text:</p><h3>+0</h3><p>I turn 32 today.</p><p>An unimportant year.</p><p>Hope it kills me.</p><p>But who knows,</p><p>the revolution might work slow.</p><p>(This is ten years of birthday gifts, and a response</p><p>to whoever the fuck wrote a poem when they turned 23</p><p>that inverted into me.)</p><p><br /></p><p>Do you remember the law of fives?</p><p>It's a fucking lens, but</p><p>the world does not want to be seen.</p><p>It's entirely too much, and it hurts to stare straight in the face...</p><p>But from 5 you can touch anything.</p><p><br /></p><h3>1</h3><h3><br /></h3><p>I lost a friend this year.</p><p>The one whose name I was called, once, while giving head.</p><p>We hadn't spoken in a few years. I never came out to him</p><p>I don't think. All the grief I've managed</p><p>is: a short eulogy, a compilation of his music,</p><p>and the occasional Denogginizer. Every time</p><p>I drink one it's in his honor, and every time</p><p>I drink one it's suspecting</p><p>that he probably didn't share my memory</p><p>of sharing one with him, many years ago,</p><p>on his recommendation. It was a small moment,</p><p>nothing special, but it serves now.</p><p>And I will never be able to confirm my suspicion.</p><p><br /></p><p>[[[I wanted to quote Fergy here,</p><p>but in all our archives</p><p>it's just him sharing things</p><p>and me</p><p>failing</p><p>to respond</p><p>to them.</p><p>No quotes.]]]</p><p><br /></p><h3>2</h3><p><br /></p><p>When I say "I" in a poem, does it mean five things?</p><p>It means, one, the body that typed this, that speaks it,</p><p>that exists in the world with a history and a projection toward</p><p>the (no) future.</p><p>It means you, too, the listener hearing me say it,</p><p>the reader being interpolated, the I in your head.</p><p>It means, three, the unholy, perhaps unwanted</p><p>trinity; the you and the I made one,</p><p>the apotheosis of us through language.</p><p><br /></p><p>Does it mean four? If it means four, it means it</p><p>aspirationally. Striving. The I who has inverted.</p><p>The I that the first I cannot,</p><p>but has to, believe in. The I that the first I</p><p>is pleading the second I to believe in, to recognize.</p><p>The I that might return out of that trinity, that</p><p>third I.</p><p><br /></p><p>But can it touch the world? Can it make five?</p><p>Can I touch anything?</p><p><br /></p><p>[[[That other pronoun - the "they" - helps.]]]</p><p><br /></p><h3>3</h3><p><br /></p><p>If that 23 year old got anything right, it was</p><p>loving communities, and being unable</p><p>to conceptualize property.</p><p>I own more things today than I ever have.</p><p>Two handfuls of kitchen equipment,</p><p>a bed frame. No</p><p>assets, no car or home or</p><p>stock or career or stable drive</p><p>toward life, but still more. I wonder:</p><p>if I ever do own, will I learn to miss?</p><p>Or is that just the commodity fetish?</p><p><br /></p><p>Do you remember the commodity fetish?</p><p>It's a consequence of the mode of production -</p><p>capitalism -</p><p>where relationships between people</p><p>are obfuscated into relationships between things.</p><p><br /></p><p>A fun game:</p><p>take a look around, and guess how many people are hiding.</p><p>Take this handmade Hello Kitty. Oli is hiding in it</p><p>they made it and gave it to me. To make it</p><p>they needed fabric, lace, buttons, stitches, stuffing.</p><p>That's at least a couple factories. They needed to know</p><p>how to stitch, where to get these things.</p><p>At a rough estimate, I'd say this handmade Hello Kitty</p><p>hides at least a dozen people. Except.</p><p>That's only counting the people who immediately touched it in some way.</p><p>Because each of those people was shaped</p><p>by people who took care of them when they were sick</p><p>laughed with them when they were sad</p><p>fed them;</p><p>each was shaped by people who exploited them,</p><p>turned their bodies into laboring abstractions</p><p>profited off of stolen time</p><p>preyed on moments of weakness.</p><p><br /></p><p>It's not quite true that</p><p>everything is everyone</p><p>but.</p><p><br /></p><h3>4</h3><p><br /></p><p>In tabletop roleplaying saying is doing,</p><p>doing is being, and being</p><p>is agreeing to a story, together.</p><p><br /></p><p>A story, of course, is a collection of people</p><p>alchemizing the raw material of rules, lines,</p><p>randomness, and interpersonal histories</p><p>into models of relationships,</p><p>imaginary social structures,</p><p>expressions of joy or regret</p><p>and tests of the limits of plausibility.</p><p><br /></p><p>[[[If this poem is testament</p><p>to a decade of doing,</p><p>it might run the risk of erasing</p><p>the fact that this has been a decade of personal failure.]]]</p><p><br /></p><p>So I seized on one of the stories that tabletop roleplaying games tell.</p><p>"To do it, do it."</p><p>If you're in a fight, don't say</p><p>"I roll to attack."</p><p>Say:</p><p>"Backed into a corner I:</p><p>Swing my battle axe (or)</p><p>Release poisonous spores (or)</p><p>Fall in love (or)."</p><p><br /></p><p>To do it, do it.</p><p>Tell the story together, with trust.</p><p><br /></p><p>It's the only phrase that's ever managed</p><p>to orient me toward something resembling</p><p>a future. Because a told story</p><p>becomes a story remembered;</p><p>a clean kitchen one to cook in.</p><p>And because, like every other bit of this poem,</p><p>it is a way of being against atomization.</p><p><br /></p><p>[[[A decade of personal failures can only be stomached</p><p>if you can abandon the personal.]]]</p><p><br /></p><h3>5</h3><p><br /></p><p>Five lies at the center of the mystical hub</p><p>not because it has any special properties of its own,</p><p>but because</p><p>of its relationships.</p><p>Any time you find the need to do some arcane pattern-finding</p><p>you convert everything according to numerological norms.</p><p>At first, the fives will be scarce.</p><p>But if you break it down just right</p><p>you'll always end up with a five.</p><p><br /></p><h3>+0</h3><p><br /></p><p>This decade of hello kitty horror games</p><p>and albums and podcasts</p><p>and other gifts is a decade</p><p>of crises of capital producing</p><p>austerity and death, generalized precarity,</p><p>proletarianizing. It's a decade of</p><p>militancy repeatedly crushed by agents of the state</p><p>and their militias. It's a decade that</p><p>cuts off at the beginning of covid.</p><p><br /></p><p>But we're avoiding the question.</p><p>Can I touch anything?</p><p>Is there a fifth I after</p><p>the author, the reader,</p><p>the apotheosis, and the aspiration?</p><p><br /></p><p>No.</p><p><br /></p><p>"I" can't touch anything.</p><p><br /></p><p>"You" can, though.</p><p><br /></p><p>And we must.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-62698153172100572782020-09-30T23:05:00.000-07:002021-11-08T19:19:01.239-08:00Always Bee Cooking #14: RIP Gina, The Unkillable Sourdough Starter<p></p><p>Sourdough recipes haven't been the majority of the things I've written on this cooking blog, but they certainly sometimes seem like it. From the Seared Sourdough Pikelets to the <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/33696177"><u>irreplicable Freestyle Bread</u></a> to the <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/38626578"><u>User's Guide</u></a> to <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/41002378"><u>learning how to read recipes</u></a>, Gina has been a pretty huge part of this. Which is why I'm excited to announce that near the beginning of September, a mere ten months after I received her as a gift, I am free. I found Gina full of literal maggots and decided there was no way to save her. Sorry, BW, and thanks. </p><p>I say free because a lot of my relationship with sourdough, especially since becoming an essential worker again a couple months back, has been pretty ashamed. I never once left Gina in the refrigerator, so when I would accidentally go a week without feeding her it would feel pretty rough. She always bounced back, though, even if I had to take her outside to let some fruit flies free. I would make sure, at that point, to refresh her a few times before making anything for anyone other than myself. And then I would make something for my house or to give to people, and then I would forget for a week, and repeat.</p><p>Which, of course, lead to maggots.</p><p>For reasons beyond the end of my first sourdough experiment, I haven't spent a lot of time cooking - or even really thinking about food - in September of 2020. I deboned and broiled my first trout recently, have made a handful of the kinds of salads that mean "put mayonnaise and seasonings on meat/pasta," attempted vegan, soy-free milk bread rolls that turned out to be fine if you didn't know what they were supposed to be, and continued to try to develop proper technique (Jacques Pepin-style) for a classic French Omelette.</p><p>The truth of Gina is that she has been instrumental in allowing me to develop my baking skills these last nine months. Partially through the aforementioned guilt meaning that I had to do something at least once every few weeks or so; partially through my own stubbornness (that Freestyle Sourdough post linked above, for instance, where I insisted on making a recipe that couldn't be replicated to make it clear that baking isn't as "scientific" as people would have you believe); partially through carrying a consistent, buttery tang through all of my baking that didn't lessen even with neglect, and so allowed me to experiment and still know that the end result was likely to be good.