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alisarae's Reviews (1.65k)
These essays were originally written and published at different times, for different reasons, but what they have in common is what Lilla calls reactionary politics and I'll call nostalgia politics. If action or revolution in politics means taking a step forward where society hasn't gone before, then reaction means denying that this step was a good one and trying to ctrl+z things back to the way they were before. Apocalyptic predictions, just-so stories, mytho-histories, and explanations that point back to a root cause are favorite tools of reactionary politics.
"Reactionaries are not conservatives. They are just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings. Millennial expectations of a redemptive new social order and rejuvenated human beings inspire the revolutionary; apocalyptic fears of entering a new dark age haunt the reactionary..... And the reactionaries of our time have discovered that nostalgia can be a powerful motivator, perhaps even more powerful than hope. Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable." I guess we can say that conservatives don't want anything to change, they fight for political stasis, while reactionaries want dramatic change in order to turn back the clocks of history.
I was hoping that ML would go into American politics and how contemporary pop culture feeds this nostalgia, but that isn't the case. I wasn't familiar with the thinkers and authors who are the subject of his essays, so it was interesting to learn something new at least.
will post notes on essays later.
"Reactionaries are not conservatives. They are just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings. Millennial expectations of a redemptive new social order and rejuvenated human beings inspire the revolutionary; apocalyptic fears of entering a new dark age haunt the reactionary..... And the reactionaries of our time have discovered that nostalgia can be a powerful motivator, perhaps even more powerful than hope. Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable." I guess we can say that conservatives don't want anything to change, they fight for political stasis, while reactionaries want dramatic change in order to turn back the clocks of history.
I was hoping that ML would go into American politics and how contemporary pop culture feeds this nostalgia, but that isn't the case. I wasn't familiar with the thinkers and authors who are the subject of his essays, so it was interesting to learn something new at least.
will post notes on essays later.
Very cool concept of different types of tea imbues different types of magic. It had more political intrigue than I expected, too.
The premise - an upper middle class family from NYC is on vacation at a remote cottage when the apocalypse happens - starts off strong. Unfortunately nothing much happens after 30%. I think the dynamics between the characters are good and read as authentic for the most part, but with so much possibility it just seems like a deficit of creativity to not do anything else with them. It reads very much like a short story writing exercise that ran out of steam.
The court intrigue and political conspiracies that surprised me in the first book gave way to a meandering journey to find the horcruxes in the second book. I was pretty bored since I don't enjoy journeys or fetch quests. And even worse, dream sequences or anything adjacent just bores me to tears, and those were a good 25% of the book. Overall I think the concept, magic system, and world were strong, but I was hoping for power struggles with Ning serving in the court.
I happened across this story while randomly browsing the classics at my library and I mistook it for something else (Captain Scrimshaw? Captain Ahab? who knows). The story itself is nothing particularly memorable but the plot is dynamic and flows well.
What always strikes me about science-fiction is how it knows humanity so well. Describing the maiden voyage of a pleasure cruise to the moon: "Passengers who paid so highly expected to be pleasantly thrilled and shielded from all reasons for alarm. And they couldn't be. Something happens when a self-centered and complacent individual unsuspectingly looks out of a spaceship port and sees the cosmos unshielded by mists or clouds or other aids to blindness against reality. It is shattering. A millionaire cut his throat when he saw Earth dwindled to a mere blue green ball in vastness. He could not endure his own smallness in the face of immensity."
This feeling is called "the overview effect" and was first coined by author Frank White in 1987. The first person to physically experience and describe it was Yuri Gagarin in 1961. Scrimshaw was originally published in a sci-fi magazine in 1955.
I suppose it's not impossibly hard to imagine how it would feel when you leave Earth. I would probably imagine going to space might feel something like when I hiked to the peak of a mountain or dove down to 40 meters underwater and could only see the immensity of the open ocean in all directions. It's exhilarating to realize the problems of daily life, of relationships and work and bills, are minute and fleeting. The shift in perspective is an instant mood-lifter.
What surprised me, then, is that's not how Leinster describes it. The main character, Pop Young, is able to do his job on the surface of the moon so well because he isn't driven to existential madness like everyone else. Because he doesn't have memories to compare his lunar perspective to. Leinster describes being in space as an existential dystopia, and daily life on the moon a literal "medieval notion of physical appearance of hell."
