I was so excited to read this book. I am ‘into witch shit’; I really liked the idea of using witchcraft as a metaphor for women’s solidarity, and all I was so excited to read this book. I am ‘into witch shit’; I really liked the idea of using witchcraft as a metaphor for women’s solidarity, and all the powerful feelings and social effects this homosociality can produce.
In the end I found myself wishing it had been more uncompromisingly witchy. While I enjoyed the chapters individually, I felt like the central thread of witchcraft and magic wasn’t necessarily carried through.
It’s a mark of the book’s success that it did invite me to consider the role of lore and ritual in practices as diverse as makeup application, social work and permaculture farming, and how nuns, elders and midwives become guardians of the watchtowers: magical guides across life’s thresholds. I considered how it’s through collaboration with other women that we can access powerful states of transcendence: through playing music, through teenage fandom, through dance and athleticism.
Implicit throughout is the idea that these rituals, facilitated by these relationships, transfigure womanhood itself into something fluid and mercurial, something felt from the inside rather than a stolid category that can be pinned down from the outside. This is an especially powerful concept in regard to the trans chapter co-authored with Liz Duck-Chong.
But I wish Sam George-Allen had been more explicit, more insistent, that all this IS witchcraft! The power of being completely present in your body and mind, feeling you can change the world, and the feeling of belonging completely to your friends, to your passions, to your work, your community and surroundings, just as they in turn sustain you and lift you up… THIS is what witchcraft is – not just tarot or crystals or spells!
The introduction promised this approach, but then the chapters seemed to get bogged down in memoir, or discussions of patriarchal panic over women’s skills and collaborations. The prose was clean and delightful to read, with a lot of evocative scene-setting and observation, and I had a sense of plentiful research and erudition bubbling below the surface; but there was a lot of rumination on what is and isn’t considered feminist, and how men have sought to atomise and belittle women.
I’ve admired SGA’s essays in the past but this book felt like it was pitched to the entry-level feminism market. Reading it felt like riding in a sports car at 40kmh. The sophisticated level of critical analysis I’ve seen from SGA before, and was craving here, seemed to me like it had been dialled down in order to make the book ‘approachable’ and ‘accessible’.
Maybe my own inner witch wanted a more freaky and nerdy book than the Australian trade nonfiction market can sustain?...more
I taught this book at La Trobe University in the subject ‘Narrative Analysis’. It is strange how the form and style of this book are so similar to MagI taught this book at La Trobe University in the subject ‘Narrative Analysis’. It is strange how the form and style of this book are so similar to Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’, which I was looking forward to and yet hated; this, which I was kind of dreading having to read, felt like my brain was sinking into a warm bath. It’s exactly the kind of allusive, historically informed and nature-grounded writing that I love.
The game of weaving Sebald’s motifs and metaphors into a broader narrative about European entropy, death and ghosts was so pleasurable to me. Vanishing cities, empty quiet houses, lost friends, lost industries, illness, trauma and madness, animals in torment, and everywhere: busy, remorseless human exploitation.
I also enjoyed that Sebald was a character in the story but nonetheless an enigmatic presence; he uses himself as a vessel to tell stories and explore ideas, not to flay his history and his psyche for the enjoyment of others. I hesitate to call this memoir or even travelogue but it’s not quite a novel either: it’s a delightfully ambiguous read....more
I taught this book at La Trobe University in the subject ‘Narrative Analysis’. It was the one I was most looking forward to – I’d been meaning to readI taught this book at La Trobe University in the subject ‘Narrative Analysis’. It was the one I was most looking forward to – I’d been meaning to read it for ages – but as soon as I got started I realised how badly I’d misjudged it. I’d had the idea it was going to be a fun Jennifer Egan-style romp but instead it was a turgid autofiction in the vein of Chris Kraus, whose work I struggle to enjoy.
I was thinking the students, who were mostly second-year undergraduates, would struggle with the critical theory and the fragmented structure, but to my surprise they loved it almost unanimously, and many students chose to write their essays about it.
Meanwhile I was like, “Life is too short to keep reading this.”
I mean, she couldn’t even get the Ship of Theseus metaphor right....more
This book is written in agreeably plain English and is structured in easy-to-follow chunks, with little summaries at the end of each chapter so you doThis book is written in agreeably plain English and is structured in easy-to-follow chunks, with little summaries at the end of each chapter so you don't get lost. But it helps to have a background knowledge or interest in artificial intelligence, and/or an interest in mathematics, because the author is a scientist, not a sociologist or cultural commentator.
