essays – Koba English

Sister Outsider

Audre Lorde is a name that’s been familiar to me for years, for better or for worse through people quoting her in well-designed little social media banners about poetry, the master’s tools dismantling the master’s house, or self care. There is something kind of sad and deflating in that: to generate a substantial body of artistic work as well as intellectual and theoretical thought, only to be reduced to the 21st century equivalent of a soundbite, lost in the stream of other reductionist soundbites.

The Sister Outsider essay collection came up in a podcast I was listening to—contextualizing Lorde a bit more beyond a neatly designed and typeset swipe-able image—and anyway, here we are now!

I actually finished the collection a few weeks ago; I just couldn’t find the time or brain to write about it until now. The short review that Sister Outsider doesn’t need is that it’s a fantastic collection. Lorde is a deep thinker and an engaging writer. I just wanted some of them to be longer, because there were lots of ideas and assertions that Lorde presents without cracking them open because they were always in service of some other, larger thesis, particularly in “Uses of the Erotic: the erotic as power.” Lorde uses a very nuanced and all-encompassing concept of “the erotic” that I was hoping she would examine more deeply and that I get the feeling she perhaps hashed out in other pieces not included in the book—like, I don’t immediately see the eroticism of constructing a bookshelf?

The diary accounts of visiting the Soviet Union and Grenada also stick out as personal favorites, maybe because those are more self-contained accounts of real-world events rather than out-of-context selections from longer, fuzzier academic conversations?

I’m also keenly aware that this is the rare piece of nonfiction by a Black author I’ve managed to read as an adult. Out of that nonfiction, almost all of them are either autobiographical or a treatment of race relations in the US. (I expect all of them are, but I’m hedging my bets here in case I’m wrong.) Obviously race relations, or whatever the best term is anymore, is important and one worth learning about. But I feel like surely Black journalists and academics are experts in a wide variety of fields, so why should the default expertise readily available to me be so limited? Offhand I can think of astronomy: Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has at least a couple of popular science books out by now, as does Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

Of course limiting this to English, to books published in the US or the UK, is another factor. Etc. I guess my point is, this is something I try to reflect on in my nonfiction choices: whose expertise do I have access to? Whose is marginalized? How can I broaden the knowledge pool available to me?

Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture

If I wanted to depress myself, I would do a series called “In Search of Lost Bookstores” and feature books in my library that I purchased at stores that have since shuttered.

Just kidding, I’ve already depressed myself just by thinking about it!

One of those entries would be this thirty-year-old collection of academic writing on the nascent online culture of the early 90s. In high school, anything at all related to Cool Cyberpunk Hacker Shit was instantly my bag, so I picked up Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture on one of my many youthful browses of the Lion Around bookstore (RIP). It was already ten years out of date by that point, but no matter! I read a couple of the essays right off the bat; I gave most of the others a pass as uninteresting and highly technical. . Nonetheless I kept the volume through several purges, sensing that one day I would have enough of a brain to actually engage with the content. That day was today, the year of our Lord 2024, a full thirty years after its initial publication—an ice age ago in online time.

How does it hold up?

In some aspects not very well at all, or maybe more fairly: it’s clearly a book of its time. Lots of ink is spilled over Mondo 2000, reminding us that people once took it seriously as a cultural forum. (Though I guess its ghost still haunts the Internet in the form of BoingBoing.) When discussion focuses on the intersection of technology and sexuality, it’s as awkward and dated as you’d expect (did anyone ever actually call it “compu-sex”?) and HIV/AIDS as an existential threat is a very present issue. In much of the discussion, sexual and otherwise, the underlying assumption is that VR is going to be the thing pretty soon and that people will be using that to have safe, gratifying casual sex—but for now, typing will do. Thirty years later, it’s safe to say that VR didn’t pan out like any of these authors were expecting.

