Donald Trump’s nonsensical threats are an attempt to distract from his own country’s self-destruction
At the risk of sounding chuavinistic, I do honestly think that no one's quite as good at dragging America as Canadians. Quote:
Trump has promised to return America to its traditional way of life—and, to be fair, losing wars of occupation is traditional for the United States.
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That’s why America wins every battle and loses every war. They can perform military actions perfectly but they can’t recognize the ultimate consequences of those actions. War, for them, is a kind of hobby. They only enjoy it on foreign soil, when the stakes are on the other side. [...] September 11 was the most successful military action of the 21st century exactly because it exploited American vulnerability toward spectacles of violence in their homeland. The Americans played right into their enemies’ hands after a single attack. Their foreign policy decisions in the subsequent decade could not have been more self-defeating if Osama Bin Laden had been dictating them.
American foreign policy operates on a combination of extraordinary technical facility and fundamental stupidity; this may be their defining trait as a nation.
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We should fear American weakness rather than strength. And America has never been weaker in our lifetimes. It is barely in a condition to defend itself, or even to understand when it is being attacked. Sometime in the next four years, America’s enemies, rather than its allies, will pick their moment and pop the United States like a balloon. All it will take is a pinprick.
So, last month, when I said I Will Read More Fiction In April? Yeah, that wound up being mostly fake lol. However!!: I'm still revising along, and I did finish a cowl, and I caught back up on Poetry Quest (wahhoo!!), so I really genuinely do have almost exclusively fiction on my lineup for May.
Reviews for April's reads linked:
ON WRITING ★★★★½ Came up in a writing class I take online; delightful and short and the opposite of coddling. I am still thinking about it a full month later, so: more resonant than I realized at the time. (Throw yourself against the door.)
STRUCTURING LIFE TO SUPPORT CREATIVITY ★★★★½ Excellent practical resource guide! Lots of activities and thought exercises to help you figure out how to organize your life around your creative pursuits (or fit them in better given the space you have)--very much Take What You Need kind of book.
A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST ★★★ I got some good vibes out of this one (my hope!), but I'm afraid I bounce off Solnit's style :/ Even this one required a lot of patience from me. Worth it, but I don't think I'll keep acquiring her work (definitely a Me Problem, I know).
BEING ACE ★★★★ Solid collection of YA short stories about, you guessed it, Being Ace! Good genre mix.
MY POEMS ★★★ Dual language (Russian/English), March's Poetry Quest installment! I had outrageously miscalibrated hopes for this as language practice, which I walked back partway through April (because. it was partway through April.). It's fascinating to compare the original and translation--reading anything in its non-original language turns writing into a three-way conversation instead of a two-way conversation (what choice did the translator make? what was the writer going for? how would you have done it, as a second-language reader?), and I love that for enrichment reasons.
THE BUILDING THAT WASN'T ★★★ This could've been so good if it were good :( Unfortunately, it was Just Mid. Weird and fucked up loop of a book that, sadly, did not deliver.
LOCKE LAMORA AND THE BOTTLED SERPENT ★★★★ Locke Lamora My Beloved!! This is an extremely fancy edition of a two-part short story originally sold to Grim Dark Magazine, but!: the Fancy Publisher says they'll publish an ebook edition of their expanded version in a few weeks!
SOPHIA PARNOK ★★★★ For Poetry Quest! Mostly biography, sprinkling of poems. Twentieth century Russian lesbian poet who is such a writer icon. Academic text but approachable!
ANNA AKHMATOVA - 85/942 pages read. Did I read a couple pages last night before bed so that at the end of the year I can say I have Read Some Of This Every Month? MAYBE SO,. I am finally properly into The Poems, though!
In May I genuinely, genuinely, plan to read Way More Fiction. I've pulled everything on my current TBR that fits Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which is. a Not Insignificant Amount of Reading lol. Also, I need to reread Murderbot to date in preparation for PLATFORM DECAY, and I need to make more revision progress (September is Looming), and and and--always much to do haha.
Under the Cut: How I Generally Conceptualize ~*★Stars★*~
★ - This was Bad. I would actively recommend that you do NOT read this one, no redeeming qualities whatsoever, not worth the slog. Save Yourself, It's Too Late For Me. Book goes in the garbage (donate bin).
★★ - This was Not Good. I would not recommend it, but it wasn't a total waste or wash--something in here held my interest/kept my attention/sparked some joy. I will not be rereading this ever. Save Yourself (Or Join Me In Suffering, That Seems Like A Cool Bonding Activity).
★★★ - This was Good/Fine/Okay/Meh. I don't care about this enough to recommend it one way or another. Perfectly serviceable book, held my interest, I probably enjoyed myself (or at least didn't actively loathe the reading). I don't have especially strong feelings. You probably don't need to save yourself from this one--if it sounds like your jam, give it a shot! Just didn't resonate with me particularly powerfully. I probably won't reread this unless I'm after something in particular.
★★★½ - I liked this! I'll probably recommend it if I know it matches someone's vibes or specific requests, but I didn't commit to a star rating on Goodreads. More likely to reread, but not guaranteed.
★★★★ - I really enjoyed this!! I would recommend it (sometimes with caveats about content warnings or such--I like weird fucked up funny shit). Not a perfect book for me by any means, but Very Good. This is something I would reread! Join me!!