I found my eyes glazing over during the descriptions of how certain programs and algorithms work and was far more interested in the historical, philosophical and cultural aspects, but that is just the way my brain works (or doesn't). Others may find the science stuff gripping.
A lot of the book's content wasn't new to me because I follow media coverage of some of the key developments in AI such as robotics, natural language processing, deep learning and big data, artificial general intelligence and singularity panics, the impact of AI on the future of work, and autonomous lethal weapons (or as we philistines outside the field insist on calling them, 'killer robots').
As an academic authority in the field, Young has the advantage of not being breathless in the way of journos and tech entrepreneurs, but at times he's more dry and sober than I would have liked. But Young's professorial authority is the point of this book: it adds a sense of reassurance, a counterbalance to the often hyperbolic claims made about the present and future capabilities of AI.
I read this book in preparation for interviewing Young at a City of Melbourne event. I was really worried about embarrassing myself with my helpless Terminator fandom in front of an IRL brainiac, but I think it went okay in the end. Anyway, now I shall return to my copy of 'I'll Be Back, Therefore I Am: Terminator and Philosophy'....more
The casual grace of Doyle's writing, and the ease with which she combines material from secondary sources with anecdote and analysis, made this book sThe casual grace of Doyle's writing, and the ease with which she combines material from secondary sources with anecdote and analysis, made this book such a pleasure to read. I grieve that it is being received mainly as a voice-of-a-generation memoir rather than a lucid work of cultural criticism and social commentary.
God I hate memoir as a genre, and I despise the industry pressure on authors to offer up the details of their personal lives as tools for a reader to understand other topics. I despise that audiences like reading these kinds of books, and that they succeed commercially.
That said, many of the cultural moments, social situations and feelings Doyle recounts were familiar to me, and I felt soothed by this book – it reassured me that I'm not a unique loser, or even part of a generation of losers, but someone living in a moment when social, economic, political and technological shifts are changing what it means to be an adult in relation to goalposts we've been acculturated to believe are fixed and unchanging. This is why I appreciated the historical and cross-cultural comparisons Doyle makes.
Mainly I felt exhausted and bad about myself after reading this book, though, because nonfiction writing is so intellectually draining for me and has negative connotations of commercial failure and audience indifference. The fact Doyle does it so well and has been widely acclaimed for her skill makes me feel depressed about ever attempting a book-length nonfiction project again.
On the bright side, here's the discussion we had about Adult Fantasy on The Rereaders, the podcast I co-host....more
While I was reading one of Olivia Laing's lucidly written, intellectually engaging meditations on loneliness and modern art, I was thinking how satisfWhile I was reading one of Olivia Laing's lucidly written, intellectually engaging meditations on loneliness and modern art, I was thinking how satisfying it is to read a perfectly crafted essay. It's a pleasure in direct proportion to how much I hate writing essays.
What I appreciated most about this book is that Laing doesn't make it all about herself. She's vividly present – as the biographical narrator, the avid investigator through archives, the aesthetic guide through the oeuvres of very different creative people, and the maker of judgments – but her own experiences are merely the hooks upon which she hangs the much more interesting material about other people.
I really struggle with the contemporary conflation of essay and memoir. Fucking Joan Didion. I dislike her work a lot. And I am so loath to write nonfiction myself. I dread the idea of having to make some abject spectacle of myself in order to be marketable as an essayist. Perhaps this is why, despite Laing's interest in American cities, I found The Lonely City more 'English' than Future Sex, which is firmly in that American tradition.
Obviously I feel flat and depressed after reading any zeitgeist book about love, sex or relationships. I didn't want to read it at all but we are discObviously I feel flat and depressed after reading any zeitgeist book about love, sex or relationships. I didn't want to read it at all but we are discussing it on The Rereaders, and I wanted to get it out of the way before Valentine's Day: another cultural artefact that reminds me of my complete failure as a sexual being.
Some of the chapters here have the lively observational feel of long-form journalism – for me the chapter on porn was the most cohesive and successful, though I also liked the chapter on Witt's foray into a weird 'orgasmic meditation' cult. Others felt more memoiry, which made me dislike them although I identified with Witt in some ways, and she has a knack for writing precisely and with immediacy, which gives her prose an exhilarating, ride-like feel (especially in the chapter about Burning Man).
Some chapters felt perfunctory, especially the chapter on birth control. And the polyamory chapter focused on one group of people, becoming more about their story than about the breadth of polyamorous relationships. They sounded like dickheads TBH.