There are also selections that, even without the retro-futurism, kind of stumble. The performance art group Survival Research Laboratories is still running to this day (would you like to subscribe to their Patreon?), but the account Mark Pauline provides of a show in Austria fails to articulate anything interesting beyond the deathwish of one of their local assistants. (The numerous photos of the Austrian show/exhibition were black and white; maybe full color would have helped.) Another essay on virtual reality as a plot device in fiction feels like a puffed-up excuse for Marc Laidlaw to showcase his own writing. Halfway through the piece, Laidlaw confirms this suspicion and explains that he was originally asked to submit a selection of his fiction, but felt whatever he submitted would be out of context, so he wrote an essay about the topic of virtual reality and then included his own writing in the essay. The other piece of fiction, an excerpt from Pat Cadigan’s Synners, was simply presented on its own as a piece of fiction and functioned just fine without context. (And in fact, I promptly added the whole book to my TBR after I finished the chapter.)

The more abstract, theory-based, and otherwise philosophical essays, on the other hand, still feel highly relevant. Editor Mark Dery’s interviews with Samuel Delaney, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose (collected in the chapter “Black to the Future“) are a goldmine of thought that I will definitely be revisiting, moreso because Dery chose to interview extremely intelligent people rather than because Dery provided much insight himself (sorry). Likewise with Claudia Springer’s “Sex, Memories, and Angry Women,” which touches on an interesting tension in the portrayal of women within cyberpunk but that also requires me to refresh my memory (hah) of the works in question before I can really have anything to say about it. I don’t know enough about the state of neural networks and AI research to know if Manuel De Landa’s “Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason” is still fresh, but Gary Chapman’s* “Taming the Computer” still feels as relevant as it did in 1994. Perhaps—cliché be damned—even more so.

Cue the ominous music.

Overall, despite some dated, now-irrelevant concerns and speculations, a solid collection to have on hand in 2024.

*This is Gary Chapman the technologist and academic, who died in 2010. He’s not the Gary Chapman famous for the Five Love Languages, but sadly only the latter has a Wikipedia page.

Språkets myller

I went on a small library binge at the end of 2023 to stock up on holiday reading. With my goals for 2024 already in mind, I walked out with one book off of my TBR pile and two books in French (plus one spontaneous selection).

More accurately, I picked a book adjacent to my TBR pile. The title I was after was Margareta Westman’s Språkets lustgård och djungel, which the Stockholm library website assured me was available at Stadsbiblioteket. Alas, it was nowhere to be found, but another book by Margareta Westman was readily at hand, so I took that one instead. Språkets lustgård originally ended up on the TBR after it was referenced in another Swedish essay collection on translation that I read, though if I had any other thoughts besides “Hm, that sounds interesting” they’re lost to me now. We’re talking six, maybe even seven years ago at this point. And since Språkets myller is, unsurprisingly, on the same topic of linguistics, I’m willing to count it as a win for my TBR goal.

Westman was a (popular?)* professional language nerd and, among other achievements, head of the Language Council of Sweden. She wrote a lot about the Swedish language, and after her death the Council decided to collect several of her essays into one place: Språkets myller.

It’s hard to get too excited about a collection where the average age of the content is older than me (collected and published in 2000, but original publication dates ranging from the 1960s to the 1990s), especially when it focuses on a topic that evolves as quickly as language does. Westman’s ideas are interesting and expressed with lucid prose, but any of the chapters about how young people express themselves “these days” are now historical relics rather than au courant observations. Other topics are a bit more timeless, like thoughts on the purpose of writing instruction in the classroom and how to structure it, or reflections on shifts in attitudes towards linguistic norms and mistakes.

Overall, trying to review, summarize, or even just discuss Språkets myller in English was a lot like trying to do the same with Den högsta kasten: it’s simply too Swedish. What’s the point? But at least with Westman I learned a thing or two along the way—and I crossed a book off my TBR—which is a lot more than I can say for Rydberg!

*Since I’m not Swedish I have no idea how Westman’s reputation lands in the general popular culture: was she a popular and accessible language authority akin to Susie Dent in the UK? Or…I’m not sure who in the US, actually. Or is she a name for nerds? I queried a very unscientific sampling of Swedes around my age who are all to greater or lesser degrees interested in language. The first answer I got (from someone who had studied linguistics at the university level) about whether they were familiar with Westman was “no, not at all.” The same pattern emerged as responses rolled in from others.

