Angela Ambroz
Gorgeous art, and I enjoyed the poem, but I'm not sure how this would work for young readers. Specifically: there's no narrative arc or main character. The concepts are pretty abstract (basically, magic of yore), the words pretty complex, and the ending a bit abrupt. I think kids could really enjoy the open-ended quality, especially accompanied with such beautiful illustrations, but I do wonder about this book's “sticking power”. Will it be something they come back to? That keeps sparking their imagination? I'm not sure.
Oh, bummer. I really wanted to like this book. I wanted to learn from it. I mean, how many books are out there about this most wonderful (and relatively unknown) genres of Italian film, the commedia all'italiana of the 1960s-1970s? How many books try to weave together Italian political history with the works of filmmakers like Dino Risi, Ettore Scola and Lina Wertmuller? Okay, maybe there are indeed others. But this was the first one I, for one, have ever seen. And that was pretty exciting.
Unfortunately, I could only get through about 2/3 of it - I had to skim the remaining third. It was just too bogged down with bad writing (adjective noun adjective noun, etc). I kind of can't blame the author - English seems to be his second language, and much of his English felt like literal translations of Italian (including idioms!). e.g. “before everything” instead of “above all” (“prima di tutto”). This sounds petulant, but it really starts to wear on the reader. I had to constantly translate back and forth between English, this-book's-English, and Italian; having to exert that extra brain energy to figure out what, exactly, he was trying to say. Even more unfortunately, the thesis of the book is slim to nonexistent - much of it feels like an unenlightening taxonomy of a number of Italian films. I didn't really learn anything mind-blowing about the ones I had seen, and I didn't get very interested in the ones that were new to me. There didn't seem to be any grand thesis to hang it all together. Instead, it just felt like a lot of aimless hot air (a very Italian sin, admittedly).
Sigh! Who will honor the comedies all'italiana? Someone must!
The thing I like about Zen is its winning combination of austerity and irreverance; it can really cut to the chase about Buddhist principles. And who doesn't like a good kōan, ready to shock them into a state of higher awareness? WHO, I ASK YOU?
This book is a collection of recollections and stories from a popular Zen master, Seung Sahn. Zen's history in American Buddhism is always very interesting, and many Buddhist teachers that came to the West brought with them charisma and controversy (e.g. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and so on). Seung Sahn seems to have been the same (well, if his wiki is to be believed!), and I would have loved to learn more about the life and politics stuff back in Korea: for example, he was originally from Pyongyang, born into a Presbyterian family, before emigrating south and converting to Buddhism.
The stories really convey Seung Sahn's charisma: I found myself laughing out loud, and appreciating the wit - even cheek! - of some of them. I loved the short section on “Can women attain Enlightenment?” (yo, feminist-me was all ready for battle - as was the woman in the story - Seung Sahn's repartee, “Oh, so you're a woman then?” was a great way to pull the rug out from under me/her). The writing - like any book that purports to be about wisdom and parables - felt sometimes simplistic, sometimes repetitive, sometimes “OK, OK, I get it!” But I guess this would be when a Zen student would get hit with the stick. You don't get it! It was especially pleasant to find the stories and messages resonating in my day-to-day activities. I found both existential solace (always useful!) and some good kōan-ish (in Korean, I think it's kong'an?) moments to chew over. Because woman/man/etc stuff is all just false dichotomy, dust-in-the-eyes stuff. Yo, we can get into Buddhist philosophy later...
Is this the same structure as Where's the Giraffe? YES IT IS.
Where's the difference? HERE IT IS.
Is this more socially woke and career-oriented, sacrificing an interest in animals simply living their lives in favor of various individuals pursuing the very edges of human scientific exploration? YES IT IS.
Is this maybe more stressful to young minds and counterproductive to cultivating meditative calm in the Age of Anxiety? YES IT IS.
Do I recommend it anyway? THERE YOU ARE!
Good ol' boy sci-fi, where the rich vastness of the universe is nonetheless incapable of dislodging the narrative from narrow-minded white American male-ness.
In this, Protagonist is a stowaway on a massive (Miyazaki-esque) flying city contraption; almost a proto-steampunk visual. Too bad the city feels about as diverse as Pittsburgh. (I say this with much love and respect for Pittsburgh.)
