literature-islit
LITerature is LIT
I read books, I write about them
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George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Here’s a book that really surprised me. I can’t remember why, but I started reading essays by George Orwell and discovered, to my surprise, that I enjoyed them a whole lot more than his fiction. Of course, 1984 is an absolute classic
And, you know, amazing and visionary and revolutionary and etc...
But i was, like, reading this compilation of essays that George Orwell wrote throughout his writing career and finding myself, like, laughing out loud.
Like, i don't know if that’s the most lame or nerdiest thing I’ve ever confessed to, but I decided to get my hands on more of his non-fiction writing and I really was not disappointed.
George Orwell was not anything more than middle class but got a scholarship to a school where he was considered low in social standing so provides a really interesting viewpoint on class which, he says, was a pretty decisive social division in the era of the UK that he existed in.
He wrote an essay about what it was like to attend his boarding school that made me feel viscerally nauseas and uncomfortable, uncomfortable like the way you get during school when you’re dragged from uncomfortable change room then made to jump in freezing cold pools for lap swimming, then made to go out and run laps during PE class no matter the weather.
School sucked. You were either stuck shivering in the playground in winter, or stuck sweating in long socks and a blazer in summer. If you didn't have a hat to wear during recess and lunch in summer you had to go sit in the hat room. Don’t even get me started on how much I hate everything that I brought to school for packed lunch
Anyway, that’s all beside the point, which is:
THIS IS A REALLY ENTERTAINING BOOK DESPITE ITS UNEXPECTED SUBJECT MATTER AND YOU SHOULD READ IT
The book narrates a presumably fictionalised retelling of Orwell’s misadventures, descending into poverty while living in Paris. He loses his job, has to pawn his clothes, then has to move in with a Russian named Boris, who keeps promising him that things will look up, but every avenue they try to get money is a dead end and they get ripped off by con-men posing as Bolshevik revolutionaries who want to hire newspaper writers.
Eventually, the duo secure jobs in a restaurant and things start looking up. What follows is a description of a restaurant that would not be out of place on the Gordan Ramsey TV show, Kitchen Nightmares
the only thing missing is the chef microwave, but that’s more due to technological constraints than lack of trying
Orwell paints a picture of an undersize kitchen where vegetable peels are scraped directly on the floor, then stamped underfoot to stop them presenting a slipping hazard. Dishes are dunked into sinks of water that double as the waiter’s handbasin. A communist waiter delights himself taking revenge upon members of the bourgeoise by wringing dirty dishcloths into their soup. Food is dropped on the water, washed off, then pressed into shape with the same hands that slick back the chef’s hair regularly, no break to wash in-between.
Its enough to make Gordon feel like this:
There’s more, of course. Orwell quits the job, goes to the UK and has to spend a few weeks living in “spikes” with “tramps” before he can get other work. He meets interesting people, does interesting things and maintains a detached sociological narrative viewpoint on the things he uncovers.
But what I liked most about the book, was its description of the rhythm of life working 14 hour days at meaningless service work. He thinks that if kitchen hands thought about it for just a moment, they’d go on strike or form a union to protest about their 14-16 hour days: but they do not think because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.
On the one day a week, as a kitchen hand, when Orwell didn't have to go to work, he drank. This leads to my favourite passage of the book, about the moment after the end of a night of hard drinking, when the pleasure wears off, but not the alcohol:
We perecieved that we were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk. We went on swallowing the wine, but it was only from habit, and the stuff seemed suddenly nauseating. One’s head had swollen up like a balloon, the floor rocked, one’s tongue and lips were stained pruple. At last it was no use keeping it up any longer… We crawled to bed, tumbled down half-dressed and stayed there ten hours.
Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.
How could I relate so hard to something written literally 90 years ago??? Really makes you think that maybe... the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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Cory Doctorow - Little Brother & Homeland (2020)
I was certainly not the only person both frightened and intrigued by reports of millennial being stalked and finding dead bodies while messing about with an app called Randonautica (which I would most certainly NEVER EVER download to my phone and view kind of on par with ouija boards - but I’m highly superstitious and get bad vibes from it lol)
But researching randonautica (and by researching I mean spending a whole hungover Sunday obsessively scrolling the associated reddit page and the supernatural forum on 4chan) introduced me to the work of ex randonautica founder (probably not the right descriptor but u get me right lol) Nick Hinton, and his theory that the world ended in 2012.
you may remember the hype
From Mandela Effect Facebook groups, to conspiracy forum threads devoted to the CERN facility, the idea that there was some kind of timeline jump in 2012 that has led to life not being quite the same since is surprisingly quite common...
... but, I have to say, I don’t buy it.
What I think is happening, instead, is that technology and technological advancements have been moving so fast, that we’re all too busy racing to catch up to really recognise what an impact and change it has had on the way we live, the way we interact with the world, and how the bombardment of stimulus from all the screens we browse simultaneously changes our relationship with our reality (less present in our moment, geographically and in time; spending more time sucked into vortexes of news, communication and advertisement). I read books supposedly set in the present time, and watch TV shows, but aside from the fact that people use iPhones and stuff I don’t think anything has accurately captured what it truly means and feels like to live in this day and age, and I think maybe some people are a little in denial about it.
Enter... Cory Doctorow and this masterful collection of two of his books Little Brother, and the sequel Homeland.
Let me keep this review short and sweet, because there isn't much to say except that YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK.
But amid the amnesia-inducing automatic refreshment of news feeds of all social media corporation varieties, it is so REFRESHING AND REASSURING to have a thick volume of corporeal text in my hands that encapsulates EXACTLY the events that happened between 2008 and 2015, and puts them together in such a way that really makes sense of what has happened to our world.
Maybe it’s controversial to feel that way. There’s certainly a lot of idealistic thought contained here (and its YA fiction, so some of it is incredibly unrealistic, such as the protagonist taking on the entire US DHS) that governments and corporations have had plenty of column space to teach us how to reason our way out of agreeing with, and Wikipedia even informs me that it was pulled from one high school reading list because its themes were too much about questioning authority.
And maybe my love for it is a little bit romanticised and personal, because the events and the technologies and the talking points it references are EXACTLY the things that were current in my life throughout the years of 2008 and 2015; I was this awkward kid with my nose buried in my MacBook and always searching, always exploring more and more and more, and things like Occupy Wallstreet and stuff WERE my culture, in a way, because I saw them happen on the internet in real time.
And (I could continue this tangent forever) maybe it’s kind of messed up that these things I experienced only through the medium of the screen can mean so much to me when I wasn’t there physically... but it means a lot to me, all the same, to see them recounted and reappraised because they are happenings that I have no physical objects to solidly prove they happened, and people like my parents are probably not even aware they happened, but they were formative to me all the same.
And also the fact that we sure are not living in 2015 any longer, and the time that the book is set in doesn't exist, and still lots of media and stuff haven't caught up, is also strange to think about. Technology is superseded all the time and I’m sure that kids turning 18 today feel like they’re growing up in an even crazier and more unique time, and i don’t know, maybe i have to tune in to TikTok or something to fully understand what it is like for them, or maybe one of them will pick up pen and paper and write a book about it some day so i can learn and relate, despite creative writing degrees being severely defunded by the government.
I hope they do.
But i’ll keep this summary short sharp and sweet and just say - please. Please read this book. It is one of a kind. It is a little soppy and cliche in the vein of most YA. it has a bit of a male-wish-fulfilment vibe about the protagonist’s girlfriend. BUT. It’s fantastic and heartbreaking and incredible all the same. AMAZING AMAZING 10 STARS.
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Phil Lapsley - Exploding the Phone (2013)
Let’s talk about nostalgia.
