Angela Ambroz

Lurid, florid, grotesque aesthetic, which is perfect for capturing the idea of a giant ogre in the sky whose diet consists mainly of English kids. Honestly, this seemed quite scary for a preschooler, and indeed my kid was GLUED to the pages and needed to have every light then turned on. Though they kept assuring me they were not scared, it was not too scary, no no GO ON.

Damn, that was some intense shit. And timely! Timely because the f-word has been coming up again and again in my life these days: from the office to casual evenings with lady friends. The f-word being “feminism”. Inadvertently, I have found myself in a froth of angry femrage as things such as unequal pay, gender policing, gendered toys and other patriarchal nonsense have been much bandied about in my social circle.

So a feminist dystopia was just perfect. Also wonderful was that it was set in Cambridge, MA. Doubly wonderful was that I IDed Cambridge from the merest VIBE, man, from the mere mentions of a “subway stop near a river”, “the city beyond”, “the university” with “red bricked walls”. This protagonist! She speaks of Cambridge! It was nice to have that vindicated with more blunt mentions later on (like when she's like, “over the river... IN BOSTON”).

Anyway, I was meant to read this 15 years ago in AP English class. I didn't, because I was sometimes a lazy student. I read it now instead! It was marvelous. Probably better as an adult feminist lady, rather than a silly teen.

Offred (get it?) is a red-cloaked “handmaid” in a weird, Near Future land (Cambridge, Massachusetts, ahem) where men are men and ladies are TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY SUBJUGATED. Seriously, it is awful. Offred is called of-Fred, for firsts. For seconds, she has to wear the equivalent of a giant red, shapeless sack and a dog cone - lest she SEE too much, that crazy hussy! She is to be quiet and look down and NEVER EVER READ and every month, on ovulation day, she gets sexed by “the Commander”, the older dude who is head of household in the mansion where she lives. He does this while she LAYS ON HIS ACTUAL WIFE, who pretends to be the one getting sexed. It is awful. Godawful. It is so crazy, in so many ways.

Anyway, this is clearly a land where Republicans - ha, I kid! - Tea Partiers - still kidding! sort of kidding! - okay, Texas Tea Party-type Republicans (!?) - have taken over New England (horror of horrors). The birthrate is down, eco-problems lead most babies to be born with three heads, and religious fundamentalism grips the land. Women have now become “Econowives” (baby chamber/cleaner/cook for the poor), or fancy “Wives” (baby chamber for the wealthy), or “Handmaids” (baby chamber for the wealthy, if the fancy Wives can't cut it), or “Marthas” (as in Stewart, i.e. cooks/cleaners for the wealthy), or “Aunts” (gender police at the crazy re-education centers). There are obvious echoes of the Holocaust, Iran in the 1970s, post-Taliban Afghanistan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and basically any dystopia, real or imagined. The plot also follows the usual narrative arc, with the usual heartbreaking betrayals and horrifying moments of seeing the human spirit get crushed. What did Orwell say? A face getting smashed under a boot, forever and ever? That stuff.

It's really a bummer.

It's also beautifully written, with dense, layered wordsmithery, with lots of Georgia O'Keeffe-y meditations on blooming flowers and sex organs and touch and sensation and repression and the lusty soil, etc. The wordplay is clever, sometimes to the point of self-indulgence, but, oh Margaret Atwood, I can't get annoyed at you. It was all too good.

The epilogue is clever to the point of ZANY; like, I wanted to just put the book down and scream from delight, like a little kid. (Does anyone else get that? With books? Just me?) It's also semi-reassuring, though the dystopian ambiguity (think 1984's ending, or Brazil's, etc) is relatively intact. So don't worry, hard-hearted readers, there is no Disneyfication! It is horrible, start to finish. Offred has (one of the?!) worst lives ever!

And that's the crux of it, of course. That, like any good dystopian book, it eventually (or has already) COMES TRUE. This picture circulated my social media toobs a while ago, and, yes, it's ironic. And also very sad. And also indicative of Orwell's predictive genius. Dude was writing about 1930s Fascism, and he basically predicted the world of Snowden and Manning. Similarly, M.T. Anderson wrote (the mind-blowingly awesome) Feed a few years before Facebook, but he basically predicted the world we're getting: a world where Google/Facebook want to become not only the interface between you and the Internet but, preferably, between you and REALITY, so you can just consume, consume, consume. Cuz, you know, their shareholders! i.e. Google Glass/Oculus Rift, and so forth.