</p><p>Among Gina's accomplishments: the Seared Sourdough Pikelets was, I believe, the first recipe I ever developed on my own. She was the source for what was argued to be the best cake a friend ever had; a Sourdough Chocolate cake that I somehow managed to fold together in just such a way as to complement the most chocolate interior with marbled veins of marshmallowy, buttery sourdough. She was transformed into a Friendship starter, briefly, which let me know that Friendship Starters kind of suck. She also was the centerpiece of perhaps my single biggest cooking feat to date, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzzEWVkUdzw" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">a day where I made three cakes for Family Dinner</a>. I also passed her on to two friends, one of whom baked their first loaf of bread using her (I think that's true?) and became, as far as I know, the first person other than me to test the Seared Sourdough Pikelet recipe. </p><p>So here's one for Gina, who arrived in a busted jar spilled out over a cardboard box, grew into a source of joy and learning, and left in a compost bin feeding the flies. Maybe someday (though likely not soon) I'll try to grow my own from scratch, and maybe after I do that I won't be so cavalier about how easy sourdough baking is.</p>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-48065207062787521442020-08-29T23:04:00.001-07:002021-11-08T19:18:57.774-08:00Always Bee Cooking #13: On Recipe Writing, Or, A Review of Two King Arthur Flour Recipes for Sourdough English Muffins<p></p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>When I began writing this, the goal was to review the Sourdough section of <em>The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook</em>. It’s about 30 pages long, or 5% of the whole book. I’ve cooked almost everything from it multiple times; breads, obviously, but also sticky buns and cakes. Breakfasts and desserts. It’s an impressive book that I have had almost nothing but excellent results from.</p><p>Which is frustrating, because I think the recipes are badly written. I knew that going into writing this review; what I didn’t realize is how precise I would need to be to articulate my problems with the recipe writing.</p><p>So that review is now this: a comparative review of two recipes for sourdough English muffins. One from the <em>KAF Cookbook</em>, and one from <a href="https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/sourdough-english-muffins-recipe" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">kingarthurbaking.com</a>. The goal, here, is closer to performing a close reading of a text than it is product analysis. I hope that, in pointing out issues with these recipes, I can help readers focus in on their own needs for recipe writing and to better imagine the results of recipes they read in the future.</p><p>****</p><p>Let me get ahead of myself.</p><p>The Sourdough section of the <em>KAF Cookbook</em> is positioned near the end of its 600 pages, followed only by crafts (like paste and papier-mâché you can make from flour) and appendices. I note this because I suspect some of the problems I’m about to lay out are either addressed earlier (in the portions of the book I haven’t engaged with), or at least assumed based on layout.</p><p>That is: the sourdough baker is presumed to have the knowledge and experience of the bread baker, the dessert baker, the muffins & pastas & pancakes-maker. It is the final step in learning to bake, in other words.</p><p>I find this assumption suspect, given my own personal circumstances. Sourdough is not the simplest thing in the world, but its difficulty is no more reliant on expert technique than baking with Active Dry yeast is. Now let me stop getting ahead of myself.</p><p>My favorite example of the shortcomings of the <em>KAF Cookbook</em> come from comparing the recipe for English muffins in the book itself with the recipe for English muffins available on the website. Let’s go step by step. First, the introduction:</p><p><strong>From the </strong><em><strong>Cookbook</strong></em>:</p><blockquote><em>The best English muffins are made with sourdough and their characteristic “holes” are created by adding baking soda just before they are cooked on a griddle.</em></blockquote><p><strong>From the </strong><a href="https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/sourdough-english-muffins-recipe" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><strong>kingarthurbaking.com</strong></a>:</p><blockquote><em>Who doesn't love English muffins? Homemade sourdough muffins seem even more scrumptious, and some of the taste-testers here had to admit that these crusty, chewy, tangy gems were some of the best they'd ever eaten.</em></blockquote><p>I would honestly give the edge to the cookbook here. It’s a better sell that includes a guiding hand, letting you know that there is an important technical aspect to watch out for. “Some” testers calling these “the best they’d ever eaten” is pretty useless, honestly.</p><p>Onto ingredients.</p><p><strong>From the </strong><em><strong>Cookbook</strong></em>: </p><ul><li>1 cup sourdough starter</li><li>1½ cups milk</li><li>5½ to 6 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour</li><li>1 tablespoon sugar</li><li>1 tablespoon salt</li><li>1 teaspoon baking soda</li><li>Cornmeal to sprinkle on baking sheet</li></ul><p><strong>From <a href="http://kingarthurbaking.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">kingarthurbaking.com</a></strong>:</p><ul><li>2 tablespoons (25g) sugar</li><li>2 cups (454g) warm water (110°F-115°F)</li><li>1 tablespoon active dry yeast or instant yeast</li><li>1 cup (227g) sourdough starter, ripe (fed) or discard; ripe will give you a more vigorous rise</li><li>7 cups (843g) King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour</li><li>½ cup (56g) Baker's Special Dry Milk or nonfat dry milk</li><li>4 tablespoons (57g) butter, at room temperature</li><li>1 tablespoon salt</li><li>¼ teaspoon sour salt (citric acid), optional; for enhanced sour flavor</li><li>semolina or cornmeal, for coating</li></ul><p>These are different English muffins, structurally speaking; which is why this isn’t a comparative review to find the “better” version.</p><p>The most obvious difference is that the website does entirely away with the baking soda that the <em>Cookbook</em> version prioritizes. There are no chemical leaveners at all. The characteristic “nooks and crannies” of these muffins are exclusively produced by the CO2 production by the dry/instant yeast and whatever is still active in the sourdough starter.</p><p>The website version also has more clear sources of flavor: sugar is doubled, salt trebled, butter and dry milk and citric acid added to add texture and intensity of already-existing flavors. All of that added moisture and they’ve only added a cup extra of flour, with no change in the amount of sourdough starter (except that its role is better explained).</p><p>As far as ingredients go, the <em>KAF Cookbook</em> is clearly superior if you’re impulsively starting some English Muffins; fewer ingredients, more focus on pantry staples. And I can say from experience that they are delicious. The website, on the other hand, is almost certainly going to leave you with more tender, flavorful muffins. As long as you have dry milk on hand (I, personally, never have). It’s also more thorough about what those ingredients are for and what slight variations are okay.</p><p>Onto the directions.</p><p><strong>From the </strong><em><strong>Cookbook</strong></em>: </p><blockquote><strong>Making the Sponge:</strong> In a ceramic bowl, mix together the starter, milk and about 3 cups of flour. Cover this with plastic wrap and leave it to work for anywhere from 2 to 24 hours. You might mix this up just before you go to bed so you can have fresh English muffins for breakfast the next morning.</blockquote><blockquote><strong>Making the Dough:</strong> When the sponge has developed, mix the sugar, salt, baking soda and 2½ cups flour together in a separate bowl. Stir these into the sponge as thoroughly as you can and cover the resulting dough with plastic wrap and let it work for anywhere up to an hour. This allows the gluten in the flour you’ve just added to absorb some moisture and relax.</blockquote><blockquote><strong>Kneading and Shaping:</strong> Flour your kneading board and hands well as this dough will be soft when you turn it out. Knead for only 2 to 3 minutes until the dough is smooth and no longer lumpy. With a floured rolling pin, roll it out, like a pie dough, from the center to the outside, until it is between ¼ and ½ inch thick.</blockquote><blockquote>Cut out circles between 3 and 4 inches in diameter (the muffins will shrink in diameter as they cook). A large tuna-sized can with both ends removed works well, or you can even throw tradition to the wind and cut squares.</blockquote><blockquote>Place the muffins on a cookie sheet that has been sprinkled with cornmeal and let them rest for at least 15 minutes.</blockquote><blockquote><strong>Cooking:</strong> Place 4 or 5 circles on a lightly greased skillet on low, low heat with the cornmeal side down first. Cook slowly for 10 minutes, gently flip the muffins over and continue cooking for a further 10 minutes.</blockquote><blockquote><strong>Serving:</strong> Cool your muffins, split with a fork to make the most of their wonderful open texture, toast and enjoy right away, or store the cooled muffins in a plastic bag to use at your leisure. English muffins also keep well in the freezer.</blockquote><p><strong>From <a href="http://kingarthurbaking.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">kingarthurbaking.com</a></strong>:</p><blockquote>1. Combine all of the dough ingredients, except the cornmeal/semolina, in a large bowl.</blockquote><blockquote>2. Mix and knead — by hand, electric mixer, or bread machine — to form a smooth dough. The dough should be soft and elastic, but not particularly sticky; add additional flour if necessary.</blockquote><blockquote>3. Place the dough in a lightly greased bowl, cover, and set it aside to rise for about 1 1/2 hours, or until it's noticeably puffy. For most pronounced sour flavor, cover the bowl, and immediately place it in the refrigerator (without rising first). Let the dough chill for 24 hours; this will develop its flavor.