I’m so nostalgic for the 2013-2015 era that I haven't upgraded from an iPhone 6, so I can live comfortably in my low-tech echo chamber and avoid hyper-connective developments like TikTok and Instagram Reels which I know would be fatal for my long-fought-for, recently-revived attention span.
like it or not, but this is technology at its peak. everything since then has been a slow decline
But these days, nostalgia drenches everything. You have, according to various internet self-proclaimed cultural expert magazines, teens who are nostalgic for an experience they’ve never had listening to mallwave, Instagram accounts like Velvet Coke dedicated to highlighting fashions of the 90s that, until the Kardashian/Fashion Nova/BBL era, were considered very grave mistakes. People are so nostalgic for simpler times that they be romanticising Motorazor flip phones and velour tracksuits, and the days where celebrity paparazzi picks were plastered over thousands of magazines that have since folded
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And, you know what? I get mad nostalgic too.
Nostalgic for the times long gone before Anonymous was infiltrated by the FBI, and equated with the alt-right, before their members were either jailed or snapped up by influential tech companies, when they were just a crew of young kids punch drunk on the power that being able to hack into the poor password protection of multinational corporations to expose their sins might give a 17-year-old 4chan lurker (not to mention helping stage the Arab Spring, support people in uprising from tyranny etc).
Highly recommend this book
I recommend this book a little less
But what’s funny about my obsession with computer hackers, is it all led one way - and that was toward realising that the very first hackers weren’t just geeks hanging out on old message boards shielded by anonymous user names.
The very first incarnation of the computer hacker didn't hack into computers at all - they hacked into phone systems.
It’s NERDY AF, but, if you skim read past the technically detailed pages, THIS is one of the greatest, most action packed books I think I’ve ever read in my life and I thoroughly recommend it to all people who are filled with joy by tales of human ingenuity!
It centres around the ‘phone phreak’ community, a name given to a loose group of people who all, one day, spontaneously began messing around with the phone network and discovering ways to take advantages of loop holes in the primitive system. Because, you see, before the phone network was run by computers, it was run by actual people.
You picked up the phone and the operator on the other end asked who you wanted to dial. You told her, she’d connect you - voila. Even more instant than Siri.
Obviously, aside from the fact that certain phone switches only connected with certain others, so to make a long distance phone call you might need to be connected with like five or six other long distance phone centres until you finally found one who could connect you with who you wanted to speak to.
Anyway, these phone phreaks carefully studied the makeup of these phone switchboards and they discovered a few interesting things.
After careful study, trial and error, etc they found that Bell Phones had certain test lines that you could call for free, and acted as impromptu conference calls for anybody else who also happened to call the same number at the same time. Sure, there was generally a busy tone playing while you were connected, but you could speak over it, and connect with any other stranger who happened to share your interest in playing with phone lines - a whole community formed this way, which anticipated the internet message board in its early incarnations.
RIP to the early golden days of the net
More enterprising phone phreaks realised that you could invent devices that mimicked the tones sent down the analogue phone network and secure yourself long distance phone calls for free. In fact, making these devices is exactly how the founders of Apple got their start in tech - and almost ended their careers, too, until a narrow escape from the FBI
It was a glamorous time - nerds, drugs and constant surveillance from tech-stunted authorities wondering exactly how and why so much fraud and theft was being committed involving the telephone system.
But, all good things must come to an end.
As Bill Acker is quoted as saying: “Right now, we have more control over the phone system than we will ever have again.”
The telephone company, sick of being ripped off, were eager to find a solution. They also had a monopoly on telephone service and, thus, unlimited funds at their disposal to upgrade their network. And so digital phone services began replacing the analogue dial tones, and so the interest factor of exploring non-standardised and regionally different phone system was eradicated as everything became the same.
I think that’s what drives my nostalgia for the past. I’m so bored by this globalised standardised culture where everything is all the same. Same trends on Netflix and same two phone companies making all the phones and forcing you to do the same boring updates, and same Google and Facebook that everyone uses to communicate, being followed by the same ads based on the same algorithms all around the internet, with Spotify and YouTube dedicated to bringing you more of the same content that you viewed and listened to last time blah blah blah, etc etc etc.
But then again, just like Bell Telephone corporation was broken up for having a monopoly on phone services in the 1980s, so Facebook is facing a similar type of lawsuit.
And, what I think this book demonstrates that can’t ever be broken, is human ingenuity. It is human nature to seek to overcome limitations of any kind, and like skater kids always ride their bikes pursued by security in the mall, so do the latest trends become routine and then boring and attention turns to something different and fresh and new.
So, what will be next? I look forward to seeing.
~~~so n0stalg1c 4 dis p@st i n3v3r 3xperi3nc3d~~~
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Ted Chiang - The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010)
It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post and really that’s because I’ve decided that I feel happier as a person when i avoid the daily reality of going onto the internet and seeing that, despite our hopes and dreams for the year 2020, all it’s really given us technologically is elon musk using the venture capitalist model to achieve a series of childhood dreams for profit, and that a bunch of potato chip companies have decided to make chips that taste like different sauces, and a bunch of sauce companies have decided to make mayo that tastes like chip seasoning.
whyyyyyyy
I mean, that’s an overly bleak and oversimplified outlook, but it kind of relates to the short story I am describing today, from the masterful collection Exhalation by Ted Chiang.
I’d include some fun biographical information about Ted Chiang, but I don't know that much about him and his wikipedia age is able to refine his birth date to an exact year but not month, so he seems kind of private which I think is pretty cool, and his stories were recommended to me by a friend of mine telling me about them at a picnic and i was like “yeah let me write that down I’ll check them out” as you do but rarely actually follow through with, but the stories sounded so cool and up my alley that I actually did follow through and I’m glad I did. The whole collection is amazing... but the story “The Life Cycle of Software Objects” is particularly exceptional, and this is the one i will be recommending that you read today!
So....
It basically follows the story of Ana, who used to be an animal trainer until all the real animals died out, and is hired by a software company to train a kind of AI animal that they want to release as a consumer product, for people to raise as if their own and have the satisfaction of nurturing consciousness to maturity. A series of commercial and technological challenges ensue, the AI creatures (digients) fall out of favour with the consumer market and are superseded by new technologies, and Ana and the other trainers are left with these rejected creatures, who they have developed deep affections for, who are stranded in cyberspace. They want to fund software engineers to be able to update their code so they can exist in the new digital spaces, but there isn't much interest, until virtual sex company Binary Desire comes along with an offer that is hard to refuse - they’ll fund everything needed to improve the lives of the digients, but with the aim of then offering a them as a product for a consumer market interested in forming sexual relationships with the creatures.
UMMMM MAJOR ETHICAL DILEMMA ALERT!!
LIKE, HOW DO YOU QUANTIFY THAT CHOICE?
And i won’t include any spoilers, so you’ll have to read the story to find out ;)
But what I love, love, love about the story and Ted Chiang’s writing as a whole, is that it’s so realistic in its approach to technology.
Like, you know, obviously you have some sci-fi that is completely in love with the potential of technology and foresees robot maids
not quite
And flying cars
relatively inefficient
but what these science fictions failed to anticipate is the inner workings of finding funding for technological advancement in late capitalism and how it utterly warps the effectiveness and priorities of what products do actually make it to market
something is very wrong :(
But what Ted Chiang does masterfully is outline the peaks and valleys of popularity and journey to commoditisation and commercialisation of every new trend/product/technology/meme and that’s what makes this short story so visionary and incredible. It’s almost like a parody, except that it’s so true to life.
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this is, in hindsight, the moment it all started going downhill for us
You know, maybe some people say that warfare spurs on technological innovation. Probably more likely, it is porn. And so the central dilemma - a virtual sex company wanting to fund these AI creatures that their creators envisioned as pets - is just so warped and ridiculous that it’s... incredibly realistic.
READ THIS STORY! And let’s hope 2021 brings us more enlightened brighter days LMAO.
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Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
I’ve been reading a lot about the future lately and unfortunately things don’t exactly look fantastic for us homo sapiens as a species.
