nonfiction – Koba English

Bolag Föreningar Stiftelser: En introduktion

Another niche read that I picked from the syllabus of an introductory course into business law, the same as Rätt och rättfärdigande: en tematisk introduktion i allmän rättslära.

Mostly posting here to say that I read the thing (and just in time for my authorization test, even!). It’s a brief, clear survey of the different forms of associations in Sweden, and the different laws that apply to their organization. I probably learned something, but in all honesty I should probably read it again at some point and take notes.

Grannskapsrevolution

A vacation is never complete without a book purchase! At my WWOOF host’s recommendation, my roommate and I dropped in to shop at the varuhall in Orsa while he went to pick up the sailboat for winter storage. The artisanal and tourist goods on display included copies of Grannskapsrevolution; if memory serves there was a sign about how it was a book from a local author. The topic matter was also relevant to a lot I’ve been thinking about recently, including my personal projects outside of work, so it seemed like a natural choice for a souvenir.

Author Lina Zakrisson works as a social sustainability consultant focused on helping various stakeholders (residents, property owners, etc.) create stronger, more vibrant local communities. Grannskapsrevolution is thus a combination of manifesto, marketing, and DIY guide on just that topic—she makes an explicit point of highlighting her consulting work, though you still get plenty of tips and information for your money without any scummy “sign up for my course to learn more” sales pitches. But Grannskapsrevolution seems like a condensed version of Melody Warnick’s This is Where You Belong tailored to a Swedish (Stockholm?) target demographic, so reviewing it in English feels a bit pointless. I’ll just wrap up by saying that I expect my copy will be circulating among the board members of my local buy-nothing association and by highlighting what was the most memorable anecdote in the book for me:

One of Zakrisson’s neighbors ran into her while she was out walking her dog and that launched a fair bit of smalltalk, since her neighbor was also a dog owner. As they parted ways, the neighbor invited her over for a fika sometime and Zakrisson agreed enthusiastically. Yes, of course! That would be lovely! Then when she got home, she thought, Wait, it’s a bit weird to just invite a perfect stranger into your home like that. Or what if she’s some kind of psycho? The fika gets put off and delayed for a while because Zakrisson isn’t sure what to make of it. Of course the story ends with her eventually making good on the invitation, and of course she has a lovely time, and in the end that neighbor becomes an actual friend. As an afterthought, Zakrisson adds that once she got to know this neighbor better, she learned that her neighbor was American, and even though she’d lived in Sweden for years by now, she had still had grown up in the US.

Me, an American: of course she was an American, lol

Also me, an American: so that’s how all of my invitations land with Swedes

Historiskan 1/2024

My airport read ahead of my trip to the US in May. What did this issue cover?

- - An interview about a feminist history podcast, whose name now escapes me
  - A biography of Aphra Behn
  - Svenska Norgehjälpen, Sweden’s aid project for Norway during Nazi occupation
  - Holomodor, which seems highly relevant these days
  - Tehuanas: Zapotec women from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico who have long enjoyed a relative independence from, and equal standing with, men
  - And, on the flip side of history in the new world: a biography of Inés Suárez, conquistador
  - St. Vitus’ Dance
  - A fascinating biography of Maria Enquist, a notable “beauty expert” (and probable grifter) at the turn of the twentieth century who offered some of the first cosmetic surgery in Sweden (paraffin injections)
  - Queen Christina of Saxony, the reigning queen during the Siege of Tre Kronor
  - Sweden’s first theater, a project put together by two noblewomen but which no longer stands today because it was torn down soon after its construction
  - Brief little bios of women long-distance swimmers
  - And of course the cover story on Amelia Earhart

Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back

I picked up Chokepoint Capitalism from my host’s bookshelf in London because I was worried about finishing the emergency book in my purse too early and because I guess I love reading about economics now?

Cory Doctorow was a name already familiar to me, as someone who reads science fiction and is terminally online, and I was glad to see him reined in somewhat by Professor Rebecca Giblin. Not that any of his ideas are distasteful or extreme, or that I even fundamentally disagree with him, but Doctorow’s style when it comes to writing about politics or economics can be a bit over-the-top.

Chokepoint Capitalism is a detailed, academic-based look at how Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, ClearChannel/iHeartRadio, Apple, Live Nation and other behemoths have solidified a hold on their respective markets, what the authors term “chokepoints.” I say “academic-based” because it is clearly deeply researched (no doubt Giblin’s contribution), but the presentation and style is still more in the vein of popular science (popular economics?) than dry scholarly reading. Giblin and Doctorow bring the receipts, as the kids no longer say. These companies have actively removed any other mediator between artists and audiences, and as the only gatekeepers can dictate essentially whatever terms they like, in terms of selling but also in terms of buying.

