bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with memoir

In Vermont this weekend I picked up a book I’d been considering buying for a while, since I wanted to reread it and I think it’s something I may wish to revisit periodically: Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength, her memoir about her lifelong obsession with exercise, which also doubles as a tour of the last sixty years of American exercise fads and an introduction to transcendentalism.

I got home and read it all in one afternoon, with a break in the middle to do some yoga. It was just as good the second time around. It’s not as simple as that it’s relatable, as a fellow gay gym rat, since much of it isn’t, but a lot of it is. It’s just that the book is both funny and sad and also it goes all over the place but in a way that I like.

I decided to get a jump on March reading (Irish History Month, no longer short-book February) by picking up a book I’d borrowed from my father: Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.

O’Toole was born around the same time as my father, which provided a certain reading experience for my dad, an Irish-American Catholic growing up in postwar suburban Connecticut. I am thirty years younger than both of them so the reading experience was quite different for me; I only started having that “oh yes, I remember what was going on over here during that time” and “I think I heard about that while it was happening” kind of comparative experience right toward the end, when he was talking about things like the gay marriage referendum and the repeal of the constitutional abortion ban. For the rest of it I was pretty squarely Reading About History Times, which suited me just fine as I enjoy reading about history times.

O’Toole is a very engaging writer. Most of the chapters start off with an attention-grabbing anecdote–sometimes personal, like the time he accidentally let the pigs out on a summer trip to the Gaeltacht and the pigs had to be rescued by Sean O Riada, but other times more traditional newspaper-article type teases–which he then ties into the larger analysis of whatever aspect of Irish life and politics in whatever year or years the chapter covers. He’s also got a good handle on that sort of dry, respectable humor that really good reporters ought to have, where they are funny without doing anything as overt as making jokes.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is largely a chronicle of the various hypocrisies, self-delusions, bits of wishful thinking, and self-defeating romanticism of post-Independence Ireland, including his own journeys of disillusionment with such pillars of Irish society as the Catholic Church, the Fianna Fail party, and militant nationalism (more specifically, the tradition of venerating doomed blood sacrifice to make songs about over figuring out how to actually win material political victories). In the hands of a less skilled and thoughtful writer it could be possible to conclude that independence was a mistake, or that the Irish really are as ungovernable and uncivilized as their critics say, with their slavish devotion to a backward, medieval faith and their affinity for doing terrorism. O’Toole is, fortunately, not that writer. He writes insightfully and sympathetically of the shame and insecurities that gave rise to the bad psychological habits of the Irish–the colonial survival mechanism of knowing things without acknowledging them, an increasingly maladaptive habit that festered until the country broke open–while being unsparing about the human toll of the various things Ireland looked away from for decades, from the physical and sexual violence of the Church institutions that ran so much of Ireland’s social infrastructure to tax evasion. (The tax evasion was a really big problem.)

The nuance, the attention to detail, and the determination to look through rhetoric and sentiment and justification to find the human element in every story, was really thrown into sharp relief when I was fortunate enough to have tickets to the Wolfe Tones’ farewell concert in Boston fall into my lap immediately upon finishing this book. The show was enjoyable but did not exactly showcase a coherent political analysis, being a celebration of Irish militant nationalist history without regard to its contradictions and carefully calculated to avoid offending the political sensibilities of current Irish-Americans essentially regardless of what they were, or at least to keep everyone so hyped that they don’t notice that they sort of offended everyone’s political sensibilities regardless of what they were. The show started off with a (regrettably very good) Boston police pipe-and-drum parade band that barely fit on the stage and then, following a reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in its entirety, went into a slideshow about the Easter Rising that began off with a photograph of an Irish Volunteers recruitment poster railing against the excesses of the “Peelers” (i.e., the cops). A very kumbaya-esque let’s-all-hold-hands-and-pray-for-peace-and-brotherhood type ditty (“Give Me Your Hand,” maybe?) segued seamlessly into “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a nationalist classic about getting into street fights with either the actual Tans or maybe your racist neighbors, depending on how you want to read it; it’s a bit ambiguous. “The Streets of New York” was dedicated to an NYPD police officer and was followed up almost immediately with a rendition of “Joe McDonnell,” a song about one of the hunger strikers, whose chorus begins “And you dared to call me a terrorist while you looked down your gun.” Pro-peace, pro-cop, and pro-terrorism all at the same time! Erin go bragh!

It’s undeniable that the Tones are a forcefully good time; O’Toole has a hilarious anecdote about himself as a teenager watching a Wolfe Tones concert and finding himself unexpectedly yelling “Up the IRA!” at the Taoiseach immediately afterwards. But being surrounded by the whitest crowd I’ve ever seen in Dorchester clapping for the BPD and yelling “ooh ah up the ‘ra” while a very 1990s-looking PowerPoint of grainy old photos of the patriot dead played behind the band was for sure a bit over-the-top, and I could feel a critical little ghost Fintan O’Toole sitting in the back of my mind, possibly having a nosebleed. (We left after a very drunk woman in a Free Palestine shirt–featuring a keffiyeh-masked militant with a rocket standing back-to-back with a balaclava-masked Provo with an Armalite–was gently removed by the mostly-Black theater staff–the only Black people on the property–after they asked her to stop putting her handbag on the stage about twelve times, and we decided we’d had enough of a politically weird experience to keep busy analyzing it for the rest of our lives.)

Where was I? Right, actual history.

This book clocks in at about 500 pages and I feel like if I got going I could probably write 500 pages about it, but I’d end up carefully rereading the whole thing in the process, and that might be a project better put off a bit, at least if I want to get through other books this year. I found this book unputdownable enough that I stayed up too late reading it more nights than one; at the same time, because it touches on so many different things, I also spent a lot of time looking stuff up on my phone (starting with aerial photographs of Crumlin and going through a bunch of music on Spotify and the artwork of Jim Fitzpatrick), and staring off into the middle distance while my brain struggled to tie in the things I was reading about here to all the others scattered bits and pieces that make up Irish history in my brain–here’s what O’Toole says, and here’s what Rory Carroll said in There Will Be Fire, and didn't Patrick Radden Keefe also talk about that in Say Nothing, and sure there was just an episode about film censorship on The Irish History Podcast, and hey look it’s Michael D. Michael D. Up On His Bikeldy Higgins!