Gift From the Sea

Another random “left field” book, I stumbled across Gift From the Sea when a college friend asked me to read a selection from it at her wedding in Seattle. It’s a short book, and in the run-up to a wedding there’s a lot of “hurry up and wait,” so over the next couple days I just…read most of it. After the wedding I put it on my to-read list so I would eventually finish reading it. An excellent souvenir, then, when years later I was visiting that same friend in Seattle and came across a copy of Gift From the Sea in the bookstore!

As Becky (my friend) describes it, it’s a book that Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote to convince herself to stay in a crappy marriage. That knowledge, paired with the couple’s Nazi and Fascist sympathies, certainly takes a bit of the shine off of it—here’s an excellent example of separating art from artist and where people are comfortable drawing the line. For me, Gift From the Sea is on the “I still feel comfortable consuming this” side of the line; an example of a “nope, no thank you” would be the music of Percy Grainger.

Gift From the Sea is an installment in one of my favorite not-really-a-genres, “author retreats into isolation and writes their Deep Thinky Thoughts.” Other examples of the form include Walden and Journal of a Solitude. Lindbergh writes a great deal on the need for solitude and alone time in romantic relationships, particularly for women; as much as it’s depressing to admit in the Year of Our Lord 2023 (compared to 1955), this still rings true. All the data currently available about the burden of childcare and domestic duties in hetero partnerships, marriage or otherwise, indicates that the bulk of it still falls on women. Hence why the alone time—time “off the clock,” so to speak—is particularly important for women in this situation.

The other underlying current in Gift From the Sea is the vague sense that modern life is overwhelming and things are happening too quickly, which again: looking back on 1955 from the distance of 2023 the idea of life moving too fast is ludicrous. I suppose that overwhelm is a permanent part of life anymore, and as such sentiments like Lindbergh’s will remain relatable. You read books like this one not necessarily to learn anything new but to remind yourself of what you value and what’s important in your life. “Yes, that’s right, I need to take more time for myself,” you say, nodding along. “Yes, that’s right, I do best when I have alone time to recharge.” Sometimes we need that reminder, and that’s probably why Gift From the Sea remains such a favorite.

Braiding Sweetgrass

I was concerned about the environment from a pretty young age, though whether it’s because Captain Planet was a successful piece of propaganda or because the combination of pragmatism and anxiety (“There’s nowhere else to go if we ruin the Earth”) set in early, who can say? Either way, “environmental awareness” has always been in the back of my mind, though usually in the form of planet-wide existential crises: the hole in the ozone layer, climate change, that sort of thing.

Coming up on ten years in Sweden, however, I’ve started thinking about the environment as a means of creating place on a personal level. How do you create the feeling of at-home, of belonging? The first step is to make the new surroundings familiar, to learn the names and properties of things. Theoretically. I don’t actually know very many plant or tree names for anywhere I’ve lived, but sometimes I page through our copy of Den Nordiska Floran with a guilty conscience.

Braiding Sweetgrass, as a collection of essays on ecology and the nature of relationships, speaks to that approach to the environment. Yes, planet-wide catastrophes are looming, but any individual disconnect from the environment is a loss on a personal level as well. Each essay in the collection explores a different facet of this disconnect, including at the academic level where the dispassionate and disconnected objective approach to environmental studies supercedes or ignores a squishier, more subjective one. Kimmerer is at home in both worlds and has a knack for transforming bleak, dry data points about a particular moss or plant or animal species into a narrative that, again and again, focuses on relationships and interdependency.

Here is an interesting tension: supporting worthy causes versus acquiring stuff. I always like to buy at least one thing if I visit a local independent bookshop, but I was on vacation, traveling only with my carry-on bag and a purse, and with limited shelf space at home. Financially support Reading in Public, an adorable bookstore and cafe in West Des Moines, or add to my growing mountain of stuff?

It comes as no surprise that I bought the book, of course. Now the escape route to avoid the mountain of stuff: am I deluding myself if I think that a curious reader taking the Greyhound out of Indianapolis will find the book before a harried cleaner just tosses it in the garbage? Would the profit earned by Reading in Public be worth whatever environmental cost may be incurred by the book once it leaves my hands? Is my motivator a noble detachment from stuff or the mindless disposability that naturally arises in a world filled with consumer goods that are constantly made anew? Am I a thoughtful steward of the planet or just lazy?