Emperor Akbar's Moghul court is cool. The Medici's Renaissance Florence is very cool. But put them together and it's, oddly, just like... meh.
A sweet, beautiful children's book encouraging the little ones to practice mindfulness. I didn't love this, though, because I found the language a little too complex for the really little ones - and yet I found the art a little too simple for the older ones. Is this aimed at toddlers? Preschoolers? I also wondered what the research and evidence from child psychologists is in terms of encouraging kids to work through their strong emotions. Sweet, but I'm not sure I would recommend this to others.
I am sick to death of graphic novel memoirs; the genre is just saturated, and I wish people would just put their graphic novels in SPACE, for the love of God! And I've never had much luck with comix anthologies.
So color me surprised when I found this collection (a) delightful, and (b) insightful! I was like, what more can be said about anxiety? That garden weed of a mental illness, always springing up everywhere? What could I possibly want to hear about it? And for so many pages?!
And yet - it was so good! And such varied voices and experiences! I was moved! I started keeping a list of the artists that I particularly liked, so I could look them up elsewhere, and that list... well, it got VERY long.
A charming and fun anthropological survey of child-rearing practices around the world. Here's a sampling of some of the advice from these seven societies:
- Watch out for witches. Srs everyone is so worried about witches.
- Bury the placenta. This was a popular recommendation.
- If your baby is born with teeth, kill it (!).
- If your baby's first tooth is an upper tooth, sorry, kill it as well.
- Teach your baby all the proper greetings for family members; for example, teasing grandfather with lewd comments like “old saggy balls!”
- Don't let your baby touch the ground, we are not animals!!
- Make sure the ground is the first thing your baby touches, we are very connected to the land!
- Don't bother talking to your baby, they don't understand anything anyway.
- Remember to talk to your baby all the time, they understand ALL languages.
- Make sure to start teaching your baby Bible things asap... since your baby is born in original sin.
- Your baby just came from the afterlife.
- Your baby is actually a reincarnated god.
- Your baby is a reincarnated elder.
- Your baby might be eager to “reincarnate” an elder - aka, kill a grandparent.
- Definitely feed your baby tons of breastmilk.
- But not the early breastmilk.
- And only for three months.
- Or five years.
- But definitely around two years of breastmilk. Unless it's a girl. Then three years.
- Other good foods for newborns: tea, taro, millet, medicinal leaves.
- Srs watch for witches, they are the worst.
- Remember that witches are super jealous of your gorgeous baby. So cover your baby in cow dung and remark loudly, “Have you ever seen such an ugly baby?!”
In short, I loved this book. I'm going to post it on all parenting forums whenever someone says “in the old days” or “the natural way” to do something is XYZ. I will run in and scream “BUT HAVE YOU ADEQUATELY PROTECTED YOUR BABY FROM WITCHES?”
The tone is whimsical and tragicomic; Vollman lingers on things such as the weird (and almost incomprehensible) units of measurement for things like radiation poisoning. (I assume he was also making a larger point about the Japanese government intentionally obfuscating details of the nuclear reactor explosion.) Overall, an absorbing, too-brief account of Vollman's explorations in the post-disaster Japanese countryside. This could have been a full book, and I wish it had been. As such, it felt abbreviated.
Less brilliant than the 2013 Best Of. Weakened by two ‘true crime' articles that were awful to read about.
5 stars, purely for the magical, expressive artwork. Wow, Fritz Koch-Gotha. You speak to me with your ink and watercolors (?) through a century!
My German is basically preschool level, so I could stumble my way through this. Some ye olde Germanne words tripped me up. Yes, it's super old fashioned.
An incredible collection. Major kudos to the Longform team. (Also, yeah, Pittsburgh!)
I converted this Best of 2013 list into a Readlist for my Kindle, just as an experiment. But oh, wow, was the content amazing. The essays, selected by the Longform people, were indeed the best essays from last year - I can imagine no better. They were timely, powerful, moving and deeply intelligent. “Jahar's World” (Rolling Stone), about the younger Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was haunting. I was in Boston in April 2013, and knew most of what the article covered - but I still found it striking and insightful. “Into the Lonely Quiet” (Washington Post), about parents who lost their children at Sandy Hook, was painfully upsetting, both the micro of these people's terrible loss, and the macro of America's awful gun policies. (Seriously, “the right to bear arms” has so much costs, and zero, ZERO benefits.)