At any rate, I understand why my dad’s been talking my ear off about this book for months and why he insisted I read it, and I may find myself becoming completely insufferable about it too!

The aces book club read Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir, and even though I totally missed the book club, I also read it anyway because I’d gone to the trouble of getting it out from the library, and everyone said it was really good. It is also apparently one of the books that’s regularly targeted by the right wing as being inappropriate for teenagers, which sounded stupid when I first heard about it but frankly sounds even more stupid now that I’ve read the book. It’s extremely for teenagers. It’s an earnest, heartfelt, wholesome coming-of-age memoir with much less actual sexual content than, say, any of Alison Bechdel’s memoirs. It explains a lot of 101-level concepts to the audience as the author recounts learning about them. The right wing’s problem, of course, is that they don’t want queer teens to learn anything, and I know that, but for some reason it feels extra stupid when actually reading the thing because it’s really pretty tame. (Or maybe my sensibilities are somewhat brutalized at the moment having just finished a massive, dense book about people dying of AIDS.)

If there was anything I didn’t like about this book it would probably be that I think I am close in age to the author and so at times it was too relatable. Like some things were affirmingly relatable (some of the ace stuff) and some things I’m sure will be very affirmingly relatable to other people (I am not nonbinary), but some things were very “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it” (I don’t want to be reminded of my tragic teenage fandom past, thanks). It is obviously not Kobabe’s fault that queer- and queer-adjacent-(for-the-moment) teenage nerd fandom of the early 2000s was cringy as shit, and e does a very good job of illustrating its general cringiness, but personally, these days I just want to rewatch Lord of the Rings in peace without remembering how much time we all wasted arguing about which Fellowship member was the gayest (all of them). (Also, no, I have not seen Turning Red yet.)

Anyway, it was cute and funny and seems like a solid introduction to a variety of Queer Feelings that teens may find comforting to know it’s not just them/educational to understand what their peers are going on about.

Now that I have become an Alison Bechdel stan I decided to read the graphic novel that nobody really seems to talk about, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama.

On the one hand, I can certainly see why it’s not talked about as much as her other works. It doesn’t have the same kind of “hook” as “growing up in a funeral home with a repressed gay dad”; the premise is a much more straightforward one of the difficult relationship between a neurotic daughter and her neurotic mother. There’s a lot in it from Freud and the other early psychoanalysts. The basic subject matter has been done, in short.

I liked it anyway, although not as much as her other memoirs. I particularly liked the art style–where Fun Home was black and white and The Secret of Superhuman Strength was fully colored, this one is illustrated in black and white and red, my absolute favorite color scheme. The red in question isn’t too warm–it’s a purplish-mauve sort of red in varying tints and gives the whole thing a sort of dark Victorian-drawing-room air that appeals to me. Also, while familiar names like Freud and Virginia Woolf show up a lot, the predominant academic referenced here is one Donald Winnicott, who I wasn’t familiar with, so I got to learn some stuff about early child psychoanalysis.

But overall it wasn’t quite as good as the others and I’m not sure I’d really have enjoyed it if I weren’t already emotionally invested in Bechdel’s family life because of the other books. Since I was, it was interesting to examine it again from another angle, and to look more closely at the character of her mom and the relationship between them. But it really is a very navel-gazy sort of book (it is honest to god mostly about going to therapy).

Like a lot of books about dysfunctional families it made me appreciate that, somehow, my immediate family is not that dysfunctional, all things considered, and especially that my own mother was committed to not recreating all the same dysfunctions that plague both of my extended families, which I will not be relating in detail on the internet for free. I should probably go back to therapy for a number of reasons but “to exorcize my parents from my brain” is not really one of them.

I have been having a difficult time these past few weeks in making myself get up and get my ass to the gym. Or outside to go running. Or even out of bed to do yoga on my floor, immediately next to my bed. A predictable result is that I feel disastrous–to go from five-to-seven workouts a week to one or two half-assed ones makes me feel gross in every conceivable way, from my skin (which is breaking out) to my sense of general vitality (which can best be described, roughly, as “my get-up-and-go got up and went”). All I really want to do, besides nap, is sit around and read, so I figured it might be a good idea to read something that would make me want to get up and move. I put in a library hold for Alison Bechdel’s new memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength.

I’d read Fun Home over the summer and decided that I liked Bechdel’s dry, neurotic humor; unapologetically meandering bookishness; and, of course, her art style, which is kind of important with graphic novels. If anyone or anything was going to be able to talk me out from under my weighted blanket, it’d be this.

While I did manage to get up and do a proper yoga session this morning, it would be an oversimplification to say that this book is all about the benefits of exercise. It is, in fact, mostly about Transcendentalism, and Bechdel’s lifelong habit of getting involved in a variety of very intense fitness trends in a serially-obsessive way that I can certainly recognize. What are we doing when we get really into a new sport? Are we getting more in touch with ourselves, or are we distracting ourselves from other things we ought to be paying attention to? Are we becoming more in tune with higher truths and at one with the universe, or is the relentless search for certain types of self-improvement an impediment to self-acceptance, a late-capitalist, Protestant-work-ethic dysfunction intended to keep us constantly buying fancy new running shoes? Or both?

The book is broken up into decades, starting with the ‘60s, when fitness had not quite yet got hold of the American imagination. The memoir thus also serves as an interesting cultural history, examining each decade’s fitness trends in philosophical, but loving, detail. Over the years Bechdel gets into running, skiing, karate, yoga, weightlifting, mountain climbing, HIIT, and a bunch of other stuff, although she seems to have had the good sense to swing back around to running before Peloton became a thing.

Bechdel is, emphatically, not a jock, she was a bookish artsy kid and grew into a bookish artsy adult. She is a gym rat, a fitness freak, an exercise nerd–a solitary, ever-searching sort of creature trying to conquer a lot of overthinking about What It All Means and fear about her place in the world by putting her body through a variety grinding disciplines and their subsequent waves of endorphins, in pursuit of some kind of indestructible self-sufficiency. It is extremely relatable to me personally, even though I am not a 60-year-old lesbian with a house in Vermont, and I haven’t drawn anything since like eighth grade.