William Shatner makes an interesting comparison between the imagined view us optimistic dreamers have of space versus his own experience: "I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound. It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness."
Though Jeff Bezos did not describe his own trip as anything but wholly positive (let us not forget his vested interest in suppressing any bothersome doubts about his venture), both he and Shatner walked away from the experience describing a stronger and more pressing need to care for our unique planet and environment. "This is the only good planet in this solar system, and we have to take care of it. And when you go into space and see how fragile it is, you'll want to take care of it even more. And that's what this is about," Bezos said. And Shatner: "Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral."
I've been trying not to retweet negative news bites on Twitter for the past few months, but it's honestly a challenge and I couldn't resist spreading the news about these things this week:
1. "The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has, for the first time in state history, canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers...An estimated 1 billion crabs [90% of the population] have mysteriously disappeared in 2 years." source
2. "FUN FACT: turtles, crocodiles, and alligators' sex is determined not by chromosomes but by the temperature the eggs incubate at. NOT FUN FACT: they may all go extinct soon because a temperature difference of a couple degrees will make them 100% female/male, depending on species. In 2018, more than *99%* of young green sea turtles examined in a study were females." Source. Tweet.
3. "I got arrested today in downtown St.louis, cause it's illegal to feed the homeless!! This was my 5th time getting warned about the new law. I really don't care. When ppl are hungry, please feed them. It was cold! Also so I gave out scarfs gloves, chili etc. Y would u lock me up?" Tweet.
4. Insects, the backbone of the entire ecosystem, are experiencing a "rate of extinction [that] is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century." Source.
You know, it's just crazy to me that we are determined to make literally everything, even fellow humans, go extinct. To kill off the source of true, profound, existential human joy in the known universe. I'm talking about: forget being able to live on Mars physically (and a big F.U. to you, Elon), psychologically I don't know if we could survive that. Just this morning I was trying to remember the last time I saw a housefly. It's been... years? Imagine a life without other life. Imagine that.
What always strikes me about science-fiction is how it knows humanity so well. Describing the maiden voyage of a pleasure cruise to the moon: "Passengers who paid so highly expected to be pleasantly thrilled and shielded from all reasons for alarm. And they couldn't be. Something happens when a self-centered and complacent individual unsuspectingly looks out of a spaceship port and sees the cosmos unshielded by mists or clouds or other aids to blindness against reality. It is shattering. A millionaire cut his throat when he saw Earth dwindled to a mere blue green ball in vastness. He could not endure his own smallness in the face of immensity."
This feeling is called "the overview effect" and was first coined by author Frank White in 1987. The first person to physically experience and describe it was Yuri Gagarin in 1961. Scrimshaw was originally published in a sci-fi magazine in 1955.
I suppose it's not impossibly hard to imagine how it would feel when you leave Earth. I would probably imagine going to space might feel something like when I hiked to the peak of a mountain or dove down to 40 meters underwater and could only see the immensity of the open ocean in all directions. It's exhilarating to realize the problems of daily life, of relationships and work and bills, are minute and fleeting. The shift in perspective is an instant mood-lifter.
What surprised me, then, is that's not how Leinster describes it. The main character, Pop Young, is able to do his job on the surface of the moon so well because he isn't driven to existential madness like everyone else. Because he doesn't have memories to compare his lunar perspective to. Leinster describes being in space as an existential dystopia, and daily life on the moon a literal "medieval notion of physical appearance of hell."
William Shatner makes an interesting comparison between the imagined view us optimistic dreamers have of space versus his own experience: "I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound. It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness."
Though Jeff Bezos did not describe his own trip as anything but wholly positive (let us not forget his vested interest in suppressing any bothersome doubts about his venture), both he and Shatner walked away from the experience describing a stronger and more pressing need to care for our unique planet and environment. "This is the only good planet in this solar system, and we have to take care of it. And when you go into space and see how fragile it is, you'll want to take care of it even more. And that's what this is about," Bezos said. And Shatner: "Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral."