Part of the reason I write these dorky little book reports is to help me remember what I read. For novels and fiction, it’s simply a matter of not wanting whole hours of my life to disappear down the memory hole. But for nonfiction it also becomes a matter of actually learning something from what I’ve read, which is to say I’ve started this particular dorky little book report when Chokepoint Capitalism was no longer fresh in my mind and almost all of the details and nuance have already vanished.

Fortunately Giblin and Doctorow gave an interview about the book to explain it so I don’t have to.

The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe

I think The Bright Ages ended up on my TBR because I saw a Swedish copy at my in-laws and thought the topic sounded interesting, especially since my knowledge of Medieval history begins and ends with the interdisciplinary unit we had in middle school. While people crack jokes all the time about the perceived uselessness of fields like Medieval studies, familiarity with the period seems like good starting point for understanding how our current economic system got to be the way it is—and I’m sure I’m not the only person with a growing interest in that particular piece of history. Plus, as authors Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry point out in the introduction, a (historically inaccurate) popular understanding of the Middle Ages informs political ideology even today. Educating the public is therefore part of improving the health of our political dialogue.

They have their work cut out for them, no doubt. How well did they succeed?

This is another case where ebook reading no doubt hampered my comprehension, especially since I read it in bits and pieces over a relatively long period. I started it sometime before my trip to the US in May, and I finished it on a flight to London on July 30. Even though each chapter is more or less standalone, focusing on a particular event or development, such a long time in between reading sessions meant all the previous context had long since vanished into the memory hole.

But more than that, after I finished the book I struggled to articulate how The Bright Ages had shed new light on the topic (if you’ll forgive the pun). Gabriele and Perry do an excellent job of bringing in marginalized figures into the picture, and they also continually emphasize how interconnected the world was at the time: goods and therefore people traveled across incredible distances, like barefoot Christian monks traveling within the Mongol empire. At the same time, it’s hard to argue that an era was more enlightened or humane than we give it credit for when you’re simultaneously describing book burnings and religious violence. Other points it seems like the distinction was one of semantics more than anything else. Whether or not Rome actually “fell,” it still declined in political importance. Of course, it could be that I didn’t even know enough to be dangerous, as the expression goes, and therefore don’t have a deeply ingrained imagined history to be debunked.

Whatever else, the writing is also always engaging and easy to follow. Gabriele and Perry depart from the typically dry style of academic writing and take a warm, conversationalist tone. As a result, The Bright Engages is a fun and engaging read, and the fact that it took me so long to finish the book is not in any way a commentary on its quality. It’s me, I’m the problem.

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.

Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

Honestly, I wasn’t super enthused going into this one. Matt Bell’s Refuse to be Done was the first title from my TBR that I found at a bookstore in Chicago and that was enough for me to declare my errand done rather than force my hosts to languish in the bookstore longer than necessary. (Not that they would have called it languishing, but still.) I finished it on a bus between Albany and the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

This book just isn’t for me. Only a few of the tips or tricks in here are ones that I could apply to my own writing, and the promise of the title (“how to write and rewrite a novel in three drafts”) is 100% a bait and switch. If you follow Bell’s advice, you will definitely write more than three drafts, but “three drafts” is a much more enticing promise than “three stages.”

The three drafts promised in the title boil down to:

What Bell calls the “exploratory draft,” or what I think of as “the NaNoWriMo draft.”
The “rewrite, don’t revise” draft, whose goal and purpose seems a bit unclear and muddled. I think part of the reason the book has no table of contents is because it would become very clear how little meat and potatoes Bell has to offer for this section. (The chapter on the exploratory draft is close to 70 pages; this one is around 16 pages. The last chapter is around 50 pages.) As far as I can tell, this is where he thinks you should carry out major structural and story revisions. But then he sums up his advice as:

When in doubt, rewrite instead of revise.

How do you know if you’re rewriting versus revising?

Some clues: the presence of new typing (or at least retyping) and the absence of merely copying and posting.

When in doubt, rewrite instead of revise.

Trust me.

And at first blush that seemed like the exact opposite of what he was trying to convey in this very brief chapter? “Just spit and polish that dreadful scene you have instead of fundamentally changing it.” After multiple re-reads and several days of reflection, I think what he means is something like: write over scenes from scratch instead of just trying to tweak what’s there. The problem is that “rewriting” and “revising” never get very clear definitions; it’s the equivalent of being told “cribble, don’t tralapse.” This chapter might as well be called “draw the rest of the fucking owl.”

3. The last stage, or draft, sounds like a “spit and polish” draft where the focus is on language rather than narrative, but again he doesn’t really give it a name or clear purpose so who knows.

In addition to the bait-and-switch title and the “draw the rest of the fucking owl” vagueness in the middle, like any book on writing there is the obligatory list of the author’s personal pet peeves presented as Objectively Bad Writing mixed in with helpful exercises. At least at this point in my life I know to just skim those sections rather than live or die by them.