In addition to her own journey through various forms of exercise–and other coping mechanisms, like bouts of low-level alcoholism, high-level workaholism, therapy, and meditation–Bechdel walks us through the lives of some of the key Transcendentalists and Beat writers who had similar obsessions. I’m a terrible English major and have never read Kerouac, but these historical subthreads provided a broader philosophical grounding to Bechdel’s musings.

There’s probably a lot more that could be said, but I’m just going to think it over instead and see if maybe I can talk myself into getting up and going for a run tomorrow morning.

Now that I have surpassed all my reading goals for the year, including the one to read at least 25 books that I had already owned as of the end of last year (to try and put a dent in the TBR Shelves of Doom), I treated myself to a nice cozy winter treat: a big old stack of library books, volumes that I’d wanted to read but dutifully been refraining from dropping the money on to buy new. One of these was Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, her first book, published three years before From Here to Eternity, which I read last December. December seems like a good month to stay in and read humorous books about death.

While From Here to Eternity is structured as a travelogue, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is more of a coming-of-age memoir, only in true 21st century fashion, the coming of age happens after you graduate college and have to figure out how to live your life on your own dime in your mid-twenties. Having acquired a fascinating but not particularly marketable undergraduate degree in medieval studies, our morbid protagonist decides she’s had enough of reading about dead bodies (a very prominent theme in medieval… anything) and wants the real deal. After much fruitless job-hunting she is hired at a small crematory in the Bay Area. Crematories are the low-cost burial option, costing only several hundred instead of several thousand dollars, because the death industry in the United States is a giant ripoff, based upon selling and upselling a lot of overpriced nonsense to grieving families to fill the gaping hole in our culture where meaningful rituals should be (so, not so different from how our culture approaches a lot of things, really). In working at the crematory, Caitlin learns a lot of things, from how to put makeup on a dead baby to all the interesting colors of mold that can grow on a corpse (basically all of them). She also slowly develops and refines her own philosophy and cultural critique about death, increasingly convinced that the US culture of death avoidance leaves Americans particularly ill equipped to handle it when it happens, which the death industry then feeds by promising ever more elaborate (and usually expensive, though sometimes the draw is that it’s less expensive) ways to remove them from having to deal with it. (Sometimes you can see why they’d want to do that for reasons besides financial extraction; Americans’ expectations around death are often quite belligerently wrongheaded.)

This book is not for the squeamish; it contains a lot of content that is extremely fun and exciting to the morbid weirdos who are its target demographic. Young Caitlin also makes a great main character for college-educated Goth girls like me who did not do anything as hardcore with our humanities degrees as “abandon them to go burn corpses for a living” to live vicariously through. I devoured the book in about a day. I loved the gross details, the insights into the industry, the various cultural and historical comparisons, the philosophizing, the humor. And I think the work that Doughty and other “alternative death” folks are doing to push back on our dysfunctional funerary industrial complex is very important, although that hasn’t yet caused me to do any actual research or planning on what I want done with myself when I die (I should get on that).

I think it might be time for me to actually catch up on all those Ask A Mortician videos…

As a follow-up to the excellent book club on Angela Chen’s Ace, the New England Aces group decided to have a second book club, this time on Rebecca Burgess’ graphic novel How to Be Ace. Due to library wait times, I missed this book club, and was able to pick up my copy from BPL a day or two after the book club. Go figure.

Before I get into the content on the inside of the book I must express my extreme professional displeasure with whoever copy edited the back cover. There are two paragraphs in the back cover copy. In the first paragraph, someone has laboriously hypercorrected all instances of singular they to be mis-conjugated, pairing them with the same verb forms one would use for “he” or “she,” leading to the formations “they gets older,” “they leaves school,” “they starts to wonder,” and “they doesn’t want,” all in one eye-searing sentence. The second paragraph of back cover copy is conjugated normally (“they navigate”), as is the author bio below. I’m sorry, but… what. Whomst. How?

The actual book part of the book is pretty good. It’s a straightforward memoir that clearly illustrates the alienation and attempt to navigate societal expectations that many ace people experience, including the laborious attempts to logic out some kind of sense to the behavior we’re seeing modeled--a challenging task when the only feedback you get is people dunking on you when you get it “wrong,” with no ability to ask clarifying questions before going ahead and getting it wrong because most of the expectations you’re trying to figure out are so deep and so intuitive for other people that they can’t articulate them even (or perhaps especially) when you ask. It also chronicles the joys and challenges of finding out that there are words and theory and other people having better conversations out there that you can use to make sense of your experiences and the other people’s expectations, they can just be sort of hard to find. The book also talks about the author’s experiences with anxiety and OCD, and of the financial stress of navigating the Great Recession fresh out of school. I appreciated that the book talked frankly about Burgess’ mental health could affect how they think and feel about their asexuality--their self-image and their ideas about what they felt they had to do in various circumstances--but rejected the idea that one must have caused the other, and the unrealistic expectation that asexual people have to have no physical or mental health issues at all in order to prove that they’re “really” asexual. Burgess is only one person, and it’s all too easy to go through depictions of asexual people and bug out every time they fail to sufficiently reject a stereotype, so I am sure there are ace readers who will feel disappointingly un-represented by the introverted, socially anxious comics nerd depicted here. As someone with close ties to the introverted, socially anxious comics nerds community, however, I think the book did a perfectly fine job of illustrating how asexuality is not the dominant sexuality within that demographic, as well as gently highlighting how the sense of alienation caused by not sharing basically everybody’s interests in sex and romance can actively feed social anxiety, not the other way around. The depictions of sort of drifting out of conversational circles because you are just bored goddamn stupid but don’t want to, like, derail a conversation that’s obviously important to the people having it were probably the most relatable parts of the book to me, although overall it had a pretty high relatability factor given that I am also an introverted white AFAB ace person who runs in generally artsy/nerdy circles and I appear to have graduated college the same year.

