What seems like a neat, tightly coiled little story about Ben Tanaka—an Asian guy with an Asian girlfriend and a secret jones for blue-eyed blondes—slWhat seems like a neat, tightly coiled little story about Ben Tanaka—an Asian guy with an Asian girlfriend and a secret jones for blue-eyed blondes—slowly, terribly unfurls into something huge and messy and truthful and disturbing. There are moments in here that make you cringe so hard your shoulders graze your ears. Some of the most intelligent writing about race and masculinity I've ever read....more
Good luck figuring out what to do with yourself once you've finished this book. The title might sound hyperbolic, but Davis underpins his terrifying tGood luck figuring out what to do with yourself once you've finished this book. The title might sound hyperbolic, but Davis underpins his terrifying thesis exhaustively with this tidal-wave-o'-super-scary-facts-delivered-nonchalantly prose style, which, along with the occasional offhand allusion to Bladerunner and the profligate use of the adjective "Orwellian," makes this probably the scariest thing I have ever, ever read.
Which is not to say it isn't also incredibly erudite and well researched. That is, of course, what makes it scary. It's one of those books that makes you entirely reorganize the shelves in your brain. Here's Davis's take on war, for instance: "The demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around [slums:] that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion."
Here is just a smattering of the super-scary facts:
One third of the global urban population lives in slums.
Right now, almost half of the developing world's urban population is sick from a preventable disease associated with poor sanitation. There will be about 5 million preventable deaths of children under five years old in slums by 2025.
In Cairo's slum, called the City of the Dead, a million people live in homes they made out of tombs.
"In Mumbai, slum-dwellers have retreated so far into the Sanjay Gandhi National Park that some are now being routinely eaten by leopards."
Because of disinvestment in public services like heat and water and housing required by the IMF, "Millions of poor urban Russians... suffer conditions of cold, hunger, and isolation uncannily reminiscent of the siege of Leningrad."
In wealthy suburbs in Cape Town, the rich and middle class encircle their communities with ten-thousand-volt fences that were originally designed to discourage lions, so great is their fear of the poor who live in the hellish slums they build HIGHWAYS OVER to avoid seeing. Similar walled communities in China and Southeast Asia have names like "Orange County."
A slum in Nairobi has 10 working latrines (which are really just glorified pits) for 40,000 people. (This from a horrifyingly informative sub-chapter titled "Living in Shit.") In Indian slums, women can only defecate between two and five in the morning, because the only places to relieve oneself are public parks, and modesty demands that they not be seen doing this, so they don't eat during the day.
Desperately poor slum-dwellers in Kinshasa have taken to blaming their poverty on disabled children, whom Pentacostal preachers have convinced them are evil witches. The children are torturously "exorcised" and then abandoned in the streets.
And it just goes on and on. This litany of awful, awful facts.
Here's the closest thing Davis offers to a solution. It's one sentence in the last chapter, nestled into a discussion of how the Pentagon and military academies are now basically training our armies the art of fighting poor people in slums: "Indeed, the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism."
Oh, and here's the last sentence: "If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos of their side."
"Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable." A brisk short-sentence march through early 20th-century New York City that somehow manages"Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable." A brisk short-sentence march through early 20th-century New York City that somehow manages to keep up its breakneck pace through 17 years of history and 300+ pages. It is also miraculously unpretentious, and sometimes really, really hilarious. Harry Houdini is one of the parade of historical personages that people the novel, and by far the most compellingly rendered, which seems fitting since Doctorow's plot is Houdini-esque in its ridiculous daring and its tendency towards spectacle. You spend a lot of time wondering how in God's name Doctorow is going to pull this next trick off, and then he does, and you feel compelled to cheer but also wonder if he might not be a little bit crazy to even attempt such a thing. ...more
I haven't seen Precious, but I'd been sort of dreading reading Push because the previews for the film made me think it'd be some tired teacher-savior I haven't seen Precious, but I'd been sort of dreading reading Push because the previews for the film made me think it'd be some tired teacher-savior narrative. It's not. Sapphire makes Precious herself so prodigious and vital that it necessarily relegates the teacher, Ms. Rain, to a supporting role. She's just a teacher, and a pretty good one, and she does her job. But the book is about Precious. I like that.
I also like that the author acknowledges her debts to The Color Purple, which is in many ways Push's urtext, but that she also complicates and builds upon Walker's explorations of the intersections between incest, sexual abuse, sexuality, gender, poverty, and racism. (For example, Jermaine, a lesbian in Precious's remedial reading class, is quick to point out that she is gay, and that she was sexually abused by men, but that the former fact predated the latter. "Men did not make me this way," she insists, "Nothing happened to make me this way.") ...more
Seriously, absolutely imperative if you're going to teach Huck Finn. Charles Nilon's essay "Freeing the Free Negro" about the "evasive" ending of the Seriously, absolutely imperative if you're going to teach Huck Finn. Charles Nilon's essay "Freeing the Free Negro" about the "evasive" ending of the novel is especially enlightening. ...more
Eh. "Black Perpectives on Huckleberry Finn" is a better choice for opening up debates about caricature and minstrelsy. Eh. "Black Perpectives on Huckleberry Finn" is a better choice for opening up debates about caricature and minstrelsy. ...more
I can't say anything new about this book. So I won't. Believe the hype.
Ok, I will say this for anyone who is contemplating reading this thing: approprI can't say anything new about this book. So I won't. Believe the hype.