To his credit, Bell cites a lot of interviews and articles from other authors describing their own process. He also gives a lot of concrete examples of well-done prose and unique narrative structures for curious readers to investigate, as well as in-depth reference books on more niche elements of style. As usual, finishing one non-fiction book on my TBR only led to me adding others.

Really, this would have been better as a library read than a purchase. The only reason I don’t regret plunking down money on this book is that it went to support a local indie bookstore. Refuse to Be Done might be the book that gets someone started on their very first novel, but I am not that person.

Motorcykel genom Sverige

I’ve mentioned before that my reading habits as an adult have largely moved from “obsess over one author and read everything I can get my hands on” to “sample as many authors as possible in the time I have left on this Earth.” There are a few authors I still binge on, and one of them is Ester Blenda Nordström. It’s nice to have a reliable comfort read in a foreign language, someone you can trust to write in language accessible to your limited capacity, which is probably why the authors I binge on anymore are all not in English.

With Nordström in particular it seems like publishers have yet to really make the bulk of her work readily available to the public. Bakhåll has put out some collections, of which Motorcykel genom Sverige is one, but it seems that her reportage from other trips—Chile and Argentina, Japan and China, France and Spain—hasn’t been collected in the same thematic releases as Amerikanskt or Byn i vulkanens skygga. Indeed, contrary to its title, Motorcykel covers more than just her 1914 motorcycle journey throughout Sweden with her father. It also functions as a “greatest hits” collection from those aforementioned travels, an appetizer or sampler tray before the main course. We catch glimpses of her crossing the Andes on mule, attending a bullfight in Spain, surveying the damage of the 1925 North Tajima earthquake. Arranged in what appears to be chronological order, the collection also rather poignantly includes Nordström’s last published article, a reminisce about life out in the countryside. The timeline seems to encompass most of her active career.

There isn’t much need to review Nordström herself here. It’s a collection chosen to represent the best of her writing, so of course it’s good. Any one piece would qualify as a stand out selection, but the first that springs to mind right now is the account of her “hat pin” tram journey, a small piece of undercover reportage during what the above Smithsonian link calls “the hatpin terrors.” Another really excellent chapter is the bullfight, with no punches pulled about its inherent brutality. If I were a comparative literature professor I would probably assign this chapter as reading alongside Hemingway.

It’s a fun collection, though as an introduction to Nordström it might need extra context or explanation. It’s also a shame that the main course feels so incomplete. While all of Nordström’s reportage for papers like Vecko-Journalen, Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm Dagsblad and so on is probably well archived for academics, the collections that are readily available for general consumption only seem to be new editions of the ones already published as collections in Nordström’s lifetime.

The Dawn of Everything

What a doorstopper!

The reason I meticulously note (almost)* everything I read here is so that I remember reading it. I don’t know enough about the brain to know if writing about things really helps it transfer over to long-term memory, but I’ve already had the experience of completely forgetting something I said or did until I re-read a journal entry about it, so I assume the same holds true for books.

All of that to say, I don’t think I’m capable of doing The Dawn of Everything justice here. In a nutshell, David Graeber and David Wengrow look at archeological and anthropological evidence to (in their own words) “ask better questions.” The paradigm that they’re trying to upend is actually quite similar to the one that Stephen Jay Gould also sought to demolish in Full House:

The argument Gould makes in Full House is basically one against the teleological framework of evolution: that things evolve for some higher purpose, or more specifically deliberately towards complexity; that complexity is somehow the best, most special, or most desirable form of life.

(quoting my own summary there)

But instead of deconstructing a teleology with complexity as the end goal, here Graeber and Wengrow are deconstructing a teleology with agriculture and the state as an end goal; that agricultural was an instant revolution that inevitably led to an apparatus we currently call “the state,” and that the world we are living in now is more or less the inevitable end state of things. They also occasionally take the time to dunk on Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

The whole book is something like 400, 500 pages to argue against this conclusion, and frankly I don’t have the recall or the comprehension to reconstruct it here. Like David Graeber’s Debt, I’ll have to read this one multiple times to really be able to confidently explain its premise. What I can say after one read-through is that they believe the archeological evidence points towards a history of mankind that experimented with flexible and novel arrangements of power that, even on a large scale, preserved what they call the three basic freedoms: the freedom to make promises, the freedom to disobey orders, and freedom of movement (the freedom to leave a place if the situation becomes too onerous).

There’s a lot of non-fiction that I read because I have weird niche interests, or because I ran across it at the library and it seemed interesting. There’s also non-fiction that I tackle because I want to better understand the world I live in, and The Dawn of Everything falls squarely in that category. More than that, there’s a category of non-fiction that I wish were required reading so we could start building consensus reality again and so we could maybe learn something from history. The Dawn of Everything is one of those books.

