klc

grateful for the explanations, but i found the glaring absence of structure disconcerting in an architecture primer

More a primer than a set of arguments. A valuable summary of where this political experiment stands.

drives in the right direction with many intriguing strands albeit questionable analogies (risk vs impact, tech vs impact). comes off as a tad triumphalist in its celebration of a revolution where the first rock has scarcely been thrown

more a litany of complaints than a cohesive thesis, applying a cynical lens that paints all phenomenon with a universalising brushstroke (e.g. everything is explained by incompetence, lack of expertise). not charitable in acknowledging intentional design or trade-offs (e.g. civil service and ministerial rotations). stays at 1st level of analysis, taking responses/phenomena at face value when they suit the argument while reading others as symptomatic of the hopelessly irrational and broken system when they don't. fundamentally, would benefit from a clear discussion on the why rather than the what, laying out the implicit assumptions of its proposals (why should parliament be a place for forensic examination with no time constraints? why should the govt be reformed as a technocracy? + where have these worked vs been pipe dreams?). that being said, some fantastic case studies (e.g. afghan evacuation)

another late auster that leaves me cold. the characters are repetitions from before that don't seem to add new dimensions and so now it gets grating when they all speak with that same introspective austerian voice in a hermetically sealed plot. especially as auster tries to write about the gfc here and shows limited understanding of what it meant to anyone who isn't a baby boomer who loves baseball and doesn't use a phone

intriguing and compelling thesis passionately/painfully detailed, paints in too broad strokes while having the temerity to back these arguments up with scenes from movies

i wish auster would do more with his set ups in these late meta fiction heavy novels. since he's bothered to configure the few povs, why not give us one more contradiction, one more revelation, one more epistemic mystery? thanks for the aperitif though

another freewheeling auster pageturner where the absurdity of existence becomes kinda fun. this time levitation is the central metaphor, levitation off the ground, levitation off the streets, levitation into text

the oxford handbook of circular assertions

so low key you barely realise it's started then ended, wish this was actually about cinema as the sight and sound ad proclaimed

there are essentially two projects at play here. one succeeds, the other is unconvincing.

project 1: demonstrate that the human past (and present) is a record of radical variability. people have in fact almost always organised themselves in ways that are unthinkable in our parochial and unreflective contemporary world. and it has nothing to do with progress. the authors spotlight the inappropriate use of other societies as shallow metaphors and superficial lessons for today's societies in influential popular and academic narratives. this is a very important project as it demonstrates how contingent and provisional our current social arrangements are. we are all trying so hard to control our lives and will be made into fools when social relations inevitably shift in unexpected ways in spite of every effort to reify them. by sifting through the archaeological and anthropological record in a both sufficiently thoughtful and aggressive way, this project succeeds.

project 2: demonstrate that an ‘anarchic' form of social organisation is possible and perhaps desirable. this project is more latent, less explicit, but it seems to be where each argument wants to go. here, the authors fall prey to many of the lapses they have identified in other works. there are too many problems to cover without looking uncharitable. the top few for me are: (a) an apparent disregard of how power manifests ‘structurationally' (imo) in interpersonal relations and everyday phenomenon, not just in broad strokes of social organisation. given that most people like being in a society i.e., they don't want everyone else to just fuck off and leave them alone as the book sometimes implies, this is an important mode of analysis. it is unfortunately glossed over in favour of the notion that societies as a collective can choose new paths together through a mystery box process that somehow generates equitable results beloved by all despite a smorgasbord of power dynamics. (b) the dismissal of material agency. i fully agree that environmental determinism is dumb af, but i also think we exercise our will on the world around us based on the materials we can access and the pathways they avail to us. e.g., the climate is doing very poorly but we can't just dream up electric vehicles, we actually need to obtain the damn nickel. and so, where nickel is and what properties it has will determine the options we can bring to the table. nickel's material reality doesn't automatically imply a form of social relations or power structure, but it does imply a constrained starting point for our negotiations with one another. (c) it's fair enough to reject the ontological turn - no one knows what it means and probably societies ‘reason' in more similar ways than we imagine. but we cannot flatten the myriad of knowledge, ethical and aesthetic configurations of different societies (ironically accepted as diverse in their political configurations) and assume they would all make a “common sense” choice to move towards a small ‘f' sort of freedom marked by citizen assemblies and just uprooting the family if the king is being annoying. this conception of the individual seems like a recent invention and despite my personal attraction to the idea of a life shooting the shit, ultimately my communitarian ass would probably not want to live in that society.