TLDR summary: once companies are able to replace human workers with machine robots and algorithms, it’s over for us as human workers because why wouldn't they want to make the cash money savings, and even with the universal basic income they only want to introduce so we don’t hunt down the 0.001% of business owners that will remain, social mobility will be eviscerated and we will live in a feudal society. Except at least in a feudal society the monarchs needed the labour of the plebs to get resources. We’ll basically be surplus to the requirements of the people on the top of the ladder. Economies will crash, because a healthy economy needs the workers to have enough purchasing power to support other industries. There’s a huge argument in this book FOR the eradication of crony capitalism and the reversal of all cuts to government services, arts bodies, etc because the more secure our jobs and the better wages the average person is able to earn, the more wealth inside the community generally BUT NOBODY WANTS TO TELL YOU ABOUT THAT WEARING THEIR CHINOS AND RM WILLIAMS BOOTS DEBATING WITH YOU ABOUT THE ECONOMY ONLINE FROM EITHER SIDE OF THE SPECTRUM. Sorry for getting heated.
And this book
In one word: terrifying. Like the atomic bomb dance, Bostrom sees a super intelligence as an inevitability, and argues we need to get there before threatening foreign powers get there first. He thinks we will inevitably (without presenting evidence as to why) be ruled by a superintelligence under a one world government, but basically acknowledges that a truly super superintelligence would be much smarter than its controllers, would know how to spread its tentacles through everything and basically achieve world domination over us poor human beings, the children playing with blocks who accidentally press the wrong buttons and eviscerate ourselves.
Bro, I just want to be Amish.
Like, seriously, sometimes i think about the future and find comfort in the idea of becoming Amish, or joining a Monastery, or moving to Pete Evan’s commune in the NSW hinterlands.
I am more serious than you’ll ever know.
Because right now our species is fxxxing around with some stuff that we have the technical knowledge to understand, without countering that arrogance with an understanding of the soul.
And Urusla K Le Guin knows that, and has been knowing that for a long time. And that’s why this book is a cautionary tale that I think is more applicable now, than ever before.
So, The Lathe of Heaven is about this guy who has dreams that change the world. He’ll go to sleep, the world will be one way, he’ll have a dream and wake up to find that the events of his dream have changed reality completely.
Understandably, this makes him terrified of sleep.
He overdoses on a drug that stops you from dreaming and has to go to a therapist, who convinces him that he thinks he is insane. BUT - the therapist actually believes him - and sees a way to harness this power for his own benefit. Soon, the therapist is manipulating his dreams for his own benefit. The therapist first improves his own material position, then sets himself about using the dreams to bring about desirable outcomes for humanity like world peace. Only, things always have sneaky little inadvertent outcomes, don’t they?
Problem --> solution --> solution creates bigger problem - the summary of many of humanity’s efforts to “fix” the world so far
He wants to eliminate racism, so everyone’s skin becomes grey and the beautiful diversity of different cultures on the planets is lost.
An attempt to solve “overpopulation” reduces the population via devastating plague (lil too close for comfort in our current times)
And, desiring world peace, he inadvertently creates an alien invasion on the moon, which unites the people of earth against this existential threat.
(side note - the aliens are truly my favourite characters in the book. LOVE them.)
Says George Orr the protagonist, witnessing the problem after problem caused by his therapist’s ignorant, egotistical efforts to play God and fix things that are not his to solve:
“To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough. You have to … be in touch. “
IMO the true mysteries of the world are the sacred knowledge of the people who knew how to live in harmony with the earth’s natural processes.
And i really hope our scientists and tech barons realise that before we’re all left behind.
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Iain Reid - I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2016)
Ok, straight up, I’ve never ever read a novel or short story that had me genuinely scared.
except for this book that made me cry when i was 11, but I’ve repressed that from my memory
You know, there’s books that make you feel a little tense or gross or tensed out or weird (Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe, maybe that short story by Chuck Palahniuk about the pool circulation pump which is not for the faint-hearted MAJOR cONTENT WARNING)
But for the most part, right, it’s just words on a page and doesn't get under your skin quite as bad as, say, some video-conjured spook with a major split end problem
Or what i personally view as the greatest horror series of all time, the fantastic and mysterious Jeopardy
how were they allowed to broadcast this show at 5pm on the children’s channel?
Anyways, so horror movies = potentially traumatising, sleep with the light on, maybe there is a ghost in my closet feels. Horror books = quaint, can put down when they get too heavy and make a cup of tea. Right? Right.
Not anymore.
THIS BOOK IS GENUINE NIGHTMARE FUEL.
Everything about it is immediate - first person perspective, tight. Very short time span - literally, we open with the unnamed narrator, the girlfriend, in the car with her boyfriend Jake, on the way to meet his parents at their country house for the first time.
And things get weird - ASAP.
She hasn't told him, but she’s been getting repeated calls from “The Caller”, a prank caller who leaves repetitive and unnerving messages FROM HER OWN NUMBER. But this is fine, she’s just going to ignore it, and talk about philosophy with her boyfriend...
They get to his parents house and it’s like madly uncannily STRANGE, he doesn't talk the whole dinner, the mum’s got nervous twitches, and hears whispers, and then she decides to GO INTO THE BASEMENT where someone has been painting THE BASEMENT with creepy spirits in it...
I started reading this late at night by myself and man. I could not put it down. Every single page turned had something strange or unnerving or just straight out off that repulsed and fascinated me at the same time - it’s masterfully written. It truly is incredibly masterfully chillingly written.
BUT.
THE ENDING.
(has also been adapted for netflix by my main bae Charlie Kaufman)
SPOILER ALERT - I AM GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE ENDING NOW SO DON’T READ ANY FURTHER UNLESS YOU’VE READ IT ALREADY BECAUSE IT JUST WONT BE THE SAME
Okay
I hated the ending. I HATE TWO KINDS OF ENDINGS IN BOOKS.
THE FIRST ENDING I HATE, IS THE ENDING WHERE THEY WERE GHOSTS AND DEAD THE WHOLE TIME.
IM LOOKING AT THIS MOVIE IN PARTICULAR AS A TERRIBLE EXAMPLE OF THIS TROPE
its like WOAH all these weird stuff going on in the house is kind of creepy! What a great mystery! I am so intrigued. And then all of a sudden - OH THEY’RE JUST DEAD SPIRITS WHO HAVENT ACCEPTED THAT THEY’RE DEAD YET. All the fear is sucked out of the room. The thing i was kind of intrigued by, suddenly seems trite and lameeeeeeeee....
And the second type of ending that I hate, is unfortunately the type of ending that is portrayed in the book, I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
And that is the ending where EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE BOOK IS A PROJECTION OF THE PROTAGONIST’S SUBCONSCIOUS BECAUSE THE PROTAGONIST IS CRAZY.
Now, like, I understand there is one movie (that i haven't seen) where this is done really well, and the cop suddenly realises that he was the killer all along, or something like that.
And i also read the book Complicity by Iain Banks, and that made me roll my eyes when you work out the protagonist is crazy, but it also is full of a great depiction of tobacco and alcohol dependence that was written in such an immediate snappy way that i found some forgiveness in my heart for the trope.
sorry for spoiler
But the end of this book... just had me feeling like...
SUCH AN INCREDIBLE, ENGROSSING, GRIPPING BEGINNING. And then just like- the author doesn't even have to go to the effort to unravel any of the mysteries initially set up, because it was ALL IN HIS MIND???
Sooooooooooo disappointed.
:(
ruined the book for me. Now i don't even know if i want to invest the time to watch the Netflix special. Maybe i will get over it in time.
What do you think?
Are there any good examples of the they were dead all along or he was crazy the whole time tropes that disprove my distain for them?
Should i find the forgiveness and acceptance in my heart to see what Kaufman has done with the tale for Netflix anyway?