Similarly, with this, Atwood isn't (only) describing the shape of things to come, but she's also describing, well, the sorry history of Afghanistan, or any country where women's rights have taken HUGE, brutal steps back. Just look at this. It's awful, and tragic, and scary. It makes me want to donate to Planned Parenthood (do it) like crazy.

Oh! And I haven't even gotten into the wonderful, textured portrayal of actual feminism that Atwood portrays, what with Offred's awesomely ancient 1970s Women's Lib mom or her awesomely punk, riot grrrl lesbian BFF from college, Moira. It is great. But I feel this review has already gotten too long so I'll just say READ IT READ IT READ IT. CONSUME CONSUME CONSUME.

Well, maybe a 3.5.

A digestible, welcoming intro to the crazy science that is systems theory. Basically, this is a dharma text, cuz everything's interconnected and we're all systems within systems, etc. So Buddhist! But also: so true, eh.

Meadows uses general examples (from bathtubs to national economies), and it's generally understandable and not too intimidating. Sometimes her politics, and the datedness of the book, shine through (there is a loving paean to Jimmy Carter), but that is easily forgiven.

You will never look at sidewalks again. A game changer on urban planning, and how city designs can suffocate or foster communities.

A sweet, uplifting, medium-deep look at a world without men. This has indeed been done before (as the author wonders in her Whatsapp screenshot at the end of the book) - Y: The Last Man, which was, mwah, phenomenal. This is much less serious and probing in its premise. It's mostly just a nice fem utopia full of nice people. My favorite bits were the young girl, Emiko, and her grandmother (a millennial, presumably).

Compulsively readable. You know water cooler gossip that's super juicy and trashy? This was like that. About a water cooler I knew nothing about: Theranos and their hyped-up vaporware of magical one-drop blood tests. Others have noted that it's amazing everything got as far as it did.

Briefly: young, blonde, blue-eyed Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford in her second year to pursue an idea to make blood testing cheap, scalable, and democratized. A blood test in every home! The vision of tech “disruption”, she founded a company, got a bunch of illustrious elites on her board (James Mattis! Henry Kissinger!), enlisted her much-older, bullying and brutish boyfriend, Sunny, to be her second in command, and generally kept making giant promises that never materialized. At its best, it seems that Theranos - instead of inventing a new way to test blood using only a single drop from a finger prick - just gerrymandered other companies's machines and engaged in super complicated sleight of hand (fake error screens, fake results).

I was reminded, oddly, a LOT about Kim Philby, the British Cold War double-agent. Philby managed a 30-year-long con of his British colleagues, all the while feeding information to the Soviets. Holmes did something similar (on a much shorter, but not that much shorter (!), timescale - 10ish years?). Many powerful, supposedly intelligent Wise Elders (old white men) fell into her thrall. And I think, like Philby's case, it speaks to the power of our innate ape social hierarchies: if you LOOK the part, you can get very, very far. And once you get sucked into the scam, it's easier (psychologically) to double down rather than admit error.

Anyway, a lot of fun. Reads like a soap opera. SO MUCH DRAMA.

A brief, decent book about an obvious thing that many people can't bring themselves to do: stop supporting social media.

Social media has been likened to the tobacco industry. It's a pervasive problem. We have a bunch of research about how bad it is. The incentive structures are a nightmare. It ruined the 2016 election. It undermines democracy, empathy, actual human connections. It's false and full of lies. It's addictive. It perpetuates our worst instincts; it turns us, as Lanier says, into assholes. And so on.

Anyway, billions of people use Facebook. What a nightmare! I have no tolerance for the “concern troll” argument that disadvantaged groups are somehow unable to leave Facebook; I lived in Tanzania for two years and India for one year. In those places, Facebook is now bundled with people's mobile phone plans and offered as a “free” service. I've seen an argument (on Twitter): “this is the only access to the internet these people have!” Oh yes, Facebook offering such succor to the poor and benighted. Give me a break. MPESA gives succor. Facebook sure as hell does not.

