I feel like this book might be a case of “it’s not you, it’s me”, or I should read it in French…
I read the translated version because my husband receiI feel like this book might be a case of “it’s not you, it’s me”, or I should read it in French…
I read the translated version because my husband received a copy for his birthday earlier this year, and after he was done with it, he had a lot of thoughts, so I wanted to check it out, and it felt silly to go find a copy of the same book in another language for the sake of linguistic purity (I am not a good Québecoise, according to some…), so I just read his copy.
But the fact is, there is a reason I usually prefer reading books in the language they were written in: even the best translation can only ever capture so much of what the writer meant to convey, and that’s an unavoidable flaw in the process. So yeah, maybe the issue is that I need to eventually re-read this in French.
However, it is also possible that it was just a weird timing situation. This book is well written, extremely clever and erudite, and surreally bizarre. That makes it a unique and fun romp. There is something detached about the prose that also made it easy for me to leave on my bedside table for a couple of days at the time. I had to remind myself to pick it up, and I find that a bit disappointing: from everything I had heard about it, I was really expecting to be engaged, and I just wasn’t…
Linguist and philosopher Roland Barthes is hit by a truck after having had lunch with the President. Is this a simple road accident, or a nefarious plan to eliminate him in order to acquire a discovery he has made that could change the world? A cop and a philosophy student end up teaming up to resolve this strange mystery, which involved Bulgarian hit-men and a strange, high-stakes debate club.
I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the Existential Comics series (https://www.existentialcomics.com/), but when I saw this book described as “hilarious” and featuring plenty of famous philosophers, that was sort of what I had in mind. But it’s not really what the book is. While Binet does give you enough information to understand the work of the people he inserts in his story so that you don’t need to have read their works to get it, I found that he didn’t quite push the envelope far enough with this idea. I think there was a missed opportunity here, to make the various philosophical and intellectual ideas he features into a stronger part of the narrative. He is obviously well-read and very clever, but I just felt like his ideas were a touch too shallow.
I will keep an eye open for a used copy in French; perhaps the original will manage what the translation didn’t?...more
"Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audi"Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art."
Review/personal reflections on the book’s subject matter. Feel free to disagree with me, this is an entirely personal perspective on a thorny issue.
This book had been on my radar for a while, because I find the topic it explores truly fascinating, but I wasn’t in any particular rush to read it. Then it happened: a musician whose work had meant so much to me for almost twenty years was accused of sexual misconduct, first by one woman, then by a dozen, his band broke up, their label folded and a huge stack of records I have cherished and found strength and comfort in now looks… weird and tainted because that man used a very progressive and inclusive message and persona to conceal some terrible actions. This is not a new phenomenon; I had simply felt lucky it had never hit so close to home before, and it was heartbreaking to see the veneer peeling off.
“Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” is all about the increasingly frequent reckoning we encounter, of not really knowing what to do with a work of art when its creator’s deeds show them to be, well, monsters. Separating art from artist is an age-old debate, and the #metoo movement has certainly brought it back into our collective consciousness, as victims now find their voices backed by a community and support system they may not have had access to before.
Can we take art on its own terms, and truly ignore that it was created by a person whose behavior was inappropriate at best and criminal at worst? As mentioned before, I hadn’t experienced that question with works that were very close to my heart until this year. I was not sufficiently attached to any one specific work of art made by a monstrous person to feel that strongly about it. And right now, frankly, I’m still not sure how to feel about my pile of records.
Dederer is not trying to find a definitive answer, but more to get people to consider this issue as personal, complex, multifaceted and potentially unsolvable. I do like the main image she uses, of a stain on the work done by terrible people. If we have a shirt with a stain, will we keep it, still wear it in public, will it be relegated to the clothes we wear to clean up and paint, or will we consider it ruined and throw it out? I think it’s a good analogy.
My pile of records is now stained. Is the stain set all the way into the vinyl grooves to the point where they can’t be listened to? I honestly don’t know, because the inspiration and comfort they gave me was real, even if one of the men involved in making them was lying about who he was and what he believed in. Art is powerful like that, which is why these situations are so tricky to figure out and so divisive. Dederer uses “Annie Hall” as an example to discuss the fact that Woody Allen is not the only one who worked on this movie: do we throw Diane Keaton’s performance in the trash along with all of Allen’s movies? It’s not that simple – and I think of the other three musicians who worked tirelessly on my pile of stained records, the way their own trust was betrayed by a bandmate, the shock, guilt and horrible feelings they must be experiencing. Do I throw their labor, their creativity, their genuine love and commitment to their art and fans to the trash? Is it inextricably linked to the deeds committed by their bandmate? Do all the good things that came from their work (the people they inspired to get into music, into activism, into politics) go away? It’s a lot to chew on, and frankly, I have no clue.
Dederer’s floundering and refusal to take a stance clearly annoyed a lot of readers, and I get why, I really do: it is much more simple to just draw a hard line, but I also think that life might be too complicated for that. I think that because our relationship to art is so deep and so personal, untangling our feelings about it requires more introspection than a lot of people are comfortable doing; in the book “Your Favorite Band is Killing Me”, the point is made than when we support an artist, we often see it as taking a moral stand, so if an artist we supported turned out to be a terrible person, we see our continued support of their work as a moral failing on our part, or even an endorsement of their actions – hence the need to learn to pry artist and art apart.
