Fear and Trembling
Okay so here's the thing I really can't tell what Kierkegaard is going on about here. I read the whole book and thankfully it's a short book because there's all the stuff about Abraham and there's a bit about a merman and the ethics of listening to God to kill your own son.
Reading this made me think less about Abraham and more about both the directions given by the deity and the son who would have been the sacrifice. I want to learn more about that position and a universe that accepts that as formally true and accepts it as a question of faith and not as fundamental Brokenness to the entire edifice of the mythology. Overall it was an interesting and worthwhile read but if you really ask me exactly what I'd read and could synthesize a summary I probably couldn't.
Revolutionary Suicide
I really like reading this book because I got to learn more about the Black Panthers from Huey's perspective. I knew they were really interesting and had some good policies. I didn't realize just how awesome they were. But I think what Huey really covers is how much the white power structure goes against anyone who might push back against that power structure.
So it was interesting to read but also kind of depressing because you saw how it all played out in the 60s. And you're reading it and you go oh wow this is very similar to how the world is today and hasn't changed that much. And that's the not fun feeling to have.
I'd say that the only thing that really dragged about this book is the last 80% where he really covers his trials to the minute detail. It seems as if it was probably recent to the writing so it was well within his mind but I think it kind of goes against the broader structure and it's not as effective as some of the earlier chapters. Overall it made me want to learn more about the Black Panther Party and the history of Huey and his companions and how Eldridge Cleaver did him wrong.
Planet on Fire
This was a hard book to read Because I probably agree with all the descriptions of the problems they look at in the book. I agree that there is a emergency that we need to deal with on the climate front and that's embedded in an entire social and political structure that is fundamentally broken and will not fix the emergency on its own accord.
The problem is that this book is written like a very well-written undergraduate paper. It talks about the problems and I kept wanting to say “well okay what is the mechanism that we use to fix these problems?”. Because to really address them as you mentioned earlier we have to fundamentally reshape the political and economic structures. So I'm reading it and I see at the very end of the kind of hand-wave towards it but even then I already made my decision about this book and so it didn't really strike me as a good strong mechanism for change.
Which is unfortunate because so many of these books are able to diagnose the problem and we can fall back on that world. That's like the quote we attributed to Jameson where it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If we don't end capitalism as we know it there's going to be a major dislocation in the political and economic social structures anyway in the later part of the century. It's very scary and depressing and it's something we need to do something about and I think I'm of the same boat as the authors here and not knowing exactly what we can do about it
Existentialism is a Humanism
This book serves as a pretty good introduction to the philosophy of existentialism. The core of it is a speech that Jean-Paul Sartre gave with the same title. It's interesting because it's a short book anyway but the speech itself was so short that they had to wrap it up in an introduction, the Q&A of speech, and a separate commentary on The Stranger. It even includes something like a 10-page question from some other dude. It strikes me as the most exemplary example of the “This is more of a comment than a question" style question that you will ever see. In spite of all that it's still like 100 page book. So if you're interested in existentialism like I am it's not a bad thing to look up. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a PDF of the speech itself somewhere that you can just read. It might really do exactly what you need instead of this presentation format that I have from Yale.
The Antifa Supersoldier Cookbook
Matt Lubchansky Is a National Treasure. They're probably the third or fourth best left-wing political cartoonist working today, at least in my opinion. I usually see their work through the neighborhood so it's nice that I was able to get this long-form version where we get to see help water a narrative Arc. It's really a smart look at the ongoing conflict between the citizens of America and the police we pay. That makes you laugh but also makes you a bit sad because it also shows the ongoing escalation that's not really necessary and it shouldn't be necessary but we kind of live in a police state which isn’t fun.
Diaspora Boy
I'm a fan of Eli Valley. What his art is able to do is really make you uncomfortable. And it makes you uncomfortable because he's telling you the truth and he's showing you things as they are.
I think it's a skill a lot of cartoonists don't really have. I think the other thing that I really like about him is his drawing style - that real heavy dark line work I'm sure has the name but it reminds me of old school woodblock prints. So they're also very visually interesting.
The book itself is actually kind of hard to read. And it's not because of subject matter but because of the very physicality of the book. It's printed as if they were printing a broadsheet page but it's much heavier than a broadsheet page so I had to lay it out on the table to thoroughly read it. The other piece about this specific text is that it is really focused on Jewishness and the Jewish experience as a left-wing American Jew and how to deal with the state of Israel and how it goes against so many of your ideals. Something I really like that Valley does here is that he includes short essays to give context to what was going on both in his career and World politics of the time because there's a lot of deep cuts that if you're not hyper conscious and aware of what's going on within that specific context you'll only miss it.
Unfortunately the conflicts that Valley writes about are daily ongoing and they don't seem to have any resolution so that even though this book was published 4 years ago it still feels very timely I would recommend that you read it.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
There's a line from the preface to this book we're James Agee says but he's going to take his subject matter seriously.
It Is hard to find the cogent words to talk about this book.
It's not a novel, but it is novel.
See if you go look up the reviews you'll find confusion about what it is that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was supposed to be about. And I have the same confusion. Ultimately I think this book is often lumped in with Grapes of Wrath not because they're stylistically the same or did they really kind of hit on the same subject matter or even though that's more parallel. But what I think Steinbeck has in common with James Agee is that they both took that subject matter seriously. If I could compare this book to anything in literature I think it is those interstitial chapters to Grapes of Wrath that aren’t specifically about the Joad family but that are trying to set the scene.
Because ultimately what this book is more than anything “about” it's not about the sharecroppers it's nominally covering but I would say it's more a close reading of the land of the objects and the clothes and the things that they touch. More than anything it reminds me of that mid century literary criticism before the French broke everything but it's a literary criticism that applies to the physicality of the world. So it's kind of like a precursor to Barthes looking at the semiotics, the laundry detergent or whatever.
So It's a really interesting book but it's impossible to read cover-to-cover because it is like a kind of pastiche of bringing together notes and clipping. You don't get any kind of narrative arc but it's as if you're looking at a world from one inch away. I tried to understand it like that. I think it's a rightfully celebrated text but you have to understand it on its own terms and not try to see it as something else that you wanted to be.