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he wasn't what i wanted what i thought no :(
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Don Watson - Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (2003)
Well, I’m back after a long absence, and while I’d love to tell you it’s because I was really busy doing important things, in actual fact I was just re-watching Veronica Mars (first and second series only) and became a little obsessive about the series, at the expense of, you know, consuming literature and stuff.
pukka shell necklace on a tv bad boy? yes, logan was my age 15 Dolly Mag reading OG celeb crush
But now I’m back! With possibly the most niche outwardly-geeky selection yet - a book that is extremely un-sexy in subject matter and yet somehow seems to sum up everything (and i mean everything) that plagues our dysfunctional public sphere and has culminated in the problems we are seeing manifest this year so far
Taking ‘The Decay of Public Language’ as its subject matter, and with a part of the book dedicated to replicating, as written, customer service letters the author received from Optus (to highlight their rhetorical deficiencies) this is probably a bit of a hard sell to get people to read.
But it also functions as a decimation of the managerial assumptions, adopted from corporate logic, that have ruined everything good about arts, culture, politics and society - and it does so in pages that are crammed full of sweet and sparkling ZINGERS.
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The crux of the argument is that, since everything started to be viewed through the lens of business, the language of business imposed itself on the way we think about everything, to the point where we cannot formulate views of success outside of KPIs, or descriptions for people who want to go to university to be educated outside of the word “customer”
and so it continues...
We’re at a point today, where not even sports coaches can describe their teams success in language that doesn't refer to ‘risk-taking’ or ‘the bottom line’. As Watson neatly summarises:
“No player in the history of the game to c.1990 was committed to the ball. Now every player must be.”
He notes:
A politician will now talk about promises being core and non-core as if these business categories mattered to a promise.
In the same way, teenage basketballers are told to be accountable as if they were global corporations
While politicians like MLK were once great orators, who quoted poets and had an astute command of language to inspire, to speak to principles, to speak to what it means to be human - our politicians sprinkle soundbites with poll-tested results-driven words like ‘mateship’ in
“the verbal equivalent of a handshake.”
And it has the effect of numbing our minds and, ultimately, stifling our ability to express ourselves.
You know, I really did start this blog because I had just become so bored of all the algorithm-driven content out there. I started my degree in creative writing with a desire to read widely and no idea where to begin, other than a Google list of ‘10 books you must read before you die’ and things like that. But when you leave it to companies, to SEO-ranked Google searches, to YouTube videos and Netflix to suggest to you what content you should be consuming, there is a risk that your view of the world fades to a pin-prick. In this blog I want to showcase writing that’s outside the narrow line that’s illuminated by front page search results - and the idea behind this book illuminates exactly why.
Because, in our lives today, we accept the very flawed assumption that it is natural and normal to view something like a public art gallery as a business like any other, that should be run according to ‘strategy’ to achieve ‘outcomes’ that are unable to be detailed in any language other than that of the corporation.
The managerial landscape is the equivalent to the great map of Baudrillard’s simulacrum being rolled out over everything previously considered normal and natural about human life.
This ultimately manifests in change being pursued for the sake of change, rather than because it will materially improve anything about the human condition we are all limited by:
We are so thoroughly persuaded that everything depends on adapting to the new, we are letting go of the language for no better reason than that it is very old.
WOW readers
sorry i went so DEEP in this review
tfw u use the meme when you haven't even seen the film
but this book is deep and will make you laugh cry and everything in between! And for a book with a lot of space dedicated to replicating how even the BoM’s language to describe weather has been corrupted by managerial speak (e.g. the re-conceptualising of ‘rain’ to ‘rain event’) - that’s a hell of an accomplishment!
and one more for the lulz. it’s a sick, sad world.
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Michael Herr - Dispatches (1977)
When I was a teenage edge lord, blind to social justice concerns, I thought Hunter S Thompson was the coolest guy, and that his books (the one I loved most of all was The Rum Diary) were the epitome of how amazing, energetic, surrealist, electric writing could be.
Now, thankfully, my approach to the world is informed by a wider perspective, and I appreciate how white-male-centric the viewpoint of “New Journalism” was - I’m talking about writers like Tom Wolfe (although I still think that Radical Chic is worth a read), I’m talking about the free-flowing streams of consciousness that hold echoes of Jack Kerouac’s beat philosophy...
And despite acknowledging its limited perspective, there are still things I love about the style of writing - its flow, its technicolour realism. Most of all (and especially when reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote), I love the strange out-of-place feeling you get when information that we’re conditioned to associate with visual mediums like Netflix documentaries is replicated in print. Of course, in the 70s and 80s before wide-spread access to such technology, they had no choice. Words alone had to evoke setting and mood, just as how b-roll footage, music and lighting do these days. In these books, I think the value of the printed word really shines - kind of like we all know it’s much better to read the book before you see the movie.
This is one such book.
Michael Kerr was a journalist for parts of the Vietnam war, and the novel he’s produced (although at times fictionalised) is a really visceral depiction of many of the realities of battle for soldiers on the field:
Maybe you couldn’t love the war and hate it inside the same instant, but sometimes those feelings alternated so rapidly that they spun together in a strobe wheel rolling all the way up until you were literally High On War...
Not confined to mere factual narration, he really goes into detail on the impact it all - mentally, physically, emotionally:
Thousands of people died in Vietnam that night… and for the next six years I saw them all, the ones I’d really seen and the ones I’d imagined, theirs and ours, friends I’d loved and strangers, motionless figures in a dance, the old dance. Years of thinking this or that about what happens o you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterwards you can’t handle the experience. Until I felt that I was just a danger too.
He acknowledges the limitations of what journalism can do to inform a public during such a war, both explicitly and in recounting the parasitic nature of sticking a camera at dead bodies, at heartbreaking situations:
The press got all the facts (more or less), it got too many of them. But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death… The jargon of Progress got blown in your head like bullets, and by the time you waded through all the Washington stories and all the Saigon stories, all the Other War stories and the corruption stories and the stories about brisk new gains in ARVN effectiveness, the suffering was somehow unimpressive… you got to a point where you could sit there in the evening and listen to the man say that American casualties for the week had reached a six-week low, only eighty GIs had died in combat, and you’d feel like you’d just gotten a bargain.
Is it obvious that I loved the book, because instead of describing the book I’m just quoting long chunks of it?
Recently, I’ve been reading The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, which is a thick book full of long sentences that’ll catch you slipping if you aren't paying attention, but remains the gold standard for emphasising the importance of enshrining human rights in law to protect from destructive over-governance
bae
And she tangles with theoretical perspectives on the tendency of certain regimes to pervert the natural human ability for creation and, instead, pursue blind destruction which can only lead to annihilation:
For power left to itself can achieve nothing but more power, and violence administered for power’s (and not for law’s) sake turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate
And I guess the reason i bring it up is because, while the philosophical enquiry is helpful, it’s just as gut-wrenching when the reality of Western society’s imperialist tendencies is depicted via long-form journalism, in anecdotal images and recollections.
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But, ya know, I’m no military commander so, like Bright Eyes says (ironically), i’m just gonna sip my tea and “leave the hawks of war in their capitols”, so to speak
Anyway, this book brings you up close and personal with the worst of human nature - from scenes of senseless destruction and ending of life, to the inherent necessity of dehumanisation when participating in “us vs them” conflict, to moments of gritty and macabre humour as coping mechanism that today we might describe as “toxic masculinity”.
It’s an incredible read.
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Alex Garland - The Beach (1996)
A couple blog posts back, I was referring to a list the BBC had written of “The cult books that lost their cool”. Seeing that it, in fact, contained a number of books that I really liked (Jack Kerouac and David Foster Wallace, to name a few), I immediately spiralled into an identity crisis (am I “uncool” according to BBC standards?) that was only relieved by the list then absolving me of the need to pretend to like Hemingway
its nothing personal bro, the work just does not resonate
Although, side note, I was really sad to hear of his persistent surveillance by the FBI :( but anyways
Back to the list by the BBC. I dunno, after reading it a few times I thought that maybe I should use it as a guide of books that I should read, and so, BBC commentary on its non-hipness notwithstanding (Richard is searching for a truly authentic experience, something that few even pretend to want any longer, preferring instead to enquire about what filter’s been used), I immediately decided to find Alex Garland’s novel, The Beach, at the library and give it a read for myself.