</blockquote><blockquote>4. Gently deflate the dough, turn it out onto a lightly floured work surface, cover it, and let it sit for a few minutes, to relax the gluten. Divide the dough in half. Working with one piece at a time, roll ½" thick, and cut in 3" rounds. Re-roll and cut any remaining scraps. Repeat with the remaining half of dough.</blockquote><blockquote>5. Alternatively, divide the dough into 24 pieces (total). Shape each piece into a round ball, then flatten each ball into a 3" round. For a somewhat more even rise as the muffins cook, flatten each ball slightly larger than 3", and trim edges with a 3" cutter (or trim all around the edge with a pair of scissors). Muffins with cut (rather than flattened) sides will rise more evenly.</blockquote><blockquote>6. Place the rounds, evenly spaced, onto cornmeal- or semolina-sprinkled baking sheets (12 per sheet). Sprinkle them with additional cornmeal or semolina, cover with plastic wrap, and let them rise until light and puffy, about 45 to 60 minutes. If the dough has been refrigerated overnight, the rise time will be about 2 hours.</blockquote><blockquote>7. Carefully transfer the rounds (as many as a time that will fit without crowding) right-side up to a large electric griddle preheated to 350°F, or to an ungreased frying pan that has been preheated over medium-low heat.</blockquote><blockquote>8. Cook the muffins for about 10 to 12 minutes on each side, or until an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center of a muffin registers 190°F. The edges may feel a bit soft; that's OK.</blockquote><blockquote>9. Remove the muffins from the griddle, and cool on a rack. Store tightly wrapped at room temperature for 4 or 5 days; freeze for longer storage.</blockquote><p>It’s here, I think, that the differences really show themselves. I’ll try to unpack how, because it’s my central issue with the cookbook itself: the sourdough recipes are really, really excellent. As long as you bring enough knowledge to fill in the gaps. When you’re trying to cook “by the book” they are incredibly frustrating.</p><p>Before that, though, I should acknowledge that the <em>KAF Cookbook</em> was initially published in 1990. There are reasons for the different approaches here; thirty years, for example. But also the book is a tome, and costs money (unlike the website), and has more explicit limits on space (page layouts) than the website does, and so has a different presumed audience. Those thirty years also saw massive shifts in the discourses around home cooking, which maybe one day I’ll properly be able to get into. I bring that up here to make it clear I’m not discounting these historical and material differences when getting into the comparison.</p><p>Let me get ahead of myself again. The first problem will come second. Here is the second problem: look at the cook times. The <em>KAF Cookbook</em> calls for 3-4 inch rounds flattened to between ¼ and ½ inch thick, while the website specifies 3-inch rounds at ½ inch thickness. So the cookbook version is a little wider and a little thinner, on average, with more space for variation.</p><p>The <em>KAF Cookbook</em> calls for “low, low heat” for 10 minutes per side. The website asks for 10-12 minutes per side on “medium-low heat.” Can I tell you something, from experience? Low, low heat for ten minutes per side is nowhere near long enough to cook through the English muffins you get from the cookbook. Keeping it low meant my first batch had to be cooked for something closer to thirty minutes per side. Which is annoying.</p><p>This isn’t a problem because it’s wrong. Most recipes are wrong, because it is impossible to figure out variables in things like burner strength, pan availability, personal patience, and on and on. It’s a problem because of what it chooses to prioritize difference within.</p><p>The cookbook wants to be generous with the size and shape but not the cooking time. The website calls for specific dimensions with variation in the cooking time. The latter is generally more useful, in my experience, because it signals that even if you make things perfectly even there are variables at play that you should anticipate. The former simply says: do what you like, and here is when it will be done.</p><p>The first problem, then. It is one that plagues so many of <em>KAF Cookbook</em>’s recipes, and it shows up in the first line: “In a ceramic bowl, mix together the starter, milk and about 3 cups of flour.” Then you cover this, whatever it is. Is it a batter? A shaggy dough? A smooth dough? A fucking rock with loose flour everywhere? Who cares! Cover it!</p><p>If there is one thing I’ve found deeply annoying when reading recipes to try to learn baking, it’s the use of vague terms to refer to the consistency of a dough. What is a “shaggy” versus a “smooth” dough? How stiff is a “stiff peak?” What does “silky” feel like in any context?</p><p>The most frustrating thing about this is that the answer usually ends up being fairly obvious. But it’s only obvious in the doing, rather than the reading. You can (and will) overshoot it or undershoot it. But even though they use vague descriptors, a lot of the standard terminology of baking is actually incredibly useful, at least in terms of helping you identify when you’re ready to move to the next step.</p><p>The <em>KAF Cookbook</em> is lacking these descriptors in almost every important area. You have no opportunity to be annoyed by the vagueness of a “silky” knead, because you are expected to knead for the prescribed amount of time and pray.</p><p>A side note: the vague way dough consistency is described is both the funniest and most liberating thing, for me. I had long bought into the idea of baking as the “scientific” (which is to say math-oriented) side of cooking. It turns out to be the place with some of the most flowery (flour-y? yes.) language in the whole recipe world, even as they insist on precise percentages. C’est la vie. Or, more precisely: bake weird shit, fuck ‘em.</p><p>Compare that total lack of an indication of what you will be covering with plastic wrap to the website’s version: “Mix and knead — by hand, electric mixer, or bread machine — to form a smooth dough. The dough should be soft and elastic, but not particularly sticky; add additional flour if necessary.” What a wild difference.</p><p>For instance: the website’s version anticipates the question of tools. This is <em>a problem</em> with baking recipes; it’s not uncommon to find recipes that reveal much too late that they can only be done with a stand mixer unless you are prepared to hand-mix for an hour, at which point the timing of everything else will fall to pieces. This reflects the assumption that the <em>KAF Cookbook</em> makes that I discussed above, where using “advanced” ingredients assumes you have a certain grasp on technique.</p><p>Finding decent baking recipes that don’t assume that you know advanced technique just because they include a slightly involved (or “advanced”) ingredient often feels impossible. Ingredients and technique are different things. What the “by hand, electric mixer, or bread machine” does is to say: We are not going to tell you how long it takes to get where you need to go, because it doesn’t matter. We are going to tell you where you need to end up, because that does.</p><p>And where you need to go is a “smooth” dough. “Soft and elastic, but not particularly sticky.” That is going to feel different to every pair of hands connected to every of brain that tries this recipe. But it’s at least a guideline.</p><p>An important point: if you try this recipe and fuck it up, you have a potential point of failure here. If you try it again, you can remember: maybe I didn’t add additional flour when it was necessary, maybe it was stickier than intended (or less soft, or whatever). If you fuck up the <em>KAF Cookbook</em> version, there’s no reference. You simply did what was asked and it didn’t work; it therefore must be a bad recipe.</p><p>I would also like to return to the “ceramic bowl,” briefly. I could say that it’s an indication of the bizarre, broken priorities of the <em>KAF Cookbook</em> to insist on specific equipment rather than conveying useful information. I just did, in fact. More importantly: it’s not important. Whatever bowl you have is fine. Maybe some will serve you better than others, which is a journey worth taking. Prescribing the bowl rather than telling you what you should be striving for is <em>terrible recipe writing</em>.</p><p>This is the meat of the issue, and what I’m hoping most strongly to convey. Recipe writing is about producing good food in clear ways. It’s about choosing optimal ratios of ingredients and developing them with explicable techniques. It’s a product-oriented writing: the goal is to end up with something delicious and/or healthy and/or novel, but always edible.</p><p>An aspect of this that can get lost, though, is that recipe writing is also about teaching process as well as product. Whether the writer intends it or not. Because recipes are product-oriented, they will inevitably cut out explanations of why they suggest a certain method of cooking or include a specific ingredient. This lack of explanation can lead to an incurious relationship toward food. You simply plug in the recommended variables and receive something delicious at the end. Voila.</p><p>This is especially a problem when a recipe works out well. If you don’t need to know what stage to knead dough to, then you’ll never know you need to ask. And so when you try to introduce variations, you have no way of knowing which questions to ask. And if you don’t know which questions to ask, you have no way of knowing why things work or don’t.</p><p>A good recipe will end in good food. A great recipe will help you learn <em>how</em> to make good food.