Books
Finished off my alphabetical mission and got to move on to undirected reading!
U: Exodus, Leon Uris
Lots of sitting on the toilet and crying about the Holocaust. TMI?
Man, I have a lot of feelings about this book that aren’t necessarily “about this book” but about Jewish-American identity and Israel. It’s easy, in the current climate, to dismiss Exodus as problematic Zionist propaganda and judge anyone who would read it. I don’t doubt that it’s full of factual errors, and the portrayal of Arabs is definitely racist. But it is a historically important book–this was an international bestseller and, as such, played a big role in shaping a generation’s view of Israel in a way that’s difficult to shake off, even as more information has come to light about what really went on during some of the historical events covered in the book and what the Israeli government has been doing in the years since then. To be honest, I’m not especially informed on Israel, and reading Exodus, I was like, oh right, this is basically the the narrative I’ve absorbed from being an American Jew and this is why I feel conflicted about anti-Zionist movements on the left that I’m supposed to be supporting–because, especially when so many holidays revolve around “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat” and learning Jewish history is, like, the Spanish Inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust…it’s hard to separate Israel, the idealized safe haven from persecution, from Israel, the actual country. And what Exodus does really effectively, somehow, is show the horrors of pogroms, ghetto life, the Holocaust, and refugee camps in such a way that, emotionally, Israel feels like the only solution?
Okay, so aside from all that, Exodus as a piece of literature is not great! It’s way too long and not especially well-written. None of the characters really feel like people. The central romance–oh god, I can’t. The details of battles and military tactics–spare me. The way women are portrayed–eww:
With Karen near her she could keep the child from becoming an aggressive, angry sabra girl. It was good to live with a purpose, Kitty knew. But too much purpose could destroy womanliness. She had hit Jordana in a weak spot and she knew it. Since birth Jordana had been given a mission to carry out without question, at the price of her own personal happiness, career, and femininity. Jordana did not know how to compete with the elegant women coming into Palestine from the Continent and from America. She hated Kitty because she wanted to be more like Kitty and Kitty knew it.
(Now, arguably, this passage is just reflective of the character’s views and not the author’s. And, you know, the ’50s. Still gross. And let’s not forget all of the descriptions of “high breasted” women.)
V: Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese
Super compelling! Somewhat horrifying gynecological theme throughout and I’m not totally sure what to make of it. Like, it definitely highlights direct and indirect sexual violence women are subjected to–women dying in childbirth, women dying from STDs, rape, female genital mutilation, vaginal fistulae–but in a sort of detached way? Maybe that’s what this Guardian reviewer is getting at when she talks about the “brutality […] in the novel’s gender politics.”
W: Orlando, Virginia Woolf
I do not like Virginia Woolf as much as someone might expect based on everything else about me. This was a bit of a slog, although there are definitely some worthwhile passages in there.
Selected excerpt
The Old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of October 1928. People spilt off the pavement. There were women with shopping bags. Children ran out. There were sales at drapers’ shops. Streets widened and narrowed. Long vistas steadily shrunk together. Here was a market. Here a funeral. Here a procession with banners upon which was written ‘Ra–Un’, but what else? Meat was very red. Butchers stood at the door. Women almost had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin– that was over a porch. A woman looked out of a bedroom window, profoundly contemplative, and very still. Applejohn and Applebed, Undert–. Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. What was seen begun–like two friends starting to meet each other across the street–was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment.
This stood out to me, because E.M. Forster had a similar (in my view, anyway) passage in Howards End, expressing this sort of psychological car-sickness:
A motor-drive, a form of felicity detested by Margaret, awaited her. Charles saw them in, civil to the last, and in a moment the offices of the Imperial and West African Rubber Company faded away. But it was not an impressive drive. Perhaps the weather was to blame, being grey and banked high with weary clouds. Perhaps Hertfordshire is scarcely intended for motorists. Did not a gentleman once motor so quickly through Westmoreland that he missed it? and if Westmoreland can be missed, it will fare ill with a county whose delicate structure particularly needs the attentive eye.
[…]
She looked at the scenery. It heaved and merged like porridge. Presently it congealed. They had arrived.
It’s interesting to think that for the first generation of motorists, car rides would have come with this major perceptual shift and that not everyone was just like “woo cars! So fast and convenient!”
X: Sky Burial, Xinran
Wasn’t sure I’d be able to find an X, but this was available via HathiTrust (a few weeks after this, I did find a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my parents’ basement–oh well). This was…fine?