Here’s where I’d argue the BBC got it a little wrong: the novel is described as “amphetamine-fuelled”, but the strongest drug i recall anyone doing is weed.
#notevenonce
I do get why people might wanna talk smack about the book, though, because it opens with the typical kind of white privilege scenario of disaffected youth backpacking from island to island, ruining slices of paradise with their mere presence, because their pursuit of cool is then bragged about to their friends, enticing more and more people to visit these formerly untouched places, irrevocably changing the landscape from untouched paradise to tourist trap ... and the cycle continues endlessly, until the whole world becomes some kind of Western-centric holiday park for instagram influencers to travel for free in exchange for promotional portraits
couscous for comment?
Now i think about it, this theme (running throughout the whole book) may, in fact, be more relevant to our culture now more than ever (although not immediately so much in light of the restrictions on travel mandated by COVID-19).
Synopsis: Young British backpacker named Richard is given a map by a guy at his backpacker hostel who then commits suicide. The map marks out a special place on an island tourists aren't allowed to visit, Richard makes friends with a French couple and they decide to work their way to the forbidden destination... only to get there and find (spoiler) - an independent commune of free spirits who live at one with the land!
cue bulk imagery that we now relate primarily to microsoft desktop backgrounds
What could go wrong? Without going into too much detail, I see a kind of synergy between the plot and things I’ve heard about in relation to the novel (which I haven't read), Lord of the Flies.
Things go wrong. Disastrously wrong. It all unravels in a kind of car-crash narrative that you cannot look away from.
I read this novel compulsively over one night. It was that much of a page turner. I see people writing phrases on GoodReads like ‘intensely readable’ and I cannot help but agree. If you’re looking for a little slice of island paradise, a little trip to the beaches of Thailand and all the adventure and danger that comes along with it - all while staying COVID-safe in your neighbourhood and maintaining high standards of personal hygiene
Do urself a favour and grab a copy - this is the book for you!
there is also a movie
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Betty Medsger - The Burglary (2014)
I’ve been really into reading a lot of non-fiction recently, and so I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction book about people throughout history doing (imo) really cool things.
This ^ an incredible account of the history of pirate radio in the UK (content warning: absolutely spot on description of wet days in a flooding boat with no power in the freezing cold that will absolutely have you shivering by proxy even in the heat of summer or curled up under the snuggest doona).
^^ this is literally the most eccentric story I have ever stumbled upon, about a man whose achievements include (directly copied from wikipedia): “[inventing] the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant,[1] and [pioneering] the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets”, who went on to become a disciple of an occultist, Alestair Crowley, live in a commune, spend most of his time trying to invoke otherworldly beings with witchcraft, indulge in polyamorous relationships and eventually blow himself up under mysterious circumstances...
^^ and finally this book, which reads just like a spy novel, but was actually real life, about a female spy for the British who lived in Nazi-occupied France during WWII and, like, saved lives, lived undercover, did amazing things for her country... Just wow.
Turns out there’s a lot of people throughout human history who have done some crazy things that will blow ur mind.
;)
Anyway, most mind blowing of all, I reckon, is the tale of what happens when a group of ordinary citizens see injustice in a society and feel compelled to break the law to expose it, and restore democratic law and order that is chronicled in Betty Medsger’s The Burlary, a recount of the infamous burglary of FBI office that revealed what had been suspected but generally dismissed as a paranoid hippie delusion - that the FBI was routinely placing ordinary Americans under surveillance and harassing them for expressing their disagreement with official government policy.
What is so crazy about the book is that, until its release, nobody knew the identities of the self-appointed “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI”. Medsger herself was one of the journalists to whom the stolen files were initially mailed to, and only years later, at dinner, did two of the burglars, just ur average suburban couple, reveal to her that it was them who did it, and they’d lived for a long time in fear of being found out and gone on to live ordinary American lives.
Y’all i know i keep coming back to the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s like a broken record, but I am just so continually fascinated by the era... from the actual level of desiring meaningful participation and involvement with the political processes of their communities, to the fact that some activists would just drop everything and hitchhike their way to move to ares where they could, for instance, help end bus segregation or live on communes.
One of the participants in the burglary, interviewed in the book, said he was so outraged when he read a book about how unjust it was that America was participating in the war in Vietnam, he rang up the government and requested that they direct him to books and material that would back their position on the war. When they offered to send pamphlets of poorly-disguised propaganda, it wasn't enough. He called again and asked for more - can you image?
Like, it’s hard enough to get through to the Centrelink these days, let alone requesting the government provide sources to prove the correctness of official policy...
I was hypnotised by recounts of the commitment of religious groups to non-violent protest - breaking into draft offices and destroying conscription records, just to save young men they didn't even know from getting involved in a conflict agains their will. I’m not gonna lie - I even cried while reading this book, multiple times. Protestors won court cases on the basis of their conviction that government actions were wrong. Parents realised their sons had died in Vietnam for less-than-noble reasons. Above all, the purity of a (perhaps naive? Perhaps mistaken? But still admirable) belief in the rightness of the principles of democracy shines through:
the likelihood that the government, through the FBI, was spying on Americans and suppressing their cherished constitutional right to dissent. If this was true, he thought, it was a crime against democracy – a crime that must be stopped... Without the freedom to dissent without being spied on… dissent was empty, erased, useless.
innocent and pure times.
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how do you read so many books
haha well i used to read a heap when i was younger, but mainly like sweet valley high and baby sitters club so i wouldn't say that i had taste. and then i spent the ages from 14 years old until about 23 years old just addicted to the internet with zero interest or understanding about what kind of lasting satisfaction i could get from books that i wasn't getting from constantly, like, consuming these bite sized pieces of clickbait and flicking through tabs and abusing my attention span like a drug, etc. And so when I started reading again, I actually found it really hard to get into because my attention span was so low, and I had to keep trying to refresh my phone and stuff.
Then in first year uni I read this article that changed my whole perspective on reading: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/
which basically explains that while we’re born with all the skills we need to learn language and verbal communications, we need to learn how to read. And like any other skill we learn, we’re going to be bad at it until we get better. And i realised that, firstly, i needed to read more if i wanted to do well in what i was studying, and secondly that the more i read the better I was going to get at it. And so i really tried and it was hard, and I think it took about three or four months for me before reading books really became something I could do for a few hours at a time without wanting to check Facebook or anything.
But also since I started reading a lot, I’ve never been happier or kind of felt more able to understand life and express myself. And I really get sad when my friends speak about themselves saying things like “i’m not a good reader”, because I feel like if they just knew that reading was a skill that you might feel bad at but can get way better at if you know that you will get better at it when you invest time in, then they wouldn't speak so down on their abilities. and we’re one of the first generations where, like, it’s been easy for us to really get lax at the reading skill. and I also think there’s a bit of the instant gratification/short attention span to losing the ability to deep-read, because we’re so used to the short dopamine hits of news feeds and 15 second tiktoks, etc. I get a little sad when I think about it really! #readmore!!!! hahaha.
But also I'm a nerd w/o other hobbies lmao.
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Erasmus - In Praise of Folly (1511)
Ok so if I could get a little spiritual for a moment, surely I’m not the only person on the planet who has felt that the vibes recently have been a little... heavy.
There’s so much going on every time I scroll the Facebook feed. There’s injustices in the world, immense uncertainty about the future, bad news here, bad news everywhere... in these past few days, to me it has felt almost overwhelming. And, of course, it’s important to raise up voices and bring attention to causes in need, esp if we are already in a privileged position.
But, you can’t be scrolling the feed feeling that anger and sadness 24 whole hours out of the 24 in a day!
well, you literally can, and that’s the problem.
So, when the vibe is heavy, and it’s dragging you down, way down, in a way that’s bad for ur mental health - what is the solution?????
Switch up the vibe!
switch!