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-64587627509519829982020-07-31T23:02:00.000-07:002021-11-08T19:18:52.618-08:00Linkout(s): Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, FINNA interview with Nino Cipri for Spectology, and More<p></p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>I've been bad about sharing my critical work on this [defunct patreon] platform, so let me reassure that the help I'm getting over here is keeping me busy. The big critical post I had planned for this month - a ten(ish) episode podcast series that I'll be calling <em>Island Demeter</em> and features a rotating cast of friends playing tabletop roleplaying games - hasn't quite come together yet. I'm really hoping for August. In the meantime, the thing I'm proudest of is the above review of <em>Mexican Gothic</em> by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I read the novel back in February and immediately started calling it my favorite book of the year (I've read a surprising amount of new fiction this year too!) and possibly my favorite haunted house novel ever (that's counting <em>House of Leaves</em>, which is still my go-to answer for "favorite book ever?" questions that I never actually get). I can't call it an important read or whatever, but it's so fucking good. The review has some spoilery stuff, but it's telegraphed.</p><p> I also had an interview with the author of my <em>second</em> favorite book of 2020 so far go up on <a href="https://www.spectology.com/e/digital-book-tour-nino-cirpi-on-finna-a-story-of-parallel-universes-as-found-in-furniture-store/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">the Spectology feed</a>. The book's called <em>FINNA</em> and it's about wormholes in an IKEA that lead to multiverses and transitioning from lovers to friends and it is very gay and makes my heart feel whole. The author's Nino Cipri and they were genuinely the best person to talk to. I've had folks ask how long we had known each other after listening to the interview. The answer, of course, is that we met on the call and talked for about two full hours, one of which ended up as that podcast episode.</p><p>And I've got stuff incoming, as well. There's the 10+ hours of recorded gaming that I'm working on. We're sitting on three more book tours for <em>Spectology</em> - one with Nick Mamatas, one with WM Akers, and one with Kathleen Jennings. I'm still making moves in that direction. I have a review of the anthology <em>Women's Weird</em> forthcoming at some point in <em>Strange Horizons</em>, and I think of it as a sort of companion to my <em>Mexican Gothic</em> review, diving into the implications of Weird Fiction, revisiting the politics of collections and (anti-)canons and, you know, maybe talking extensively about <em>Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated</em>.</p><p>I've also been doing organizing-adjacent work that I'll be sharing at some point. One thing with (former and current) coworkers might be one of the most important things I've ever worked on, depending on how it goes. And even the novel coronavirus can't keep <a href="http://playdatepopup.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Playdate</a> down; we've got some really exciting things planned for the next iteration that could genuinely provide a much-needed model, if we're able to pull it off (and I'm confident we are because my co-organizers are fucking monsters).</p><p>So yeah. A little bit of appreciation for my patrons. Y'all have been an incredible resource for me. The support has meant that even in really brutal times for my mental health I've known that there's some folks out there who want to show material support for me to continue doing this jumbled whirlwind of critique and creativity that I do. And to do it in the way I want to, which is the only way I really can. It's huge, to me; thank you. And also don't feel any pressure to continue, haha.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-7538580438493425832020-07-31T23:01:00.000-07:002021-11-08T19:18:49.199-08:00Always Bee Cooking #12: Kitchen Roles - Scavenger<p></p><p>We are, all of us, many people. Across time, certainly, but also in any given moment. Often contradictory, as often complementary. I am, in the kitchen - as this column, I hope, can attest - primarily a student. Of technique and of popular (read: often pseudo-) science, of flavor and ingredients and patience. I am many things, though. One of these is a scavenger.</p><p>If I were to break down my cooking in purely quantitative terms I suspect a plurality of it would be to feed myself. A late night <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CDN5nmeBhy8/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>omelette</u></a> or a <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/37459579"><u>chicken roasted</u></a> for eating over a week or two. <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/30182921"><u>Herb butter pasta</u></a> that I would be embarrassed to share, but sustains.</p><p>A plurality, but not even a majority. Even in strictly audience-oriented terms I am nearly as likely to be cooking for others - or, frankly, for no one - as I am for myself. Whoever ends up eating that <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CBqmU52BJuU/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>polenta casserole</u></a> or that chicken fried rice is immaterial. I cooked it for an audience of refrigerator space and carrots just before they are overcome by mold. I cook because I need to scavenge, to clear out, to <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/29504950"><u>make use</u></a>.</p><p>I scavenge in part because of how long I spent not cooking. My early memories of kitchens aren't at a grandmother's knee, stirring red sauce for sixteen hours. They are trips to the pantry at two in the morning, thinking I am sneaking because I have no sense that everything here is here by design, by labor exploited for a wage that is spent at the supermarket in time allotted for <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/28769402"><u>the reproduction of the self</u></a>, bagged transported and unbagged in precise places. That is only counting the work of the consumer (my mom in this memory), not the producers, the shippers, the logisticians.</p><p>I think, in this memory, that I am sneaking when in reality stored food is only forgettable in its presence. The second it is gone it becomes unforgettable. "Do we have chips? check the pantry!" becomes "I just bought a variety pack on Wednesday! You can't have possibly eaten all of them!" the second there are no chips in the pantry.</p><p>I scavenge because I have hated grocery stores since long before the novel coronavirus turned each trip into a desire to hoard. Partially from lack of knowledge, which I am slowly overcoming. Partially from social anxiety, from the pressure of being around bodies, each with a mind as full as yours, each with stresses or joys radiating off them. Partially from the analysis paralysis that accompanies a shelf full of identical products, packaged differently, sold at price points that only don't seem arbitrary if you've spent years working in supply chains. Partially because until two days ago I hadn't driven a car in six years and had lived in a variety of food deserts, where grocery stores meant liquor stores or a minimum round trip of an hour, walking. So when everyone started complaining that they couldn't just pop by the store to grab a couple things when making dinner, once shelter-in-place began, a small part of me thought: hello. Welcome.</p><p>I scavenge because I have often lived with others who have full time jobs when I didn't. With people who buy things to use and then don't get around to them. Through no fault of their own. We are each of us many, and each of those selves need to be reproduced in order to labor under capitalism. That means eating and sleeping, but also dedicating time to read or play games or socialize. Which is all time spent not cooking. And it's necessary time, every fucking day. So the time I save shopping is the time I spend eyeing what's about to go bad, considering how to flip it into something edible, researching technique and trying to feed myself and my comrades.</p><p>I scavenge because I have a hard time getting rid of things, and seeing how others lose them helps me let go. I scavenge because I have a hard time getting attached to things, and seeing someone else's food getting moldy gives me a sense of what it might be like to care.</p><p>I scavenge because I'm fucking broke all the time. Even when I'm not, I can't help it. I don't buy things for myself. Except, well. I did just buy this thing. It's a 10" nonstick skillet, and it's the absolute best purchase I've made in the kitchen (because my chef's knife was a gift).</p><p>The only pot or pan I had ever bought was BC. You know. Before Cooking. Okay that's really bad. Take two:</p><p>The only pot or pan that I ever bought, prior to this skillet, was a cast iron wok that I used all of a half-dozen times over the course of four years. I gave it away as a gift just before I moved back to San Francisco. As in, immediately prior to starting to take cooking seriously. Since then I've scavenged, cooking on really nice cast iron, really shitty aluminum; in pots that are tiny or enormous. The things that others have bought themselves or been gifted and I've "accidentally" ended up using as much, or more, than the people who will take (or gift!) them when they move.</p><p>If I'd been asked a year ago what piece of stovetop cookware I would purchase first, a nonstick skillet would have been my last answer. They were what were in the kitchens I never used, scratched up and barely functional. When I started learning about them, they seemed like a scam: here is a surface that cracks under the slightest pressure of a fork or even the abrasive side of a sponge, and when it fails it becomes the worst possible pan. They don't get as hot as aluminum or carry heat as evenly as cast iron; they don't have the magical bullshit people attribute to copper or even the aesthetics of steel. It's just planned obsolescence: the pan. But then I started watching <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CshkecuFfMc" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>a lot</u></a> of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3QYai6bv5M" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Jacques Pepin</u></a>, which is annoying of me, to me. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1XoCQm5JSQ" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>That fucking classic omelette</u></a>.</p><p>For those who don't know: <a href="https://www.seriouseats.com/2016/02/cookbook-love-letter-kenji-jacques-pepin-complete-techniques.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>Jacques Pepin</u></a> is one of the original celebrity chefs. He had a show with Julia Child. He's probably best known at this point for the "classic" French omelette, a creamy, simple omelette, often without filling, that involves no browning at all. It tastes good - it's eggs and butter - but it's mostly a test.</p><p>Pepin prefaces the many tutorials for it available on YouTube in precisely this way. It's the way he can tell if a new chef has good technique. It's kind of a pain in the ass, and you kind of need a nonstick for it to even be possible (or a really, really, really well-seasoned cast iron). It's the opposite of scavenging: using only the highest quality ingredients in a very simple way that requires a ton of practice to do right, much less consistently. I may be a scavenger, but like all of us I am also many, and one of that many <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B_YDf2khXG2/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>can't</u></a> turn down a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CC4CH1BhGnj/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>challenge</u></a>. Maybe <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B_aaUl1B5xk/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>especially</u></a> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B_c9hVUhLvy/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>when</u></a> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B_fgszthM6q/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>it involves</u></a> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B_h9vX-BVpo/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><u>eggs</u></a>. And, I think, the first one many people learn to cook. Or at least one of the first ones I did. You can't exactly scavenge three-egg and toast breakfast, after all. <br /></p>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-5105189352321358922020-05-29T23:00:00.001-07:002021-11-08T19:18:45.722-08:00Audrey Horne & the City: Katy Keene's Alright<p>Most of the time, I watch <em>Riverdale</em> when I catch a particularly bad cold. Knowing that I'll be laid up in bed for a couple days I will queue up whatever I haven't yet seen (whether that's <em>Riverdale </em>or <em>The Good Place</em> or <em>Pretty Little Liars</em> or <em>Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated</em> or...) and spend a day or two just plowing through it. Strangely, I actually followed <em>Riverdale</em>'s fourth season week-to-week for the first eight or so episodes, and then fell off. A few days ago I wrapped it up, and the day after I spent in a strange haze of the first seasons of its first spinoff.</p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>I doubt I'll ever write much about the fourth season in particular so I'll say here: I think it's my favorite season since the first. Season one of <em>Riverdale</em> is one of the best examples of A Group Of Friends I've watched on television. It's a masterclass in pacing out how to propel viewers through watching four people care about each other. Season two is the one that took off, where Archie turns into a near-fascist vigilante and there is a massive riot outside of a prison. Season three is anchored by a <em>Dungeons & Dragons</em> analog called Griffins & Gargoyles and continues the second season's plot/mystery-heavy structure. Season four scales that back, structuring itself by flash forwards to the death of Jughead.</p><p>Those flash forwards allow for way more quiet moments. The season doesn't have to fill blank spaces with side plots; it can focus on what is important to the characters at any moment (whether that's a big mystery or a small character moment) since there is a promise of excitement in the future. That lead to at least one of my favorite character moments in recent history: <a href="https://twitter.com/Benladen/status/1202055751641911301" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">that second, emphatic yes</a> is so clutch. It's a little riot of excitement in a snowstorm, an expression of the tiny joy of trusting someone deeply and having that trust rewarded, an act of selfless self-deception that rewrites the self. I fucking love it. Season four peppers these moments throughout in a way that seasons two and three often missed, and then it gets to the big reveal and that part's kind of boring but who cares, the joy was the framing, not the execution.</p><p>But that's not what I'm here to talk about. Between watching seasons two and three of <em>Riverdale</em>, I took a break to watch the entire run of <em>Pretty Little Liars</em>, a show that I had heard good things about and was clearly an antecedent. Even that managed to pay off* in season four, when Lucy Hale (who plays Aria in <em>Pretty Little Liars</em>) showed up as Katy Keene. I expected that was the whole of it and was satisfied. I then found out that it was actually a crossover episode for <em>Katy Keene</em>, <em>Riverdale</em>'s first spinoff series, starring Hale as well as Ashleigh Murray (Josie McCoy of Josie and the Pussycats).</p><p><em>Katy Keene</em> keeps some core elements of the <em>Riverdale</em> formula but ends up being more <em>Sex & the City</em> than <em>Twin Peaks</em>. Katy Keene is an aspiring fashion desire in New York City who lives in an apartment with Jorge, a drag queen and aspiring Broadway star, the aforementioned aspiring singer Josie, and frequent guest Pepper, an aspiring Andy Warhol, I guess? She's rich (but is she really??) and maybe a con artist and maybe just needs a little help from her friends. Their incompatible sexual preferences remove most of the possibilities that they will hook up or couple off within the foursome (so no Betty/Jughead Archie/Veronica equivalent, as it were), but otherwise the dynamics are broadly similar. One of the characters even gets to do voice over to narrate the episodes! Except that's actually one of the biggest differences.</p><p><em>Riverdale</em> is, decidedly, not called <em>Jughead</em>. It is also not called <em>Archie</em> per the comics that spawned it. <em>Katy Keene</em> being called <em>Katy Keene</em> strikes, at first, like an imagined 90s spinoff of <em>Twin Peaks</em> called <em>Donna Hayward</em>. Or, perhaps more accurately, a <em>Twin Peaks</em> spinoff called <em>Lana Budding Milford</em>. Although if you wanted to argue that Donna was never a central character in <em>Twin Peaks</em> I don't know that I'd have strong enough feelings to push back particularly hard. The influence of <em>Twin Peaks</em> on <em>Riverdale</em> isn't just that it took the idea of "dead girl rocks town; secrets revealed" and replaced the girl with a boy. It's the primacy of the town itself, the way it chews through people and yet those people stay and destroy themselves and each other. Which is not untrod territory for shows set in New York City (...probably? obligatory mention that I'm certainly no TV expert &, in fact, am barely a viewer). But.</p><p>So: <em>Katy Keene</em> imports some of the structure of <em>Riverdale</em>, but guides our focus to the individual rather than the environment via the name. This is not a neutral action, but it's also not a determining one; only a frame. And it's a frame the first season clearly struggles with, given how much time it clearly wants to spend with Katy Keene <em>and</em> how much time it wants to spend with Josie McCoy. The editing feels choppy not in individual moments so much as in pacing, like the showrunners couldn't decide who or if there was a strict point of view character. Ultimately I think this ends up benefiting the show, but we'll get there. Because it's sometimes a bit of a rough watch.</p><p>One influential aspect of <em>Twin Peaks</em> I haven't yet mentioned on <em>Riverdale</em> shows up in the latter more as suggestion than actual fact. <em>Riverdale</em>, especially in the first season, often gestures toward the languid pace punctuated by extreme action characteristic of Lynch's filmography - including <em>Twin Peaks</em>. The way shots holding a beat too long leads to plot beats lingering two beats too long leads to mysteries dissolving into an aether of Lore in <em>Twin Peaks</em> is gestured at, as well as the way sometimes those extra beats are suddenly interrupted by an eruption of violence or bliss (Amanda Seyfried high on cocaine in a convertible in season 3, for instance) or inexplicable. In <em>Riverdale</em> those techniques of alienation are just subsumed back into the soap opera structure out of which they were born, but the mark of that alienating use still lingers.</p><p>And that mark remains in <em>Katy Keene</em>, at least as far as the show is self-consciously of a piece with (or a piece of) <em>Riverdale</em>. Which is fascinating because, as the show grows into its own, the clear reference points that it enjoys playing with are much more similar to sitcoms and <em>Sex & the City</em>. To that point: <em>Katy Keene</em> really doesn't find itself until episode 5.</p><p>"Song for a Winter's Night" becomes sort of prototypical for the rest of the season; it takes place during a polar vortex, so after some setup the main cast is trapped inside with a series of escalating tensions rapidly unveiling themselves. Katy has 24 hours to make a dress for her boss and fashion-industry gatekeeper Gloria; Jorge has a run-in with his mother while in drag and needs a new dress; Josie's boyfriend/manager has been outed in the tabloids as having been intimate with his stepsister, and suspects Pepper is to blame; and Pepper's cons are slowly coming unraveled as Josie does some digging. Between a musical number, some serious accusations of selfishness, the reveal of $60,000 of debt, a broken radiator, a couple ruined dresses, a broken sewing machine and a reconciliation, the episode pushes the group dynamic into "madcap hijinks" territory - editing and all - and comes out the other side with genuinely new dynamics.