I suppose the only downside is that the people most likely to read and enjoy Braiding Sweetgrass are the ones who are already asking themselves those sorts of questions—preaching to the converted. But better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

The Best of Myles

Fresh out of college, I read At Swim-Two-Birds at the recommendation of a friend who went on a bit of an Irish literature kick after studying at Trinity College Dublin. Not long after that, I stumbled across The Best of Myles on a visit to The Strand in New York City; so well disposed was I to Brian O’Nolan that I added it to my basket. Plus it was an old, possibly original hardback edition (and pretty beat up at that), and I’m a sucker for old books.

And then it languished in my collection for something like thirteen years!

Push came to shove when an Irish co-worker moved into a new apartment. “Wouldn’t that make for a reasonably appropriate housewarming gift?” I thought. And then later, as I read it: “It certainly makes more sense in his library than in yours.”

Not that I didn’t enjoy it, or that it’s not funny, but I’m not Irish and I have yet to do an obsessive deep dive into Irish history*, so a good portion of the references were beyond me, including the occasional section written in Irish. Hardly surprising, considering that O’Nolan’s “Cruiskeen Lawn” column anthologized in the collection was written in both English and Irish.

An overall fun read, and a reminder that I should dip my toe back in the pool of O’Nolan’s novels. There aren’t that many, after all, so might as well read the entire collection.

*The universe seems to have heard my request in this matter and brought Fintan O’Toole as a guest on one of my favorite podcasts. I immediately put a hold on We Don’t Know Ourselves at the Stockholm library.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Sometimes the books we read transcend their mere bookishness in the world and become something akin to life milestones, mementos of a particular point in our lives. Under the Net is a fantastic book on its own, made all the more fantastic for me because I bought it at the now-defunct “What The Book?” in Seoul and read the bulk of it in Gimpo airport, hoping against hope that a seat would open up after I missed my initial flight to Jeju. (One did. I had a great time.) Naturally that specific copy that I own, with the handwritten note to the previous owner and a What The Book? receipt still in it, immediately transports me to South Korea in July 2012. But any discussion of that book in general, or Iris Murdoch generally, will also bring along memories of that time of my life.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and Jerome K. Jerome is similarly of a specific time for me, though in a grimmer way. An acquaintance recommended it (another left field book) sometime in 2019 and close on to winter I was reading a free ebook version from Project Gutenberg on the subway to work. I remember closing the ereader app and pocketing my phone as I came up the stairs of Hötorget, dawn only just getting started, everything still half-dark. I remember pulling my phone out on my way home in the evening and dashing off a quick message to them to say, Thanks for the rec, this is hilarious! before opening the ereader app back up for the return trip.

And then I didn’t have many commutes for a long time after that, for some reason!

I also forgot about Idle Thoughts for a long while, though whether that’s because of Covid or because of my own distractability is hard to say. Here I am, three years later, and I finally finished it, and now the book has become emblematic of my journey through coronatider.

Well, that’s a bit melodramatic. I have a good memory for a lot of things, but I would be hard pressed to summarize the entire collection and tell you which essays I finished before Covid, which during, and which after (if you want to say that there’s an after, which is debatable). Another book that needs no review, no introduction, no hype; Jerome has earned his place in English literary history. But for all of that historicity, reading Idle Thoughts today feels surprisingly fresh and relevant. Plus ça change.

Axplock ur idéhistorien II

I guess the theme so far in 2023 is “reading other people’s books.” I closed out 2022 with The Power of the Dog and then ended up reading Stick (twice! for translation’s sake!) straightaway in 2023, both at the recommendation of a friend. In between those, Axplock ur idéhistorien II arrived on my doorstep—a book I’d promised to babysit for a digital nomad friend who wanted to order it off Adlibris but had no Swedish address to ship to.

And one does not ask me to babysit a book without expecting me to read it.