Some of the articles were simply amazing in their investigative skill: I was stunned by the journalist taking one of the illegal migrant boats to Australia in “The Impossible Refugee Boat Lift to Christmas Island” (GQ). I also found “Invisible Child” (NYT) fascinating in its granular portrayal of a young homeless girl in Brooklyn.
CAN'T RECOMMEND IT ENOUGH. Onto 2012, 2011, 2010...
Edited to add: And did I mention Venkatesh Rao's brilliant “The American Cloud” (Aeaon), about the “Hamiltonian cathedrals” - the backend of American consumerist capitalism - and the “Jeffersonian bazaars” - the front-end of human-scale “theater, as told through the prism of Whole Foods and its BLAZING FALSENESS (and yet attractiveness)? Can that article be more genius? No, it cannot. This has seriously bumped his blog up on my reading list.
Found this one in a crowded bookshelf, practically blew the dust off of it. Magical beginning! Basically, a series of kinky, silly, cynical sight gags about romance and the sexes and sex. The drawings are imaginative and surreal. Includes various iterations on themes like: likening women (and sometimes men) to household appliances, men/women holding the puppet strings (or cutting up, or dissecting hearts) of other men/women, stuff like that. Definitely not for kids.
A strange, brilliant, and charming book. I have no idea how this could possibly be considered a children's book - unless your child moonlights as an AP art history teacher with the sense of humor and cultural reference points of a 70 year old.
But no matter.
This is such a fun, weird book. I bought it because (a) ITALY, (b) for children, (c) using drawings rich in architecture and perspective. AKA it wowed me the way David Macaulay's books have been wowing me. But whereas Macaulay is also a kind of visual jokester with a master draftsman's hand at drawing perspective and a love of architecture and deep, deep, DEEEEEEEP nerd study, and, okay, an old man and therefore with old cultural reference points, Anno's vision is just... weirder.
First, it's completely wordless. He has an “explanation” of the “scenes” at the very end, but the explanation is rambling, with many digressions just all over the place (most notably, the story of Jesus - Anno is not Christian and this is not a Christian book, per se, but he weaves in Jesus's story and iconography throughout, since it's “important to understanding Western art and culture” - and lots and lots of Renaissance art). You're invited, by the images, to peer very deeply and scrutinize them VERY closely. Anno certainly did. He seems to have hand-drawn every. single. blade. of. grass. in those large rural scene. Every brick in the town.
Oh yes, that's another thing. This book is more an “inspired by true events” portrayal of Italy: Anno makes a hodgepodge of historical periods and places. Brunelleschi's dome is dumped in some random small town. So is the Trevi Fountain. Every awning has the Italian flag on it. In a way, this makes things feel a little surreal. This is not an accurate portrayal of any one place. It's an ensemble of how Italy [makes Italian hand gesture] FEEEEELS. Except for the nationalist awnings, which is very unItalian.
My favorite cultural reference was the unexpected Bicycles Thieves moment.
What's super interesting about 2600 (which is a long-running magazine for l33t h4x0rs) is how much it looks and smells and sounds like a punk magazine. Wow, is the aesthetic the same. The posturing ego, the slightly obnoxious tone, the idealism, the rebelliousness. See one of my fave Portlandia skits.
Anyway, this was fun and got me suitably paranoid about WHOIS info (aaagh) and suitably inspired about maybe setting up some sort of antennae to emit destructive interference to my neighbors' WiFi signals JUST BECAUSE I CAN. Actually, okay, I don't know if you can do that. Wouldn't that eff up the 2.4GHz spectrum around you for everything? And it's probably illegal (“probably illegal” being an important slogan of the scene).
I liked the article about the guy checking a Linux OS's command hashes both upstream (from the OS he forked from, I guess) to downstream (the OS he was the main builder of), since people were spreading rumors that using that command secretly sent secret info stuff to The Man (which is such a a Mr. Robot idea in and of itself). The guy checks the SHA-1s of the command as it was downloaded and as it's deployed are identical - i.e. no one futzed with that command. I didn't know commands even HAD SHA-1s, but that makes sense and WOW THAT'S COOL.