And that brings me to the subject of today’s book, which is all about turning the world on its head and looking at things a little differently.
This is Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus:
and if you can’t tell by his sick threads, he was widely considered to be one of the greatest scholars of his time (which was a long long long time ago - the 1500s, like, can you even imagine it? What did they do all day? What did they do at night when they couldn't sleep - no phone to scroll. What did you do? Maybe that’s why he’s written so many books...)
Anyway...
I will admit probably one of the biggest barriers to enjoying this book is that, having been written in another time, there’s a bunch of words he uses that we wouldn't use these days. And the sentence structure is a little off. But, persist through it - you’ll get used to it, and it’s worth it!
The main idea of the book/essay (which is written as an address from “Folly”, personified, himself, trying to convince you why he is the best thing since sliced bread)
which is a luxury that Erasmus, like, probably didn't even have
Is that life is only worth living - only liveable, in fact, because of Folly! The sacred spring from which we get life.
He says - life is extremely fun when you are a child, and extremely foolish. The wiser you get, the more serious and depressing things seem (I’m extremely paraphrasing - these are most definitely not his exact words) and, in fact, if we were only to “abstain completely from all intellectual exchange” we’d be happy and young forever!
My fools are plump, sleek and well groomed! They’ll never face any of the troubles of old age, unless they’ve caught a touch of the intellectual’s malaise – humans, alas, never manage a life that’s wholly blissful
He then proceeds to list various occupations and types of people, and explain why he, Folly, is a central part of their existence - letting fly with zinger after zinger...
youtube
ah, simpler times.
So, here we go:
The worst things always find favour with the greatest number, because the greatest part of humanity is under Folly’s influence.
Fools are such favourites with great monarchs that some kings can’t eat breakfast or start anything new or endure a single hour without them
The intellectual takes refuge in books by time-honoured authors and learns from them no more than how to write with style
The superstitious delight in hearing and repeating reports of miracles and far-fetched tales... The more improbable the story, the keener they are to believe
For lawyers, complexity is their criterion of excellence
Preachers: enjoy themselves describing every aspect of hell with such accuracy as to suggest they’d been resident citizens there for years.
Monarchs, if they had good sense, would realise that there was nothing more grim and repugnant than the life they lead.
Monks and friars: regard it as the acme of holiness to be so uneducated as to be actually illiterate (OMG ERASMUS hold back)
Philosophers: wasted the loveliest part of life in sleepless nights and mental and physical exertion, and hasn’t savoured the tiniest bit of pleasure in the tie that remains... Prematurely departing this life – though what does it matter when someone like this dies, since they’ve never lived? (I-- )
In conclusion, to be human is to be foolish, and even when we are taking our lives and occupations the most seriously, there are elements of our attitude utterly encased with folly - and we only have to adjust our viewpoint, to see this (and our lives) in a folly-embracing way.
Thus he leaves us, ending with a wise Greek proverb: I hate a drinking friend who can remember.
I’ll drink to that!
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Donna Tartt - The Secret History (1992)
Sometimes, I think the happiest times of my life were the two months I spent living without a TV or wifi in a small country town.
gather round children...
My housemate had just moved out, and I was going to move out two months later, and the internet was in his name, and I couldn't really be bothered going through the hassle of making my own internet account, etc, so I just figured I’d make do. And it’s funny, like, at first it was at times a little boring and a little scary. Sometimes, I just wanted a comforting noise to have on in the evenings when the sun was down and things were quiet.
So, I lived old school.
fun for the whole family
I listened to the radio... I read magazines... I played mp3s from my iTunes... and sometimes I just stared at the ceiling in silence. And, you know what? It actually was incredibly peaceful. I did all the stuff I had to use wifi for at work, and once I got home I dedicated myself to just... emptying my mind and chilling out.
GPOY
I was obviously frothing to get back to 21st century life but even still now, the world of instantaneous communication at my fingertips, and zoom chats to attend and so on - I think back about my life without these technologies and I feel a little nostalgic. Because, don’t you think, sometimes the pressure of always being on and available gets a little much?
You know. Zoom chats are awkward, because u can’t read body language so you’re either talking over each other or trying to judge if the gap is long enough to speak. And, with the option of sending an interstate friend a text or FB message, it feels like there’s too much pressure to... I don't know. Stay engaged in a conversation. Whereas, sometimes I just wonder if I’d have a better quality of discussion if I reverted to writing letters?
I am, once again, in danger of going full Luddite.
There’s something I like to do, when I want to delve deeper into my nostalgia for the past and step deeply inside an all-encompassing retro reverie. When I want to feel the textures of telephone conversations and notes hastily scrawled and dropped in pigeon holes. A time when study meant libraries, and old books and handwriting (not jstor), when you had to walk hungover to get food (no UberEats), when you could go to your college dining hall and enjoy a cigarette with your black coffee (ok, just joking about that one)...
In other words, I step into the world in between the covers of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
Donna Tartt is so cool. She went to Bennington College with my (extremely problematic) fav writer Bret Easton Ellis, and while he scrawled his Valium-drenched numbed-out hip-lit Less Than Zero, she was passing him chapter after chapter of the novel that would eventually (she takes her time writing - as you should - can’t rush perfection) become her first bestseller.
the epitome of cool
Anyway, the story goes something like this: Californian outsider from blue collar family attends arts school in wintry Vermont and becomes intrigued by a group of outsiders who spend their school days studying Ancient Greek with an impressive, passionate teacher with sparkling blue eyes. Eventually, they invite him to the periphery of their clique. As he slowly gets to know them, he becomes aware of a secret - they spend odd hours of the night whispering in secret, there are unexplained tensions and injuries and stains on the sheets...
Also, from the novel’s opening, you are aware that one member of the group will soon die.
anyone who’s read the book - would this celeb couple not be perfect to play the role of the twins if they were (which they should) to make some kind of netflix miniseries of the novel?
Suspense and intrigue ensues. There is the most vivid depiction of a cold winter I’ve ever read in a book, which had me shivering and clutching at my doona even at the peak of summer. As someone who has lived at a college, the richly textured depiction of college life sent me immediately back to the oak fittings and heavy, stuck windows of my first year dorm room. THIS IS A BOOK TO SAVOUR.
you also might learn a little something about the ancient greeks.
Anyway i read this Good Reads review of it where the reader was criticising the story because the characters were “pretentious” and it felt all like some kind of humble-brag about how “alternative” a group of friends might be and etc, and while I respect the review author’s POV i have to say I disagree totally. You know, most American novels about college-aged students tend to focus around the high-jinks and shenanigans they get up to, that is to say - they focus around the popular groups
ok, not quite college, but you know what I mean
And so i found it really refreshing that the main characters in The Secret History were certainly not cool (not cool in the sense of going to college parties to drink and hook up kind of cool) (not cool in the Bret Easton Ellis Less Than Zero way, which reads as if it were set in the same universe as this novel (probably kind of is) but about the ‘cool’ kids and makes for interesting parallel comparison); Tartt’s characters are extremely eccentric and, like, flawed in their own personal ways - but somehow painted with such a vivid brush that you could really imagine their appearances, idiosyncrasies, and etc...
Okay, okay, maybe it is slightly elitist. But a guilty pleasure kind of elitist for me! Step back into the roaring late 80s to 90s era, when college kids got the traditional liberal education for free - and totally took it for granted! Without their phones tracking their every move, the crushing pressure to learn the latest tik tok dances and the distracting void of scrolling through memes - it was a recent history but one that has irrevocably past. Read this book to savour it!
you don't know what you got til its gone...
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
So, I’ve been reading a lot of books about artificial intelligence recently.
The dominating sentiment is, paraphrased: it’s here, it’s already being put to use, it’s going to improve our lives, and to question its value is to stand in the way of progress itself!
it is true that opposition to new technology throughout history has frequently been short-sighted and, in hindsight, unwarranted
But.... hear me out. Right now, we live pretty comfortable lives, right? We can say we struggle - but we have phones in our pocket, technology, movies on demand. HOWEVER... by many metrics our lives are getting worse. Rich people are getting richer, but middle and lower class incomes are stagnating. To me, income inequality is the greatest problem of our time.