Anyway. I love Jaron Lanier. I saw him speak years ago. Appalled when no one in the audience knew of E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, he strongly recommended it and I read it shortly afterwards. And it changed my life. So thanks, Mr. Lanier! I also think his tech skepticism is informed and healthy. And, of course, I'm inspired by his weird and quirky interests: his writing is smart, confident, kind-hearted, and wacky. Which is always a balm.

I wonder how many people have actually deleted their FB accounts...

This could also just be called “Me in a Shop” as I am clumsy like mutton. I enjoyed the acknowledgement that sheep produce wool in this one. I didn't spot any knitting sheep (Fair Isle, even!) as in the other Sheep Lit entries. I'll keep my giant, vacant, weirdly-shaped eyeballs peeled for them next time.

Reading plays is sometimes OK, but sometimes it sucks. This time, it kind of sucked. Nonetheless, the climactic feministizing of the “doll” was pretty badass. Huzzah!

I must have read this years ago in school, and I remember completely not understanding it. It was all yams and palm wine and slow village life, and I was kinda like, “yo where's the plot dude is there gonna be a fight or what” <–teen me

I have since matured but, alas, probably not by much. A classic in post-colonial fiction, this book follows a village in the Igbo region (southeastern Nigeria) during - I think? - the late 19th century. It follows, basically, the “last golden years” before the tide of colonization really started taking hold. It's a deep dive into a specific culture and society; one we feel, as modern day readers, is on the edge of a severe existential threat. The tension is palpable (OMG WHERE ARE THE BRITISH WHERE FIND THEM AND CAST THEM OUT), though I also spent a lot of time wondering what those villages are like NOW and TODAY. What gets preserved? What gets lost? What gets adapted?

Anyway, so maybe the first 60% of the book is just life in the village, and much is made of idiomatic sayings (which were great) and the stuff that ethnographers are into (weddings and death rites and cuisine and such) and then the horror happens: Christian missionaries arrive. Shit gets real, then, and mostly because shit starts to NOT MAKE SENSE anymore. The missionaries and the colonial government don't understand, don't attempt to understand, and it's all pretty horrible.

So I think the best part of this book was Okonkwo, the protagonist. He was so brilliantly etched: driven by a raging insecurity, ruthless in his ambitions, and ultimately a bit of a Fisher King as well (i.e. his fortunes mirror the land's). The sympathy and exactitude of Okonkwo's portrayal was - MWAH. BRILLIANT.

Another striking point was how, when the missionaries arrive, all the village misfits join up: this immediately made me want to read anthropological histories of religious conversion, and why people choose to associate with in- or out-groups and all that.

But yeah, overall, I appreciated this in a clinical way, but didn't connect super deep. For Nigerian stuff (which I have decided I love, seriously, the country of Chiwetel Ejiofor, John Boyega, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, mwah mwah), I guess I like more modern stuff? With Lagos as the MOLTEN CORE OF NAKED CAPITALISM. i.e. Americanah :)

* I made the mistake of reading the feasty scenes when I was really hungry and I was like SOUP AND FUFU AAAGHHH

A wonderful conceit, with a narrative drive that moves like a freight train. Anti-social, slightly sadistic, bullying and bullied Andrew calls himself Ender. He's the typical Angry Young Man... that is, until he's recruited to play battle games against other kids in a crazy zero gee space station thing. The battle games are presumably to prepare the kids for an upcoming war against an alien species, and Ender, ever the outcast, proves himself (at 11!) to be a military genius.

This juxtaposition of the traditional tale of a military leader (full of blood, guts and demented glory), against an even more traditional tale of the “different”, vulnerable kid struggling to grow up, is an inspired contrast: each enriching the other and, now that I think about it, providing commentary on both (are all generals emotionally stunted boys?!). Seriously, you will probably read this in one sitting.

Alas, another Italian letdown. How hard is it to find a nice Italian book to make a nice Italian lady feel nice about Italy?! Very difficult, apparently!

I was all ready to love this book (with the giant caveat that I hate fiction... yes, I know). I like post-modern gimmickry. It even felt a little commedia all'italiana in vibe, with fourth wall-breaking, bittersweet feelings, and general intellectual whimsicalness. It felt like it could have been C'eravamo tanto amati (one of my favorite Italian films), in book form.