It’s a tidy little collection spanning just about two hundred years of Western thought, with a focus on the major social ideas that continue to leave their mark on politics today. (This is a polite way to say that a few of the selections are nothing less than noxious.) The selections are abridged when necessary, with context for each selection as well as a short biography of each author:

Kant, “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”
Hegel, “Reason in History”
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
Marx & Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”
Gobineau, “An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races”
Bremer, Hertha
Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Mill, “The Subjection of Women”
Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morality
Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis
“Program of the NSDAP”
Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism”
Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

If you took the above table of contents as a reading list it would probably keep you busy for a year, so collections like these with just The Hits and the central theses are great to have on hand and are much cheaper than, say, a first-year philosophy survey course textbook. (Did I keep mine because I knew I would want to revisit it later? Yes. Have I done so? Actually, also yes.) I might buy my own copies of both volumes just to have around for reference, who knows.

Do I have a similar English recommendation? Not really. Passion of the Western Mind has a similar, if broader scope, but it’s entirely a secondary source. I had Ten Great Works of Philosophy in my library for years and kind of wish I still had it.

My Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2017, According to GoodReads

I enjoy GoodReads’s little “Your Year in Books” widget they roll out at the end of every year, but my favorite thing to look back on at the close of a year (or more accurately, the beginning of every new one) is how many 5-star books I read. That was only four in 2015. In 2016, I handed out only five. I was a little luckier (or maybe a little more generous?) in 2017 and handed out eight. Seven if you don’t count a re-read of one of my favorite childhood books.

This year I’m splitting the nonfiction and the novels into two different posts. Part of it is because I have slightly different criteria for 5-star reviews in fiction and nonfiction, and part of it is because I read enough 5-star books this year that a single post dedicated to all of them would border on unwieldy. This first installment covers the best nonfiction I read in 2017.

Politics and Social Justice

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, Kate Moore. I had already known about the radium dial-painting disaster as a footnote in the history of radium and nuclear science, so I was glad to see the topic get its own full treatment. The radium dial companies’ continuing priority of profits over worker health, and their subsequent refusal to accept blame for so much suffering and to make it right, remains relevant today, nearly 100 years later. Moore’s research is exhaustive, which can sometimes make for overwhelming reading, but it all deserves to be chronicled.*

The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior, Sarah Kendzior. I enjoy her writing for De Correspondent, so I bought an ecopy of this essay collection (predating the 2016 election) to have as subway reading.

Memoirs

Black and white cover of May Sarton's "Journal of a Solitude," a shot of an empty desk light by a lamp from outside a window. — Image courtesy W. W. Norton & Company

Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton. Walden was one of my favorite books I read in high school, and one that deeply influenced me. With the account of Thoreau’s stay in the woods fresh in my mind, I picked up this up at a library sale years ago. But much as I wanted to read it, I somehow dropped off after a few pages every time I attempted until I read it during my trip to the US this summer. Maybe it was a question of needing enough time to get into it; maybe it was a question of age or life path. But I’m so glad I hung on to this book through countless library down sizes.

The cover of John Kerstetter's "Crossings," featuring bullets and scalpel in an "X" shape. — Image courtesy Crown Publishing, Inc.

Crossings: A Doctor-Solider’s Story, Jon Kerstetter. Kerstetter’s account of growing up on, then off, then on an Oneida reservation to become a doctor and then a medic in the US army until he suffered a stroke (an aspect of his life curiously absent from the subtitle or marketing text) is gripping and sometimes heart-rending reading.*

A cover of Ester Blenda Nrdström's "Amerikanskt," featuring a college of vintage photographs, including a young woman in denim overalls and a white bucket hat. — Image courtesy Bokhåll.

Amerikanskt, Ester Blenda Nordström. Much like America Day by Day, I found this account of Nordström’s travels throughout the United States in the 1920s fascinating, both as a snapshot of an America long gone by and also as the perspective of an outsider and first-time visitor.

Part 2, featuring the best novels I read last year, coming later this week!

*indicates ebook copies I received free of charge from NetGalley in exchange for a review; reviews were already posted elsewhere and I genuinely loved these books.