Dederer is also careful to make a difference between an audience member and a fan, which she defines as someone who makes the art part of their identity; the fans tend to have much bigger reaction to transgressing artists than audience members, which makes quite a lot of sense, and absolutely resonates with my personal experience with these situations. Add to that the relatively modern phenomena of parasocial relationships and how fandom is linked to consumer culture, and you have a disaster waiting to happen every time an artist puts a toe out of line.
She also makes a very interesting connection between cancel culture and consumer culture, and ponders if the two are not inextricably linked, which also circles back to the concept of fandom, which is often expressed via consumption of goods. The way personal identity becomes fused with fandoms and with our consumer habits is something we do agonize over, because we feel that we ought to spend our money (which is power in the capitalist society we live in) ethically, on things that reflect our values.
A few people have expressed frustration that Dederer looks at a lot of monstruous men and few monstruous women in this book, but I got the feeling that she explains the double-standard well enough: some behavior will be excused in men and be considered unacceptable in women. I do wonder if more women would act the way those famous, monstruous men did if societal norms would have allowed them to get away with it, but there are different standards between genders, or at least, there have been for a very long time. I was especially struck by the idea that Joni Mitchell is a monster for putting her daughter up for adoption (bad mother!) but there are legions of famous absentee fathers that people still idolize, and that aspect of their personal life is rarely questioned or held against them.
Dederer is a beautiful writer, and while this book can feel at time more like something she wrote for herself, to help herself untangle feelings she doesn’t know “where to put”, I can truly appreciate the obvious talent she is working with. The second half of the book meanders a bit more, and while it is still interesting, it feels less tight and engaging than the first half. Her chapter on Nobokov actually makes me want to re-read "Lolita". I found her chapter on the historical rear-view mirror very interesting, because I often wonder if we do in fact, know better now than people did 30, 60 or 100 years ago; I am glad to see I'm not the only one who isn't so sure about that...
By the end of the book, I was left with a simple and yet infinitely frustrating (and somewhat depressing) conclusion: art is complex and powerful, and we need it to support us, make sense of the world, fill us with wonder, hope and inspiration. But art is made by humans, and humans are, statistically speaking, often total dicks. Which means we will inevitably consume art created by a total dick at some point or another. That's the sad reality, and it is up to the reader/listener/viewer to determine where their personal line in the sand is about this.
"Genius is the name we give our love when we don't want to argue about it, (...) when we don't want to hold our heroes accountable."
The musician I mentioned at the beginning of the review wrote some amazing songs that have shaped the way I think in many ways; he also offered to buy me a drink after a show about 15 years ago, and I now wonder if I would have been one of the women quoted in the Rolling Stone exposé about him if I hadn't been surrounded by male friends when that happened (there is also the equally horrifying possibility that at 25, I might have already been a bit too old for his taste). I may never know what the fuck to do with any of that. I may never have the capacity to enjoy that music again "in spite of everything", and that makes me sad. I am glad he is being sued for his alleged crimes, and I am heart-broken for the people he hurt. But I may never throw out those records.
A small and lovely book about Zen Buddhism, its history, philosophy and practice. I picked it up and should have gobbled it, but the past year has beeA small and lovely book about Zen Buddhism, its history, philosophy and practice. I picked it up and should have gobbled it, but the past year has been a tough one with regards to my own Zen practice, and I think I was afraid of the book. It happens. I powered through it this weekend and got out on the other side more centered than I have felt in ages. Go figure.
I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5 because as much as I enjoyed it and though it was a charming concept, it was a bit uneven: some concepts are given incredibly detailed attention, while others are just mentioned quickly without going in any deeper, some terms are used and never really explained, so someone who isn’t familiar with the lingo will not quite understand what is being discussed. It does have one of the best practical how-to about sitting zazen I have ever read, and those illustrations would be extremely useful to a beginner.
Recommended, but consider keeping a copy of the “Shambala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen” handy, in case you should run across concepts you are unfamiliar with....more
I first read “The Communist Manifesto” in college, for a poli-sci class. I have to say that I don’t recall much from that reading: in my defense, it wI first read “The Communist Manifesto” in college, for a poli-sci class. I have to say that I don’t recall much from that reading: in my defense, it was almost twenty years ago. But I decided to revisit it because last year, I got some books by Rosa Luxembourg that reference it a lot, and China Mieville will soon publish a book on the Manifesto, and I felt like if I was to truly appreciate those books, I needed to have this one a little bit fresher in mind.
This edition’s introduction, by Marshall Berman, is very interesting as it seeks to contextualize the text in a post 2008 crash society. That said, as it was published in 2011, it could use an update, as things have not exactly gotten better economically speaking since then.
I put this book on my mandatory reading shelf because in my opinion, it should be read by everyone, if only as a very interesting artefact of historical and economic interest. But I think it is also very hard not to notice that some passages in it are not only accurate, but often quite prescient. And the text itself is about forty pages, which can be read in a single sitting.
As far as I am concerned, this book is a necessary document to fuel our thinking, now more than ever, as the past two years have pushed the world into a unprecedented crisis and our economic system is in a very precarious place. Some of the perspectives and connections detailed in this book are very important, even today, and should not be forgotten. Marx's vision was not always realistic, as he seems to have forgotten about the problem of human greed, but nevertheless, his head and his heart were in the right place.
Marx knew when he wrote this book, that giving a proper plan of action to his readers was silly, as each culture – and time period – has its own specific challenges to overcome in order for society to be closer to this rather utopian ideals of wealth distribution. Even back then, there was no one-size-fits-all solution that he could conceive. But we can still be inspired by this book, and our motivations can be fueled by the final call to unity....more
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