Anyway, overall it’s very cute, very readable, and has some important stuff to say about growing up and self-acceptance that apply even if you’re not ace. I do wish I hadn’t missed the book club.

Oh my God I am like two entire weeks behind on book reviews, at least.

I borrowed Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential from my brother a few days after the news broke. I hadn't read any of his books or watched more than a handful of episodes of his shows so I was a little surprised by how upset I was to hear about his death. It might be partly because so many other people were also upset about it--my foodies and travel-loving friends were upset, obviously, but so much of the leftist activism world was also mourning the way his work showcased working-class cuisine from cultures all around the world, not to mention his devastating critiques of ghouls like Henry Kissinger.

Kitchen Confidential is a funny, irreverent, slightly terrifying look at the "back of house" in a wide variety of restaurants. Bourdain, despite being an old, had a job-hopping habit that makes my generation's serial interns look like postwar company men, apparently due in part to that being normal in the restaurant industry but in part due to a prolonged period of drug problems and generally being sort of a fuckup for a while. The incredible rate at which restaurants fail didn't help, either.

The book is made up in part of writings that had appeared elsewhere, in publications like The New Yorker, which means that the book tells Bourdain's story in sort-of-but-not-quite chronological order--the chapters are each on a particular subject, but the chapter on culinary school is in the earlier part of the book and the chapter on going to Tokyo to train the executive chef at Les Halles Tokyo is near the end, that sort of thing.

If you're familiar with Bourdain's commentary on his shows, you'll know more or less what to expect in terms of voice and sense of humor in this book--it's pure Bourdain commentary the whole way: sarcastic, foul-mouthed, irreverent, self-deprecating, and vocal in his advocacy for the working people of the industry, even as he also makes fun of basically all of his coworkers. It's a reasonably educational look into the state of the restaurant industry, or at least the way it was 20 years ago (I'm sure some things have changed and some things haven't), and it's also sort of a wacky office comedy, and it's also an ode to the delights of good food. There are some tips for home cooks on restaurant-ifying their dinner parties to impress their guests, and some advice for restaurant customers on what not to order on which days of the week. Honestly, it's a bit all over the place, but in a good way.

After the relentless epic that was Dark Money we decided we'd like to read something shorter and lighter for the next book club; however, because we are bad at not being morbid, we instead decided to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, which is shorter but really not any lighter, since it is about police brutality and America's multi-century history of vicious, violent racism.

Although this book was short—about 150 pages—it took me three days to read because I tried to read it slowly and carefully. It's not something to just zip through.

Between the World and Me reminded me of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and a quick look through the press the book has gotten makes it clear that this was likely intentional; the parallels are pretty clear. Coates' book takes the form of a series of letters to his teenage son, Samori, just as Baldwin's book was in the form of a letter to his nephew. Both are works of memoir, discussing their visceral, lived experiences of American racism and tying their life stories in closely with the philosophical, historical, and political dimensions of American racism. The parallels are even stronger in part because there are some broad-brush similarities in their life trajectories. Both grew up in poor, often violent urban areas--Baldwin in Depression-era Harlem; Coates in Baltimore in the '80s (i.e., during the crack epidemic)--and spent a lot of time in libraries; both are atheists; obviously, they both became highly influential writers--more specifically, they both became authoritative voices on racism in America and developed platforms within what is still a very white liberal literary establishment. But beyond that, the similarities between the two books come mostly from the depressing fact that racism in America hasn't actually changed nearly as much between 1962 and 2015 as we'd like to believe it has.

One of the motifs Coates uses a lot is the invocation of the body, often using terms like "my body" where most people would probably just say "me" or "black bodies" where most writers would use "black people," etc. Coates is pretty clear that he's an atheist and believes that our bodies are all we're made of and that consciousness is an emergent property of the body and all that materialist stuff, so his focus on the body is the opposite of how a lot of other writers, especially religiously inclined ones, use it, where the body is just a shell and what happens to it is not of ultimate importance; instead, Coates uses the unambiguous physical existence of bodies to break past the abstract tendencies of so much of Western discourse, to bring the realities of racism home from the vague philosophical plane that people take refuge in when talking about terrible things. (I'm perhaps being condescending here but it never ceases to amaze me what a widespread habit of thought this is and how hard it can be to break through it, on any subject, from parents telling kids to "just ignore" bullying because they assume all bullying is verbal and it doesn't occur to them that it's hard to ignore being shoved into a locker, to all the various people I've witnessed who know that Nazis are bad but who still had to be walked through the idea that Nazis do bad things--and were surprised.) Coates' continual invocation of the body makes it clear that "rights" are not abstract and "racism" being systemic is not the same thing as it being philosophical; that what's at stake here is not just intangible ideals about dignity or belonging, but actual fear of physical violence. He talks about the psychic toll of constant hyperawareness; the fear behind the harsh discipline that parents inflicted on their children in the neighborhood he grew up in; the threats from other boys in the neighborhood compensating for their lack of bodily security by engaging in their own violence and territorialism.

The other big motif in the book is the Dream, which is only superficially a lovely dream, but Coates uses it to mean comforting myths or self-delusions that people use to avoid learning about or facing up to the violence in American life and American history. the Dream, which is a false, stands in contrast to the body, which is real, and again is a noticeable departure from how these concepts are traditionally invoked in high-minded Western writing. You can see parallels between the Dream as it is dreamed by "people who believe they are white" and Baldwin's argument about "the innocence which constitutes the crime." Coates is pretty blunt about the level of longstanding delusion it requires to maintain the Dream, the "practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands."