Mmmmeh. Ostensibly, the interesting bit of reading this is its meta: what is it that the author chooses to emphasize or ignore. To begin with, the (true? mostly true?) story of Emily Ruete, formerly Sayyida Salme, Princess of Zanzibar, is an interesting little nugget of Zanzibari history. Her biography also offers a cool peek into 19th century Zanzibari culture and customs. It was fun, for example, to note the similarities and differences between the Omani Sultanate on Zanzibar - as experienced by Ruete - and the Delhi-based Mughals from the same period. Especially the million kids thing! So many princes and princesses! Love it.
BUT! And this is a big but. The “meta” that makes this autobio most interesting is, according to its Intro/Foreword, about how much Ruete whitewashes. Her role was often politicized - she backed the wrong brother during one attempted princely coup, Bismarck backed her return to Zanzibar for a (second) attempted coup (both didn't work out). As such, she portrays Zanzibar as this maaaaagical, wonderful land full of lovely people who are happy all the time. Political campaigning, much? Everything is so strongly idealized and completely bland that it's frustrating and tedious to read. Similarly, there were periodic spasms of either defensiveness against her adopted Germany (German ladies wear boring, monochromatic clothes; Germans are neurotically over-educated), or just plain ol' racism vis-a-vis those “evil, conniving Hindoos” or those “lazy, ignorant Africans”. Sure - the meta that Ruete had these prejudices is interesting (it bespeaks a racially complicated, culturally mixed island), but it's not so nice to read.
William Dalrymple - go to Zanzibar!
This is a review for the online tutorials on which this book is based. It's unclear to me how different the book is from the online tutorials, but the latter are GREAT. Extremely thorough, clear, and helpful - with tons of great resources elsewhere. I've bookmarked this for future use, since it really is incredibly helpful and I'll probably want to refer back to some of the lessons as I move forward. It's really exciting to see the sample website come alive - especially once we add our first CSS stuff! happy sigh
Edited to add: Props also to the Bocoup people, from whom I found my way - via recommendations within recommendations - to this resource.
Hm.
Well, I didn't really like it. I unexpectedly liked PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a few months ago, but this one - nah.
Stuff I liked:
- I like PKD's satirizing of American consumerism, i.e. the Ubik commercials i.e. the old Dan Aykroyd SNL commercials.
- Umm.
- Some weirdness. And my 2018 reading resolution is “MORE WEIRD”.
Stuff I didn't like:
- All the female characters were lame. They're objectified, they're all either wives/girlfriends or, ahem, “shrews”.
- The dated stereotypes of every character other than the white dude protagonist and his elder white dude boss. Actually, even the protagonist was a stereotype: the crusty, grimy private eye of PKD's cyberpunk visions. Deckard etc etc.
- Not weird enough.
I mean. The plot is the same as Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, which was also super dated, but was much more airtight from a plot/pacing perspective, and had the same psychedelic shifting reality thing going but WITHOUT the tiresome social stuff.
A treasure trove of info on Tanzania, updated every three months by, it seems, a club of TZ superfans mostly based in London. Politics, economics, sports, and some lovely commentary. It's basically a well-curated, dead-tree-copy RSS feed of what's been happening in Tanzania, as reported by the world media, and as marginalia-ed by the editors.
Great series. I can't wait to get through the back issues to see how both TZ, and this club, evolved.
We read this as a chaser after the quite dour and moralizing book about an eternal paper bag (“One Little Bag” - SPARE ME). My kid picked it. I was like, are some pages missing? This is like 4 pages? Okay let's give it a shot.
It's nuts. Basically you scream some patterns. HI! HELLO! HI! HELLO!
My kid loved it. LOVED it. I tell you, step 1: patterns. Step 2: programming languages.
A nice, dense philosophy book, written with lots of wit. This was NOT a book that you can zone out on, and - indeed - it required Full Attention to reap its benefits. This meant that I read it in tiny bursts and, if before bed, would basically immediately fall asleep. This would be a good book to sneak into a meditation retreat, or to have on a long flight/train ride, or anywhere else it's easy to focus and be alert.
