Critiques et Commentaires

What a delightful sprawling madcap slice of New York. Dark and funny, an overwhelming cast and set of threads and diversions. Did any of it matter? Does it voice a rosy cozy gritty 60s or grimly stubborn mid-point between southern oppression and modern violence of drugs and poverty? As recommended to me, the audiobook is an absorbing performance.

Wasteways and waste regimes, this points to larger intersectional issues of production, consumption, and political-institutional capture - but is primarily a close comparison of waste management policy in Boston & Seattle in the 1980s and 90s, focused on ultimately narrow variations in recycling programs and citizen input, and how those are compliant or resistant to our national narrative of trash.

Atmospheric, crashing ocean surf, tangled beaten bodies at the edge of land and sea. The title collection most coherent to me, the overall sense of storm-tossed black Carribean experience more than any particular line or shape.

Intrigued by the rapidly burgeoning scientific research on plant capacities, a climate journalist turns to current questions of intelligence, consciousness, and sociality. Overlaps with Franz de Waal, Donna Haraway, Future Ecologies, etc in pushing at our human-centered and exploitative perspective on the world to wonder what it would mean to consider our intellectual capacities diffused to all distant kin.

Continuing to walk and collect stories, more lovely weaving of perspectives in this one.

Oops, I proposed this again for another bookclub. Time for a re-read!

Women-led, funny and enjoyable, a familiar-feeling quest to right wrongs and make friends and save the day.

Guo's commentary project as presented is to invert and unify Taoist contrasting themes of social norms (naming) and spontaneity (nature), in a foreshadowing influence for Chan/Zen, to de-emphasize Non-Being as a numinous origin of Being, to ground all things as self-creating in a self-negating "vanishing into" in this translation. Whether this is compelling or utterly circular, Ziporyn does a lovely job mirroring that in steady direct attention to Guo's imagery and language and argument, with only the lightest references to contrasting or comparative philosophical interpretations.

Soul-searching memoir essays peering through and interrogating analogies in deep sea science for growing up on many outsides, finding queer community, and clear-eyed reflection on sexual assault.

darkly humorous sci-fi novella on structures of oppression and exploitation and liberation in capitalism and academia.

Wow, a fantastically-informed world and engrossing story of strong women. Update 2024: still outstanding, complex and revealing narrative on oppression and community and power.

Uncategorizable and deeply examined. Elements of anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism, other ways of being and more-than-human, self-examination and introspection, personal stories of academia indigeneity and systemic harms, care and careful humility and sober reflection on our dependence on exploitation. To face and embrace modernity within yourself and in the kindest sense of hospice to sit with it through an uncertain death. If or when this is for you, strongly recommended.

A great rant on compulsory coercive educational institutions vs learning. Still entirely relevant on testing, ranking and grading, and the non-learning societal purposes of schools, but you can hear the exhaustion of repetitive railing against the system. Several inspiring models for alternative learning from specific teachers and model small institutions tucked in the middle, with that tired realism about whether education itself can center learning.

Marvelous personal stories of deep friendships that challenge and enliven how we think about care, intimacy, and partnership. "We weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them." Covers a lot of varied ground from these accounts, from growing old, to disentangling masculinity's sexualization and stigmatizing of intimacy, to friend family and co-parenting, to the grief and pain of loss of platonic love without the artificial finality of "a break-up", to the monopolization of legal rights afforded to marriage.

More bookclubbing.