</p><p>That's the show at its best. Hale brings an interpersonal emotional bigness that she was capable of on <em>Pretty Little Liars</em> but rarely got to exhibit (because she ended up tied up with her teacher boyfriend way, way too fucking often) that puts a point on the stakes. Murray keeps the <em>Riverdale </em>energy alive and palpable and can genuinely sing. The show leans into the (cinematic) glamour of New York City's "struggling" artists and does so in a particularly millennial(ly coded, at least**) way. Up to and including weird valorizations of the Chelsea Hotel and Warhol's Factory while meeting billionaires in Washington Square Park (...and having a cable bill be a point of contention, which I guess shows just how far television has fallen given that it has to thematize its own existence to remind the viewer). This is the best stuff not because it enraptures but because it manages to pull off the highwire act of something like a screwball comedy while synthesizing its influences into its own thing.</p><p>The <em>Sex & the City</em> influence isn't all bad, but it's most prominent when the show is at its worst. There are moments where it drags its feet and can only get its message across by having Hale do a bad Carrie Bradshaw-style voiceover to explain how she's feeling (even though half the time Hale's acting and the scripting and shooting are strong enough to make the voiceover extraordinarily redundant) about a particular pickle. Or when a subplot extends way beyond its lifespan because the sex is (allegedly) hot, like how much of Josie's screentime is eaten up by the on-again off-again relationship with her manager, aforementioned billionaire Alexander Cabot, or Pepper's with her assistant/lover/former doorperson(?) Didi.</p><p>If I highlighted "that second, emphatic yes" of Betty's during <em>Riverdale</em>'s snow day episode from season 4, it's because I like it as metonym as much as anything else. The power in these shows - for me, specifically, at this point in my life, specifically - is, in large part, in their modeling of friendship. You may have noticed that's a <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/27198392">bit of a theme</a> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/29397826">around here</a>. It's a theme I've been actively thinking through at least since I watched <em>I Know What You Did Last Summer</em> and was kind of blown away by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt's performances, having not long before taken a class on John Carpenter that focused at least partially on the way he portrayed homosocial relationships after the style of John Ford. So, you know. A good chunk of a decade before I realized that I might be interested in the modeling of femme*** friendships for <em>very personal reasons</em>. Like that I myself might occupy that space, for instance, and might have been denied the possibility of actualizing it in early life.</p><p>By that very personal, historically-specific metric, for instance, <em>Pretty Little Liars</em> is another important text that, like seasons 2 and 3 of <em>Riverdale</em>, is far too often too interested in the Mystery to allow itself time to stretch out into who these people are and why they react to and interact with each other in the ways that they do. <em>Katy Keene</em>, from its first season, seems like its something that might hit a sweet spot at some point in the future. A season two and three would be nice, I guess is what I'm saying. Even just the one, though, is alright.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>*I mean, it paid itself off, obviously. <em>Pretty Little Liars</em> is also excellent for a shockingly high percent of its run, spinoffs... excluded. <em>Ravenswood</em> is such a bummer.</p><p>** The other way to say this is "woke" I guess, but I think I'm trying to get that word out of my regular use since it seems less and less demonstrative of anything aside from, maybe, performatively progressive on social issues. <a href="https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/malcolm-harris/kids-these-days/9781478992332/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Millennial</a>, on the other hand...</p><p>***This is an awkward use of femme; "female friendships" doesn't exactly include me even if it's probably more accurate in describing the actual media, and at least at this point "friendships between women" wouldn't either as I continue to develop my own understanding of myself as an enby femme who is trans, &c &c.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-79449801173110319442020-05-28T22:58:00.000-07:002021-11-08T19:18:42.364-08:00Linkout: Melissa Caruso Interview for Spectology's Digital Book Tour<p></p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>My third interview for <a href="https://www.spectology.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Spectology</a> is with Melissa Caruso, author of the forthcoming fantasy novel <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/melissa-caruso/the-obsidian-tower/9780316425070/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">The Obsidian Tower</a>. It, like Veronica Roth's book, has a very early twist that made having a more detailed discussion... kind of a pain. That, coupled with my less-than-cooperative brain, lead to a bit of a (lets call it) meandering conversation (on my part).</p><p>We did get some good conversations about craft - how drafting can help, recycling old characters to good effect, overwriting conversations to develop characters - and tabletop/live action roleplaying, so I'd count it as a win. Plus the book was a pretty fascinating look at obligation (did I say obedience in the episode when I meant obligation? i did!) through the lens of fantasy, which in my book makes it well worth a read.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-33930290588419761702020-05-23T22:57:00.000-07:002021-11-08T19:18:38.564-08:00Linkout: Spectology Digital Book Tour with Veronica Roth<p>My second interview for the Quarantine Digital Book Tour is with Veronica Roth, who wrote the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_trilogy" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Divergent books</a>. I've interviewed two authors and one of them has sold 30+ million copies of one book. It was intimidating!</p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>A little behind the scenes: Roth's team reached out to the <a href="https://www.spectology.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Spectology</a> folks (which includes me I guess!), and I agreed to take on the interview. We talked with at least a half dozen people to set up the interview, and at no point until the call started was I in contact with Roth. Luckily I found enough in the book that I really enjoyed, and have spent a lifetime learning how to overcome social anxiety. And, luckily, Roth was genuinely engaged in the conversation and happy to answer my "questions." </p><p>I think we hit on some interesting questions about her new book, <a href="https://www.pegasusbookstore.com/book/9780358274995" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Chosen Ones</a>, and what it's like to write a visually-oriented novel that tackles mental health questions around "chosen one" narratives. I'd love it if folks who listened would give feedback (up to and including that I talked way too much, which I'm incredibly aware of).</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-56454121610056870402020-04-30T22:56:00.001-07:002021-11-08T19:18:35.304-08:00Always Bee Cooking #9: Working Through What This Is<p></p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>Since my last Always Bee Cooking post at the end of February, there's an argument that I've been embodying the title. In that time I baked my first cake, baked my second and third cakes, baked my fourth and fifth cakes in one day, and baked my sixth, seventh, and eighth cakes on one other day, all with nothing more than about three mixing bowls, a couple of whisks, and some dollar store pans.</p><p>I made a sweet offshoot of Sourdough starter, fed and kept it, recipe tested it against my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/32179538">Seared Sourdough Pikelets</a>, and abandoned it. I tested out some pan sauces, spent a week making scrambled eggs and thinking seriously about how to make them better (or the differences between cooking methods, at least). I collaborated with a friend on genuinely great pastas, spent three hours making tater tots from scratch, made my first pizza, stuffed mushrooms, buttermilk-marinated chicken. And those are just the things I remembered to post about on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/aieopa/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Instagram</a>.</p><p>So the lack of posts here haven't been because I don't have "potential content," I guess. It's been for two main reasons. The first are a series of brick walls I've been running up against. You know the ones. They're labeled things like Mental Health, Global Pandemic, Financial Insecurity, Defense Mechanisms Developed Out Of Childhood Trauma And Damn Near 30 Years Of Unacknowledged Dysphoria, Impostor Syndrome From Having No Formal Training And A Garbage Palate. Just normal stuff.</p><p>The other is that there's a pretty big gap between what I want this series to be and what I'm able to produce for it right now. What I'm able to produce is this sort of thing. Blog posts with heavy Personal Stories hooks. Text dumps that put people off reading them. Acknowledgments of my limitations that hopefully punch through to something interesting or useful, especially to people who don't have a ton of cooking experience. I can see some theoretical value in that. It's not what I want to be doing, though.