Y: Sorry Please Thank You, Charles Yu (2nd time – previously read in 2014)
There is at least one really good piece in here, but the “look how meta I am!” stuff doesn’t appeal as much as it did when I first read this. Similar to how I felt rewatching Community a few months ago.
Z: The Black Death, Philip Ziegler
The biggest struggle to get through. Unfortunately, I think I’m only capable of reading history that’s a bit more on the pop-history side than this. I was amused that for every single number cited (e.g., populations of cities, percentages infected), the author was like, “but it could be half that or twice that, who the fuck really knows”–which, fair enough! I wish we approached more history with a clearer sense of the confidence intervals around “facts,” but I recognize that would make for very tedious reading.
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Yay, done with the alphabet challenge! Like Cutting for Stone, this was super compelling while making feel embarrassed about how ignorant I am wrt African history!
Intimations, Zadie Smith
Not her best, but decent–which is totally fine, given that this is just a small collection of lockdown essays! I will continue to read every book Zadie Smith puts out.
The Internet of Garbage, Sarah Jeong
Super depressing!
Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev
Super fascinating! (And also depressing!)
A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov (tr. Vladimir and Dmitri Nabokov)
Sure, whatever. Probably worth reading more attentively at some point, maybe in a different translation. Given its place in the Russian literary canon, I’m glad to have finally read it, even if it didn’t make that much of an impression on me in and of itself. A few years ago, I stumbled upon this book called Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia in an academic library and was absolutely delighted by the title. After flipping through it a bit, realized how much more context I needed before I could actually read it–I have since read Sanin, which was the main topic, but collecting a few examples of “superfluous men” in 19th century Russian literature wouldn’t hurt. So: Oblomov–check, Pechorin–check.
Selected excerpt
Contradiction is, with me, an innate passion; my entire life has been nothing but a chain of sad and frustrating contradictions to heart or reason. The presence of an enthusiast envelops me with midwinter frost, and I think that frequent commerce with an inert phlegmatic individual would have made of me a passionate dreamer.
Trust Exercise, Susan Choi
Super compelling and also super frustrating. I’m still, months later, trying to decide how I felt about this. And can I convey that in any way less dumb than like, whoa the titular “trust exercise” is the book itself! And the act of reading in general!
It’s such a weird thing to feel betrayed by fiction within fiction (within fiction???). I guess with more conventional fiction, you know that it’s not describing real events, but there’s a sort of unspoken contract between author and reader that the characters and events described really do exist within the reality of the novel? Like, in the world of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett is a real person who exists and she really did go to those balls and have those conversations and marry Mr. Darcy in the end. If you go into Trust Exercise without having read anything about it, then based on the back cover summary and Susan Choi’s previous work, you read the first half thinking that, in the world of Trust Exercise, Sarah is a real person who exists and she really did go to those theatre kid parties and have those conversations and…what in the end?
Who the fuck knows, because that narrative gets cut off and we find out that what we just read is actually the first half of a novel that “Sarah” (not her real name) wrote based (to some unknown extent) on what actually happened within the reality of Trust Exercise. So you adjust to and get invested in that reality–and then the narrative gets cut off again. Is the third section the same reality as the second section, and it just turns out that the second narrator omitted some seemingly crucial details? Or does it not really matter what “actually” happened and who did what?
The core truth of the novel: there was an abuse of power. Adult men took advantage of teenage girls who might not have seen themselves as victims at the time. A performing arts school facilitated this by providing an environment in which teenagers are made to think of themselves as more adult than they actually are and boundaries are inherently looser, because ~theatre~ is all about being open with your body and emotions in a way that would be inappropriate in other contexts. That’s something essentially true outside of the reality of this novel–adults working with teenagers in a professional capacity have ample opportunity to abuse their power and sometimes (often?) do so! teenage girls sometimes enter into relationships with older men that they perceive as consensual at the time, only to later realize they were being groomed!–so why are we so concerned with what actually happened as described within the reality of this novel?
And why does this bother me so much more than other novels with unreliable narrators and/or big twists? Or something like The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, where you assume it’s just kind of quirky detective fiction and then partway through it’s like jk ALIENS AND ROBOTS. (Because! I wrongly assumed Susan Choi and I had a contract, as this wasn’t advertised as experimental!)