I've been trying not to retweet negative news bites on Twitter for the past few months, but it's honestly a challenge and I couldn't resist spreading the news about these things this week:
1. "The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has, for the first time in state history, canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers...An estimated 1 billion crabs [90% of the population] have mysteriously disappeared in 2 years." source
2. "FUN FACT: turtles, crocodiles, and alligators' sex is determined not by chromosomes but by the temperature the eggs incubate at. NOT FUN FACT: they may all go extinct soon because a temperature difference of a couple degrees will make them 100% female/male, depending on species. In 2018, more than *99%* of young green sea turtles examined in a study were females." Source. Tweet.
3. "I got arrested today in downtown St.louis, cause it's illegal to feed the homeless!! This was my 5th time getting warned about the new law. I really don't care. When ppl are hungry, please feed them. It was cold! Also so I gave out scarfs gloves, chili etc. Y would u lock me up?" Tweet.
4. Insects, the backbone of the entire ecosystem, are experiencing a "rate of extinction [that] is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century." Source.
You know, it's just crazy to me that we are determined to make literally everything, even fellow humans, go extinct. To kill off the source of true, profound, existential human joy in the known universe. I'm talking about: forget being able to live on Mars physically (and a big F.U. to you, Elon), psychologically I don't know if we could survive that. Just this morning I was trying to remember the last time I saw a housefly. It's been... years? Imagine a life without other life. Imagine that.
I'm getting more into old timey true crime. The Man from the Train is another book I've read about an early 20th century serial killer. American Demon struck me with how modern police investigation had become by the 1930's, occurring just 20 years after The Man from the Train. The pre- and post- WWI divide is wide. Finger printing, chemical analysis, psychosexual profiling, and even lie detectors were used in this case.
The story is told through the lens of the career of Eliot Ness of The Untouchables fame, focused mostly on the period of his life when he was Cleveland's public safety director. Approaching the Torso Murderer case in this light was a great decision on the author's part, because the "resolution" only makes sense if you understand the niche political setting of Depression-era Cleveland (it's more interesting than it appears at first glance). Although I am usually more interested in the other side of the coin (ie, a profile of the killer), Eliot Ness proved to be enough of a complicated, enigmatic figure to hold my interest.
The story is told through the lens of the career of Eliot Ness of The Untouchables fame, focused mostly on the period of his life when he was Cleveland's public safety director. Approaching the Torso Murderer case in this light was a great decision on the author's part, because the "resolution" only makes sense if you understand the niche political setting of Depression-era Cleveland (it's more interesting than it appears at first glance). Although I am usually more interested in the other side of the coin (ie, a profile of the killer), Eliot Ness proved to be enough of a complicated, enigmatic figure to hold my interest.
Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special: More Than 275 Recipes for Soups, Stews, Salads & Extras
Moosewood Collective, Moosewood Collective
I’ve never quite understood the hype for Moosewood cookbooks and assumed they must have been coasting on their reputation for actually edible vegetarian recipes from the 90s or whenever it was they got their start. I generally found the recipes adequate but nothing special, the one-size-fits-all approach to cooking for a range of tastes.
This book made me reconsider my opinion. I’ve always loved a quaint soup n salad combo, which is *exactly* the setup going on here. Find an interesting soup, and every recipe has a handful of suggestions for a corresponding salad, (and vice versa). Plus soups and salads don’t usually depend on gluteny ingredients, and I’m excited to try out the recipe for a simple gluten free yeast bread in the Accompaniments section.
This book made me reconsider my opinion. I’ve always loved a quaint soup n salad combo, which is *exactly* the setup going on here. Find an interesting soup, and every recipe has a handful of suggestions for a corresponding salad, (and vice versa). Plus soups and salads don’t usually depend on gluteny ingredients, and I’m excited to try out the recipe for a simple gluten free yeast bread in the Accompaniments section.
Great characters, magic system, and voice, but the plot was a let down. I actually went and read a spoilered synopsis because I thought I had missed something, but nope, I just didn’t like the resolution.
Overall this reminded me of American Gods, in the way that mythical and supernatural beings interact with modern urban environments. I didn’t particularly like that book, but I would recommend Rivers of London if you did!
Overall this reminded me of American Gods, in the way that mythical and supernatural beings interact with modern urban environments. I didn’t particularly like that book, but I would recommend Rivers of London if you did!
This was the craziest, most tangled story I've ever heard of! As Silas said, "I'm glad you got to experience Game of Thrones." This is soap opera level drama, for sure. Just unfortunate that it's a true story.