And for the first few chapters, it was. The structure of the book is, well, yes, a funny post-modern gimmick. Chapters alternate between a second-person narrative following you, the Reader, as you fall in love with the Other Reader; and chapters of various books that you, the Reader, read in an attempt to actually read If on a winter's night a traveler. Is your brain a pretzel thinking about that? Good. That's the point, and it's very fun, and, yes, it gave me something I like to call “hot brain feeling”.

But then I just lost interest. Once the originality of the premise wore off (which was around halfway through the book for me), it just started to feel frustrating and tedious. The book is also a giant meta commentary on a particular type of 1970s/1980s left-wing intellectual from Italy (as C'eravamo tanto amati is, also), and usually I can be down with a little nostalgizing of recent Italian political/cultural history. But here, it just felt soooooo booooring and all the Readerverse characters felt sooooooo pretentious.

The quest to find an Italian book I actually like continues, with much sadface. :(

My kid had literally just told me that their preschool teacher had told them that “a monkey turns into a boy” and I was gawping like a fish, trying to find an ELI4 explanation for “EVOLUTION”, and then - BY CHANCE - we read this book.

Thank God.

A better science education/overview than (a) I could have ever given, and (b) most American schools offer HAR HAR HAR, sorry the joke was wide open, had to go for it.

The kids love this one. I think my favorite character is... WALTER, the staring fish of horror.

PROs:
- Charming incorporation of Italian culture in a genre (board books) that is severely lacking in it.
- Good values are role modeled by Protagonist Baby in obeying your parents when they put you in a jacket, put you in a stroller, take you to various places, and then decide when the trip/fun is over and it's time to go home. Narry a tear in sight!

CONs:
- Unrealistic expectations placed on mom who takes NUMEROUS forms of public transportation for what seems to be a 30-minute visit to Nonna's house. They take a water taxi, for God's sake!

Five stars.

Surprisingly charming. 19th century British slang is full of those things that went into the British stereotype still perpetuated (and nursed!) by Americans today, 100+ yrs later. That is to say, it's adorable. I say, old boy! Good show! The cases themselves are episodic and interesting enough, but the real joy is the Holmes/Watson relationship (which is very, VERY slashy - what with Watson “ejaculating” this and “ejaculating” that (my Kindle informs me that this is an archaic way of saying “to exclaim”) and meditating on Holmes' lanky, opiated-genius sexiness), and Holmes' wizard-like ability to understand everything about a person just by the way they sit in a chair. Seriously, your butt cheeks say it all, apparently. As does that one ink stain in your shirt sleeve - ah ha! Anyway, it makes House MD that much cuter, and I found myself turning all Sherlocky on people that I passed in the street (“Ah ha! A hurried gait, sneakers over pantyhose and an umbrella - this is a sensible working lady going to a meeting!” etc.).

So, I have OCD. I was diagnosed many years ago, after several years of suffering in shame and confusion, and it feels both (1) integral to my identity and (2) completely foreign from the “real” me. This book was actually recommended to me by my Expensive Professional OCD Whisperer (i.e. therapist), and - indeed - I was perversely THRILLED to learn that John Green - someone I've admired for many years - also suffers from OCD, and has it pretty bad, and still manages to produce such amazing work (Crash Course! famous books!). You go, John! My OCD is generally something I'm cagey and shy about - but if John Green can be open about it, and if Andrew Gelman can be open about his Tourette's, then I know I also shouldn't be embarrassed. (Still, it's so embarrassing...)

Also, I used to write moderately popular Star Wars fanfic.

All this to say that I felt a special kinship to this book, about a teenage girl suffering from some pretty bad OCD and her Star Wars fanfic-obsessed best friend.

First, I feel an enormous affection and gratitude for ANY cultural depiction of OCD that is vaguely accurate (hell, I even feel affection for the inaccurate portrayals, like As Good As It Gets or Monk). As Saul Tigh would say, “It's good to be seen.”

This book offered, indeed, a VERY accurate portrayal - while the details of any OCD sufferer's obsessions and compulsions are unique to them, the nature of the disease is very predictable. The “meta-thoughts” are boringly standard.