Selected excerpt
When we say we are obsessed, we say we’re possessed, controlled, haunted by something or somebody else. We are beset, under siege. We can’t choose. I was obsessed with Sarah, meaning obsessed by her, deprived by her very existence of some quality I needed to feel complete and in charge of myself. If you’d asked Sarah, however, she would have said she’d done nothing to me. That’s how it is with the people by whom we’re obsessed. They’ve obsessed us, they’ve transitive-verbed us, but no one could be more surprised than they are.
So who makes it happen–obsession? Unlike the things that I did blame her for, I didn’t blame Sarah for this. I didn’t blame either of us. Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost. I knew Sarah was my ghost, but she’d forgotten I even existed.
Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, Rebecca M. Herzig
Incredibly readable for non-fiction, and doesn’t come across as super opinionated (for better or worse)–it talks about views on and methods of hair removal over time, but the author doesn’t really interject to be like, “and hey, isn’t that super fucked up?” A lot of interesting historical context that I wouldn’t have ever thought about:
More to the point, the advent of the bathroom facilitated shaving’s passage from the public barber shop to the private space of the home. Where shaving previously relied on the help of paid or unpaid assistants, razors could now be used, safely and discreetly, in a room equipped with running water, drainage for effluvia, and a well-lit mirror. Shaving, formerly conducted by men on men in public, male spaces, moved into a sequestered room dedicated to maintenance of the body, where it could be practiced in unobserved solitude. The labors of hair removal were newly individualized and concealed.
Horrifying: the medicalization of totally normal hair growth patterns! The dangerous “treatments” women have and still do subject themselves to deal with this! Like, yeah, this is dated:
One of the most popular—and deadly—of these products, the thallium acetate depilatory Koremlu, cost only thirty-five cents per jar to manufacture but sold for between five and ten dollars per jar. Prior to the passage of the landmark Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938 (pushed to the fore of congressional attention due in part to injuries from depilatories), and before claims against the firm finally forced it into bankruptcy, thousands of Koremlu users were either killed or permanently maimed by muscular atrophy, blindness, or limb damage.
But I wonder if future generations will look back on waxing, electrolysis, laser hair removal, etc. as similarly brutal and not worth the risk.
Man, I’m so angry about depilation! Can we all just, like, stop? (I ask, totally hypocritically, because I still can’t let my upper lip hair grow for a week without becoming totally disgusted with myself and bleaching/chemically depilating/shaving it. Especially dumb in this age of mask-wearing!)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Worth it for the title essay on Haight-Ashbury. The other ones are certainly readable, but didn’t leave much of an impression.
Selected excerpt
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling
Yes, let’s have some more anger about medicalizing and capitalizing on women’s disgusting bodies!
Subkultura 2017: Stories of youth and resistance in Russia, 1815-2017, Artemy Troitsky
Not exactly what I hoped it would be, but interesting nonetheless and I would like to read more about pretty much every group mentioned in this– the 200-year scope is too broad to get deep into any of the subcultures introduced. Also, the physical book is really beautifully put together.
Troubled Blood, Robert Galbraith
I refuse to keep up the “Robert Galbraith” pretense, so I will be referring to the author of Troubled Blood as J.K. Rowling.
All of the current discourse about J.K. Rowling’s transphobia–sure, fair enough, but I don’t think it actually came through in this book, as much as critics wanted to make that an angle. To me, a much more blatant issue with this is the cruelty wrt people’s physical appearances. Okay, so it turns out I basically already said the same thing when discussing the first books in this post from 2017, but it remains an issue! Any evil, shitty, or just mildly inconvenient character will inevitably be described as overweight, balding, pockmarked, etc. in a way that feels so petty and mean-spirited (not to mention unkind to readers who may share any of those traits). Like, the narration revels in pointing these character’s physical “flaws”, and even if you interpret it as being Strike’s perception of a character rather than an objective narrative judgment of them–eww.
And since I felt so affronted by the length of this book (900+ pages!), I found myself assessing the necessity of every detail included. Just like–why have you chosen to highlight this? Is it going to tie in to a plot point later on or are you just trying way too hard to convey the ~vibe of the scene? Do we always need to know what exactly people are wearing and eating? Do we need the repeated descriptions of Robin looking longingly at “unhealthy” food and reminding herself she’s on a diet? I think there have been mentions of the Robin watching her weight in previous books as well and it makes me so uncomfortable! Maybe because, combined with the unflattering physical descriptions of unlikable characters, it feels like J.K. Rowling’s body image issues coming through the text. (To be clear, I have no idea if J.K. Rowling has ever spoken about body image–this is purely speculation and projection.) Looking back on the previous books, I could see Robin’s dieting as an aspect of her stifling relationship with Matthew and feeling pressure to be his “type”. Now that they’re no longer together–one could argue, I guess, that it ties in to the ways he’s still controlling her through the divorce proceedings. But even if that is the case, I don’t think it’s worth it for the readers.