overall, because project 1 is so fundamental to social change and yet so hard to parse in the monolithic discursive climate of our world, this book on the whole is a wild success.

earnest and encouraging, if occasionally industrial. but it's less about receiving new information, more about opening yourself up to jeff tweedy's radical acceptance of your ability to create

clear cogent and persuasive primer generating plenty of food for thought, could benefit from more recognition of power dynamics

powerful and persuasive polemic with a compelling thesis that sticks. the anecdotes are particularly horrifying and necessary. could explore the structurational reproduction and everyday transformation of ‘caste' as an institution more, or risk portraying it as a mysterious yet all-explaining monolith.

moon palace meets leviathan - rehash of old auster themes (fevered protagonist trying to recover fast disappearing stories, missing artist skipping town/s to new lives, pathways steered by chance not agency) with only one addition (cinephilia, but that doesn't hold up well in a novel) 

uneven between halves. you can tell auster is extremely intelligent - neuroticism excels in assailing the concrete but less the abstract

more dvd special feature than novel, this one is a reunion of old auster characters who have come to a locked room to give the author a beating. hard to buy into the flagellation and winking

rare auster L - bizarre hybrid of (1) the typical auster protagonist, the steely yet neurotic drifter, and (2) pained attempts to explain dog psychology. this brand of anthropomorphism has been far improved by cartoons, it's unclear what this novel still offers

lesser auster, this one finally breaks the levee of verbosity, meandering without a clear course to follow

one of the sharpest, clearest and most urgent applications of bourdieu in social analysis, masterstroke after masterstroke

now having read more auster, i find it easier to place his breakthrough piece. in essence, it's an assemblage of deconstructed forms, narratives, prose. each is compelling on standalone basis but together they often do not mix well. in particular, in all 3 sections, auster seems to dig himself the same hole as his writer protagonist in the later oracle night does, having penned a brilliant first 50 pages but unable to find a meaningful resolution beyond a reduction into dust. each section gets stronger, the last displaying an almost there version of the confident, all-conquering narrative voice that he masters in novel #2 and never loses

was buying into the screed initially. however, over successive chapters, the same surface level conspiratorial ‘globalist cabal' analysis is repeated with limited consideration of the intricacies of power reproduction. then the punchline: capital d democracy will save us all

starts out promising then meanders half-heartedly through its novel within a novel concept, never quite deciding what it wants to be

concise, matter of fact review of sg's political structure and ideology. great on the history, not doing so much of the critique

Auster's use of duration makes you deeply and uncomfortably aware of the parallel lives you're not leading. In his 4 versions of 1 life story, anything that you think should stick is on shifting ground (sexuality, broad strokes of human relations, lifelong careers all provide to be results of banal contingencies) and anything arbitrary can have staying power (liking films lol). There are two endings. One is weak - to be vague, he briefly suggests that the 1,000 pages you've just read are a matter of ‘epistemology' rather than ‘ontology', and that spoils the meal. Auster has always been too cool (read: undisciplined) to care about the coherence of the random narrative devices he lobs over to his readers - they often do not fit in the novel, they are just novel. That is the sense in which he is a post modernist (the rest of his work reads very modernist). The other is strong - after 1,000 pages on the absurd twists and turns that violently stich together one already above average life, he shows us there are true men of agency and destiny who fuck shit up for the rest of us because they are simply too powerful.