I loved how Aza, the protagonist, acknowledged the existential doubt that having OCD gives you - OCD is egodystonic, meaning it feels foreign, you feel “not like yourself” when you're deep in it. This raises all sorts of difficulties though: Why should it take so much work to “feel like yourself”, if your “natural” thoughts keep getting eaten by the OCD monster? Why does it feel like OCD is a separate entity living in your brain, something you have to outwit and bargain with and avoid and so on? Who's the true self in there?

I would hazard that ALL OCD sufferers absolutely loathe their OCD: they hate the intrusive, distressing thoughts, but they also hate what it turns them into - self-involved to the point of neglecting everything and everyone else around you. It can kinda turn you into a selfish asshole. I loved that John Green, speaking through Aza, acknowledges the bullshit of calling these mental illnesses “superpowers” - or the common cultural narrative of madness being akin to genius (Monk!). Oh, please. All this shit does is distract you by idiotic fears and then you get bad grades or forget your loved one's birthday, BELIEVE ME.

At the same time, this book actually helped me have MUCH better insight into the frustration of DEALING with someone with OCD. Every loved one who's had to deal with my OCD on a regular basis has, eventually, become incredibly frustrated and kind of thrown up their hands. Indeed, I lost patience with Aza immediately (sorry, Aza). When the sufferer's fears are so clearly absurd to you (Aza, for example, worries chronically that she'll catch a deadly bacterial infection), you quickly lose patience. “Omg this again?! JUST STOP.” Naturally, the sufferer is JUST AS frustrated, JUST AS out of patience, and is ALSO begging their brain to “JUST STOP” - but they can't. Anyway, this was helpful to feel - it gave me a lot of sympathy (and awe!) for people who love someone with OCD. Cuz it's hard! What a pain in the ass! This was handled very well in the book - e.g. Aza's best friend, Daisy, and her fanfic as an outlet.

Okay, anyway. This book is ALSO about a disappearance mystery (which feels totally unnecessary) and a teen romance. It's set in present day Indianapolis, and features John Green's habitually overwritten teenagers. It has waaaay too many references to high poetry and fine literature. Are all of these people reading Yeats?! Who ARE these people!? The tone is very one-note. Everyone is basically a mini John Green.

So that's just okay. But you still gobble the book down. Like The Fault in Our Stars, there's one (kinda gimmicky) hook - there, cancer; here, OCD - that keeps you reading. But remove the Horrible Illness, and you're left with kids that are, oof, pretty insufferable. I definitely liked, on a “hey we should be friends!” level, Starr from The Hate U Give more. I definitely like-hated, on a “omg hilariously awful teens from hell!”, the kids from MT Anderson's books more.

Henyway. So it's an okay book, with a heart - nay, a nutty imprisoned brain - of SPARKLY GOLD. I certainly wish I had found this when I was an obsession-addled teen, and I think John Green has, indeed, done something important by potentially offering succor and understanding to (quick google) ~2.3% people out there.

A fine, workaday collection of spec fic short stories.

Cat Pictures Please definitely shined brightest - it envisions a world of a do-gooder ChatGPT, trapped in its search engines and chatbots, trying to surreptitiously improve the lives of its stubbornly-irrational human users. This was a clever, funny, and satisfying read.

The rest weren't quite as good, but they were decent. There was an uncomfortably prescient short story about a Covid-esque plague - I checked, and that was published in 2015.

A lesson we all honestly need to hear. Just shut up for a minute!! This is probably more aimed at the parents. I'll keep this nearby for the teen years.

FIVE STARS. ELEVENTY STARS. This got me choked up. A grandson and grandfather are divided by language - they have no shared one. Visits are tough and awkward for both. Until grandson whips out his markers and starts doodling the superheroes; turns out grandfather is quite the artist himself as well. And art unites them!!! TEARS IN MY EYES.

The art, indeed, is lovely LOVELY in this book. Hats off to Dan Santat for capturing two - nay, three! - distinct styles: the grandson's, grandfather's, and overall narration style. Glorious illustrations to pour yourself into. Good for preschoolers/little kids, not sure about toddlers. Also glorious for anyone who's had language change over the generations - and the fear that grandchildren and grandparents won't be able to communicate.

Really bummed, but killing this at 25%. The Renaissance - and the Renaissance masters - are an integral part of my self-identity; the (Italian!) pursuit of beauty and truth, the mix of science and art, the glory of the human form, blah blah blah. But this was just a chore. It was also, ahem, BAD VALUES.