Reveiw: American English, Italian Chocolate: Small Subjects of Great Importance

I am a sucker for a great essay collection. There is an art to crafting short writing, fiction or otherwise, that I admire in others and wish I could cultivate for myself. Incidentally, despite my struggles with brevity, I am absolutely ruthless when it comes to editing other people’s short writing. I have a friend on a short story kick who can attest to the extent of my cuts (and actually, you’ll blog-meet him soon enough). But the only way to get better at short-form writing is to read a lot of it, right? So when this collection turned up on NetGalley, how I could turn it down?

American English, Italian Chocolate is a memoir in essays beginning in the American Midwest and ending in north central Italy. In sharply rendered vignettes, Rick Bailey reflects on donuts and ducks, horses and car crashes, outhouses and EKGs. He travels all night from Michigan to New Jersey to attend the funeral of a college friend. After a vertiginous climb, he staggers in clogs across the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In a trattoria in the hills above the Adriatic, he ruminates on the history and glories of beans, from Pythagoras to Thoreau, from the Saginaw valley to the Province of Urbino.

Bailey is a bumbling extra in a college production of Richard III. He is a college professor losing touch with a female student whose life is threatened by her husband. He is a father tasting samples of his daughter’s wedding cake. He is a son witnessing his aging parents’ decline. He is the husband of an Italian immigrant who takes him places he never imagined visiting, let alone making his own. At times humorous, at times bittersweet, Bailey’s ultimate subject is growing and knowing, finding the surprise and the sublime in the ordinary detail of daily life.

Author: Rick Bailey

My Goodreads rating: 2 stars

Average Goodreads rating: 4.22 stars

Language scaling: B2+

Recommended audience: Those interested in short-form nonfiction writing, whether for its own sake or for the sake of improving their own.

In-depth thoughts: Essays! Cross-cultural marriages! Everything I should love! But this collection fell a little flat for me. There was no “surprise” or “sublime” for me in these rambles through the details of the everyday; just a sort of mild interest. The only essay that really got close to something for me was “For Donna, Ibsen, Pepys, Levitation,” which touches on one of his “non-traditional” (read as: single mother returning to school after a long absence) literature students who was trying to balance her passion for the class with raising her kids and trying to stay safe from her abusive ex-husband. But even that doesn’t hit the mark entirely. After a seemingly innocent lefthand turn into levitation, Bailey fails to bring it back around to the central moment in the essay: Donna, the mother and abused woman and eager literature student. Here’s the jump Bailey makes, once you take out the long, extended aside on levitation:

“I saw Ghosts on the syllabus, you know what I thought of?”

It’s my turn to laugh. “Patrick Swayze?”

“In school, like in ninth grade, we did this thing called levitation.” She gives me an embarrassed look. “Did you ever levitate?”

Seeing Donna in class, reading and thinking and sharing, was like witnessing a levitation.

There’s probably over twice as much material spent on the history of the parlor trick, dead Englishmen’s thoughts about it, and Bailey’s memories of it than on the living, breathing human in front of him, and it just feels off. While none of the other essays were this off for me, they were all equally detached and disinterested from their subject matter, except when it concerned Bailey’s own reminisces. Maybe he should have just written a straight-up memoir?

I was also a little confused over the title, or rather the title in connection with the description. I went in expecting a lot more about cross-cultural marriages, about immigration, about adapting to new cultures (or being around those who have to adapt to a new culture), and everything else that comes with those huge life milestones. And yet, nothing.

I majored in English in college, specifically creative writing, and sometimes I wondered if I should have taken myself and my writing a little more seriously by pursuing an MFA afterwards. But the writers my professors brought to campus to give readings or to guest lecture, and even what they wrote themselves, had an American University Workshop-y sameness to the writing (even if it was good) that I could maybe pretend to like but never be able to bring myself to write. There were ideas in here that I liked, but they were painted over with that workshop-y sameness to the point where it was hard for me to maintain my interest.

While I might be tempted to point to one of these essays if I ever tackle personal essays or memoirs in a lesson, American English, Italian Chocolate was just not my cup of tea, and I don’t know if I would necessarily recommend it to EFL students.