I was looking for something that talked about the kinda default way everyone thinks about math as being inherently Platonic - that is, that we think of math as something True, beyond human fallibility and human society even. This book argues firmly against that: Hersh establishes the “mainstream” philosophy of math as being Platonist, but then discusses his “humanist” belief in math as a socio-cultural construct. The book is a combination of sly jokes/author personality (which I usually dislike, but here really enjoyed - he was funny!), a philosophical discussion using impressively simple examples, and then a survey of philosophers - from Plato onwards - and where they fell on the mainstream/”magical math from the eternal cosmos” vs. humanist/”math is just a game and shorthand” spectrum. He also interestingly framed the mainstream vs. humanist philosophy of math as correlating strongly with the right-wing vs. left-wing beliefs of the philosophers themselves (!) and - even more surprisingly - with the fixed mindset/elitism vs. growth mindset/math education is shitty paradigm. That last dichotomy was the most surprising - and the most eye-opening for me! It definitely explained my own fraught relationship with math (brief bio below).
So I came into the book firmly on the Platonist side - I'm not Platonist on anything else, but I had subconsciously swallowed the mainstream attitudes whole: math is magical truth from the cosmos, something we discover rather than invent, and something that you can either see or not. Or, as my favorite Leonardo da Vinci quote says: there are those who see, there are those who see when they are shown, and there are those that do not see. Magical math!
Hersh dismantles this argument by noting the ways that math is a social convention, collaboratively and imperfectly invented using impossible-to-totally-logically-underpin proofs written by real, living, fallible mathematicians who mostly take it on faith, and that many previously-held mathematical truths (Euclidean space) have been dismantled or revised. I think this book would have been a bunch more enjoyable for actual pure/academic mathematicians, since he drops a bunch of stuff I had absolutely zero knowledge of - very exotic stuff! But his general points he makes concisely and with great wit. I also really enjoyed the survey of philosophers: I loved the short bios with sarcastic, lively interjections (boy, he really has it in for Wittgenstein, haha!), and I came away from this book with a list of people I keep meaning to read more about: John Stuart Mill (u r a hero, jsm), John von Neumann (also such a hero, wow), Karl Popper (world 3!!!! WORLD 3!! what a brilliant idea), Bertrand Russell.
Okay, small feminist aside on the surprising way this philosophical argument impacts the mindset/math education stuff: part of the mainstream “magical Platonic math” mentality is a strong elitism. If math is something that's baked into reality's DNA (and, again, not a tool we invented to understand reality's DNA), but if it's the actual - ahem - SOURCE CODE - then there are people who can read this code/see these truths, and those that can't. It matters less how you teach it, since there's just One True Math and “smart” people eventually get there one way or another. This, of course, perpetuates all manner of bad things: like how only white dudes have the True (Math) Sight. If you permit me the indulgence, I realized recently that my “math bio” is like a textbook case of stereotype threat:
- In high school, I considered myself “bad at math”, but scored a higher math SAT score than my (male) friend - who went on to major in mechanical engineering. :/
- In college, I minored in math and adored every class. When I asked my calc 2 prof if I should apply to an applied math master's programs (WHAT FUN!), he discouraged me. ://
- In grad school, I struggled through those goddamn Lagrangians and assumed the struggle was because I was “bad at math” (and not because grad school is grad school).
- In one of my first jobs, I figured I'd never learn to use Stata (the statistical programming language we used) well, because I was “bad at coding” and “bad at math” and didn't “think logically”. (I ended up writing the Stata tutorials for staff training, lecturing on it and TAing it.)
- Now I'm a data scientist, and I math it up for ~40 hrs/week with GREAT PLEASURE and yet I STILL constantly have imposter syndrome and assume I “have no natural talent” for math and will “never be that good at it”, but am grateful that my joy/passion for doing it at least keeps me from totally sucking.
I mean, LOOK AT THAT. It's INSANE. I have literally mathed with pleasure near-constantly since I was 15, and have meanwhile never recognized it as a core part of my identity, but instead felt always like an interloper. I mean, DAMN.
Anyway, so there you go. Definitely recommended, especially if you like epistemology.