One of the early arguments Coates makes in the book is that racism isn't the result of race; race was basically invented to provide a justification for racism. Racism, of course, was invented for reasons of wealth and power; while I don't think Coates is an anti-capitalist writer, he's very well informed about the ways American wealth was built on the stolen labor, stolen wealth, and stolen bodies of black people--including that enslaved people were considered not a consumer good but a commodity, meaning that not only could they be bought, sold, and traded, but they could be underwritten, securitized, insured, and turned into all sorts of fancy Wall Street financial products. He discusses how difficult it is for black families to build wealth; in his famous The Case for Reparations piece in The Atlantic, he goes into more detail about redlining and other racist housing policies. But he also talks about the ways in which ascending into the middle class can afford some kinds of privilege and escape compared to how he grew up, but also the ways in which, in essence, middle-class blacks still can't buy their way out of being black, with all the danger that comes along with it in America. The last part of Between the World and Me relates the story of Coates' former classmate at Howard, Prince Jones, who was shot by the Prince George's County police in front of his fiancee's house. Jones was raised in a securely well-off household and was about as respectable as it's possible to get, and it didn't save him, which seems to have made a pretty big impression on Coates. At the end of the book he recounts a lengthy, powerful interview with Jones' mother.

Between the World and Me, while obviously heavy, is not completely bleak all the way through. Coates talks a lot about his time at Howard University, and its impact on his thinking about black history and identity. (This section left me with a long list of things to read, starting with The Autobiography of Malcolm X.) The love with which he writes about his school, which he refers to as The Mecca, and all the people he met there and all the things he learned from them, as well as his adventures in learning how learning about history works (i.e., it's messy and contradictory), is heartwarming.

One thing this book isn't, obviously, is an objective in-depth study of any of the topics it touches on. But that's OK, because it isn't intended to be, and there are many other good, heavily researched books you can read about police brutality, or black poverty, or the history of racial constructions in America, or race and capitalism, that you can pick up at the library if you want to learn more about these subjects, which we all should. But the book has a lot of moral and philosophical force, and it challenges those of us who are not Coates' kid to whom the book is explicitly addressed, but who are reading it anyway because it was published for mass access, to both think and feel deeply about the material and physical consequences of what it means to be black or to believe you are white in America.

Book: Life's a Gamble by Mike Sexton

Review is here.

I kind of didn't want to read Disrupted.

I heard a lot about it because it takes place right around here, so it was getting a lot of press in the regional news; some of the reviews were also getting sent around a certain part of my social circle; namely, the part I developed when I worked at a hip and dysfunctional marketing tech startup in Boston. It was not HubSpot, but many of the things I was seeing in the reviews being sent to me sounded quite familiar.

I was partly curious to read it, but also sort of figured that since I'd already lived through a brief and disastrous tenure at a chic marketing startup, I figured that actually reading the book would mostly just give me unpleasant flashbacks and impede my attempts to let go of the whole thing. I am already pretty bad at letting go of grudges, so I figured I shouldn't actively sabotage myself.

Enter my mom, who, having had two children lose jobs at super trendy Boston-area startups in the space of about a year, ordered the book and read it, apparently to see if these places really are that unnavigably volatile or if her children are just stupid. Then she told me I had to read it. At this point, curiosity got the better of me and I started reading it, although I refused to actually borrow it and have it in my possession; it stayed at her place and I read it there.

My feelings on this book are mixed. Basically every shitty thing Lyons writes about HubSpot rings true to me, either from my own reading about the way the economy has gotten disastrously fucked, especially for young people; from my own lived experience working at a similar company; from stories I've heard from other people who work at similar companies (including other reports of people having a shitty time working at HubSpot; apparently they're TERRIBLE to their female web devs); and, in the latter half of the book, from dealing with and witnessing the behavior of gaslighting assholes whose main tactic is to stun you into compliance with WTF-ery so off-script from normal human behavior that you just can't figure out how to react to them.

So when it comes to strictly factual, reporter-y things, Lyons is stellar. He does a fabulous job of laying out how these "new economy" companies spin themselves as being Great Places to Work with tactics that sound good but actually screw people over — like "unlimited vacation time," which is code for "you don't bank PTO so when we let you go we don't have to pay you any banked PTO" (thank God the place I worked didn't do that one, at least), or giving people lower wages in exchange for stock options that vest in five years, when the tenure for most workers — especially lower-level ones, who are most likely to think that "stock options" sounds impressive and grown-up, and who probably don't realize that their salaries are being lowered to supposedly account for this because most industries have depressed entry-level wages ridiculously already — is half that or less, meaning that most workers will simply not receive this part of their supposed compensation. Shit's enough to make you vote for Bernie Sanders.

Unfortunately, Lyons seems to have a severe cognitive disconnect between the stuff he reports on and his ability to understand exactly the same things when they are going on in his immediate vicinity — or, heaven forbid, to him — and there are times when it really hurts his reporting. Much review ink has been spilled pointing out that Lyons is clearly kind of an asshole, and it is true that he is playing the Cranky Old Man Journalist role to the hilt — an archetype I personally find to be in a weird halfway territory between relatable and insufferable — but my issue with his general cranky asshattery is not really that it is unlikeable, but that it prevents him from being able to get more than surface-level observations about the general weirdness and shenanigans going on around him. In short, he styles himself as an anthropologist, but he's definitely the sort of anthropologist that is why anthropology as a discipline has so many issues and so much incomplete information. What he doesn't manage to do is go undercover, which I think would have provided a lot more insight and depth into how anyone but Dan Lyons actually feels about any of the shit that goes on in these companies.