</p><p>Basically every other post since I started this series, I've been threatening to do a longer theoretical post. I've been threatening that because what I actually want to develop within this space is a genuinely left wing way to write about cooking, from the perspective of someone who is deeply inexpert. Not because people who have gone to culinary school or worked their way up in restaurants are less left wing or some bullshit, but because these are the two perspectives I have and they are two perspectives that feel deeply, miserably lacking from the Culinary Discourse, at least as I'm aware of it. Please feel free to point me toward folks who embody these things, if you know of them. If you point me to some liberal I will judge you, just a little bit. Not that much, though, if it dissuades you. The problem is that I've learned a lot from them, because cooking media is overwhelmingly, exhaustingly, and too often deliriously usefully, liberal.</p><p>I would like to clarify that last sentence, but that's precisely the problem. The clarification requires a significant amount of clear background, and the brick walls aren't avoidable. Not even by reference to the framework of <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/28769402">reproductive labor</a>. Theory is theory; praxis is praxis; those walls can be fungible, but sometimes you cook theoretically and write actively. And sometimes the structural analysis is right and the individual circumstance is fucking broken.</p><p>Is this another empty promise, then, that I'll have a full dissection up, soon, of the pedagogy & ideology of cooking media, especially around how it interacts with learning to cook for the first time in your late twenties/early thirties? I guess that's to be found out. As a comrade says, we can only hold space to allow others to hold themselves accountable. I hope to hold myself to account.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-21044085862919072062020-04-30T22:55:00.000-07:002021-11-08T19:18:32.311-08:00Linkout/Announcement: Quarantine Digital Book Tour with Spectology<p>I've joined with the inestimable folks at <a href="https://www.spectology.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Spectology</a> to edit & sometimes(/mostly?) host a series of "Digital Book Tours," to provide a space for speculative fiction authors whose book tours have been interrupted by COVID-19. You might remember Spectology from when I <a href="https://www.spectology.com/e/214-stars-in-my-pocket-like-grains-of-sand-w-bee-radical-visions-of-identity-class-and-gender/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">talked about Samuel R. Delany's <em>Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand</em> with them in December</a>, or when I called them my <a href="http://uninterpretative.blogspot.com/2019/01/top-10-podcasts-of-2018.html#spectology" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">8th favorite podcast of 2018</a>.</p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p>The first episode came out on Tuesday, where I interviewed El Lam about their book <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/laura-lam/goldilocks/9780316462891/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><em>Goldilocks</em></a>, which came out in the UK today and is coming out in the US May 5th. The book was a really neat read - it features five women who steal a spaceship in a climate-ravaged, fascistic near future in order to found a utopian society on a new planet, and does a great job of being both thriller-paced and pausing for character development & striking images. <em>And</em> it does a phenomenal job of drawing characters whose class position defines them against their desires, which is a phenomenal achievement, imo. That's a reductionist reading, but I'm trying to be brief, okay.</p><p>Anyway, support Goldilocks when it comes out & subscribe to Spectology, because there's a grip of good conversations about SF novels there already &, yknow, you probably miss my irrepressible giggle. It's terrible podcast audio, but it's irrepressible, so.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-428422755689638092020-02-24T06:11:00.000-08:002020-02-24T06:11:39.316-08:00Occupy C(OL)A: A Decade of UC Struggle<div style="background-color: white; color: #241e12; font-family: aktiv-grotesk, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 10px !important; margin-top: 10px !important; white-space: pre-line;">
At the <a href="https://occupyca.wordpress.com/timeline/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">beginning of the 2009-2010 academic year</a> a coalition of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty occupy the Graduate Student Commons of the University of California, Santa Cruz. They splinter off of a demonstration at the base of campus against an egregious tuition hike. A prepared statement declares the <a href="https://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/occupy-california/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">situation untenable</a>, the space liberated, and demands outmoded. Barricades go up as an attempted occupation at UC Berkeley is thwarted.</div>
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The Grad Student Commons holds for a week before voluntarily then dissolving. Over the course of the next four months there are something like twenty actions, primarily occupations and sit-ins, across the University of California system. In 2010 the escalation continues as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZkoOm100Hc" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">electrocommunist</a> dance parties are added to the mix to disrupt business and cover for other militant actions. Students also begin to join non-university actions like the riots against the verdict in the murder of Oscar Grant.</div>
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In 2011 the escalations spike. Students continue to struggle against the hollowing of the university by the state and the administration and continue to cross over with militant struggle against police brutality. When the Occupy Wall Street movement hits, it is in part due to the veterans and comrades of the Occupy California struggle (in New York and Oakland especially, but also elsewhere) who help transform the idea from an <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/57/Wall-Street-1.jpg" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">Adbusters photo-op</a> to the seeds of a USian mass movement with a class analysis.</div>
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The continuity of national struggle over the past decade is full of ruptures. The police repression of Occupy eventually snuffed it out. Black Lives Matter developed its own momentum and path with, at best, assists from participants and organizers of Occupy. A number of sites of struggle also pop up, from Standing Rock to the Muslim Ban to street fights against alt right and neo-Nazi goons. Electorally, Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary candidacy blew open the doors of the DSA, who seem primarily to have educated and agitated in order to position him better for his 2020 run (and surprisingly successfully, it seems, even if he does not take the nomination).</div>
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I begin in 2009 not because it is the origin (though it can sometimes feel that way, given the massive ruptures that Obama and the Great Recession constituted) or because it was my own point of radicalization, but because we seem to have looped back around. Graduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz are engaging in a <a href="https://twitter.com/payusmoreucsc" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">wildcat strike for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA)</a> right now which started in December of 2019.</div>
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They are striking even though it is against the terms set by their union (the United Auto Workers) in the last rounds of negotiation. The strike has quickly been held up by a coalition – of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty – and has faced <a href="https://payusmoreucsc.com/response-to-janet-napolitano-spread-the-strike/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">barely-veiled threats of deportation</a> from former Department of Homeland Security head and current UC President Janet Napolitano. </div>
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The first four years of Trump’s presidency have seen inspiring actions but little in the way of engaged, mass movement building (and no, the liberal #Resistance does not count). COLA4All is reminiscent of that pre-Occupy occupy, spreading quickly across the UC system and, hopefully, into broader movement building opportunities. Hell, they even got a <a href="https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1230288311006134274" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">nod from Sanders</a>, and Napolitano <a href="https://twitter.com/reclaimuc/status/1231260534626045952" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">backed down</a> quickly thereafter.</div>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/reclaimuc" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">Reclaim UC</a> put it well, arguing that the material conditions behind the COLA wildcat strike are consistent with those that inspired the initial wave of Occupy California – “[D]uring the California student movement of 2009-10, everyone understood how the UC administration used its police forces to enable and enforce tuition hikes: ‘Behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops.’ 10 years later, tuition increases have slowed down and, with few options for revenue growth, administrators have turned to ‘cost-cutting,’ esp[ecially] regarding labor costs, as a key component of their strategy. UCSC police are still on the front lines of UC’s financial strategy.” </div>