Anyway, it’s easy (and fun!) to criticize Rowling’s writing style, but fuck, the Strike books are still incredibly readable and obviously the will-they-won’t-they between Robin and Strike has me hooked and I’m sure I’ll read the next one and hate myself a bit for it.
TV
Current shows: I Hate Suzie, Indian Matchmaking, I May Destroy You, Love Island (US), Lucifer, Stateless, Strike, The Duchess, The Great British Bake Off, Uploaded
Rewatched: Line of Duty, New Blood, Taskmaster (UK), The Circle (France)
Stand-up specials: Jack Whitehall: I’m Only Joking, Sam Jay: 3 in the Morning
What a weird cultural document this season of Love Island–where the “villa” was on a Las Vegas rooftop–is going to end up being. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s still absolute garbage. At some point one of the contestants says “I forget there’s like a whole-ass pandemic happening right now,” but the show really doesn’t let us forget that.
In terms of non-garbage TV: I Hate Suzie and I May Destroy You–both super well-written, timely, and occasionally uncomfortable (in an intentional way). Old seasons of Taskmaster hold up.
Movies
Apparently the only movies I can enjoy at the moment are music documentaries, because everything else I watched over this period–well, maybe poor choices (Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga and Guns Akimbo are not good movies by most standards, I think), but some of it is just me–impossible to really enjoy Hamilton because the hype (2015-present) is still too annoying, impossible to concentrate on Mystery Train in the way it probably deserves.
- Mystery Train (1989)
- I barely even remember watching this. I want to like Jim Jarmusch movies more than I actually do.
- Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020)
- Ugh, I have so many problems with this but I think there’s a kernel of something worthwhile in there?
- Hamilton (2020)
- Okay, so what would I think of Hamilton if I could separate it from all of the hype? I probably don’t dislike it. It’s obviously a great achievement on a lot of fronts, and it did make me cry at times. But I think I still would feel a bit of distance from it, as I find it difficult to connect with sung-through musicals, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s acting is…not great, to me.
- Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets (2014)
- Fine, not amazing.
- Guns Akimbo (2020)
- I would have liked this 10 years ago, probably.
- The Old Guard (2020)
- I would have liked 5 years ago, probably.
- Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm (2020)
- Charming! Old Welsh farmers + rock stars (incl. Liam Gallagher) = yes please.
- Soviet Hippies (2017)
- Charming and also a bit sad, seeing the state some of these guys are in now. RIP Kolya Vasin.
Music
This playlist
Best Bandcamp purchases (7/1/20-9/30/20)
- OLIGARKH, Anatoly / OLIGARKH, Zemlya i Volya
- Fontaines D.C., A Hero’s Death
- Anton Maskeliade, O / Anton Maskeliade, Subtract the Silence of Myself
- IDLES, Ultra Mono
- ISPANSKIJ STYD, styd
- meatraffle, BASTARD MUSIC
- Clinic, Wheeltappers and Shunters
- LA Priest, GENE
- Rüstəm Quliyev, Azerbaijani Gitara
- Korinya, Korinya
iTunes play counts, January-September 2020
Most played artists
- Blur
- 346 total plays across 104 tracks
- Most played: “Girls & Boys”, 20x
- Kasabian
- 304 total plays across 82 tracks
- Most played: “Eez-Eh”, 21x
- Shortparis
- 241 plays across 30 tracks
- Most played: “Новокузнецк”, 21x
- Duran Duran
- 224 plays across 61 tracks
- Most played: “Too Much Information”, 12x
- Гражданская Оборона
- 215 plays across 44 tracks
- Most played: “Про дурачка”, 20x
- Fat White Family
- 206 plays across 37 tracks
- Most played: “Feet”, 29x
- The Who
- 192 plays, 110 tracks
- Most played: “I Can See For Miles”, 7x
- Temples
- 180 plays, 35 tracks
- Most played: “Shelter”, 15x
- Gorillaz
- 161 plays, 64 tracks
- Most played: “The Swagga”, 18x
- Кино
- 155 plays, 69 tracks
- Most played: “Попробуй спеть вместе со мной”, 9x
ballerlikemahler 