Ok, I will say this for anyone who is contemplating reading this thing: appropriately enough for a book about addiction and obsession, it really rewards binge reading. Get ready to burrow down in this thing like a foxhole and wonder where the last four hours went.
And I will also say this: I honestly need help figuring out what to do with myself now. If you're anything like me, this book will change the way you think about reading and novels and what fiction is capable of doing to you. Since I finished this, I've picked up and fumbled at other books I'd planned to read next. Meh. Honestly, and I'm not being at all hyperbolic here, after Infinite Jest, all other novels seem like they're bringing knives to a gun fight.
Please don't tell me to read DeLillo. Or Pynchon. I think it's best to just stay out of that whole milieu until I get over this. Also, DeLillo sucks. There. I said it.
And DFW's short stories... It's just that they all read like chapters in what promises to be an amazing tome and I just end up pissed that there isn't in fact an amazing tome once they end and they are just profoundly unsatisfying.
Pretty much all I can get into these days, fiction-wise, is making an elaborate, possibly useless timeline of the major events of IJ on this ever-lengthening Word Document while I skim through it and get snagged places and just end up re-reading.
So I think maybe I'll just turn right around and read it again. Yeah, I just decided that right now. So, like, if you don't hear from me for a few days and the neighbors start to complain about a smell coming from my apartment, you'll know what to do. ...more
It's a little impossible to describe how I feel about David Foster Wallace now that I've read this book. The most obvious thing to say about his writiIt's a little impossible to describe how I feel about David Foster Wallace now that I've read this book. The most obvious thing to say about his writing is that it is deeply funny, in the way that a single phrase will hit your cortex on the subway in such a way as to make strangers stare at you because you just let out an actual, very loud "HA!" (When he calls Kyle MacLachlan a "potato-faced nerd," for instance, or when he is careful to note that a rural Illinois fair goer describes carnies as "traish" and then "spits brownly.")
The second most obvious thing to say is that DFW is terribly, terribly intelligent. Creepily, preternaturally so. He is the only person I have ever heard describe exactly what is so frightening about David Lynch films, which is a ridiculously difficult thing to do, to go out and define "lynchianness" when this is a thing that David Lynch himself would flat out refuse to define even if he was articulate enough to do so, which he is not. Only David Foster Wallace is. Really. I think that. Here's his definition: lynchianness "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." I mean. Jesus. Right?
So he is a funny genius, of which there are not many. Or, actually, any others that I can think of. Because I didn't say "comic genius," because DFW isn't one of those. He isn't a stand-up-comic type whose genius is a semi-conscious thing contingent upon timing and not getting enough attention as a child. There are and have been plenty of those, even discounting the fact that that term gets tossed around like confetti when a bunch of comedians get together, to the point that I think I've heard it used to describe Gilbert Gottfried. No, DFW is a funny genius, a genius who also happens to be a very funny person. I've never met one of those. Have you? Has anyone?
And now I will never meet him. Obviously. And, like, of course it's astoundingly unlikely that I would ever have gotten to meet him even if he hadn't killed himself. And even LESS likely that we would have had any sort of meaningful interaction beyond me deploying some heavily prepared bon mot while he signed a book. But still. There is something very profoundly upsetting about the fact that he is dead, and dead before his time, and dead by his own hand.
In short, I think I'm a little in love with David Foster Wallace in exactly the same sad, hopeless way I was in love with Truman Capote when I was fifteen. Before AND after I found out he was gay. And this makes reading DFW's work slightly difficult and pretty sad, actually.
I do like to think my taste in literary men—or my taste in the shadowy ghosts of male literary giants that haunt their work—has, like, improved since my adolescence. It has, right? ...more
My favorite bits are those in which Grendel describes his fraught relationship with the "Shaper," the harpist and poet who entrances and moves him to My favorite bits are those in which Grendel describes his fraught relationship with the "Shaper," the harpist and poet who entrances and moves him to tears even while he sings of Grendel's accursed origins and inherently evil nature. To make matters worse, the Shaper glorifies men, whom Grendel knows from his constant vigil on the margins of the meadhall to be no less murderous than himself. This hypocrisy fills him with rage even while the sheer beauty of the poet's song inveigles him and "infects" his own running commentary, making it more poetic, more beautiful, and, Grendel thinks, less true. Eventually, Grendel can't help but stagger out into the crowd bawling "Friend!" at which point, predictably, the men shriek in horror and try to kill him.
It's a gorgeous, perfect scene, and I'm tempted to type the whole thing, but I won't. Here are some of the more amazing snippets:
"He sings to a heavier harpsong now, old heartstring scratcher, memory scraper."
"I listened, felt myself swept up. I knew very well that all he said was ridiculous, not light for their darkness but flattery, illusion, a vortex pulling them from sunlight to heat, a kind of midsummer burgeoning, waltz to the sickle... Thanes filled the hall and a great silent crowd of them spilled out over the surrounding hill, smiling, peaceable, hearing the harper as if not a man in all that lot had ever twisted a knife in his neighbor's chest."
"If the ideas of art were beautiful, that was art's fault, not the Shaper's. A blind selector, almost mindless: a bird. Did they murder each other more gently because in the woods sweet songbirds sang?"
An unnamed, ungendered, unreliable narrator; gorgeous, often hilariously digressive storytelling; rollicking, reckless, but still nearly perfect proseAn unnamed, ungendered, unreliable narrator; gorgeous, often hilariously digressive storytelling; rollicking, reckless, but still nearly perfect prose. Imagine that Woolf's Orlando managed to cram all his/her lives and lovers into a single era and had a better sense of humor about the whole thing.
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