More specifically:
—Lyons points out the lack of diversity and the labor exploitation at these companies, but mostly just seems to use these stats as a club against companies to reinforce that they suck. He doesn't demonstrate any sympathy for the people hurt by practices like insta-firing or sexual harassment, or even interview them. This is a sharp contrast to the beginning of the book where he loses his own job and spends about two chapters illustrating at great length how destabilizing and scary it is, even though he gets notice and severance and all that stuff, and tries to negotiate for things like "just" staying through the end of the year (several months away at the time). While he's happy to point out that it's mean for HubSpot to fire people on a "go to lunch and don't come back" basis, he doesn't acknowledge — even in passing — that, judging from his reaction to being given notice and severance, if this had happened to him he would probably have had an actual heart attack.
—He notices that turnover is high and people get disappeared fast and mysteriously, also notices that everyone around him is RELENTLESSLY CHEERFUL and ALL-IN all of the time, and concludes that all millennials are dumb and easily hoodwinked. Dude: Everyone whose facade of less than 100% committed Kool-Aid drinking cracked even for a moment got let go before you were able to see it. DUH.
—He doesn't really establish relationships with his colleagues, so if any of them are secretly stressed to death and miserable under their cheerful marketer faces, there's no reason to believe they'd confide in him about it. In fact, as an older celebrity hire for whom a new position was specifically created and who seemed to be wandering around a lot of the time not actually doing much, I think if I, a twentysomething young lady who hates self-important business buffoonery with a passion that makes her teeth hurt, were working there during that time, Dan Lyons would be the absolute LAST person I'd let my Obedient Capitalist Robot face slide in front of, especially considering he doesn't seem to have the social intelligence to keep his opinions to himself in a dangerous situation and put on an Obedient Capitalist Robot face of his own, meaning if he didn't rat me out deliberately I'd worry he'd do it just without thinking anything of it. And I say this as someone whose Obedient Capitalist Robot face isn't even very good to start with.
—Specifically, at one point he asks his younger colleagues if they wouldn't rather make more money than be paid in candy, and is baffled when they're all like "I like candy!" Like having some Baby Boomer with a nebulously defined job trying to goad you into complaining about your pay IN THE WORKPLACE doesn't have IT'S A TRAP written all over it in aggressively orange letters with a gif of Admiral Ackbar on it. Millennials know what Baby Boomers think of us when we indicate in any way that we would like to be compensated for our labor. If Lyons is unaware, he should go read some of the stuff put out by the legacy media companies that can't afford to employ him anymore because millennials aren't subscribing to them, and see if he can't figure out why we're not.
—He believes that everyone besides him who worked at HubSpot liked it because they have great Glassdoor reviews. I know at least one hip martech company in Boston that has specifically asked employees to leave positive ratings/reviews on Glassdoor to cancel out negative ones. If Lyons had been at all plugged into the Secretly Miserable Stressed-Out Debt-Ridden Underpaid Millennial Underground Gossip Network at HubSpot, he may have heard something similar. Learning to tap into and navigate the gossip network at my old place of employment was the single most valuable skill I learned there, although I learned it too late. Lyons, it seemed, never learned to use gossip at all. He seems unaware that he could be missing anything. Not a good investigative journalist trait, dude. Be more suspicious!
—HE'S SURPRISED HE GOT IN TROUBLE FOR A COMMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA THE GODDAMN SECOND TIME HE GOT IN TROUBLE FOR A COMMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA. And after he'd seen other people also get into giant unprofessional fights over comments on social media. Learn from your experiences! And yet he continues to be incredulous, instead of appreciating that he's the only nonexecutive in the company who would be allowed to hang around long enough to do that twice.
—Basically he complains about how ageist HubSpot is, which is entirely true, but completely fails to acknowledge the other ways in which he still really does have old white guy privilege, because he keeps getting breaks other people don't get. Like being able to negotiate a leave of absence (lol) and actually being able to get anything out of his stock options. I know this stuff is probably invisible to him because it's supposed to be a standard part of how jobs work, but it's not anymore.
—OK, so basically all my complaints boil down to one thing: I think he blows off the younger generation of workers as stupid and hoodwinked too easily and glosses over the ways the 99.9999% of us who aren't startup founders are getting screwed, because his desire to tell an entertaining fish out of water story about how full of wacky people HubSpot is is stronger than his empathy for a generation that's been comprehensively fucked over economically, and certainly a hell of a lot stronger than his curiosity. Most of the people I know who have been struggling through workplaces like this are not dumb. I know people who have been made "executives" at content farms who are 100% aware the moment they get the job that a) they are not ready for this, b) the company is using the prevalence of internships and contract work in the "gig economy" to make themselves look good for giving people salaries at all even when they're abysmally low, c) calling someone an "executive" or "manager" is a shitty way to make them work an additional 20 hours a week with no overtime pay like they're a fuckin' lawyer or something, and d) we'll be called lazy and entitled and told to work harder and make better decisions if we point out that we can't live in the rapidly gentrifying cities where the jobs are and pay the student loan bills racked up from getting the degrees the jobs require on the wages the jobs are paying. WE DON'T LIKE WORKING FOR SHIT WAGES AND WE'RE NOT DOING IT DELIBERATELY TO UNDERCUT BABY BOOMERS. WE DON'T HAVE A FUCKING CHOICE. There's too many of us, too many of us are college-educated, we have mortgage-size debts to pay off even if we don't have houses and families, and so much former entry-level work has been downgraded to usually-unpaid "internships" that we can't afford to not take any job we can find that pays us in actual money at all — even if we're only being paid partly in money and the rest is in stocks we'll never cash out, or salt and beer like we're in the fucking first-century Roman Army. Oh, and if we ever turned down a job just because it was laughably underpaid, five million pseudoCalvinist Baby Boomers with pensions 'n' shit would immediately materialize to lecture us on how awfully full of ourselves and lazy we are and that we should be grateful we could get a job at all and not think we're too good for it. Hey, wait, no — we don't even have to turn down the laughably underpaid jobs for that to happen! But basically, if Baby Boomers are worried that their jobs are being threatened because companies can hire 22-year-olds for a third of the salary they'd have to pay real adults, they may also wish to STFU about how enormously entitled 22-year-olds are that they think they deserve a whole third of a salary. Please see how these two things are related and stop calling us dumb.

Obviously, there are only so many things you can cover in one book, and Lyons' focus here was on how colorfully strange HubSpot is and on the shortsighted, jargon-riddled fuckery of the startup bubble, rather than the younger generation's lack of economic opportunity. But if someone's getting overpaid, someone else is getting underpaid — and I think the underpaid deserve a little more real compassion than just being used as a rhetorical device against the overpaid. Also, full confession: Baby Boomers whining about millennials like we fucked ourselves over is something that got on my last goddamn nerve several years ago; I am well out of nerves and even the slightest hint of it will turn me into a giant angry class warfare rage monster.

