Reviews

Review “This book is not a suicide note.” A fair opening line, as Critchley (SC) goes on to list several novels and essays published under titles containing the word “suicide” which are closely followed by the completed suicide of their authors. It is a cloud that follows this book, which is pure white with NOTES ON SUICIDE in large, blue text on the front cover. I felt self-conscious reading it on the metro this morning, and at work I put the book upside down on my desk, and at the park I held it in such a way as to obscure the title. Lest people think I’m planning to off myself (I am not, FYI). ...

This short text from Ernaux is a collection of her Nobel lecture, banquet speech, and then a short biography. At 43 pages it is so short that I read it in about 20 minutes (the type is quite large), and would strongly recommend it. She writes about the alienation from your home and people that happens when you move out of your homeland, your homeclass. Language changes, and yet it can snap you back. She discusses her writing style, how she developed it and the decisions made therein, particularly in her use of the of “I.” ...

Review I picked this up because Singular Adventures is cited in Philippe Besson’s Lie With me, which I adored. This collection of short stories has entries in it that I love and will re-read, but the first half is flat out bad. Some of the first part has the sort of over-the-top smut eroticism that I wrote in high school, fantasizing about the locker room, and yet it almost always punishes the reader for having fun by taking strange and dark turns. ...

What an incredible piece of writing. In 61 pages, Ernaux illustrates how all-encompassing love can become, how it can turn into an obsession where everything is subject to it. No event is without link to the object of love, everything takes on a mystical connection. At first I was tagging or highlighting things that I related to, had experienced in my affections. That became a real burden because it happens on almost every page. ...

I found this book by asking for seminal texts on the concept of “good” or “goodness” after/while reading The Human Condition. I described my current beliefs and my problems with Arendt’s formulation of goodness (which she has little to say on in The Human Condition), and was told that my beliefs would probably line up the most with Murdoch’s text. I think that is right. For only 120 pages, or perhaps less, I took a long time to get through this. I made highlights on most pages, sometimes whole pages, breaking only to circumvent the kindle/goodreads long highlight rule, so I could come back later and get them all. (Yes, this is a very, very, rare Kindle read for me, because I knew I’d be doing a lot of highlighting and didn’t want to transpose the whole book). ...

I read this for my small press book club. I am not sure why I stuck with it. On page 11, we have this sentence: Sylvia, our mother, reminded Henry daily, such was the routine of marriage, about fixing the ladder daily and went about partitioning the attic space, figuring if they were to have children, they would need a place to store them. I know it is snobby of me to take issue with the writing, and I know there are better things I could do with my time than critique a published author. But, really, where was the editor? My emphasis in the above highlights just one problem, a strange repetition that doesn’t make sense. There is also too much going on in the sentence. 39 words! That’s 15% of the Gettysburg Address! Too long. I also think it’s trite. The same-word-in-one-sentence problem didn’t recur often enough for me to notice, but overlong sentences full of overdone triteness became the standard. ...

I picked this up at the Esri federal conference a few weeks ago. The subtitle, “Mapping Solutions to Wicked Problems,” stuck out to me because in grad school I had an Econ course all about wicked problems. Naturally, being a social worker who has spent his career thus far working on homelessness, I was pleased that homelessness has a chapter here. The book is a nice (and short) collection of case studies on use of mapping and GIS in particular to communicate, respond to, and storytell about, problems of incredible complexity. I skimmed the non-homelessness chapters and I think they look fine. The homelessness chapter is pretty good. There are some great examples of dashboards and maps (though some of the maps, particular a few that I think were Indianapolis based, are excruciatingly hard to read), and the case studies are interesting, if a bit light. I found myself very interested in the one featuring Santa Clara County’s Silicon Valley Triage Tool, and ended up going to do some more reading on that elsewhere. ...

Notes — # Review Quite a lovely photobook! I purchased this because I loved Ty Cole’s photography in the Capital Brutalism exhibit at the National Building Museum. I like architectural photography, and these shots of interior are novel for me, at least. The technical drawings of completed, planned, and abandoned homes are also lovely in white on black page. The book itself has a recipe book theme which I understand the bit of though is a little lost on me. Nonetheless, I like the form factor of the book. I’m sure I will flip through this a lot thinking about what makes a good angle. Home construction is not something I know about, but the specific method that Bldus discusses here seems interesting (though it also seems strikingly like a 300 page commercial for an architectural firm. Which it is.). ...

Quick disclaimer to say that I am woefully unqualified to review Arendt. I am not well read philosophically. I picked this up alongside Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling because 1) it kept showing up in other books I read, notably GHAM and The Long Form; and 2) I am interested in ideas around “goodness” – what it is, how to be it, what it means to be it. Arendt speaks relatively little about goodness. ...

Notes p26, quoting A. Lincoln - “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.” p31 - “The most destructive aspects of the Calvinist belief system have endured and serve most importantly to emotionally distance the domiciled from the visibly impoverished–preventing us from fully investing in humane solutions proven to work.” p40 - “In March 1990, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it would begin conducting a yearly national census of homeless people—a single-point-in-time numeration of Americans who were visibly homeless. The following morning, homeless activist Mitch Snyder—leader of Washington DC’s largest shelter, …, responded by dumping a massive load of sand on a bridge, preventing many Virginia commuters from entering DC. Once the two-ton dump trunk [sic] had emptied its load, Snyder conveyed this simple but enduring explanation: “It is easier to count grains of sand than homeless people in America.”” p88 - “After famously not recognizing his own HUD secretary at a meeting of urban mayors (Samuel Pierce was Black), Reagan slashed HUD expenditures—both for public housing complexes and portable Section 8 vouchers—from $26 billion to $8 billion. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of this carnage. If you are looking for the single, most significant factor that transformed US homelessness from a cyclical ebb-and-flow to a permanent fixture on the American landscape, this is it.” p102 - “Democratic support for the federal government’s central role in providing affordable housing had diminished so thoroughly that, early on in negotiations to ‘reform’ welfare, to avoid the possibility of any outright veto being overridden, Clinton offered House Speaker Newt Gingrich the wholesale dismantling of the Department of Housing and Urban Development—the realization of a decades-long Republican dream.” (TB: Hey Bill, go fuck yourself. Idiot.) p109 - “[Broken window theory] origins can be traced to a now infamous 1982 Atlantic article by George Kelling and James Wilson, which badly twisted a 1969 research paper by Stanford Universities Philip Zimbardo, by concluding, “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” Kelling and wilson’s enduring malignant conclusion: law enforcement should come down hard on small acts of disorder or they will metastasize into something far bigger.” TB: Zimbardo! I had no idea he was the origin of Broken Window. You may know him from the Stanford Prison Experiment. p112 - “For the first time ever, median rent in the fifty most populous metro areas exceeded $2,000. Put simply, “In no state, metropolitan area or county in the US can a worker earning the federal or prevailing state or local minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom rental home by working a standard 40-hour work week.” More than 40 percent of US workers cannot afford even a one-bedroom fair-market rental with one full-time job.” p125-128 or thereabouts, discussion on the point-in-time counts. Good discussion! Huge undercount, bad at counting rural populations, etc. p136 - start of section on Housing First, an evidence-based best practice that you will likely see more or less scuttled by the second Trump administration for no good reason. p163-172 - great section on international perspectives on affordable housing, including co-ops!! Review Odd double feature with my other review/finished book today, On Tyranny. ...