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The conversion of the public university system into a de facto private entity, run like a business with minimal state support, lends continuity to the administrative and repressive apparatus. At a more systemic level, the struggle for COLA is linked to Occupy California by way of the Great Recession. The wave of immiseration that hit low- and middle-income households (with a wildly disproportionate impact on people of color) was a kind of creative destruction. From developers’ perspectives, neighborhoods that had been subject to the slow beat of "Urban Renewal" and tax breakdown were suddenly freed of the one barrier to successful gentrification – the fact that they were lived in by poor people of color who couldn’t be arrested (or murdered by police) for being homeless. Even better when those neighborhoods were adjacent to the booming tech industry. Silicon Valley’s radiating wealth coupled with scarcity artificially created by developers buying up foreclosed houses meant the second half of the 2010s blossomed into rent hikes that left even unionized graduate student workers in a position that they have once again described as <a href="https://twitter.com/payusmoreucsc/status/1225168300411244544" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">untenable</a>.</div>
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It would be ridiculous to claim that as goes the UC system, so goes the nation. What is clear, I hope, is that the material conditions facing university workers are not at all disconnected from the material conditions we all face. Graduate students too are being immiserated by the private control of the means of production, by the neoliberal state’s disinvestment from every social service except the military and police, from being propertyless wage workers in proximity to the fluid exchange of venture capital, IPOs, and land developers.</div>
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There has been a spark of life in the labor movement over the last half decade, although most of it has been talk. Bernie Sanders and Sarah Nelson have been among the most identifiable spokespeople, but everyone from graduate students to Kickstarter Employees to Game Workers Unite (and even <a href="https://www.sagaftra.org/join-us-tuesday-performancematters-virtual-picket-line-social-media" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">SAG-AFTRA</a>, in striking against the videogame industry a few years back) have been making moves unprecedented since Reaganomics. If that spark is to catch fire, COLA is one of the necessary models.</div>
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UAW leadership is facing corruption charges. Unions for Iron Workers and Firefighters have endorsed Joe “Medicare for all is bad for unions” Biden in the Democratic Primary. Even more recently, leadership of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW, a union known for at least a handful of militant locals) endorsed Biden as well to <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22315/ibew-labor-bernie-sanders-joe-biden-endorsement" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">immediate backlash from a sizable group of members</a>. A reborn labor movement without the capacity for actions like the COLA wildcat strike is, at best, only marginally better than the shambling zombie of a labor movement we have seen under neoliberalism.</div>
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Like Occupy California before it, the COLA wildcat strike represents a possible path forward in response to the same prevailing conditions, mutated as they have been over the last dozen years. It will require <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc/donate?utm_source=widget&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&fbclid=IwAR2hpKN26Tg4sdUbJtqDjNY0q2g6KWUFAgoJMbSFAAVZZRcvSfOUKAK5c-8" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: transparent; color: #e64f39; cursor: pointer;" target="_blank">material support</a>, generalization, and escalation. But we’ve done it before. This time we’ll just have to do it better.</div>
Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6395871063078591358.post-47999165678903544112020-02-20T22:47:00.001-08:002021-11-08T19:18:22.080-08:00Always Bee Cooking #8: Finishing My First Molasses<p>This morning I finished off the first jar of molasses I ever bought, something like two years ago. I don't remember what compelled the purchase, but over that time (and despite its somewhat infrequent use) it became one of my favorite pantry staples. Not for its versatility, but for its targeted use.</p><div style="position: relative;"><div style="height: auto;"><div class="sc-1sp3zau-0 kVdvan sc-1di2uql-0 iwStOA"><p><img data-media-id="54736773" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/3/eyJyb3RhdGUiOjAsInciOjgyMH0%3D/patreon-media/p/post/34209970/12410519e24f42efa28498ea474fabba/1.jpg?token-time=1633824000&token-hash=tyZPMHmCQOAqxOkWIUI7kLRr0nDTVpbZS7Cg0sc0mB0%3D" /></p><p><br /></p><p>I used it for basically three things, exclusively. Two of them I will include basic recipes for below. The third was oatmeal, which I have still yet to learn to love (or like). Before that, though: as I understand it, molasses is the byproduct of refining sugar. Blackstrap (what I was using) is the dregs of the most refined; lighter molasses are less refined and contain more sugar. The opposite goes for sugar; the darker brown, the more molasses is contained in the sugar itself.</p><p>This is useful information! For instance: it leads you to the conclusion of the first recipe below. And once you've made that, it makes it clear what utility certain kinds of sweeteners on the sugar-molasses spectrum provide to a specific recipe. Making cookies? Molasses is wet, so you could up the ratio of brown sugar to white if you want to make them more moist. The caramely, bitter byproduct is the best way to bring a level of sweetness without tipping the scales into saccharine.</p><p>The two recipes below hit the two major staples of my cooking: one is a preparation for other cooking, the other a staple that I have when I forget to eat for way too long. Neither are baking or (strictly) barbeque, which are probably what most people associate with molasses; I have no problem with either pursuit, but I haven't found myself working it into those (or, really, barbequing at all). Maybe on the second bottle.</p><h3>Recipes:</h3><p><strong>Homemade Brown Sugar</strong></p><p><img data-media-id="54736782" src="https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/3/eyJyb3RhdGUiOjAsInciOjgyMH0%3D/patreon-media/p/post/34209970/5b9e31496b01478eb02c33f339f7f6c7/1.jpg?token-time=1633824000&token-hash=nABxttskwhc06YLYcf4kohJqAmJDFjIwjXnvtC7bdZU%3D" /></p><p><br /></p><p>This is hardly a recipe, but every time I've looked it up online I've seen people say wild shit about making brown sugar at home. Like, in a blender and shit. No one wants powdered brown sugar. That's absurd. Here's what I've done when I'm trying to bake and realizing I don't buy brown sugar or when I need to give a gift to some friends I'm crashing with for a week.</p><p>Place a small saucepan over low heat and add one part molasses. When it barely starts to bubble, add two parts white sugar. A rubber spatula works great to combine the two, but a spoon will do fine. Once they're incorporated you're going to keep needing to add sugar. The moment it breaks from just lightening up the liquid molasses to becoming distinct clumps you could theoretically stop, if you wanted really, really dark, clumpy brown sugar. The more sugar you add the lighter the color will be and the less clumpy.</p><p>Things to note: add sugar in stages. It will give you more accurate control over the results and won't lead to a giant mess. Don't be afraid to move the pot off the heat if things start to simmer too steadily or if the sugar starts to caramelize. You just want the heat to facilitate mixing, not cook. Also: enjoy the weird transformation, it's really fun. Plus you can make the brown sugar you want, which is chill.</p><p><strong>Fake Baked Beans and Rice</strong></p><p>Place a pan over medium heat. Open a can of pinto beans and decant some of the liquid. Pour the beans and the remaining liquid into the pan. Add enough molasses to come halfway up the beans, salt, pepper, a good amount of hot sauce. Stir to coat, then cover until the molasses bubbles vigorously. Drop heat to medium-low and let reduce, stirring occasionally to re-coat. Add dried thyme and sage a minute or so before serving and stir one last time.</p><p>For the rice: just before you pour the beans into the can, wash a couple cups of rice and then add your preferred amount of water (for my rice cooker that means a 1:1 ratio plus a little extra water). Add any flavoring you want - I find even a little bit of canola oil goes a long way, but butter or rosemary or black garlic oil are all excellent options. It should be done right around the same time. Serve beans over rice (and if you need something a little more nutritious throw some frozen veggies in the oven at 425 and top with those).</p><p>Things to note: I don't provide measurements here because I have no idea what the size or shape of your pan is. The goal is to get a good shellac of flavor on the dang beans. I trust that you can do it. The only real concern is to not torch the sugar, so using low heat and taking a little longer is always preferable. That's also why I recommend canned beans: you kind of can't fuck them up. I assume liquid smoke would be a great addition to this, but I've never actually seen or used that before I don't think.</p></div></div></div>Benladenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972015735063159831noreply@blogger.com