*Some are so niche and special interest that I don’t really see the point in including them here in my public record of reading. My commonplace book, as it were.

Historiskan 4/2023

Since I’ve made such a deliberate point of trying to summarize what I’ve read in the Delayed Gratification magazine that I subscribe to, I thought I would do the same for Historiskan, another periodical I subscribe to.

1. A brief essay from Cecilia Nordlund about founding Popkollo.

2. A highlight on three women—Gerda Meyerson, Maria Forsell, and Emma Anstrin—who were part of fighting for Deaf rights alongside an article about plans for a Museum of Deaf Culture that will open in 2026.

3. An interview with Eva Dahlman about her upcoming book about women photographers in Sweden from 1848 to 1968.

4. The cover story: Eva Bonde writing on basically A League of Their Own, aka the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Bonde points out that part of the post-war decline of the AAGPBL was the advent of television and televised games: people who enjoyed watching the sport no longer had to actually attend games, but could watch from the comfort of their homes. An interesting point I didn’t think much about before, though I also never thought much about women’s baseball in the US except with respect to, well, A League of Their Own. And it was of course segregated, so Black women weren’t included and instead played alongside men in the Negro Leagues. (I remember reading about the Negro Leagues in elementary school but not finding it all that interesting as a ten-year-old; it’s since become one of those things that I feel like I should read about now as an adult, in part because I’m more interested in baseball now than I was as a ten-year-old.)

5. A bio of author Maria Gripes by Lisbeth Håkansson Petré in honor of the centennial of her birth. The headline called her one of Sweden’s most read authors of children’s and young adult novels but I’d never even heard of her until this, so I guess that’s another cultural gap filled. A big part of the reason I subscribe to these kinds of magazines.

6. A history of political protest music in South America by Bella Stenberg. A lot of it focuses specifically on nueva canción in Chile and the women involved with the movement: Violetta Parra, Margot Loyola, Gabriela Pizarro, and Mercedes Sosa.

7. A brief biography by Karin Tegenborg Falkdalen of Kristina av Holstein-Gottorp, a queen of Sweden. Not my favorite Drottning Kristina but still an interesting read nonetheless.

8. A brief on the “tickle torturers” (les chatouilleuses) of Mayotte by Victoria Machmudov. It’s kind of wild to read about a colony rejecting independence, but maybe my brain is melted from being American. Some of the major players in the movement to break away from the rest of the Comoros archipelago and retain a connection with France were women, including Zéna M’déré. Unsurprisingly, things aren’t going great in Mayotte at the moment. Their wealth relative to their neighbors in the archipelago has led to a lot of immigration, but they’re still the poorest departement in France.

9. A look at the women in the animal rights movement by Camilla Bergvall: Lizzie Lind af Hageby, Leisa Schartau, Princess Eugénie, Elna Tenow, Ellen Börtz, Birgitta Carlsson, and Ruth Harrison.

10. Another historical biography, this time Olga of Kiev, by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson.

11. A look by Pauliina Räsänen at what the circus life entailed for women at the turn of the 20th century and its role as a space of relative liberation: a break from gender norms, the ability to travel freely, being able to support one’s self (and out-earning a lot of men, at that). Too many names for me to bother listing but I thought Laura Madigan was interesting if only because of the tragedy surrounding her and her family.

12. Mette Hardenberg and her encounter with a demon, as summarized by Julia Håkansson. It’s a mildly interesting story, certainly moreso than that skeletal Wikipedia entry makes it out to be, so I’ll summarize the summary here:

Hardenberg got married off, as women tended to do back in the 1500s. Her husband published an account, in which he claims that his wife is unwilling to share the story herself but that he thinks it’s worth telling. For a period of six weeks, she was tormented by an evil spirit that beat the shit out of her if she mentioned God. Then she had a vision (in a dream?) of God, who told her to make a pilgrimage from Totterupholm to a tower in the Vallø castle. It was a trip of thirty kilometers and she went disguised as a beggar, and then at the end she had a showdown with the demon in said tower, where she won thanks to her knowledge of the Bible.

It’s hard to know what to make of the account today. The go-to explanation is that it was some kind of mental health struggle, and historians point to similar problems that had afflicted other members of her family. Others have more recently suggested that it could have been a form of marketing as a show of Hardenberg’s spiritual strength in conquering a demon—and modesty in not wanting to talk about it—that would win her esteem in the eyes of the church.

13. And finally, a longer piece by Sari Nauman on the first refugees in Sweden: from then-Swedish Latvia to Sweden proper during The Great Northern War which lasted over twenty goddamn years, what a grim thing to consider. (People were already fleeing religious persecution before The Great Northern War, of course, but the first time the Swedish word for refugee—flykting—appears in text it’s in connection with a woman fleeing Russian aggression in the Great Northern War.)