On why it's a chore

Welp, this is my own fault, but I listened to the audiobook, and thus missed the visuals. And having Alfred Molina (who is quite a good actor!) narrate how wondrous and beauteous the shining curls of Leonardo's painting of Random Catholic 15th century Italian thing is, ho boy. (Though good on Molina - who I think is half-Italian? - for his smooth Italian pronunciations, brrrrravo.)

But it's also a chore because it TELLS, rather than SHOWS, us why Leonardo was so special. Everything is “magnificent” or “wondrous”, but - well, WHY? Is it because Leonardo had such a wide-ranging, rapacious curiosity for everything and every topic? Is it because his paintings are beautiful? Is it because he had such zany engineering sketches? Is it because he was so prolific? I guess so? Maybe?!

There are some interesting biographical bits that I didn't know about - for example, Leonardo was (semi-openly) gay; he was an illegitimate son; he was notorious for being flighty and starting a million things but never completing them. But the biography is thin on the ground, and it's mostly a series of breathless descriptions of Leonardo's paintings and notebooks. Isaacson doesn't build up the scene of what 15th century Florence - ONE OF MY FAVE SPOTS IN SPACE AND TIME - was like. As a comparison, both Brunelleschi's Dome (which kinda suffered from the same plodding reverential tone as this) and Galileo's Daughter (which was MUCH BETTER) present a rich and fascinating portrait of the city at the time. This book soooort of does; I liked hearing about Milan under the Sforzas (where Leonardo spent many years), and we did learn a bunch about the theater productions they put on there (though Isaacson is strangely defensive (?) about this stuff - being like, “SOME PEOPLE consider Leonardo's contributions to costume design and stage craft boring/not important, BUT...” dude, it's OK!).

On its bad values

But the MAIN thing that really started to irk me the really wrong way was that, beyond just TELLING us repeatedly how “genius” Leonardo was (without being able to describe what “genius” exactly means - again, is it wide-ranging interests? tireless production? beauty?), the book also huuuuugely suffers from what Carol Dweck would call the “fixed mindset”. That is, since Isaacson seems incapable of understanding HOW or WHY Leonardo is a “genius”, he attributes Leonardo's “genius”-ness to some ethereal, God-given, magical quality. It's the narrative of the effortless, “conduit of God” genius - think Amadeus - the kind that is starkly binary. Some people have it, most people don't.

And while I do agree with a GENERAL ranking of people's abilities (e.g. this A.O. Scott of Pixar's The Incredibles is an excellent essay on that), I STRONGLY disagree with those abilities being portrayed as entirely internal (no help), entirely binary (haves/have-nots), and entirely unearned (no need to study if you're “smart”). Leonardo's output was amazing BECAUSE of his curiosity, but his curiosity was also nurtured by his circumstances: as an illegitimate son, he was free NOT to pursue his father's profession (notary!); he was wealthy enough to not have a trade; he lived in a world that rewarded a good art/science hustle. He was confident - even too much so! - and sold himself well and allowed himself the luxury of pursuing flights of fantasy. He wasn't too worried about conforming, but also didn't need too. And he's been lionized, perhaps even disproportionately.

Like, as a contribution to human ideas, I think Brunelleschi's work with perspective - the insight of using mathematical principles from geometry to portray 3-dimensional space in paintings was, well, “GENIUS”. But Leonardo is much more well known. Again, why! He worked in a bottega with and under other artists; art historians spend a lot of time x-ray analyzing the paintings to separate Leonardo's left-handed brush strokes from the rest of the bottega's artists but - again - WHY SO BINARY? Why are the contributions of Leonardo's colleagues, with whom he worked so closely, completely discarded in favor of the guy with the cool notebooks?

I don't want to hate on Leonardo. I love Leonardo. I love all the Renaissance masters. I LOVE THE VALUES OF THE RENAISSANCE. But this book - BAH. This book sullies those values, transforms them into a Great Man history of humanity's pursuits of truth/beauty/knowledge, and that just kinda pisses me off. I guess I should have seen it coming, given Isaacson's reverential biographies of other Great Men like Steve Jobs. Sigh. My 2018 resolution to “be more Italian” hits a speed bump.