★★★★★ - I LOVED THE SHIT OUT OF THIS, IT REWIRED MY BRAIN, WILL RECOMMEND TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE AT THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION (content warning caveats still apply--see 4-star disclaimer). Excellent book, I'll reread it regularly, I'll buy copies for all my friends, I'll try to convince all of Booklr to read it, PLEASE join me!!
John Keats wrote “Ode on Melancholy” for me. Specifically he wrote it for me at 15. He wrote it for a teenager in a suburb in a city in a country, none of which existed at the time of his writing. He may not have known it but he did. And I do not know who I am writing this for, or for what time, or to what purpose. But there is a deep longing in me—and it’s not a lie, not a fraud—to make these words for you. These ephemeral connections are the substance of victory, to belong to a constellation of meanings, to alleviate a specific, minuscule cosmic loneliness. It seems like such a small satisfaction to expend your life on. It isn’t. “You ask, why send my scribbles,” Ovid, in his exile, asked. “Because I want to be with you somehow.” Somehow, anyhow.
—Stephen Marche, on the truth about writerly perseverance, LitHub Craft of Writing Newsletter
—Stephen Marche, “Winning the Game You Didn’t Even Want to Play: On Sally Rooney and the Literature of the Pose”
As I was saying... Aside from that, this article is too long, too forced. The distinctions don’t hold up. The styleless and politically dramatized translationese of the hyped-up Millennial novel derives from the model of a few Silents and Boomers (Coetzee, Ishiguro, Sebald), never mentioned. The Silents and Boomers themselves conveniently get reduced to Roth and Amis (nothing he says in that section applies to Morrison, Atwood, Ondaatje, etc.). The comparison between Seamus Heaney and Rupi Kaur could have been between, say, Ishion Hutchinson and Rod McKuen to similar aesthetic but opposite historic effect. Etc. Like much historicist diagnosis of the arts, it comes off like excuse-making. Taken too seriously, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, as if there weren’t a war on between word and image when Faulkner and Fitzgerald went to Hollywood or Morrison and McCarthy went on Oprah. Marche casually brushes off counterexamples by saying they don’t represent “the writing that defines the moment,” as if that were up to someone besides a critic with a prominent berth. Why sell your birthright to some publisher’s marketing team? “It seems that history is to blame,” says a character in Ulysses; Joyce has him say this to show he’s an idiot. There’s never any good reason to write a novel without verve or style. I knew I was untimely, but I wrote Portraits and Ashes anyway, and even if I don’t get rich till I’m dead, it will have been worth it to have written, for example,
As the bus shook, she superstitiously kept her hand cupped over the location of her wound like a medieval horseman, cleaved from sternum to pommel, swaying on his headlong mount, trying to hold his guts in.
Illustration by Sébastien Thibault (sebastienthibault.com).
America's Next Civil War
The United States shows all the warning signs of impending social and political collapse
The US Congress is too paralyzed by anger to carry out even the most basic tasks of government. America’s legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government is in free fall. The president discredits the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the judicial system on a regular basis. Border guards place children in detention centres at the border. Antigovernment groups, some of which are armed militias, stand ready and prepared for a government collapse. All of this has already happened.
Cliché is anesthetic death. Only the unfinished building lets in light. Fiction, in its greatest period, was deeply unfinished as a genre. It was written for the rich or possibly the poor, for reasons of high art or possibly low commerce, by radical invention or antique saga-spinning, about the everyday or the extraordinary, through modes of parody or preaching. Social media has thrown nonfiction into a similar happy confusion. What is simple reportage? What is memoir? What is a blog post? What is an essay? What is high and what is low? What is commercial and what is art? All of the standards and distinctions are melting; old forms, superheated in the furnace of the internet, may be molded into new.
It should not be taken to imply that Canadians don’t love their country, or that I don’t love my country. I do. Most Canadians do, too. They just love it quietly.
July 1 is Canada’s 150th anniversary, but nobody seems particularly eager to join the party…
The irony is that Canada, at the moment, has a lot to celebrate. Our prime minister is glamorous and internationally recognized as a celebrity of progressive politics. We are among the last societies in the West not totally consumed by loathing of others. Canada leads the Group of 7 countries in economic growth. Our cultural power is real: Drake recently had 24 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time — for one shining moment he was nearly a quarter of popular music. Frankly, it’s not going to get much better than this for little old Canada…
Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, articulated Canada’s difference from other countries perfectly: “There is no such thing as a model or ideal Canadian,” he said when he was prime minister in 1971. “What could be more absurd than the concept of an ‘all Canadian’ boy or girl? A society which emphasizes uniformity is one which creates intolerance and hate.”...
Nationally, Canada has been spared the populism that has swallowed the rest of the Western world because there is not, and has never been, such a thing as a “real Canadian.” … To lead this country, you must be able to navigate multiple languages and multiple cultures. Our longstanding identity crisis has suddenly turned to a huge advantage — we come, in a sense, pre-broken…
So why is Canada so bad at celebrating itself?…Canadian self-flagellation results always in the same warm, comfortingly smug sense of virtue…It transcends the political spectrum. Whether it is Conservative insistence on frugality and small-town values or the furious outrage of identity politics on the left, everyone has the same point to make: We’re not as good as we think we are, and the government should do something about it…
None of what I have written should be taken to imply that Canadians don’t love their country, or that I don’t love my country. I do. Most Canadians do, too. They just love it quietly…
~ Stephen Marche, excerpts from "Canada Doesn’t Know How to Party" (NY Times, June 23, 2017)
Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around.
Stephen Marche in his article “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”