For a calmer and more rational takedown than mine of the irresponsible, victim-blaming ways the media covers the idiosyncrasies of millennial lifestyles and economic habits, please see Sarah Kendzior's excellent piece on Quartz this week: http://qz.com/720456/the-myth-of-millennial-entitlement-was-created-to-hide-their-parents-mistakes/

I got less angry near the end when the story refocused away from "observing" the rest of the company and making assumptions about them and onto the process of Lyons getting what in the business world I guess is called "managed out," in this case, the process by which it happened is, in the mental health, sociology and social justice worlds, called "gaslighting." Trotsky's calculatedly incomprehensible behavior is probably unfamiliar to anyone who has so far escaped being in the line of fire of similar emotional abuse, but from my weird addiction to reading advice columns, I don't think it's as uncommon as we'd all hope it would be. Some people just regularly operate in extreme bad faith. This part of the book also reawakened my sympathy for Lyons because nobody, nobody deserves to be deliberately blocked from getting shit done at work, especially not by the people whose job it is to enable you to get shit done. This is the opposite of the point of work and it is truly, truly baffling to deal with, especially in places that talk a big talk about rewarding people who TAKE INITIATIVE and DO THEIR OWN THING but if they personally don't like you they will permanently back-burner any idea you try to run past your superiors and dress you the fuck DOWN for subordination if you try to do anything without running it past your superiors. People and places that operate solely on vague buzzwords do it because they don't want you to have anything to fight for yourself with. It's all too common, but its still inexcusable, and Lyons documents it all clearly, thoroughly, and with the same sense of disbelief/naivete that irritated me so much during the rest of the book, except here it comes off more as a type of innocence that it's sad to see destroyed.

Honestly, the scariest, most effective, and most dramatic part of the whole book is the afterword, which covers the scandal surrounding the firing of two HubSpot executives for what, as far as anyone's been able to figure out, appear to be attempts to procure a copy of the manuscript for Disrupted via hacking and possibly extortion. This is the kind of stuff that really illustrates why the self-important cowboy culture of startups — the deliberately ill-defined rules, the cults of personality, the might-makes-right (or more often, money-makes-right) sense of entitlement, the unshakable belief that if you can get away with something, it must be a moral good for you to get away with it — aren't just irritating quirks of individual douchebros with too much money, they are problems. They allow morally bankrupt people with delusions of technosainthood to seriously fuck with the rest of us honest dumbasses who got suckered into trying to work for a living.

In short: Eat the rich.

Anyway, things end fairly well for Lyons, as he goes on to be a writer for Silicon Valley, which is better than being jerked around in a culty martech startup in New England, and if the people at HubSpot legitimately don't understand that then maybe they are even weirder than the people in other culty martech startups. Things ended OK for me, too, in case you were wondering; I got a job at a newsroom in an industry that might have the least social utility of any sector of journalism ever, but I am OK with that, since I am also allowed to make jokes and they are even letting me occasionally do journalism-ing instead of just editing (I'm still probably getting paid like a third of what Lyons was making as a journalist, though, so we can't put that one entirely on startups). Lyons is right that journalism is much much better for people with cranky senses of humor, even though I know he would probably think I am dumb because I am an overly excitable young lady with a cranky sense of humor instead of an important middle-aged guy with A Family To Support.

Anyway, I know this is (a) a long political rant and (b) about the farthest thing away from an objective book review as you can get, but I did only read the book because someone wanted to hear about it specifically through the filter of my personal experiences with a similar type of company, so that's what you're all getting (congratulations if anyone who's not my mom actually read it this far; I owe you a drink or something) (Mom, I probably owe you a drink too).

Should you read this book? This is going to depend a lot on your personal experiences. If you've worked at one of these places and have any political opinions in the directions that work should produce something useful, or companies should treat employees like humans, then maybe not; it's bad for your blood pressure. If you think that genius is directly correlated to net worth, don't bother — this book is going to challenge your assumptions, but let's face it; you're not going to want to hear it and you're going to write Lyons off as a douchebag who's just sour that he's not quite a big enough douchebag to pull off bilking other people out of millions. (Also, get back in the sea.) If you're a person who has been sheltered within traditional office environments and you are curious about how all this hip open-office-plans-and-ping-pong-tables stuff you've been hearing about works in practice (spoiler: it doesn't), then you should DEFINITELY read it. If you're a manager dealing with low employee morale and are considering trying to fix it by adding branded taps and a foosball table instead of taking another look at your training or performance evaluation processes and making sure they're not made out of holes, also read this book.

Current Mood: angry
Current Music: "Do You Hear the People Sing?" Les Mis

As a matter of professional interest and definitely not because I am just a giant nerd anyway, I finally got my hands on a copy of Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, by Mary Norris, the senior copy editor at The New Yorker, a highly prestigious publication. Full disclosure: I don't read The New Yorker. My interest in The New Yorker extends about as far as being vaguely proud that a friend from my high school days who works as a fact checker there recently became mildly Internet famous for making Alex Trebek say "Turd Ferguson" on air. Other than that, I figure if there's anything good--usually the Borowitz Report--somebody will post a link to it somewhere.

I went into this book prepared to nitpick, due largely to my own prejudices about The New Yorker being maybe a wee bit pretentious, and I nearly immediately found ample stuff to nitpick, since quite early in the book Norris starts talking about dictionaries. Now, when she gets deeper into talking about dictionaries, it turns out that she actually is aware that, for example, "Webster's" is not a brand name and any dictionary can use it, and that some "Webster's" dictionaries are published by Merriam-Webster and others are published by completely unaffiliated publishing houses. But that doesn't stop her from kicking off the section on dictionaries with an announcement that The New Yorker is fully committed to the Webster's "brand," to the exclusion of all other dictionaries--"even Oxford," she says, as if it were somehow surprising that an American publication would limit itself to using American dictionaries and not employ a British dictionary as its spelling reference. Perhaps this book is not aimed at people who actually work with dictionaries, I thought, especially considering that she introduces the book by seeking to dispel a number of myths about copy editors. But then I'm not entirely certain who besides copy editors she expects to be very interested in all the stuff about pencils and the copy editing workflow at The New Yorker and who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick that she gets into in the second half of the book. I, for one, loved the second half of the book, especially the Moby-Dick chapter. (The capstone course for my English degree was an entire semester on Moby-Dick. I have strong, if mixed, feelings about it.)