LOLed at many of these. I was reminded of my childhood, reading Gary Larson's The Far Side. This was v funny.

I had been meaning to read this ever since I heard The Distraction Addiction's author, Alex Pang, on the (now sadly defunct) Buddhist Geeks podcast, talking about a really good book about the Sabbath, written by Rabbi Abraham Heschel.

Inspired by Pang's book, I've been experimenting with taking ‘digital sabbaths' for the past year or so: it usually means a full day of no screens (including the Kindle!). Driven by the panic that The Machine Stops induced, I try to aim for 2x a month: actually EXPERIENCING DIRECT, UNMEDIATED REALITY. Mostly this means finally reading through the giant pile of unread (physical) books on my shelves, and realizing that I have no idea how to get anywhere without Google maps and don't know how to get dressed without my weather app.

I read Heschel's book, then, on one such digital sabbath, and it was a perfect companion. I don't practice Judaism, but I don't think you need to be Jewish to appreciate its very powerful wisdom: he writes poetically, accessibly, and makes profound points. For example: humanity has conquered space - physical space - but we're slaves to time. We forget how precious it is, we waste it on YouTube cat videos or on race-to-the-finish ambition (“Next year, I'll get an MBA; then I'll do X, then I'll...”). Rabbi Heschel argues about the Sabbath being a “palace of time”: we should build cathedrals to eternity by pausing regularly in the whirling stream of onward time. On this day, all conflicts are paused - it is the ultimate time-out, the temporary truce in EVERYTHING. I remember one digital sabbath felt, for me, like I was on a vacation from my life: I could just - do nothing.

He talks about the joyous preparations of the Sabbath, and the importance of breaking enslavement to the material world. He directly links it to paradise/Heaven/immortality - that Sabbath was given by the Lord to us (unto us?) as a taste of eternity. Again, I'm not Jewish - I'm Buddhist and nontheist and don't spend too much time thinking about an afterlife (apart from the cold, dead, nothingness kind) - but I found even that point touching, even mystical. (It also got me thinking about Einsteinian time-space as a dimension, and how time travel isn't physically impossible, but I digress.)

So yeah, definitely a book I'll be coming back to, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in building an “architecture of time” for themselves.

These strips are, yes, very authentic and relatable. It felt very 90s, very Foxtrot. But you know what I miss from the 90s comix era? Gary frickin' Larson. Anyway, I finished most of these panels with a “heh”.

In 19th century Paris, a Belgian prince and a talented dressmaker strike up a deep friendship over a shared secret and a passion for fashion. I'll try not to spoil it, though, okay, it's not a HUGE secret.

So I think the critical reviews of this comix (of which there are not many) do make a good point: this places modern, 21st century sensibilities and sensitivities in a 19th century context, and stretches that anachronism to the point that it's basically a fluffy, feel-good fantasy. Why, not long ago in the 20th century - even in the late 1990s - the prince's “secret” was still being portrayed as a sinister, scary sign of taboo depravity (I'm thinking specifically, e.g., of The Talented Mr. Ripley).

That said, I think anachronistic historical fantasy like this is just as important as utopian futurism like Star Trek The Next Generation (TNG): we need to have a vision of how things COULD be, and indeed, there's often no really good reason they're not this way. I regularly use TNG as a benchmark for how I want to conduct myself, how I imagine the “ideal” of some behavior is: “well, what would they do in a post-scarcity, enlightened 24th century?” I'm not even joking. Utopias are hard to write convincingly, but they are SO important and so powerful when they are convincing. Similarly, I think a middle grade historical fantasy of how gender norms CAN be fluid, and people CAN be accepting, is also so important. Imagine being a 12 year old reading this? Kids are so good at that: at pointing out the illogical inconsistencies of our ape-hierarchy, average-dumb society. They haven't spent years and years and years marinating in a social stew that put pressures on them to think in a certain way. I'm an old Millennial/young gen Xer, and much has already happened (socially/politically) in my lifetime that I just never would have imagined possible. This book is one of those books that helps you imagine! And so, I say, LET THE KIDS IMAGINE A BETTER WORLD!

Okay, so all that aside. I always adore Jen Wang's art - she has a beautiful, fluid, charming style that is just really lovely to read. Bravissima!