Now, my skills are in the humanities. I’m no economist. But ... I see how there could maybe be a correlation between a) companies seeking to “lean out” operations and “restructure” in pursuit of increased profits b) increased casualisation of the workforce leading to income insecurity and c) the aforementioned increase in income inequality. Like I said - I’m no expert in the field. But it would stand to reason that these three phenomena are interrelated.
To me, desirable technical advances would address this problem. I mean, we already know that we produce enough food to feed the world one and a half times over each year. Scarcity is an illusion. Technical advances should address this problem, not compound it - right?
Well, not so much.
Some contention on the accuracy of the context of this quote with what Einstein meant but... it’s oft-quoted so I’ll quote it again.
I read the following books on artificial intelligence and they sure make clear advertising pitches about how they’ll help businesses increase their profits. The problem with the bias is that they make it sound inevitable. They make it sound like anyone who wants technological innovation to be matched by regulation that safeguards human rights in the face of such change, is a Luddite standing in the way of progress.
But economics and science without humanities can never tell the full story of what’s important in human life. One author freely acknowledges that, before a cancer diagnosis, he would have not even thought twice about putting his work before his family and the birth of his child. The other problematically asserts that, without science: “A few million humans would live in savannahs and forests, eking out a hunter-gatherer existence, without writing or history or mathematics or an appreciation of the intricacies of their own universe and their own inner workings” (which is exactly the kind of colonialist thinking we are trying to dismantle in 2020 - as if indigenous cultures didn't have as much of, or possibly even more of an understanding about the universe, the environment and humanity than our Western culture!)
The point I’m making (perhaps unpopular) is that science or economics without humanities has huge blindspots, first and foremost in the idea underpinning the so-called AI revolution, which is that greater productivity = progress. That this greater productivity is always and without exception a good thing.
Says Lee on the world post-AI: People will face the prospect of being permanently excluded from the functioning of the economy. They will watch as algorithms and robots easily outperform them at tasks and skills they spent their whole lives mastering.
In this future, while productivity = profit for business owners, the people are utterly excluded from the system of economics that supposedly without exception is a marker and champion of democracy.
Man, I’m getting a little serious here - lemme cool down.
mfw mac gets on the bridge of perfecto like: Just play it cool, baby, just play it cool... you know, cool
Anyway, to get back on the topic, even though it’s been out for OVER FIFTY YEARS, i still think Kubrick’s depiction of AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey remains the definitive depiction of the pitfalls we are opening ourselves up to experiencing with the more automated we make our lives.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a very slow-moving movie that takes you on a journey through the whole of humanity’s lifetime, from the very emergence of homo sapiens, to our predicted end at the hands of advanced technology and also advanced lifeforms.
a little bit chilling.
Kubrick whips his way from thousands of years in the past to thousands of years in the future in an instant, so slick you don’t even get whiplash. We find ourselves on this retro-futuristic spaceship
special effects so good ppl thought he faked the moon landings
bound for Jupiter on a mission so secret that half the crew is suspended asleep, and the true purpose won’t be revealed until they reach their destination. BUT things go wrong
As they often do in movies.
Hal doesn't take very kindly to the humans trying to shut him down.
Without spoiling too much, it culminates in psychedelic visual sequence that takes us through time and space and place which has (imo) not been equalled in cinema since.
tfw the aliens abduct u and try 2 make u feel comfortable
ITS AN EPIC MOVIE. Go watch it. And... let’s heed the knowledge gathered in the past in approaching the tricky technological conundrums of the future, yeah? We don’t wanna end up like the astronaut in the pod, cast out adrift to a certain death in space, if you know what I mean?
pic related.
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David Foster Wallace - Mr Squishy (2000)
Yes, this is a post about another short story. Sorry, I guess I just read a lot of them or something. I guess I retract what I said in a previous post, that they are unsexy and unappealing to read. They’re totally okay. You should read more. And, as usual, there’s a bit of a back story as to how I got to this one...
So, I’ve considered Dave Eggers to be a great writer ever since I read his 2013 novel The Circle (now a major motion picture starring Emma Watson) which portrays the dystopian perils of a Facebook-like company urging everyone towards maximum disclosure.
what’s on ur mind? Everyone would love to know haha. Keep refreshing the page for more likes and shares and dopamine hits! Don't be left out! Tell everyone what you are thinking - all the time! Help us help you! We just want you to connect....
The Circle is a great book. I was like - man, I’ve got to read more writing by this man. But, the rest of his writing?
I’ll let everyone battle it out on GoodReads. Some quotes:
it's *so cool* to be post-dave-eggers, and talk about how you didn't really like this book all that much, and it's even cooler to totally hate this book.
I was reading this book and around page 237 (or was it 327?), I figured it out- he's talking to ME. He wrote this book for me. Dave Eggers looked into the future and saw that I would want to read a self-referential, self-satisfying memoir.
I disliked so very much about this book.
The reviews above are talking about his debut novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I... don’t have much to say about. There were good bits. There were incredibly tedious bits.
I would rate it a solid 3/5
It being pitched as a non-fiction memoir, then using lots of narrative elements that are mostly associated with fiction kind of confused me. I was like - ok, there’s no way this guy actually used his inheritance money to launch a real life street press magazine, and then convinced an actor to fake his own death just for the publicity.
But he did.
things u cannot do with social media
And anyway, long story short, kind of fascinated by the idea that in the 90s, at a time before media conglomerates had acquired almost all small press and advertising revenue was at all time lows, and even getting people interested in actually paying money to hold a magazine in their hands and read it was probably the most major barrier to entry to the market; the idea that in the 90s it was fair game and a bunch of college kids could just make a magazine and print it and kind of guerrilla their way into that market, as some kind of genuinely authentic counterculture... wow. I knew I had to try to find out a little more about these types of magazines that Dave Eggers curated and published.
The 90s
Which brings me to The Best of McSweeney’s, a compilation of some of the best content to be published during the run of McSweeney’s which was yet another magazine thing published and curated and etc by Dave Eggers.
The whole book is worth a read.
And the stand-out story, Mr Squishy by David Foster Wallace.
I’m conflicted on how I approach David Foster Wallace’s legacy because he does have a history of abusive treatment towards women, yet on the whole I feel like his writing is revolutionary and unique, and acts to undermine the dominant paradigm instead of reinforce its ideology. My ambivalence is shared by Electric Lit’s 20 Authors I Don’t Have to Read Because I’ve Dated Men for 16 Years: (”A list like this wouldn’t be complete without DFW, but at the same time his inclusion feels disingenuous, because when it comes to Wallace, I am the literary bro cornering you at a party to ask if you’ve read him and why not. I love DFW’s work in the same over-personal obsessive way this list is meant to mock. Wallace is also an author whose body of work defies the kind of easy summary that can be gleaned from listening to a dude talk at a party about his favorite writer, or applied independent of actual engagement with the writing...”)
BBC Culture considers his magnum opus Infinite Jest to be a cult book that has lost its cool.
But, if that’s the case, how do you explain Mira Gonzales (in a defiant act of anarchy that would appall even the least-conservative librarian) constructing a pipe out of the book to smoke weed from, BBC? How do you explain that?
Removed from the context of this preceding discussion, however, I regard Mr Squishy as a work of art. 63 pages of DFW’s signature dense prose (the kind of prose that catches you slipping; this is a story to read with your morning coffee, not just before you hit the hay at night) about a marketing focus group for a new Mr Squishy snack, a story that highlights the manipulations of advertising, marketing groups’ ultimate impotence in the face of a brand that knows the kinds of conclusions it wants to have proved, and the way world wide web technology loomed, casting its great shadow over the particular slice of history Wallace is writing in, threatening to rupture the security of the jobs around which people like marketing facilitator Schmidt have based their entire lives.