San Francisco recurs in what Witt identifies as a synecdochical way: as a palimpsest of different ideals of sexual freedom, from weirdo hippie idealism to the technologised individualism of today. A recurring theme is how technology allows people to find sex partners, discover the kinds of sex they like and manage their sex lives – including performing sex acts for a living.
I obviously am unable to treat sex with any future-focused optimism but the technology side of it is interesting....more
This beautifully researched survey of Australian indigenous agriculture is jam-packed with fascinating information about some very sophisticated land This beautifully researched survey of Australian indigenous agriculture is jam-packed with fascinating information about some very sophisticated land management, infrastructure-building and primary production practices. Pascoe's innovative approach combines archaeological evidence from contemporary fieldwork with meticulously researched archival accounts of the earliest white colonisers, whose observations of the local peoples they encountered reveal much more now than they did to 18th- and 19th-century white society.
The book is divided into sections that cover particular themes or ideas – land boundaries, housing, fisheries, religious practices, animal husbandry, and so on. it's striking and innovative to be making the claims Pascoe does for indigenous cultures: that they were just as recognisable as 'civilisations' as the European cultures of the same or earlier periods, and in many ways were more advanced. It's exciting to think how we can advance and broaden our contemporary use of land by tapping these ancient knowledges of how to enrich and harvest them. And it's shameful to see how white colonists have stupidly dismantled successful land use practices just because they failed to recognise their significance.
But I wish that Pascoe, or a firm-handed editor, had found a less dry and scholarly structure to present this really interesting material. There was some repetition in the writing that perhaps could have been avoided if another structure had been used. And at times the book felt like hard work to read. I'm glad, though, that mine seems to be a minority view – Dark Emu has found a broad audience and sold out quite a few print runs since its original publication....more
This was an awkward book to read because I know the author and the end of his marriage forms the structure for this political travelogue. It's a frameThis was an awkward book to read because I know the author and the end of his marriage forms the structure for this political travelogue. It's a framework that both shapes and limits what he observes here, although Zachariah's ex-wife has almost no presence in this book, appearing only as wisps of memory and lost everyday habits. She's basically just the reason why he's become a shell of a man who embarks on a manic journey around Australia in the hope of filling that emptiness somehow.
For me the book succeeds best on the level of travel: you can sense Zachariah relaxing on the road, that liminal nowhere-space in which you don't have to think about your regular life. I also appreciated the grubby artefacts of being away from home: looking up directions on your phone; plugging into random power points when you run out of battery; wearing stale shabby clothes when you're trying to be professional. There are some bittersweet moments when Zachariah tries to reconnect with key places and people from his past, only to find them never quite meeting up with his expectations.
The political commentary was lively – I enjoyed the use of footnotes as well – and there were some enjoyably observed moments on the campaign trail from an outsider's perspective, but the book felt light on substance. Perhaps that's because I was reading this in December, some months after the 2016 federal election and after the disastrous election of Donald Trump in the US. How pathetic and provincial the Australian political scene is. The stakes are so low and the media narratives are so impoverished. Zachariah is an outsider, but being an insider seems like a shit job that's just as bad.
As Zachariah follows the campaign, he's searching for some meaning within it that just never arrives – and it's telling that the ordinary people and the minor-party politicians he encounters are much more interesting than the major party machine men and women. The book left me feeling kind of flat but maybe the aim was to make me feel a little bit of Zachariah's own malaise?...more
It was odd to read this in 2016, when the subculture it narrates has become relatively hip, not just thanks to the 2012 film adaptation and its 2015 sIt was odd to read this in 2016, when the subculture it narrates has become relatively hip, not just thanks to the 2012 film adaptation and its 2015 sequel, but also the TV series Glee, which premiered in 2009 (the year after this book came out) and has popularised the primacy of the national competition as the means of judging merit, and the idea of the vocal mashup of two songs in contrasting genres. (It's such a tired idea now, though.) The book works on the basis that collegiate a cappella is fundamentally niche and eccentric, but it really is much more mainstream now.
So basically Pitch Perfect now seems really dated to me. Mainly I was reading to see which bits Kay Cannon had cherry-picked when writing her screenplay. The all-girl choir with a mission to redeem themselves through competing in the national championships; the newcomer who shakes up staid traditions; the mean, disciplinarian musical director; the idea of an a cappella fellowship in which different ensembles perform, compete and clash with each other on and offstage; and the 'bad boy' choir with a huge female fanbase.
