In this short but expansive book which reads sometimes like poetry, sometimes like philosophy, and always like resistance, Berkowitz encourages us to become authoritative about our own experiences.
Martin John – Anakana Schofield
Martin John is not so much a character as a caricature of masculinity, a figure that, though, granted a privileged position in meaning’s labyrinth, is, nevertheless, caught in his own circuit, fumbling with his zipper.
The Resilience of/to Sleaford Mods
Rihanna is neither the un-investible noise of resistance nor the efficient investment of resilience, but rather the inefficiency of melancholy.
The Roar of Morning – Tip Marugg
The Roar of Morning is quite anti-climactic — in a digressive and descriptive mode it falls well short of self-knowledge or it fails to intimate truths, those buried umbilical cords, that an apocalyptic event is waiting to disinter.
The Misery of the General Reader: Fukuyama and Graeber
If Francis Fukuyama allows me to congratulate myself for being a few shades less conservative than the author, then Graeber’s radicalism makes me feel flaccid, middle-class, and complicit in a system whose flaws I don’t even sufficiently perceive.
The biggest impact on my method was how I’ve seen writers back themselves into a corner or become exasperated with various dead ends and move beyond that to completion and artistic excitement.
A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin
Berlin’s stories examine the consequences of living as if one were free when one is, because female, necessarily not.
Somewhere in the fibers of the book’s skeleton, there is a legitimate philosophical argument about free will or a lack thereof, and in many circumstances, it might be an interesting one.
A first-person narrator is allowed to be unreliable. The voice is like a dirty windshield at night in the rain. Even if all you see is glare and blobs, you assume whatever’s out there is real. But the second an omniscient narrator makes a continuity mistake, readers want to kick its ass.
Is the self what we’ve lived through, what we’ve felt and thought? Is it what we have written? What part of the self browses the Internet? What is that self trying to get to?