This is a story of many layers.
Many people have already written much better on this story than I could ever dream of.
Amazing blog interpretation highlighting the multi-layered nature of the narrative (did I mention the narrative has layers?)
570 word sentence highlighted and dissected for its brilliance (don’t let something so ominous as a 570 word sentence deter you, pls)
How are you gonna get yourself a copy of this story to absorb its brilliance, to appreciate the way it delves deeper inside a fake character’s head than other writers make it seem possible to go? I don’t know. I’m sure there’s a PDF flying about on the internet somewhere. You can borrow The Best of McSweeney’s from any library in South Australia. The story also, I believe, can be read in DFW’s short story collection Oblivion. However you find it is not important. What’s important is that you read it. This man does things with words you never knew were possible!
And, yes, I bragged on Instagram about having started to read DFW’s epic Infinite Jest. (Having re-read this blog post I feel the need to clarify that the picture above is not me, nor my hand; I found it on the internet). That was two years ago, and I am still about halfway through the 1079 page tome. It takes time, okay. Time and patience. I am in the (elongated) process of reading it, and anticipate I will finish it soon...
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Sean O’Beirne - A Couple of Things Before the End (2020)
Life in the age of the world wide web is a crazy thing. Never before have we been so blessed with instant connection and access to the honest thoughts and expressions that crowd the heads of our fellow citizens.
Our language is in a constant state of evolution.
Expressions that hold meaning for us today are expressed in terms far different to those of the past.
But, what really interests me is the way certain words have become emptied of meaning through overuse. Don Watson interrogates this so-called ‘decay of public language’ in his book, Death Sentence, pointing out that a lot of government rhetoric (‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’) has become so broad as to be utterly meaningless.
He uses the words ‘anaesthetic prose’ to describe this phenomenon. Kevin Rudd’s speech-writer (citation pending) wonders whether politicians use this language to avoid the inevitable backlash that comes with setting goals and failing to achieve them.
Much better to set so-broad-as-to-be-meaningless targets to avoid that trouble entirely - amirite?
if u understand this meme ur at least as old as me
This is all a roundabout way of bringing me to the book I am describing today, a magnificent collection of short stories by Australian author Sean O’Beirne.
First up - what great cover art.
Well, they’re not so much stories as fragments of consciousness. And, given that our consciousness is further fragmented by the standardised forms of communication available to us on the internet, O’Beirne further fragments his snippets of consciousness by playing around with these forms.
In fact, his story Water Girl Ty Tucky is simply a collection of comments, like the kind you get at the bottom of dailymail articles, expressing what fictional readers may or may not have gotten out of watching an interview about “Ty’s efforts to reconnect with Water Girl after their one-year hookup and divorce.”
The story Leader takes the form of a transcript of a press conference given by a Trump-esque leader. Footy Mysteries is a series of plot synopses from the fictional FOOTY MYSTERIES book series (giving me mad flashbacks to Scholastic Book Club)
along with that primary school banking club, an iconic part of my childhood upbringing
But what all the stories emphasise, to me, is how our words have become hollowed of their meaning through their standardised use in modern communications.
Take The Anzac Spirit, which you can read here.
A reporter’s controversial statement on ANZAC day triggers apology after apology, think-piece after think-piece. We’ve seen it happen time and time again in real life. Reproduced in fictional form, the predictable reactions and reactions to the reactions compel the thought - what is the meaning of the repetition of the outrage/apology/outrage/apology pattern? Column inches are filled, apologies given, excuses made, but at the end of it all - what are these people trying to say?
What does it say about us?
Can the routine, now-predictable defence of the many cultural myths that, when challenged, compel these kinds of responses continue to say anything at all meaningful about who we are and the ways that we live our lives?
Missy is a heart-wrenching piece of dystopia fiction exploring the following scenario. Imagine you are living in a climate apocalypse, and the temperatures are over 50 degrees every day and the aircon doesn't work anymore, and there are residential places you can live in where the temperature is controlled, but you have to apply via an agent and wait to hear back from them.
And so you email them, and don’t hear back from them, meanwhile life is getting worse and worse and worse.
And you email again - and still they don’t respond.
@ real estate agent: can i have my bond back tho? (JUST KIDDING FOR THE RECORD I HAVE NEVER HAD AN ISSUE RECEiVING BACK A REAL ESTATE BOND)
A terrifying possibility - that, in an apocalyptic future, we will still be held back by faceless bureaucratic process. In desperation, the protagonist finally abandons the formal tone of client-agent relations and pours her heart out: cursing the agent, amending the application, begging for a response... only to retract it all when she is finally approved: “As you say... these things take time, the proper checks have to be made, and I can understand you have to be careful in these really very uncertain times.”
Today we can communicate faster than ever, with anyone in the world. But quantity doesn't equal quality. Ease of communication doesn't necessarily facilitate depth. In many ways (maybe because of the more public and permanent nature of our communications) we are inclined to ‘stick to the script’ and say much less of what we mean.
I think it’s really tough for writers to respond to modern times, because so much is always changing at lightning speed. This collection of stories fascinates me because it both records the experience of being Australian at this point in history, and urges contemplation of the conversations we have on national-scale, and how these conversations impact (or don’t impact) our lives.
i love it
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Miss American Dream (2016)
Okay, so maybe with this post I am really pushing the boundaries of what one might classify literature. But i think anything’s art, if it makes me slightly uncomfortable, or if it leaves a little something niggling in my brain, some question left unanswered, that seems to indicate something profound and ambivalent about life or humanity.
And, for me, this ‘documentary’ does that.
It’s not a traditional documentary as such; it’s a compilation of all the paparazzi footage and interviews of its subject stitched together into chronological order; the digital residue left behind from a life of being paraded as a spectacle in the public eye. In that way, I guess it’s what the critics predicted when they talked about the “post-postmodern” or “remix culture” or however they imagined the 00s and 10s before realising the rate of change of technology meant many predictions would become obsolete the minute they were made.
The documentary takes for its subject Britney Spears, who was presented to every girl in the early 00s as a cultural artefact, the ultimate aspirational dream, and whose image was then used to sell millions (maybe even billions) of dollars of music, merchandise, beauty products, paparazzi photos...
Unfortunately for Britney, her fame collided with the intersection between traditional media and online, when there was both a thirst for unprecedented levels of access to celebrities and the technology to make it happen, before anti-paparazzi laws were tightened and before respect for basic human decency made people say - hold up, no, this woman is a human being not an animal.
And before celebrities could release statements or exclusive pictures on their own Instagrams and have the upper hand. It was a time when a bunch of people basically made a living stalking Britney:
I consider partylikeits2007 to be a kind of pop culture historian, because they’ve made a heap of videos using this technique. Full disclosure, i can’t find a source for where I was reading about this, but I was reading about how we’re almost living in a time considered “post-history”, because for the first time we can access images and pictures and information from any stage in history instantaneously, almost like it’s happening concurrent to current events. I think it’s almost disorienting, because we can access everything, but its fragmented and without context, and presented to us with commercially driven algorithms, and that’s why I value the work done by partylikeits2007, because very rarely are we given the opportunity to step back and digest large amounts of media and data after they have been stitched together into a cohesive whole.
Like, there are parts of Britney’s life that have made world news and are well-known in pop culture. Maybe you’ve viewed a few of the videos that are included in the footage by themselves and had opinions about them. But, stitched together, seen as one, the whole progression of the narrative in the public eye (and please note - it has nothing to do with the reality of Britney’s experience and everything to do with the narrative imposed on her by media) is utterly devastating. To what extent were we, the viewer, complicit in her objectification, in the use of her life’s events for entertainment? There’s probably something with a theoretical background to say about this all - the spectacle... a quote from Barthes or Baudrillard... but I think the emotional power of this documentary says it all without needing the critical theory reference.
Yes, the video is almost 3 hours long, yes that’s basically a marathon - but if you have the time and inclination, its an incomparable experience.
vimeo
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