The real low point of this book is the chapter on gender, and not even entirely because of her rather idiotic insistence that pseudogeneric "he" wouldn't be a problem if people didn't notice it and think it was (which: welcome to literally how words meaning things works) while, as usual, completely glossing over the fact (actual, scientifically studied fact) that singular "they" straight up actually is not a problem because people don't notice it and even people who claim it is Very Very Wrong and one of their Biggest Pet Peeves and are deliberately on the lookout for it so they can correct it manage to miss it at least half the time in other people's speech or writing and can usually be counted upon to use it regularly themselves. (Tom Freeman calls out her use of singular they in this very book over at Stroppy Editor: https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-singular-they/). This was, indeed, a disappointing argument to run into, especially after what is a very intelligent discussion of the fundamental flaw in most attempts to come up with new pronouns to fit into the language: most of them try to be logical, so they stick out, where as English is not logical and the whole damn point of pronouns is to blend in. No, most awkward part of the chapter on gender is her somewhat self-congratulatory account of her bumbling journey to accept her transgender sister--who she introduces as her brother, although at least she doesn't deadname her (I think). While I mostly like the personal, autobiographical stuff in this book, I would have been pretty OK if this chapter had stuck to being A Brief History of Pronoun Schemes Academics Have Come Up With To Avoid Admitting Singular They Exists.

The high point of the book, in my opinion, is the chapter on swearing, which is very sweary and thoroughly delightful. Although this is in close competition with the discussion on VICTORIAN COMMA USAGE, because I adore both wacky Victorian writing and fussing over commas, and I admit I've always sort of wondered what passed for "copy editing" back in the day when all the sentences were 50 words long and full of too many commas and stuffed with Significant Caps. Well, now I know! I don't know how many other people feel that their lives are greatly improved for knowing this--maybe it is just me--but I am WAY happy. Oh, and the bit about the pencil convention was golden.

Actually, everything after the third chapter (that being the gender one) had me pretty much completely hooked, full of gossip about the staff at The New Yorker, dryly funny personal anecdotes about really nerdy things, and grammar advice delivered with, huzzah, a good attitude. Idunno, maybe they had to put the weird, less-good-attitude stuff at the beginning to lure in the sort of target audience that reads books by copy editors? Apparently if you start off by saying "I am a professional copy editor and I have no time for fucksticks who think bad grammar signals the End of Civilization and probably think Strunk & White is a good grammar guide, what twerps" you won't retain readers who self-identify as "interested in grammar" for long enough to teach them anything--you have to lure the people who liked Eats, Shoots and Leaves in first. Like how the first few episodes of Orange is the New Black had to be about the middle-class blonde white girl to bring in a middle-class white audience before it could start giving them everyone else's interesting stories. Or that seems to be the going theory for why the first three episodes are kinda weak, anyway. What was I saying? Oh, yes--the book gets less cranky as it goes on.

Also, I am super, super jealous of the sheer number of people involved in the QA process in a New Yorker piece. The place has a separate style editor. A STYLE EDITOR. I want to be one of those when I grow up. I sort of am, at my current place, but I am also the sole copy editor for most pieces, the proofreader, the fact checker, the collator, the person who has the graphic designer input all the changes, and sometimes the formatter. I'm also turning into the foreign languages and geography QA'er, apparently, which I suppose is somewhere between being a style editor and a fact checker at the same time.

Sometimes, you read a biography or memoir of an artist because you’re already a big fan of the artist. In fact, that’s probably the case most of the time people read biographies or memoirs of artists. But other times, if you’re me, you read the biographies of artists whose work you’re not familiar with because somebody told you the book was really good, and then afterwards—if the book was as good as they say—you go check out the artists’ work.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I’m just today listening to Patti Smith’s first album, Horses, because last night I finished reading her memoir, Just Kids. I read it on my dad’s recommendation, because I had embarrassingly little idea who Patti Smith is.

Just Kids isn’t quite a memoir in the traditional sense, in that very little page space is given to—well, most of her life. It also doesn’t focus on her time being famous. While there is a bit of childhood stuff in the beginning, mostly for background, and some more on her adult life at the end, quite briefly, the bulk of this book takes place over the space of maybe five years, her first five years in New York after running away from home in 1969, when she was broke and obscure and struggling to get by and make art. These are also the five years that she was living with Robert Mapplethorpe, because really, the book isn’t about Patti Smith so much as it is about Patti and Robert. It’s more of an elegy or a very long love letter than an autobiography.

The book is full of awesome, crazy little stories about Patti and/or Robert meeting all sorts of interesting, weird people that were famous or would be famous later, from Jimi Hendrix consoling her about being too nervous to attend a party to Allen Ginsberg buying her coffee and a sandwich because he thought she was a pretty boy. The two “kids” are very interesting characters in their own right, as well—two dedicated artists and absolute kindred spirits, whose devotion to and support of each other managed to weather quite a lot of things that would have ended an ordinary couples’ relationship, such as Robert being gay and both of them getting involved with other people. Patti in particular is quite relatable in a slightly dorky way—apparently people tended to assume she was either a junkie or a lesbian or generally a lot more “wild” than she really was, due to her appearance and the “scene” she was part of, but she apparently didn’t even drink much, and was happy to spend a lot of time home reading and writing. That isn’t to say she didn’t have adventures, but they weren’t sex and drugs adventures; they were totally artsy nerd adventures—like, she went to France by herself without either speaking the language or booking a hotel first, to visit Rimbaud’s grave.

A lot of the book is about clothes, which, as a Goth, I approve of. Patti Smith has a bizarrely specific memory for who was wearing what at what event, even for someone in the sort of artsy scene where people consider dressing to be a form of arting oneself up. Some of these remembrances may be aided by photographs, of which there are a bunch of adorable ones included in the book, but I am still very impressed.

Patti Smith’s poetic sensibility and identity as a poet first and foremost infuse her prose writing. She has wonderful, lyrical ways of describing things, both physical things and emotional experiences, and she’s smart without being dense, and full of references without being pretentious. She definitely comes off like someone you’d like to have a glass of wine with and listen to her tell you stories about When I Was Your Age all day.

I would strongly recommend this to anyone interested in the seventies, or rock and roll, or art in general.