Rapkin captures a vivid sense of being present behind the scenes, and has a slick, magaziney style – I was unsurprised to learn he was a senior editor at GQ. I found his prose accessible and entertaining, and there was drama in the way he would cut between the three choirs he followed over the 2006-7 college year, sketching out their respective narrative arcs in broad ways.
Divici from Oregon are the all-girl ensemble struggling to regain their identity and reputation after a devastating loss at nationals; the Beelzebubs are the tradition-bound Boston ensemble who are striving to better their last, extremely overproduced album; and the Hullabahoos from Virginia are the party guys whose leadership vacuum jeopardises their packed touring schedule. Rapkin also explores, with sometimes farcical results, the broader, grassroots culture of alumni and entrepreneurialism that supports the competitions, the recording and the touring.
It was jarring at times, though, the way in which Rapkin's opinion sometimes intrudes. I was kind of weirded out by the way he'd casually mention someone was "carrying 20 pounds she'd been meaning to lose", or that they were "openly gay" or "Semitic-looking". He's also uncritical of the way the B'hoos' female fans get called "B'hos".
Later in the book, as he spends more time with these students, Rapkin becomes more explicitly critical of their failings and mistakes. He's impatient with the Bubs' cliquey, endlessly self-referential culture and with the B'hoos' disorganisation. He makes Divisi's emotional analysis of their music, and their response to the personal problems their group faces, seem weak and silly, even hysterical.
I had to wonder what the members of the groups involved – who become characters in the book – must have thought of the way they're portrayed. I wonder what they're up to now. I hope they're doing fine....more
I bought this as a reference book for my own WIP, and found it to be a well-organised and accessibly written summary of the Tutankhamen tomb excavatioI bought this as a reference book for my own WIP, and found it to be a well-organised and accessibly written summary of the Tutankhamen tomb excavation and the Egyptology industry at the time, as well as a summary of what's now known of the boy-King himself, and an exploration of the cultural afterlife of Tutankhamen, including the 'mummy's curse'.
I read it with some pleasure, as I have such fond childhood memories of paging through the catalogue for the British Museum's 'Treasures of Tutankhamun' exhibition, which my parents visited in 1972. (Two years ago I wrote a 'Meanjin' essay about exhibition catalogues as an affective reading experience and a publishing genre.)
Just today, some maniac on Facebook was pretty, pretty sure that Kiya was not Tutankhamen's mum, and she was shouting down anyone who disagreed with her. For me it only underlined the foolishness of believing we can ever know anything definitive in history and archaeology. Knowledge is always evolving as more material and archival evidence is uncovered, and analytic techniques improve.
This book, written in 2012 (before the hoo-ha about the partition wall in Tutankhamen's tomb, which some believe conceals the long-lost mummy of Nefertiti), struck me as both up-to-date and even-handed. Tyldesley marshals and summarises the evidence for various different theories, then offers her own interpretation without claiming it's THE facts.
For some reason, I especially liked that Tyldesley pushes back against the popular theory (frequently encountered in the 'Daily Mail' and 'National Geographic') that Tutankhamen was munted-looking and inbred, with a club foot, and walked with a cane.
He may very well have been; but then we're reliant on such a fragile and circumstantial set of evidence; as Tyldesley points out, the mummification process itself can create the appearance of a club foot, and the mummy was initially unwrapped and autopsied with none of the meticulous care that researchers would use today. I mean, he was dismembered in order to get him out of his bandages. And his dick fell off and was found years later, buried in the sand tray in which his body was placed for examination.
Anyway, a fascinating book and one I can see myself consulting as a reference. Not that I have any academic training in the field (for all I know, Tyldesley might be considered a populist hack), but to a lay reader, I feel it might, like the ancients it describes, stand the test of time....more
I have such fond memories of this book! Of course it's ghostwritten. My housemate Sandor had a copy and I read it half-jokingly but found it quite entI have such fond memories of this book! Of course it's ghostwritten. My housemate Sandor had a copy and I read it half-jokingly but found it quite entertaining. This must have been when it first came out, because I only lived with Sandor until 2003. We used to joke about 'The People's Elbow' etc.
It seems so crazy how young The Rock looks on the front cover. His wrestling days seem so long ago now. But he still has a similar goofiness and a physical charisma. I think he's made good career choices. People have definitely smelled what The Rock was cooking.
I only dimly recall the book itself but for me, knowing very little about pro wrestling, it was an interesting insight into the posturing and the professionalism of 'sports-entertainment'....more
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